Amanda Takes Off...

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Nami Island

Saturday morning Good Man and I met at the Eastern bus station. We took a 90 min ride to Gapyeong , where we had some lunch (the restaurant was not impressive) before taking a taxi to the ferry launch for Nami Island.

The taxi ride to the island was scary. Our driver was not a bad driver, but a taxi in front of him slammed on his breaks and we very nearly rear-ended him. Good Man and I hit the seats in front of us. The driver froze, then turned around and looked at us. He tried to say something while we tried to catch our breath, but I think he was a little confused as to which language he should speak. Finally he said in Korean, "Are you OK?"

"Yes, we're OK."

We all sort of laughed that nervous laugh you do after you've nearly had a car accident and the rest of the ride was fine.

We got to the wharf (an overstatement) and took the ferry to the island. Nami Island is...an odd little place. The island is very new. It was formed on the Han in the 40s when a dam was built. But that's not why it's odd. The land is owned by one person...

Nami Island calls itself "The Republic of Nami." Your round-trip ferry ticket is your "visa" from "immigration." You can buy a "passport" to give you discounts or yearly access, I'm not sure which. No cars are allowed on the island, but you can get golf cart tours of the island and rent various types of bicycles and bicycle-like contraptions. Some really famous drama was filmed there.

Japanese tourists like the place so much that you can exchange money on the island—only Yen to Won and vice versa.

The island has a Unicef center, a wax museum, an odd recycled cans brick statue museum thing. Lots of tourist shops, of course. But once you start to get away from the shops and "first kiss" statue and grave of the island's founder or whatever, once you get to the edges of the island, it's actually quite beautiful.

There are many different trees, and the 단풍 (autumn leaves) were very lovely. According to one sign, on Nami, "there are trees tall enough to touch the sky." Other places, it seems, trees don't touch the sky. Maybe they touch water. Or dirt. In fact, the sky was flat and grey, which made the colors really pop. The river around the island was a gorgeous sea glass green.

There were many couples there, a few families. So we wandered around, holding hands, looking cute, taking pictures.

At one point we sat down on a bench and I broke out my I-don't-have-a-cake-pan-so-I-made-strawberry-bread-instead-not-cake-cake-like surprise. I had some cream cheese, and we'd gotten a plastic knife at the bakery before getting on the bus. We ate chunks of strawberry bread with cream cheese and I sang happy birthday to him, mixing English and Korean until I got to a line that sounded like, "생일 축아합니다 내 남자 친구...happy birthday to you!" What can I say? "Boyfriend" in Korean (namja chingu) rhymes with "you" in English. It worked.

Photography on the island was interesting. So, so, so many people taking pictures, about an even split between point-and-shooters and digital SLRs, though I saw one Yashica SLR. (I wonder if my mother still has her Yashica?) Many people had tripods.

So we've got tons of people who can take pictures or think they can. Great. And what do we end up with? Four or five couples in a tight area, setting up their tripods and self-timers.

"Why don't they ask each other to just take the picture? Easier, faster, less room for error, the person can wait until nobody is walking in the frame, unlike a self-timer..." Before Good Man can answer me, I supply the answer, "Cause Koreans are so Confucius and afraid to talk to strangers. Weird."

Good Man laughed and told me I was right.

Also, many people had these huge, huge zoom lenses. I don't know why. I don't think I'm too much of a photography snob. If you want to spend money on expensive lenses or cameras when you don't even understand the relationship between f/stop, shutter, and ISO, go right ahead. But they had these huge, heavy zoom lenses, and they weren't using a flash (to account for decreasing light), shooting sports, or taking pictures of birds. The island is small. The island is crowded. You're not taking a picture from 500 feet away, why do you need a 586mm lens for?

And thus my Photographic Theory of Korea was born. "In Korea, buy as many accessories as you can so you can avoid interacting with anyone else, ever."

Really, think about it. If you're tripodless, you need to ask someone else for help or get creative. (We did both. I like my tripod, but was not lugging it around.) If you have a prime lens, you actually have to move your feet to get to what you want to see—and other people might be standing there!

I told Good Man, who just laughed at me.

As we wandered around the island, we found some interesting insects. I sat on a bench and shot 40 frames of one insect. Good Man, who put up with my spider obsession well, said that I was "a bug person." I wasn't in the States, but bugs in Korea are unusual.

I wanted to see ostriches, and we finally sound some young ones. The adult "wild" ostriches apparently left the island five days earlier. Now, if anyone can tell me how "wild" ostriches got on and off the island, please do. We wandered around while eating sugared donut hot dog things and four ostriches ran in front of us. At this point, Good Man had a horrible headache, I was cold. I turned to him and said, "OK, I've seen the ostriches. We can go now."

On our way to the dock, I saw a group of people taking pictures. I said to Good Man, "Go offer to take their picture."

"Why?"

"Because they're a group, and all of their group photos are going to be one person short, and they're Korean, so they're not to ask anyone."

We went back and forth about this and he finally said, "Why do you care about other people so much?"

Well. That stopped me. He said, "I'm sorry, I have a headache. You're very kind to care about other people but..."

"But you're Korean."

He just did a smile-grimace at me.

Fair enough. And the group had broken up by that point in any case.

Once we landed, we went to a dalk kalbi restaurant. Korea is very boring sometimes. There is an area of Seoul known for jokbal, another for ddeok kalbi, another for jajangmyeon, etc. Well, this area was dalk kalbi. We had some kalbi and raspberry wine for dinner. And it was delicious.

We went to our hotel, Picasso, and crashed around 6 pm. This was a fairly expensive love motel ($60) and one of the lesser quality ones. The bed was hard, there was no supplementary pack of, uh, stuff, though we did get toothbrushes and one double-blade razor. No internet access. Unlike past love motels we've stayed in though, this one had adult novelty vending machines on each floor.

"Hey, Good Man, did you know my mom sells sex toys?"

He lifted his head off the pillow. "Um. What?"

"My mom sells sex toys."

"Has she always done that?"

I shook my head, "She didn't when I lived at home. It's soft-core stuff, lotions, creams."

He just looked at me. Considering that he lies to his mother about our weekend trips, considering that she thinks he drinks with his friends a whole lot...well, if the positions were reversed, I'm not sure how I would respond either.

The next morning we got up late, lounged around a bit before heading back to town. Guess who our taxi driver was? Yep! The same guy! I recognized his steering wheel cover and some lotus flowers hanging off his rear view. "Did we ride you yesterday?" I said. He nodded and laughed, mentioned the near-crash. The ride back to the bus station was smooth.

Good Man and I headed back to Seoul, but it was still fairly early, so we went to Technomart. He finally decided what he wanted for his birthday: RAM. We bought some RAM, had some pizza...

A very nice weekend.