Friday, June 17, 2005


Do you see anything strange about this young man about to get on a bus? (my bus from Vang Vien to the Capital) - Look closely. Then scroll down.

Now do you see it? Look at where his right hand is in his jacket pocket. Now look below. It's an AK-47 (I think), and he's been assigned to protect the bus from bandits. Cool, isn't it? On this road there hadn't been any attacks this year (yet).

Thursday, June 16, 2005


flip flops, anyone? a market stall in one of my haunts near Chun-ge-Chun

Thursday, June 09, 2005


LINT

Yes, this represents a new, all-time low in the ephemeral and irrelevant world of blogging- posting a picture of your sock lint.

You see, this lint has come to symbolize my life. Let's just back up for a minute and reflect on where lint comes from:

Lint comes from your skin rubbing your clothing, or your shoes rubbing your socks, like my Doc Martens did to my socks. In case you don't wear 'Docs', the leather uppers are stiff and cardboard-y, so from the action of my heel slapping, tiny, individual fibers are pulled away from the warp and woof and they fall to the bottom of the shoe, where they join other fibers and are matted by the hammer of my heel into lint.

Although you could look at my overpriced Docs as little lint factories, pounding out their products across my foot-miles, another way to see lint is to consider what the bhuddists like to call the Precept of Impermanence - all things must pass, all beings are mortal, even rocks give way to time, etc. To put it simply, lint is clothes death.

As I rushed around on this Friday, the last day of the semester, all the final tests safely behind me, I was determined to get out of this country for the 10 days between now and the next class of Summer Session. I had it all worked out; I would pop over on the boat, getting my visa enroute - or then I had option B, pop over to Bangkok with the stub-end of a ticket I returned to Korea on, essentially costing me nothing.

So I'm rushing around, making plans, breaking plans, forming new plans, formulating ideas, checking the weather, verifying prices, and all the while busily making lint (see picture above). And as it turns out, Sock Lint is all I have to show for all my rushing around; once again, there are no tickets available out of Gilligan's Island-Korea; no affordable destinations (other than Thailand, which sort of bores me now) and no visa possible from the Chinese Embassy in reasonable time (I love the Chinese government and their impossible, thieving, murdering ways, because it gives me something to hate more than my own government)

The travel agent just called. Guy says they can put the fix in for me at the embassy so I can hop tonights boat (the next one is in four days) to Beijing if I want. They ask for 300,000 won (about 300 dollars).

"Is that including round-trip boat fare?" sez I
"No" sez they
"What! 300 for a freakin' visa? It was supposed to be a shopping trip, just there and back in a week" shkreamed I

I guess I'll be here, then. The plus side is I can start blogging again; in China this would have been impossible, as most blogging sites are blocked by the Chinese gov'ment. (gotta love'em, right?)

I'll dish up some more lint later on.