Boredom on the Orient Express

Hour 0: The guidebook tells us that Beijing West Railway Station is the largest train station in Asia, and it certainly seems busy enough to justify so much square footage.  Even at 9:00, when we begin lining up for our train to Kunming, Waiting Room 4 must have five hundred people crammed into it.  Families squat among islands of bags that clog up the aisles, though nobody sits on the floor but us.  When we see people hack up big wads of phlegm and spit them on the floor, we understand why.

Most of the men crouching by the walls are slurping down cups of instant noodles.  We came prepared, having stopped for a plate of the famous Peking Duck before coming to the train station.  Or at least, that was the plan, but somehow we ended up being served an entire roasted pigeon instead.  It was good, but greasy.  And gnawing on the bald head was an experience I’m not eager to repeat; made me feel like I was cannibalizing Patrick Stewart.

o_O

We’re called to line up for boarding at 8:45, and the aisle turns into a scrum.  Old men shoulder past me to squeeze ahead one place in line, young women in high heels elbow past us, dragging their children by the collars.  Gradually the space between passengers is reduced to an inch, then to nothing.  Compared to yesterday’s train to Beijing from the Great Wall, this is completely senseless; everyone in line has an assigned seat on the train, which means that getting to board three seconds sooner brings no reward but an extra three seconds of train time.

We board our train and congratulate ourselves for sending our bikes ahead instead of bringing them on board and hoping for the best: our hard sleeper car is composed of stacks of bunks and little else, with virtually no room for luggage.  We happily take the bottom bunks, which have the added luxuries of a table and storage space under the beds.  We make ourselves as comfortable as possible and settle in for the next 43 hours.

Hour 1: One of our bunkmates is a youngish guy who bellows every time he yawns.  He sticks around the whole trip, serenading us with his sleepiness.

Hours 2-17: Toss, turn, and fret about our bicycles.  The young English-speaking employee at the freight counter in Beijing assured us that everything would be fine, but images of broken spokes and missing cycles haunted my thoughts, keeping me awake even on the surprisingly comfortable bunk.

Hour 18: We’re finally on the ball enough to catch sight of a sign at one of our stops.  We’ve made it to Changsha, yet another Chinese city I’ve never heard of.  Looking at our map, it looks like we’ve been going due south since getting on the train.

Hour 20: Xiangtan.  Our previous bunkmates have all moved on, and we are joined by a couple of middle-aged ladies and a smiley 3-year-old with a long rat tail and a toy musket that he tries to jab in his mom’s eye.  He quickly becomes the star of the whole car: he’s patted and spoken kindly to by every other passenger, and Jenn and I pass an hour entertaining him (and ourselves) with hilariously inept magic tricks.  He laughs every time we speak English; for comparison, I try saying nonsense syllables for awhile, and he finds these less funny.  He then tries to force-feed me an enormous slice of grapefruit, and I completely fail to teach him the word “no.”

Hours 20-41: The boy's mom and her friend eat.  Just, like, eat and eat.  Cakes, fruits, lunch boxes, instant noodles, dumplings, candy, chicken.  In fact, it seems that nobody on this train brought anything to entertain themselves with except for food.  By the end of the trip, we're wading through plastic wrappers and crumbs.  In that time, we finished a book, knit half of a sock, played Settlers of Catan, and drew adorable pictures to help explain ourselves to people who don't speak any of the languages we speak.

Hour 22: I look up from my falling-apart copy of Tom Jones when I hear a plastic hissing noise.  The little boy, under the half-watchful eye of his mom, is peeing into a trashcan.  Jenn and I exchange shocked looks.  The toilet is just down the hall, after all.  And hey, that toilet is scary as heck, and I certainly don’t want to go in there, either, but it must be horribly unsanitary to have a puddle of pee sitting open in the train.  We try not to think about it, and are a little more careful about putting on our shoes.

Hour 25: Improbably, impossibly, the radio starts playing a song from “Pure Moods.”

Hour 28: I wake up, realizing the lights and radio were finally turned off at some point.  Jenn is still awake, tells me that she can’t stop coughing.  “I hope I didn’t catch something from that kid,” she says, and I can’t do anything but agree.

Hour 35: Wake up in a city somewhere in Yunnan province, I think.  Sharp, tooth-like mountains jab up from the earth, breaking up the roads and bridges of an otherwise unremarkable, new-looking city like all the ones we’ve passed so far.  The smog seems to have returned, though that could be...just fog?

