this was a huge shopping complex where the washrooms had an extraordinary view of the mountains as well as the cityline, and the magnificent Dongdaemun gate, which is visible in this photo if you look closely.
public washroom in Jejudo, South Korea
another one of those weird washroom stalls where there was a child-sized urinal and child-sized toilet in the stall. i was fascinated. as i took the photo, a child whined outside the stall because he actually had to use it. i'm a horrible person.
my little sister is the kind of generous individual who will gladly share many things with me - like chicken pox, when we were small children, and on this particular trip to Korea, her cold. despite delays caused by my nonstop sneezing and fever-induced ramblings, we managed to go out and explore more of Seoul today.
knowing my love of exploring local music, my dad bought us tickets to see a show at the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts. originally i had been hoping to see some pansori, a form of traditional folk music where a singer tells a story while a drummer accompanies him or her along with verbal responses - hence sharing components of the call and response format of black gospel music as well as the simple yet tremendously expressive nature of the blues. i've been working on this theory that pansori is the korean form of the american blues, only centuries older.
an example of pansori - starts at 37 seconds
it's cool enough to make me want to learn korean just to put on interesting pansori shows in Kensington Market.
as it turned out, pansori wasn't being featured today. instead, we saw other traditional performances: we saw court music (byeolgok) performed with five instruments i had never seen before (except the drum. i know what drums are). then there was a salpuri a folk dance that was put on originally to exorcise evil spirits in the shaman tradition. i have to admit i know a lot more about music than dance, so although the female dancer with the white scarf was quite expressive, i paid a lot more attention to her accompaniment. the music was disturbing, simply haunting. aspects of it made me think of the darker pieces of Godspeed You Black Emperor, only with centuries more suffering and brooding behind it. it was weird and abrasive and a very foreign sound to our Western-trained ears, but i found myself irresistibly drawn to it. i wish i had been allowed to record it, so i could, i don't know, learn the zither to replicate it, or something.
an example of salpuri. slow and haunting music - kind of like godspeed you black emperor
the final act was a sanjo featuring the geomungo instrument. Sanjo, from what i understand, is a folk music performance where one musician solos. it seemed like pansori, only with an instrument telling the story, rather than a vocalist. it was kind of like two friends from the deep American South, sitting on a porch on a hot day, with one man playing banjo and the other guy the washer, one man singing "my baby done left me an' i got the blues" and the other guy responding "amen!", only here these men were wearing traditional korean hanbok, not overalls, and they were playing the zither and the barrel drum. same sort of feel though, if you get what i mean. and the audience members, especially the older ones familiar with the sound, were equally moved by the music, and i heard some of them call out responses along with the drummer. it was quite the sight.
the whole show was pretty enlightening. Korea has such a long rich music history, and we are so lucky that so much of it is still preserved, especially when the Japanese invaded the country and forbade the expression of any Korean music for decades - it's a wonder that people were still around to remember how to tell it, Korean-style. i would love for elements of traditional Korean music to seep into mainstream music, like the way the blues, reggae, and even bollywood sound has. of course, i don't think i could really bear it if Avril Lavigne started belting out pansori, so maybe there is some blessings in obscurity.
Also, due to my inability to tell the difference between chun (a thousand) and man (ten thousand), i now own a thirty dollar, authentic bamboo-carved recorder.
after the show, we went to the Kangnam Express Bus Terminal and explored the many shops around there. i picked up some priceless gifts for my friends, but my favourite find was the record store where i picked up some of Korea's more contemporary musical treasures that i'd been searching for: some Shin Jung Hyun, known as the godfather of Korean classic rock, Park Ji Yoon, a pop singer turned introspective singer-songwriter/actress/photographer, and the Rock Tigers, who call themselves as the pioneers of Korean rockabilly - and are possibly still the only Korean rockabilly band that i've ever heard of anyway.
We’ve finally returned from our island adventure in Jejudo. And what an adventure. Jeju is sort of a cross between Korea’s Hawaii (a tropical vacation spot) and Newfoundland (where people speak funny). With all the palm trees, mountains, and ocean scenes, it reminded me somewhat of Vancouver Island’s Tofino, only with a lot more Korean restaurants than fish taco stands – but equally expensive. It’s a magical land where orange trees line the roads, all the cars are white rented Hyundais, the weather changes suddenly without warning, traffic lights are completely illogical, tractors ride along the highway, and Buddhist temples appear majestically out of nowhere amidst the forests of palm trees.
