The low-budget traveller is on the road for a month, living out of a single backpack. I don't mean a proper backpack like hikers use. I mean pretty much a book/computer backpack, the kind that gets used for school. Stuffed full, it could break at any moment. But then, so could the old guy carrying it. For now, they both persevere.
I have about four days worth of clothes, maybe only three if this humid weather continues. I'll probably be doing laundry at least seven or eight times. So it is not a task that can be avoided. And avoid it, I did not. Shortly after dropping off my possessions at the motel, I headed out to do a load of laundry. First issue: Where is a laundromat? Allow me to state that nearly 24 hours after the fact, my rage at Google Maps has not completely subsided. When I say it's a torture app, and not a navigation app, that's not a joke. I mean it quite sincerely. I suspect that the employees at Google Maps have it in for Dumbass, Old Grizzled, Fumble Bumble, as they call me internally.
The good part about Google Maps being useless for finding a laundromat in Gangneung is that you get to talk to some people. First up was the motel owner, a wonderful young guy who pointed me in the right direction, from which I quickly veered off course.
Then I met a bright young lady from some Western country at a bus stop. I am still kicking myself in the ass for not being able to identify her nationality based on her speech. She could have been American, but something was different. She certainly spoke Korean well. She did a great job of getting nearby laundromat information from the Korean student girls at the bus stop. (I couldn't ask them myself. Not proper.) I was hoping she lived in town and knew it well, but it sounds like she was a recent arrival, albeit not as recent an arrival as myself at the one-hour-in-town mark.
They gave me great directions: "Just walk straight up there and turn right at the convenience store." I walked straight up there and straight up there some more, and there was never a convenience store. But this is not unusual for me. Operating at 50% comprehension, I often get things wrong--in all languages. Strangely, I don't mind too much right now. The main purpose of this trip is to get healthy, and I planned on doing a lot of walking and hiking. That I have put in a lot of kilometers walking while lost is but a bonus. And it is, after all, a great way to learn your way around. Let me put in a plug here for Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat's concept of Calculatus Eliminatus, which has influenced me greatly in my life: "The way to find a missing something is to find out where it's not."
And find out where a laundromat was not, I certainly did. There was no laundromat on the road along the river. Nor was there a laundromat as I walked on and on in the rain (and humidity!!!) under my umbrella. Desperate, I turned back to my torturer, Google Maps. With exquisite torture technique, they showed my blue dot getting closer and closer to the destination until I was upon it. Great! A childcare center and a playground. I'm sure they'd like to have a sweaty old foreigner hanging around the daycare. Well-done, Googlers!!! You got me again.
Like a hostage with Stockholm Syndrome, and no one around to ask, I gave myself up to the Google Maps torture session. They threw up more of their alleged laundromat red flags on the screen, and like the dumbass that I am, I walked--and walked. Towards the real or fake red flag I was driven. Despite my frequent protestations, I have been assimilated just like Star Trek's Captain Picard into The Borg. "F-ing hell. They've got me, and I'll never again be free."
I closed in on the laundromat red flag, Nothing. I went past it. Nothing. But then--humans!!! Two old guys about my age, maybe a bit older, were standing on the corner smoking cigarettes. Now we're talking. These two old guys took up the challenge exactly as I would if you asked me for directions in my home neighborhood. There was some debate between them: "F that. That's too far." "What about over there?" "Yeah, that's close." In agreement, they switched to giving directions mode: "Go up there (pointing). Turn left at the big road. Go about two hundred meters. There's a big building at the entrance to the apartment complex. There's a laundromat in that building."
I followed their instructions exactly, and that's exactly where the laundromat was. Oh, poor, pathetic Google Maps. You have no idea how vastly worse you are in comparison to what those two guys did. Go ahead. Proceed onward with your mechanization of the world. I want no part of it. You've already destroyed a vast quantity of human memory, of knowledge, of memorization strategies and techniques. My God! What are you doing to our brains? And for what? On the road, your Google Maps seldom works, to the point that I'm surprised on those rare occasions when it does work.
But quit you, I cannot. I am your torture victim, and I have been assimilated.
