I HEART KOREA

I have lived in South Korea for almost a year and a half now and like anywhere, once you get a routine going and you are familiar with your surroundings, it is easy to get into a rut and get bored. It is easy to forget that you are in such a foreign and wonderful place and to become complacent and to stop DOING NEW THINGS!

Doing new things re-opens your experience of the world you are living in and reminds you that your daily world is only as big as you allow it to be. New experience makes your world huge and exciting.

This weekend I met up with two friends in the city of Pohang about an hour and a half north of Busan by bus. It was a little cloudy and threatening to shower lightly but who cares. We were there for the official fireworks festival of South Korea. The year before I went to the massive fireworks display off the Gwangan bridge out at the coast. It was a scary experience because of the sheer mass of people. We discovered we were trapped on the beach at all sides and that the only way out was to FIGHT our way through a dense crowd, the kind where everyone is trapped by one another and people start to panic and fight. After that we were lifted off our feet by the crowd and carried by our rib bones into the subway car where my friend found she couldn't breath. So! We decided, NEVER AGAIN!!

The Pohang fireworks festival was so relaxed and lovely. Just the right amount of people to feel that you were somewhere where SOMETHING good was going on. After a false start at a beach side food stall, where we were served inedible fish which when we complained about was taken, put onto a different plate and served back to us, we found a DELICIOUS restaurant and sat out on the open patio waiting for the fireworks.

As my friend commented, fireworks are in her top five things in life, up there with family and friends. And as they started I realised she was right, they really do strike you in the heart. She also noted that no matter how old someone is, everyone feels like a four year old awed by life while watching fireworks, open mouthed, head tilted back taking in the star spangled beauty in the sky.

Anyway....I loved the weekend. The big explosive red hearts that popped into the deep blue night sky made me feel love for whoever it was who was making that beauty, and it made me feel so happy and at peace and I remembered how great Korea really is. I think the BBQ and the alcohol helped.....but chaknow!!

Life life life. Too good.

Norfolk Giants

Along the
road just
around the
gravel
bend

past the soft
fern
and the silver
brook

through the daisy
chain maze of
your childhood

across fields and past
the red barns
where rabbits
hide
soft eared amongst
the bails
with this seasons
warm babies

rolling over the
tops of those mountains
where
your eyes always
traveled
to the
dark caravan of
giants
walking east
their eyes eternally caught
on the line of the
distant ocean.

And,
oh,
how you longed
to join them.

Vast Waters

Warning : Boring 'someone else's dream' blabber ahead

I dreamed last night that I was out in space. And as is the way with dreams I have no idea what kind of physical body I was inhabiting, if I was inhabiting one at all. I was clearly not a human body floating in the darkness, not an astronaut nor even an alien, but more like a kind of 'me eye' - just a looking viewing consciousness which was attached to my own individuality. I was looking down on Earth. As the big old me eye sat bobbing amongst the stars it couldn't help but notice how much the Earth looked like a tiny glass ball with a living micro-dot at its center.

The atmosphere around the Earth was SO clean, so fragile and so inexplicably delicate, like the thinnest of hand blown glass. 'I' felt astounded by this, how completely exposed, alone and terribly vulnerable we are, how it is the most unique and unusual of circumstances that this tiny ball of life, like a wee frog's egg in a vast empty pond, has managed to survive for as long as it has, the right amount of distance from the sun, with the right amount of gravitational pull from the moon, with the right amount of extraordinarily thin atmosphere around its skies and body to provide life for the minute little ball of creature that lies within.

And the me eye felt a deep lonely sadness. A thought that life possibly does exist somewhere out there in the universe. But the feeling that if life does exist somewhere out there......it is surely gazillions of billions of millions of light years, down trillions of black holes for which no map will ever exist, across exploded stars and outside the shell of everything that we know, away. Because the overriding feeling 'I' experienced was of how tiny this delicate ball was, and how vastly huge and endless 'I' and space were.

I am not saying this is a new realisation. I know that millions and billions of people, time immemorial, have had these kinds of experiences. It is just that I was able to experience it fully within my dream and I woke up feeling an incredible but sad sense of awe. And a lonely vastness. No wonder I suffer from periodic bouts of existential angst!

The New Zealand Made Cyborg Named Emily

As I get more comfortable with my role as a teacher I have started to play wee trickster games with my favorite classes. Especially my younger classes who are outrageous and crazy and love to be tricked and taken on long wild walks down the garden path. I love playing with their minds because eventually when they figure it out they scream in delight and get so worked up. Its the best kind of entertainment.

