The Sun in a Net

alternative schools

2009-03-15T17:11:00.000-07:00

Read a few newspaper articles or a random English teachers blog, and inevitably you will come across something about South Korea's behemoth of an education system. Like China and Japan, Korea's education system emphasizes rote memorization and testing to assess student performance and aptitude. The pressure on kids starts as young as elementary school, when parents begin to push kids to attain high marks, often enrolling them in hours of afterschool academies that teach anything under the sun -- art, math, science, history, Chinese, Japanese, and, of course English. Academies, many parents believe, give kids a leg up in a fiercely competitive society. Their elementary school marks will determine what kind of middle school they enter, middle school marks determine the high school they enter, which all goes to determine the college they enter. And much more than in the US, this will play a heavy hand in their future job prospects.

My host siblings last year, who were both on the cusp of elementary and middle school, went to an average of 9 hours of hagwon a week and have taken two two-month trips to the Philippines just to study English. And this is not an extreme, but the norm of what middle and upper class families do to ensure their children have decent job prospects in the future. Its not unusual to meet Korean students who have been sent abroad to foreign boarding school for years beginning in middle school or high school so that they can master English abroad rather than drudging away for hours in after school academies to learn it.

The results, as you might predict, turn out to be that students spend an insane amount of time memorizing information for tests that they will forget after passing. The mother of all of these tests is the 수학능력시험 (National Scholastic Achievement test for college entrance). Leading up to the test you can seen families in church, temple, and in front of the testing center, praying for the good marks that will land their children into a prestigious university. The niece of my host parents stopped coming to family holidays for the past year and a half because she was too busy preparing for the high school examinations that prepare students for this goliath of a test. Unlike the SATs, the board of education holds the 수학능력시험 once a year. Students usually have only once chance at taking it, unless their family is willing to support them while they curl over in library cubicles preparing an additional year for the chance at a better score (a friend of mine took it three years because he wanted a score that would get him into a more reputable university). I asked my roommate a Korean grammar question the other day and he said "I had to study that for the college entrance exam but I forget it, like most of that stuff."

Especially in language education, Koreans are starting to realize that the system doesn't work. Its produced a sizable number of Koreans who know English grammar better than many native speakers but can barely put together a 5 word sentence. And from what I saw in my elementary classroom last year, teachers are beginning to use more activity-based techniques that get students actively using the language rather than studying only grammar and vocabulary from books.

Believing that the mainstream education was failing many students, a group of alternative schools has sprung up in Korea that are trying to address the stress of public schooling. In the past 12 years Koreans established at least 80 alternative schools throughout the country. Many of these are organized by different interest groups (christians, buddhists), but a sizable portion (that I can't find a link to an actual number at the moment) of schools are being established to create student-centered environments for the students. Over the winter vacation I volunteered at one of the Seoul-based schools that are attempting to create these types of environments -- The Haja Production center.

So here's the point in the post where I am planned to give a well-organized description of what this school is and to argue that it is doing something effective that normal Korean schools are missing. Really though, I only volunteered at this school for a week and while I did get close with the students i worked with, that's hardly enough to make some big point with. So instead I'm going to use this space here to just generally talk about what I do know about the Haja center and what i liked about it during the time I was helping there.

Haja was set up for students who were disillusioned with the public education system (not only those who quit school, but also students who wanted a different style of education). The center is set up more like an open university space where students can come and go in and out of the building freely when they don't have class but are expected to attend scheduled classes throughout the day. There are a range of different disciplines. From what I can remember there is global studies, where students study social issues -- especially through the social conditions of migrant workers living in Korea, percussion ensemble, video production, writing, fashion design, hip hop music production, and a few other things that I forget. I believe the students have one year of general studies, choose a discipline to focus on in their second year which they will continue studying for the final 3 years of the school. In their senior year they are expected to organize a large project related to their discipline (which is what brought me to the center -- I was helping a student run a 4 day English camp that was helping her plan for a series of camps that she will give throughout the spring in different alternative schools around Seoul). To change the students impressions about education and the bad associations that they have with schools in the traditional sense, the school does not use the word teacher (which is always attached to a teachers name as a sign of respect in Korea) or student, replacing these words with words that mean something like the producers (students) and the people who are always at the center working to make it run(teachers). The school seemed to have pretty high expectations about students accepting others regardless of age, gender, sex, sexuality, size, shape, and on down the list. What I found during my time there is an environment where students seem to work together with less power struggles and little squabbles than I have seen in other students their age. I also noticed that students are much more willing to express themselves, both in their choice of clothing, their willingness to volunteer, and their use of ideas in creative projects. This is all coming from someone who has experience with college and elementary students but little with high school students. So I don't have a whole lot to compare it against. But, it was a place that i felt the students were very comfortable and that I personally felt was one of the most comfortable places for myself that I have been in here in Korea. Working there and being away from teaching for the few months before made me realize that I do really enjoy teaching and that I think I will do it when I get back to the united states as "the big job." Ideally, I'd like to teach in an alternative school working on similar principles as the Haja Center.

English Camps

2009-01-28T00:14:00.000-08:00

Since I haven't worked a real job since July, all throughout the fall I'd been looking for winter English camp jobs to supplement my lack of income. Luckily, Fulbright (whose English camp I taught at this summer) started a new winter English camp that I hopped onto, and so January third I caught a train 3 hours south to just about as far south as you can go in mainland Korea, to a town called Mokpo. The camp was put together by the board of education for an area called Shinan, that is a group of thousands of islands off the mainland of Korea, and people still live on many of these islands, go to school, farm, and do what people do on the mainland minus the convenience of a nearby city and plus the benefit of doing it on a beautiful, green, craggy island. Plus, the area is famed for having the second largest sea salt field in the world (next to brittany -- where celtic sea salt comes from). All of the kids took boats or crossed huge steel bridges to get from their homes to the mainland. Sixty 6th graders piled in with us at a local YMCA, and teaching these kids was one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in Korea.

Compared to the Fulbright camp I taught over the summer, all of the instructors and counselors got much closer and many of us went on to another camp in Pohang that followed immediately after the Mokpo camp. Over the course of these camps I learned many swear words and extremely rude words in Korean through the korean counselors and finally chose a Korean name -- 김더덕 (Kim Deo Deok). Deo Deok is a relative of ginseng, and in the hierarchy of the ginseng family, it ranks the lowest. Which, I feel, fits my personality well, plus when its broiled its one of my favorite Korean foods.

Also of note, Korea leased half the arable land in Madagascar for growing corn and palm oil(http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1861145,00.html) for processed foods and ethanol.

December

2008-12-22T04:27:00.000-08:00

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.

Making Koreans

2008-11-30T04:58:00.000-08:00

"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.

My Two Teachers

2008-10-26T17:40:00.000-07:00

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.

First Essay in Korean

2008-10-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Jon stars in Back to School

2008-09-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

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

Geumgang Art Biennale

2008-09-17T23:50:00.000-07:00

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:

Over Ohio and High Water

2008-09-06T17:20:00.000-07:00

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.

