Its almost Christmas and I've only been posting a bunch of psuedo-thoughtful rambles about culture for the last few months and haven't posted much at all about what's been going on day to day. So here are a few tidbits that have made me excited in the last few weeks:
1. I've made it my mission to set up my former co-teacher and the new administrator of Geumgang's Korean program on a blind date. Both are approaching that age where if they don't get married, they are hassled beyond what even the most mild mannered person can take. I hear it often enough now and I'm 8 years younger than them. At first, this was a selfless act of playing matchmaker, but I've now been made aware that according to custom if they stay together for two years they have to buy me a suit. So, everyone keep your fingers crossed. And don't get married or have any other events that require me to buy a new suit for the next two years.
2. I saw a Shamaness chanting hardcore while I was hiking to an all foreigner temple on the other side of the mountain to hear an American zen-master talk about mountain energy. The shamaness was kneeling in front of a shrine and singing beautifully while hitting a cymbal-like drum. I've never been much of a fan of listening to just singing. Recently though, a number of things here have drawn me towards singing with very spare percussion accompanying it. The first is pansori (판소리), traditional Korean opera. I saw it performed in Seoul for the first time a month or so ago. You can watch a clip here:
Pansori, like the shamaness and the buddhist chanting I'm going to describe below, uses the percussion to emphasize parts in the piece rather than to keep rhythym. Also amazing is that the drummer shouts short grunts and words of encouragement call choo-eem-sae (추임새) to emphasize parts that are especially emotional. The audience is encouraged to join in with the choo-eem-sae too.
The final form is buddhist yeh-bool (예불) or worship in front of the image of buddha. I've been going to these in the evening every now and then. The sutras are chanted while bowing before buddha and the chanting is emphasized by hitting a wooden block. I'm not sure what these actually do, because they don't signal us to bow and they always seem to be different. But they add to the intensity of the chanting.
3. Finals are over and I am enjoying doing nothing/ making lesson plans for the winter camp I'll be teaching in January/ trying to read the Republic despite falling asleep every five minutes because it is boring as shit. I thank the Korean administrator who long ago invented that glorious thing known as the 2.5 month winter break here.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Making Koreans
"We have made Italy, now we must make Italians." --Massimo D'Azeglio
This weekend I visited a First birthday celebration with my host parents. The big shindig is a holdover from a time when severe diseases commonly hit children right after childbirth and made their first year of life an uncertain one for the parents. Its the "we're going to make it" celebration when, it was expected, the threat of disease had passed. Special rice cakes are made and passed around to everyone in attendance to ward off evil spirits that may hiding around some corner in the baby's future. The baby wears a weird costume and I think rides on someone's back. The biggest part of the celebration though is when the child chooses from a big assortment of different objects one that will represent their future passion or occupation. So included here is a paint brush (artist), noodles (cook), book (scholar), pencil (writer), instrument (musician), money (rich person), and a few other things that I forget at the moment. At this particular party the baby girl choose a paint brush.
More interesting than the ceremony itself, is that its only recently that this ceremony has been practiced across the board by almost everybody in the country. For example, my host father, host mother, and many of the teachers at my old school had never had the ceremony. According to my host father, this is because the ceremony was reserved for the Yangban(upper classes) until the Japanese occupation. I'm guessing that with most people's incomes rising alot in the last twenty years, people have had more disposable income to throw at these big broo-hahas.
Lately though I've been wondering how this, and many things Korean, are a response to the period of Japanese occupation, the formation of an independent state afterwards, and the collapse of the extremely rigid Joseon dynasty class system in the midst of those two events. Cultural practices that were once strictly reserved for certain segments of the population suddenly seem to have been universalized. Instead of people carrying on only the traditions that distinguish their former class, they've been picking and choosing between those traditions that distinguish themselves and the country as Korean. Take the Hanbok --traditional Korean dress -- for example. The common hanbok worn by most people during formal occasions now is modeled after what the upper classes and rich wore during the Joseon dynasty. A majority of people couldn't afford clothes this fancy, and instead wore much plained cotton or hemp based clothes instead of the silk or imitation silk of the upper class designs. Farm music and royal court music has also been elevated to a reputable status and enjoyed by most people regardless of class.
The list goes on with these different cultural symbols, but most of these I think have been promoted by the media, education system, and individual Koreans themselves as defining qualities of Korean culture as they tried to define their country in the wake of the Japanese occupation and the quick modernization that took place after the civil war. An ethnographer writing during the 1980s described talking to Korean students in Seoul during the 1980s and telling them that she was studying Korean culture. The ethnographer said that overwhelmingly, these students asked what there really was of Korean culture to study. They felt, she said, that most of it had been destroyed between the occupation, the war, American influence, and their rapid development. At the same time though this was a period when people were beginning to rediscover traditional cultural practices perhaps out of anxiety over that lost past. In my school last year, everything remotely traditional and idiosyncratic was promoted to me as the legacy of "our nation." It'll be interesting to see what will continue to be practiced and evolve and what will be preserved as little more than nods to the past.
This weekend I visited a First birthday celebration with my host parents. The big shindig is a holdover from a time when severe diseases commonly hit children right after childbirth and made their first year of life an uncertain one for the parents. Its the "we're going to make it" celebration when, it was expected, the threat of disease had passed. Special rice cakes are made and passed around to everyone in attendance to ward off evil spirits that may hiding around some corner in the baby's future. The baby wears a weird costume and I think rides on someone's back. The biggest part of the celebration though is when the child chooses from a big assortment of different objects one that will represent their future passion or occupation. So included here is a paint brush (artist), noodles (cook), book (scholar), pencil (writer), instrument (musician), money (rich person), and a few other things that I forget at the moment. At this particular party the baby girl choose a paint brush.
More interesting than the ceremony itself, is that its only recently that this ceremony has been practiced across the board by almost everybody in the country. For example, my host father, host mother, and many of the teachers at my old school had never had the ceremony. According to my host father, this is because the ceremony was reserved for the Yangban(upper classes) until the Japanese occupation. I'm guessing that with most people's incomes rising alot in the last twenty years, people have had more disposable income to throw at these big broo-hahas.
Lately though I've been wondering how this, and many things Korean, are a response to the period of Japanese occupation, the formation of an independent state afterwards, and the collapse of the extremely rigid Joseon dynasty class system in the midst of those two events. Cultural practices that were once strictly reserved for certain segments of the population suddenly seem to have been universalized. Instead of people carrying on only the traditions that distinguish their former class, they've been picking and choosing between those traditions that distinguish themselves and the country as Korean. Take the Hanbok --traditional Korean dress -- for example. The common hanbok worn by most people during formal occasions now is modeled after what the upper classes and rich wore during the Joseon dynasty. A majority of people couldn't afford clothes this fancy, and instead wore much plained cotton or hemp based clothes instead of the silk or imitation silk of the upper class designs. Farm music and royal court music has also been elevated to a reputable status and enjoyed by most people regardless of class.
