There is a place in downtown Seoul, where all the old laborers gather. Past the gold shops on the left, with the thick legged ladies and the Chinese immigrants doing what they do world round. Past the lines of street stalls selling blood sausage, silkworm pupa, kimchee pancakes with shiso, deep fried everything, fish meal cakes, tripe, pig intestine, pine needle drink in small cans. Past the coffee shops with European names filled with the girls with high-heeled shoes, past the endless neon shopfronts and blinking banners in the gracefully regular Korean script.

The laborers all meet there, in their 50s and 60s - the hunched and squat remains of an old Korea where meat was hard to find, where rice was a luxury. They sit around small street stalls at feed - holdovers from the time before - from the time when Korea was a poor and dusty place, a place where peace-corps Americans didn't drink the water, a place where Japanese industrialists held court in black cars and in the back of hotels. They seem content with their luxury goods from 20 years ago, as all of the aging do - except that 20 years ago in this country, the country was an entirely different place, and luxury items from that era are things like orange flip-flops. Their rubber shoes, their baggy cheap clothing, their odd plastic caps all speak of a low quality manufacturing - the kind of work that has now moved to rural China and ASEAN countries like Vietnam.

I sit in the shadows by a temple door with the occasional flickering of a broken neon sign offering buckwheat noodles in the Japanese style flashing across my face - watching the old ones trudge around and fill their faces with fried things. An old man falls off of his plastic chair, a green bottle of soju bounces down with him. Everyone laughs at his table. It seems he could have broken something because it takes him over 30 seconds to even start standing up, but happily he is stuffing long brown and red snakes of noodles into his face again in under 2 minutes with dull metal chopsticks.

They might as well be a different race altogether these ones, so different are they from the younger Koreans. Few of them stand much higher than 5 foot 2, while the young here are impressively tall for Asians - more in the 5 foot 10 range. Their wrinkled faces are so much wider and flatter. I'm told this "moon face" was a sign of beauty in the old days, and women girls were encouraged to sleep face down to encourage the wide shape.

These days, plastic surgery is simply everywhere, and chin-shaving is one of the most common surgical enhancements after creating western style eyes and high & sharp noses. Sitting in a Chinese tea shop trying to ignore the confusing English of the talkative owner I read his English language learner's magazine with a trite article about Korean plastic surgery that offered the interesting statistic: 20% of Korean girls get plastic surgery for their highschool graduation gifts.

A popular technique is to sever the nerves in the lower calve at the back of the knee to prevent the thick "melon calves" that girls today want to avoid, and that are so prevalent among the squat "ajumma" or "married ladies" that mill about the laborers park and feed the aged. Another is skin bleaching, and of course very popular is breast enhancement. As a man, I cannot with full honesty speak ill of the latter of course, but it is a bit interesting.

The result is stark - and evident - when university girls occasionally walk by the park - two races, two countries all together. One poor, one rich; one short, brownish, and wide - one tall, pale, and thin; one developing, one rich.

The aged, with their silver teeth and garlic breath - sitting and smoking in the Asian squat and oversided baseball caps, pour their soju - basically cheap and flavored single distillation ethanol - into small cups in this small downtown park, just like they have always done, just like they did through the tough years and the good years working in the factories.

Across town, in a brightly lit office in Gangnam, sit hundreds of files about Toyota's success with flex-fuel ethanol engines in Sao Paolo - including, no doubt, original plans from Toyota.

Soju, the old ones know, is an unbeatable fuel.

The old man falls out of his seat again, and the thick fingered ajumma helps him back up.

The park chatters on behind me as I walk back down into the brightly lit streets.

Air India Flight XXX, shooting up from Delhi and through the checkerboard clouds of smog and white fluff from the north. I am sitting in my economy class seat, back of the plane, smells like cheese and sounds more rattley than you would want your aircraft to sound. My seat is frayed blue cotton twill and the faded Arabic on the food tray reminding me to twist the knob to close and lock the tray into place is also reminding me that this plane is second or third hand equipment.

To my amazement, a mountain chain appears outside the window off in the distance. The Himilayas are pushing towards me, above the clouds, passing by in the same way I would drive by a graveyard on the way to school.

