Scarecrows and 'Staches

This weekend was the start of my long-awaited summer vacation.

Ah, summer vacation. An expression indellibly imprinted into the minds of American children from Kindergarten – even earlier for those who attended more ambitious preschool programs. When you're a child, summer vacation chiefly means one thing: no school. Being cramped into a hyperactive, ADD child's body which is subsequently cramped into a classroom that is the antithesis of everything hyperactive and ADD, the absence of school is cause for the greatest jubilation. Never mind that within a week of vacation starting a horrible, unforeseen boredom inevitably creeps in and the same children that couldn't contain their excitement just weeks before find themselves in the doldrums of summer heat-amplified ennui. Never mind that by the end of summer vacation all but the most ardent of vacation lovers find themselves secretly glad that school is restarting.

Never mind all that. By March, seats are worn from squirming bottoms. By April, ends of pencils and pens are chewed to unrecognizable pulps. By May, the tops of even the good kids' desks are covered with scribblings of dogs jumping fences, birds flying free of their cages and cowboys escaping old western prisons in a blaze of glory. If you look closely at these childishly symbolic scenes of freedom from tyrannical oppression, you will notice they all have one thing in common. Somewhere, peaking its head around the corner as the hound leaps its barrier, cheering the cockatoo on as he emerges from confinement, blazing right along with the cowboy's pistol-weilding glory, is the sun.

Summer is coming. And freedom's coming with it.

Of course, as the years go by we all come gradually to realize (though we still refuse to admit it) that summer vacation often turns into boredom more quickly than our spring fevered brains and sun scrawled desks anticipate. This affliction is amplified as we reach our adult years and undergo the troublingly common process of losing our imagination. The grand, branched structures in our back yard that once served as space stations, pinioned fortresses and arbored Amazonian abodes deconstruct into mere trees – a good backdrop for a kitchen window view, occasionally useful for respite from the sun, but climbing them never enters into consideration. Rain, once a puddle-bearing harbinger of adventure just waiting to happen, becomes a nuisance and a depressant, good material for mutual commiseration with similarly weather-inconvenienced friends.

An imagination is not often much good for adult sorts of things these days. Unless you're one of a preternaturally lucky minority, it doesn't help you make money. It's not all that good for “social networking,” (a very adult word) either, since the biggest pool of available friends consists of people your age – who by and large happen to be adults and consequently carry with them disturbingly adultlike personality traits, like not having time for imagination. Grown-ups don't see much use for imagination, on the whole, so they don't often bother with it.

Which is usually quite a fine thing for living the adult life, but it is not so fine when one finds oneself staring down the barrel of two weeks off work with nothing in the world to do except everything that's fun that you can think of. If there is ever a time for imagination, it is summer vacation, which is why children handle it much better than adults, who usually break down in a fit of responsibility and find themselves doing work-esque things like chores and errands just to fill up the time.

At times like these I am even gladder than usual that I am a particularly childish person, which allows me to do things like I did yesterday – shave my beard into an American Civil War replica mustache, set off aimlessly outside of town, and go wandering through a random farmer's field taking pictures of (and with) the eccentrically dressed scarecrows along the way, which you can see below.

So please, take a look and share in my childish little adventure. And if you ever find yourself faced with a vacation, do try and have some fun, will you?

(Oh, and I've gotten a new camera, so hopefully the pictures will be prettier :)

Passing this endearing little scarecrow by the Yeo-cheung-hak-kyo (girls' middle school), I spontaneously decided to photograph it. It would become a theme of my little adventure.

Ambling through a farmer's village and following a little path by the rice fields, the path ended but I found this little passage and decided to see where it led.

An old, abandoned house overgrown by the forest was one of the first things I came upon.

I found what appeared to be a bicycle and a garden hose amidst a pile of junk behind the house.

The journey continued up a rivulet I decided to make my path for the next part of the trek.

My arm literally bounced off this spider's web as I was crashing through the undergrowth. Huge, terrifying, but nonetheless I had to admit it was beautiful.

It must have been a magical forest, because things were abnormally huge and colorful there. I thought this butterfly was a bird from a distance, so lengthy was its wingspan.

A Chon-nom (country boy) scarecrow kept a sleepy watch over this field I found on the other side of the mountain.

A respite for lost wanderers? A resting place for weary farmers? Maybe. But I have my heart set on it being a den for smugglers and Gochu (hot pepper) thieves in the wilderness.

Migook saram i-ye-yo! (It's an American!) Yankees fans are everywhere.

The road goes ever on and on...

The continual assault of thousands of spider webs could not wipe the smile from my face as I emerged from the Magic Forest, gruesome mustache still intact.

George and me hanging out in the Kokuma (sweet potato) field.