One of my most recent class room pastimes was convincing my rowdy class of eight year olds that I was not, in fact, Maggie Teacher but Maggie Teachers twin sister Emily who had recently flown into Korea to help out our school. For the first few seconds they sat staring at me, all fourteen heads cocked to one side inspecting every inch of me. Then the questions started. How old are you? Why do you look exactly the same as Maggie teacher? (because Emily and I are monozygotic twins of course!) How long are you staying for? Is Maggie coming back? Where is Maggie now? Can we go and see her? Can you speak any Korean? You are not really Emily are you? You are Maggie! Aren't you? TEACHER? TEEEEAAACCCHHEEER!! And then the screams of delight and semi terror began. It was excellent. And hilarious. I love watching as belief and disbelief flutter across their faces.

In another of my best classes I convinced them that I was not a human but a New Zealand made cyborg. That New Zealand was famous for producing top of the line educational teacher-cyborgs which were then shipped all over the world, predominantly to South Korea, China and Japan. One student asked me why a cyborg would be eating popcorn (as I was at the time) to which I responded that this was not popcorn, but polystyrene which kept the small engine in my chest running at optimum capacity. Do you have a heart teacher? One student asked. Of course not! I replied! I am a cyborg!!

I have been informed in a very serious manner by one of my classes that it is imperative I go to prison very very shortly, as I am a terrible liar and they just can't handle the injustice of me making such outrageous accusations and still being free to wander the school halls.

My First Bike

Until a Christmas
when the crunchy shells
we had eaten
lay on the track
outside our front door
and the hibiscus flower
bloomed in the summer
heat
like a softened earthbound
sun and against
the trellis wall
leaned a bike
with red and white
checkers
cutting through the
bluest air with
tires that pushed
marks into the cool
red clay the
shape of diamonds
fallen from a
pocket.

Seasonal Transfusions

The moon did not enter my life in Autumn.
It was always there.
We picked blackberries
when the days were long and dry
and we too were as ripe as the black blood
which bled like real
from the small collected cells of juice.
Scrambling with skins scarred by summers hands,
bleeding just a little
the grasses and thorns
testing our sincerity,
our full blooded-ness,
taking a little back from what we took and ate
with our expectant pink mouths;
bleeding us
enriching the soil
for the next summer.

Vanishing

I’ve got my own head in my

hands

and suddenly its so heavy

it presses down through

my ageing palms

burning a hole down

towards the ground as

if it longs to be buried,

to be six feet below the surface

of this life,

sighing, whispering amongst

the feeding enzymes and

atoms of the earths body.

While my body walks around

these streets,

motioning, signing, in the language

of life and forward, linear

propulsion,

no one really notices the

empty space above my neck,

no one notices that

instead of expectant brown

eyes there is now only

the odd passing cloud or

the glassy empty blue of

atmosphere.

My body jostles,

pushing fleshy jovial

sounds of bodily existence

out into the world

convincing those

around,

that I

am still

here.

But, long ago now, my head

burned a hole

through my palms,

through the cover of my

bed, through the

grassy cover of the earth,

and now lies

whispering and sighing

waiting for someone

to hear it.

Ten Love / Hate / Wow Things About Korea

A wee list of things that I love about Korea (even the things I hate, I secretly love)

1. Plastic surgery is huge here! Before arriving in Korea I knew very little about Korean culture and had no idea how much of an image obsessed society it would be. I had no clue that people were relatively label obsessed or that they would be as 'blingy' as they are.

Plastic surgery is a booming business here and some of the most advanced techniques and innovative plastic surgeons in the world are located in Seoul. One of the first 'crazy' Konglish advertisements I saw here was a massive billboard advertising 'small face, lovely breast'. Meaning 'make your face smaller and your boobs bigger'. Koreans have insecurity issues about having big heads. I find their big heads and their insecurity about it really really cute! They all think that their noggins are massive and that to have a small face equals beauty. I often get my head compared to the size of someones fisted hand.

Eyelid surgery is extremely common and half of the women in my office have had the procedure. The eyelid it cut so that a western style fold in the lid is created. I love Korean eyes, I love the long moon like shape of them and their long black lashes. I often want to stroke peoples eyes here. Weird I know.