The list goes on with these different cultural symbols, but most of these I think have been promoted by the media, education system, and individual Koreans themselves as defining qualities of Korean culture as they tried to define their country in the wake of the Japanese occupation and the quick modernization that took place after the civil war. An ethnographer writing during the 1980s described talking to Korean students in Seoul during the 1980s and telling them that she was studying Korean culture. The ethnographer said that overwhelmingly, these students asked what there really was of Korean culture to study. They felt, she said, that most of it had been destroyed between the occupation, the war, American influence, and their rapid development. At the same time though this was a period when people were beginning to rediscover traditional cultural practices perhaps out of anxiety over that lost past. In my school last year, everything remotely traditional and idiosyncratic was promoted to me as the legacy of "our nation." It'll be interesting to see what will continue to be practiced and evolve and what will be preserved as little more than nods to the past.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
My Two Teachers
In our classes its open season on almost any subject, granted that its discussed in Korean. Love, ettiquete, spicy food...our class has worked its way through discussions on all of life's many sacred and profane subjects subjects with the two teachers we meet with each week. As my Korean improves bit by bit with these teachers, I am actually becoming able to learn about Korea through Korean. No longer am I forced to always resort to "Do you like..." questions and deductive reasoning to guess at someones opinion. So as you can imagine, these two women have been at the center of most of my Korean-culture-learning experiences this semester. At the same time, these women are almost night and day.
Our Tuesday and Wednesday teacher grew up in Seoul and attended University there (a sign that she either studied pretty well or that her parents were pretty well connected). Overall I'd say that of the two she's better adjusted to foreigners and diverse opinions. And take her ideas on marriage: the other day in class she told us about her boyfriend, and we all raised an eyebrow at that. After insisting that she is not having an extramarital affair, she explained that its just what she calls her husband. Not even in the United States have I heard of anyone doing this. Her logic goes something like this though: whenever you call someone husband, it implies that you are going to serve them as a wife. They have a more equal relationship, share in housework, responsibilities, and he routinely makes her ramen, so it feels odd for her to call him her husband. While I am still not ruling out the possibility that this was just an elaborate story to cover up the accidental admission of having an affair, its bizzarro world for Korea any way you cut it.
And what a liberal opinion on drug use she has. When the foreign monk in our class admitted to doing drugs (before he became a monk), she didn't freak out. She asked a calm set of questions about American norms and then even gave the monk a concerned yet calm congratulations on quitting. She also had no reservations about going into 15 minute explanations when asked how to say things like: "I have to poop", "I have to pee", or "We made out." All of these conversations are performed at mind-bending speeds that many of us catch only in bits and flashes. They are also conversations where the teacher talks to herself for a majority of the time. But we've come to think of our questions as the slaloms that steer her.
Our Wednesday and Thursday teacher grew up in the country in the same general area as our school, in what I assume was a pretty traditional family. Despite teaching foreigners for some time she often seems thrown off by anything outside the pale of traditional Korean values. One of the American girls in my class recently started dating a Korean student two years younger than herself. After a long class discussion about age and dating with our class, our teacher took me aside, concerned, and asked if it really was normal for a girl to date a younger guy in America. After explaining that it often happened, she laughed and said "strange." And then there was the discussion about tattoos and the American man who tattooed his entire body to look like a lizard. She thought it wasn't unusual for Americans to do this and even flicked out her tongue like the lizard man himself had done on a talk show she had stumbled upon at some point in the recent past.
While presenting my essay on Pittsburgh in class a few weeks ago (that I've posted below) my teacher stopped after reading that my ancestors had come from Italy and Slovakia and said, "then you're not American." I told her that I am American and this is when she started getting confused. The other Americans and I tried explaining that if you are born in America you are considered American. Then our teacher said this must be true for Europeans, but not for Asians. She insisted that you are always Korean or always Japanese or always Chinese. At this point things got too complicated for us to say anything more than, most Americans think Asians that are born in the us are Americans too. I don't know if she bought it, but we gave her enough to be confused over America for the next few days.
I imagine its hard conceptualizing the diversity of America and our idea of American identity when you come from an country as ethnically homogeneous as Korea. And being in Korea this past year has made me realize what an odd country America is. We can have such a diverse population and while many people may feel they are not part of the American experience, I think that many of us share some basic common values in diversity and personal freedom. And all Americans, of course, like pizza and basketball I am told by a student down the hall. Which I guess makes my teacher correct, I must not be American then.
Our Tuesday and Wednesday teacher grew up in Seoul and attended University there (a sign that she either studied pretty well or that her parents were pretty well connected). Overall I'd say that of the two she's better adjusted to foreigners and diverse opinions. And take her ideas on marriage: the other day in class she told us about her boyfriend, and we all raised an eyebrow at that. After insisting that she is not having an extramarital affair, she explained that its just what she calls her husband. Not even in the United States have I heard of anyone doing this. Her logic goes something like this though: whenever you call someone husband, it implies that you are going to serve them as a wife. They have a more equal relationship, share in housework, responsibilities, and he routinely makes her ramen, so it feels odd for her to call him her husband. While I am still not ruling out the possibility that this was just an elaborate story to cover up the accidental admission of having an affair, its bizzarro world for Korea any way you cut it.
And what a liberal opinion on drug use she has. When the foreign monk in our class admitted to doing drugs (before he became a monk), she didn't freak out. She asked a calm set of questions about American norms and then even gave the monk a concerned yet calm congratulations on quitting. She also had no reservations about going into 15 minute explanations when asked how to say things like: "I have to poop", "I have to pee", or "We made out." All of these conversations are performed at mind-bending speeds that many of us catch only in bits and flashes. They are also conversations where the teacher talks to herself for a majority of the time. But we've come to think of our questions as the slaloms that steer her.
Our Wednesday and Thursday teacher grew up in the country in the same general area as our school, in what I assume was a pretty traditional family. Despite teaching foreigners for some time she often seems thrown off by anything outside the pale of traditional Korean values. One of the American girls in my class recently started dating a Korean student two years younger than herself. After a long class discussion about age and dating with our class, our teacher took me aside, concerned, and asked if it really was normal for a girl to date a younger guy in America. After explaining that it often happened, she laughed and said "strange." And then there was the discussion about tattoos and the American man who tattooed his entire body to look like a lizard. She thought it wasn't unusual for Americans to do this and even flicked out her tongue like the lizard man himself had done on a talk show she had stumbled upon at some point in the recent past.
While presenting my essay on Pittsburgh in class a few weeks ago (that I've posted below) my teacher stopped after reading that my ancestors had come from Italy and Slovakia and said, "then you're not American." I told her that I am American and this is when she started getting confused. The other Americans and I tried explaining that if you are born in America you are considered American. Then our teacher said this must be true for Europeans, but not for Asians. She insisted that you are always Korean or always Japanese or always Chinese. At this point things got too complicated for us to say anything more than, most Americans think Asians that are born in the us are Americans too. I don't know if she bought it, but we gave her enough to be confused over America for the next few days.
