The mural painted on the wall of an elementary
school in Tainan, Taiwan. December 2006.

I know I've posted this picture before, but
it's one of my favorites. The expression on
the man's face gets me every time - he looks
SO happy! Gansu, China (near Langmusi),
August 2006.

Overun!

Just before Christmas my much-loved rabbit
MoShui, who had been with me for my entire
stay in Changwon, died. These little guys
joined the household a couple of months later.
The one pestering Amy on top of the table is
Gom, which is Bear in Korean - and he is one!
The one on the floor is Soot.
Seoul, February, 2007.

Osaka Ferris Wheel, February 07

Kyoto

Faces of Japan

Amy raises her face to the sun
after the darkness of an Akashi
underpass.

Akashi, Japan, February 2007















A Kyoto shrine figure.

Japan, February 2007














These two

goddesses


overlook

a peaceful zen garden

in Dzaifu.



Japan, April 2006

Ramblings

From December until February Korea enjoyed the warmest winter ever on record. February in particular was exceptionally warm - an average of 4 degrees Celsius higher than normal. The average daily temperature topped 5 degrees Celsius (above freezing) 20 full days ahead of schedule. My koi pond hasn't seen ice since mid-January. Until today.

All sorts of trees flower here in very early spring. Plums are especially beautiful this time of year, white petals so profuse on the rounded crowns of branches that from a distance they look like snow drifts atop the hills. The Chinese say that plum trees are like women - though impossibly delicate in appearance they choose to bloom only when conditions are most averse to it. Magnolias, on the other hand, look hardy but are very, very sensitive to cold. For the second year in a row all of the magnolias in town are frozen.

Even my house had prematurely settled into spring. When the ground around my shallow foundation reaches a certain temperature, it triggers the gauge in my boiler to switch 'seasons'. For springtime, this means that the ground temperature is expected to be colder than the air temperature, so my boiler runs less often to compensate for the difference. When I returned from a weekend visit to the countryside this morning, the house was so cold that my feet ached stepping onto the floor and all of my normally active gold-fish had sunk to the bottom of their tank.

With the boiler cranked to high (the only way I could get it to respond to the urgency of my temperature woes), I decided to indulge in a pot of sam-gye-tang at a neighbourhood restaurant. My hope was that the hot ginseng-and-rice-stuffed chicken soup would restore feeling in my toes and steel me for my return to the icebox I call home. But alas I had forgotten that at the moment my back doesn't like sitting on the floor (or anywhere else), so although feeling was indeed restored to my toes, I almost wish it hadn't been. Yeow!

I suspect that when most people eat sam-gye-tang, they are not so thorough as I am. It's not that the dish is outrageously expensive, just that I eat it so rarely that I feel as if I couldn't possibly waste a single morsel. Besides, not many people go to my favorite local spot, so no one is there to watch me dig into the steaming pot with both hands and strip the tiny bones of every scrap of meat. The denuded carcass gets deposited in one bowl, while the rest gets stirred together with the broth into a thick stew studded deliciously with brownish crystals of rock salt. Sublime!

Because the chicken is boiled for so long to cook the rice and other goodies inside it, in this process of delectable disembowelment I get to see parts of the bird that I normally can't examine in such fine detail. Like a minuscule, perfect vertebra, and the matching pillow of cartilaginous disc that accompanies it. It seems just, under the circumstances, that it's the same structure in me that is the root of my own discomfort.

At physio this morning, muscles being pummeled into submission by a combination of machinery and manpower, my 40-year old therapist pauses long enough to point out a white hair on my 30-year old head. Having just celebrated my birthday 3 days ago, I am still adjusting to the new digit in my age and although this wasn't my first white hair it seems like a portentous one. 'Not married?' he asks through the blows, then adds in Korean 'better hurry.' At home afterwards, looking at the hair in the mirror, I see that at least it's thick and strong and healthy. I hope that my vertebrae are paying attention and taking the hint that in my body, things all get better with age.

The problem in my back is unspecified. The doctor thinks it's a chronic sprain, while the physio is sure it's a disc problem. When it first started it was wholly incapacitating, white fire across the entire of my low back. Now it's more localized, lower down and only on the left side. It mostly just hurts when I'm sitting - I can walk for hours without a hint of discomfort. I figure that if this is my body's method of aging, then bring it on - far better to be crippled into perpetual motion than into statuesque dismay. We could all be so lucky!