Because of the low Korean Won and the strong Japanese Yen it is becoming an increasinly popular weekend gettaway choice for wealthy Japanese to pop over here to A) buy some cheap Louis Vuitton and B) Get some plastic surgery done at much more affordable prices than at home.

2. It is often assumed that I like to drink simply because I am a westerner. This annoys me greatly as I am not a big drinker in any way shape or form. I get 'asked' (they are actually more statements than questions) in a mocking fashion questions such as 'you love to drink!?' and 'you love soju!' to which I answer 'no......not really', but nobody seems to hear!

The reason this frustrates me is that there is an assumption that western people are alcoholics and drink far more than Koreans but often this attitude comes from people who have no idea that all westerners are different. It also frustrates me because I have never in my life been to a country where I see so many people absolutely WASTED wandering the streets on the weekends, having public brawls with their wives or husbands and spewing on pavements or gutters. 'Kimchi Flowers' dot my walk to work every Monday morning. Kimchi flowers are the red explosion which are projectile vomited from Ajoshees (married men) after nights of having consumed far to much Kimchi (fermented cabbage) and Soju (weak vodka tasting alcohol). Beautiful.

3. Giving and receiving with two hands. Wonderful. In Korea, when you are pouring a drink, having a drink poured for you, handing money or receiving change, giving or receiving a gift, in fact in many many giving and receiving situation, you use two hands to offer what you are giving and two hands to take what you are receiving. It is SO lovely. It shows a real sign of respect to the other person and takes the time to acknowledge the fact that you are having a moment of your life with this person, that they are another living human being who deserves respect. It also seems to counter the 'take take take, now now now' aspect that is taking over more and more of our modern lives. Love it.

4. Korean babies / kids. They are gorgeous. Soooo much cuter than western babies! They have gorgeous huge heads, dark crescent moon eyes, silky black hair which is occasionally permed
( hilarious - perms on babies are another much loved thing here!) and mocha coloured skin. Do I hear a chicken coop near by?

5. Being stared at. Don't like it. When I first arrived I felt thrilled to be stared at all the time. I was on the high one gets from being in a new land and felt like an exotic foreigner for the first time in my life. I could not understand why my friends Meg and Max had developed such an angry attitude toward being stared at or hassled by members of the Korean public.

Now I understand. I do mind being stared at if the person who is staring at me is A) a really nice looking man or B) someone who is having a quick stare and is conscious of the fact that staring is rude, and so knows when to stop. When I don't like it, in fact, when I HATE it, is when the staring is shameless, ongoing and accompanied by comments such as 'HOW MUCH?' yelled across a crowded subway car by a man who has politely assumed that I am a Russian prostitute.

6. Korean food. Amazing. Delicious. Spicy. Fresh. Yummy. Many people know little about Korean food unless they have traveled here. I guess before coming I assumed that Korean food would be a lot like Chinese, greasy, deep fried, oily, heavy and so on. It is nothing like Chinese food and not really similar to Japanese either. Lots of barbecued meat wrapped in leaves with sauces. Can't explain it, but its damn fine I tells ya!

7. The necessities of life are cheap here. Renting an apartment is about 300 dollars per month, my favorite restaurant meal is five dollars, the last dress I bought was 40 dollars, taking a taxi costs about three dollars, my electricity bill is about ten dollars per month, a beer costs two dollars.........etc. As it should be.

8. Korean humour / craziness on T.V. There are many 'reality' style T.V. programs here in which famous Korean singers and actors regularly take part. All sorts of simply mad games are played which involve flinging each other into mud, throwing octopuses, being human tetris blocks through moving walls, wearing crash helmets and trying to run across waterfalls, seeing who can circle a girl around their body the most times before dropping them into the ocean of a home made raft and so on. The awesome thing is that while celebrity culture is VERY strong here, Korean celebrities do not have a problem with making fools of themselves and having a grand time while doing so. Its refreshing to see people not taking their 'cool/rich/goodlooking' selves to seriously.

9. Style! Koreans are stylie! They are willing to take risks and wear some outrageous things. Its especially wonderful to see men being daring with what they wear. Lots of bright colours, stylized mullets, skinny coloured jeans, awesome high top sneakers in various shades of ultra neon and some scarily 'plungey' necklines on mens T-shirts. New Zealand seems so conservative in comparison and it makes me realise what a macho and limited culture that still prevails. Men really embrace fashion here (well, men of a certain age.....) and its great.

