Never miss a party. Good for the nerves—like celery.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Camel’s Back”

Updated list of the people from the hostel:

• Owner– owner of the hostel, 41yo guy. Originally from Cananda, he seemed (and acted) way younger. Fond of drinking and talking about being horny.
• C.H. – one of the staff members, 28yo guy. Bespectacled, served in the navy, intensely shy.
• Nacho – Korean-American female staff member in her early thirties, originally from L.A., in charge of the volunteers. Bespectacled, hilarious, and plump, with a BTS haircut and a crazy sleep routine.
• Chica – Spanish volunteer / actress from Madrid, 34yo girl. Short, perky, petite, with long, straight hair and freckles.
• Lil G– Mexican volunteer, 33yo guy. He’s my height, yet three times thicker than me, like a bodyguard.
• Painter – Brazilian volunteer, guy in his late thirties. Been here for around five months. Half of the time, he painted the hostel instead of cleaning.
• Horizon – Israeli volunteer, 22yo girl. Half Turkish, half Indian, sensitive yet tough.
• Ryu – German volunteer, 22yo girl. Platinum-dyed hair, straight, black eyebrows. Fluent in Japanese, having spent senior year of high school in Osaka. Also, intermediate in Korean.
• Q – Spanish volunteer from Barcelona, 20yo girl. Thin glasses, curly hair like a poodle’s (her own description).
• Mon chéri – French volunteer, 22yo (?) girl. A tall, redheaded beauty, she’s the party girl, with a  thick, sultry accent and a love of coffee.
• Cosima – Romanian volunteer now living in the island of Sardinia, 27yo girl. With glasses, a bob cut, and a sharp nose, she possessed deep knowledge of Korea (and delicious ability of cooking Korean food). I picked Cosima, the feminine version of Cosmo, due to her cosmopolitan nature.
• Angel – 27yo French girl with long curly hair, black glasses, and an olive skin, staying at the hostel for a month, studying Korean in Busan. Her long term residency and bubbly personality made her an instant addition to the volunteer group.
• Twenty – Brazilian volunteer, girl in mid-twenties (no correlation with her alias). Round glasses, long, delicate hair, quite bookish, with a thick Portuguese accent, and good knowledge of Korean.
• Kaela – Argentinian volunteer, girl in mid-twenties. Extremely petite, extremely pleasant, with dark hair, sharp features, and thin glasses, she’d moved to Copenhagen during the pandemic.

10 June 2023

• 13:10-14:40 sheets
• Horizon’s surprise party, featuring some… surprises

Shift at the Hostel

Today I woke at 4:00, my body expecting another sunrise and meditation. I dozed off at 6:00 and woke again at 10:30, paradoxically more tired, and my muscles more sore from Sunmudo.

After breakfast, Chica told me about her night out. Her first weekend in Busan, she’d met a local guy, whom she dubbed Korean Number 1. Last night, at Thursday Party, she’d met the criminally handsome Korean Number 2.

“On a scale of 1-10, how was it?” everyone around the table wanted to know.

She thought for a moment.

“7?” I suggested.

“No, it was more,” she said. “It was 9.”

“So did you get his contact details?” I asked.

“No. I forgot.”

“No!” I exclaimed. “You have to find him!”

She wasn’t sure she agreed. And besides: “I’m not sure he wants to see me again.”

I thought the same about my Japanese incident.

“If you to go back to Thursday Party,” I began, “I’m sure you’ll find him.”

The discussion ended soon after, with Nacho arriving for our shift.

At least cleaning was a light day. I taught sheets to Kaela, a new volunteer from Argentina, who now lived in Copenhagen.

Horizon’s Surprise Birthday Party

In the afternoon, Lil G and I went to buy a cake and party materials for Horizon.

Today was Saturday. Her birthday wasn’t until next Sunday. But this was Lil G and Mon Cheri’s last weekend in Busan, and she’d grown close enough to them during my absence, that they’d confined in me their intention to throw her a surprise party today.

Owner bought soju and snacks. I decorated the basement and wrapped a present from Daiso for her: a “happy-birthday”-in-Korean headpiece, to ensure she would be the center of attention at the club tonight; plastic cartoon shades, because she liked to look badass; a keyring I’d gotten… somewhere… of a woman’s thonged ass, because she was cheeky, and we’d been joking a lot about sex; and a long birthday card, very serious and emotional for me to write.

It was all I could afford, in terms of budget, but I thought long and hard about it, recalling Horizon’s streak of lonely birthdays.

I led her down to the basement. She was stunned, in a way that moved to tears. No one had ever thrown her a surprise party.

In attendance: Owner, C.H. (sitting next to me, too shy to talk to anyone), Nacho, Chica, Lil G, Painter, Horizon, Q, Mon Cheri, Cosima, Angel, Twenty, Kaela, and two new guests, a Russian-Korean guy and a French girl, who’d been sleeping in the same bed in my dormitory. I wasn’t sure what they were doing here. Must’ve missed their integration into the group during my trip.

Ryu was sleeping in the volunteers’ dormitory.