I imagine its hard conceptualizing the diversity of America and our idea of American identity when you come from an country as ethnically homogeneous as Korea. And being in Korea this past year has made me realize what an odd country America is. We can have such a diverse population and while many people may feel they are not part of the American experience, I think that many of us share some basic common values in diversity and personal freedom. And all Americans, of course, like pizza and basketball I am told by a student down the hall. Which I guess makes my teacher correct, I must not be American then.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
First Essay in Korean
One of our Korean teachers requires that two students write an essay for class each week about whatever topic they want. I was lucky enough to be at the end of the list for this assignment, so I just turned it in last week. The essay needed lots of editing, but it nevertheless taught me a lot more about grammar and some basic sentence elements that I just hadn't needed to learn until attempting this essay. So, at the bottom of the post is the original Korean essay and above is my rough translation.
Pittsburgh: Steel City
When I ask Koreans, that wear my hometown baseball team's hat, if they know of Pittsburgh, they don't know. But, a few weeks ago, in the Nonsan Post Office, I happened to meet a man who knew a lot of things about Pittsburgh. Because my hometown is very small, I was really surprised that this man knew so many things about Pittsburgh. He knew that there were many steel mills and that the American music composer, Stephen Foster, was born there. Maybe that man can introduce Pittsburgh better than me, but anyways I will introduce it.
The French discovered Pittsburgh first, but the English conquered it in a war and founded the city. At that time the city was very important for trade and the military. After about 1820, the city started growing big. At this time, the city started making steel. And Pittsburgh's population quickly rose. Many foreigners came through the Steel mills to find work. Italy, Germany, Slovakia, Poland...many nations came! My ancestors came from Slovakia and Italy. Each ethnic group created their own neighborhood. Even today, there are still these kinds of neighborhoods. Each of these neighborhoods has diverse architecture. The South Side is a neighborhood with famous architecture. Each neighborhood has people, restaurants, and architecture that is a little bit different.
A long time ago, because Pittsburgh had a lot of factories, the air was really bad. So, when office workers would wear a white shirt to the office, at lunch the shirt would have changed to brown. Because other countries started making steel too, most of the mills in Pittsburgh have closed. Since the air has turned clear and the city clean, the city has received awards from magazines for it. Pittsburgh was also poor for a while, but now the economy's being restored and the city's becoming beautiful again. And because there are many universities and good hospitals, people have started moving to Pittsburgh again. So more good restaurants and music clubs are also opening.
If you come to America, take a trip to Pittsburgh!
피츠버그: 강철 도시
제 고향에 있는 야구팀모자를 쓴 한국사람한테 피츠버그를 알고 있냐고 물어보면 잘 몰라요. 그러나 몇주전에 논산 우체국에 갔을 때 피츠버그에 대해서 많은 것을 알고 있는 아저씨를 사귀게 됐어요. 제 고향을 아주 작기 때문에 그 분이 많은 것을 알고 있어서 정말 놀랐어요. 아저씨는 피츠버그에 강철공장이 많은 지도 아시고, 미국 음악가인 스데반 포스터가 태어난 곳인 지도 아셨어요. 어쩌면 그 분이 저보다 피츠버그 소개를 더 잘 할 수 있을 지도 모르겠지만 그래도 역시 제가 소개해야겠어요..
프랑스사람이 피츠버그를 처음으로 발견했는데, 전쟁으로 영국이 정복하여 도시를 차지하게 되었어요. 그 당시에는 군대와 무역을 위해 매우 중요했어요. 1880년쯤이 지난후에야 커지기 시작했어요. 이 기간에 강철을 만들기 시작했어요. 그리고 피츠버그인구가 빨리 늘어났어요. 많은 외국인들이 일자리를 찾아서 강철공장으로 왔어요. 이탈리아, 독일, 슬로바키아, 폴란드...많은나라에서 왔어요! 제 조상은 이탈리아와 슬로바키아에 왔어요. 인종마다 마을을 세워나갔어요. 요즘도, 이러한 마을들은 아직도 있어요. 마을마다 다양한 건축물들이 있어요. 건축물이 유명한 마을은 사우트 사이드예요. 이 마을에는 슬로바키아와 폴란드 사람들이 살면서 유럽풍의 건축물을 지었어요. 마을마다 사람들과 식당, 건축물들이 조금씩 달라요.
옛날의 피츠버그에는 공장이 많어서 공기 매우 나빴어요. 그래서 회사원이 하얀셔츠를 입고 직장에 가면 점심때는 갈색으로 변해있었어요. 요즘은 다른나라도 강철을 만들어서 피츠버그의 대부분의 공장들은 문을 닫았었어요. 공기가 맑아지고 깨끗한 도시가 되어서 잡지회사로부터 상금을 받았어요. 또 한 동안 피츠버그는 가난했지만 요즘은 경제가 다시 회복되어 가고 있고 아름다워졌어요. 그리고 대학교와 좋은병원이 많아져서 많은사람들이 다시 피츠버그로 이사오기 시작했 어요. 그래서 더 좋은 식당과 음악클럽과 커피숍이 문을 열었어요.
미국에 가면 피츠버그를 여행하십시오.
Pittsburgh: Steel City
When I ask Koreans, that wear my hometown baseball team's hat, if they know of Pittsburgh, they don't know. But, a few weeks ago, in the Nonsan Post Office, I happened to meet a man who knew a lot of things about Pittsburgh. Because my hometown is very small, I was really surprised that this man knew so many things about Pittsburgh. He knew that there were many steel mills and that the American music composer, Stephen Foster, was born there. Maybe that man can introduce Pittsburgh better than me, but anyways I will introduce it.
The French discovered Pittsburgh first, but the English conquered it in a war and founded the city. At that time the city was very important for trade and the military. After about 1820, the city started growing big. At this time, the city started making steel. And Pittsburgh's population quickly rose. Many foreigners came through the Steel mills to find work. Italy, Germany, Slovakia, Poland...many nations came! My ancestors came from Slovakia and Italy. Each ethnic group created their own neighborhood. Even today, there are still these kinds of neighborhoods. Each of these neighborhoods has diverse architecture. The South Side is a neighborhood with famous architecture. Each neighborhood has people, restaurants, and architecture that is a little bit different.
A long time ago, because Pittsburgh had a lot of factories, the air was really bad. So, when office workers would wear a white shirt to the office, at lunch the shirt would have changed to brown. Because other countries started making steel too, most of the mills in Pittsburgh have closed. Since the air has turned clear and the city clean, the city has received awards from magazines for it. Pittsburgh was also poor for a while, but now the economy's being restored and the city's becoming beautiful again. And because there are many universities and good hospitals, people have started moving to Pittsburgh again. So more good restaurants and music clubs are also opening.
If you come to America, take a trip to Pittsburgh!