10. Men are allowed to be openly and physically affectionate with each other here without being judged, while at the same time the existance of gay people is ignored or even flatly denied. This is one of the things here that I find surprising / contradictory and bizarre. It is so wonderful to be in a country where teenage boys can hold hands, old men can wandering arm in arm down the street and young boys can stroke their friends hair without being thought of as gay. Men being affectionate with other men seems as 'natural' and accepted as womens affection for one another. Yet unless you are in a very specific area of Seoul, you could imagine that Korea is completely devoid gay men or women. It not acceptable to be gay here. In any way shape or form.

Kimchi Flowers

The infamous Kimchi. The most popular Korean dish. Fermented cabbage, which, like cheese and wine is said to taste better as it matures. On first arrival I was not a fan of the spicy / sour taste of the slimy red pieces of cabbage which accompanied every single meal I ordered. But over time the much talked about addiction ensued.

Another popular Korean consumable is Soju. Just as 'Korean' in the fact that upon first meeting you feel immediatly as if you do not like it (as I have found the case to be with Busan Koreans and Kimchi) but just as 'Korean' in the same regard that given a chance it will open to you its warmth and underlying depth.

Soju is Korean alcohol made predominantly from rice but is not similar to Japanese Sake in taste at all. Rather than the soft doughy taste of Sake, Soju tastes more like weak, very bad vodka. The kind of vodka an apprentice moonshiner might make in his Mother's bathtub.

Soju and Kimchi. A lethal concoction, in so many many way. The main one being the phenomenon of the 'Kimchi Flower'. It sounds beautiful doesn't it? Can't you just imagine a field of cabbage gone to seed, bright flowers aglow and lovely old Korean men and women coaxing their oxen saddled with ancient wooden cart to plough the fields before the next moon is right for planting. However a Kimchi flower has nothing to do with seeds or earth or even flowers really. It is not born of sunlight and water but rather of Ajoshi (married men), too much soju and a belly full of Kimchi related foods.

Kimchi flowers can be seen everywhere in Busan. Kimchi flowers are vomit stains. Like fireworks, the red Kimchi has exploded onto the pavement leaving a vibrant red flower to be appreicated by the mornings commuters.

A Tiny Frog's Egg in a Big Empty Pond

There is something about being away from home that opens your mind. It isn't something that you can be noticed on a day to day level so much, although there are of course days when you are away from home when amazing or unexpected events and realisations about life occur which can change your world. But rather, for me personally, it is a slow change which I tend to notice bits at a time. It is kind of like building something, but unfolding something at the same time, it is to with becoming aware of unexpected strengths and weaknesses which pop up at unusal times and reveal complexities.

I had a really unusual wish as a child. I used to wish that someone could invent a machine. This machine would look something like the metal detector gates at the airport. I used to wish that a machine / computer existed so that a person could pass through the door and once out the other side a book would be ready and waiting, and the book would be all about the person who had just walked through the door. And just off to the side of this gate would be a bench, and you could go and sit on the bench and read all about oneself, ones talents, ones weaknesses, the kinds of troubles that one could expect in ones life due to the circumstances in which one was raised or ones left over emotional family inheritance.

I dreamed last night that I was out in space. As is the way with dreams I have no idea what kind of physical body I was inhabiting, if I was inhabiting one at all. I was clearly not a human body floating in the darkness, not an astronaut nor even an alien, but more like a kind of 'me eye' - just a looking viewing consciousness which was certainly attached to my own individuality. I was looking down on Earth. As the big old me eye sat bobbing amongst the stars it couldn't help but notice how much the Earth looked like a tiny glass ball with a fluffy earthy centre.

The atmosphere around the Earth was SO clean, so glass like and so so inexplicably delicate, like the thinnest of hand blown glass. 'I' felt astounded by this, how, completely exposed, alone and terribly vulnerable we are, how it is the most unique and unusal of circumstances that this tiny we ball of life, like a wee frog in an egg, has managed to survive for as long as it has, the right amount of distance from the sun, with the right amount of gravitational pull from the moon, with the right amount of extraordinarily thin atmosphere around its skies and earth to provide life for the minute little creature that lies within.

Even though I am someone who believes that life in other parts of the Universe is highly likely, I 'realised' in this dream how very rare this occurrence of life in space must be and that if there is another planet inhabited by life somewhere out there, then it must be gazillions of light years and billions of dimensions away. Never to be found.

