Monday, June 15th, 2009

If I'm rich, I'll wear Bliss. That's the first note in my travel notebook for Monday the 15th. I made it as I was walking up Omote-Sando, the posh designer avenue coming off of Harajuku. Some of the most amazing prices I'd ever seen. On the other hand, everything in some of the windows was a work of art. I only say "some of the windows," because I think there's a lot less art in some of the big designer labels than there is in smaller shops elsewhere. Of course, even the smaller shops were pricey in this area: 30 bucks for a change purse was not at all unheard of. I moved on.

I did pop into the Oriental Bazaar to check out the Japanese souvenirs there. It was a tourist trap, obviously, but as tourist traps go not too bad. I still want to pick up my souvenirs in other places, but if I can't find something I want later I know where to go. I also stopped in at Kiddyland (an obscenely expensive 6-story toystore) to find small souvenirs for the kids. I ended up getting them tiny charms and erasers out of the vending machines.

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Note: I love the hydrangeas everywhere. They're in full bloom here, and besides the amazing ones at the East Garden Sunday, I saw plenty at Omote-Sando and elsewhere in Harajuku. I think they're one of my favorite flowers. I keep trying to take a picture of one that captures the exact shade of blue, but so far haven't been able to. Maybe it's my camera (or my ignorance in using it). Mom: hydrangeas? Or should I just come home and start my own garden? Because this week, I'm starting to be tempted.

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At lunch, I wrote: "Keep trying to like Hara. better, but just feels like a big, pretentious mall. Prob. more fun w/ friends." I'd been tromping around a while at that point, and had been mildly harassed by a North African (?) hustler in the slightly-seedier Takeshita-dori. I had lunch at the Eco Cafe, which I think was some sort of experimental organic place, but wasn't really good enough to warrant the money. Damn good coffee, though, and after I had some I felt better. I'd also found a necklace I liked-- hematite beads with copper and amethyst accents-- at a jewelry shop called the Stone Market, on one of the small streets in Harajuku. The store had some cool stuff, pretty reasonably priced, and the sales guy was really nice. I'd go back, if I came back to Tokyo again.

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The coffee revived me a bit, and I went wandering. I ended up at the Fiesta Gallery, which is a massive sprawling two-and-three-story house-turned-art-gallery, which can be rented out for peanuts by local artists who want to have private showing. You choose a little bit of wall-- all the rooms are available, bathrooms and shower rooms included-- pay about five bucks a day, and put up your stuff until the money runs out. It was interesting. There was a mix there-- "real" artists, who had really interesting and compelling stuff on the walls, and then others who were pretty obviously amateurs, with... less... compelling... things. I thought the best by far was... well, the card says "kuroko." A young man was sitting in the gallery, greeting passers-through, but I'm not sure, now, if he was the artist or not. "-ko" would indicate a girl, but honestly I don't know. It's pretty gruesome stoff, some of it-- lots of things-turning-into-things, people-growing-from-things, things-growing-from-people, bones and bodies, etc. Still, it makes you look, and keeps your attention, and I did quite like it. Or, at least, I thought it was pretty good. Here's the (http://members3.jcom.home.ne.jp/0722326001) website on the card I got...

There were some foreigners outside on the (painted, mosaicked, be-sculptured) deck, chatting. One of them seemed to be pitching an art installation, themed around garbage and ecology, to another, who was trying to show off how jaded and knowledgeable he was. They... gave the place a very art-school, college town atmosphere, which I guess it has overall, anyway.

Seeing an amateur gallery, where it looked like just about anyone could display, made me want to try and produce something in terms of visible art. If I were cooler, I'd bring a sketchbook when I went out and make lots of pictures for you all to marvel at. Maybe when I get home I'll try to draw more, outside of whiteboard masterworks in my kindergarten classrooms.

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Harajuku more or less won me over, in the end. There's a massive "fashion tower" (as Koreans would say) called Laforet, which appears to be where most of the action is at. (To those who've been to doota! in Dongdaemoon, it's like that, but a lot cooler.) I was lured inside by the promise of "books" in the basement, but was quickly distracted by the gothtastic shops I knew my friends must have visited a few days before. I started up one escalator at a time, and was pushed by sheer stubbornness to see the whole thing. A lot of the stuff was aimed at certain markets-- gothic, Lolita, gothic Lolita, rocker, punk, artiste-- but there were also a lot of stores that were just plain cool. I saw some of the hypercolored accessories that are so popular in Korea now, and wondered which country had started wearing them first. Are the kiddies wearing neon plastic jewelry in the States these days? I can't keep up.