Hour 37: The endless fields and rivers have turned to dramatic rocky mountains sprinkled with distant rice paddies.  When the train veers closer, they turn out not to be rice paddies at all, but stairs of narrow paths cut into the red earth.  Too small to be rice paddies, or really anything agricultural.  What are they?

Where the cliffs are too steep for these paths they are covered in wild grass or impenetrable woods.  We’ve come a long way from the bamboo forests and gray stone of Japan.  The mountains grow higher and higher around us and my heart sinks in proportion.  Did we make a huge mistake in deciding to ride our bikes here?  Sixteen hundred kilometers from Kunming to Laos.  If all of it looks like this...

Jenn points out that it looks like Tuscany, but with more mountains.  And more dengue fever.

Hour 38: An old man in the next berth beckons me over and asks me something in Chinese.  I follow my usual M.O. and smile, shrug, and say, “Sorry.”  He repeats his question, and I go with my buest guess and answer, “Kunming.”  This seems to satisfy him, so I clarify: “Beijing to Kunming.”  Then he asks something else, and I try, “USA?”  He laughs.  Apparently I guessed wrong.  Somehow he’s able to ask me how I’m planning to travel in China without speaking Chinese.  Mister, I couldn’t answer that even if the two of us shared a language.

Hour 39: I finally break down and order a lunch box from one of the vendors that wheel up and down the aisle.  I take a picture, then judge it immediately too gross-looking to share with the world.  Tasted OK, although I question the wisdom of giving cabbage and kidney beans to people who have to share an enclosed space (and a severely nasty toilet) with one another for 43 hours.

Hour 42.5: We pull into Kunming a good 20 minutes early.  We are stunned that, 3000 kilometers later, this is the same country as Beijing: the smog has all but disappeared, replaced by the hawkers, colorful ethnic dress, and zillions of scooters that scream "Southeast Asia."  Our stomachs tighten as we eventually zero in on the freight office, but all the worry turns out to be for naught.  Our bikes and panniers are fine if slightly dirtier than we remember.  We reassemble Sally and Jenn's bike (which remains unnamed, even though I proposed the name "Bike Tyson" that Jenn dismissed with, "Why, because it's black?").  The crowd of movers and customers stop what they're doing to gawk at our routine and say what I hope are encouraging words and not, y'know, bitter curses.

Jenn and I frantically try to remember which side goes down.

Altogether this voyage cost us about 200 bucks and 43 hours of our lives.  Beats flying any day of the week.  Though next time we'll probably pack more food.  Incidentally, Jenn did catch something from that kid and spent the next 24 hours coughing.

You Ate WHAT? Championship Edition

By now, I think it’s safe that we don’t have anything to prove when it comes to being adventurous eaters.  Every time we get the opportunity to put some kind of unfamiliar critter in our belly, we jump at the chance: we chow down on chicken hearts, blood sausage, sheep testicles, live octopus, whale brains, and silkworm larvae.  And (except for the larvae), they’re all pretty damn good.  In our experience, people typically don’t bother eating stuff that doesn’t taste at least pretty okay, and we’ve armed ourselves with that knowledge in our quest to eat our way across the world.

With varying results.

Now, China has a bit of a reputation as far as food goes.  Actually, from what we’ve heard, it has two entirely different reputations: in the popular imagination, China does not consume what we consider “Chinese food” in the West, but rather heaping bowlfuls of sheep eyeballs and cat brains, fried mantises and pickled anus.  And of course, depending on whom you’re talking to and how potentially racist they are, dog.  According to the people we’ve met who have actually been to China, however, Chinese people are bigger fans of less intimidating cuisine like fried noodles and dumplings.  This was a dispute that we had to settle for ourselves.

On the recommendation of Wikitravel, we made our way to Beijing’s Donghuamen Night Market, a site we were told featured traditional Chinese street food, and also snakes and scorpions.  Truly a challenge that we couldn’t pass up.

We took in the sights and the smells, which were spicy enough to cut through the ever-present layer of smog.  There seemed to be a thousand dishes for sale, most of them on sticks, all of them distressingly familiar.  Grilled squid tentacles, meat dumplings, noodles with cabbage, roast chicken.  Vendors shouted in Chinese and in English, and we tuned them out as we had done with touts all day.  One voice, however, cut through:

“Hello!  Hello!  Snake!”

We did a double-take.  The vendor brandished a skewer of diamond-painted skin and smiled.  We ordered two, with chili.

