Month: March 2026

Bin there, done that

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“I love to travel. I just hate the travel part.” — old axiom

Why is boarding a plane so unpleasant? It’s unnecessarily stressful, for me at least, riddled with confusing queuing rules, mumbly loudspeaker instructions that sound like the adults in Charlie Brown specials, brazen line-cutters, and the overall sense of sweaty barnyard herding.

My biggest stress point is the overhead bins and making sure I find a space for my small carry-on roller that’s not in row 57 when I’m in row 22. So now, on United, I pay a $24 fee for “priority boarding” largely to avoid overhead bin combat. (Though passenger jostling is an amazing spectacle.) Even then it can be a hassle to locate an empty bin that some moron hasn’t stuffed with jackets and backpacks that belong under the seat.

I’ve never tussled with a fellow passenger for bin space, but once while struggling I murmured “shit” under my breath and a flight attendant heard me (what is he, a cocker spaniel?) and said aloud, “Oh, we’ve got a live one here,” which of course only pissed me off more.

Paying for priority boarding is worth it. It places you in line 2, just behind the first-class bigwigs, meaning you board in the second group instead of the saps in 3 through 5, who shed bitter tears as they futilely seek space in the already packed overhead bins while you coolly, regally read your book, your carry-on stowed directly above you, snug and smug.

But that, of course, is only the beginning of the journey. The rest is its own kind of nightmarish diabolical shitty hell. The cramped, crowded quarters. Seat backs that bonk you on the forehead. Mealy meals — chicken or pasta, always. Drenched, toilet paper-strewn lavatories (their term, not mine). Butts constantly bumping you in the aisle seat as people scrunch by. Chiclet-size pillows made of gauze. And so forth in the untold litany of awful air travel platitudes.

The tradeoff for this misery is why you do it. Flights will wreck you with stress and redeye fatigue. They are, frankly, a pain in the ass. My post-flight recovery time is cosmic. But then I rebound, ready for days of stuff in a new city, until it’s time for the dreaded return flight. I steel myself for this phenomenon.

The going-back blues are knee-buckling, a gut punch of leaving a place at which you seemingly just arrived. Oh, the banality of home! The only remedy is to begin mapping your next trip, including — and this is critical, really, listen — strategizing how to snag the perfect overhead bin, a forward-thinking start to any vacation.

Joy to the world.

I stabbed my face, and other fun things 

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Before I visit a country for the first time, I like to bathe in the local culture, mainly through books and movies. (I save the food part until I get there and do it right, with bite.) As mentioned in my last post, I head to Seoul, South Korea, in a few weeks, so I’ve been hungrily reading novels and watching films by Korean artists. Christ, they’re grim. How I love it.

Take “Memories of Murder,” by Bong Joon-ho, who made the stinging class-warfare satire and Oscar-winner “Parasite,” itself fairly bleak. This excellent serial-killer detective saga throbs with death and dark humor, winding down to a gut-punch ending that will leave your jaw somewhere around your big toes. Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil” is another serial-killer drama, a fiendishly clever spin on the revenge thriller splattered with brutally sadistic punishments that I cannot speak of here, lest the authorities bust in.

Something lighter? Try the smash Netflix series “Squid Game,” in which financially strapped citizens try to win millions playing grueling games with the simple rule: you lose, you die. I haven’t seen so many blood geysers since “The Wild Bunch.”

Twisted, yes. But then you don’t know Park Chan-wook’s 2003 masterpiece “Oldboy.” Yet another revenge rampage, Park peppers his gorgeously gory film with creative curlicues not easily forgotten — like the antihero devouring a whole, live, squirming octopus in one take and, later, fending off dozens of assassins armed with only a hammer, a tour de force of cinematic choreography.

It’s not much sunnier on the book side. I just finished the slim novel about suicide “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” by Young-Ha Kim. It’s gloomy, but also not great. It’s infatuated with its own misery. 

More famous is “The Vegetarian” by Nobel Prize-winner Han Kang. The heroine of this celebrated novel renounces meat, triggering a plague of psychological and bodily repercussions. (Put. Down. The. Cheeseburger.) And I’ve just started “Lemon” by Kwon Yeo-sun, about the unsolved murder of a high school student. More death — party time!

