Hanging out at the coy pond, feeling coy.

One of the biggest corporations in South Korea is Dae woo: you've probably heard of them. They've got their thumbs in many pies: cars, stereos, even department stores. I found out recently General Motors owns a stake in the company. It's mind-boggling how a few people basically own the whole world, and let little peons like me make a liveable wage, while many others make a hardly liveable wage and endure incredibly shitty working conditions.

Forget about a big fish in a small pond: I'm a microscopic plankton. Love me.

George Bush IS intelligent.

Look. He's got the whole world talking about him, thinking about him. Maybe most of it is negative, but you know what they say: there's no such thing as bad press. The occasional ridiculous verbalism does not automatically make someone stupid. Think about it. I say stupid shit all the time and I was the most sought after student in my Master's degree cohort. The only difference is that I don't have zillions of cameras on me at all times to catch my "Bush-isms."

No. I simply don't believe it's possible to ascend to the top of the most economically and militarily powerful country on the planet (though I don't think they are any more) without at least having the intelligence to recognize intelligence and surround yourself with it.

That said... intelligence is a neutral quality; it does not automatically translate into moral "rightness." George Bush is a bad, bad man.

The Mighty Cicada

This is a picture of the loudest insect on earth: the cicada. Cicadas live as larvae under the ground for over a decade, then they come out, they sing their song, lay eggs or fertilize eggs, and then die. I think of them as magic creatures, prehistoric, wise, and powerful. How else can such a small thing make such a big noise but magic. Yes it's physics, but the best magic is always based on the material nature of the world.

I bring cicadas up because one of my students brought in two of the largest cicadas I've ever seen to class today. Everyone except him and me freaked out. The cicadas stayed speechless, stunned by their erstwhile captivity. If aliens tried to contact intelligent life on earth during august, all they would hear was a relentless metallic buzz, drowning out the traffic and the conversations below.

Small Face, Lovely Breast

This ad was one I saw on the Busan subway. It advertizes a small face, but lovely breast. I think it is for plastic surgery, which is fairly popular here. The most popular form of plastic surgery is the replacement of the hymen!!!! (or so I'm told). I wonder what's wrong with big faces? Maybe the Korean sense of beauty strays more towards finer features. I personally like big round faces...

I'm not exactly skinny, but I'm not nearly fat by North American standards, and I had one of the young students write me a letter, asking me why I was so fat. I laughed. Finally, the gender divide seemed erased as far as the expectation of female thinness goes. It made my day! I gave another group of students an assignment to draw and describe their best friend, and one of the girls described her best friend as fat!

This was not her being mean or anything (I don't think so at least). The Koreans just have a different sense of honesty about these things...

Lost in Translation

For a native English speaker, there are many signs in Korea that cause one to pause and maybe have a private giggle. I took a photo of this sign on the ferry to Ulleung-do, an island in the strait between Korea and Japan. My friends and I thought it was a very funny translation. You often see T-shirts that have laugh-inducing English slogans on them. One memorable one I saw today was "Fuckin Design T-Shirt Store."

Since I spent too much money in Seoul (it is quite a bit more expensive than Masan, as you would expect) the weekend before, I decided to take it easy last weekend. On Sunday I hiked halfway up Mt. Mahakasan to find the café I discovered the last time I hiked. I intended to get a beer to sip while I finished “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth (excellent book, incidentally). I sat down and started to read, but no one came over to take my order. I noticed that there was people only at the one table, and they were laughing and carrying on. Looked like they were having a good time. After about half an hour of reading and taking photos, the aforementioned people waved me over.

The only woman of the group vacated, and from what I understood, she was the patroness of the café. Next thing I know, I’m being offered moccoli (rice wine), plum wine, and kimchi (pickled cabbage) with tofu. One of the group was due to travel to Canada himself, to Vancouver. He was also a chiropractor. As I had begun seeing a chiropractor in Canada before I left, I tried to let him know that I would be interested in seeing him as a patient.

This was the first time that I got frustrated by the language barrier. No matter how hard each party tried to understand the other, I could not get his business card or phone card. He kept asking for mine, and weird as it might seem, I still don’t know my number because the school takes care of all my bills and subtracts it from my salary. About an hour later, I ambled down the lower portion of the mountain, slightly tipsy.