I didn't try on much (just one shirt, not nearly generous enough), but was surprised to see quite a lot that looked like it would fit me. Either the Japanese are a bit bigger than Koreans (some people are, certainly), or there's just a lot more give in the clothes. Here, too, the "laundry basket" look has gotten popular-- layers and layers of floaty earth-toned clothes, shirts and scarves and big droopy hats, everything you need to make you look like an artist living an idyllic life in the country. Except, of course, that few artists could afford so much as a scarf at one of these places. Most of the stores were boutiques, or at least branches of very fashionable chains, so of course the price tags were heavy. The music was quite good, anyway-- especially at one shop that sold headphones and "rocker gear" in general-- and I enjoyed looking around and seeing what people had created.

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Went to the Tokyo Apartment Cafe for dinner. (The guidebook had recommended it, and it's right next to Laforet-- win-win, yes?) Had a tomato-and-olive salad (actually tomato-and-olive-oil), vegetable soup, and a glass of wine. Is a preference for white wine an East Asian thing, or what? The red ones on the menu were a bit much, so I had the house wine, which was okay. (Listed as blush, but looked red and tasted... mild, I guess.) The food was okay, though not amazing. The atmosphere was cool, but it was definitely the sort of place I'd want to go with friends. I was starting to feel quite lonely at this point, so I ate pretty quickly and left (though, stirred by my new Fiesta-Gallery inspiration, I did try to sketch a little at the table).

I'd been getting a rotten headache, and it got really bad at dinner, rather cramping my enjoyment of the evening. The wine helped a bit, I think, and I dulled the pain further (ha, ha) by eating a crepe (my second of the day) from a stand nearby. Winced and shuffled my way back to Nezu station for my last night at Sawanoya.

Fortunately there's a pharmacy right by the subway station. Popped a few ibuprofen, which helped tremendously. I've gotten a cold, actually, and I think the headache must have been the beginning of it. I was fine Saturday (with the obvious exception of having been dead on my feet) and I really hope it goes away by Sunday, because I do not want to get dragged out of line by Japanese (or Korean!) customs officials a little too concerned for my health.

A band of American college students (I think) had showed up at the ryokan that morning with their Japanese teacher-- one of them admitted, when asked, that they were on a class trip. When I came back in that evening, several of them gave me borderline hostile looks. I tried to make polite conversation after I had my bath later (Sawanoya onsen... how I miss you...), but the two girls still downstairs were not in the mood for talk. I'm not sure if they were just clannish, in the way that tour groups (I guess?) can get, or if I had unwittingly offended them somehow. Maybe they just didn't want their Genuine Japanese Experience cluttered up by other foreigners. Whatever. People are weird.

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Downside of tatami rooms: You really kind of have to close the windows when it rains, because otherwise you get rotten straw. Oh, forgot to mention-- it started raining around five or so, and showered off and on the rest of the night. Seems to be a pattern here, though tonight (Wednesday night) we've mostly missed it. Forgot my umbrella Monday, but will not make the same mistake again!

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Am typing this in my room at Suzuki. Can hear vague sounds of the guest next door doing something or other. There's no lobby here, unfortunately; I'd really like to talk to some other travelers, since it's mostly been me and my iPod this week.

What I'm Doing Now

It seemed like a good idea-- not least because my mother suggested it-- to resurrect this blog from the sands of time.

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I'm on vacation. A serious vacation, from the middle of May till the end of June. The first two weeks were spent with my mom, traveling all around inside Korea. We hit a lot of tourist spots, ate a lot of food, enjoyed each other's company and generally had a great time. Now I have the month of June to fill.

I have one more trip planned, from June 13th-21st. I'm going to Tokyo. I've always wanted to go-- to Japan in general, and Kyoto and Tokyo specifically. I'd like to go more than once, and I decided I'd stick to one city this time. Partially it's to motivate me to go again, though I don't think that will be a problem. I haven't made very detailed plans yet, but that's my only goal for tomorrow so I should get some details sketched in then.

I'm going alone. I found out after I'd booked the tickets that some friends of mine were going a week earlier, but I have things to do in Korea this week and couldn't change the dates. I used to think about traveling alone without even blinking-- I've spent a lot of time alone-- but now the idea is less appealing. Part of the reason I'm not doing more traveling this month is that it doesn't seem as much fun going myself as it would be going with friends.

