The Start of Summer

The winter finally seems to have released its terrible grip on this island after months of false hope and seeming mockery. The true indication of this was that our plans for a large beach gathering, foiled in previous weeks by the sadistic weather pattern of "beautiful sunny weekdays/piss-poor dreary weekends and vacation days", was finally able to happen. So we packed our beach towels, sunscreen, and, with jaded skepticism, an umbrella and warm clothes for the unfortunately common meteorological bait-and-switch we'd experienced constantly over the previous months.

Our destination, Hamdeok beach, was described and pictured somewhere back in my first blog posts. Thankfully, it seems that the thriving beach-roach population was wiped out by the months of cold weather. We found the beach deserted when we arrived, save two or three Hamdeok locals; as it is not yet officially "beach season", the Korean population wouldn't dream of going near it, leaving us a deserted island paradise.

As an outsider living in a society where behavior is overwhelmingly dictated by social custom, we are uniquely free. While this has hurt us (in the freezing depths of February, a store informed us that "heater season" was over, and thus the heaters weren't being sold anymore), it also leaves us with open beaches and occasional sale of items going out of vogue. I am not sure if this indisputable cycle of goods and behavior is an imposition on the Koreans, or if they are truly of one mind on such things, but I do know that when it was miserably cold at the beginning of Spring, I personally was glad that I wasn't socially bound to shed my jacket and go out in skimpier attire like the Koreans. They looked miserable.

When we got to Hamdeok just after noon, we walked toward the small cove at the end of the beach where, during the official Beach Season, the ultra-strict beach lifeguards have no authority. While I have never been here during the height of summer when they are on patrol, I have been told that because Koreans are notoriously weak swimmers, swimmers aren't allowed out beyond, like, chest depth. Even if a foreigner tries to go out beyond these limits, they will circle around you on jet skis blowing whistles at you until you surrender and return to shore. As a result, the foreign population has found an adjacent beach to escape such harassment. Today, however, the group had apparently chosen to go elsewhere, so we started back up the path to the main beach where we supposed they must be.

On the way, we passed a small hut where five clearly high-school aged girls were clandestinely pounding down cheap beer. Drunk and excitable, one of the ran out at us after seeing my friend's dog Zeus. She insisted that we all take pictures together with her. We obliged, and she stumbled back to her friends, but it was hardly the last we'd see of them- they eventually found the group of foreigners later that day, and went from group to group trying to talk to people. They later claimed to be twenty years old... somehow I doubt it. Maybe that was part of them angling to have someone buy them booze or something.

Zeus, the (maybe) poodle-Cocker Spaniel mix


The high school girls Zeus attracted


Going on the inevitable beer run some time after we had settled down, I found a GS 25 store just down the main road. Outside, a man sat at a table and was, despite it being 12:30 pm, working on his 13th can of Cass beer. I passed, and had the distinct impression that I was nearly invisible to him. This changed rather dramatically when I left the store carrying two bottles of makeolli, the unfiltered country liquor popular with farmers, old men, and midday alcoholics (most fit into all three categories). As soon as the old man saw the milky-white beverage, he magically took an interest in me and started pulling out all the English word he knew to try to get a cup of it... which is rather strange, because at roughly $1.20 a bottle, it's not exactly vintage champagne. This happens every time I walk out in public with a bottle of this stuff- old men come out of the woodwork and start trying to make conversation. Maybe that's why I like drinking it: it makes me King of the Bums, like some kind of Pied Piper. Makeolli, the alcohol of mooches.

After several hours of laying out (or rather, burning my pale self) in the sun, I overheard one of the other foreign teachers talking about some sort of music video shoot taking place on the secluded beach we had first visited. A friend and I set off to check it out, though we did so unfortunately barefoot, and had to traverse progressively more and more painful stretches of barbed grass and volcanic rock shards to get there, under the mistaken impression with each step that we were closer to relief at our destination than if we went back and got shoes. As a result of our slow limping, we caught the very tail end of the K-Pop dance routine. The crew started to strike the set, and the dancers and a man that seemed to be the singer started climbing up the stone steps towards us. The man sheepishly said hello to us, greetings which we returned, and followed with a question about what was going on. A look of absolute terror spread over the guy's face, and he took off running, shouting "English No! English very very very no!". We found out from one of the crew that the video was for a new Korean dance artist called Miracle, who we understood to be the man who had just run screaming from our native language. That makes the first (but possibly not the last) time I've scared a pop star by simply talking to them.