I turn my head up towards the hill on my left. In the gathering daylight, it looks like a hyper-realist painting; the mass of sunlight, off-white and stucco combines in such a way. In the slight chill of an early morning, the beach is waking up, and not long from now, families of three will be strolling leisurely, joining the morning joggers and enthused swimmers. Already it seems as if I am the only one left from the night’s revelry. I probably am: empty beer cans circle the mounds where fires have been buried; chip packets lay half hidden by sand.
I have walked up and down the beach five or six times and am losing patience. My wallet has surely been lost irretrievably under the blanket of moving sand. But still, some blind faith tells me that it has to be here somewhere, that maybe that mound over there that I haven’t checked holds my precious treasure (have I checked? Haven’t I? Alcohol, lack of sleep, and the changing light are seriously corroding my fragile perceptions). That similar things have inexplicably worked out for me in the past gives me the unbounded optimism of both the lucky and the drunk.
I sit down to rest. The sun is starting to warm, and suddenly my leather jacket is a pillow and I am struggling to find sleep in a way that doesn’t alert the other beach-goers that I am passing out drunk. This, of course, is a doomed enterprise. I am undoubtedly passing out drunk.
Two pretty young women are paddling in the water not far from me. Avoiding the aggressive attentions of a flock of seagulls they yelp, arousing me from my slumber. It dawns on me that this is how Sunday mornings should be spent: wholesomely, not still |
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drunk with a mouth full of sand. As they walk back up the beach towards the boardwalk one of them asks, “Are you ok?”
Trying for bemused nonchalance, sitting up, I manage, “Yeah, fine…” I realize it’s time to go. I leave the beach, casting my mind over the events that led me to this point and reach this conclusion: However much fun you have during the bright night, it isn’t possible to feel anything but disgust when you haven’t slept after a night of drinking and are already contemplating the mess of bureaucracy through which you will have to wade to replace what you have lost. When the scruffiness of urban scrawl isn’t hidden by neon light, when it doesn’t feel like the gentle sea is lapping at the beach but rather that the concrete jungle into which you are trudging is lapping back at nature, Korea can seem a forbidding place.
At the sound of my apartment bell I wake. It is 2:30. I wrench myself from bed and pull on my filthy jeans, sand spilling everywhere as I do, and make for the door. I open it to a middle-aged Korean man. “Anyong haseyo,” I say, hoping he isn’t a Jehovah’s Witness.
“Anyong haseyo,” he replies before, tentatively, “P-passport?”
I do his bidding unthinkingly and return to the door and hand it to him. He takes my passport from me, checks it, and hands it back along with a black leather wallet from his back pocket. Without a smile, and after hardly registering my confused ‘Kamsamneeda’, he turns and walks slowly back down the hall. I open my wallet to find nothing missing. I stand bewildered in my doorway. Five hours sleep and a small human kindness later and Korea isn’t so forbidding after all.
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