Korean Job Discussion Forums

[plokiju]

I have a few mildly interesting ones.

I took a grehound from Edmonton to Penticton once. It was over 20 hours and my sister and I (I was 11 or so at the time) had food poisoning and were sick the entire way. Many little white bags were filled and parking lots, well, you know.

Just last year, I was taking a trip from Rochester, NY to Washington, DC. It was the second night of my vacation. I was staying at a little B&B in Ithaca where an old friend of mine was working. 15 minutes after I got there the place burned down. The smoke detector went off but I wasn't the least bit concerned so left my bag inside. I lost all my clothes, my passport, a disk with like 500 photos, a textbook, a library book. I had my drivers license and a credit card which is all you need really. It was kind of freeing to go from carrying this giant backpack around to having nothing at all.

Another time, I was in Romania and there was no place to stay in town. I don't know why all the hostels were full. Anyways, these Belgians were hanging out the window of one of them and offered to give me one of their beds. I felt like an honorary flami (I think that's what Flemish people are called). Those were some good times in whatever city it was. Sibiu I think. Much better than my other 2 crazy travel stories where I lost all my belongings and stomach contents.

[Cedar]

On the30th I woke up early, but it was raining and there were no taxis on the street so I had to carry my four bags all the way to the bus station. When I got there there were just two people present, a man and his daughter, but they hogged the window side of the two front seats—the only place where the windows could open on the whole bus. That was kind of rude. Anyway, mostly I sat next to the girl (they were tourists from Beijing), and eventually after scary sliding in the muddy under construction road we arrived in Hezuo. I couldn��t find anything to eat and the same in Luqu, so I arrived hungry in Maqu at shortly after lunch time. Karjam insisted we stay at Shouqu Hotel, the ��best�� in town. We get a discount though, because of Karjam��s connection to the owner, his former high school teacher. We went into the room and it had carpet with burns allover it and hair matted in it. Ugh!! I rebelled, so we stayed across the hall in the ��cheap�� rooms with no bathroom, but at least they have tile floor! We ate with Dorsi Dinci and bought Karjam��s overcoat, but not a shirt, though we tried, the shirts weren��t to both of our satisfactions. I was exhausted and sick feeling, so most of the rest of the time I slept in the room, reading a bit about peasant protests during the Japanese colonial period in between.

[Cedar]

When I tried to go in the supermarket the guy pointed at my dripping umbrella and said something and pointed me back out. I stood around in confusion near the door feeling a bit persecuted (wasn��t I supposed to use an umbrella on a rainy day?) when finally he came back over and said ��You don��t know the method?�� which fortunately was Chinese I could understand, so I agreed and he led me outside and around the corner to an umbrella check place. I got tag number 204 and headed in. The supermarket was unbelievably large. I was there with Karjam in 2001 but they must have remodeled. And definitely last time the food was near the door, so if it was three stories, I never knew it. The first floor has appliances and Wall-Mart-esque clothes. I looked at irons and fans. The irons were cheaper than the fans, which seems wrong somehow. The second floor has stuff like pots and pans and dry goods and detergent and soccer balls and blankets. The third floor had food; the funniest thing was the meat. Every time I thought, ��I��ve seen the last of it�� I��d run into more. The fish section was a tiny area of depressing very dead half thawed creatures on crushed ice. But the meat, though. The only kind of meat missing was the meat still on a live animal. There was a section for jerked meat, for other meaty snacks, for fresh cuts, for frozen, for canned meats, for use the butcher��s help to get meats, for sausages, for frozen sausages, for meaty flavored things for in your soup�� it was unbelievable. All that meat and I couldn��t find soy milk (I only saw soy milk powder).

[plokiju]

I forgot to mention one of them and it's probably the craziest one.

I had mentioned to some friends that I was planning to go to Romania. They told me not to go because I would die. Even a Hungarian friend of mine warned me. I brushed them off.

I took a train from Belgrade and got out at the first major Romanian town. I was a bit lost and bewildered I guess. This Italian business man started talking to me for a bit. I reached the front of the train station.

This is when I felt pretty confident that Romania was not a place I wanted to be. There was a man in the middle of the street with no legs, there were all these car honking at him, and packs of dogs running around barking. I just stopped and didn't know what to do. Eventually I took out my travel guide to find the nearest hostel.

The Italian man sees me and decides to help. He offers to let me share his taxi and then he gets out at his little hotel. He pays and tells the driver to take me to the hostel and if there are any problems to bring me back to that hotel. I get to the hostel and of course, it's shut down. It was the only hostel in town. I get back to the old hotel.

The Italian goes to Romania quite a bit on business and so has all these friends at the hotel. They are all speaking Romanian/Italian (sounds very similar) and they give me pizza and sausages and whatever else. I was starving. Then the man gives up his room. There aren't any other rooms at the hotel. I still don't know where he went afterwards. Anyways, these two girls in their early 20s walk into this place. Everyone is friendly with them. They are heavily made up but I think that maybe Romanian women just all look like prostitutes. I'm pretty naive about these kinds of things. Anyways, after about an hour of eating and drinking the man decides to get his stuff from the room. The whole crowd goes up to the room and then the whole crowd leaves except for me and one of the girls. Then I realize that they are prostitutes. I somehow communicated to this girl who spoke only Romanian and a few English phrases that I wasn't interested. I really don't know whether she was paid for or not. That Italian was very generous. One of the perks of going to Romania on business for him.

