Saturday Walk

We found the trail that each of us discovered in two seperate walks was one in the same yesterday. We followed it to an end, what we were hoping would be an easy route to Jenny's apartment in the neighborhood we lived last year, but found what smelled like a nightsoil field that had to be crossed.


Before leaving I took a picture of Traci at the start of the trail from our roof. She was puzzled by the navy blue man sized object that she couldn't remember putting there. Then she turned "oh a piece of garbage . . . " and forgot all about the strange sight until I showed her the picture.





The trail wound up and over a small wooded hill covered in graves and small vegetable plots. Some new holes were dug, seemingly ready for someone, and labled with what you could see in two different directions. One reason for the absence of bodies may be that the views are of somewhat dilapadated vegetable hothouses and a gas station.

Down one hill past the scrap metal heap and up the other side.



Where we found more grave mounds and small vegetable plots




and passed by the school and playground where I took my first tentative steps on the yellow dirtbike last year. It was where Greg and I made slalom courses and figure 8's of trash to practice tight turning. Having done that for a while I tried to see how fast I could get it and nearly crashed.





We saw a woman working her rows overlooking the fields that stretch north from Gumi towards Seonsan. They are just starting to look green and alive, the harbinger of spring when Korea sheds it's shit-feathers and actually becomes a beautiful place.




We jumped a small fence after walking through the aforementioned nightsoil fields and ended up in our old complex, now known as shitville. It was a ghost town, eerie and like something out of a bad horror movie. Doors were flapping and banging in the wind. Garbage was left everywhere as if people fled some plague (birdflu?) Adding to the atmosphere were the red circles painted on all the empty apartments signaling to passersby the contaminated units, the places to be left alone.


We started digging through the trash, of course, looking for gifts for Jenny or a table for our rooftop lounge now in construction. We found both. A car pulled up to one place, actually displacing us from a particularly interesting pile of trash. An old couple got out and went inside, giving us maybe a glance. I told Traci they were the stubborn ones, not willing to give up their homes to some developer owned by one the massive conglomerates that run the business of this country. I even compared them to the Saved by the Bell episode where the kids help save their favorite resort in Hawaii from doom by developer. Sadly I don't think this old couple has the ingenuity of Zach, Screech and AC Slater to lend a hand.




The place creeped Traci out, though she couldn't pull herself away



We found a nice broken mirror to take a serious self-portrait in. It may be holiday card material.



And more broken shards littering the ground behind an overfilled dumpster.



One place we looked into and found an onion, though sporting a green shoot, still quite usable, laying in the middle of the plethora of ajumma shoes. There was other trash about and a black plastic bag of bean sprouts a little past there prime. I expected someone to jump out at me, some big guy with tattoos going up the back of his neck and arms lined with sunken veins, telling me he was squatting this pad and for me to bugger off. No such thing happened, though a little later a man with a broom did come from around the back of another building--a terribly scarry thing indeed.

Around the backs of the apartments, you might still think they were lived in, albeit by sloppy sloppy families.



We walked through one place, not trashed inside, but not left in a condition anyone would be proud of. Even the floor seemed empty and hollow.



We had finally had enough. It was a little sad. When we moved out in August we were under the impression it would all be torn down to make room for new apartments, something not so ghetto. Instead, it's still there looking more like junkietown than ever.


We started looking at this pile of garbage and realized that just behind it was the courtyard where we barbecued all last summer, where children were still riding bikes around in circles, and adjoining that our old building. Our old place is the one with the fan in the window on the first floor, near the center of the image, if you can see it.



Taking pictures, to us then seemed a gauche and tactless thing to do. We went up to the mart where we would buy our beer, sometimes several times in one day, and bought some beer. It was like giving water to a dying person. The shelves were all nearly empty and on those products remaining a patina of dust told us how long they'd been there. There were mainly things that nobody buys from a small mart: five gallon jugs of a variety of soy sauces, massive bins of pepper, ironing boards. And there were products that people still buy on a daily basis in a dying area, at a failing local mart: beer, soju, chips, chocolate. Just past the door on the way out I took this picture on the sly--it's a little blurry--further evidence the old neighborhood's quietus draws near.