Propaganda South of the DPRK

Well, we survived.  We did what so many E-2 visa holders before us have done and travelled with a group of teachers to the demilititarized zone (DMZ) early on the morning of December 20.  A Korean friend rented a van for the seven of us, and drove us to the border a short distance but long time away.  Korea's so small, you see, that highways are not as common as red lights through residential and commercial areas.  The 50-odd kilometer trip took over an hour with a fast driver.

Once we arrived and bought our tickets (less than 10,000 won) we had to kill a bit of time on the South Korean side.  Near the ticket booth and close to a few small souvenir stands - those vendors brave some really cold days! - was the Bridge of Freedom, a bridge built to exchange 12,773 prisoners during the Korean War in 1953 (or so says my little tourist brochure).  At the end of the ROK's side of the bridge was this fence covered with messages to loved ones still in the North.

Predictably, we had to board a tour bus to visit the few sites along the border we were allowed to see.  We were the only big group of Western foreigners, but two tour guides gave information in English (first), in Chinese (second) and in Korean only after each stop's visit was over.

First stop was a military base on the South Korean side of the border, 2km from the country's boundary (part of the agreement the countries signed when creating the DMZ included a 2km retreat from the border).  "You are lucky," our sweet Korean tour guide told us in English.  "It is a clear day today.  It is normally much cloudier."  Although there were inexpensive pay-to-view public binoculars to peer across the border with, it was a foggy day.  I could barely see the big building in the North Korean 'city' across the DMZ that was supposed to represent industry and big business.  "There are 17 factories in this city," our tour guide said.  Even accounting for the fact that the DMZ is a veritable conservation area, I, for one, saw no sign of life.

Admission: this photo has been doctored using the massively sophisticated program iPhoto (note: not a sophisticated program) to try and show you more of the landscape.  I just wish it was also able to show you the beautifully reddish-orange sky to the right of the camera's view.

After taking a few pictures in front of the yellow line (gasp!) drawn on the pavement to mark the photography 'safe zone', we hopped back on the bus to our next stop; a tourist information centre.  Ooooh!

Here, we were ushered through the small information centre filled with billboards of information, maps and 'interactive' sceneries explaining the Zone.  Most interesting to me was a series of four billboards that described four underground tunnels that had been discovered since the 1960s, if memory serves.  The billboards claimed that the tunnels had been dug by North Korean forces before, during or after the war (I can't recall which).  Apparently, the North continues to deny that it was responsible for these tunnels.

After a short, sad video set to loud rock music, we were ushered out of the building and across the parking lot to a souvenir store (not our last, by any means).  Here, we were instructed to put all our belongings in free lockers - cameras in particular - and then proceed down the hallway to pick up a yellow hard hat.

Hard hat?

The hallway led to a long, bouncy ramp down into one of the tunnels that had been discovered by the South.  At the base of the ramp, our guide showed us holes drilled into the granite cave.  About 3cm in diameter and drilled deep into the surface, the holes were drilled upwards at maybe a 30 degree angle.  These were dynamite holes, our guide told us.  Because of the angle at which they were drilled, we know that the North excavated the tunnel, she said.  They also lied about the reason for drilling the tunnel.  Even though the cave was drilled into granite, the North claimed they made the tunnel to excavate coal.  They painted the cave with thick black paint to try and fool the South.  Look, she said, and she wiped thick, wet black stuff from the walls of the cave, revealing sparkling pink granite.

Right.  This, only three days after this BBC news story explaining how the North has accused the South of trying to assassinate Dear Leader.

Sure enough, when we started walking to the end of the tunnel, about 1.3km from the base of the ramp, we noticed that the wet black stuff lined the humid cave right to the end.  Black paint and holes in granite weren't the only reasons we'd walked so far down into this tunnel (remember, we had to walk back up, too).  After ten minutes of ducking steel poles, hitting our hard hatted heads on the pointy granite ceiling and shuffling past incoming visitors who had already been to the end of the tunnel, we reached the end and waited in line for our turn.  It wasn't until I was at the front of the line that I realized what it was I was going to be looking at.