Cherry Blossoms

2008-05-13T06:29:00.001-07:00

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.

A little piece of heaven I like to call Jeju

2008-04-09T02:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Hiking stories

2008-03-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Health

2008-03-27T16:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Jon takes Seoul

2008-01-27T06:15:00.000-08:00

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.

Hustled in Bangkok

2008-01-07T06:27:00.000-08:00

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.

The Taean Oil Spill

2008-01-01T05:59:00.000-08:00

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.

Hitchhiking Notes

2007-12-18T22:15:00.000-08:00

This summer I took a trip to Portland, Oregon to spend time with my friend Kate and tour the west coast for the first time. I stayed in Portland for 1 week and then hitchhiked from Portland to San Fransisco over the course of 4 days. I jotted down notes of every person I rode with in between rides and thought that I would type them out on here without revision.

Day 1

PDX-City outskirts: PSU student, red-haired kid, who studied in the Dominican Republic and had the back of his truck crammed with outdoor gear.

City Outskirts -- Salem, Oregon: Hippie-type guy with long black hair and glasses. Stopped to get oil changed and tires rotated. Runs telepathic productions.org and was getting his dog from house in Salem to take to a sitter for his trip. Coming back to join fire crew and then moving to Montreal with his Eugene-based girlfriend. Used to live in Eugene. Lived in Golden Gate Park in Frisco for 2 weeks drinking whiskey and selling drugs, then hitched the 101 back to Eugene or Portland in 4 days in the rain when someone ripped him off and he and his friend had no money to take a bus back. Met guy named dumpster who took him to a punk farm party.

Salem -- Eugene: Record label guy (Romni Records) who had a "build it and they will come" philosophy. Bashed Oregon for being behind and not thinking the same as him. Wanted to explore making custom ipods with musci alrady uploaded. Complained about giving no one giving hitchers rides and how he had to walk a long distance once when he was hitching and no one would pick him up.

Eugene -- Florence: Baptist minister, born in Seattle, who runs a conservative baptist congregation in Florence, Oregon. Also teaches a class at the local high school on life skills. This was the most unexpectedly beautiful ride, pasing through a mountain pass that took us through pools of mist and large fields of flowers and dilapidated farm houses. This is where i saw a large field of purple flowers at sunset with a single person standing in the middle with a red sweater. I think it will stick in my memory for a long time, for some reason.

Day 2

Florence -- Grisam Bay: The type of person I was waiting to meet. Mountain man type guy with a tight mustache and intense "Hook" brown eyes and an intensity/ sincerity to his speech. He was a story-teller who people at his old Alaskan fishing job called "Daddy." Hitched the 101 when he was younger and actually hitched from San Diego to Anchorage in 2 weeks, ended up staying 29 years until his parents recently died. he had just been laid off from a carpentry job -- dubious lay-ff because he had recently been injured -- and there was this underlying tension in the car while he talked to his case worker on the phone and with his son. Lived in a camper in a different town than his wife. Was going crab fishing on this particular day with his son. Told me a story about winning a $100 when he was 8 for filleting a fish in under 10 seconds. Name, I think, was Stanley Kessner.

Grisam -- North Bend: Former trucker named Troy who now takes care fo the local trailer park for his dead mother-in-law. Tattered-looking man who had also hitched as a youth. Went on long tangents about the government and insurance companies and actually dropped me off 8 miles farther than he said he would.

North Bend -- Coos bay: Minnesota man who knew he was going to be laid off and so made plans with his wife to tour the Oregon coast to find a place to live. Started in Astoria and drove all the way south deciding on Coos bay because of the scenery and the cost of buying and fixing up a turn-of-the-century home.

Coos Bay -- Bandin: man named Steven. He had a large but well-groomed beard and a calm, medicated voice. Steven had gone to Reed for Biology and then enrolled in Cornell for his PHD. After speaking with many of the professors researching sodium channels in nerves he realized that he didn't want to be doing this with his life and dropped out. Enrolled in film school at boston University shortly after adn thought that he would like to make ethnography films. Marrying a rich wife, they decided that they wanted to live in east Africa for a while after seeing some souveniers that her parents had brought back from a trip. Steven spent a few months there, in Kenya, doing lots of acid and smoking lots of weed with the holy men there (whose exact name I forget). These holy men believed that if someone took your picture they stole your soul. Steven said that a man had been speared a few months before he had arrived for filming without permission. He realized then how a camera can be a weapon and topped watching movies for years afterwards. He then went on to get his teaching certificate from a college whose name I now forget. he now works for the county health department working on their anti-smoking campaign and earning his master's degree in public health on-line. His son now lives in east africa, moving there on a Fulbright after studying abroad there for many months. His project was seeing whether a butterfly farm would work on a mountain in Kenya. After research he found that it would and built a butterfly co-op that I think the community now runs. his son married a Tanzanian woman and now studies in Atlanta for his masters or PHD. Steven also really liked Peru and was from Massachusetts.

Bandin -- Gold Beach: Older man whose name I unfortunately now forget picked me up. He was originally from Texas, moved to California when he joined the service (and actually went to PGH a few times with a military buddy) and moved to Gold Beach after he finished a career as a park ranger somewhere, i think, outside of the east bay. He gave helpful advice about dealing with black bears, mountain lions, and rattle snakes when sleeping outside. His son is a diabetic and studying to be a nurse in Texas. his parents were some protestant denomination before studying eastern religions and then practicing nothing in old age. He grew up practicing nothing, became a staunch evolutionist in college and then was converted to Jehova's witness after meeting his second wife. I can't begin to summarize the religious conversations we had but they were prompted by me mentioning that I plan to live to be a 110 (he had said you don't really know anything until you turn 40 and I said that I'll have plenty of time to use that knowledge) he said that he plans to live forever through Armagedon. he pointed out helpful camping spots at the end of the ride and came back to bring me a Jehova's Witness book and a Snapple.

Sidenote: That night I was walking back into town after trying to hitch for another 45 minutes. On the way down I ran into this man and woman. The man was 30-40 years older than the woman, with a large white beard and no teeth. He called me "goin' to California" and asked if I had any bud. Then if I had any food -- which I replied I only had nuts -- which he responded by pointing at his teeth, or lack thereof. Then he asked for money and I said that I didn't have much. Before all of this though the man told me that the two of them were leaving their families to start new lives together. She responded that they were kind of free spirits and had no idea where they were going. They also had a dog and carried all of their things -- some pringles, pop, and blankets -- in a red wagon that they pulled behind them. They recommended that I sleep in a laundromat in town that they had slept in the night before. They ended up sleeping about 10 feet from where I had left them when I continued walking into town to get some food.

