Seven months after the fact

One of the last things I did before I left Cape Town, just before I sold my computer and put the multi-plug in the last open box marked ‘MISC’, was to claim a corner of cyberspace for my Korean blog. I didn’t know a lot about this country I decided to spend a year of my life in, but I had heard of Kimchee, tasted South African renditions of it, and thought Kimchee Times was a nice banner under which to present my ‘findings.’ After all, what with all the strange adventures I was bound to have necessitating timeous reporting, I anticipated frequent informative entrees for the folk back home on everything from Korean politics to the noxious gasses on my street corner. It would be perceptive, poetic, insightful, entertaining, and inspiring. It would be some of the finest travel prose written since the book of Exodus. It would never happen.

Now, four days shy of seven months, my space at thekimcheetimes.blogspot.com is still only an empty shelf. It would have gathered dust and a cobweb had it been a real shelf, but nothing is real when everything’s in flux. And when you do eventually take a step up onto the sidewalk and out of the bustling streets of this little peninsula in the orient, everything feels rather ephemeral. But you would be mistaken. And I frequently am. It does exist, it’s very real, and it wants to know everything you know. Never has a place been both so wireless and so wired. Never has so many gorgeous women been surrounded by so many average men in such a confined space. Never has a national drink been so nauseating.

Having to cover so much lost-time and head-space in a single blog requires painting with a broad brush. No, rather throwing multiple 5l tins at a canvas. But none of that will happen here. From now on, somewhere between watching nerd-warriors battle it out on the GSL and teaching middle schoolers modals and imperatives, I might have the will power to add the odd anecdotal splatter. Hopefully, five months from now, these will all conjugate (like a bunch of Korean verb endings) into a chaotically coherent whole; a picture of some people living in a town, by a river, with some crazy neighbours, and the plethora of distractions that fill their waking lives.