피츠버그: 강철 도시
제 고향에 있는 야구팀모자를 쓴 한국사람한테 피츠버그를 알고 있냐고 물어보면 잘 몰라요. 그러나 몇주전에 논산 우체국에 갔을 때 피츠버그에 대해서 많은 것을 알고 있는 아저씨를 사귀게 됐어요. 제 고향을 아주 작기 때문에 그 분이 많은 것을 알고 있어서 정말 놀랐어요. 아저씨는 피츠버그에 강철공장이 많은 지도 아시고, 미국 음악가인 스데반 포스터가 태어난 곳인 지도 아셨어요. 어쩌면 그 분이 저보다 피츠버그 소개를 더 잘 할 수 있을 지도 모르겠지만 그래도 역시 제가 소개해야겠어요..
프랑스사람이 피츠버그를 처음으로 발견했는데, 전쟁으로 영국이 정복하여 도시를 차지하게 되었어요. 그 당시에는 군대와 무역을 위해 매우 중요했어요. 1880년쯤이 지난후에야 커지기 시작했어요. 이 기간에 강철을 만들기 시작했어요. 그리고 피츠버그인구가 빨리 늘어났어요. 많은 외국인들이 일자리를 찾아서 강철공장으로 왔어요. 이탈리아, 독일, 슬로바키아, 폴란드...많은나라에서 왔어요! 제 조상은 이탈리아와 슬로바키아에 왔어요. 인종마다 마을을 세워나갔어요. 요즘도, 이러한 마을들은 아직도 있어요. 마을마다 다양한 건축물들이 있어요. 건축물이 유명한 마을은 사우트 사이드예요. 이 마을에는 슬로바키아와 폴란드 사람들이 살면서 유럽풍의 건축물을 지었어요. 마을마다 사람들과 식당, 건축물들이 조금씩 달라요.
옛날의 피츠버그에는 공장이 많어서 공기 매우 나빴어요. 그래서 회사원이 하얀셔츠를 입고 직장에 가면 점심때는 갈색으로 변해있었어요. 요즘은 다른나라도 강철을 만들어서 피츠버그의 대부분의 공장들은 문을 닫았었어요. 공기가 맑아지고 깨끗한 도시가 되어서 잡지회사로부터 상금을 받았어요. 또 한 동안 피츠버그는 가난했지만 요즘은 경제가 다시 회복되어 가고 있고 아름다워졌어요. 그리고 대학교와 좋은병원이 많아져서 많은사람들이 다시 피츠버그로 이사오기 시작했 어요. 그래서 더 좋은 식당과 음악클럽과 커피숍이 문을 열었어요.
미국에 가면 피츠버그를 여행하십시오.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Jon stars in Back to School
Since graduating college, I've never stopped considering myself a student. I assumed that this self-branding would wear off with time and better things to think about, or whatever else makes us change our self-identity with age. But I just re-entered university to study Korean full-time, so this must extends my lease on the title, yeah?
Not that it matters, but its funny. I have an 18 year-old for a roommate and Korean friends who are at least three years younger than me.
About three weeks ago I started an intensive Korean language program at a tiny Cheontae Buddhist university called Geumgang University. Its almost the complete opposite of the environment at the University of Pittsburgh. Suddenly I've gone from an urban campus to one of the most rural campuses in Korea, a 17000+ student population to one less than 300, and a vibrant campus-life on the weekends to one that stops dead friday afternoon, as kids go off to the big cities.
But its an interesting situation. Everyone here gets a free ride, courtesy of the University. They specialize in language training, so there is a constant switch back and forth between Japanese, Chinese, English and Korean. And the environment here is amazing: built on the side of a national park famed for its "energy" this area is a hotbed for Korean shamanism. If a building isn't a farm here, its most likely a shamans house. Outside my window is a shamaness's house, and there's often pots and pans and drums being hit together as they carry out their ceremonies. Also on the other side of the mountain is the Korean equivalent to the pentagon, where they carry out trainings. So, when it isn't pans and drums being beat in the night there's the occasional sound of gun shells going off during rifle practice.
While I'm making it sound like this noisy and bizarre area, its really quite peaceful and one of the most beautiful areas I've been to in Korea. I have a constant view of the mountains, long stretches of green rice fields, some historically very important temples nearby, and wonderful hiking with trail heads right behind the school. I also brought a bike along with me when I came back to Korea, so its made for some awesome sightseeing along the country roads that wind back through these parts. I'll post some stuff about my trips thus far when I get some more time.
Oh yeah, and my mailing contact for the year will be this:
Jon Farinelli
Geumgang University-- dormitory room 309
14-9 Daemyeong-ri Sangwol-myeon, Nonsan City
Chungnam, Korea 320-931
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Geumgang Art Biennale
Korea's landscape works in two extremes. Either there are the mountains, where building becomes too costly, with large breadths of largely undeveloped forest, or there are the tracts of flat land where every bit of space has been parceled out for monstrous high rises, storefronts, or agriculture projects.
The Geumgang Art Biennale is an art exhibition that takes place every two years on a mountainside in the ancient Baekje capital of Gongju and finds a middleground between these two extremes. You can visit the exhibition's site here. I had a chance to go with two of my friends that I've made here at Geumgang University.
Here is one of the shining stars right here:
Most of the projects at the Biennale explore how art and construction can blend with natural environments to work symbiotically with them, while planning for the changes that the normal processes of plant growth, decay brought on by the weather, and whatnot will have in transforming their pieces. Alot of it is in the vein of Andrew Goldsworthy stuff.
We had a chance to talk with a dutch artist who made this thing.
Its a big chimney made from unfired bricks that she is gradually firing from the inside with a months worth of constant fire. Its not doing the job a normal firing process would do, but gradually hardening it up. She said that the work will be interesting for her to see in 3 or 4 years, when the elements have worn down the chimney and the foliage grows up around it to make it a normal addition to the area.
While Korea has a lot of mountains, one of the most amazing things about the whole exhibition is that the mountain is a permanent site for the biennale and these projects will stay up indefinitely after the biennale officially closes in November.
Some other things I really enjoyed looking at: This is a cliff made out of old newspapers.
And here is some more of the works, that don't need any more of my comments:
The Geumgang Art Biennale is an art exhibition that takes place every two years on a mountainside in the ancient Baekje capital of Gongju and finds a middleground between these two extremes. You can visit the exhibition's site here. I had a chance to go with two of my friends that I've made here at Geumgang University.
Here is one of the shining stars right here:
Most of the projects at the Biennale explore how art and construction can blend with natural environments to work symbiotically with them, while planning for the changes that the normal processes of plant growth, decay brought on by the weather, and whatnot will have in transforming their pieces. Alot of it is in the vein of Andrew Goldsworthy stuff.
We had a chance to talk with a dutch artist who made this thing.