We downed pure soju (Owner dared Horizon to drink an entire cup, insisting it was a Korean birthday tradition). I brought out my new penis whistle (also gotten from… somewhere), and dared Lil G to blow it.

“Horizon, you know you’re hot?” Owner said, by now tipsy. “She is fucking hot.”

Horizon was aghast.

“Can you please shut the fuck up?”

Owner was getting so drunk – so was everyone else – that no one found her yelling rude or off-putting. The atmosphere in the basement was very charged.

In fact, Mon Cheri, being our resident party girl – in what was possibly an attempt to change the conversation – dared Owner to a drinking contest.

She’d been going out to Seomyeon on a daily basis for a month now, drinking every night. What was another glass for her?

A few sips later, we got the answer.

Tears, Vomit, and McDonalds’

She started feeling very bad. Weak, head lolling, nauseous, pale. Angel was holding her head, when she retched.

Lil G and I carried her up the stairs for some fresh air.

“This is so fun,” she mumbled.

She was probably the only one feeling that.

Everyone was following us with looks of concern. Horizon as well.

“I have the time of my life,” I started singing, in an attempt the lighten up the mood. “And I never felt this way before.”

“And I swear, this is true,” the others sang. “And I owe it all to you!”

We let Mon Cheri sit on a chair in the driveway. She vomited and vomited, barely able to sip water. Angel, Lil G, and I cleaned her vomit off the parking lot with baskets of water.

Angel and I held her hair and wiped her mouth. Half an hour like this, and the vomiting stopped. Angel and I let go.

Then Mon Cheri dropped to the floor.

Lil G and I hurried to carry her upstairs. She threw all over the elevator and herself. We lay her on the floor of the girl’s bathroom, right in front of the volunteers’ dormitory. Sideways, per Angel’s instructions.

Mon Cheri nodded a bit, in response to our words. She was barely conscious.

Angel’s dad, a nurse from France, instructed us to make coffee with salt for Mon Cheri. Caffeine, to wake her; salt, to replenish her minerals.

We continued to talk to her in the meantime. She stopped responding.

We called 911. Did she have insurance, I wondered?

“I don’t think we need to talk about money,” Angel said.

Of course. I felt bad for even bringing it up.

Mon Cheri was still breathing. Owner called the wrong number; the police showed up. They kicked us out of the bathroom. Too many people here. All the volunteers had gathered around.

I went down to the driveway with everyone. Only Angel and the staff remained upstairs.

Horizon took me to a corner, and broke into tears.

In between all the commotion going on, with guests curious to inquire about the situation, and the volunteers anxious and restless, and the paramedics entering the building, Horizon spewed a different kind of vomit – an emotional one.

I could not have been more surprised to hear her social trauma. She was the hot girl, the funny girl, the badass girl, who caught every straight guy’s attention.

Yet before puberty, things were different for her.

“It just reminds me of fifth grade,” she said, “when I was ostracized and my mom threw a birthday party for me, and the two popular girls told me: no one will come to your birthday. And they were right. No one did.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“None of my friends remember my birthday,” Mon Cheri reminded me. “This was the first time someone had thrown a surprise party for me. Every year I spend my birthdays alone, just going to the beach, or the mall, by myself. And I just felt like, for the first time, I was going to have a good birthday. And I know Mon Cheri didn’t mean to do it, I know she was the one who planned this party, but…”

“You can say it.” We talked in Hebrew close to the other volunteers. “She ruined it.”

“Yes,” Horizon sighed, “because it was perfect, and we’ve been talking about this for days, while you were gone, before Mon Cheri would leave Busan, to go out and celebrate together, and I waited for it so much, and now it’s all ruined. I should’ve stopped her, when she started drinking, I feel so bad for not doing anything –”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “None of us thought this would happen. She dared Owner to a drinking game, fully conscious, and all of a sudden stared throwing up.”

“But it just brings me back to fifth grade. To always getting excited, and becoming disappointed in the end. To feeling like no one cares about me.”

“Do you remember last Saturday?” I asked. “You thought Mon Cheri hated you. She didn’t invite you to go out with us. I left on Tuesday, came back last night, and now you’re best friends. I told you it’d take a few days. Everyone here loves you.”

It only made her cry harder. The tough girl, who yelled “YOUR MOM’S A HO” at guys who had catcalled her, and given them the middle finger. The tough girl, who’d almost got into a physical altercation with a guest, who had (falsely) accused her of racism.

“I don’t cry,” she wept. “I never do this. I always hide my emotions, because I had to get used to this. I’m the only person who doesn’t disappoint me.”

The last sentence made me cry.

I told her how I hadn’t had friends in seventh grade, and how all my friendships, even nowadays, had eventually come to an end. How my friends had stopped responding to me at some point, and ghosted me. Even those who had known about my “friendship breakups”, and promised to stay in my life.

I’d gotten used to being disappointed by everyone. My family – I was always the black sheep, the odd one out, so they’d never understood me. My friends – they hadn’t either. I’d never met someone I thought cared about me 100%. Horizon and I were in a similar position of traveling to get away from everything and everyone.

“I just feel like you’re the only one here I can talk to about this,” she said. “No one else would understand.”

