Thursday, August 25, 2011

Busan Journal, China Adventure, Part I


Getting There

If memory serves, we first dreamed of travel to China during the 1970s, shortly after Nixon greeted Mao in Beijing. 

At the time, our family was very young, three under five, with another child still to come, so we did not see how China would ever be possible.

 A lot has happened since then.




When our stay in Korea began to materialize, China became a possibility.  As we planned for our February 2011 departure for Korea, we had a rough notion we could use our base in Korea to visit other places in Asia.  Both China and Japan seemed within reach. Vietnam was a more distant possibility.

If we could visit Japan, we would want to see Naho, one of our first home stay daughters. If we wanted to see China it would need to be in late May or June, after our Chinese home stay kids returned home from their U.S. colleges. Largely because of tropical heat, which we are constitutionally unsuited to, the possibility of Vietnam would remain "remote."

Japan does not require a tourist visa, but China does.  Back in January, without precise travel dates for our visa application, we were advised to apply once we reached Korea.  There is a Chinese consulate in Busan, we were told; just apply when you know more.

Good idea. No problem.



We had originally planned to visit Japan during the university exam break in mid-April. Unfortunately, as everyone knows, Japan suffered an earth quake at the end of March that caused both a devastating tsunami and a nuclear reactor "meltdown."

Naho, who lives in Tokyo, said we should not come. But once life had normalized, our mid-term window had passed.

We continued to hold out hope for Japan even as we made plans for China. After settling travel dates with Edward, who had lived with us the year before, I hunted down the Chinese Consulate in Busan only to find myself lost in a hot, crowded, windowless, square room filled with signs in Chinese and Korean.  Not an English word in the place that I could see.

It was austere and unfriendly to the point of being forbidding. Chest-high counters along three of the walls were crowded with people filling out applications. Dozen of people were queued up to windows along the fourth wall, tiny openings covered almost completely with glass.



It would be fair to say, I felt a bit conspicuous.

In time, a young woman in uniform came out to me.  She asked what I wanted, which surprised me as this was the visa application office.  I told her.  She looked at my passport and my applications, then informed me that I needed a Korean Alien Registration Number.  No ARN, no visa.  No visa, no China.

I had no ARN, as I had been told it was not necessary.

What follows is the kind of bureaucratic run-around that we have come to call a "catch 22" after the ever changing regulations that kept servicemen from leaving the combat zone in Joseph Heller's famous war novel.

After the Chinese Consulate, we visited Korean Immigration to apply for an ARN.  After several hours in the small, crowded waiting room, we met Mr. Yoyo, who was both very serious and very helpful.  Not fast, but helpful.  His English was OK, which we thought was just fine as we had no Korean beyond "anyounghaseo" and "kamsamnida."  Hello and thank you.

Mr. Yoyo spent a great deal of time examining my Fulbright ID, our passports, our applications, and his computer screen.  From time to time he would ask a question for information that I had already written on the application; then he would get up and walk to use a computer on the other side of the room.

Several times he looked directly at us and said, "Mr. Zoller, welcome to my country."

I felt it was a nice gesture, welcome, as immigration offices have to be the least friendly places on earth, apart from war zones and prisons.  At any rate, I felt I was getting mixed messages. The room said "abandon hope" -- Mr. Yoyo was saying "welcome."



The short version of this story is that the three week wait for the ARN became seven due to a change in regulations while our passports we "in the system" somewhere in Busan. I found this out when I went down on the appropriate date to pick up the Alien Registration cards and our passports. Rule changes would delay our departure for China until June 20, way too late for us due to my teaching obligations and our departure date for return to the States.

It also meant we could not squeeze in a quick trip to Japan as we had no passports.

In the mean time, we learned that if we flew to Hong Kong, which has special status in the Chinese governance structure, we could obtain an expedited visa for China within 24 hours.So we did not need the ARN after all, just our passports, if I could only get them out of the system.

When I texted Mr. Yoyo in early June to see if I could move the process along or simply retrieve our passports, I received this text in return:  "Both AR cards and passports are here.  You can pick them up."