Gold Beach -- Brookings: Picked up pretty quicly on this one. Man pulled up in a pick-up, having just gone to his lawyer to pay for divorce proceedings. Jeffers complained that his wife had taken in her 23 year old son and when he didn't want him there she filed a restraining order, so he filed for divorce. he worked in the timber mills and said that he may seem a little screw-loose but that I have to realize he came from one of the craziest families. he then pulled out a pistol and said that it was his pedophile killer for his pedophile brother who messed up his arm in the recent past. His brother was actually a pedophile -- charged for raping a young girl and then in the appeal process acquitted because the girl filled out a form wrong or something like that. He went on to tell me that when he was younger he acrewed over $9000 in fines for driving without a license and other mischief. He said he often tried to outrun the cops and sometimes actually did it. He said that he may not know much but that he thought it was ridiculous that they shut down logging in Oregon. That spotted owls had never been around there. He did say that he thinks loggers should evaluate what they are cutting (by species) and be sure to replant them proportionally. He said that this was the problem with the black forest -- lack of diversity made it inhospitable for animals.

Brookings + 3 miles: People that worked at a gospel mission. One originally from Sacramento. Wante dme to come in to eat, sleep, and shower.

Gospel Mission -- Smith River: Hare Krishna guy. Bald with brown bandanna. He lived in an RV and was borrowing a friends truck. He was in the area to begin gold hunting. Currently lived on social security because he told welfare he didn't want to work for the sinful people. Wanted to get a 214 pot license because he said it was worth about $100,000. Growers will pay people with the license to live on their land so that they can legally grow marijuana, supposedly.

Smith River -- Crescent City: Large guy who fished in winter and did cement in summer. he said he made $85,000 on a 4 month fishing trip each year. Used to set up stage for the dead for 18 months and still set up stage for area concerts. Was in the service and was stationed in Japan (which he said was dirty) and Germany (which he loved).

Crescent City -- Crescent City: An old, single man with the most hilarious accent. He was originally from somewhere in the south. He wanted me to stay at his house for a night and said that he would drive me to Eureka when he went to visit his friend in the morning.

Crescent City -- Eureka: Deliver driver who took this route everyday. Had only picked up one other hitchhiker in the last few years and only picked me up because (a) I looked clean (b) he had made all of his delivers and had nothing but diapers in the truck and (c) was going right to Eureka. He played in a jam band that had former members of Grinch (some jam band from the east coast that he claimed was famous). He grew up in Philadelphia/ New Jersey/ Delaware area and attended art school out there. We talked a lot about Meth's impact on the Northwest and he admitted that he had done it a few times during art school to keep him awake enough so that he could finish assignments. He pointed out where the herds of wild elk kept to in the park.

In Eureka: Couldn't find place to sleep so I resorted to putting down $35 on a motel room: I was at the ATM when this girl started talking to me and eventually said that I could stay in her bak yard -- she was going to a party and hadn't warned her mom about visitors. it was a long walk and I was worried that I had laid down in the wrong yard and would have the police called on me because there was no house # labeled. The mother lived in this shed that had been converted in to a room and I guess chose peeing outside over walking back into the house bcause in the middle of the night I was woken by "who the hell are you?" I explained everything and she said that she would have accidently beed on me if I hadn't stirred at the last minute. She turned out to be really cool and invited me inside in the morning to shower and eat.

Eureka -- random truck stop: First woman to pick me up. She gave me a ride about 15 miles down the road to a truck stop. She had been grown up in a self-described "hick family" that didn't follow any religion too much. But she chose within the last year to become a baptized Christian (I forget the denomination, but I think that it didn't really matter much to her). She was a nursing assistant (I think) and worked as a caretaker for an older man (she said she asked God for patience and got patients). Her fiance was raised Buddhist and began attending the same church as her recently.

Random truck stop -- San Francisco: After only about 20 minutes of waiting on the side of the road this two-person band picked me up in an old station wagon they had borrowed form a friend. We listened to the microphones, talked about their first experiences attending anti-war protests and how they thought they would participate in activism in the future. The guy driving, who played drums in the band, had been arrested at his university in Tacoma, Washington for trying to block the transfer of some tanks to boats that were going to transfer them to Iraq. He also enjoyed biking alot. He had grown up in San Diego and the girl riding with him, the guitarist and vocalist of the band, grew up in Portland. They had played a show in Eugene Oregon the night before and were going to San Francisco despite having a show canceled on them, to look for a random club to play in. The guitarist was also meeting her mother there. We stopped in lots of random roadside attractions like "Gravity Hill" which was supposed to be a hill with a weird gravitational pull but turned out to be just a house turned at a weird sideways angle that threw your body off when you walked through it. From San Francisco they were going on to San Diego and then down through the southwest to tour for another two weeks.

Teacher trip

2007-12-08T17:26:00.000-08:00

One morning at school I was told that the teachers were going on a hiking trip together and I still don't actually know where we went.

We left at 7 in the morning and packed 15 or so people into a tour bus that looked to hold around 40 or 50. After riding for a half an hour or so I was told that tour buses are not tour buses in Korea unless they have a no-rai bong (노래방) machine (Korea's version of karoake) and that the government had made laws against dancing in the aisles of moving buses. Soon after the explanation the no-rai bang machine was turned on and the lunch ladies at school began dancing in the aisles of the bus and pulling me and other teachers into the aisles to dance with them.

The mountain we planned to hike was a four-hour ride away from hongseong (the town i'm living in) and we ate twice on the way there, with a little to drink at the second meal. When we got to the mountain I was in disbelief that we were eating again, this time at a restaurant that served mountain mushroom soup and other mountain-specific herbs with alot of macheolli (rice wine). We hiked for about 30 minutes and when I say hike I mean that we walked along a flat path through some historical gates and past some old historical buildings. Even though I still don't know the name of the place we visited, it was a famous path during the joseon dynasty, a mountain pass that students on their way to the national examinations in Seoul had to pass through as they made their way from the southern provinces. The area was beautiful and had high rocky peaks that I was eager to climb, but when we stopped to eat and drink more after only 30 minutes I realized that we probably wouldn't be hiking to the top. The pattern continued and we stopped again another half an hour later to drink some more. The hike ended up being 2-3 hours after a four hour ride each way, and I couldn't stop laughing since I had no idea where we were going the entire time or what we were doing.

On the way home we stopped to eat and drink again and that would be the last of our many stops. I ate a type of miso soup and everyone else ate some kind of meat soup. The next day at school I was asked over and over if I was sore from all the hiking we had done.

Kim Jong

2007-12-06T16:20:00.000-08:00

One of the first lessons I had to teach my high-level students at school was "what will you do this fall." I had only been living with my host family for a week or two and had no idea what there actually was that set Korean falls apart from America's, but I put down "I will make Kimchi this fall" as a phrase to practice, figuring that the dish was eaten so much it had to be made sometime during the fall. I had no idea how much it actually does mark the season here. During November its gotten to the point where piles of cabbage, red pepper bags, and mixing tubs have seemed more like some weird lawn decorations, stacked to all heights along houses or restaurants, than they do actual food staples.

