Meeting Mr Kim by Jennifer Barclay

Author:Jennifer Barclay
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857653246
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd
Published: 2008-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

I referred to the monk’s handwritten directions and caught a bus to Kochang, then from Kochang to Puan, and from Puan to Pyonsan. I was falling asleep on the bus in the still-hot late afternoon as I saw what looked like Pyonsanbando fly past the window.

Jumping out at the next stop, I asked a group of teenage lads the way, and they pointed me back in the right direction. As I was making my way along the road, one breathless skinny boy caught up with me and said he wanted to help me. I declined his gallant offer to carry my pack, but happily agreed to have some English-speaking company on my walk. We continued along making pleasant conversation. His name was Oh Jung-seok, and in fact he wasn’t a teenager at all but a twenty-two-year-old student of Hotel Management at Cheju University. He had an endearing way of apologizing abjectly for his English, which was actually pretty good. I was the first foreigner he’d ever seen in Pyonsan, he said. I felt honoured.

At Pyonsanbando, Jung-seok found me a cheap room in a guesthouse right on the beach, with a window looking out to sea, the curtain billowing in the breeze. Perfect. Leaving my bag, I went back out for a cold drink, offering to buy Jung-seok one for his kindness. Nice as it was to be meeting people, I was really tired, badly needed a shower, and didn’t have the energy to chat. He said he’d be pleased to show me into Inner Pyonsan next day, and waved a smiling goodbye. I took my beer down to the beach, where the sun was setting, turning orange, then pink as it sank; there were islands silhouetted grey. I hadn’t heard waves for some time, not since Tokjokdo.

Back at the deserted minbak (guesthouse), I found the shower at the end of the corridor. The facilites were small and basic but clean: concrete floors, cold water and buckets. I opened the door of my room and stepped up barefoot onto the raised floor. There was a fan, quilts laid out on the linoleum for bedding, a pillow. The cell-like simplicity and the sound of the sea outside my window were calming.

Down the road were a few quiet restaurants. A friendly wave beckoned me into a place that looked expensive. But the people spoke English and understood when I told them I had little money. They cooked me a fantastic meal of steaming, spicy instant noodles with egg and green onion, and side-bowls of rice, kimchi, tofu and potatoes, and charged the tiny amount of 2,000 won when I left. In fact I didn’t have change so they asked me to drop in next day to pay, and waved goodbye, calling ‘See you again!’

I strolled down the beach, the sand soft underfoot. Campers were sitting around fires. Others were walking or sitting together, sharing a drink. A woman sat on a wooden bed, massaging her feet. The beach was beautiful, a bright moon shining on the waves and the stretches of flat wet sand where the tide had gone out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.