Honestly, snake is the least intimidating weird food we’ve tried.  The taste and shape were so similar to a garden-variety squid tentacle (that’s what we keep in our garden, anyway) that we half-thought we’d been ripped off.  Still, if you can’t trust a complete stranger selling snake on a stick, who can you trust?  Snake is chewy, savory, and all in all more food-like than half the stuff they sell at KFC.  The scariest thing about this experience was the price tag: 60 yuan for two, amounting to about $10, a hefty sum that would buy four much more filling meals elsewhere.

Worried that we wouldn’t be able to fill our bellies for less than a hundred bucks, we wolfed down some safer offerings, which tended to be much cheaper than the exotic stuff: grilled corn, fried dumplings, and a big bowl of stewed tripe.  Our hunger thus sated, it was time to get serious.

The friendly-looking young vendor called to us as we walked past.  He gestured to his many-legged wares.  “Hello!” he said.  “Hello!”

“How much?” I asked, suspicious.  He told me that each stick of fried locusts was 30 yuan, and I waved him off, assuming we could get a better deal at a different stall.  “But!” he yelled, then abandoned his English, made antennae with his fingers, and began making cricket noises.  We thanked him and moved on.

Sadly, there seemed to be some kind of agreement or syndicate at work at Donghuamen Night Market, as all the prices were the same down the line of food stalls.  We returned to Bug Man, deciding that if 10 bucks was too much to eat bugs, then dammit, we were just going to have to spend too much.  We gave the man a fistful of cash and ordered one stick of crickets and one of miniature scorpions.

This is when it first hit me that we were doing something crazy.  Somehow it had never entered into my head that there’s a reason most people don’t eat scorpions on a daily basis.  They're pretty poisonous, right?  Or venomous?  Is there a difference?  The Fear started to kick in.  Were we about to spend the next week laid up with food poisoning?

Well, if we were, we resolved with a sigh, then at least we’d be the coolest kids in Intensive Care.  We took the plunge.

Cricket is, I’m sorry to say, not a taste sensation.  My worries disappeared with the first bite, which reminded me more than anything of the tiny shrimp that are such a popular snack in Japanese izakayas.  The main taste was of frying medium, unfortunately.  Though the feeling of having legs stick out your mouth as you chew is delightfully bizarre.

Round two: Jenn and Harry vs. scorpions!

Note: we made a delightfully witty video of Jenn eating scorpions and declaring them delicious.  Unfortunately, we can't post it due to technical something-something.  Anyway, little bitty fried scorpions became our new favorite food.

Scorpions were clearly where it was at.  Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to explore this new world of deliciousness, we headed back to Bug Man to try a more intimidating specimen.  This one was a whopping 60 yuan for a single nighmare-creature-on-a-stick, but we were in too deep to back out now.  Also it's possible that the venom was affecting our brains.  We scoffed at the startled-looking foreigners who were tentatively nibbling on chicken wings; we were obviously so, so much cooler than punks like them.  Who would bother to travel thousands of miles just to eat something they could get at home?  We chuckled, then dug into our bug.

And the reviews are in!

Yeah, we clearly flew too close to the sun on this one.  There was some sort of meat inside them claws, but they were protected by a thick layer of inedible chitin.  It tasted like a mouthful of fingernails, something I've finally learned not to eat.  It...wasn't food, really.  Gnawing on a mouthful of shards of black armor did nothing but cut up the insides of our mouths.  Discreetly, we tossed the thorax and tail in the trash, flushed with anger over wasting $10 on something that wasn't even food.  The little scorpions on sticks were a harmless delicacy, something that anyone could giggle over and praise themselves for being adventurous.  This big one?  This was sold only for ego purposes.

As we conducted our walk of shame back to the subway, our reputation had apparently already made it down the line of vendors.  "Hey," one vendor whispered to the next, probably, "here come a couple of foreigners who think they have something to prove.  Bring out the weird stuff!"  "Let's see if they'll eat raw starfish or something!"  "I bet I can get them to eat a hammer!"

"Hello!  Spiders!" called one man, holding up enormous tarantulas on sticks.  "Dog!  Dog!" shouted another, brandishing some unidentifiable cut of meat.  We had been branded as rubes.

"What did we do wrong?" we asked ourselves on the subway ride back to the hotel.  We had wanted nothing more than to eat what few dared to put in their mouths...and therein is the lesson.  There's two kinds of weird food in the world: stuff that people in other cultures really do eat, and that's scary purely for cultural reasons (balut, beonddegi, most state fair offerings); and then there's stuff that was never meant to be eaten, but enterprising cooks know that they can pass off as delicacies to gullible tourists or anyone who wants to show off their fearlessness.  The big scorpion belongs in the latter category along with those hot sauces that make you cry and throw up.  We had proven ourselves adventurous, even fearless.  What comes next for us is to pursue the wisdom that most people learn at a much younger age: don't put stuff in your mouth that isn't food.