Its a big chimney made from unfired bricks that she is gradually firing from the inside with a months worth of constant fire. Its not doing the job a normal firing process would do, but gradually hardening it up. She said that the work will be interesting for her to see in 3 or 4 years, when the elements have worn down the chimney and the foliage grows up around it to make it a normal addition to the area.
While Korea has a lot of mountains, one of the most amazing things about the whole exhibition is that the mountain is a permanent site for the biennale and these projects will stay up indefinitely after the biennale officially closes in November.
Some other things I really enjoyed looking at: This is a cliff made out of old newspapers.
And here is some more of the works, that don't need any more of my comments:
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Over Ohio and High Water
After teaching a two week intensive English camp for Fulbright, I returned back to the United States for a 3 week jaunt around the life I left a year ago. Throughout this year I never really thought I would have trouble adjusting back to life in the United States -- doubting I would get the "reverse cultural shock" that everyone seems concerned about on returning -- and, truth be told, I didn't. What I did go through, however, was the strange realization that I have been gone for an entire year from my family, friends, and peers. I'm realizing now that having full interactions with people (ie. speaking the same language and having some common understanding about where each individual is coming from) has helped me throughout life to take a mental note of time while I was living in the United States. Time seems long when there are a lot of these interactions and short if there are few. Without them here in Korea, the past year flew by as if it had only been three months.
Coming home to see how time had changed my family, to hear how diseases have developed or been eased, and how people have gotten married and moved into a much different stage of their life, has made me realize how long I have been gone. But, that is a feeling I would have had even if I was still living in the states, even as close as a state like North Carolina.
All of that aside, it was nice to come back to an environment where I don't have to be as conscious about my etiquette (not that that was a big deal here, but something I did have to pay attention to), to wear my old worn-in clothes, and to eat salads in the grass. My friend Elaina also got me into seeking out wild herbs and greens: my personal favorite being Mullein, which has helped clear up my constantly-blocked sinuses. And I had a chance to go sailing, bike alot, go to a drive-in, catch up with lots of people from in and out of town, and just generally bask in those things that have come to seem genuinely American in their absence.
Coming home to see how time had changed my family, to hear how diseases have developed or been eased, and how people have gotten married and moved into a much different stage of their life, has made me realize how long I have been gone. But, that is a feeling I would have had even if I was still living in the states, even as close as a state like North Carolina.
All of that aside, it was nice to come back to an environment where I don't have to be as conscious about my etiquette (not that that was a big deal here, but something I did have to pay attention to), to wear my old worn-in clothes, and to eat salads in the grass. My friend Elaina also got me into seeking out wild herbs and greens: my personal favorite being Mullein, which has helped clear up my constantly-blocked sinuses. And I had a chance to go sailing, bike alot, go to a drive-in, catch up with lots of people from in and out of town, and just generally bask in those things that have come to seem genuinely American in their absence.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Cherry Blossoms
In April the cherry blossoms bloomed and it coincided nicely with voting day, on which most people have the day off from work. I took a car ride with my family to the Gyeryong Mountain where we took these pictures.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
A little piece of heaven I like to call Jeju
Eighty-five kilometers south of the Korean peninsula is the volcanic island of Jeju, a province of South Korea that Koreans like to say is famous for rocks, wind, and women. It also has nice beaches and tons of citrus. Most of the close friends that I made when I first arrived in Korea moved to this island in August and so I've been meaning to visit for awhile but haven't gotten the chance until F-bright flew us down to the island for a conference this past weekend.
Thursday afternoon I flew from Gunsan airport with three of the other F-brighters that live in Hongseong. After an hour we arrived in the cleanest Korean city I've come across and the capital of the island, Jeju-si. Its amazing how fresh the air on the island feels right now compared to the mainland, with spring yellow dust storms pummeling it from China. The first night we visited a famous rock that is shaped like a dragons head and watched as people sat on rocks and ate raw seafood that old women had just fished from the sea in front of us. Close by the dragons head was a gorge/ sea-inlet where governors used to picnic. I would love to post pictures of all of these things but unfortunately I ran out of camera batteries and didn't have a chance to get new ones the whole weekend.
That night I stayed with my friend Tom and his host family, where we made cookies with his host mother. I fell asleep early and while Tom was off to school for the morning I took a bus to the southern end of the island to look at Sanghang Mountain before our conference began. I enjoyed the bus rides almost as much as getting out and looking at things. The island is lush green right now, the cherry blossoms had just bloomed and lined so many of the roads, and all of the land is broken up by fences made from volcanic rock. Sanghang mountain was a wide, rocky pinnacle that sort of just jutted straight out of the ground and then leveled into a relatively flat top. While I wasn't able to hike up to the top -- its not really possible without gear -- there was a set of steps that led up to a pretty amazing cavern where Buddhists had built a large Buddha statue. I was about to leave to catch an earlier bus but don't called and convinced me that I should walk down by the water. I'm glad I took his advice -- the waves eroded the rocky shore line away so that it was a bunch of pock-marked rock faces. Old women sat with tubs of raw fish and soju for anyone that wanted to stop for raw seafood and drink alcohol.
From the mountain I took another bus into the southern town of Seogwipo, where our conference was being held in a nearby hotel. We had conferences throughout the afternoon and caught up with each other. That night we went to a western-styled bar that played a good mix of 90s American r&b and had decent but overpriced red wine. The next day we had more conferences and then traveled to a village with traditional Jeju houses and then to an extinct volcano named sunrise point. We were able -- maybe illegally -- to walk through the center of a big crater that dotted the center of this volcano. It was a pretty amazing sight -- a solid, grassy field with rocky peaks at every corner. When we got to the far edge of the crater, it looked over a 200 foot or so drop to the ocean where rocks jutted out from clear blue water. On the outside rim of the volcano, people rode slabs of cardboard down the grassy, but slick hillside and did somersaults to the base. We caught a bus back to the hotel where I drank too much rice wine and wandered around a garden path that wove around our hotels property, next to the shore.
I woke up with a bad hangover, three hours of sleep to add to the previous night's five, and the biggest mountain in South Korea to climb at 9 o'clock in the morning. With my friends Rosie, Laura, Emily, Amber, Ariah, Jeremy and Jen I climbed the 1900+ Halla mountain. This was by far the best hike I've had even though it rained, half the mountain was covered in snow, and I developed a large boil-like sore on my back from lugging a pack poorly on my hips. Maybe because Jeju wasn't bombed heavily during the war and because its warm enough year-round on the island that people don't need fire wood, the island has large trees and tons of seemingly undisturbed plant life. On Halla I saw the biggest pines I've ever come across in Korea, but the interesting thing about the mountain was how quickly the flora changed as we went up. Eventually the flora gave way to a bare peak and a stair case the last few dozen meters to the top -- a nice reprieve from the snow. Usually, you are supposed to be able to overlook a huge crater lake with tons of odd forests surrounding it, but we were in the clouds and the fog was too heavy to see. Nonetheless seeing the louds swirl and dip down along the bare top were worth sitting at the top for a few minutes.
