SEA Part 1

He wouldn’t answer his phone, so I went down two floors and knocked on his door. It was 6 am on a Saturday, so as a connoisseur of weekend sleep and a subscriber to the golden rule, I knocked softly at first. There was no sound of life behind the door, and my patience was hanging by three hours of sleep and a residual drunkenness too far dispersed to hold back the gross, enraging effects of a pre-dawn wake up. Gradually, my knocks grew louder until I was pounding, closed fisted against the door, sending booms echoing up and down the deserted hallway.

Ten minutes later, I was deciding whether to pull the fire alarm in one final desperate effort, or to leave my sad somnambulistic friend in his drunken slumber and leave for Southeast Asia on my own. As I pondered with weary sincerity, I continued at intervals my assault on the door, and just before I turned to pursue my adventures alone, Jeff came to the door, bleary eyed and half dressed.

“Give me a second to pack,” he mumbled.

I stepped into his 5^th floor room in the large, newly built apartment we both lived in at the expense of our respective employers. It is common practice for the private schools in Korea to supply their native English teachers with housing; it is also common practice among these teachers to then decorate their rooms with a sort of itinerant destitution including an odd assortment of discarded furniture, empty beer bottles and whatever other accouterments maintain the resident’s sanity. In this case, Jeff had filled his excess space with musical instruments, which he put to use quite prodigiously when he was not passed out on the floor.

He was packed and ready in less than 5 minutes.

“You got everything?” I asked. “Passport, money, camera…change of underwear?” Neither of us brought much more than the essentials. We both understood that whatever could carried safely and comfortably through jostling, sketchy markets, or on the back of a motorbike swerving recklessly through crowded city streets was kosher, anything more than that had no business in our bags.

Jeff confirmed. We were ready. We sealed the deal with a shot of Jameson before heading out into the cold, Korean morning.