something to nibble on

So there I was, sitting in a cutesy Korean coffeeshop, with fish eating my feet.

It was the end of a typical weekend - the kind where I catch the first bus out and the last bus in and pack the day with various activities with friends in town. I had met one of my Korean friends downtown as she got off work for the evening, and she pulled out a booklet of advertisements to scan for coupons and places to go. We haltingly chatted in three languages with her Japanese co-worker about some of the shops, restaurants and spas in the book as she leafed through, and decided that we weren't all that hungry.

"Mmm, you want coffee and ... bread? This place has coffee, tea and bread," Yuni said, pointing to one of the pages. Her English is really pretty great, but there are plenty of times I miss what she's saying or only get part of it, and we hang out in part to trade language practice.

"Sure - sounds great," I shrugged, the ever-agreeable tourist. I wasn't quite sure what "bread" would turn out to be, but wherever my Korean friends want to go usually is great, so always happy to leave the decision-making up to them. Often, when you deal cross-cultures and cross-languages, you find yourself letting go of the small things and just seeing what happens - otherwise you'd be hammering out details for hours. She tore out the page and pocketed it, nodding.

We waved goodbye to the co-worker and ducked out into the cold night, then scuttled down a couple streets until we came to a nondescript set of stairs. Yuni pulled out the crumpled advertisement and consulted it a moment before scanning the signs plastered on the building.

"Here," she nodded.

We scurried up the stairs and through a door that opened into a warm, bright world buzzing with low conversations and smelling of tea and toast. Aproned staff bowed and greeted us, gesturing toward small tables surrounded by plush chairs in purple, green and gold. Bookshelves and faux trees were scattered among clusters of laughing young women. A few couples leaned close over steaming mugs, backlit by holiday lights and brick walls painted with foliage and shadows. It appeared to be pretty much the standard coffeeshop scene in Korea, with a bit of novel flair, and I was excited to have a potential new hangout downtown.

We set our stuff down and scoped out the menu, deciding on chamomile tea and the "toast bar" - basically a bunch of different breads set out by toaster ovens, butter and various jams. Koreans are pretty crazy about their toast, and there are entire shops devoted to just serving the crusty stuff. This seemed to be the coffeeshop version - aka, the "bread" Yuni had talked about. She went up to the counter to order for us and came back a few minutes later with our tea.

She said she also ordered something else, which I didn't quite understand, but I got that it would be ready when our number came up on a sign over on the wall - about 30 minutes. I wondered what could take 30 minutes in a coffeeshop, but again, it didn't seem worth figuring out sooner than necessary, so I smiled, said "Great," and asked her to pronounce "dog" and "crab" in Korean, which sound exactly the same to me but are supposedly different. Then we chatted about her sister's wedding and some translation work she'd done earlier that week for the U.S. Army in a court case for some soldiers who had gotten in a bar fight with some Koreans.

A few grammar and culture conversations down the line, number 178 was up, and I looked up at the counter, expecting to see a plate of something or other. But no, there was Yuni, calling my attention back and telling me to bring my bag. What? Um, okay ... maybe we had to go collect whatever it was from some other part of the restaurant? I grabbed my bag and headed after her, over to the side of the room where there were steps up to a long wooden platform. I hadn't really looked over here before but there weren't any other people except for the attendant, marking something on a clipboard and apparently giving Yuni some sort of instructions.

What the ...?

Yuni motioned me to take my shoes off at the bottom of the stairs and kept listening and nodding. I slipped off my clogs and padded up the stairs, curious. I could see some inset areas coming into view, and I thought for a moment that maybe they were like the floor tables I'd seen in other restaurants and this was a place for eating some sort of ceremonial food ... hmmm. But as I topped the stairs I realized that I was staring down into tanks of water ... and not just water - water full of small, darting fish. There were several cushions around the edges of the tanks, and sinks set into the floor a few feet away. I was totally bewildered.

Fish, fish ... oh yeah. I flashed back to the conversation we had had at Yuni's office about spa treatments and recalled a rather gross one about people submerging their feet into tanks of live fish, who eat away the dead skin. Kind of like a pedicure, a la Fear Factor. Wow. It all came clear. I had somehow missed the part about how we were going to get this spa treatment. But here I was, in this mod little coffeeshop in downtown Daegu, about to have my feet eaten off by a writhing mass of sea creatures. And it was a bought and done deal from a very sweet friend, and apparently quite the rage by the hip 20- and 30-somethings, judging by the crowd ... so hey, what the heck. When in cute coffeeshops with feet-eating fish in Korea ...

So yeah ... you can check out my pictures (just happened to have my camera along, by some great fortune). I really did it. And here's a Washington Post article with more information on the treatment, though about a Tokyo spa, and a link to the 나무그늘 site (the Daegu coffeeshop where I went) - though this site is all in Korean.

As for my experience, well ... learned the words for "creepy" and "tickle" in Korean, and basically tried not to think too much about it, except for realizing that this was perhaps the strangest 10 minutes of my life.

a trail of red lanterns

So I'm terribly behind in getting anything up about my trip to China - the government apparently blocks Blogger there, so couldn't do it from Beijing, and got swept into work and life when I got back. Anyway, better late ..., I guess.

So Beijing, Beijing. It's a cool place. Downright cold, actually. Those Siberian winds are really something.

But other than the chill, which was really only bad one day, Chinese New Year was the perfect time to travel there. Most of the city (population about 15 million people) clears out to go to their hometowns, so there's virtually no traffic and you can zip around to all the tourist sites. And the rest of the city turns out at festivals during the day (we happened across a major fair on our one free day) and stays home to light fireworks - traditionally to scare away evil spirits but today probably more to appease everyone's inner pyro. It was one of the most amazing scenes I've witnessed, standing at our plate-glass hotel windows and looking out over the exploding city - every block, every street, every house, it seemed, aflickering and abooming. Probably one of the biggest collective fireworks shows on Earth. The ruckus went on until about 2 a.m. every night but was totally worth the experience.