I don't write about this dream to say that I had any kind of realisation about the state of life that is 'new', only to say that upon waking I realised how limited our time is, here on Earth, and as a consequence how limited my time with my Father really truly is. One day he will die and I will not have him any more. He will be gone from my world. And I will have only memories of him to remind me of how it felt to be in his presence. And one day, in what feels like a long long time from now, but really is not, I will die too and my children will not know how to hold those feelings of my Father close to them any longer.

This little dream, of a delicate little frogs egg floating in the most vast of ponds made me realise that while being away from home and traveling really is necessary for me right now, my family, my whanau are the most important thing to me in this world, in this life, and that it is through them that I truely know myself.

Being Away From Home

Being away from the place that you were born is an amazing experience. Being an English language teacher to a bunch of elementary school students here in Korea, I have recently learned the ins and outs of the word 'amaze'. A word I usually only use to describe things which have wowed me or touched my heart in a very happy or exciting way. But to be amazed is also to be affected with wonder and astonishment. To be astonished does not only mean to be happily impressed but also to feel as if the apparition of a huge question mark had smacked you directly in the head.

The Right to Bare Arms

I remember hearing from two of my friends who had recently come back from a stint living in Shanghai, that there were signs in the subway cars notifying commuters that short shorts were not permitted.

Shanghai is the sixth largest city in the world and so as you would expect, rush hour on the subway is similar to being a greasy little sardine amongst millions of wee fish, jam packed into a barreling tin can. Short shorts - the kind that you wouldn't want to bend over in - worn by Shanghaiing women apparently aroused the tightly packed Shanghaiing men so terribly that they had to be banned from public transport altogether.

Short shorts here in Korea are not banned from subways and are a very popular form of clothing for Korean women during the intensely hot summer months. A Korean kindergarten co-worker of mine once came to work in a pair of purple silk mini overalls, so translucent, short and disco purple were they, that I remember seeing our male manager standing huddled in the corner of the office, seemingly in some kind of short shorts trance, hypnotized, spell bound by the partial bum cheeks which dipped like grapes from the silky material. This woman was a kindergarten teacher! I remember thinking that if someone wanted to put their hand right up into her knickers, they wouldn't have much trouble.

Another time I was on my way to meet a friend on a Saturday and as I ascended the subway stairs into the hub bub of daylight I realised that it was not, in fact, the sun I was looking up toward, but instead right up the pants of the woman in front of me. I gasped, staggered and gawked. I could see *almost* everything.

This was one of many many thousands of women in Korea who wear these intensely short shorts. It is accepted and acceptable to wear shorts which skim the most private and sexual part of a womans body, yet strangely, wearing tank tops / singlets is considered somewhat risque and more sexual.

It is May here and Korea, I am SURE, is actually a large chicken inside an oven, and God is a very busy housewife who is slowly but surely turning up the ovens temperature day by day, and in her flurry is totally unaware that she is about to roast a mini universe, not a fat little fowl. And so a part of me can very much understand the need to take off a large percentage of ones clothing. But how did it come about that airing your ass is less provocative than airing your armpits? I have never met anyone who wanted to make love to my armpit.

If I were living in New Zealand right now I wouldn't be thinking twice about wearing singlets in the kind of temperatures that we have here in Korea. I would have been in sleeveless tops long long looooong ago. But here in Korea I feel a real sense of shame at baring my arms and even a small part of my chest, and I am not even too sure where this 'shame' has come from. No one has specifically *told* me that showing my arms is somehow sexually suggestive. I guess over the past year I have subconsciously noted that Korean women in summer as a rule do not put their arms or decolletage on show and have, like a monkey who uses a stick to fish ants from a hole copies this technique from another monkey, adapted myself to suit the cultural climate.

On a hot night my friends and I were going out for dinner and some drinks. I decided to brave it and wear my new dress which had a low cut neckline and shoe string straps. All was going swimmingly until we arrived at dinner where I sat down and removed my cardigan. Suddenly our table had a small pool of young women around it (like those fish that nibble on Whales) one of whom started to stroke my arms and collar bones and declare 'ooooh, ooooh, sexy...... (stroke stroke) ....... sexy.....(stroke stroke) but you must be cold, are you not cold? Yes, I think you must be cold. Here..... put this back on...' and kindly smothered my entire front in the cardigan that I had only minutes ago removed. I felt like I had just been sexually assaulted and given a motherly telling-off at the same time. It was a confusing kind of feeling.