Two Saturdays ago, my host family met with their extended family for Kim Jong (the hangul input on my computer is on a fritz right now, so I can't write the Korean) -- the proper name for making a large batch of cabbage kimchi in the fall. My host mother woke me up early in the morning and we drove to my host father's mother's house, where my host-grandmother cooked breakfast while everyone else gathered together the supplies that would go into the kimchi: red pepper, glutinous rice paste, oil, cabbage, turnips, garlic, green onions, and other odds and ends that I don't know the names of.

After a long process of mixing the red pepper, oil, rice paste, and turnips strips together we all sat on the ground and began to spread the paste all over the cabbage head. Then the cabbage heads were packed tightly into tupperware containers. The whole process took about five or so hours and we went through somewhere between 100-200 heads of cabbage.

Before the advent of refrigerators, greenhouses, and food imporation, Kimchi was one of the few ways for Koreans to get greens through the winters. Traditionally, Kimchi was fermented in large clay pots that you can still see outside of traditional homes, but the smell from the pots coupled with the fact that most koreans now live in large apartment high-rises where space is limited has made Kimchi refrigerators a better option for fermenting the cabbage. The big tupperware containers are put into the kimchi refrigerator and, for our family, the containers will sit in the refrigerator for a year before they are eaten. The refrigerators are specially designed to change temperature and moisture conditions throughout the year depending on the stage of fermentation that the cabbage is in.

Healthwise, Kimchi is great. It has high levels of carotene, absorbic acid, vitamins B1 and B2, and Calcium and Iron. The long fermentation process also provides a lot of bacteria that's beneficial for digestion. The American magazine Health ranked Kimchi on its list of the world's top 5 healthiest foods.

Kimchi's also resurrected a lot of the cultural tensions between Japan and Korea surrounding the Japanese occupation -- and Japan's recent attempt to claim kimchi as a traditional Japanese food, rather than Korean food. You can read about it here

The past month in Recap

2007-11-10T18:11:00.000-08:00

This past month has been busy and has given me less time to update this blog, so here's a summary of the last month:

I've met some people in Seoul and so have been making the 2 1/2 hour trip between Hongseong and Seoul every other week or so to hang out. There I've gotten lost in a miles long auto tunnel, explored the "hip" districts around Sinchon and Hongik University, gone dancing at hip hop clubs, visited the interesting but ultimately bad Computer music festival at the Seoul arts center, and eaten some decent (at least for Korea) international cuisine around Hongik and Itaewon. Come January Korean schools go on a 2 month winter break and so I will be moving to Seoul during that time to take more Korean classes and, possibly, do an internship so I'm interested in exploring the city a little more. Seoul isn't a very appealing place to live long-term, but two months will be great to get involved in some stuff that isn't available in my small town. Also: the sort of youth culture that I am constantly missing being away from America has a bit more of a presence in Seoul.

The 19th-21rst F-bright held their fall conference in Gyeongju -- the capital of the Shilla dynasty for 1000 years. Called the "Kyoto of Korea" it has the largest collection of historical structures in any one place in Korea. We had two days of lectures and meetings, sharing our experiences, catching up, and discussing how we can improve our teaching methods. That Sunday we spent the entire day visiting historical sites and I have pictures for about half of them, but my camera was dropped and so they are stuck on there until I either fix it or get a new camera. We visited Seokguram, Bulguksa, Goeneung, Bunhwangsa, Anapji, Gyeongju National Museum, Cheomseongdae Observatory, and the Cheonmachong tombs. When I get the pictures off of my camera I'll post pictures of this stuff and explanations of what they are. Monday I went on a hike with some other ETAs in a provincial park just outside of the city. The landscape was pretty diverse -- ranging from rocky peaks to green valleys cut by pebble-lined streams.

On Friday last weekend the three other ETAs that teach in Hongseong and I held a halloween party for our host siblings. Everyone wore costumes and we bobbed for apples, carved pumpkins, gave out candy, and played a whole slew of games. It was interesting to watch the kids do these activities that I've done every year for the first time ever and to see how weird/ funny our Halloween traditions are. On Saturday of last week I went to a wedding reception dinner for a member of my host-family's family and then my host-family got in the car and drove to Naimjangsan -- a national park two hours south of our town. The park is one of the most popular in Korea for Tampoong -- the word Koreans use to describe the process of the leaves changing each fall. Koreans are obsessed with seeing the leaves beginning to change -- every hotel and motel around Naimjangsan were booked and so we stayed in a jimjillbang with so many people crowded in that dozens of people had to sleep on the floor of the changing/ lockers rooms and people had to be moved so that people could just open their lockers!!! We had to wake up at 4 in the morning just so that we'd have a chance of getting a parking spot in the park and already at that time the parks lots were almost filled and large groups had begun hiking up to the peak. We finished hiking and look around by 10 in the morning and by that time the park was closed because it had become filled over capacity. I'll write a longer entry on all this in the future.

My weekends are almost all planned until the end of December which is crazy for me. I'll be in Seoul alot through November -- attending a f-bright and us embassy thanksgiving meal and proctoring english tests at the end of the month. I'll also be helping my host-family make Kimchi which I am very excited for.

Brad visits Korea

2007-10-11T16:30:00.000-07:00

Having someone from home visit I think helps validate the life you're living in a foreign country. Suddenly there is a connection between the life you knew and the life you're living that makes the two seem a bit more mentally compatible. I haven't experienced culture shock here and don't think I will, nor do I think that I'll have a huge problem adjusting to life back in the states (Although, I am really worried that the Korean habit of not flushing toilet paper down the toilet -- instead throwing it in a trashcan next to the toilet -- will stay with me in America. I can see myself now: thinking there is a trashcan next to me and then throwing toilet paper all over the floor. I can just imagine the bad assumptions people would have about Korean hygiene!). It is nice though to have someone familiar visit and know what you're talking about when you are describing where you work and live, who you live with, and what you are doing day in and day out.

My old roommate Brad visited over the weekend and now is that connection between home and here. After work last Thursday I took a train filled with old drunken men (on this ride at least alcohol + train + old Korean men = lots of random fights with the train staff) to nearby Cheonan station, where the high-speed KTX trains connect the north-end of the penninsula at Seoul to the South-end at the port city of Busan. From there I was locked out of my KTX train with 12 other Koreans and had to deal with an hour of prolonged arguments that eventually led to a partial reimbursement, lots of apologies about how this had never happened before, and a new ticket on the next train. An hour and a half late into Busan, I met Brad, who was worn from over 12 hours of traveling from Naruta Japan, where he works as a english teacher through the JET program. The next three hours we took cabs half-way across the city to a jjimjilbang that turned out to be closed and ended the night on a good note, by finding a hot spring motel that had a bathroom bigger than the bedroom (that's not to say that the bedroom was small, the bathroom was just HUGE and had multiple bath tubs).