It should be a nice, relaxed trip. I'm thinking about spending each day in a different area of the city, though I'll probably change my plans (such as they may be) once I actually get there. I'll probably do a lot of wandering around, shopping and taking pictures and watching people. I'd like to talk to people, too; I wish I knew more Japanese. I know a lot of people speak English, but I feel bad not knowing the local language, even though I'm only going for a week. Hopefully people won't be too offended.

That's three weeks of travel. The other three weeks, interspersed with important things (a wedding, a good bye dinner, etc.) are devoted mostly to idleness. At first I was going stir crazy, but now I'm getting to enjoy it. Every day I get to sleep late, stay up late, eat when I want to, go where I want to, and spend most of my time reading and playing with the cat. (The cat seems to be pretty happy about all the attention. I feel bad for leaving him alone so much when I'm at work.) Overall, I'm enjoying the hell out of my free time, and I don't want to go back to work.

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At some point while my mom was here, we hit that point where Korea suddenly decided it was summer. Korea dresses by the season, not by the weather. There seem to be cut-off dates inscribed in the culture, which perhaps I could read if my Korean were better. They tell people when it's okay to wear short sleeves, or go sleeveless, or turn on the A.C. Maybe it's in the news; maybe everyone just watches the celebrities and does what they do. We foreigners tend to dress more for comfort, and I've often been the only one on a subway car in summer clothes, despite the weather. Right now the trendy Seoul ladies are all wearing gladiator sandals and cute little buns in their hair. I've seen several people in sleeveless tops, and am no longer getting funny looks for wearing mine.

The weather ranges mostly between sullen heat and heavy rain, with a few muggy days in between. It poured down rain tonight. The sidewalks here are all uneven bricks, and the water stands in puddles or runs everywhere in little creeks. I soaked the cuffs of two pairs of pants and was glad to put on dry pajamas when I finally got home for good.

As long as I don't have to go outside too much, I almost prefer the rain to the "clear" days. There are millions of cars here, and the air pollution is getting really bad. Looking out the bus windows, sometimes I feel like I'm in a futuristic landscape being toted through poison gases in a protective bubble.

Bug season has also begun. Aside from the mosquitoes, I really don't mind them-- mostly they're delicate little black things, easily squished and not very noticeable. The mosquitoes themselves are a bit of a problem, always out for my sweet blood. I keep thinking about getting a net-- there's a hook above my bed where someone must have hung one before-- but I've been through two summers here without one and don't know if the expesnse is really worth one. If I catch a horrible mosquito-borne disease, feel free to point fingers and say "You should have bothered!" The mosquito trucks are almost more troubling than the mosquitoes themselves. They come out at dusk, and drive around trailing pesticide fogs that smell kind of like a more noxious form of auto exhaust. Does not smell healthy to me, though Korean kids seem to like it. (Old clip, but still funny.)

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Went to a friend's wedding on Sunday. She's American, but married a Korean, and they had a full-on Korean ceremonies. Korean wedding ceremonies are big photo-shoots, staged and short, with fabulous gowns and lots of staff and a very assembly-line feel about them. I've been to several of them here, all for co-workers, and they're mostly variations on a theme. Most people get married in a wedding hall, which is a big building with one or several chapels in it, each of which can be rented for about a one-hour ceremony and is then cycled over to the next group (not counting clean-up, set-up, and other prep time). Guests give money, not gifts, and in return are given meal tickets for the buffet dinner that follows the wedding. There are a lot of guests at these things. Many are friends or colleagues of the couple's parents, and may not know the bride and groom personally at all. Everyone pays their respects to the couple and their parents, gets a picture taken with the bride, watches the ceremony, eats fairly quickly, and leaves en masse.

My friend's wedding was fairly typical-- except, of course, for the fact that the bride was not Korean. The Koreans involved in the wedding did not seem to know how to handle this. The ceremony was in Korean, and only a few phrases were translated. Most of the Korean guests I saw spoke to the groom's parents, but did not have much to say to the bride or her mother. Worst of all was how my friend's mother was treated. She'd just arrived in the country the day before, speaks no Korean, and was obviously uncomfortable. The wedding hall staff dealt with the situation by sticking her in a corner and ignoring her. All the foreign guests made a point of talking with her, but I thought it was really shabby of the staff-- and the groom's parents- not to make more of an effort to include her. The language barrier is not really an excuse; there were plenty of bilingual Korean guests present who would probably have been happy to translate.