It doesn't really make sense to me, and this contradiction is something I notice a lot in Korea. For example the Buddhist origins of Korean culture which would put detachment from desire, materialism and vanity at the fore, yet Korea is one of the MOST vain and materialistic countries I have even encountered in my life. People are obsessed with appearances, with being slim, having small faces, skinny bodies, eye-lidded eyes, highly bridged noses and large breasts. Plastic surgery is a massive industry here and half of the 22-32 year old teachers at my school have had some form of plastic surgery. Half.

Yet while they seem to care about 'appearances' (in more ways than just ones own body) above all else, Koreans seem to have a weird detachment from the sexuality that is produced by appearance. Young children are presented in overtly sexual clothing on Korean talent style T.V programs gyrating and pumping their hips in a way that westerners are only used to seeing pop culture entertainers do. The first few times you see it you think it is wrong, and then you forget that it is not 'normal' on what is normal in the scale of your life pre-Korea, and you clap and sing along as a three year old contestant humps the leg of the 40 year old host in a bid to win the belly dancing stage competition. No Koreans seem to see this kind of performance as sexual. It is more a mimicry of Western culture and ideals, but hollowed out and used in its most empty way. For pure entertainment value lacking all cultural background.

Anyway, I am rambling.

It is May here in Korea and things in this wee oven are only going to get hotter and hotter. I do not plan to keep cool this summer by baring my bum to the old men on the subway and in the streets who already stare at me and my girlfriends as if have a birth given entitlement to look (and occasionally touch) any part of our body that they fancy. If they stare at my arms and chest at least I wont be restricted by sleeves and this will make it easier to flip'em the bird or swing a punch. Rantings on sexism in Korea to come later.

Shadow Cadette

I watch you
closely under my
microscope

and YOU

sneaky child

are in two places
at once

and you say:

time only moves forward
FOR YOU - sleeping child.

The light from
you is years old......

I am offended
you
have fooled me.

You died long ago

just a ghost shadow
or bullets wing-ed whiz
from a year of
lonely space
of colossal rocks
made small.

Empty space

Lonely boy

Decoherance.....in the looking
glass the vision of
your face pulls
forever backward
in strings to
yesteryear;
a mouth a mile long
and eyes at every place
between
now

and
then

and then.

Jjimjilbang - Going To The Public Bath House

On one of my first dates with my Korean boyfriend I was informed that we would be attending and then spending the night at a jjimjilbang. A jjimjilbang can be a very large or very small public bath house where many Koreans will go after a soju-filled night out to scrub away the nights shadow and grime and after washing can pay a small fee and spend the night in a marae style sleeping room.

I was completely aghast and terrified at the prospect. Bath house culture does not exist in my home country New Zealand and bathing and personal cleanliness is a matter kept strictly within the home. The body is not something that us New Zealanders readily show pony around in the public domain and the thought of walking completely naked through throngs of ajumma (married women with hands strong enough to break your fingers) teenagers and children made me feel nervous to the point of fainting. Was I going to be the only foreigner among several hundred Korean women? Would everyone point, stare and laugh at my bum and boobs? Would I end up huddled in the corner of the steam room waiting for the lights to go out so I could slink away like a shame faced alley cat into the darkened night? I didn’t know what to do.

New Zealand is a British colony and along with the Queens English, meat pies and pound cake, we inherited the joyous English sense of shame. Something which we lovingly passed on to Maori people who up until our arrival had been quite fine, thank you, wandering around in what God gave them. Thanks to the English and their propriety and ‘sensibility’ many of us New Zealanders have grown up with the idea that the body is not something to show off, that it is a highly sexual object that should be kept heavily shrouded in many layers of clothing and of which you should always feel a slight sense of disgust and embarrassment. Going to the spa with my boyfriend (who I was shocked to realise I would have to part with for several hours) would be my first experience of being naked in front of more than one person at a time. It was like my old dreams of suddenly appearing stark naked at school in front of Friday assembly were actually coming true.

After arriving and figuring out which locker to put my shoes in and which locker to get undressed in front of (there seemed to be a million different lockers for a million different things) I made my way into the main spa room fully clothed in the pajamas provided by the (nude) receptionist. I showered with the speed of a sparrow rolling in dust and like lightening leaped into a yellow coloured pool of mud. I carefully placed the pajamas beside the pool for the time that I would need to get out. I noted I was the only person in the entire spa room who had their pajamas with them let alone had them sitting beside the pool. After a few angst ridden minutes of faux relaxation had passed I decided to change pools and realised with terror that my pajamas were gone. Some overly busy ajumma had taken them and I would have to walk around like everyone else – NUDE. My nightmare had officially come to fruition.