The next day we gradually made our way to the Busan Film festival -- asia's largest -- and met up with other F-brighters in what turned out to be a huge reunion with almost everyone that had come over on the program. In all, Brad and I caught two movies because of the difficulty for foreigners without a foreigner id number (i don't have one because i am here on a diplomatic visa) to get tickets and the long lines to get them otherwise. Noteworthy was The Naked Summer by Kenji Okabe. The movie documents a summer camp run by Butoh dance master Okaji Maro and the creation of one of Okaji's performance pieces with the camp members. Brad and I left the movie wanting to join one of the summer camps at some point in the future.

With the rest of Saturdays movies sold out early in the day, Brad, I, and some other F-brighters, made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take a bus an hour and a half north to the town of Jinju, where a huge lantern festival was being held. The festival is meant to commemorate the 1592 invasion of Japan, when Korean General Kim Si-Min sent thousands of lantern down the Nam river to stop the Japanese from crossing the river and to relay messages to neighboring towns about the health of certain soldiers and general war updates. For us: the festival was a huge light spectacle with make-shift floating walkways through lantern floats, enormous walls of lanterns that stretched across the mile-long old wall of the city, and various lantern tents. We ended the evening drinking Makgeolli that was scooped into bowls from a big trash can with a group of young Koreans.

We returned to Busan early Sunday morning, with just enough time to eat a large meal and tour the russian area that surrounds Texas St. -- a foreigner district across from the train station. Brad came back to Hongseong with me and spent Monday and Tuesday playing with my students at school and spending time with my family in the evenings.

Bukhansan

2007-10-11T04:44:00.000-07:00

On the outskirts of Seoul is a national park called Bukhansan. Its name means "North Han Mountain" and refers to its position north of the Han river. It also marked the northern boundary of Seoul during the Joseon dynasty. Me and my friend Jeremy hiked this mother two weeks ago, which turned out to be a 7 or 8 hour hike altogether. I've been getting in a fair share of hiking while hear, but this topped them all. The last 2 km of the climb were along a solid rock face that you had to pull yourself up with metal wires that were strung through poles bolted down to the rock. After the climb we relaxed in baths of yellow soil, charcoal, mugwort, and jade in what was hands down the best jjimjilbang I've visited here so far. Below are some poor quality Panoramas and pictures of Bukhansan.

Daejeon

2007-09-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-07T00:31:00.001-07:00

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.

Domestic Life

2007-08-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

Last Friday the F-bright orientation came to an end with a large ceremony held at Yonsei University, that the F-bright office has hyped into something slightly less than a national holiday. "Yonsei Day", as they call it, is a formal introduction to our principals and co-teachers. Our schools sign our contracts and we say goodbye to the 69 other English teachers that we've lived with for the past 6 weeks of training. It was an 8 hour ordeal of polite bows and awkwardly pronounced Korean formalities, a traditional dinner, and intermittent periods of sneaking in goodbye hugs to friends. After everything was wrapped up I was shuttled two hours south of Seoul, past growing mountains and a hint of salt water breeze as we drove closer to Sudeoksa -- a mountain-top buddhist temple near the coast that is surrounded by a street of small
shops and restaurants. Here, my co-teacher Shin Su Yan and Vice Principal pulled off and we sat down with my host family for a traditional meal of many herb pan chans (side dishes), soup, and milky rice and herb wine served from a bowl with wooden spoons.

From there I seperated from my co-teacher and vice principal and loaded my bags into my host family's van so that we could drive back to their home in a small rural town called Hongseong. When I first came to Korea I said I would jump from the balcony if I ended up in one of the ugly, white high rise apartments that pock up the otherwise beautiful landscapes fo every town, big and small, in this country. But i'm now living in one and its not so bad at all. What aesthetics are sacrificed on the exterior are made up for within, and I've been making myself comfortable in my family's small, but efficiently organized home.

Details about my family: my host father is a public school teacher and my host mother does something with insurance claims through Samsung. On sunday I went on a hike on a nearby mountain with my host father's coworkers, an event that takes place once a month. Afterwards we ate Sam Bap (rice wrapped in cabbage or lettuce leaves and stuffed with other vegetable odds and ends) and I met my friend Emily's host father and watched one of the teachers smashed the back end of his car after a few drinks in the restaurant. Which actually brings up an interesting point about driving here -- per capita Korea has one of the worst records for auto accidents in the world. Whereas in the united states wearing a seatbelt in the backseat is just seen as a personal safety measure because people realize that driving can be dangerous, in Korea the back seat belt is seen as unnecessary and its actually borderline offensive to wear it. The few times that I've tried to put it on, I've been told "we just don't do that here." If I say that I like to wear it, I get the hint that I'm making some unspoken comment on their driving. Confucianism pervails!

Korean Bridge to connect to Sorok Island: Aged Leper Colony

2007-08-09T02:35:00.000-07:00

A Korean Bridge Must Span Years of Bias and Sadness

By: NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: August 9, 2007
New York Times

SOROK ISLAND, South Korea — After the clod-covered offramp is smoothed over with asphalt, after the road signs are put up and the construction cranes taken down, a bridge, long anticipated, will open here in September. Spanning a third of a mile over seawater, it will connect this islet to the Korean mainland for the first time.

Anywhere else, the opening of a simple bridge might go unnoticed. But Sorok Island is this country’s most famous leper colony, established on an island in the country’s most isolated region, a place of lifetime banishment and silent deaths for generations of people with leprosy.

So on both sides of the bridge, the opening is being greeted as a cause for celebration, proof, in concrete and steel, of the fading of ancient prejudices. The authorities are moving up the opening date so that it will coincide with Chusok, South Korea’s harvest festival, on Sept. 25.

“This will no longer be an island if there is a bridge,” said Kim Ki-sang, 69, who came here in 1946 and has never left. “Before, we were so close but we were not free. This bridge is releasing decades of sadness for us.”

And yet, some still question whether Sorok Island will truly become a part of the peninsula. Will its mostly elderly patients, particularly those who have lived here for decades and lost ties with those on the other side, dare to cross the bridge?

There is also great trepidation about letting the outside world so freely into Sorok Island, which is now accessible from the mainland only by ferry. Out of concern for the residents’ privacy, the islet’s seven leper villages will be sealed off from car traffic.

“Things will be harder to control with the bridge bringing in more people,” said Kim Chung-hang, 65, who first came here in 1957 and is now a leader of the 650 lepers here. “But if we want to gain something good, I guess we also have to sacrifice something.”

Officials say that despite lingering prejudices against the disease, they have registered few objections to the bridge’s construction from Doyang, the town on the other side. Kim Hong-sun, an official with South Cholla Province here, said shop and hotel owners in Doyang were more concerned about losing business, because once the bridge opened it would not be necessary for travelers to stop in Doyang.

The Sorok leper colony was founded here in 1916 by the Japanese, Korea’s colonial rulers at the time, and life has seemingly stood still ever since.

Roughly 100 of 130 colonial-era buildings are still being used on Sorok Island, which is about 1.3 times as big as Central Park. Even a Japanese Shinto shrine still stands on a small hill near one of the islet’s main intersections. Elsewhere in South Korea, traces of Japanese rule were systematically eliminated after the end of World War II, so that only a handful of colonial buildings now remain in Seoul, the capital.

