I awoke from a very annoying dream.
In the dream, I was riding a bus in Korea. Pretty typical. But the landscape outside was New Zealand. Not typical – but understandable, given my recent activity. The collection of people on the bus resembled a cross-section of people I know on facebook: barely-known fellow-foreigners-in-Jeollanam, old friends, former co-workers, schoolmates from 30+ years ago. And some Koreans, too. The bus was stopping at all these small New Zealand towns.
I was feeling frustrated, because I wanted to go home, to Yeonggwang, and I was beginning to suspect I was on the wrong bus.
More and more passengers got off the bus, until finally, I was the only person on the bus. And then, the bus stopped not even at a town, but at an isolated farm in a flat part of New Zealand – something like the countryside south of Whangarei, maybe. And the bus driver announced, in Korean, that we would be taking a break.
In my broken Korean, I asked, for how long.
The bus driver laughed. "Until October 25th," he explained.
I felt very angry. "엄청 귀찮아요!" [That's really annoying!] I protested. The bus driver merely grinned. I noticed, for only the first time, that he wore a turban. This seemed rather un-Korean of him, to be wearing a turban.
I spent some time assembling my next sentence. Finally, I said something that I knew was bad Korean, but suggested the meaning: "You never said anything. At the last bus station."
The bus driver laughed again. "I announced it this morning," he said.
"그렇지만…그렇지만…," [but… but…] I spluttered. I wasn't on the bus, this morning, I wanted to say. But my linguistic capicity to put this meaning together in Korean was inadequate.
I got off the bus and sat down in the grass, in the hot New Zealand sun. There were sheep grazing, in the green fields, and bugs buzzing around some flowers planted in a row beside the gravel road. Some of the flowers had been crushed by the bus's tires, which struck me as really inconsiderate, until I meditated on the possibility this farm belonged to the bus driver. He just didn't give a damn, I thought.
I'd definitely gotten on the wrong bus – Yeonggwang was not walkable, from here.
Inside the dream, I meditated on novels by Kafka and Witold Gombrowicz. I decided there was a lesson to be drawn from these novels.
I turned around, and boldly approached the turbaned-yet-Korean bus driver. "What's for lunch?" I asked. "Do you have any ramyeon [ramen]?"