Dateline: Ilsan
I had a moment of true panic during my trip. I was in the TSA line at LAX. I was holding my passport. Normally when I’m travelling I carry my passport with my Alien Resident Card (“ARC” – which is what I need to show I’m a resident of Korea with a valid visa, when I land) tucked inside. So, I’m getting my passport ready to show to the inspector-person at the head of the line before the scanning machines, and there’s no ARC! Total panic. It’s not in my wallet (its other resting place). It’s not in the pocket where I’ve been carrying my passport. It’s not in my bag. I step out of the line and search thoroughly. Utterly gone!
This is a moment of true panic.
And as I’m searching through the various compartments of my backpack for the second time, a nice Israeli man (I can tell by the passport in his own hand) comes up to me and says, “did you drop this?” It’s my ARC.
“Where was it?” I ask, thankfully taking it.
“On the floor right over there,” he points, a few meters back in the line. Damn!
Well that was a close call. I normally don’t lose stuff that way. I’m pretty organized, and a pretty efficient traveller. That was… unpleasant.
The pseudo-panic occurred this evening. Just now. Despite my commitment to stay awake and get into the new time-zone, I had drifted off to sleep. I woke up sweltering. My air-conditioner was off. Hmm. Everything was off. Everything. I had no electricity.
Actually, power failures are pretty rare in Ilsan, in my experience. I was puzzled. I looked out the window. It was dusk. The building across from mine had lights on. Not a neighborhood outage, then.
I stepped into the hallway outside my apartment. The hall lights were on. Uh oh – it’s something in my apartment.
I dug out the circuit breaker box in the back of my closet (I had it buried with stuff). But playing with unfamiliar switches (by feel – it was dark in the closet) yielded no result. Argh. I couldn’t conceptualize spending my first night back in Korea with no electricity. That seemed very… unfair.
I put on some shoes and shuffled downstairs. “제 방에 전기가 없어요,” I told the friendly man in the watchman’s room/office thing. I wasn’t speaking great Korean, but it got the point across. He asked something, confirmational. So I confirmed, “네. 다 없어요” Is this even the right way to say that? Didn’t matter, he’d understood. He furrowed his brow. He studied his CCTV monitors for a second. He called somebody – the maintenance guy, I realized. He knew my room number – the watchmen guys all know me – I try to chat with them sometimes.
He told me to go back up to my room and wait – it took me a minute to understand that’s what he was asking. I’d only just arrived back in Korea, and I was groggy and feeling disoriented. I went back up, and propped my apartment door open. I tried to pick up the explosive disaster that was my apartment – I’d discombobulated my possessions during my packing routine at my departure, two weeks ago, as I always do, and upon my return, I’d merely layered my unpacking over that, and done a load of laundry and cluttered my sink.
After about 5 minutes the maintenance guy showed up. He had a flashlight. Actually, so did I – why didn’t I think of that? He looked around. “No power,” he observed, in English. I nodded. He shined his light on the circuit breaker box. He played with the switches for what seemed a long time. On. Off. This one on. That one off. And suddenly, the power came back. Hmm.
And so I had power. I thanked him. He nodded, grinning, and left.
OK. All better. I tried to stay up again.