Barbed wire kept me fifteen feet back from the mail slot-sized hole in a plywood wall.  I lunged to the left, into a puddle, to get a better view through the rectangle.  The bright light above me, meant to improve the sight of the permanent security camera behind me, made it difficult to see through to the next wall and beyond it.  There were three walls, and nobody should pass through all three of them to get to the DPRK, we'd been told at the top of the ramp.  South Korean military had used to be stationed between the first and second walls.  But the danger was between the second and third walls, which enclosed a space filled with land mines.  I was 170m from North Korea, hundreds of metres beneath the DMZ.

The eerie feeling lasted only a few seconds, because by then someone else had shuffled in behind me to take their turn.

So we shuffled back to the bright end of the tunnel, a little less carefully this time.  Many head bumps later, we were in bright artificial light and hiking up the steep ramp and onto the bus.  Not before we hit up the souvenir shop, though.  Although I was tempted to get some ginseng jelly candy made in North Korea (ginseng is Korea's national pride - both in the South and the North, as our tour guide would have us believe), Jon had a better idea.

For 4,000 won, about the same price as the watery Southern stuff, this beer was great.  More like Heineken, I think, although I have a hard time believing that North Koreans actually drink the stuff.  Is one allowed to drink beer in a country whose authorities claim that its civilians must consider "adhering to the national grain regulations and preserving army rations as the top priority"?

Onto the next stop: a bathroom and another souvenir shop.  Next?

The train to nowhere.  Opened in 2002 by South Korea's then-President and George W. Bush (there's a picture in the station of Bush holding a pen upside down while signing a rail tie) I don't believe the sation has seen any passengers pass through its doors.  Officially, it is known as the ROK's first stop until it opens for travel to Pyeongyang.  Its grand opening date is unknown, but it has been staffed for years despite the fact that it is almost entirely empty.  An awfully boring place for a poor Korean man doing his mandatory military service to be stationed.  I felt badly for the two soldiers who must guard the unmoving escalator day in and day out.

Then it was back on the bus to warm our frozen toes, to return to our vehicle and to head out of the little town that must depend on tourism until the train station opens for business.  Judging by recent North-South relations, they'll need to man the arcade for a few years yet.

Our own undercurrent

After a very quick month of editing and peer review in November, Jon's paper, "Women and Non-Violent Forms of Activism in the Niger Delta Resource Conflict", has been published in the Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Development Studies, Undercurrent.

Undercurrent publishes articles bi-annually and accepts submissions from all Canadian undergraduate students up to six months after graduation.

For those wishing to read it right away, you can read the PDF by clicking here.  Your browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari) should download the PDF right away.  Jon's article begins on page 39.  If you would like a hard copy, get in touch with us and we would be happy to get you one.

New Place Before the New Year

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Note: Although we've moved, Jon and I will still receive all mail sent to our old address, because the building manager receives and reroutes all of the building's mail.  The only change to our address is the apartment number, from Apt. 407 to Apt. 306.

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Five months finished!  Wow, time flies ...

The beginning of this month has been busier than usual.  Aside from new classes to teach, new teachers to help orient to The School, and a new season to dress for (it's going down to -18 tonight!), we have a new apartment.

"What?  A new apartment?  But you haven't been in the first one for five months yet!"

True.  Point taken.  We love our 'old' place.  But a phone call yesterday forced a change.

"Hello, this is Stony*, the housing manager, I need to talk to you.  There's a problem.  Can I meet with you right now?"

Now, I know that we're not really allowed to have Keedo.  We've been told point blank we should find him another home.  So I panicked quietly on the elevator from the 3rd to 19th floors, planning how I was going to either deny Keedo's existence or explain his presence away.

Thank goodness I didn't have to.  I'm not a very good liar.

See, we'd been living in one of the only renovated apartments in the building.  A few other apartments on our floor, older ones, had been recently moved out of - and not moved into.  Since we moved in, the front entrance was relocated and lined with cheap 'marble' tile, the basement floor has been gutted and is being rebuilt, the floors below it have started receiving the same facelift and, most recently, we have to walk past sparks of a welder assembling an elevator where the old entrance used to be.  All this in five months.

Our new place is an improvement on the already trendy, already functional little studio we'd started with.  Aesthetically, we've traded dark wood for light.  The new bathroom is a bit larger than the 'old' one.  The kitchen includes a built-in drying rack and is one cupboard larger. The living area is a bigger lopsided pentagon, instead of a predictable square.  And, most importantly, the bedroom is separate from the living area.  Entirely.  It's funny how squeamish some guests become with a bed in the middle of the living area.  This room has already become the place where Keedo and I hide while Jon deals with the building's management.  Wonderful!