Korea Outtakes and Extras

An illustration of awful gender roles: ladies mince, men disco dance.  Also: camera wizardry!

Man do I love this picture.
"Jenn, no, that's now how you put up a tent!"

Journey to the West (East)

All right kids, that about brings us up to speed.  We made it to Seoul in just under three weeks, a little less than what it took us last time and with far less frustration.  We're in top fighting shape, we've remembered most of what we'd forgotten about bike touring, and incredibly, we still haven't blown through our savings yet.  Not entirely, anyway.  Which means it's onto the next phase of this grand adventure: China and southeast Asia!

Previously, this leg was referred to as "Shanghai to Singapore," but seeing as we probably won't be going anywhere near Shanghai, we're now calling it "Beijing to Bangkok" for alliteration's sake.  Maybe we'll make it as far as Singapore, maybe not.  In any event, here's a bit of important news about the Gaijin At Large:

Unless we run out of money sooner than we anticipate, we will most likely be coming back to the ol' USA in May of 2015.  If we're accepted to a program to teach English in France, we'll be in the States until that starts up in September.  If not, then we'll likely be in the States for the foreseeable future.  Not forever, mind; there's still way too much world out there to be tied down to one place for more than three years or so, and though we're both fast approaching that most decrepit age of 30, we still have a few years left before we have to yell at kids to get off our lawns full-time.  But in any case, if you're looking forward to getting some Gaijin love in person, you'll get your chance starting next May (reservations accepted).

And now a brief moment of comic relief.

The next announcement: since we're going to be in China for the next two months (give or take), that means our access to the Internet will be...questionable.  I've read that, officially, Blogger and like websites are completely blocked on the Chinese internet, so even when we are able to find internet access, we may not be able to keep the blog updated regularly (or at all).  I've also read that bypassing these blocks is so regularly done that even a technologically incompetent cretin like me should be able to manage it.  In any case, if the next two months (or more) go by and there's no update to this site, don't worry about us.  We'll try to keep the "Where Are We Now?" section updated at the very least, but to repeat, if you don't hear from us, don't worry, we're totally fine.  Expect more amazing tales of questionable veracity in a few days or a few months.

So for now, we bid you 안녕히게세요, 行ってきます, a bientôt, and catch you on the flip side!

Seoul Power

At long last, the bright and sunny Saturday came when we made it back to Seoul.  Right on schedule, as it happens, and even if our schedule for the last few days wasn't the most ambitious one, it sure felt nice to arrive somewhere when we meant to.  It was also encouraging to know that we could go farther each day than we were going, but we just didn't want to.  And we even meant it this time!

We had a guesthouse reserved somewhere on the south side of the river, though not until Sunday; every guesthouse, hostel, motel and yurt in the city seemed to be fully booked for the weekend.  Indeed, from Friday the bike path was obscenely crowded.  Moms in high heels, kids on training wheels far too small, shaky young ladies letting their boyfriends do all the pedaling on their shiny rental tandem bikes.  Day trippers, in short.  Tourists who were as unfamiliar with the rules of the bike path as they were with the basic physics of riding a bicycle.  The racing cyclists, with whom we usually have a steady relationship of mutual distaste, were as peeved as we were: our usual calm, lonely ride on the path became an exercise in sudden braking, passing on the left, and ringing our bells to absolutely no effect.

As we were stuck in traffic for most of the day, it gave our fellow cyclists plenty of time to stare at our back bumpers.  A dozen or more lycra-clad bikers pulled up behind or next to us and chatted about our mission and about how we liked Korea.  Dozens more shouted vague words of encouragement: "Fighting!" "Good travel!" "Cheer up!"

We stopped for a brief lie-down under a highway overpass, and there we were greeted by a middle-aged dude who wanted to compliment our bikes.  We ran through our usual Q&A with him: where we came from, what country we're from, how amazing our trip is, etc..  When our typical conversation topics ran out, though, things took an unexpected turn when he asked us, "Do you like makgeolli?  Let's go drink makgeolli."

