6-2-5

Today is yook-ee-oh (literally, six-two-five), the anniversary of the start of the Korean War. It's funny how I ended up visiting various cities during momentous days, completely unintentionally - I happened to be in Jerusalem during the 40th anniversary of Jerusalem Day, in Brussels during a free weekend long festival that turned the entire city into one big carnival, in Mumbai during the start of its monsoon season, in Seoul during the North-South World Cup qualifier game and the anniversary of 6-2-5.

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Other than getting hit by the monsoon rains in Mumbai and catching a horrible cold in Berlin that caused me to cut out Vienna from my trip, the travel gods have been incredibly kind to me during this trip. The weather in most of the cities I visited was, for the most part, pretty great (including my entire stay in Seoul - I happened to arrive on Day 4 of the official monsoon season but there hasn't been a drop of rain in Seoul yet since I arrived and the forecast is for sunny clear skies through the end of the week - which is such an anomaly that the news shows keep discussing how strange it is. I wasn't mugged, robbed, physically assaulted, hurt, etc. I didn't miss any of my flights or train connections (although I did run into a snag in Berlin when I discovered upon arrival at the airport that my flight had been cancelled months ago and no one had informed me - they just put me on another flight on a different airline). I didn't see any rodents in any of the places I stayed at (although I did see cockroaches at my homestay in Guatemala, which prompted me to move out to a hotel after the first week). I am incredibly blessed with amazing and wonderful friends who traveled with me in Costa Rica, Spain, Turkey and Malaysia. I am incredibly blessed with the amazing and wonderful El Hombre/L'Homme who traveled with me in Guatemala, France, Italy and Belgium. When life is this good, I sometimes wonder if it means that I'm getting rewarded for something good I did in the past...or whether being this blessed now means that I will have to endure something bad later. I know this sounds a bit morbid, but I am a huge believer that (at least in my life) you never just get only the good or only the bad - my life so far has been balanced by extremely fortunate and extremely unfortunate events. Right now everything seems to be so unbelievably...great. As P said to me a couple months ago: "You are unanimously, universally hated. Your life is perfect - you're traveling around the world and have a guy you adore and who adores you. Do people like you even exist?" And while my life is far from perfect, I have to say that it's pretty damn great right now and I can't think of anything more I could ask for without being absurd. Which makes me wonder...urrr, when is the "bad" that balances out all this "good" going to happen? It's not a thought I have very often but every now and then when it strikes me how great life is right now, the fleeting thought that it can't stay this great forever goes through my head. Hopefully I balanced out all the "good" by suffering through incredibly dirty hostels and mild harassment from locals everywhere i went.

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Koreans are prone to mass hysteria. Currently this mass hysteria is centered around the U.S. beef deal. Koreans think that the U.S. will import beef tainted with mad cow. It is utterly ridiculous and when I watch the protestors on the news I am seriously shocked at how irrational people are...seriously??? Do Koreans think that the U.S. is secretly trying to kill off all the Koreans? I honestly think that some Koreans actually believe this. On the one hand, Koreans are absolutely completely off-the-charts irrational and paranoid. On the other hand, I attribute this paranoid hysteria to hundreds of years of oppression and threat of cultural annihilation by the Chinese, Japanese and the West.