Many, many, many weekends ago (May 15-16, I think) my Korean class ended for the semester and the classmates went out for dinner that Friday. Nothing too special to report except that when wondering around the area we stumbled on a foreign imports store that had, bless the Lord, A&W Root Beer. YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. It had been 1.5 years since I had tasted that sacred elixir. Much, much too long. Korea drinks, with considerable frequency, Coca-Cola and most other Coke products, but no root beer. They even have Pepsi products now....but no root beer. I have just discovered that A&W's international headquarters are in Malaysia, not that far away, so perhaps a trip is in order. Not like I didn't already want to visit Malaysia. I struggle to understand why they wouldn't import such a tasty drink, but at present I have to chalk it up to Korea's weird (aka terrible) taste preferences. Any country that would willingly drink ginseng concoctions (gag) and actually like the taste of white rice (that's impossible since white rice has no taste...you simply can't like a flavor that doesn't exist) deserves to have its flavor palette questioned. As for the root beer, it was the highlight of my entire weekend. Not the marathon in a weird new city. Not the misadventures in the new weird city. It was definitely the root beer. I may have scared some passerby with the noises I was emitting. Sorry to scare you folks, but I promise I was not getting my rocks off in the middle of the street. Root beer is just really good.
That particular weekend was the Gunsan International Marathon (they can get away with saying "International" since they invited 3 legit black runners from Kenya or somewhere to wave, shake hands and then win the race easily...and they did). Carrie and Jenna had planned to run and I had planned to cheer, since the actual half marathon I ran a few weeks previous was anything but rainbows and kittens. However, Jenna hurt her ankle skateboarding (yeah, I laughed too) so she was stuck cheering just like me. Now we just had to get to Gunsan, and that turned out to be anything but easy. The "plan" (note the quotations) was for all of us to meet in Suwon and then catch a bus down to Gunsan. Sounds easy enough. However, as I am me, I f'ed it up. For starters, I got on the road late and horribly underestimated the time it would take on the subway from my apt to Suwon. As a result, I got into Suwon station 10 minutes before the bus was set to leave and I still had to get across town to the bus terminal. Boo. I accepted my failure and sat down for a tasty FAIL burger in the station, then set off for the terminal. Presumably I would just catch the next bus, departing an hour later, then catch up with the girls in Gunsan. Cept there was no bus an hour later. So 2 hours after the girls I finally was able to leave.
Shit didn't really get any better once I actually got to Gunsan. The ladies had obviously wandered off to find food and a hotel, but as we are in a new and terribly unremarkable town, there was little they could do to navigate me to their location. "Turn left at the store that smells like rotting cabbage." "Ahhhh, which store? They all smell like rotting cabbage!" They figured they had found a potential rendezvous point in the town's "fashion district", a small street closed to traffic that was lined with clothing stores and weirdly tacky lampposts with fish (or was it pelican?) statues on the top. I told my cabbie the name of the area and he didn't understand for a while but eventually seemed to get it, so I figured I was in the clear. When I told him I was meeting my friends, the yuckster responded by asking "Girlfriend?" and when I responded with a "no", he followed with "boyfriend?", to which I also responded "no". hah, very funny. Now just fuck off and drive the damn cab. Which was obviously too much for him to do, as he drove me all the way to the other side of town. Albeit the park he took me to was really pretty and they had a cool concert going on, but it wasn't exactly where I wanted to be. The girls called again and this time I just gave the phone to him and eventually he got it. He then followed that up with yelling at the girls for giving him bad directions. Which would have been warranted had we not been repeating the same name for the place the whole time. In the end, i met up with the girls. And it was only 3-4 hours late. Uggggg.
Now is the time I should probably discuss Gunsan itself. I know I've said this before, but Korea is basically 2 countries. You have the first world, metropolitan side, consisting of Seoul, Busan, Daejeon, Daegu and the other 6 or so towns with one million plus people. Then you have the rest, which is very much not metropolitan, sometimes not even first world. Think rural, rural, rural Wisconsin. Or Wyoming. Pretty and woodsy, sure, but fuck all to do, see, enjoy. Gunsan is one of the latter. The people in such towns are as you would expect from a rural, rural, rural Wisconsin town: quite insular, maybe a tad out of touch, and generally super curious about anything new that the town doesn't have (which is a hell of a lot). We as beautiful, sparkling, mysterious foreign creatures (kinda like Twilight, but much less shitty) count as one of those "new" things. We do not like this extra attention and interest from the locals. Not at all. All the staring. Makes you feel like you have 12 arms or wings or something really freakish to warrant all that attention. But no, we have 2 arms, 2 legs, no wings, hair, nose, mouth, and teeth, just like the locals. No big deal, right? Add to that that every taxi driving by assumed we were lost and made sure to slow down, get our attention or just honk at us, and you could see why the girls just got plain annoyed. Jenna has always lived in a 1 million plus town here, so she has little experience with the small town fascination with us, while Carrie got the hell out of the small town last august and hasn't looked back. I, with my elite skills at zoning out things around honed from years of zoning out the parents (sorry mom and dad....), fared much better.