He did not say how long they had been sitting in the Immigration office. Kamsamnida

We did not go back to the Chinese Consulate.  Instead I booked a flight to Hong Kong for the earliest date I was free.  Then I wrote Edward to tell him when we would arrive and how long we thought we could stay.

From that point on, come what may, we were heading for China. After a long delay the wheels were in motion, the dream would become reality.  We would have to pinch ourselves later.



Thursday, August 4, 2011

Busan Journal, Day 29

On the Rocks

From the beginning, our reasons for going to Korea were personal.

In early June two of our Korean home-stay daughters, Chloe and AhRa, rode the Korail Express Train (KTX) from Seoul to spend a few days with us in Busan. With all the laughter, chatter, and personality they bring with them, it was just like old times. 

We went to the beach, hiked trails, took a ferry ride, and ate in restaurants.  At night we all made space for ourselves in our two rooms, the girls on sleeping mats in the "living room."  Cozy.



I cannot overstate how much we enjoyed their visit; and I cannot choose some moments over others as being "the best things" about those few day, so I will just say that one memorable activity of their stay was our trip to a raw seafood restaurant on the rocks below the lighthouse on Taejongdae Island.


 These views from the top and bottom of the cliffs give necessary perspective on what "seaside" dining really entails.



This was an experience that falls into the "first and only" category for us.  Donna had come up with the idea of taking Chloe and AhRa by subway and then taxi out to Taejongdae for seafood on the rocks, thinking the seafood would be cooked.  Of course.

We had seen the restaurants from an earlier trip to the lighthouse; but as the wind on that day was daunting, we had not ventured down to the rocks for a closer look. We knew the food would be fresh but we had somehow missed its "raw" aspect.


What had looked like cooking baskets and pots from two hundred feet up the cliff were really just holding tanks to keep the creatures alive.

It took only a few minutes for the girls to select sea squirt and sea cucumber from the tubs of salt water, and it took the cooks only a few minutes more to dispatch the creatures by chopping them into bite-size pieces and bring the delicacies in on a tray.



The darker, grey pieces are the sea cucumber and the rest is sea squirt, so far as I know.  The white food in the small dish is sliced radish with whole green peppers of the hot variety, and the other two dishes have hot sauces. Apart from the raw seafood, which is common enough in Busan but not the usual fare, and apart from the reduced number of small side-dish bowls, this is how a Korean meal is served.  You use your chopsticks to take from the main dish or dishes as well as from the side dishes.

There are many variations, of course, but we saw this basic format many times. I might add that this meal was unusual because we were not served kimchi, perhaps the only Korean meal we had during our four plus months without at least one bowl of kimchi.  Whether this had anything to do with the fact that we were at the seaside eating raw seafood, I don't know.



Our reactions to the seafood was predictably different from Chloe and AhRa's. Donna dutifully took a piece of sea cumcumber, found that it was nothing like the cucumber she was used to, and could not swallow it.  After that attempt, she needed a few minutes to recover.



I managed a piece of each and swallowed both, but decided I had done my duty and took no more.  For the record, neither cucumber nor squirt had a distinctive taste to me, being both somewhat bland by themselves.  The issue, I think, is with texture.  Sea cucumber is rubbery, rather more solid than it looked.  At least for my aging molars, it refused to break apart after serious grinding, and I eventually swallowed it whole.

The texture of the sea squirt was opposite the cucumber, being soft.  I expected it to disintegrate quickly, but it too resisted chewing.  Nothing would make it fragment, so again after rigorous chewing I swallowed the whole thing.



AhRa and Chloe found our efforts to eat quite amusing.  I did not get a usable picture of them laughing, but in this one their attention to the seafood we could not eat is clearly evident.

Eating was not all we did on this trip.  We watched the big ships coming and going outside of Busan Harbor,




and we hiked along the Taejongdae Island shore with its spectacular views.


But as was true everywhere we went in Korea -- and China, too -- it was people, in this case our remarkable and beautiful Korean daughters, who made the memorable truly unforgettable.



As I said earlier, our reasons for going to Korea were personal.