By the time we came down the mountain we had done a 7 hour, 20 km hike. We took a bus back to Jeju city and I waited for my flight to Seoul, where I stayed in a bathhouse with Rosie, Laura, and Emily until we could catch a flight back to Hongseong at 5:30 the next morning. With another night of 3 hours of sleep, I was picked up from the train station and taught a full day of class.
Thursday afternoon I flew from Gunsan airport with three of the other F-brighters that live in Hongseong. After an hour we arrived in the cleanest Korean city I've come across and the capital of the island, Jeju-si. Its amazing how fresh the air on the island feels right now compared to the mainland, with spring yellow dust storms pummeling it from China. The first night we visited a famous rock that is shaped like a dragons head and watched as people sat on rocks and ate raw seafood that old women had just fished from the sea in front of us. Close by the dragons head was a gorge/ sea-inlet where governors used to picnic. I would love to post pictures of all of these things but unfortunately I ran out of camera batteries and didn't have a chance to get new ones the whole weekend.
That night I stayed with my friend Tom and his host family, where we made cookies with his host mother. I fell asleep early and while Tom was off to school for the morning I took a bus to the southern end of the island to look at Sanghang Mountain before our conference began. I enjoyed the bus rides almost as much as getting out and looking at things. The island is lush green right now, the cherry blossoms had just bloomed and lined so many of the roads, and all of the land is broken up by fences made from volcanic rock. Sanghang mountain was a wide, rocky pinnacle that sort of just jutted straight out of the ground and then leveled into a relatively flat top. While I wasn't able to hike up to the top -- its not really possible without gear -- there was a set of steps that led up to a pretty amazing cavern where Buddhists had built a large Buddha statue. I was about to leave to catch an earlier bus but don't called and convinced me that I should walk down by the water. I'm glad I took his advice -- the waves eroded the rocky shore line away so that it was a bunch of pock-marked rock faces. Old women sat with tubs of raw fish and soju for anyone that wanted to stop for raw seafood and drink alcohol.
From the mountain I took another bus into the southern town of Seogwipo, where our conference was being held in a nearby hotel. We had conferences throughout the afternoon and caught up with each other. That night we went to a western-styled bar that played a good mix of 90s American r&b and had decent but overpriced red wine. The next day we had more conferences and then traveled to a village with traditional Jeju houses and then to an extinct volcano named sunrise point. We were able -- maybe illegally -- to walk through the center of a big crater that dotted the center of this volcano. It was a pretty amazing sight -- a solid, grassy field with rocky peaks at every corner. When we got to the far edge of the crater, it looked over a 200 foot or so drop to the ocean where rocks jutted out from clear blue water. On the outside rim of the volcano, people rode slabs of cardboard down the grassy, but slick hillside and did somersaults to the base. We caught a bus back to the hotel where I drank too much rice wine and wandered around a garden path that wove around our hotels property, next to the shore.
I woke up with a bad hangover, three hours of sleep to add to the previous night's five, and the biggest mountain in South Korea to climb at 9 o'clock in the morning. With my friends Rosie, Laura, Emily, Amber, Ariah, Jeremy and Jen I climbed the 1900+ Halla mountain. This was by far the best hike I've had even though it rained, half the mountain was covered in snow, and I developed a large boil-like sore on my back from lugging a pack poorly on my hips. Maybe because Jeju wasn't bombed heavily during the war and because its warm enough year-round on the island that people don't need fire wood, the island has large trees and tons of seemingly undisturbed plant life. On Halla I saw the biggest pines I've ever come across in Korea, but the interesting thing about the mountain was how quickly the flora changed as we went up. Eventually the flora gave way to a bare peak and a stair case the last few dozen meters to the top -- a nice reprieve from the snow. Usually, you are supposed to be able to overlook a huge crater lake with tons of odd forests surrounding it, but we were in the clouds and the fog was too heavy to see. Nonetheless seeing the louds swirl and dip down along the bare top were worth sitting at the top for a few minutes.
By the time we came down the mountain we had done a 7 hour, 20 km hike. We took a bus back to Jeju city and I waited for my flight to Seoul, where I stayed in a bathhouse with Rosie, Laura, and Emily until we could catch a flight back to Hongseong at 5:30 the next morning. With another night of 3 hours of sleep, I was picked up from the train station and taught a full day of class.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Hiking stories
With spring here, hiking has resumed. I've been able to get out the last three weekend and two of those were spent at a nearby mountain named Yongbongsan. Its not a famous mountain, but popular throughout the region because its short (only about a 2 hour hike on the main path) and it climbs very quickly to jagged granite peaks. It attracts hiking groups who want a beautiful climb that won't take up an entire day and that is short enough that copious amounts of food can be lugged up top to eat at the peak. This gets to insane proportions: 2 weeks ago a group had a 10-pound rice cake, dozens of jugs of rice wine, and a pigs head on a spit that they were handing food from to everyone that passed. What I thought was a weird, one-time occurrence was there again this past weekend when I hiked the same trail -- a big group with a huge pigs head that they were offering to people that passed. Another interesting part of the trip was riding with a well-dressed Korean man who told me that he lived in Washington DC for two years, despite knowing very little English. He kept pointing at his tooth and I thought he was trying to tell me that he had gone to Washington DC to get his tooth replaced and wondered what kind of great dentist America has in Washington DC to attract international customers like this man. As he tried to talk to me about the election and I mentioned that I liked Obama I was able to make out that he saying an African American man who had walked across the street in Washington DC, punched this man in the face, and so he had to get his tooth replaced in Washington DC. This, he told me, was why I should like Hillary and not Obama.
This isn't the first conversation that I've had with someone who had this kind of sentiment and it gets into a whole other issue about how race is perceived here that I'll write about -- or point to someone else who has written about it here -- some other time.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Health
Suddenly it is spring and I am back in the country. Since returning to Hongseong and starting school again I've learned that it is Namul -- or wild greens -- season. Koreans believe that the winter slows down your metabolism from lack of activity and that eating wild greens in the spring helps to restore your appetite. My host family's dinner table has been filled with all kinds of interesting greens that are found in the mountains or creek beds and in the afternoon I can often see old women out there picking them to sell at the market. On a recent trip to Cambodia, my homestay parents also invested over $300 dollars in forty-year-old medicinal mushrooms called Sang-Hwang mushrooms (Phellinus Linteus). We now brew the mushrooms at night in a big crock pot and drink the tea in the morning. At least the immediate effects are pretty amazing -- the tea's really calming and dispelled a few big headaches I've had after stressful days with kindergarteners.