Pajama-less, I was forced to walk totally naked to my next destination. As I walked across the seemingly massive expanse of the spa to my next pool I noticed that, yes, a few people were looking at me, but out of the several hundred women in the spa, barely anyone was interested in me at all. I began to feel a rush of freedom and liberation. I noticed that no one cared that I was naked because they were all naked too. And it began to dawn on me that here in Korea the sense of ones own body is different than it is in New Zealand (or at least, different than it is for me personally). No one seemed to feel embarrassed about their body, everyone seemed totally relaxed and there was a real feeling of sisterhood and community between the bathing women. People scrubbed one another, chatted as they showered or just bobbed up and down in hot pools with their eyes closed like blissed out Octopus. I realised that being a nudist was not such a weird lifestyle choice after all.

I walked to the showers where I copied other women and scrubbed myself with a harsh material mitten until I was as red and raw as a beet. Suddenly, with horror, I noticed I was being stared at by a nude ajumma somewhere in her 40’s. As she began to walk toward me I clattered my feet like the hooves of a terrified deer unable to decide which way to escape the oncoming headlights. Was she going to say something horrible about my body? Was she going to tell me to get out?! ‘Nice to meet you ‘ she said and embraced me in a full body hug (the first completely nude hug I have ever had with a woman), and then began to sway both of our bodies back and forward so that we were now dancing together under the warm water of the shower. She began to sing the 1985 Michael Jackson / Lionel Richie classic, We Are The World, as she puppeteered my arms up and down in frantic orchestral movements and moved my hips back and forth with her own. She clearly did not have a problem with a foreigner being in her spa.

How had she known this was one of my favourite songs of all time? I shall never know. I felt accepted

Finding my flow with this bath house thing, I transfered between the hot sauna room and the cold pool and at a certain point felt a cool rushing inside my body and up my chest. It was truly the most healthy and relaxing of feelings. I was later to learn that this is a physical reaction to bathing that many Koreans attend spas to achieve, the sense of internal ‘cool,’ the sense of total body cleanliness and health, and a sense of intense relaxation.

We slept that night in the communal jjimjilbang room. I woke twice, once to find a complete stranger asleep and with his arms across the face of my sleeping boyfriend. The second time I awoke was to find a drunk ajumma hitting my feet with a wooden block because she had decided that she wanted to sleep where I was sleeping. Luckily she was pulled away by her drunk laughing friends. I stayed awake for a while after this looking and marveling at how closely total strangers were sleeping with one another, arms and legs thrown across their sleeping neighbours, everyone was so completely at ease with one another. I loved it, I felt so relaxed and happy.

We left the jjimjilbang the next morning very early and watched the sun rise over Gwangan bridge. Vibrant pinks and blues flooded the harbor as the sun pushed the night away and I floated along drinking my hot coffee from a can, cruising on a cloud of having my ideas of the world and myself shifted and opened out. Asah.

Sunday Blues

In the darkness of
Asia
a million
neon hearts glow
for love.

The pink of someones
heart,
lipstick baby
in the
cats eye yellow
moon.

The dancer
stars hold an audience
tonight
because below one thousand
lonely men sing
songs of lost wallets and
wives.

And in the corners
against the tank walls
the octopuses
long to be petted like
dogs......

In the hot spring
down the hill
the turtle boat
feet of old woman
rest at battles end
and the sun is gone
today...blown out
by the blue
mouth of the mountain.

And the dog many
apartments above
and many lives
away,
much closer to the
moon than I,
howls in the
rainbow half light
for its owner
who is somewhere
lost
in the bowels of
the city.

And me
in a cube of light
just suspended in the
nothing of
massive Asian night

just hears......

Thursday

Today was such a beautiful day! Last nights rain had washed the usual haze of pollution from the Busan air, the sun shone bright and big clouds cruised along at the same lazy Sunday pace as me. I had one of my 'I love Korea!!' days........everything smelt good, felt good, looked good and tasted good. Hanging with my two girlfriends proved hilarious and we realise we're becoming perverts as we get older! What is it with sexy Korean men hanging on street corners??