I had an emotional breakdown in, of all places, a taxi cab. Maybe that’s not so unusual. But all the same, a ride back from camping became the worst 45 minutes of my life as I combined crashing from the previous night with a driver who was hell bent on killing me slowly and painfully.
But first, I went camping. Camping was fun but maybe a little ambitious for being here three weeks. Udo is a small island off the western coast of Jeju, as said above about 45 minutes from Seogwipo, and near Sunrise Peak, which I’ll have to return to because it is a very famous crater and it is supposedly beautiful to walk up to the top. There are fly-over pictures of Sunrise Peak everywhere on the island and in travel brochures. It is called Sunrise Peak because theoretically it is where the sun first rises in Korea, although the next morning I got up to watch the sun rise and didn’t notice it coming from the mountain specifically.
I expected, for no real reason, that Udo was going to be an isolated island with nothing but jungle, beaches, and rugged adventure. To get there you have to take a ferry. There were beaches, but the tallest greenery that grows on the island are rice plants and some spare trees lining the road to make the island look better. It’s a strange little place, with lots of cows and horses everywhere. We woke up this poor horse taking a nap because me and another girl from the school went to see the horse, and because we were foreigners, everyone driving on the road stopped and then decided that they too had to pet the horse. Eventually the horse passive-agressively rose up and said hello, and then stalked away. Sorry, buddy.
That morning I had bought a tent, a comforter, and a pillow, but it rained most of the first day we were there and so one of the foreigners bought a pension for about 10 people. Someone stole my pillow later that night. Whatever.
As the day progressed, the “camping trip” gradually became less and less so. Initial promises of a BBQ soon became a trip to the only restaurant open on the side of the island we were on, a rich man’s KFC. Then I lost my wallet somewhere on the beach. Luckily, there was another group of teachers on the island, who were sort of with us, but not really, thanks to some drama which had apparently occurred before my time. So THEY were camping out on the beach. Off in their own little world, I asked one of them if I could borrow their head lamp and they said yes without looking at me. It was a good thing that they were paying no mind to my existence, though, because I was not looking my manliest crouching along the beach and groping the sand. This is a little more dramatic than it sounds, I sort of knew where the wallet was, but it certainly felt good to have it in my hands again.
I don’t really want to talk about the evening too much except to say there were some interesting predictions made with tarot cards, some anti-Israeli sentiments which made their way into the open air, some strange incidents with a girl who tried to take my shirt off and then didn’t want to talk to me the rest of the night, and a very badly conceived game of “who am I?” where we stuck famous people to our heads on toilet paper. I also confessed to someone there, for better or worse, that I have difficulty making friends with people who I think are dumber than I am.
Then at six in the morning, I was the only one up (who else but I would be the last one up during a party that basically lasted all night) and went back to the beach with the beachy people who were also up watching the sunrise. I have no idea what they thought of me wandering into their “campground” and probably saying some more stupid things, but that was nice enough. Then I went back to the pension and fell asleep on the couch.
The next day was ill conceived on my part. We spent the better part of the day at the beach, which was fairly nice, until garbage somehow sailed from parts unknown to drive us away.
But the heat was hot, I didn’t drink enough, I got sunburned, I didn’t really eat anything, and I was working on two hours of sleep. So I was able to last until around 5, but then crashed in a bad way as we were leaving. I got very anal, somehow separated from the group, and then, once I got back to the mainland, got on board the taxi cab from hell.
Here’s a good new rule to live by, if you are a taxi driver or someone who likes to pick up hitchhikers. DO NOT TAKE A FOREIGNER INTO YOUR CAB IF YOU ARE GOING TO BE SCARED OF HIM. This cab driver was freaked out by me being on the other side of the car. He didn’t speak English. That was fine. But he didn’t know Seogwipo. I told him to go to Jungmun resort and he had no idea what I was talking about. Then I just told him to go to Seogwipo and figured I could point to the signs for Jungmun when we got there. This didn’t work for him. He stopped the car four times to get a phone out and try to get someone to translate. He was yelling at me in Korean, which was stressing me out, because I had no idea what he wanted. Then, once I was assured that at the very least we were going back to Seogwipo, I tried to take a nap and then the cab driver freaked out again. “OH MY GOD,” he said in ENGLISH and he stopped the car again. Did he think I was dying? I have no idea what the hell that was about. “Let me sleep you idiot,” I told him. I tried to motion with my hands that, no I wasn’t going into cardiac arrest, I was just closing my eyes which is what people do when they sleep, but this still didn’t satisfy him. We also had some trouble with the mirror. I would lean forward, the cab driver would yell at me and push me back, and we did this on and off for most of the ride until I finally understood that he wanted to see in his side mirror. I didn’t get to take my nap.
When we stopped again, I just lost it, and started screaming back at him in English, cursing and swearing, which felt okay even though I knew he couldn’t understand. Somehow, he didn’t throw me out of the cab and we made it all the way back to Seogwipo (we never made it to Jungmun), where I checked into a hospital, called my parents, and then walked out again without telling them. Then I slept for 18 hours and am now “refreshed”, in a very tired, anxious kind of way.
At least I have the faculties necessary to write this blog post. I’m ready for nightmares about cab drivers for the next five months. That’s better than nightmares about ghosts and nuclear holocaust, I guess.
Culture Time 