The Korean wedding guests also seemed uncomfortable with the large number of foreign guests at the wedding. Mostly they just decided not to look at us. Eye contact or at least a nod would have been appreciated. Maybe it's just me; no one else I asked seemed to have noticed anything unusual in the vibe. Since both the foreigners and the Koreans pretty much talked amongst themselves (with the exception of our school's Korean English teachers, who mingled), I guess they wouldn't have. Anyway, it was a pretty ceremony, and the bride and groom both seemed very happy, which I guess is the most important part. (I actually sang a song-- they asked me a while ago if I would-- which came off pretty well; fortunately a friend of mine was nice enough to play the guitar. We did "Love Me Tender," which might not be exciting but was really appropriate for the bride and groom. So-- not a gig, but the first time I've sung on personal request. Huzzah!)

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I think I'm starting to understand how resident aliens in the US must feel most of the time. One big problem is the frustration of being unable to communicate. The worst was the first few weeks after I got here, in June of 2007. I couldn't read anything without a lengthy struggle-- all the signage might as well have been hieroglyphics. For someone who spends mostof her free time reading things, this was intensely frustrating, almost suffocating. My Korean's gotten better, and I can usually get my point across, but complex conversations are beyond me. If something goes wrong-- if there's a problem with my cell phone, or a notice gets posted in the apartment building, or something breaks in my apartment, I need an interpreter to get anything done. I need to study, and have been better about it lately, but I really want to be able to acquire the language instantaneously. I'm impatient.

There are different ways of communicating here-- different nonverbal cues, different postures and gestures, different connotations. I think about the subtleties involved in communicating in English-- subtle shifts in tone, obscure references and metareferences, the fine shades of meaning that make us choose one word over anothere-- and am frustrated by the knowledge of how much I must be missing even of those conversations I do understand. It's not that I have any particular fascination with the Korean culture-- it's just that my main goal in life has always been to understand things.

There's also a sense, here, that many people don't see you as quite a real person. There's plenty of the oh-look-Mommy-a-blond/tall/fat/foreign person that I expected when I came over here. I've gotten used to it, and it doesn't bother me that much, though it does set my teeth on edge a bit every time I hear someone say "Whoa, look, a foreigner!" or some variation. (I've started responding with "Oh, look, a Korean!" which always gets a stunned look from kids who'd never conceived of a non-Korean being able to speak even a little of their language. Sometimes I just glare.)

What really bothers me, though, is something I've noticed more and more of lately: people who treat me as if I'm not there at all, or as if I've got the plague or something. I don't mean line-cutting, or jostling in a crowd, though there's plenty of that to go around. I mean I am standing in a store or bank, face-to-face with an employee, mouth open to ask a question-- and then some Korean person comes up and interrupts the conversation with a question of their own, as if the employee had been staring at nothing. And the employee answers them, and lets me sit and stew until the More Important Person's concerns have been dealt with. Or I am on a bus or subway, and there is an empty seat next to me, and some Korean who has just boarded looks desperately up and down the car for any other seat before taking the one that is available right in front of them. Foreigner cooties. I know we're associated with the Swine Flu now, being as how the furrn devils had it first, but this all predates that.

Korean culture is quite homogenous, and it's usually very easy to tell if someone is Not From Around Here. Most people are not used to trying to decipher a foreign accent; mispronounce your Korean a little bit and you're speaking a foreign language to them. Koreans as a whole are also very nationalistic. "Us and Them" rhetoric is not just popular, but standard. An exceptionally popular name for things is "Uri," or "Our." "Our Bank." "Our Rice." "Our Potatoes." The "Us" in question is clearly defined." It's a bit much to overcome if you want to interact normally with someone to whom you might as well be an extraterrestrial.

Not everyone is like this. The vast majority of the people I talk to here are exceptionally kind and friendly-- curious about where I'm from and where I'm working, complimentary about my poor Korean, eager to communicate as well as we're able to. That's why it's so startling-- and so hurtful-- when that one person in a crowd suddenly stops what they're doing to give me a blank-faced full-bodied stare as I walk by. I guess it's like with anything-- no matter how many positive things there are, the negative ones still stand out.

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This wasn't meant to be such a negative post, but all this has been bothering me. I'll try to think of something a little more upbeat for next time.

Take care--
-K<3>