Life during Japanese rule sometimes verged on the surreal. One notoriously brutal hospital director had a 31-foot statue of himself built and forced patients to bow before it each morning. Another, remembered to this day for his kindness, treated the patients like his family so that after his death here, they pulled together their savings and built a cenotaph in his honor. After Korea’s liberation, the South Korean government tried to have the cenotaph demolished, but the residents hid it and brought it out in 1961. The 31-foot statue is long gone, but the cenotaph is still here.

The good director was gone by the time Chang Ki-jin, 85, was brought here in 1942. Like other patients, Mr. Chang was forced to work, carrying bricks on his back.

“Even though I was a leper, I was still able to work,” said Mr. Chang, who, like the oldest of the patients here, bears the sunken face and other disfigurements caused by leprosy, which can now be treated with antibiotics.

One winter, Mr. Chang’s limbs froze, and his legs were amputated.

“Our Japanese commander’s name was Sato,” he said. “He carried a big bat and would hit us whenever we rested. He was very vicious.”

In 2001, the Japanese government acknowledged that long after cures for leprosy were found, it had continued to force patients in Japan into quarantine and sterilized many. Japanese lawyers then successfully pressed the government to compensate leprosy patients in Japan’s former colonies, Korea and Taiwan, who were often subjected to even worse mistreatment. Officials in the hospital here say that 222 South Koreans, including 105 here, have received compensation of about $70,000 each from Japan.

Life remained hard after independence from Japan. The South Korean government continued to quarantine leprosy patients here until 1963. Children born of patients here were sequestered in a nursery.

“They would allow us to see them only once a month,” said Kim Chung-hang, the patient who arrived here in 1957. “But there was a big fence between us. It would break our hearts.

“Back then, we weren’t treated as human beings,” he added. “This place was worse than hell.”

Kim Ki-sang, the patient who came here in 1946, said he and his wife were forced to give up their son on his first birthday. Mr. Kim’s uncle raised the boy.

Conditions here improved along with the country’s economic growth and democratization in the 1980s, Mr. Kim said.

“Things trickled down to us,” he said.

On a recent morning, a group of farmers from a nearby village paid a visit.

“Our guide told us we shouldn’t be afraid anymore,” said one tourist, Song Sun-im, 48. Asked whether she backed the new bridge, Ms. Song said casually, “Sure.”

On the other side of the bridge, in Doyang, Yoo Jae-hong, the leader of the local merchants’ association, said no one worried anymore about catching the disease from the island’s residents.

“Of course there was a time when we found them abhorrent, and bias still exists,” Mr. Yoo said. “But in the last 20 years our views have changed.”

Some merchants, he said, were opposed to the bridge’s construction, not because of prejudice against the disease, but because travelers would bypass Doyang on their way here.

“So for the merchants, the bridge means that Sorok Island is moving further away from us,” Mr. Yoo said. “And we’re sorry about that. But I can understand that the people on Sorok Island are waiting impatiently for the opening of the bridge.”

Videos of South Korean Labor/ Student Protests

2007-07-17T02:22:00.000-07:00

At the National Conference on Organized Resistance this spring there were quite a few workshops on independent media and the representation of activism. One speaker coined a hilarious term -- "riot porn" -- to describe journalism/ video/ photography that glorifies active resistance while doing little to discuss the context, people, and stakes from which it formed. Since getting here I've become interested in finding information on the South Korean labor and student movement and wouldn't you know there is quite a few videos of protests available on right on Youtube. This stuff is riot porn to the core, and I was hesitant to post it on this blog for that reason, but I do find it interesting that these encounters happen as frequently as they do here and that the protesters get away with as much as they do without being obliterated by the police. If nothing else, they're valuable just to see how serious these protests are taken here.

Illegal labor protest in Pohan that took place, I think, sometime in 2006.

Korean National Labor Union Protest in Seoul, South Korea sometime last year I think. 1st - 5th and 2nd Mobile on the scene, with the 4th, 51st Mobile Company at the end.

South Korean Labor Movement

2007-07-14T17:42:00.000-07:00

When I would tell people in the states that I was moving to South Korea, if they didn't immediately bring up the situation in the north they brought up the South Korean labor movement. One of my rides during my hitchhiking trip through California and Oregon this May-- a guy who had been heavily involved in anti-globalization protests on the west coast-- said that during a world bank protest he had attended in Mexico, South Korean auto workers were at the head of the march, smashing cars and confronting antagonistic police to make room for people to get through the streets. Since arriving I've tried to keep on top of the news through the Korean Herald (one of many English language newspapers here) and everyday its had at least 2-3 articles on unions and the labor movement. At least three major companies have had small strikes in the last few weeks and so far this doesn't seem too unusual for the country. Below is a good summary of the history and direction of the Korean labor movement that was featured in the Herald earlier this week.

[Insight into Korea(5)] Labor movement in Korea losing steam

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the June 10 civil uprising of 1987 and the 10th year since the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. We have prepared a series of contributions from prominent foreign scholars to analyze the significant changes that Korea has undergone during the past two decades. We hope our readers can gain some insights into the nation's future from these articles. - Ed.

South Korea is well known for possessing one of the most aggressive and militant labor movements in the world today. At a time when organized labor in most advanced industrial countries is severely weakened and remains in the doldrums, South Korean labor seems rather unique in demonstrating fresh militancy and class solidarity backed by powerful unions located in heavy and chemical industries. Foreign media often portray South Korea as a country with "endemic strikes," and foreign investors are said to be afraid of the powerful unions when they consider investing in South Korea. On the other side, international labor groups show great respect for the Korean labor movement in playing a leading role in fighting neoliberal globalization.

Looking inside Korea, however, we see a different picture. Korea's large unions indeed demonstrate militancy often enough, but they hardly make up a strong and cohesive union movement. The Korean union movement currently represents no more than 11 percent of the active labor force, and union membership is disproportionately made up of the employees of large firms, leaving the majority of the workforce at small enterprises unprotected. Also excluded is the rapidly growing number of irregular workers, who now comprise more than half of the national work force. Although there is a strong push for building industry unions, the basic structure of Korean unions is that of enterprise unions, which make it difficult to achieve broad solidarity among workers in diverse job conditions. Labor leadership at the national level appears hopelessly divided along ideological and factional lines, failing to offer an effective strategy to deal with serious structural problems faced by the working class in this age of globalism. There seems to be wide public disaffection with the militant strategy adopted by large unions in their wage negotiations. Labor groups seem increasingly isolated from other social movements, which are now led by the active citizens' movement. With declining public support, and with growing internal division, the current South Korean labor movement faces a serious crisis of identity and class solidarity.

Thus, in order to understand the nature of the Korean labor movement adequately, we must address the dual aspects of Korean labor - its militancy and its organizational weakness. And to do so, we need a little historical knowledge of the way the Korean labor movement developed in the process of rapid industrialization over the past four decades.

