Holidays
It was snowing; big, white, fluffy flakes falling like ash. By the restaurant with fish heads hanging in a bag from a tree branch, I passed an old woman. Hands clasped behind her back, white mask covering her mouth, and a Louis Vuitton bag balanced carefully on her head. Three worlds colliding in one old woman. Pollution, fashion, tradition. There are juxtapositions here that catch me off guard, flashes that make me smile. Chris and I took the high speed train (traveling roughly 230 mph) to Pusan for the Christmas holiday. Pusan smells like sewage. It comes up through the vents in the streets in great whiffs of cold, putrid air. I breathed through my mouth, careful not to take any deep breaths when walking over a sewage grate. When we arrived, it was 11 pm and we were both hungry. After checking in to a hotel just outside the doors of the train station (a hotel that put the Riveria in Las Vegas to shame, complete with a bed so slanted I kept sliding off in the middle of the night, and ...