[jazblanc77]

I was in France studying on student loans, that I couldn't afford to pay back, after burning in my fourth year of university. I had a break for almost all of December and January so, I decided to see some of Europe. I ended up staying with a friend in Zurich at his parents' house. He was the head of the foreign exchange in his bank but was only 27 at the time. I don't think his parents were ever very keen to have me staying there. They were suspicious that I would rob them or something so, whenever my friend left for work in the morning, I was required to leave the house as well. This was December in Zurich mind you and it was bloody cold outside. One thing is for sure, I know the streets of Zurich very well and I should for the daily $20 pass I had to buy for the public trams there! An American girl met us on New Years eve and we reluctantly went downtow for fireworks and drinking. The girls were deathly afraid of being targetted by terrorists and kidnappers but started to have a lot of fun after the third or fourth bottle of champagne in the winter night. I left Zurich the next day with the girls and headed for Germany where I found out that I was travelling with the pickiest and most uncultured "collector" travellers ever. They refused to eat local cuisine or do anything that wasn't recommended by their travel guides. The one girl would only eat McDonalds food, pizza with only sauce and cheese (bolognese, I think), had to sleep with the lights on and couldn't go to the bathroom alone, to name a few of her quirks. I had arranged to meet a friend from university in Napoli for an excursion to Greece so, I was just passing time with these girls until I could make the connection.

Finally, I connected with my friend and his girlfriend and we jumped a ferry over to Crete. My new travel mates were exactly my type as they were more into staying in one place for a while and actually relaxing and experiencing the life of the locals. At one point, we asked the owner of a villa that we had rented what the Greek way of life entailed and he simply told us "we Greek just eat, sleep, and walk... that is the best way". Hey, it sounded nice to us so, we took advantage of the long siestas and the relaxed lifestyle, ate some great food, did some walking, skipped some rocks on the waves of teh coastline, and just revelled in how good life was.

On our first day, we ended up accidentally eating our lunch at the Crete penetentiary and later ferry hopped to Meganisi which was closed for tourism at the time. Word of our arrival spread amongst the 150 or so inhabitants of the island quickly and it wasn't long before the owner of the hotel found us, reopened the hotel for us, and had us drinking oozo with his one brother at the local taverna and eating stone oven-baked bread with his other one while waiting for a solar eclipse which was to appear that night. We met the owner's entire extended family!

We made appearances on a couple of other islands but eventually ended up in Corfu Town where we were almost stranded due to a freak 100 year SNOWSTORM... in Greece! I decided to head back to France via Thesoliniki since the snow had made ferry travel near impossible and travel unpleasant. The funny thing is that I kept missing the bus to take the ferry back to the mainland from Corfu. One time, I had actually gotten to the terminal ontime, bought a ticket, and was waiting patiently in the terminal when I saw a bus leave and discovered that it was mine. Oh well, the rubber balls in a vending machine near the door had distracted me for too long as I debated whether to use my spare change to get one or not... of all the silly reasons to miss a bus! I ended up on the corner of the one intersection leading out of town, trying to hitch a ride off the island when a bus full of soccer players picked me up and took me across. Once on teh mainland, they offered to give me a ride to wherever I was going but, unfortunately, they were going the opposite way. I got up to Thesoliniki (sp?) and had to wait for 12 hours for the ferry to Italy which was due to leave at 1:30am. The storm had blown into full force by early evening and I ended up in a strange fast food joint in the harbour reading a very dull Rushdie book while waiting to board. I eventually met a Czech guy who let me hang with him in his car while he waited for the same ferry. His parents were in Milano and he was going to visit. We ended up spending the next two days together as travel companions which is funny since he could only speak Italian and Czech and I could only speak English and French. We got by somehow! Anyways, he ended up giving me a lift all the way from Barusi to Milano, putting me up on a cot in the kitchen of his parent's one bedroom apartment, and then driving me to the train station at 5:30 am for my train to Cannes in the morning. What a super guy he was. I wish I still had his email address!

I was transferring schools so I took my stuff up to Rennes where I did a lot of drinking, injuring myself several times as a result and eventually ended up walking on a cane until I the end of the school year signalled it was time to return home. I went to Amsterdam to catch my flight out and almost got stranded there (a thought which really frightened me after seeing enough travellers who were stuck and selling the contents of their packs for food). Almost getting mugged in the Amsterdam train station and witnessing a beggar get the piss kicked out of her while trying to get some money out of me was a factor in my fear as well. NWA didn't want to honour my VALID ticket and refused to help me. The manager of the ticket desk preferred to threaten me with calling security than to enter a code into the computer that my travel agent had given me. After waiting for a shift change at the ticket desk, I finally got someone to help me. I was on my way home within a day!

I guess this isn't really a crazy travel story... it's really more of a strange memory to me. It was my first time abroad so, it always gives me nostalgia!