Time moves so fast. All the days go by in a blur of moments. My fourteenth birthday. High school graduation. Halloween 2004. Where do all the moments go? They seem to pile up on one another until I can't remember if I dated Suzanne before Katherine or if I was eleven when Santa Claus stopped putting legos under the tree at Christmas. That's why a camera is truly a wonderful machine. Press a button and make a document proving that you were there eating that with them on her birthday. Cameras bring the blurry moments of life into sharp focus, provided the moments themselves weren't blurred, as in the case of New Years 2006.



I don't normally lead the blog with the worst photo on my camera, but you see it works well with that clever bit about "blurry" life moments and the whole "moments themselves being blurred" thing and, well...Right. It's a terrible photograph; however, in place of being visually pleasing (which it's not), it is very existencially pleasing (at least to me). Shall I continue?

At the very moment that my brain sent a pulse of energy racing down the nerve cords in my arm to pull a muscle in my finger and hold down that little plastic button on the camera the large group of (mostly) intoxicated people packed into Yongdusan Park with me erupted into riotous cheering as the clock struck midnight and 2005 disappeared forever. My camera was set to a ridiculously slow shutter speed, wide open, held over my head when the crowd roared and convulsed, knocking me back and creating the blurred image above. I didn't get off another frame for another five hectic minutes as I scrambled and cursed my way to the safety of a nearby tree trunk, so not only is this photo wretched, it is also the first photograph I made in 2006.

My second frame was a little better. I call this one, "Drunken Idiots on Historical Marker."



These intoxicated revelers were sitting on the very spot I had intended on climbing myself. However, I was thwarted by the crowd and they beat me to it. I got to the seven-foot vertical slab of rock just as they were scaling it's rocky face. Their girlfriend bitched at them in this distinctive, helplessly feminine high-pitched whine as they dragged her by the arms into their impromptu box seat for the ringing of the Bell.



Ah, the Bell, the only real reason I came to Yongdusan Park to freeze to death in a claustrophobia-inducing crowd while I could have been partying in a warm bar in Kaeunsungdae.

Yongdusan Park does not normally play host to crowds of this volume and density. This quiet park resides on the summit of Yongdusan Mountain, itself nothing more than a gently-graded, tree-covered hill rising out of bustling Nampo-dong. Old men gather like pigeons under the eunheng trees and toss back swigs of liquor while they play endless rounds of GO and Chinese chess. A few tourists walk around a clock wreathed in flowers and take half-hearted snapshots of Busan Tower, rising like a sceptor a few hundred feet into the sky. A large brass statue of the famous General Yi, Sun-shin silently gazes east as if still watching the horizon for the Japanese fleet he defeated hundreds of years earlier with his ingeniously armored warships. To the right of the tourists, hanging from a beefy piece of timber in a Buddhist-style gazeebo is the Bell.

Huge, brass, guarded only by social convention and four red ropes, the Bell hangs soundlessly day in and day out. According to the Busan History museum, the Japanese cast and installed it during the occupation early in the twentieth century. They would ring it every morning to wake the surrounding proventials. That must have been obnoxious.

"Bong! Bong! Bong! Time to wake up and serve your master! Bong! Bong! Bong!"

Every time I go through Yongdusan Park I have to fight the urge to leap over the red rope, grab the huge wooden log hanging from the rafters of the gazeebo and slam it with all my might into the great Bell. Oh, what a magnificent sound it must make, I think to myself as I walk quickly past. All the cliche images I have seen of monks doing just that in movies and in advertising always pop into my head. I want to ring that bell, or at the very least, hear the magical, ancient sound up close. New Year's Eve was my one chance.

Gavin and I searched dispondantly for a bar in Nampo-dong, settling on an overlit, overpriced hof near the movie theater. For 8,000 won we got two Buds and no buzz and so we left around 11:30 and set course for Yongdusan Park. Rivers of people fill every conduit into the park, pushing and shoving their way drunkenly up the stairs. Security was there mostly to keep the Bell safe and to prevent the crowd from going nuts. That's the Bell's house framing his head.



I apologize for not getting a better photo of the bell. I was tired, sick, and the Bell wasn't lit properly. I did, however, get a soundbyte of it ringing in the new year. It will be on the public folder of my iDisk for all to download and enjoy. Go to the following URL and look for the file in the list simply called "NewYearsBell."

http://homepage.mac.com/fotonotes/

Onward.

The rivers of people became a sea, and I lost track of Gavin as I was swallowed up in the tumult. I headed for the high ground and discovered it wasn't high enough. People literally covered every square inch of space. As it got closer and closer to midnight, people began climbing anything they could find to get a better vantage point to see the ringing of the Bell.



As I said before, I too, tried to brachiate my way towards better photographs, but we all now know what came of that. I was just in the middle of setting my camera's shutter and aperture when the countdown began.

Shib...Guk...Pal...Chil...

My brain started shouting at me frantically.

"Ahhhhhhh!!! I can't see anything! Must...Get...Closer!!!" Raise the camera! Raise the camera!

As the clock ticked down, all the Koreans who couldn't see raised their cellphones into the air and flipped on the built-in cameras.



The tiny autofocus-assit lights on the hundreds of phones flashed and blinked and the whole crowd appeared to me like a massive flock of electronic ostriches craning their necks to see something in the distance. I, too, raised my camera just as the clock struck midnight. My brain sent the nerve signal. The Koreans wents nuts. I vaguely remember a cloud of pastel-colored balloons briefly filling the sky over Yongdusan. The Bell rung. The crowd cheered. Hello 2006.

All told, it was both one of the most interesting and one of the most anti-climatic New Years I have ever had. Strangly, the photograph I took will record this memory as a blur, but the memory will probably remain crisp and sharp for a long time to come. Much has come to pass in the last few years of my life, tasks have been set before me and much has become clear through the lens of experience and age. Some of these I can talk about in this blog, such as my career goals, and others run too deep to surface here. Suffice it to say that being unmarried, in my mid-twenties, without a home or a career runs counter to alot of my cultural upbringing. From the whole "American Dream" perspective, I'm a failure. On the other hand, expectations get you only what you expected, and I expect more from life. I don't know exactly what I mean by that just yet, but I hope to figure it out soon.

Anyway, look for more updates and photos in the next two days. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. Peace. --Notes