Brief history

It is rather conventional among many observers to see the origin of the current labor movement in South Korea in the huge wave of labor conflicts that erupted in the summer of 1987, in the wake of the political transition to democracy. Almost immediately after Chun Doo-hwan conceded to the demands of the opposition forces for a direct presidential election in June 29, 1987, Korea's industrial laborers broke a long period of imposed silence and passivity and plunged into collective actions. From July to September 1987, more than three thousand labor conflicts occurred, exceeding the total number of labor disputes that occurred during the two preceding decades. The great labor struggle in 1987 clearly marks a landmark in the development of the Korean labor movement.

It is important to realize, however, that the 1987 labor upheaval was not the beginning of the democratic union movement in South Korea. It started much earlier, though not well recognized by foreign observers. In many ways, the contemporary Korean labor movement started with the famous suicide by a young tailor, Chon Tae-il in 1970. He set himself on fire to protest inhumane working conditions in a sweatshop district called Peace Market in Seoul. Until his body was completely burned by the flames, Chon held a copy of the Labor Standard Laws in his hand and shouted: "We are not machines!" "Let us rest on Sunday!" "Abide by the Labor Standard Laws!" "Don't exploit workers!"

Chun's self-immolation had a tremendous impact on the working class movement in South Korea. It sowed the spirit of resistance and rebellion in the minds of millions of workers and provided a powerful symbol for the working class in a society that until then did not have a sacred symbol that could inspire and mobilize workers for a collective goal. What he fought for was justice and human dignity rather than simple economic improvement. Chun's protest therefore carried an enormous moral authority. More concretely, his tragic death played an instrumental role in bringing students and intellectuals to assist the grassroots labor movement during the harsh authoritarian period.

The grassroots union movement began following Chun's heroic self-sacrifice, and it was led by young female workers employed in labor-intensive light manufacturing sectors. The late-1970s to the early-1980s was a period marked by incredible episodes of labor resistance waged by women workers in the textile, garment and electronic industries. In one instance, women protesters stood naked in front of combat troops in order to prevent the cops from approaching them; in another instance, strikers threatened to commit collective suicide with broken bottles if the cops were going to attack them; and in still another instance, striking women workers stormed into the opposition party headquarters to secure a safer place to continue their strike. Women workers' struggle during this period demonstrated an amazing spirit of resistance and comradeship. An important feature of the union movement in the 1970s was the involvement of church groups and intellectuals in labor struggles. In the 1970s, two progressive church groups, the Urban Industrial Mission (UIM) and the Young Catholic Workers (JOC), provided a variety of educational programs to workers and defended the workers from state prosecution. In the 1980s, labor struggles became more politicized as a stream of student activists entered the industrial arena. The Gwangju massacre in 1980 contributed greatly to radicalizing the students. Students came to realize that they alone could not bring down the military dictatorship and that they must ally with the working class. The nohak yeondae, labor-student alliance, became their dominant strategy, and under this strategy a large number of students dropped out of college and became factory workers in order to raise political consciousness among factory workers.

By the mid-1980s, a large number of subterranean networks of labor activists had been formed both inside and outside the factories. Gradually, these subterranean networks extended beyond the Seoul-Inchon region and to the southern coastal industrial towns where heavy and chemical industries were concentrated. Male workers employed in these areas had been quiet on the surface until the mid-1980s, but they were not unaffected by this radical trend. Behind close company surveillance, many skilled workers in southern industrial towns, like Ulsan, Masan, and Changwon, were reading Marxist literature and forming small discussion groups.

Industrial workers all over the nation did not hesitate when the opportunity opened up in June 1987 to take collective action to demand humane treatment and economic justice in their workplaces. The significance of the 1987 labor uprising was that it brought new actors into the South Korean labor movement. The center of labor conflicts shifted from small-scale, light manufacturing sectors to heavy chemical industrial centers. The semi-skilled male workers in heavy and chemical industries emerged suddenly as the main actors of the South Korean labor movement, pushing aside women workers, who had played an active role in the grassroots union movement in the previous period. The union movement since then has become dominated by male workers employed in large-scale firms and women workers have become marginalized in the labor movement. The new unionism thus emerged represented a militant unionism with a strong antipathy and mistrust toward management and the government. This was undoubtedly the product of the extremely repressive labor regime during the authoritarian period of rapid industrialization.

The post-1987 development

The democratic transition in Korea since 1987 greatly modified the terrain of the Korean labor movement. Organized labor suddenly became empowered and emerged as a major social force for democratic reform and social justice. Many new and powerful unions were formed at large manufacturing firms, and many white-collar unions were also formed in the service sector. Union members increased from 1,004,000 in 1985 to 1,932,000 in 1989, or from 12.4 percent of the labor force to 19.8 percent. During the heyday of labor activism from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, production workers at conglomerate firms obtained hefty wage hikes with increased welfare compensation. Unions themselves also became democratized. The previously government-controlled Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) was reformed to become a genuinely independent and representative union. But a more significant development was the formation of an alternative radical national center, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) in 1995, comprising many powerful unions in the automobile, shipbuilding, health care and telecommunications industries, as well as in education and various service sectors. If democratization is one major force that influenced the post-1987 Korean union movement, another powerful force impinging on Korean labor was globalization of the South Korean economy, which has accelerated its pace since the early 1990s. If democratization opened the political space for the labor movement, globalization functioned to undermine the economic base of the unionism. Globalization in Korea brought new managerial practices aimed at creating a flexible labor force. The major focus of labor-management conflicts in the first half of the 1990s was on labor laws concerned with employer rights on utilization of labor and particularly on layoffs of workers. The conflict resulted in the Kim Young-sam government's ill-calculated legislative move to pass controversial labor laws, which were to give more power to employers to lay off workers, at a pre-dawn National Assembly session on December 26, 1996, with no opposition lawmaker present. This undemocratic move triggered a huge labor response. The newly formed KCTU and the old FKTU coordinated successfully to produce the first large-scale general strike since the Korean War, mobilizing millions of workers over a three-week period in January 1997. Since the strike was about job security and at a time when more and more people were experiencing job instability, as well as about democratic procedures, the public was fully supportive of the strike. This was one of the rare moments since the 1987 transition when organized labor appeared as a moral force fighting for social justice, democracy and economic interests not only of union members but of all working people in society.

This euphoric moment, however, did not last long because the Korean economy was hit by a financial crisis a few months later. As everybody well knows, the financial crisis and the IMF-mandated economic restructuring brought on devastating consequences to Korean people, producing a staggering number of business failures, a sharp increase in unemployment, frozen wages, decreased income, curtailments of non-wage benefits, a growing number of homeless people, and many other social problems. In order to overcome the crisis, the newly-elected President Kim Dae-jung proposed to form a labor-management-government tripartite body along the social corporatist model. In February 1998, the Tripartite Commission succeeded in producing a Tripartite Accord that, among other things, allowed employers to implement redundancy layoffs in case of business failures. Although this Tripartite Accord was welcomed as a historical compromise by most interested parties, the rank-and-file members of the KCTU were upset by the result and forced the union leadership to resign. Subsequently, the KCTU stepped out of the Tripartite Commission, and the bad feelings created at this time continued to haunt the radical leadership and operate as a source of deep mistrust toward the government's effort for labor-capital compromise.