Most of the trip was a packaged tour - a great way to hit the highlights for a great price, if you don't mind a little dog-and-pony showing. Got most all the major sites done (Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, Olympics area - including the Birds Nest, acrobat show, martial arts show) and a small dose of the actual city and people, and it turned out to be a fantastic intro to China. Click the red lanterns to get to my Beijing photos and captions. Once there you can click pictures individually or click the "Slideshow" button to view the pictures as you like.

Granted we were almost entirely on the tourist track, but I was really impressed overall by how clean everything was, and how much the city is obviously spending to impress for the upcoming Olympics. Everywhere, there's construction and renovation projects - more or less thorough. In just a few blocks, you might find newly-gleaming skyscrapers and sleek Western-style shopping malls, as well as hurried walls thrown up around decrepit sections of crumbling huts. And the bathroom horror stories I'd heard might all be true, but mostly there was modern plumbing and conveniences.

But the real story of China, for me, was its place at the end of a three-country spectrum: Japan, Korea and China. I saw all three within the span of a week, and through the preparations and celebrations of the Number 1 holiday for all three nations - Chinese New Year. It was like traveling backward from the spinoff to the source of the party, following a trail of the holiday's signal red lanterns.

And I find that my current home makes so much more sense in the context of its neighbors. Korea has a love-hate relationship with both its neighbors, influenced by milenniums of invasions and culture swaps. Just as Japan is markedly different from Korea, so is China, but to the opposite extent. Where the Japanese are slight, the Chinese are sturdy; where the Japanese are fashionable, the Chinese are sensible. Where Japan is all order and rule, China is color and chaos; where the Japanese are reserved, the Chinese are confrontational. And Korea fits neatly in between the two - geographically and in all other senses.

I've considered jobs in all three countries, and after traveling the others a little I can still see myself in any one. But I returned home with a new fondness for the middleman - no doubt in part because it's nice to return to a new place and realize that the foreign has become familiar. I remember the same sensation in Madrid, and any number of less exotic places I've lived. But it's also the one with the easiest language, if not the most English ... and the one most welcoming of Americans. And in the end I find that being the classic fence-dweller that I am, I like the view from here.

Japan: the Far, Far East

The sun was distant as we herded onto the swaying boat, bedecked with the typical Korean blare of colors and patterns, and the lingering smell of stomach acid. On the TV in front of the seats, a muted infomercial for a Hello, Kitty! vibrating belly buster flashed. We chugged out through a maze of rust-streaked cruise and cargo ships, and into a smooth expanse of the gray sea. The Sea of Japan, according to my seventh-grade geography teacher and most of Western history. It's only this year that I realized there were other accounts, that every Korean, down to the third grade, will cry out indignantly if you happen to call it other than the "East Sea." The decades of Japanese rule still don't sit well with Koreans, and this name debate is only part of the ongoing tension. Even the venerable National Geographic - the closest thing to a world authority on place names - hasn't ruled decisively on the matter, using both (though Japan's more prominently).

It's not the only thing separating these two Pacific Rim countries.

When the boat docked at Fukuoka, I was greeted by my friends and a world of order and sophistication. Spic and span streets are lined with methodical architecture and dazzling LCD screens. Trendy couples shield runway-worthy getups from the drizzle with clear plastic umbrellas, which they then lock in special cases at the entrances of gourmet restaurants. Potted flowers adorn temporary construction walls. There are whole parking garages for bicycles, which Japanese can maneuver while holding umbrellas AND texting on their cellphones. Crosswalks play music. Robots roll through malls, delivering advertising and information. Toilets have heated seats and an inspiring array of buttons and levers. And a plethora of English and well-thought signage makes it easy for foreigners to navigate most any system. Everywhere, things are tidy, planned and systematic.

Korea is a country in the midst of a near-miraculous rebound from millenniums of invasions and a quite recent civil war. But even the relatively cosmopolitan and enormous Seoul is nowhere close to the dazzle of much smaller cities here in Japan, or so I've seen and heard. Apparently, the rush of cash here after World War II created an economic force powerful enough to lift the country from devastation to prosperity in just a couple decades. Although its economic landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, and other nations are now making inroads on its markets, this small set of islands continues to be a world powerhouse. Japan provides a stable and modern lifestyle for its population - albeit at a high cost of living and grueling work demand.

The ferry from Busan, South Korea, takes about three hours, and Fukuoka is a common hangout for those needing to start the clock over on Korean tourist visas or change Korean visas. It's on the island of Kyushu, which also includes Nagasaki, site of the second atomic bomb. We spent one day touring there. "Hi, my grandfathers bombed your grandfathers, and now I'm here to take a picture." It was a little weird. But definitely worth going - the museum, park and memorial are both moving and educational. And although the bombing of Pearl Harbor is conspicuously left out of timelines of events leading up to Nagasaki disaster, it's awe-inspiring how otherwise politically neutral and peace-focused the displays are.

Otherwise wandered around Fukuoka sites, took a three-hour tour of the suburbs when we took the wrong bus (I was NOT in charge, surprisingly), ate lots of raw fish (yum!), discovered a hot lemon drink (yum!), checked out the rave-reviewed La Boheme Italian restaurant (a must-go if you're in the city), and crashed at the Khaosan Fukuoka International Hostel - a good place to stay if you don't mind a walk, or paying an extra bus fare.

Here's a slideshow of pictures. You can click on it to get to the full album with captions.