Koreans care alot about health. When local media published stories about GMOs and their ubiquity in soybean crops, tofu prices dropped dramatically throughout the country enough so that the government pushed through pretty liberal GMO laws that require products containing GMOs to be labeled. Organic foods -- while they are incredibly expensive here -- are also gaining major ground. This is a small town and even the local grocery store has an organic produce section. And while junk food is gaining quick ground here, people still that I've run into eat fresh food at most meals and reserve junk food for snacking in between. I've grown really interested in traditional medicine here and have been trekking down to the local traditional medicine shop to buy different herbs, mixing them together to see what effect they have (I do research about them first). Possibly unhealthy, but nonetheless an entertaining past-time. My current mix is fo-ti (an herb supposedly drank religiously by a chinese man that lived to be a 130, and renowned for its purported ability to return color to grey hair), Astralagus, and Polygonatum -- both supposed to do a bunch of cool stuff as well. Whatever the case, its a nice tasting blend to drink in the evening that has a vague coffee resemblance. Other herbs that I have been enjoying: Schizandra berry, Goji berry, ginkgo picked from the trees outside my school, cinnamon bark, ginger, licorice root, reishi mushroom, red and white ginseng, and local green tea.
Koreans care alot about health. When local media published stories about GMOs and their ubiquity in soybean crops, tofu prices dropped dramatically throughout the country enough so that the government pushed through pretty liberal GMO laws that require products containing GMOs to be labeled. Organic foods -- while they are incredibly expensive here -- are also gaining major ground. This is a small town and even the local grocery store has an organic produce section. And while junk food is gaining quick ground here, people still that I've run into eat fresh food at most meals and reserve junk food for snacking in between. I've grown really interested in traditional medicine here and have been trekking down to the local traditional medicine shop to buy different herbs, mixing them together to see what effect they have (I do research about them first). Possibly unhealthy, but nonetheless an entertaining past-time. My current mix is fo-ti (an herb supposedly drank religiously by a chinese man that lived to be a 130, and renowned for its purported ability to return color to grey hair), Astralagus, and Polygonatum -- both supposed to do a bunch of cool stuff as well. Whatever the case, its a nice tasting blend to drink in the evening that has a vague coffee resemblance. Other herbs that I have been enjoying: Schizandra berry, Goji berry, ginkgo picked from the trees outside my school, cinnamon bark, ginger, licorice root, reishi mushroom, red and white ginseng, and local green tea.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Jon takes Seoul
The end of January is approaching and I've almost completed one month of living in the second smallest space I've ever lived in at Seoul's premier boarding house, the MAX Livingtel. Because Korea has a very long winter break I have January and February off and moved to Seoul at the beginning of the month to take Korean classes and work an internship come February. I'm living in the college neighborhood of Sinchon and while I have no view of it, or anything for that matter, from my windowless room, the neighborhood's frenetically beautiful, amazing in how much flashy stuff it crowds into such a tight space.
Living here reminds me so much of my freshman year in the college dorms. Like in college, there is a kid who leaves his door open and that I have never seen not wearing pajamas or playing video games. Also like in college, I can hear everything my neighbors do through the walls and even gone beyond that: I can actually feel the shape of my neighbors body when he leans against our common wall!
High points so far:
I visited Sanchon vegetarian restaurant, a buddhist mountain food restaurant run by a retired monk. The restaurant brings you out an enormous meal with dozens of side dishes to share amongst many people as you watch traditional dancing and singing.
I went to an ice festival near the north korean border. The river in the town freezes over and they split it into different sections for ice fishing, ice sledding, ice go-karting, ice sliding, and ice skating.
Trying to figure out the cities music scene and stumbling upon an amazing tribute show for Korean psychedelic singer kim jeong mi. From what I've been able to find on the internet so far, Korea had a pretty strong psych scene in the late 60s and early 70s. I also stumbled into a free improv show that turned out to be some one's birthday party. The place was also a gallery, but instead of the crackers cheese and wine for h'ordeurves they served boiled fish and meat on sticks with hard liquor.
Monday, January 7, 2008
Hustled in Bangkok
Before I describe my own experiences in Bangkok and Thailand, let's first turn to Murrary Head's description in his 1984 hit song "One Night in Bangkok":
Bangkok; oriental city –
But the city don’t know what the city has kept;
The crem de la crem of the chess world in a show with everything, but Yul Brynner.
Time flies -
Doesn’t seem a minute since the Tyrolean spa had the chess-boards in it.
All change –
Don’t you know that when you play at this level, it’s no ordinary venue:
It’s Iceland, or the Phillipines, or Hastings, or… or this place!
One night in Bangkok, and the world’s your oyster!
The bars are temples, but the bills ain’t free.
You’ll find a god in every golden cloister!
And, if you’re lucky, then the god’s a she.
I can feel an angel slidin’ up to me.
One town’s very like another one –
Your head’s down over your pieces, brother.
It’s a drag – it’s a bore to be lookin’ at the board, not lookin’ at the city.
Whaddaya mean?
You’ve seen one crowded, polluted, stinking town…
************
Get tied!
You’re talkin’ to a tourist whose every move’s among the purest.
I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
One night in Bangkok make a hard man humble!
Not much between despair and ecstasy.
One night in Bangkok, and the tough guys tumble!
Can’t be too careful with your company.
I can feel the devil walkin’ next to me.
Siam’s
Goanna be the witness to the ultimate test of cerebral fitness.
This grips me more than would a muddy old river or reclining Buddah.
Thank God I’m only watching the game – controlling it.
I don’t see you guys waging the kind of mate I’m contemplating.
I’d let you watch - I would invite you,
But the queens we use would not excite you.
So you’d better go back to your bars, your temples
…Your ‘massage’ parlors…
One night in Bangkok, and the world’s your oyster!
The bars are temples, but the bills ain’t free.
You’ll find a god in every golden cloister!
A little fresh, a little history.
I can feel an angel slidin’ up to me.
One night in Bangkok make a hard man humble!
Not much between despair and ecstasy.
One night in Bangkok, and the tough guys tumble!
Can’t be too careful with your company.
I can feel the devil walkin’ next to me.
My friend Tom and I began two days before Christmas --one of the busiest times for Korea-Thailand travel. Plane tickets can be cheap to Thailand and ours were especially cheap because our travel agent routed us through the Taiwanese city of Khaoisung for one night on each leg of the trip. Being someone who likes to cut costs, I thought it was a fine deal and assumed that Tom and I could cut corners even more by sleeping in the Khaoisung airport. American airports may be used to the sight of people strewn in various airport hideaways, waiting for an early morning flight, but Khaoisung was a well-organized city with a very small airport and an even smaller presence of foreigners. So when the security guards saw two dirty foreigners stretched across the floor and seats they didn't know quite what to do. We were asked for our passports and tickets multiple times and shuffled down to customer service and had an interesting evening of all sorts of these random, airport personnel encounters and various gifts given to us along the way, as they thought that we were too poor to get a hotel room. While we only spent 2 nights in the city, Khaoisung itself was a beautifully designed with wide streets, millions of motor bikes,a well-planned grid layout, and a seaside location. Walking around the city made me nostalgic for my trip through China in 2005 and made me remember the polite chaos of Chinese cities. I was very sad that we didn't have more time to spend in Khaoisung and the rest of Taiwan. But, flights are cheap enough that I might make a trip down there sometime in the spring.
