My Travel Adventures

Our last day in Seoul started with a scenic view. We rode up the hill to the Bugak Palgakjeong, an octagonal pavilion to the north of the historical centre of Seoul. The weather was either cloudy or smoggy; either way, we could not see a whole lot that day, and distant Gangnam rose faintly behind thin milky curtains.

On our penultimate day in Seoul, my dad and I made a trip to the De-Militarised Zone. As one may perhaps expect, it is not a journey one person, whether foreign or Korean, can make by themselves. There are only a few companies that are licensed to lead tours to the DMZ, and even fewer that can lead tours to the Joint Security Area (JSA). We, therefore, joined a half-Japanese, half-English-speaking tour bus in the centre of the city, and let ourselves be led around the sights to be seen.

We undertook our return to Seoul by car, planning to get back at around six o’clock. The route inevitably traversed South Korea’s scenic Sobaek mountain range, which is pierced through and through by a vast collection of tunnels.

On our full day in Gyeongju, we visited a number of temples, beginning with Bulguksa. As a note to potential travellers: It is well worth it to wake up early in the morning and see some sights while other tourists are still clambering out of bed. When we visited, Bulguk Temple was practically bereft of visitors.

We arrived in Busan in the morning to be picked up once again by our trusty guide Mr J. Our tour began in the city, which from a distance looks like a collection of lego blocks spilling out of the mountains. Our car climbed its way up the hill through the narrow streets of the erewhile poor quarters, where many tiny houses were built on the tombstones of Japanese settlers. As we learned in a photo exhibition towards the top of the hill, the quarters were settled by refugees. Masses of people migrated South, particularly to Busan, when US, UN and South Korean forces were pushed out of the North by China – many had in fact begged US ships to allow them on board, which they did unwillingly after dumping their arms into the sea to make space. Upon their arrival in Busan, the refugees settled on the outskirts of the city to eke out a living in awful conditions.

We woke up at five in the morning to catch a plane flight to Jeju Island. Off the peninsula’s south coast, Jeju enjoys a subtropical climate beloved by tourists. Indeed, it was quite warm when we arrived, but not the smoggy, humid warmness that welcomed me in Seoul.

Our first day in Seoul was a hectic sprint through the most important sights of the city. Our guide – who went by the name Mr J – first took us to the museum of the Blue House, the residence of the South Korean president. Despite the fact that the grounds have been used for over a millennium, our guide (just like a close-by Chinese guide whom I happened to overhear) started the story at Japanese aggression, setting the tone for pretty much every subsequent stop. What became the president’s residence used to be the residence of the Japanese Governor General during the period of Japanese occupation between 1910-1945.

The reason we travelled everywhere by taxi yesterday was that the air conditioning in the family car stopped working and had to be taken to the mechanic. It eventually turned out this was a symptom of the entire cooling system being broken, but in any case, it was up and running today. Once again, Kelly’s uncle came to my aid, and after I exchanged goodbyes with a good part of Kelly’s family, he drove me to the airport, with Kelly and Yiding riding along to see me off.

On my second full day in Xiamen, Kelly, Yiding, and I visited the South Putuo Temple, originally built during the Tang Dynasty, destroyed during the Ming Dynasty, and rebuilt during the Qing Dynasty. Before plunging into the hordes of tourists, we took a little stroll around the pond in front to look at fish and turtles. To our consternation, we found a monstrous giant turtle in the midst of the pond’s other inhabitants – likely a rather ill-considered release by a rogue animal lover.

When planning my visit, I did not quite realise the extent to which I would be coddled by the entirety of Kelly’s family, not just in the apartment but outside of it. After Kelly’s grandma made us breakfast and Kelly’s dad made us tea and coffee, Kelly’s jiujiu (paternal uncle) drove us to the harbour. Along with Kelly’s cousin Yiding – a hilariously awkward fourteen-year old who made up for his shyness with a range of animated facial expressions – we took the ferry to the island of Gulangyu. Gulangyu is the site of a former international settlement: It housed a number of Western consulates after China lost the First Opium War and Xiamen was designated a Treaty Port by the Treaty of Nanjing. Nowadays, Gulangyu is a hot tourist spot, offering somewhat polluted beaches that are much better for taking pictures than swimming, as well as pedestrian, European-style streets and views of modern Xiamen.

I left Kunming on Sunday morning after Shuting treated Chianna and me to lunch. Several of us had arranged to leave for the airport together, which we did indeed do in two groups a little after twelve. As luck would have it, this was the first time that my ride to (and for that matter from) the airport did not take me down Yi Er Yi road. Instead, we headed up towards the Cuihu area, passing by a church that I had visited on my very first weekend in Kunming. That day, I spotted the church across Cuihu Lake and, feeling all sentimental about the time I had spent singing in churches these past few years, found my way to the entrance and sat in the pews for a good few minutes with misty eyes.

In anticipation of our last free Saturday in Kunming, Fafa and I made a plan to visit the Western Hills (Xishan) overlooking Dianchi Lake. Throughout the week and Saturday morning, our party slowly expanded to a group of six – besides Fafa and me, Shayley (a classmate from Yale, appearing anonymously in the previous posts “Examinations and Excursions,” and “Cheer up, Captain, buy a flower off a poor girl”), Elizabeth (previously seen in “A Note on Guitars”), Bekkah, and Shuting (Fafa herself should be familiar from the post “Cheer up, Captain, buy a flower off a poor girl”). We left at nine in the morning with Fafa at the helm, boarding the bus to the closest metro station and then riding to its final stop at the foot of the Western Hills. Fafa noted the journey took exactly 52 minutes.

Before talking about CET’s closing ceremony, I need to wind back the clock by about two weeks, then by about two months, and then forward again to two weeks ago. So, during my last two weeks at CET Kunming, my class’s topic was Chinese attitudes towards the USA. My class had not discussed politics very explicitly before, but the syllabus plunged us straight into some very turbulent waters. On quite a few occasions, our teacher would begin to talk about recent events in Hong Kong, or our textbook would discuss American “ 霸权主义 ” (hegemonism), or we would hold class debates on media bias across the globe.

This post is nothing but a shameless brag. At the beginning of our program, Elizabeth – one of my friends from the class below mine – discovered and took under her wing an acoustic guitar in the students’ common room. The strings were all getting a little worn, so she took it to a local music store and had all of them changed. Ever since then, the guitar was a popular addition to our daily lives, and I soon formed a habit of practicing a little every single day. Besides a few exercises plucking individual strings in high school, I was never taught how to play the guitar properly, but over the summer I figured out h ow to play a few songs and how to – at least in theory – play most of the important chords.

It was hot on my last day in Sipsongpanna, and yet the weather was remarkably cloudy most of the time. The hotel’s owner very kindly took me to the airport, politely alluding to the reviews for his business on the internet – I was happy to oblige.

The one thing I really wanted to do in Sipsongpanna was to visit the Dai Ethnic Garden. A collection of villages dating back as far as 1400 years ago, the site boasts a number of temples in the Dai style.

A while back, I was eating lunch with a friend, who – familiar with my packed travel itinerary – asked me whether I had been to Sipsongpanna (Xishuangbanna in Mandarin) yet. Before that conversation, I had only heard very vague things about Sipsongpanna, the most popular being the refrain “it’s so hot!” I was intrigued, however, and decided to do some research.