As it happens, yes, we do like makgeolli.  For the uninitiated, makgeolli (prn. MAHK-ko-lee) is a traditional Korean beverage made of fermented rice and also broken dreams.  Less dangerous than soju, more powerful than beer, and it goes extremely well with pajeon.  It's a milky white substance resembling watery sunscreen, though slightly tastier and with a worse hangover the next day.  We'd had many extensive experiences with makgeolli, some of them so amazingly pleasant that we were unable to remember them.

Our new friend led us down the bike path, conveniently in the direction we were already headed.  As we got further into the city center, the path grew increasingly crowded with families hauling camp chairs and coolers.  Before long it was so crowded that we had to dismount and push through the crowd.

"There's a million people here to see the fireworks," our friend told us.  Sure enough, this looked like every other festival we'd seen in Seoul: an impossibly thick crowd pushing past fried chicken stalls or browsing their smartphones on blankets.  There were a dozen vendors selling beondegi and, even more horrifying, a dozen more selling selfie sticks (which, if you haven't had the pleasure, are telescoping rods you use to take a selfie from a greater distance).

"Do you want to stop here and watch the fireworks?" he asked over the din.  We looked at the crowd, then back at our ludicrously loaded bikes.  "Or should we maybe go a little further?"  We agreed to sacrifice a better seat for the fireworks in order to get a few more cubic inches of breathing space.

 At last, we arrived at a 7-11 located at the far end of the river island, Yeouido.  Our friend disappeared into the store while we improbably leaned our bikes against each other, and he came back out with three bottles of makgeoli.

Over the course of the conversation, we learned many things about our friend, Beom Jin (including, eventually, his name).  Sixty-one years old and embarrassed to be so, retired and not terribly happy about it, he lives in Seoul with his wife and three adult daughters.  His real passion, besides biking, was America.  Over and over again he told us about how wonderful America is, how America has the most generous hearts and wisest political minds in the world.  Being the pusillanimous bleeding-heart that I am, I expressed some surprise at hearing this opinion; generally, whenever I learn something about 20th-century American history, it doesn't leave me feeling that USA = #1.  But no, Beom Jin assured us, he knows how great America is: when he was a child in the '50s, he told us, and his family and friends had nothing, it was America and no other country that gave them food and clothing.  It took me awhile to settle down and keep my mouth shut -- I got some opinions about America -- but in the end, I learned something about Korea that I'd always half-known.  Regardless of the US's motivations for intervening in Korea, regardless of some of the nasty stuff that went down in the name of fighting Communism, to Koreans of a certain age, America is the veritable cat's PJs.

Of course, this newfound knowledge didn't last very long before disappearing in a milky white cloud.

 "Hey, it's 7:00, the fireworks should be starting," Beom Jin said.  We craned our heads back the way we came, and sure enough, if you squinted hard enough, you could see distant flashes of red and green flickering through the trees.  A little disappointed by our poor view of the show, we turned back to our conversation.  By 7:10, the fireworks were over.  It was good to know that, of the million people in Yeouido that night, we almost definitely had the best time that night.  Though probably the worst time the following morning.

And then Jenn fell asleep on the sidewalk while we looked for a motel.  But that is a story for another day.

Cramping

By now, I've become something of an expert at free/wild camping, at least in Korea.  The bike path is dotted with parks and rest areas every dozen kilometers or more, and it's usually not a problem to find a relatively flat patch of land where we can set up our tent unobtrusively.  In recent weeks, we've really gotten cocky about it, too: whereas in the past we'd always try to have the tent down before anyone might wander by, now we've moved on to the "meh" method.  After months of free camping in Korea and Japan, we've been spotted dozens of times by joggers, dog walkers and cyclists, and never once have we had anyone hassle us or tell us to move on.  As long as we try to keep mostly out of the way, we get some curious looks and the rare greeting or question, but never anything more.

After 200 kilometers of (mostly) beautiful bike path, we were once again approaching Daegu.  Last time coming through Daegu, we found a free public campsite right under a highway overpass in the city.  It wasn't the best night's sleep, but it beat the alternatives, which at that point were setting up in a baseball diamond or dying on our feet from lack of sleep.  It was a relatively comfortable site, if only because I sleep better when I don't think that every rustle in the night is the Man coming to throw me in the vagrants' jail (which I assume is a thing).  Our enjoyment of the site was slightly diminished in the morning when an old lady suffering from extreme crankypantsedness confronted us, accused of littering, and told us that we had to move along and that the campsite was only open on weekends.  Then she stole the tie to our rainfly, apparently her hunger for cleaning up trash being so insatiable.