Current situation

Two decades have passed since the great labor uprising in 1987. The Korean union movement has developed impressively since that turning point and enjoys a renowned status in the international labor movement. But the current state of the Korean union movement is far from enviable; it is beset with serious organizational, structural and ideological problems. As mentioned above, the union members now represent less than 11 percent of the wage workers. Union membership peaked at 19.8 percent in 1989 and has been falling ever since. It dropped to 12.0 percent in 2000 and to 10.6 percent at the end of 2004. Not only is the unionization rate low, it is limited largely to workers employed at large firms. Currently, more than three quarters of union members are workers employed at large firms hiring 300 or more employees. Less than a quarter of union members are found in smaller enterprises. Of enterprises with fewer than 300 employees, only 2.8 percent have unions present, while 69 percent of enterprises with 300 or more workers have unions. This shallow and skewed union membership structure raises a serious question about the representativeness of the current union movement - the union movement for whom? Organized labor is no longer looked at as the socially weak but as the unduly powerful and aggressive. Despite some efforts at the national union level, local unions are increasingly preoccupied with narrow economic issues affecting their memberships. Union leaders seem to be divided along ideological, factional and regional lines. Frequent revelations of corruption and violence within union leadership have destroyed public support. No longer is the union movement able to claim the moral leadership it had in the 1980s. More fundamentally, the union movement has been unable to offer any alternative vision or practical policy alternatives in opposing neoliberal globalization.

We can identify several factors that underlie the present predicament of the Korean union movement, structural, institutional and ideological.

The first is the structural source of the problems. It concerns basically the impact of globalization on the structure of the labor force. Since South Korea adopted globalization as official policy in the early 1990s, much change has occurred in the South Korean economy. Most salient was its impact on the labor market structure. Despite strong resistance from labor, large-scale firms have carried out extensive industrial restructuring in order to reduce their labor costs and increase labor market flexibility. As a consequence, the number of regularly employed workers has noticeably declined while that of irregular workers has increased sharply since the mid-1990s. In 2004, the proportion of irregular workers (including temporary workers, subcontract workers, casual hires and dispatched workers) reached 56 percent of the labor force. (The government's more conservative estimate puts the figure at 38 percent.) Obviously, these irregular workers are situated in a far inferior job market situation compared with regular workers. On average, the irregular workers receive about half of regular workers' wages and are typically not covered by statutory welfare policies. And most irregular workers are denied union membership, even when they are working at the same firm.

The fragmentation of the labor force associated with neoliberal globalization is, of course, a well known phenomenon around the world. But in South Korea, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. The South Korean labor force was relatively homogeneous until the early 1990s. But serious internal differentiation has occurred in the past decade, especially after the financial crisis in 1997. The differentiation occurred not only between regular and irregular workers, but also between those employed at large firms and those at smaller firms. The recent economic trend in South Korea produced an increasingly polarized business structure. Large firms, especially chaebol firms, adapted to global competition relatively well, while many small enterprises suffered serious problems. This polarized economic structure is reflected in the labor force, producing two classes of wage workers, sharply divided by the size of the firms they are employed at and the terms of their employment. Union membership is correlated with these two factors. So, typical union members are likely to be those who are employed regularly at large firms or in the public service sector.

The second source of problems faced by the South Korean union movement is an institutional one, basically the decentralized, enterprise-based union structure. The enterprise union system was the product of the labor regime during the authoritarian government period. The authoritarian regimes maintained the enterprise union system because it was considered an easier system to keep enterprise unions isolated from one another and to prevent outside political influence. Unfortunately, the new union movement since 1987 did not challenge this union structure, presumably because many newly formed unions at large firms found no conflict of interest with the enterprise union system. And, once the post-1987 labor regime was settled based on enterprise unionism, it became very difficult to change it.

So, we can see that many of the problems faced by the Korean labor movement derive from structural and institutional sources rather than simple problems of union leadership or selfish motives of the unionized workers. These are difficult problems to overcome. One notable exception that has been made in recent years was the effort to form industrial unions to overcome the limitations of enterprise unions. Of several industrial unions formed in recent years, the metal worker union is the most important one, with about 143,000 members and representing powerful local unions, such as the Hyundai, Kia and Ssangyong automotive unions. But it is still uncertain to what extent these industrial unions will be able to work as effective organs representing broader worker interests and devising viable policies in the face of accelerating globalization. As revealed by the most recent case of the anti-FTA strike organized by the Korean Metal Workers' Union (KMWU), the power of the industrial union, let alone the national flagship union, over powerful local member unions (in this case the Hyundai Motor's union) is very limited. It is possible that this anti-FTA strike was an ill-timed, ill-considered decision by the metal union leadership without due consultation with local union leaders, but Hyundai Motor workers' vehement opposition to participating in what they consider a political strike was telling evidence of how difficult it is to organize class solidarity on an industry basis. It is particularly so because Hyundai Motor's union is known to be the most radical union in the nation, conducting annual strikes for the past 13 years, and because the KMWU is the most powerful union at the industry level. Nonetheless, there seems to be enough consensus among Korean labor groups that building effective industrial unions is the only solution to addressing the mounting problems of unprotected workers and the increasing fragmentation of the Korean working class in this age of globalization.

By Hagen Koo

Introducing Chuncheon

2007-07-10T06:06:00.000-07:00

After a long, long trip here via multiple planes, buses, days, and sleeps I've begun the first leg of my six week orientation for the F-bright grant that I'll be serving out over the next year here in South Korea. I've been shuttled off to a mid-sized college town named Chuncheon with 69 other ETAs from all across the states and boarded in Kwangwon National University, where we will be taking intensive language and teaching lessons until we leave for our homestays and teaching positions when the monsoon rains begin to calm in mid-August. I still don't feel like I've gotten a good feel for Chuncheon yet -- this evening is the first I've had free and I spent it recovering sleep, studying Korean, and starting this entry. I'm dying to explore the neighborhoods here and its been an odd transition since that's usually the first thing I run to when I travel into a new city. When there aren't class obligations to go to here there's always outside activities planned so that we can get to know our grant-mates -- the people who will be our support system over the next year when people back home don't understand when we occasionally freak out about what is going on in our classrooms and homes.

So far I know little about where I will be placed, but I have found out that by random fate I've been made one of 10 elementary teachers here and the only male elementary ETA ever for F-bright Korea. This does mean that, unlike the secondary education teachers, I'll have little choice in where I get placed and will probably be put in a rural area somewhere along the west coast.

To the right is a picture of my roommate, Alec, who I think is trying to kill us by leaving his fan on while we sleep with the doors and windows closed. It may not seem like a big deal, but Koreans believe that it can cause a little thing called FAN DEATH that is backed by scientific research from Korean universities!