The management has been either blissfully ignorant to Keedo or willing to look the other way for several months now.  Not a peep from anybody - not even The School's housing manager, who actually moved Keedo's crate from our old flat to the new one himself.  If they spoke with any of the neighbourhood regulars, however (not those in the building - those on the streets), they might pay more attention.  Yes, he's a bit of a barker (considering his size, maybe we should call him a yapper?), but he's become a real hit with two parking lot attendants, various construction workers, hairdressers at the nearby salon and nearly any young woman who walks past us on our walk.  He's even a hit with our canine neighbour, The Rottie, but for different reasons.

But I digress.  As I usually do when Keedo comes up in conversation.  Back to the apartment.

Although moving on the third day of the teaching month has been a little hectic, it couldn't have come at a better time.  Many current teachers are leaving at the end of December, and are looking to offload their furniture.  We've got a free couch and leather chair on the way from one of the senior teachers, and offers for more seating (and even a free Konika-Minolta camera!) from one of the younger ones.  We wouldn't have had the space for this in the studio.  But why do we need more seating?

We're hosting a little Christmas party later this month.  And, since I promised Grandpa that I would make sure there's enough alcohol on hand for all, I figure that we should provide landing ground for any who feel the need to stumble into a seat.

I kid, I kid.  We can always use cushions instead.

So we've gotten into the Christmas mood with some rustic holiday decorations from Canada (thank you Sallianne!) and a little wooden Christmas tree.  One of my favourite ornaments is the little soldier mouse.  Now all I need is a slipper to throw at him and we're set to bring everyone over for the holidays!

Ah, yes.  And I'll need to attach a little bell to Keedo's collar.

* = Not his real name

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On Imwansan, in the centre of the city, with (from left) Dan (South Hampton, ON), Jay Surti (Ottawa), Richard King (Southern UK), Arla, Jon, and Dan (Jon-Erik's cousin, from Maple, ON).

Colbert's Christmas

I can't help myself: this tune is so catchy, so genuinely big-band Christmas-y, that it almost fails to mock the holiday.  Fails even though Stephen Colbert, satirist extraordinaire, is behind it.  I failed to embed an audio clip in this blog (come on, Google, do your magic!), so you'll have to navigate away from the blog to listen to it.

Here it is, ladies and gents, "Another Christmas Song", by Stephen Colbert.  It is the first song, as I've read, of his upcoming album, A Very Colbert Christmas.  (Warning: The song gets pretty loud in the final few seconds.)

Fall colours

The colours of late October in our area, only a few days before the first frost.

Any ideas what this shield might symbolize?  It is on several of the more elaborate doors in our neighbourhood.

Keedo after his 'procedure'.  He's now cone-free, rabies-free, and ready to be shipped to Canada at a moment's notice!

Things are turning white in Korea

Always make the hard decision the first time around.

I have been oogling Macs for a few years now - especially after doing print layouts on a new 24" desktop at the Cord - and sold my old Acer laptop a bit prematurely to speed the transition from clumsy Windows to Mac.  But my Craigslist find was a poor replacement.

I bought this iBook G4 from an American teacher in a Quizno's in Itaewon.  I know - far too sketchy to trust already, right?  But he'd kept it in very good shape, had already reloaded the OS and removed all his old photos, had it up and running for us to try before we bought it and threw in his laptop case with the deal.  500,000 won later, I was the proud owner of a used Mac.

Things were running smoothly for the first few weeks.  The 1GB upgrade had helped its performance, but it was still a bit clunky when running a few apps at once - iTunes (Music), Safari (Internet), Transmission (a program to download music, video and programs), and a few Microsoft Office programs at once.  I chalked it up to high expectations and babied it through a few restarts to get it running smoothly again.

But one day, it didn't start up again.  It would start up, show a grey screen, then an Apple icon, then a little rotating dial (Apple's version of the hourglass) ... and would show this same screen until I restarted it manually or let the battery run out of juice.

After trying to call the young guy who had sold it to us (let's call him Rod), we realized that Rod was ignoring our calls.  He also ignored our emails, which politely asked him to give us a call and gave him (almost) no indication that we were running into a real problem.  Thanks, Rod.  We appreciate your honesty.