Still, since we'd be coming into Daegu on a Friday, we figured this campsite would be a good place to take a rest day for free.  Sure, we'd much rather stay in a motel, especially since our body odor had progressed from "P.U." to "biohazard," but we decided it would be best to save the money and enjoy the free campsite.  Besides, since it was mid-September by this point and the summer holiday was over, surely we'd have the place to ourselves.

Hahahaha no.  Please note our tent being ganged up on by a pack of larger tents.

Every inch of dirt in this campsite -- this cramped, smoggy, noisy campsite located right under a highway overpass -- was occupied by a tent.  But really, "tent" doesn't do it justice:

"Juggernaut," maybe, or "Colossus."  Or some other X-Man.

Our trusty tent has everything that a couple of campers could need: a place to lie down, flaps to keep out animals, a space to put our stuff to keep it dry, and vents to let out farts and such.  These monstrosities not only had the room to sleep a dozen people, but for those dozen people to dance to "Y.M.C.A."  Our fellow campers brought quite a load of stuff, too: coffee tables, bookshelves, chairs, tarps, stoves, actual literal kitchen sinks.  Many of them were engaged in what I'm told is called "day camping," meaning they packed their chandeliers etc. into their cars, drove to the campsite, set up all of their stuff, hung around awhile, then packed up again and left.  I guess I find nature hard to enjoy without my grand piano, too.

And what's camping without a complete lack of mosquitoes?

It took me several minutes to figure out what this man in the official-looking vest was doing.  He drove his motorcycle, which was rigged with some kind of pollution-spewing device, in circles along the pedestrian paths of the campsite and park.  Clouds of gray-blue smoke drifted across the trees and swallowed up children in the playground.  If he wasn't killing mosquitoes, then the only other thing I can think of is that he's a supervillain and that the secret to successful nefarious schemes is just to look like you're authorized.

I really can't stress this enough: this man was driving around a campsite full of children, spewing clouds of pure DEET everywhere he went.  It got in our tents, it got in our eyes and our lungs.  He was apparently supposed to do this.  Oh, and there were still mosquitoes.

We found a spare plot somehow, put up our tent, and tossed and turned through a night of streetlights, truck horns, and bedtimeless children holding some kind of screaming competition.  In the morning, we resolved to try to stick it out for another day, although the idea that we'd get any rest was becoming more ridiculous with each additional tent that sprouted up and surrounded us.  Any of the things that we might like to do to relax (play music, draw pictures, cook) we'd have to do under a microscope, on display for dozens of families and their pets and furniture.  When the cranky old lady from last month reappeared and started nosing around our tent, we decided to move on to a motel afterwards.  Another family claimed our spot before our tent was half down.  We left them to enjoy the mosquitoless, cramped, heavily-trafficked great outdoors.

The only bright spot is that we got to see an artist paint these murals on the overpass columns.  Though I guess he could ahve just been the world's most brazen graffiti artist.

As we continued down the bike path for the next few weeks, we found another increasingly popular twist on camping known as "glamping."  We spotted multiple signs for "Glamping Korea," more than we saw even two months before, and eventually we sighted a few...glampsites?

All the beauty of a cult compound in the great outdoors!

Essentially, glamping (which apparently does exist outside of Buzzfeed, and also is not a real word) seems to consist of renting cabins for the night.  Except these cabins are made of fabric.  Shiny new fabric, sure, with pretty new electric light fixtures, but fabric that will start to show its age considerably faster than more old-fashioned cabin construction materials (like, say, wood).  Presumably inside of these tents there's some sort of glamorous setup, like...a disco ball?  Bearskin rug?  Man, I have no idea.  And neither, presumably, does anyone else in Korea: every glampsite we saw was utterly vacant.  No glampers looking for a glamp-out at the moment (ugh).

We decided that we pitied the poor souls who so thoroughly populated that awful campsite.  Why would anyone choose to camp in conditions that so little resemble actual camping?  If they're going to bring their air conditioners and beds, why not just stay home, where all those things already exist?  And why would someone drive all the way to somewhere outside just to spend the day sitting in a tent and then go home before dark?  Jenn eventually hit on a more compassionate explanation than I could muster: they most likely came from elsewhere in the city of Daegu, and this must be the closest any of them can get to having a backyard.  Apartment life doesn't lend itself to neighborhood barbecues or kids running around freely.  Even if this campsite has none of the benefits of camping that we enjoy every night, it's not a solitary encounter with nature that these people are looking for, but just a little bit of sunshine, even if it's filtered through smog and thousand-dollar tents.