Korea...again

It's a sensory deprivation of sorts.

Nothing is quite right but it still is. Just shy enough of normal that it's disheartening but not interesting. And it reaches out into everything. Like looking out of a pair of really dirty glasses, you know what everything is but you can't identify it right. It applies to your whole body. All the perceptive gear is muddled.

It began with the food. The first casualty was nutrition. The food here isn't as satisfying. The Subway sandwich's taste stale. The meat tastes slimy. The vegetables are soft. Cokes come in eight ounce cans. Steak is anemic, dry and not worthy of the name. Hot dogs, well the less said about that the better. The pizza is the most tragic casualty as a grizzled veteran of the pizza wars. Twice the grease half the toppings. Th cheese is the Best Choice style mozzarella, only it's suddenly gourmet. Instead of the classic mainstays of pizza (hamburger, olives, pepperoni) sweet potatoes, bacon and tuna take center stage. I dined and dashed at a local Pizza Hut, I have yet to feel any moral shame for these actions.

The ground feels different. I don't feel like I'm home. I'm on foreign soil and it actually feels that way, like my foot steps don't belong. The sidewalks are different, my normal proud strut is interrupted and jammed.

The air is dirty. The sand from the Gobi Desert is picked up and settles nicely into this valley. The sand settles in my lungs and flies through my windows. It settles on my objects from home and erodes them. I sweep everyday but the dust still comes in. The famous masks you may have seen on the news. They're real. This phenomenon I am speaking of is called "Yellow Dust" and it has been the scourge of the Peninsula longer than Kim Il Sung. On a windy day I can't see beyond the block.

It's the sounds that get me though. The non stop chatter of Korean. In bars and alleyways, restaurants and grocery stores. The sound of an American voice would be spectacular. The sound of a good, solid English sentence. Subject, verb, adjective, object. The occasional adverb or present progressive. In their proper order in their proper tense. The correct auxiliary verbs and indirect objects. How I long for such an inexpensive luxury.