I wanted to salvage the 3-year-old laptop, Jon wanted me to get a new one.  So we took it to the 'a# store', an Apple reseller, to show one of their techs the problem for a quick 'Is it worth it or is it not?' question.

It was not.  So I walked out of the store with this:

It's a dated model - the aluminum body Macs were released less than a month ago - in the now overly copied white colour, but I've finally got the new operating system, Leopard, and can get the latest updates and programs - including MS Office 2008 that I successfully pirated! - and will not get bogged down with Windows update upon update.  The keys have both English and Hangeul (Korean) letters but the programs are in English, and power supply cable is Korean/European but can be easily changed for when I return home and need a 3-prong 110v power adapter instead of a Korean/European 2-prong 220v one.  Needless to say, I'm one happy camper!

Its one downside: I didn't buy it from mom and dad.  I'm sorry!

As a sidenote ... We had our first snowfall today.  It lasted for about two minutes here in the city, then turned to rain.  Some students were thrilled and ran to the window to watch the giant spongy flakes on the pedestrians below, remarking how romantic it is to experience the first snowfall of the year.  I take the snow as a good sign: after two or three days of suddenly bitter cold, daytime temperatures down to -8 after weeks of fall weather, it looks like its warming up a bit and I won't have to buy long-johns to wear under my pants for a while yet.

Icicles form on vegetation in Gyeonggi Province during the weekend.

Happy Pepero Day!

Korea is commercial. It is rumored to house to the greatest square footage of shopping space per capita. Its market for fake luxury brand products demonstrates that it is obviously plagued by conspicuous consumption. It is home to several world-class conglomerates (Samsung, LG and Hyundai are the most obvious here and abroad), and one decade after the IMF bailout, it still has a pretty liberal economy to boot.

But Peppero Day takes the cake. Or cookie, if you will.

I first saw evidence of this November 11 (11/11) holiday on November 10, when walking past a convenience store. Buy the Way had lined the walkway to its store with pink and red tissue paper, stuffed animals, baskets and chocolate - lots and lots of chocolate. 7-11 put a booth at the outdoor corner of its store selling similar goods. It looked like Valentine's Day at the wrong time of year. And it is. Well, sort of.

I have since been told that, in Korea, November 11 is Pepero Day - a commercial holiday allegedly created by Lotte Confectionary, makers of Pepero, a stick of graham wafer dipped in chocolate. A stick of Pepero, as Wikipedia and other teachers at The School tell me, looks like a number one. Better yet, five sticks in a row look like 11/11, the day of the celebration. The 'lovers' or 'couple' theme that the stuffed animals and other goodies take are only a cover for the holiday that Lotte created (although the company says that it simply adopted the holiday created by high school girls in Busan who exchanged Pepero as a symbol of friendship about a decade ago).

I only wonder if the melamine crisis - found in Lotte chocolates when it was discovered in Korea - will dampen sales further and encourage Lotte to do away with this cute but silly holiday. Other commentators are optimistic: Lotte earns about two thirds of its 1.15 trillion won annual revenue (a bit less than US $1 billion) in the two months leading up to 11/11. But not just Lotte benefits. Other confectioners hop on the 11/11 bandwagon by repackaging their goods into long, thin tubes, boxes and bags. Office supplies stores do the same.

Since I was given my first box this morning, I have eaten far too many sticks of Pepero in all kinds of sizes and flavours, and have ruined both my lunch and my dinner. That's something a poppy just can't do.

How to celebrate Hallowe'en (in a country that doesn't)

Five Rules to Help You Look (Not Too) Ridiculous

Rule 5: Stay indoors. It's not like you wanted to wake up earlier than usual to don your lame costume. Your company forced you to pull something together. You probably did it at the last minute anyways, so why wear it proudly? Get to work as quickly as possible and try to keep your Joker makeup (so artfully done, a la Heath Ledger) from attracting too much attention. This is what umbrellas are for.


Rule 4: Respect the last century of history and don't dress up as anything related to Japanese culture. No sushi rolls, geishas or sumo wrestlers. If you must do it, refer to Rule 5. Costumes that are safe bets: naughty schoolgirl, famous actor, a gangster, agent, or anything cute. Orange and black is always a good 'costume'.