World Cup Fever

A few nights ago I went to see the Korea vs. Togo World Cup game; It was being broadcast in most public locations: sports bars, billboard screens, the local stadium, and on a huge screen in a large construction site. My friends Tim and Amy accompanied me, and by this enormous department store downtown we met a few Korean friends. One of them, Yung-tek, is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life. He greeted us with gift bags, having bought us each a red “Fighting Korea” T-shirt. I went to put it on over the T-shirt I was already wearing, but Yung-tek insisted that I take off my current T-shirt to put it on. I obliged, and he and his friends proceeded to laugh at my prodigious chest hair. I blushed!

We bought snacks and beer in the department store, a sprawling multi-floor deal that is like Walmart in its “you can buy anything here” approach to retail. Next, we headed over to the construction site, part of a swath of swarming humans, all decked out in red shirts, armbands, headbands, face paint, and glowing devil’s horns. I couldn’t believe my eyes. They had erected a temporary pavilion complete with spotlights, huge balloons, a stage for entertainers, and television cameras. There was maybe a thousand people there, all cheering, chanting, and waving inflatable rods, that, when struck together, make a shallow snare drum sound. When combined, the resulting percussion is considerable.

In between entertainment acts, I somehow became separated from my friends. I looked for them briefly, and then felt that this was a futile activity, so I sat down to enjoy the proceedings. I watched most of the first half from this location, occasionally looking for my friends. Just before the game started, I heard a string of Korean announcements, and I could have sworn that I heard my name and something about Canada. I did not believe my ears though, and so I missed the obvious: my friends had secured a public announcement to try to reconnect with me. At the break, Togo was up 1-0, and I headed to the rear because many people were making their way out of the construction site. There was a bottleneck, so I thought I would have a good chance of finding them there.

I had forgotten my money on my bed, and I didn‘t know the way home, so I would have had to find a bank before I caught a cab. All of a sudden, through the loudspeaker I can hear my friend Tim’s voice say in English “Trevor, if you can hear me, meet Tim at the camera between the two towers.” I was thrilled; as I was hungry and thirsty and they had all the snacks I could alleviate my bodily discomfort and enjoy the rest of the game with good company. Korea scored two goals in the second half, and every time they scored, they fired off fireworks and people got up out of their seats, hollered, hugged each other, and slapped each other high fives. We went out for drinks after Korea won 2-0 to the jubilation of the people.

I was thinking the other night, as I was falling asleep, about how living in another country forces you to think about the country you were raised in more carefully. In a way, you learn more about your national identity when you’re abroad than when you’re in your home country. Of course some people in these days of the globalization of culture have grown up without a mother/father country, moving frequently. As an urban Canadian, I have realized here that our multiculturalism is both unique and thorough.

While there are certainly bigots in Canada, the mainstream ethos, especially in cities like Vancouver and Toronto, is that the idea of a “foreigner” is itself foreign. There are very few people of European descent in Korea, especially in Masan where I am living. There is a section of Seoul that is primarily American, a leftover military village from the Korean War, but other than that, it is a little unusual to see a Caucasian. Whenever it happens, and your eyes meet, there is a curious, inquisitive moment where you are both wondering the reason for the other being there. Usually, among people of my generation, it is teaching English that brings them to Korea.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t see the people here as intentionally trying to make me feel like a foreigner or an outsider. But they do treat you different. Overwhelmingly, it is usually different in a positive light. They come up to you and say hello, hoping to practise the little English they know; they put extra stuff in your shopping bag or give you a discount to try to give you a good impression of Korean culture, or perhaps because they try to imagine the difficulties of being a foreigner. Alternatively, they can guess why I am here, and because Korean culture places such a huge emphasis on education (it is not unusual for high school students to be up until midnight studying), I get treated with respect because I am a teacher, a sung-saeng-nimh, a term they also use for elders.

All this pampering has made me reflect on the lack of mutual respect I often felt back home. One effect of Canada’s intense multiculturalism might perhaps be an erosion of hospitality. Not that Canadians are inhospitable, but perhaps because the idea of a foreigner is foreign to many of us, we don’t feel the need to go to such great lengths to assuage the difficulties of being a foreigner. Just a thought to be considered more…

A Seoul-ful Trip (Part II)

The neighbourhood in Seoul that we went clubbing in was raucus. Cars and people packed the streets like sardines in a can. None of us had the can opener either… Jenna, Adrian’s friend, seemed to have a dead-set itinerary in mind; anytime I whimsically suggested something else (I think I only did that once anyway), it was if I hadn’t said anything. I didn’t mind at the time, overwhelmed as I was with the sights, smells, and sounds emanating from the restaurants and bars that lined the streets. I guess this crowd was sick of the place they usually went to and stayed at.

