The Train to Taegu

I live in Pusan, the second largest city in South Korea.

I teach six days a week. Sunday is my only day off. A pretty average schedule, one that many teachers in Korea have.

Pusan is a bustling port city. There's always something to do, or someplace to go around here: the top of Pusan Tower for it's incredible views, Yongdo Island and Taejongdae park, Pomosa Temple, bars, nightclubs, and theatres galore.

For fajitas, however, you must go to Taegu. Pusan has everything except a TGIFriday's.

The train to Taegu takes about 90 minutes, through some of the most gorgeous countryside I've ever seen.

Pusan, a city of some 4 million people, is sprawled out over I-don't-know-how-many square kilometers of mountainous land. Apartments, universities, and other buildings butt right up against the base of these sheer rocky faces, as interesting a juxtaposition of nature and man as there ever was.

The train pulls out of Pusan Station and I settle in my window seat. The trains run on time here. Always on time.

The announcer barks the next few stops over the PA system, along with our scheduled arrival times, and, damned if we don't arrive at each one at the exact time he predicted.

It's Kreskin-ly comforting.

The second stop is Kupo Station, and then, suddenly, the city slips away behind us, revealing mile upon mile of rolling, undulating hills, all toasted a light brown, flecked here and there with spots of green.

Pusan is a big city, but its boundaries are visible and definite and once you are out of the city, kid, you are out of the city.

I play child-like tricks with my eyes as the train speeds on, watching the electrical lines glide slowly up, up, then down again as the poles they connect to blur by.

I see houses in the distance; small, squatty dwellings made of concrete, with peaked roofs covered in curved tiles, reminding me of temples, of pagodas, of ashrams.

The houses out here in the countryside are all in clusters. 5 or 6 or 10 or 15 , all clustered around a dirt road leading in. All clustered around themselves.

I wonder who these people are, living out in the middle of almost-nowhere, tending their fields, feeding their livestock, seeing the same 5 or 6 or 10 or 15 people every day, every year.

Their world is small, the length of one dirt road leading in.

Most of the people I glimpse are older, their faces more brown and weathered than city folk. I see very few teens or young adults. Fewer children.

I wonder where the kids are. Gone to university? A job, a family of their own? Do they miss the simple life they left behind? When they come back home for Chusock*, are they enamored of their parents' simplicity, or embarrassed by it?

When they relate stories of the big city, when they speak of all the tall buildings and McDonald's and Pizza Huts and the people, all the people, is there awe and excitement in their voices, or is there a weariness, disdain for it all?

There are a few houses with no power lines going in. Not many, but still a few.

A wall of rock, huge, suddenly cruises by, a couple of feet from my face. The side of some mountain or other, it blocks out the sun.

I know I'm on a train in Korea, but this moutainside is so vivid, so hyper-realistic with its granite and boulders of different colors imbedded here and there, its trees and brush growing straight out of the side, that I can't help but imagine the whole mountain was built and dressed in a few weeks by a well-paid group of Disney Imagineers.

It just looks too perfect, like an artist's impression of a mountain rather than the thing itself. Somehow it's easier, and even a little more comforting to believe in Disney than to believe in the power of nature to produce such work.

The mountain recedes into the distance. More clustered houses. Four little ajummas**, in the blousy, flowered-print pants that they all wear, are walking along the parallel dirt road, plastic buckets of vegetables balanced on their heads.

I feel like a space alien. I come from a world light years away from their home, a place where pictures and words are sent through the air, where 01001110010 makes sense if you have the right magic portal.

They still have the dirt of the good earth encrusted on their food.

I suddenly feel very guilty and lazy and sad. I want desparately to go backwards in time, to write by candlelight, to eat things I grow myself, to never own a computer or a phone or a television again.

I really want to.

But I don't think I really want to.

Suddenly there are buildings, traffic, people. The train slows, then stops.

On time.

We're in Taegu. I'm hungry. My fajitas are waiting.

*Chusock: Korean day of thanks and familial respect
**ajumma: respectful term for an older woman