Rule 3: If you're still worried about making the wrong impression, wear a mask and show up to the wrong class. If you conceal your voice, you can continue to get paid for dressing up and acting a fool. Heck, since it's the last day of classes, why don't you try to get your students to buy you lunch. That is, if they're willing to leave the building with you ... Refer to Rule 5.

Rule 2: Foreigner bars are the only 'outdoor' exception to Rule 5. Now, remember that other foreigners have probably been wearing their costume since 6am. Their makeup has worn off. So has their excitement. Don't expect anyone else to dress up. If you do, make sure to share your costume. With everyone. This way, other people can make fun of both you and the rediculous notion that anyone can genuinely celebrate this kind of holiday abroad, while relieving you of something hot and polyester.

and, of course, Rule 1: You're allowed to be offensive, as long as you're offending minorities that are already heavily stereotyped.

Hiking Gwanaksan

Well, the changing seasons won't let me lie. We hiked this mountain ages ago ... the first weekend in October after The School's fire, actually, when the weather still called for tank tops. It's since gotten much colder, and the tanks have been covered by tshirts, dress shirts and coats. Scarves, too. Korea's long, humid summer was gorgeous (in retrospect) and we celebrated it accordingly: an invigorating walk up a mountain. Now, it wasn't much of a real hike until the mountain became a bit more steep near its top, and the hike itself was rather short, but it was a climax to the weekend in more way than one.

Jon and I went with two coworkers - Jay and Rob - to the mountain at the southern edge of the city, to Gwacheon. By subway. The 40-minute trip included one transfer during which a middle-aged Korean man yelled at myself and Jay (who's proudly Indian-Canadian, Ottawa-based). His comments were in Korean, so we didn't understand a word, but his finger wagging and spitting spoke clearly enough for us to understand. One of the hundred-something Koreans making the same transfer seemed just as surprised as we were to hear such comments. After staring each other down (confusion from our end, anger from the spitter) as we walked down the stairs, we parted ways with the overtly racist Korean man and looked forward to our weekend excercise!

A gorgeous day for a hike - I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

The hike was pretty monotonous until we came across a natural spring and took our first break. We could actually drink from this spring, and ladles had been provided to access the drinking water from a crevice in the rocks.

A little further up, we came upon Gwanaksan's main attraction: a sizeable temple housing hundreds, possibly thousands, of small buddhas. All were painted gold. And if you take a close look at the photo, you can see ingenious use of space: buddhas tucked in at the side of the rafters of the structure.

Although many hikers stopped at this point, we continued to even more spectacular views - Seoul on both sides of the mountain, a tiny temple on a dangerous precipice just shy of the mountain's 625m peak, and (how wonderful) an army base at the peak of the mountain. Beside the ramen noodle vendor and beer-selling drink stand. Ahh, the athletics of our feat!

A generous hiker cutting up an Asian Pear for our foursome ... although our thanks wasn't constrained by the language barrier, we weren't able to strike up a full conversation with her. So we'll pass on her generosity to our students ...

It took us about ... 30 minutes to descend the mountain and a few hours to get back to Gangnam for beer and fried chicken with some of the other teachers. We then went for a session of Dr. Fish ... but I'll save that story for another day. Let's just say that a hungry fish is a useful fish.

Alive and Kickin'

We've just finished another month of classes (3 down, 9 left) and another 3-day weekend. We've been busy, too, so it's time for an update.

Jon ran in a 10k race on Sunday - first race in years! - with some of our coworkers. Did marvelously. Ran it in under 40 minutes - can you believe it? The field was capped at an enormous 10,000 runners, walkers and joggers, from kids about 10 years old and upwards. The field had a small majority of men, according to the race results page, outnumbering women by 500. Jon, of course, ranked in the top two percent, only one second behind the man in 60th place. He ran it so fast that I missed his finish entirely and have no pictures to show. Will keep searching online for professional photos that I can post instead.

He had taken the place of Richard King, our coworker, neighbour and furniture hunter extraordinaire, who didn't know he'd been signed up for the race until he received his race package - race tee, timing chip, etc. Jon and I had missed the signup because we had expected to be out of the country during a 5-day holiday (this is the one that was shortened after the fire - construction on the blasted 7th floor continues). So Jon was able to take Richard's place and I went along for the ride. The 7am Sunday ride.