We went to a sheesha bar: a place where you buy a flavoured block of tobacco and smoke it through a hookah or water pipe. The place we went to was full, but the atmosphere I could tell was fantastic. The plan-B spot also had an amazing atmosphere: it had cushions with which you could lounge on the floor; a pond in the middle of the room with a burnished metal-fish scale effect on the bottom, rose petals, and candles floating on the surface of the water, and private booths on different levels separated off from the other rooms with a gauzy curtain.

While most things in Korea are cheaper than in Canada, the prices in this place were on par with a trendy spot in Toronto. I had an $8 margarita that tasted like straight tequila, and they brought us snacks. The aroma of incense was a little sedating, and I soon got restless, eagerly anticipating the bustle and excitement of another place. The next spot was a sports bar type thing where people were watching world cup action. We ordered more drinks and played euchre. I got my butt kicked!

Next we went to a bar called tinpan alley, where the beers were cheap, and the company consisted of more ex-pats than your typical Korean bar. I met Adrian’s boss here, and he shook my hand firmly said “I like you.” He’s probably one of those guys who evaluates other guys on the strength and co-ordination of their handshakes lol. Nevertheless, he was roguishly charming, and he ambled on in what I thought was a Scottish brogue, but he turned out to be Irish. Here, we played a drinking game called “Circle of Death.” It was incredibly fun: if you draw red, you have to take that number of gulps yourself, but if you draw black, you distribute the gulps to others. If you draw a king, you have to make up a category that everyone has to think of things that fit, and the first one who screws up or can’t think of one has to drink. Draw a Jack, and you have to think of something that you’ve never done before, and anyone who has done it has to drink. Our minds were humorously in the gutter for this one, and a couple times ventured into the realms of “too much information.”

We left this bar for a dance club where they were playing popular North American hip hop songs. Although it was very crowded, the dancing was animated, and much fun was had by all. Jenna could have qualified for “Girls gone wild” at some points of the evening. Adrian and I caught a cab home and unwound, rehashing some of the nights already fond memories. The verdict: Seoul is full of Soul.

A Seoul-ful Trip

I went to Seoul on the weekend, whimsical, sprawling Seoul. The scale of this city is mind-boggling. The only thing that compares to it in my experience is London (mind you, I’ve never been to New York City). The area around the bus terminal is kind of boring, so my first impression was a little dreary. The cloudy weather didn’t help. I arrived in the city at four in the morning, having slept what little I could on the bus from Masan. I romped around a little, taking a few night shots with the trusty digi-camera, then I found a bathhouse to clean up and take a little nap in.

I woke up at seven and proceeded to walk around for hours, as I was due to meet my friend after twelve, when she would finish teaching her students (yes, there’s school on Saturdays here at some schools). I wandered around in a daze, made it to the Han river, which is much wider than I ever expected. Many bridges span it, and in the distance, atop a small mountain was Seoul Tower, a structure roughly similar to Toronto’s own CN Tower, or Seattle’s Space Needle…I made a mental note to visit again in order to see the view from it; I’m sure it would be spectacular being on top of a mountain as it is and all…

Then I wandered back towards the bus depot, where I was meeting my friend Adrian. I passed it, and I found a sports field where people were playing soccer, tennis, basketball, and some weird, wobbly skateboard-type thing. Being a big basketball fan as I am, I sat down and watched the action for a while. When I finally met up with Adrian (I haven’t seen her in 8 months), she asked me whether I wanted to go to one of the magnificent palaces that Seoul houses. I said of course. But soon after we exited the subway (whose system is much more complex than Toronto’s), it started raining raccoons and wolves. We still decided to go through with the hour and a half tour, after which we ended up soaked on one shoulder each, as we were sharing an umbrella. We then went to Adrian’s apartment and relaxed a little before we met up with some of Adrian’s teaching friends for dinner at a Thai restaurant and proceeded to go clubbing. Now, I’m not the sort of person who goes to bars too much anymore, as I usually get bored because I prefer to have conversations where I don’t have to yell, and I appreciate the smoky atmosphere even less than when I was younger. But I figured that because I’m in Korea, now is the time for me to do things I normally wouldn’t, and go out on a limb; I went for the gusto!

But that’s all for now: I will finish the story tomorrow.