The stewardess is actually a steward, and he looks over at me with kind brown eyes.
"Water, Juice, Cola?"
He looks closer.
"Whiskey?"
Confused and wondering what exactly it was about my appearance that caused him to suggest this, I look closer at his cart. Box of Tomato Juice, Box of Mango juice with Arabic on it as well (the familiar Manjoo in Arabic), some bottles of water and cheap looking cola and, to my surprise, a massive bottle of Teacher's Highland Cream scotch. Nothing else. I look down the row and realize that nearly everyone is drinking scotch on the rocks.
"Um, no whiskey, tomato juice sir."
"Sir? I am not your sir, you are my sir, sir" he says to me smiling.
"What?"
"You are my sir, I am not your sir."
He hands me a glass with ice in it.
"Tell me when to stop, sir."
"I wanted -"
He twists in over the pudgy Indian sleeping next to me with the bottle of Teacher's, its contents sloshing around inside. I watch as the the scotch goes up 2, 3, four fingers.
"Stop."
"Yes sir."
“Cheaper than putting TVs in every seat.” I mutter as an Indian man in a garishly bedazzled shirt and a ridiculous beard two seats back says in thickly gujarati accented english yells "More drink!". The Gujaratis are supposed to be frail mercantile types, of slight frame and with modest bean-counting temperments – but I see nothing of the stereoype in this bursting-at-the-seams fat bastard in a party shirt. A look around the plane reveals the typically wide variety of stocks and races that make up the Indians, costumes and skins of pretty much every color imaginable. A pink turbaned Sikh (the stereotype for them reads: powerfully built tremendous drinkers, especially for people who are supposed to be vegetarian and free of every vice vice from tea to sodomy) to his right calls out "Here too please." The chatter in Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Punjabi, and thickly accently British English creates a cicada-like effect, increasingl in volume as the stewards move down the aisle. The plane is drunk.


Two hours and 10 fingers of scotch later I arrive at Bangalore airport, domestic side.
--

Mumbai. Black taxi, yellow top. Fare from the Airport started with an offer of 1000 rupees. Final fare 400, local fare 200. Snaking through the city, slowly moving down along coastal view of Marine drive, the home of the subcontinent's extremely affluent, I note to my self that I am in a real city, not the dusty gray area of Delhi. Slums snake down from the small hills by the water, teeming streets lined with blue tarp and plywood houses form ephemeral intersections not on any map. Stoplight. A boy selling newspapers. I dont give beggars money, especially children. But if a kid is selling something, or providing a service, I might buy 10. I buy 2 newspapers, and tip the boy by about 300%. He smiles. Its a good thing, he is learning to work, and not to beg. He shouldnt have to work, but the world isn't an easy place to live in or understand. Just thinking about it makes me uncomfortable.

At a stoplight, I watch as a phalanx of 3 men piss against the wall of an old office building in unison, with the same slouch-with-left-hand-on buttock stance - it reminds me of the teach-yourself-kung-fu books I used to read when I was young, with the synchronized katas depicted in black and white pictures – 3 students jump-kicking 3 students high blocking, punch, low block, punch, front snap kick…. I watch the piss run down and over the pedestrian traffic sidewalk into a stew of juices on the curb - brick-reddish ichor from the betal nut, various dusts, tea, water from somewhere else. There are swirls in the puddle.

As we jerk to a stop in the long twist of unimaginably stupid traffic that characterizes India, a little beggar girl with huge amber eyes reaches in the window. Cute, pretty even, already the age of 8 or 9, she looks at me with slightly bloodshot eyes and starts playing with my arm hair.

"Please sir, chappati (bread) sir, chappati sir, please sir."
The traffic wont move.

A.
I look her up and down
"Don't you fucking touch me with your AIDS hands you filthy fucking cyst!"
I pop the old 60s cab door handle upwards in the cab and hit her with the door as hard as I can, knocking her teeth out and leaving a stream of saliva ang blood running down the outside of the door.
"PARASITE!" I scream jumping up and down on her head with my new boots from Tommy Hillfiger.
"Get a JOB, J-O-B JOBJOBJOB!!"
She stops moving and my white i-pod earphones swing around my shoulders.
"Gaaaauuuuggghhh!!!" I manage to screech.


B.
I give her 50 rupees, even though she isn't providing a service, and it will teach her a bad lesson. Mostly because she has huge Amber eyes, and I can ingnore the stream of mucous that she left on my shirt as she reached in the window. She smiles and asks for more money, leaving mroe mucous on my shirt.

Sometimes I wonder what is worse. India. Gaauugghh..