But surely this town must have something to see or do? It's a coastal city, so there has to be a beach or something? Well, we really didn't find one. The girls did find a nautical theme park or museum or something, but that turned out to be just a couple of beached, old, rotting fishing boats. Charming. Sure it had your standard skyscraper apartments that fit together ohhh so nicely with the rest of the city's skyline, which is one or two stories at best. Yes, you have a flat, flat, flat skyline, then suddenly a handful of 20 story apartment buildings. Yeah, that looks really nice. It also had your typical fashion areas and Korean restaurants and PC rooms and red light districts, but we hate that shit. That park that the taxi guy took me to was quite nice, with the lake, lighted bridge and concert stage, but hardly worth the price of admission. In short, I shall not be returning to Gunsan.
But wait, they have built this massive sea-wall/bridge a bunch of miles outside of town to reclaim land from that dastardly ocean that keeps stealing all their land and rice and women! Ha, take that sea! You blue, wet bastard! Even better is that the land taken back from sea is going to be used for an international business free zone and possibly an amusement park, which is so much cooler than those egrets and cranes that used to just have sex there and make babies. Yuck, get a room birds! May I suggest one at the new Samsung Ocean View Resort, attached to the Hyundai Adventure Land amusement park?
Beautiful, no?
Yeah, they really did build this seawall to reclaim land from the sea. And it really was a breeding/nesting area for cranes and such, but will obviously be much better suited as a international business zone. Not sure what exactly is going to draw the international businesses to Gunsan, but I don't feel like raining on Gunsan's parade, so I'll keep that criticism to myself.
While doomed to fail as a business or tourism draw (seriously, there is not even a possible alternate reality where this would become a huge global attraction, let alone reality....its a goddamned wall that runs out into the ocean. That's it), the wall/bridge can work quite nicely for a marathon. Just run out onto the bridge for 13 miles, then turn around and come back. Done and done. So Sunday morning, our little group had to make it out to this wall. Again, sounds easy enough. We left in plenty of time, as we weren't sure how long it would take to get there. We contemplated walking, but just to be safe we settled on a taxi and damn were we glad we did. This wall ended up being 20-30 minutes outside of town, by car, driving at highway speeds. Upon arriving, we realized that this dream of a global tourism and business destination must be a newly formed one, as there still wasn't anything there yet. A bunch of storage facilities for the various shipping companies that operated out of the port sure, but not much else. But we had a half-marathon to prep for, so enough worrying about the dumpy environs.
I've never been involved with a marathon in the states, so I can't say if this is true for all marathons, but Korean marathons are ridiculous. However, given what I have seen in my time here, I would wager that its probably just Korean marathons that are ridiculous. For starters, when we went to pick up Carrie's number and timer, we discovered that she had been registered as a male. Nothing serious, but a FAIL nonetheless. From there we listened to the MCs on stage, getting everybody pumped for the run. They even had English (kudos for them for kinda carrying through with the "International" thing) announcements. Cept they were from a recording, so the MCs had to awkwardly stand around on stage, which I found humorous. Then for part of their inspirational warm-up they played recorded music. My favorite choice? The theme from the original Star Wars movies (see video below for clip). Then they trotted a few black, legit runner looking guys out on stage and everybody clapped. I didn't catch where the guys were from but they were legit runners, as they easily finished 1, 2, and 5. Again, nice effort on the "International" thing. Carrie kept getting harassed by this creepy old guy who was going around and spraying all the runners with a water bottle (GOD I HOPE IT WAS WATER......) on their back on or on their legs or something. Just weird. And then there was these guys (see below).
Maybe there are medics like that at American marathons too, but I don't know. What I do know is that men wearing roller blades and fluorescent medic shirts with bright yellow balloons attached to them is funny looking. Especially when they are stretching out in unison. I can't be the only one who finds that funny, can I?
Soon enough it was time to race and we said goodbye to Carrie and found ourselves a spot along the starting line and tried to pick Carrie out of the crowd. It shouldn't have been hard, seeing how she was probably the only super curly haired white girl in the whole race, but sadly we failed to find her until the race had started and people spaced out. Maybe you guys will have better luck.
Did you see her?
Well, with the race started and Carrie gone for around 2 hours, we had to do something. Unfortunately there was so little to do, so after wandering around for a bit and grabbing some food, we wandered out on the amazing seawall. And boy, was it amazing. There was the road and then more road and then even more road.
There was a so called "Dolphin Park" out some ways on the sea wall, but no dolphins. But we were able to do a decent amount of people watching and there were some interesting ones. Hell, there was a Buddhist guy running the full marathon in complete Buddhist gear, which is impressive since those clothes don't breathe super well. Love Buddhists. Just love em. There was also a group of onlookers banging away on drums to create some awful racket that is affectionately referred to as "traditional Korean music". I thought it was cruel punishment for the people coming down the final stretch of the run. Those courageous souls have already run 12, maybe 26 miles, so their legs and chests and bodies must ache something fierce and you folks are gonna add bleeding eardrums and massive brain hemorrhaging to that? I call that cruel.
When Carrie finished up, she told us how incredibly boring the whole race had been, looking at the same damn straight road in front of you and the nothingness of the open ocean on your sides. That and how a Korean runner had taken her under his wing and run with her at a pace much faster than she wanted to go, leading to her almost not making it back. Thought we could get a little peace and anonymity when running? Wrong. I've heard stories of people being creeped on by older fellows or hit up for English conversation...during the damn race. I do not kid.
After some quick food and water, we got the hell back to the bus terminal and got the hell out of town. It's not you Gunsan, it's me. Well, actually it's you. Sorry. I'll call you (no I won't).
Pics: See album "A little bit of Everything", pics 1-13
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