The bus drove through, he pointed to the sky, which was crimson through my prescription sunglasses, and he said, “The pollution is so thick today, usually you can see more skyscrapers than that.” There was nothing to disappoint me. I know it’s the second largest city in the world. I know it has Starbucks and Outback Steakhouse, even a 7/11 and Subway. Tell me though, what else?

We drink. We borough ourselves into old tales, except I  haven’t heard them before, and sometimes they’ll stop to think, Oh she’s new here, she hasn’t got a clue. Then they’ll stop and ask how long I’ve been here, how long I plan on being here, where I’ve come from, and I realize that if it wasn’t for the guy I’ve known for five years sitting opposite of me, I could very well make up my whole life by shaking up an invisible magic 8 ball. I don’t lie, I’m too honest, though I know that we could form a better argument out of that rather than talk about sports and sex.

It seemed that those were the two most popular topics of the night and it was always the same instigating man with the thick beard under his chin that started with, “Where’s the strangest place you’ve done it?” “Rim jobs?!? What the fuck man!” “I’ve got my yellow, red, white, and brown belt. I never in my life thought I’d get to have threesomes after I got married, but hey, better shit couldn’t have happened” It was piggish, but I can’t really be the judge when I’ve known him for just a few hours. I was told on the train back to Jeonju that this thick-bearded man ripped a dead baby fetus out of a dying birthing horse before. Now that’s a man with some kind of character. He even had to slice the dead head off with a thin wire before pulling out the torso.

We sang karaoke in a small room, just for the five of us. It is pronounced “Norebong”, bong means room and “nore” means singing. We snuck in champagne, Soju, and Powerade, and I carried the five paper cups. I sung “Don’t Stop Believin’” and a few other songs. It is an awkward act, posing at the front of the room, your back turned towards your friends while they sing along, watching you sway or watching the guy next to you jump from couch to couch when the song begins to feel intense. After several songs, we left and went to another bar, played pool, walked to another restaurant-like bar, drank another alcoholic beverage with crushed ice, which I think you’d like if you were the same person. I was beginning to feel woozy, I’m not exactly the drinking type, but I did stare at the only other girl with us. A blonde girl, blue eyes, with a hippie stare and smile. She’s sleeping with the married man who saved a dying horse. She knows or definitely at leastnow knows that he’s had sex in an elevator and on rooftops and at baseball stadiums, and I wonder how it is that people always love the strangest and most obvious contradictions of themselves sometimes. Tell me, you young American, I know that you wanted to prosecute and defend at one point in your life, but when was it that your dream turned into a hazy picture of just a beard?

I slept on the floor, excuse me, on a thin mattress on the floor and it was not uncomfortable. The next day, just him and I went walking through the soul of Korea. We went to the largest Buddhist temple, where there were a collection of people bowing, then standing up, then bowing again, and he told me that they do that 108 times, but it isn’t just Buddha that they bow to, but they also bow to themselves because we are all Buddhas, and that is what we strive to become.

We saw the start of a river, thin and barely anything, then we saw it expand so wide that the children and their mothers could go swimming in the cool water. The day was so hot that I vicariously thrived through their wafting body movements. We went to a bookstore where there was a large English section. I saw Jane Austen and he argued a little on her unimportance in literature, yet he hasn’t read a single book. At the electronics market, I found my item, he found his Korean films, and we took the train back to Jeonju. The conductor told us to be quiet on the train and he told me that it was more than likely because we were speaking English, not speaking loudly. Our English is not white noise here, he told me, just like the Spanish back home.