Is Korea so cracked? Apparently I’ve tapped into a thick cultural vein of crime, vengeance, class disparity, the sordid and surreal, the darkly existential and the exceptionally, even giddily, violent. That vein is a bloody gusher.

Speaking of unchecked violence, the other day I bayonetted my cheek with a thumbtack. I was lancing a pimple, not too giant, but big enough to evoke the Elephant Man. A hard, stubborn whitehead that was impervious to onslaughts by furious fingernails. So I said F-it, I’m getting a tack and uprooting this beast. First, I sterilized the tack’s point in the dancing blaze of a Bic lighter. Then I rinsed it in hot water. Then I took the business end of said tack and dug out the pimple’s white core from my cheek. Blood happened, but I extracted the thing in 30 seconds flat. My threshold for pain and gore is impressively high. The tattered flesh around the deceased pimple healed in a few days. I am an absolute master. Dermatologists, take note. And fellow zitheads: Shelve the Stridex. You might find more relief at Staples than CVS.

Like its kaleidoscopic neighbor Japan, South Korea is a Day-Glo bouncy house of the whack, weird and wonderful. While there, I will have ample offbeat options: Should I visit the Toilet Park and Museum, aka Mr. Toilet House, a festival of fecality? Or the Penis Park and Museum, studded with upright totems of erotic arousal (stop it!)? Or the Meerkat Friends Cafe, where twelve meerkats — so smooshily cute, like living anime creatures — a random raccoon and a floofy white Arctic fox scamper and play with you as you sip, and conceivably spill, coffee? I’ll be at all of them, of course. Oh, I almost forgot the popular Poop Cafe, whose theme is all things playfully bowel-adjacent (think chocolate soft serve, etc.). Consider it checked.

From the South to South Korea: a drastic change in plans 

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

I’m supposed to be in Nashville right now. But I’m not, and I’m glad. 

A trip down South was planned as a post-France jaunt, 3.5 days, fast, domestic, easy and fun. I’d do it in early March while the weather’s still mild, my final trip till the annual fall journey in October or November, wherever that may be.

I booked a Nashville hotel, some tours and great restaurants, and of course a flight. But very late in the game it struck me that the math wasn’t computing. The damn thing, for hardly four days in a city of modest attractions, was costing just shy what a longer trip abroad would cost. I blanched, then I panicked. What was I doing, numbskull?

This was two weeks ago, this brilliant epiphany I should have seen months ago. Text my brother, I thought and I did. He began firing off trip ideas — Granada and Valencia, Spain, for starters — then, boom, he sent me a swanky hotel bargain in … Seoul, South Korea. My immediate text response: “Oooooo.” A fire was lit.

Despite having in the past mulled Seoul as a destination, it never quite captured my imagination, even though it looks like the sister city — high rises, high tech, sleek and seductive, old and new — of Tokyo, one of my favorite places. 

Quick like, I was on the web, from Chat GPT and Lonely Planet, to TripAdvisor and YouTube, researching and rummaging. And, hell, if Seoul wasn’t completely captivating. Pagodas meet K-Pop, kimchi mingles with Korean BBQ, and temples to godlike emperors and gaudy consumerism abound. I checked mid-April weather (cool to warmish) and saw that it’s also peak cherry blossom season. What!

I’m a capricious creature, incurably impulsive, too often following my gut before my head (see: Nashville). But while this reversal — I booked the Seoul hotel and swapped my Nashville flight credits for Korea credits — is dramatic and sudden, it is not rash.  

Rash implies foolish and reckless. This time I’ve thought it out, lured to a place I’ve never been, based on hours of homework. Frankly, my heart was never fully in Nashville. It was whimsical, poorly reasoned. They may serve soul food there, but they don’t serve Seoul food. Tours are booked — I might be most excited about the “Anthony Bourdain Ultimate Korean BBQ Experience,” and why not? — hotel secured, etc. The flights are a time-sucking monstrosity — 20-some hours — but you gotta roll with it if you’re committed.  

I am at peace. I’m also madly excited.