Traveling alone, though sometimes frustrating and lonely, offers anonymity. My solitude and inability to speak Korean isolated me and confined me to a handful of experiences, mostly recommended by Lonely Planet , to which I could really relate, despite excellent English placards. I lingered before the National Folk Museum of Korea's placards about the development of Hangeul, the Korean language, dreaming for a moment that my study of Latin somehow qualified me to understand Asian etymology, and I snapped photographs of red eaves at Dongbokgeong Palace to compare to the roofs where I teach in China; but most of the time, I felt lost.
On my last day, though, solitude allowed me to indulge a strange inclination, inherited from my father, to visit the pool wherever I go. Typically, my dad finds the pool to work out the way he has loved to work out most since his days swimming at the Detroit Golf Club, University of Detroit High, and, in the late 60s and early 70s, at the University of Michigan.
My desire to find pools, however, has grown into a fascination with Olympic sites as I have begun to travel, including the Rome Olympic complex, then the Barcelona complex, the Beijing Olympics, which I witnessed, and now Seoul, but up to my time in Seoul, I had never taken a stroke in an Olympic pool. As I mounted the widening staircase of the subway exit, the red, white, and blue wings of Seoul's Olympic Park West Gate blew away my fear of wasted time.
Today would be the day, I hoped, that I actually would swim in an Olympic Pool, fortunately, without anyone I know present to see, judge, or time. The park attendant at the gate crushed me with a nervous smile. I thanked him as I walked away and planned how to beg the pool attendant. I had to remind myself to look around as I rushed to the other side of the wide, circular park.
This is it! I frantically look for the entrance. When I get inโฆI'll get in, right? They'll let me in when I tell them that this is a childhood dream, which is sort of trueโฆand then they'll let me into the nearly empty competition poolโit must be empty, because this is an Olympic park and probably exclusiveโand I'll swim a while in a lane all to myself, and then, spontaneously, I'll stab the wall, burst up with a Matt Biondi fist pump toward the empty stands, I'll explode off the block with a Jager start, like a puma mid-bound, arms taut toward the pool floor, head cocked back with eyes straight forward, and I'll have to ask someone to take a picture of that, which will take some miming to explain, but worth it!
