Thanks for waiting around for me while I hosted my trips to South Korea and Japan! I know it’s been a few weeks, but trying to write quality posts from abroad, in wildly different time zones, with chronic sleep loss has proven nearly impossible for me. So I’m glad to say that I am back, and ready to write again and I hope you’ll forgive me for the lapses in posts while I travel.
The trips were fantastic, full of great food and fascinating skill-learning and lots of new friends, so a win-win-win all around. But, true to form, and ridiculously, stupidly predictable, I flew home Monday night from Osaka and promptly got sick. Any trip longer than about eight or nine days abroad seems to do this to me. I get run down, tired, too little sleep and too much sake, maybe? It happened after the South America trip in March, and it happened again this time. But this time, stupidly, ridiculously, regressively, I got dumb-ass Covid. Yep, in 2025. I’m praying I picked it up on the plane and not before, and that I didn’t spread it around to our whole Japan group, especially as we all sang our heads off at karaoke our final night in Osaka. Although, that night was so much fun that I’m willing to muddle through a week of Covid in exchange for the memories. I haven’t belted out My Sharona and Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina like that in a long, long time. Likely since before Covid. So it was worth it.
And yes, I do get vaccinated, religiously. Which is why I have what really just feels like a cold, but with no ability to smell or taste. Remember that?
I was supposed to get on another plane this week and fly to Walla Walla, Washington at the invitation of USA Pulses, the bean and lentil growers association, for a fun summit about beans and lentils and Washington State wines. But considering my situation I decided it was best if I cancel. The latest Covid protocol is only five days of isolation, but I don’t want to put anyone at risk, and getting on another flight, well, it’s not so appealing at the moment. Plus, we’re leaving for our Farmhouse Flavors of Ireland trip on June 20th, too, so I gotta rest up! (Still room on that one, fyi, and France in October! And that one is on sale right now)
That octopus above was filmed at the giant fish market in Busan, Korea. One of the three cities on our incredible, food-filled itinerary and led by our unbelievably great guide, Michelle. She kas a Korean name, of course, but prefers to be called Michelle. She took us to the market, where we came upon this scene. It was hilarious, and just kept repeating, over and over. Watching the octopus continuously try to escape, and the no-nonsense fishmonger lady just fling it back into the tub, well, it was like they had rehearsed it, like it was a comedy act for the tourists. The other octopuses (I looked it up, that’s the correct plural, it’s not octopi) seemed to have given up, like they’d been resigned to their fate, or maybe they just had no will to live, or they thought the escapee was deranged, continuously attempting the same escape, continuously being flung back into the tub. Maybe they were all rolling their cephalopod eyes at it.
I know octopuses are very, very smart creatures, sentient even. I saw the movie, yes. And I’ve read a lot about how they can do math and solve puzzles and recognize themselves in mirrors. And that does make me feel bad about eating them, yes. This specimen had such a will to escape, it was pretty clear, but also that lady was a bad-ass no bullshit monger, and wasn’t having any of it. She just grabbed it and slapped it back into the bucket, over and over and over, while we all laughed and watched like amused toddlers. Actually, so many of the fish vendors at the market were women, and not young women, women in their 70’s and 80’s, who’d been doing this work for decades and now had children who were doctors and lawyers who didn’t want to take over the business. We heard this from many people in South Korea, that their birth rate is plummeting, and that young people don’t want to take over the traditional jobs of their parents. Who wants to stand in the cold air in wet boots all day chasing a recalcitrant octopus around? It sounds fun to me for about an hour, then I’d want to go get coffee.
I kind of feel like that octopus, though. I keep travelling, keep coming home and getting sick and then going again. Around and around, never learning, getting flung back into the bucket and crawling back out again. It’s just my way, and my constitution, I guess. I’m not as resilient as I like to think I am. I used to think of myself as pretty hearty, I backpacked around Southeast Asia, slept in two dollar hostels, took the chloroquine pills for malaria and suffered the accompanying hallucinations, but that was a long time ago. I’m older now, I need a real bed but I still keep going back.
But that urge to escape, to break free of the bucket and see what’s out there? That’s never weakened, especially now, when travelling outside my comfort zone means escaping the insanity of home for a week or three at a time. Being just one tiny person in a crowd of a million Japanese people trying to cross the street at Shibuya, or waiting for the green light to cross on a deserted street with no traffic, but waiting anyway, because that’s what you do, you follow the rules, because rules make for orderly, functioning societies. Or eating raw sea pineapple (fyi, not a fruit) because the Haenyeo free diving women (also all in their 70’s, 80’s and 90’s!) caught it hours before and are serving it generously right now, to you, raw and still quivering, well, these are the things that take you outside of yourself, make you recognize that sentient creature in the mirror but maybe see her in a slightly different way each time. Or getting naked in a steaming tub of hot water at the hotel Onsen with Japanese grannies, all of us just sighing and sinking into the water, after slurping down lucious crab and egg ramen with a bunch of new but now lifelong friends. These are the moments. That’s why we do it. To escape the bucket, at least temporarily, until life flings us back in by the tentacle.
By the way, I don’t recommend it, raw sea cucumber. Not so enjoyable. But I tried to be polite about it. Politeness is everything.
Ok, more later this week, thanks as always and stay tuned!
xx
e.
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