New Years Eve on Jeju

So I never really finished writing about Seoul, but we’re past that point now. Besides, not too much happened after I went to Seoul Tower. I spent 40 minutes or so at the war museum, hopefully I’ll go again and spend more time there.

I had a two-person karaoke session, which was fun.

This weekend, New Years came 14 hours earlier than I am accustomed. I also got a 4-day holiday weekend, which is the longest of the year for people working at Yale.

We celebrated a friend’s birthday on Thursday, going ice-skating in a wonderfully atmospheric rink set amid an abandoned amusement park (I’ll put up pictures later). Then we climbed up a mountain and went back down to land in the casino.

Casinos are tacky. That’s an objective fact. Whether they are tacky fun or tacky sleezy depends I think on whether you’re winning or losing money at the time. Also if you go with friends, as I did, people can be hanger-ons and still get free drinks. If I do that about 30 more times, I’ll have gotten my money’s worth.

The only game at a casino that is both skillful and fun (sorry, blackjack) is poker, and there is no poker in the casinos on Jeju.

I spoke at length about roulette last post, I’m sure I’ll do it again at some point, but that “game” is incredibly stupid.

Friday was spent mostly in bed thinking about the gym. Also, I learned that nobody on this island knows what a “bris” is.

Saturday was spent mostly in bed, before finally going to the gym for real. Then I went up to Jeju city and spent the next 30 hours or so gallivanting around the island and taking up the new year in sloppy and expensive fashion, although with not even a photograph to show for it.

During this time, I only had meals at Indian restaurants, eating dinner at a restaurant called Raj Mahal two nights in a row and spending the first lunch of 2012 eating samosas and smoking hookah at the curiously named “Baghdad’s.” Conventional wisdom is that RM is better, and this proved to be the case: the food and selections are better, however, both are wonderful, especially to a south-sider whose access to non-Korean food is basically limited to the occasional cheeseburger.

Also, unlike “Zapata’s”, which is a noble Korean attempt at Tex Mex, RM and Baghdad’s serve legit Indian cuisine.

On New Year’s Eve, I went to a bar, and as is typical, can’t really figure out how I manage to spend 5+ hours doing nothing but dance, drink, and open my mouth.

Somehow, I wound up in a stranger’s car going to Sunrise Peak at 5 in the morning, which is exactly what I had planned on doing in the first place, but how it actually was managed has been lost to the dark corners of my brain.

Sunrise Peak, at the extreme east end of the island, is the first place where the sun rises in Korea (and on Jeju). It’s probably the most photographed tourist attraction on the island, you can probably google it and see a bunch of aerial photos of a green crater, which looks a lot different from the ground. Rising up in the middle of the night, it is a far more impressive monolith than when viewed against larger oreums (small mountains) in the middle of the day. That’s also possibly because during the day you can see people climbing up, so you have that perspective, while it looms much larger at night.

Sunrise Peak on New Year’s is apparently a very big deal on Jeju. There was a big festival the night before and when we got there all the tents were still up.

Since there wasn’t anyone I could talk to or anything to do once we got to the top, I tried (and failed) to “sleep” on my backpack on a rock, until I was woken up by some friends who had camped there from the previous evening.

Altogether there was probably at least 500 people on top of the mountain waiting for the sunrise. When the dawn came, the profile of the crater was illuminated but…there was no sun. Korea welcomed in 2012 with a large helping of clouds and fog. But it was still a neat experience.

After going back down and stopping for a Dunkin’ Donuts (I didn’t get any sleep on New Year’s Eve, in case that wasn’t clear), I met up with some Seogwipo friends. One of my co-workers lost their phone and I spent the morning trying to look for it and ultimately failing. However, I managed to irritate everyone in the process. I felt like I had invested so much time in looking for it that it would really be a bummer if I didn’t get it.

Lesson learned, I guess?

People downstairs apparently called Yale to complain about the noise I make. I have no idea what noise I’m making that is disturbing them, but whatever it is it is going to continue apace, because I have had guests over exactly once and I have no interest in changing my late night lifestyle for a bunch of grumpy “neighbors” who’ve never even knocked on my door.

I promised a friend I’d take care of their dog for a month. The people downstairs probably aren’t going to like that.

Photos from Thursday will be put up soon.

I will end with a great quote from Jeremy Ben Ami: “I understand the point that those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. But it’s equally true that the general who spends too much time learning the lessons of prior battles will end up fighting the previous war.”