To view captions of this slideshow, hover your mouse over the bottom of the image and then click the word bubble at the bottom left of its window.

The race took place outside of the city, at a rowing club without enough parking (but of course). We arrived at the less than ten minutes before the race began, drove past the noisy, crowded starting line and away, away into the depths of the club to find a parking spot. Jon and the the other racers from the School got a nice warmup jogging to the start line and they sqeezed into the side of the throng of red-shirted racers only 30 seconds or so before the race began. Close call!

Trying to take a picture of Jon during the race, I jogged to the first curve of the course about 400m from the starting line. Weighed down by one gym bag on each shoulder, a jacket and water bottle in one hand and the camera and its case in the other, I was too slow to beat Jon or any other teacher to it. I must have spent about 15 minutes standing at the curb, watching all the runners (I wouldn't call all of them athletes, especially after the first few hundred competitors had passed), absolutely mesmerized by all the red Adidas shirts that had been included in the race package. Snapping out of it, I moved to the finish line to catch them at their best/worst ... and ran into the same problem. I must have seen over 5,000 finishers cross the line ... eyes peeled, darting from one racer to the next ... I must have blinked - slowly. Actually, I missed everyone from The School, so I must have had my eyes closed or lost in a daydream.

The School provided all with a nutritious post-race meal: deep-fried Chinese food and beer. At 10am. A glorious finish and home for a rest!

We finished the day the same way we had started it: near the water. The day of the race was also the day of Seoul's International Fireworks Festival, which is held on the Hangang (Also known as the Han river; 'gang' is Korean for 'river'). Actually an international fireworks competition, this Festival offered 30-minute-long explosive perfomances to the hundreds of thousands of spectators crowded on blankets and newspaper at the river's edge. Throngs of people swarmed the path from subway station to park, stopping traffic and taking over roadways. But the crowds didn't start there: as soon as we'd gotten on the subway we realized that it was going to be incredibly busy. I imagine it was similar to Tokyo's subway traffic: Ali, care to comment?

Once we arrived at the park, the crowds weren't much better. Chris, a coworker from Detroit, led our way through the crowds while the fireworks boomed.

Even though the subway was a sardine tin of spectators, most families, it seemed, had come early and prepared. Blankets, cardboard and newspaper had been spread on the ground creating a semblance of personal space in the crowd of over 100,000. It made no difference. Latecomers like us wove their way between the patches, migrating towards the best view of the fireworks, the edge of the river. It was worth the extra wait to get there.

(What was NOT worth it: the two hour walk away from the park in search of a way home! They had closed the subway station for safety reasons, the buses jam-packed and taxis all taken. Ah, if only I'd listened to my students, who warned me about the difficult trip home and who had mentioned that it was likely the reason they wouldn't attend the festival.)

Our little booklist

Embarrassingly, we've still seen very little of this city and its surrounds.  Our excuse: Kyobo Books has a great foreign language section with all the classics discounted by 50 percent!  (Ok, that and the fact that we'll be paying down some student debts for a while yet.)  In the first months, we were looking for anything cheap to pass the time, and have since filled a small shelf with books that one or both of us have read.  It's been a nice change to read fiction and although it will be good to have kept up our reading level, I expect that it will still be difficult to return to school and its tedious non-fiction next September ... or later.

For a while in August I thought that I might pursue an MA in postcolonial English lit, so I burned through Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Toni Morrison's Beloved.  The further I get from John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, the weaker my interest in religious symbols in literature becomes.  Yes, dad, your prediction was right again: Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis, remains unfinished.  I also finished my second book by Zadie Smith - this one the Booker Prize winner of 2005 - a satire called On Beauty.  Hilarious, although I've loaned out the book to other teachers and those who read her first novel, White Teeth, about Indian immigrants to England, preferred it to her later works.  I'm currently reading a collection of short stories Smith edited for 826 New York City (a group supporting young writers) but have not been further than five minutes south of The School. 

Jon, as you know, is a voracious reader who I can't possibly keep up with.  He's finished Australian Peter Kocan's semi-autobiographical Fresh Fields, John Hersey's Hiroshima, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (and has both Ulysses and Dubliners on the backburner), Goethe's Flight to Italy, and Huxley's Brave New World (again).  Now, thanks to grandparents John and Betty Frost, he's onto David Halberstam's popular history The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.