She was right. Lil G later asked me why she was crying. I tried to explain. He didn’t get why she was so disappointed.

“She expected something, and got something else in return,” I told him.

“Expectations are useless,” he scoffed. “Don’t expect anything.”

“Easier said than done.”

We were sitting in the common area, alongside everyone else. The paramedics had arrived, and were checking Mon Cheri upstairs. She was resisting going to the hospital.

At least she was talking again.

“So,” Owner said loudly, “who’s feeling horny?”

Fully drunk and vaping, he examined all of us. I probably wasn’t the only one too dismayed to respond.

Then Horizon entered after smoking outside.

“Are you okay?” Owner asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “I just want McDonald’s.”

“Who here can buy her McDonald’s?” Owner asked.

“No, I can buy myself,” she said. “I’m my own sugar mama.”

So that was where we went. The paramedics had said Mon Cheri was doing better, and that she could sleep sideways in her bed. She’d fallen asleep on Horizon’s bed, on the way to her own. Ryu had stayed in the dormitory to keep an eye on her.

“This happened three times,” Painter told me on the way to Seomyeon, about his five months in this hostel. “But never an ambulance.”

At McDonald’s, it was 2:00, and the place was packed. Apart from fries in March, during a break from the Sumo match in Osaka, I hadn’t eaten McDonald’s in years. Per Horizon’s recommendation, I ordered fries, mozzarella sticks, and an ice plum shake.

“This made my night,” Horizon said.

“McDonald’s in the middle of the night…” I began, relishing the taste. “Better than during the day.”

Sitting in front of me, Lil G saw me playing with the cheese oozing out of the mozzarella sticks.

“I’m vibing,” I said in response to his look of disgust.

“I don’t know how to vibe.”

I tried to explain this concept to him again and again. Twenty chipped in, immediately grasping it.

“It’s good to be around your weirdness,” he told me, still skeptical. “Sometimes. I want to learn how to vibe.”

“It’s all about coming with no expectations,” Twenty and I intermittently explained. “You don’t have a type or things you expect from someone, like how they should look. You talk to them, and after a few minutes, if you like how they behave you vibe with them.”

He was utterly confused by this.

“Just go with the flow,” I said.

After this late night snack, we walked back to the hostel, passing Thursday Party on the way.

“Do you wanna go in and look for the guy?” I asked Chica.

“I already did,” she said. “He’s not there.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll be there next weekend.”

Back in the hostel, we were having serious late night conversations again. The Colombian nightshift girl laughed.

“You’re trying to be serious, but you look absurd,” she said, pointing at my pink, plastic earring and penis whistle. The former was one of the birthday trinkets gifted to Horizon.

I went to bed at 3:00. After my last two days in Gyeongju and the temple, today was eventful again. Apart from one day of sightseeing, I hadn’t explored Busan – and I’d been here for two weeks now. But experiences like tonight’s were all the more memorable. I dozed off, thankful for my time in Korea.

Today’s highlights: throwing Horizon a surprise birthday party; eating McDonald’s at 2:00; and, in a twisted way, all the bad events of the night.

11 June 2023

• 13:10-14:50 cleaning

Late Bloomer

Another six hours of sleep. I couldn’t sleep well in this hostel.

I forced myself to get out of bed at 9:30, to work on my sister’s paper. The deadline was tomorrow. I spoke to her on the phone about it, and recounted the events of Horizon’s surprise party.

“You’re having at 28 years old experiences you should’ve had at 21,” she said.

The fact that I’d been doing things in reverse wasn’t new to me. It had been like that ever since puberty.

Later, cleaning. Sunday was always the hardest day. All the volunteers had to enlist. Apart from the recovering Mon Cheri.

Chica showed me a video she’d edited on her phone. It was of her and Korean Number 2, with the caption: “Can you help me find this guy?”

I had a feeling that with her amount of followers, such a post would bear fruit. I recalled my own attempt to do so – how I’d paid for an ad on Instagram – and how it hadn’t paid off.

The rest of the day went to cooking, eating, and planning yet another last-minute trip. I tried to have my two days off before the weekend, yet everything was already taken. Tuesday and Wednesday would be it.

My destination for this week was Tongyeong, my artist host’s favorite place in Korea. Googling yielded many enticing attractions. I decided to go there tomorrow afternoon, after my shift, and return on Wednesday night or Thursday morning, depending on my pace.

The dirty, unlivable hostel the two guys from Gyeong-ju had told (or rather, warned) me about was the cheapest place I could find. Moreover, the location was perfect.

After the capsule hotel in Nagoya, which had reeked even outside the bathroom, all through the bed area – and after that dusty bungalow in Iya Valley, where I’d slept practically on the floor, alone in nature – a dirty hostel in a small port town would be something I could brave.

I merely sought a bed and a toilet. The rest of the time, I would be outside.

The volunteers had all gone to the beach during my research. Including Mon Cheri, who had slept until afternoon, and seemed as good as new. They returned late, so I used this opportunity to have a quiet night, when I didn’t feel anti-social for not being around people. At midnight, I went to bed.

Today’s highlight: preparing for my next volunteering-getaway trip.