images from last night's walk

It wasn't a great walk last night. Oh, the weather was fabulous—just the right temperature for a nice, brisk 9K stroll out to the Han River and back. The problem was internal: I'd hoped that my chest pains were gone for good, but the previous walk's lack of chest pains may have been a mere fluke: last night was pretty bad. And it didn't help that some dude came out of nowhere and started walking alongside me, going just faster than I was going, which meant he took his sweet fucking time passing me. I hate people who do that. Most Koreans, like me, also prefer not to walk close to strangers, so what normally happens is that they'll get up behind me, then start jogging to get past me. Once they're about twenty meters ahead of me, they stop jogging and just keep walking. But this guy last night wasn't sensitive to the problem of proximity at all: he did eventually pass me, but only by walking, not by speeding up. Almost neck and neck, with me lagging slightly behind, we both went across the footbridge that leads from my neighborhood to the upper-level path parallel to the Tan Creek; I'd intended to sit down at the bench located just past the footbridge, but this fucker goes right to my bench and sits on it before I can get there. So there I am, chest hurting and feeling as if I'm close to having a heart attack, and he's taken the bench I was planning to rest on for ten minutes. Fuck. So I turn right and schlep painfully downhill, down a ramp, feeling my heart laboring the entire time as I'm forced to walk an extra few hundred meters. Luckily, there's an area with benches right at the bottom of the ramp I've just descended to reach the creekside, so I sit there, relieved but angry, and take the following picture:

Jamshil across the way: Lotte World Tower, standing alone and dominant.

I rest until the chest pain goes away, about ten minutes. My pain defines the walk. It's impossible to ignore. But I push on slowly, deliberately not rushing, and have to rest once or twice more. It's well past midnight, and only a few crazy bikers are out. There are occasional walkers, too, but they're few and far between. It's a quiet night. Once I'm back in my neighborhood, I see a bunch of white roses and decide to snap some pics of them:

Roses: the wide establishing shot.

Closer in... note the one odd-colored rose.

A rose, tucking itself in at night, 2:58 a.m.

From the roses, it's only a few hundred meters more to my apartment building, but I'm going past my building to the convenience store. Cherry Coke Zero awaits. The following sculpture, across from my apartment building, looks like a combination of some sort of bovine and that bovine's opened-up circulatory system, like a deconstructed ox heart:

As I've said many times: Koreans love abstract sculptures. 3:13 a.m.

I took the above pic as I was on my way to the local convenience store. Bought four bottles of Cherry Coke Zero. Drank two bottles last night and will have two bottles for lunch today. I told the cashier I was happy that his store has Cherry Coke Zero. I could tell he didn't know what to say to that. I'm just a strange foreigner to him, making left-handed remarks and merely confirming my strangeness.

9K of walking so late at night proved not to be enough to lower my blood sugar. I was at 170 earlier today, which was frustrating, but I did snack a bit not long before taking my meds last night. Lapses of the will are my downfall. I still haven't internalized the message that fasting means fasting—period. Well, tonight's another chance to try again, and I now have a Korean appetite suppressant that might or might not help with that: my boss had suggested I try it; he has this 한약/hanyak (Chinese medicine) guy who supplies him with all sorts of potions and nostrums, so I shrugged and decided to get some even though I have doubts about the medicine's efficacy. I had taken some of the hanyak before leaving work yesterday, and I guess it didn't help given that I snacked after my walk. I'll try again tonight; maybe it's a cumulative thing, with non-hunger building up over time. We'll see.

May is a split-personality month in Korea, a liminal month as seasons transition. Right now, the days are summer-warm while the nights are fairly cool, so that's one "split," but by the end of the month, summer will have arrived, and the nights will have become warm, too, so the other "split" is between the first and second halves of the month.* Right now is the perfect moment to enjoy nighttime walking before the heat and humidity come to dominate the entire 24-hour day. I'd enjoy these walks more if I weren't dealing with intermittent chest pain. I'll definitely talk to my doctor about that on the 24th.

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*Korean summer and winter are both about four months long. I'd say Korean summer starts about now, mid-May, and runs through roughly mid-September, which is when the nights start to cool down again. So I don't have many more cool nights left.