Our California theme persists: both Jon and I have read John Steinbeck's Cannery Row; Jon has read more Steinbeck than myself, and polished off East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath within the first two months of our arrival.  I have yet to read a full book on Korea (unless our travel guide counts?).

So, I guess this is what university has given back so far: a degree to come over here and teach, and the ability to read at a good clip.  What are we foregoing?  Apart from July's mud festival (during which an even mix of Koreans and foreigners slather themselves in 'wellness' mud), I don't think we're missing too much that we can't see during our later months.  Museum exhibits don't seem to change too frequently here.  We've got a list of festivals happening each month that our work schedule precludes us from visiting anyways.  We don't have much time for a trip out of the country now that classes have been pushed back into October and we've lost two days of manager-created 'vacation'. And I don't expect the mountains to go missing.  

All this reading has kept us from another common foreigner pitfall: drinking, be it in Korea or while traveling to smaller islands or countries on long weekends for a pint on a beach or on a mountain top.  Heck, a blogger working for The Walrus even got paid for writing about the drinking culture among foreigners in South Korea.  (In fact, he's getting paid to write a blog about Korea not dissimilar to our own, albeit a little more political, while teaching kids on Jeju Island, Korea's subtropical paradise.  The NYT also did a story on corporate binge drinking among Koreans.  So, maybe the best way to experience Korean culture is to shoot back a few bottles of soju and bear my soul to our coworkers in order to 'bond' and improve morale at work?

Or I could read a classic and remember it the next day.

Hm.  Tough call.

A Day With The (one and only) Ansan Man

Thanks to a certain four-legged little guy, Jon got an early morning start in Gangnam this past Saturday, the first day of Korea's Thanksgiving, which is called Chuseok.  At about 6am, he had the wits about him to bring a camera on his walk, tracing our usual route to the gym.

We usually pass through or pass by a few small, manicured parks.  The first is a wide path flanked by benches (and midday nappers) and a large gazebo sheltering more benches sits in an alcove dug into the hill, above.  Below is the second park, a larger, multi-tiered do, with a dirt badminton court (no net), steel exercise equipment, more gazebos and benches.  This second park is quite busy on weekends because the National Tae Kwon Do Association, which holds weekly demonstrations, is about 50m up the street.

Back home after the walk, Keedo guards my lazy bum.  Please excuse the mess.  One hour later we were en route to Ansan, nearly as far as you can get from Seoul's core while still using the subway system, to visit our friend, the Ansan Man.

Oh, Ken - I mean Ansan Man - did you actually play guitar in university?  Or is this one of those 'I'm-a-foreigner-and-nobody-can-tell-me-what-I-can-and-can't-do' moments?  I kid, I kid ... your solo was most impressive.

We left Keedo at Ken's place for lunch, after taking him on the subway for the first time.  A real faux-pas, my students told me, unless you take him in a carrier.  We just kept him in our lap and enjoyed the smiles we got from other passengers on the train.

This Praying Mantis, about 10cm or 4 inches long, had somehow gotten its wings stuck to the lid of a squid-holding fishtank.  We unstuck it gently, so as not to damage its wings, and then high tailed it out of its reach.

An afternoon walk to one of Ansan's giant reservoirs-come-community parks yielded more friends and onlookers.  We've normally kept Keedo away from strangers, in case he gets a little nippy, but Jon was (obviously) careful for both dog and girl in this case.  Some older men on the subway and elsewhere love the dog, but don't know how to greet him, sticking their hand in Keedo's face and expecting him to like it.  But maybe I'm just protective.  Sallianne: are we overreacting a tad?

You wouldn't believe the relief a bit of greenery gave me.  The hustle and bustle of life in Seoul had been quietly getting to me over the past week and our trip to Ansan was relaxing on a scale comparable to driving up to the Muskokas from, say, Georgetown.  We even got to see sunflowers!!!  And they weren't in a pot!!!

We headed back home to Gangnam later that evening.  Jon is to be credited for another nice sunset photo (just imagine the concrete jungle in the foreground doesn't exist) taken from our apartment.  More pictures and updates to come, of course!

 

Note: Ken is also posting highlights of his year-long teaching venture in a blog.  Click on the link to the right of this post, titled 'Ansan Man' to check it out.