Daejeon

Last weekend I got my first lesson in the minute differences between pronouncing ㅈ(a sound slightly between a j and a ch) and ㅊ (a ch sound) when I tried to buy my bus ticket to the city of Daejeon and ended up in a beach an hour south of here called Daecheon. So, back on a bus for another 2 hours through rain and over miles of beautiful, pine-covered mountains until I reached Daejeon, the fifth largest city in Korea.

Its sad being stuck in a place you don't know and especially with the rainstorm that blew into Daejeon on Friday, I was extremely lonely for really the first time since arriving in Korea. I ended up wandering through apartment stores until eventually I resorted to going to a DVD bang -- a mini theater type business that are all over the place here where you can watch a movie on a big screen tv in tiny, private rooms. The rain also ruined my plans to spend the night in this elaborate jimjillbang (Korean spa) that is supposed to be covered in plants and fake animals to resemble a mini terrestrium and, instead, I ended up in a jimjillbang for drunken Korea men who pass out next to tons of empty bannana boxes (I don't know what the empty bananna boxes were for or from???).


Anyways, Saturday was a step in the right direction. I randomly started climbing a mountain after the rains let up and wandered until I found the trail head to a mountain-top temple. Along the way I met an old man who had moved frmo his life-long home of Seoul to Daejeon so that he could be closer to the hospital that was treating him for cancer. He hiked the path we were on everyday to ward off the cancer and so showed me some amazing hidden views along overgrown paths through the curbs and woods of the mountain. We talked as best as my limited Korean and his limited English would allow us about the Japanese occupation, growing up being forced to learn Japanese, and how the man felt about the Japanese now. It was one of the most impressionable conversations that I think I've had with someone even though we couldn't understand half of what we said to one another. This weekend is generally how Korea has been treating me: for every miserable thing that gets me down, something or someone amazing pops up to let me know how much there is to know about this place.

Pol Cho

Sunday morning my host mother woke me up and said that we were going to meet my host father, who hadn't returned home the night before. We drove to the nearby town of Calsan while my host brother and sister slept in the back seat of the car. We arrived at a small, hole-in-the-wall restaurant and gradually the whole Kim clan began to pour in with my host father and I was introduced to the extended family of close relations to him. We ate while my host grandmother and great-grandmother poked and laughed at me, complemented my handling of chopsticks, and asked various questions about what foods I do and don't eat and why. After the meal I was taken to my host great-grandmothers house and asked if I wanted to cut the grass. A week or two before Chuseok -- the Korean thanksgiving -- Koreans cut the grass on their family tombs so that they can have access to the tombs during the Chuseok celebration (that's held on Tuesday September 25 this year), when they will bring food offerings and perform worship rites to thank the spirits of the ancestors for a good harvest. My host-father's family is very large and few people have moved very far outside of the area and so when we got to the tomb plot there were about 30 men, all members of the extended family, who had gathered to help cut the grass on just that plot. The family has 5 or 6 plots total, so I can't even begin to imagine how many family members worked on the plots that day in total. It was a surreal few hours of me raking up huge mounds of grass on the side of a mountain while 30 men of took rakes and weed wackers to the overgrown grass on these enormous tomb plots, pausing every now and then to take gulps of soju. Afterwards old men squatted around and insisted that I drink with them, so I'd let them fill up my paper cup, take a sip and wait until they weren't looking to dump the rest in the grass so that I wasn't plastered at 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning. My host father later took me to the oldest family tomb, a plot that dates back 400 years. A few years ago I got really into the genealogy of my family and tried tracing our history back, but got as far as the 1850s. Its bizarre entering into a culture where family history can be traced and remembered hundreds of years back with little research or effort.

The Deception of Korean Geography

In a country so populous, with 70% of its land taken up by mountains, its hard to escape the presence of others even when you head to the hills. This past weekend, botched plans to leave Hongseong made me explore a nearby mountain that I'd been scouring since I got here for a trail-head into the slopes. With the help of my host-mother I finally found it and did a one hour trek up a windy-paved path past primitive badmitten courts and rows of muscadine grape vines. Those that want the view at the top but not the slightly higher pulse can drive their car up a path just a bit bigger than the car, dodging hikers while being able to admire gorgeous views of an ocean bay and mountains from the asphalt switchbacks. With streams of cars and hikers I tried to find what I always took for granted about hikes: remoteness from others, a challenging terrain, an absence of more imposing human-made structures, and a panoramic view of the peak. Trying to find these things in random breaks in the foilage got me lost in family tomb plots and also led me to a beer bottle mosaic near a "medicine water" spring. Still totally great finds and well worth the trip. I'm starting to realize though, that whereas many mountains in the United States still stand as signs of remoteness (or maybe this is some unrealistic assumption of mine???), they've been transformed here from places to escape tax collectors and take up hermitage to recreational equipment that you can enjoy your weekend in.
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It seems like everyone over the age of 30 here hikes. Korea's doing for mountain climbing what America did for yoga when power yoga took off. Courses are short and usually have refreshment stands along the way (during a hike in Songnisan National Park in July we passed 7+ restaurants on our assent). As a university student in Chuncheon told me, "Old men with business jobs are the ones who go hiking because they never get any other exercise. Young people don't go hiking." Hikers are keen on gear too: dry-fit clothes, expensive boots, and tiny backpacks. My town -- a rural town by Korean standards -- has at least 5 hiking gear shops.

Even with my expectations, the hike was great. The delivery boy from a gimbap restaurant next to my house beat me to the top on his dirtbike with his girlfriend on the back, brushing her cheek against his ponytail. The top had a shamanist shrine. That night my family drove to the top so that everyone could see the view that night and we almost walked in on people carrying out a ceremony of chants and dancing at the shrine. We freaked each other out by pretending their were ghosts on the hillsides and then scrambled back into the car.