Arriving into Bangkok on Christmas Eve was an odd movement between worlds: arriving into an ultra-modern, cephlopod-like airport with hundreds of rich tourists boarding through the most intense entry process I've ever had to go through; driving in a bus along a new highway with football-field-sized billboards and a view over Bangkok's outer-lying slums where people lived in shanties and cooked over outdoor fires; and the seedy tourist area that lies within the boundaries of the old city. Tom and I took a while to find a wonderful guesthouse and within a half an hour of putting our bags down and exploring the town we met the man who would haunt the remainder of our journey: a man we only now know as "the clock man."
He had five or six gold medallions on a chain that resembled clocks at first. and I wondered what a man could need with so many clocks and thought he was a bit suspicious. My next instinct was to figure out if each clock kept track of a different timezone, but later we found out that they are some sort of Buddhist pendants that Thai men occasionally wear. He told us that he was from a teacher in the north, educating the impoverished hill tribes that live outside the city of Chianmai, and that he had come to Bangkok to take a holiday and request more teaching materials from the government. We went to some of the main tourist temples and shrines within the old city together and then, checking another clock on his wrist, the man asked us if we wanted to go and have some Thai food and beer. These sorts of requests have become normal after living in Korea for 6 months and meeting old men on my hiking trips so we said yes and were ushered into a duk-duk (a motorized rickshaw) and driven a ways to an oddly placed bar that was outside of any sort of bar or restaurant district.
We were led into a dingy restaurant where large appliances were being auctioned off in one corner and girls were singing on stage. We were tricked into ordering Thai Brandy that was sold by the bottle and not by the shot and after drinking two bottles of it we discovered that we owed the man 4000 baht each, which totaled around $128. The man was banking on the fact that we didn't know the currency and while we did he, the creepy feeling we got from the restaurant he was probably hustling for, and our tendency to be overly culturally sensitive is what really lost us our money.
This put a damper on Christmas day but we still toured around the city throughout the day. While it may sound cool that a country has as many Buddhist temples as Thailand does, they lose your attention when you see the same sorts of gold plated shrines on every corner. The Temple of Dawn though was a nice relief from all of this since it hadn't been refurbished recently and had a much different sort of design than the other temples scattered throughout Bangkok.
The night of Christmas day Tom and I rode a 14 hour train to the northern city of Chiang Mai. After dealing with the pollution and traffic-crammed street life of Bangkok, Chiang Mai's slower pace was a much welcomed relief. Much of the foreigner district was within the old city walls crumbling behind a moat that surrounds the city. Chiang Mai is supposed to have the most temples of any city in Thailand and while they grew monotonous just as Bangkok's did, there was something amazing about seeing tiny ones hidden back in street nooks and around bends in the road. Better than this were the make-shift shrines that people built themselves near their homes. And Chiang Mai had so many colossal trees that just rose up alongside these structures and were sometimes 10 of me around.
After two days of wandering around the streets Tom and I found my old roommate Brad and his girlfriend Caitlin, who are both doing the JET program in Japan and were also traveling through Thailand and Laos during their winter vacation. We visited a famous temple on a mountaintop with them and then went on a hike through a national park to huge old tree and a waterfall.
Tom and I took off in a bus through the mountains to the small town of Pai. It turned out to be less Thai and more hippie than anything else we had yet come across. It was bizarre to be seeing tons of falafel stands, watching a bunch of Israelis watch a alien documentary in English, and find more access to western goods than in Korea. This all alongside earthenware pots of boiling herb teas, chickens running around on the streets, and old decaying shrines laid aside in small courtyards off the main road. However interesting it was though, Tom and I both got sick on the bus ride to it and since we had only one night there we didn't get to see very much.
We took a train back to Bangkok and got on the wrong train to the beach, where we had hoped to spend our last day in Thailand. So instead we spent it on the banks of a pond in one of Bangkok's parks. The coolest thing about the place was the number of people doing aerobics in it. We caught our flight back to Taiwan the next day and spent new years eve picking up our baggage as it hit midnight and watched a documentary about a plane crash through the rest of the night.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
The Taean Oil Spill
As anyone who reads this blog probably already knows, I am horrible at timely updates. Because I've been busy playing santa, getting shots I don't need, sleeping in bathhouses and airports, and being conned in foreign cities, I'm just now sitting down to write about the Taean oil spill.
This you probably already heard about: On December 7 an oil tanker was pierced by a crane-carrying barge off the western coast of the peninsula, causing 10.5 tons of crude oil to escape and blacken 300 kilometers of coastline in Chuncheongnam-do province. The area is renowned for its beauty and diverse ecosystems which support many important bird and fish species. The area also supports a large fishing and tourism industry.
Finally I have a way to describe my location to people living outside the country. When I was traveling this past week I met an Italian man and was trying to describe where I lived in Korea. "Near the oil spill," I said. A conversation that usually lasts 6 sentences was reduced to one and I suddenly realized what useful landmarks disasters can be. South Korea could rename its map with environmental disasters from now on, and with a new proposal by the president to dig a canal connecting Busan and Seoul, there may be a lot to rename in the east of the peninsula over the coming years.
It took a little under a week for the oil spill to wash up on shore and show a visual impact on the coastline. So, I decided to buy some golloshes, hope on a bus on a Saturday morning, and head towards Malipo beach, hoping that I could find a crew to volunteer with.
Mallipo was one of the first areas to be hit and the scene when I got off the bus reminded me of when scientists quarantine Alex's house in ET: white oil-resistant suits everywhere; the streets blocked off with trailers and supply tents; people with clip boards holding down their papers as helicopters descend into make-shift landing pads. Within a minute of stepping off of the bus I was greeted by a volunteer coordinator and ushered off to an area where I could be of some help.
A famous beach and one of the first to be hit by the spill, Mallipo was pretty well cleaned by the time I arrived. Most crude oil had been wiped from the sand and water flowing up through the tides. Gas rainbows still shown almost everywhere though. And worse off were the rocks on the periphery of the main surf, where a black watermark showed where the oil had ascended up the rocks with the tide waters. For 3 hours I blotted gas rainbows until the tides washed up too high to continue working.
I decided to stay another night and was taken in by a group of red cross volunteers who were staying nearby. I shared a room with a kid who is a year older than me and studies Hindi in Seoul. The next morning I went with Red Cross volunteer support crews to help at the nearby beach of Sindori. Far worse off than Malipo, the top of the beach still had solid chunks of crude waste that grew thicker the closer to the water's edge you walked. I spent six hours digging up crude with a hand shovel and despite the small amounts you accomplish by yourself, within those six hours we all cleaned a sizable chunk of that beach.
Its amazing how many Koreans were mobilized by the event and saw it as a national concern. Estimates show that over a half a million people have already showed up to volunteer and the work isn't finished yet. Also included in those numbers was a sizable number of expats who showed up to help.
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