We really like white cars
The surreal feel of the island was confirmed one morning when I sat on my balcony, facing the Pacific Ocean, and while I sang a song on my ukulele, birds flew towards me and perched on the balcony railing. They were looking at me, as though they were listening to my music. It was a magical Mary Poppins moment. And then one of them pooped.
We spent our days driving and hiking around the island to see Jeju’s beautiful nature scenes and also the spots where famous scenes from Korean dramas were filmed. These sights are like nothing else I’ve ever seen: mists hugging around bridges that hang over impossible heights, the signature black rocks on a white sand beaches that stretch into bright blue waters, hidden waterfalls, and my favourite combination of mountains and oceans and palm trees and mountains and oceans and palm trees.
Giant pineapples?
We called these stone statues found all over the island “Jejududes”.
The food was something else. At first we had a little bit of trouble finding a place for dinner – the first restaurant we checked out (which for inexplicable reasons featured a tyrannosaurus rex on the front lawn) turned out to specialize in malgogi, horsemeat. When you go to Korea, you need to learn the names of animals just to make sure you don’t accidentally eat it.
But we found that the restaurant in the hotel was actually fantastic, featuring both western and Korean food.
Talk about a mixed table: My dad here is eating a seafood stew, I’m having kimchi chigae and my mom and sister are eating spaghetti.
The breakfasts at the hotel, however, were the most amazing. It also featured a buffet spread of both Western and Korean food, and that’s where I came up with my brilliant (and patent pending) concept of doing both: bibimbap & bacon, or as I’d like to call it, bibimbacon.
In this bowl you will see: bacon, kimchi, bulgogi, a cheese omelette, mandu (dumpling) and ketchup.
Besides, horsemeat, Jejudo is also famous for its hukdaeji, pork from black pigs. My parents were never too keen to have the stuff however, although they never explained to us why, until one day my sister announced that she was going to use the public washroom, and my father cryptically said, “Watch out for the pigs!”
“What pigs?” my sister asked.
“The pigs they used to raise under the toilets.”
That’s where the black pigs are from? “I’m going to become a vegetarian,” my sister declared.
We’re on beautiful Jeju Island right now. There is so much to write about, but they charge for Internet here (they charge for everything here) and I just don’t have enough time to talk about all the things we’ve seen…
The other day, we met up with a family friend S. in Yongin yesterday to visit a traditional Korean folk village. The bus drive into town was something. I didn’t quite see Seoul ending at any point – it just seemed to meld into and become other cities. There is just so much urban sprawl all over Korea. My aunt was telling us how nobody can afford to buy a house in Korea because there just isn’t any space – so everyone just builds up. I swear, I watched out the window for half an hour and there was not a single break in the rows after rows after rows of high-rise apartment buildings. All nestled among mountains. It’s really like nothing else we’ve seen in spacious open Canada. Korea is just so densely populated.
Korean totem polls
Korean farmer making straw mats
If Dalton McGuinty was Korean, this would be his office. And these would be his torture instruments in front.
Yesterday, we went down to Suwon, my father's hometown, where my great uncle took us on a hike around the magnificent ancient Hwasung fortress, a sort of Korean answer to the Great Wall of China, stretching all around the city. the creation of the fortress is a sad story about a king who built it in memory of his father, who was tortured to death by his own jealous father. out of such sadness and suffering comes this beautiful monument, which i think pretty much defines the Korean spirit: suffering, sadness, strength, beauty.
in the evening, we met up with the Shin clan, my father's various uncles, aunts, and cousins from his mother's side. since they spoke no english and we spoke little Korean, there was a lot of smiling and nodding on the part of me and my sister, as our great-uncle recounted wonderful stories about my father when he was younger, stories i definitely wished i could understand to use as blackmail against him later. i did, however, know enough Korean to understand this conversation between my aunts about me:
AUNT 1: in Korean "How old is the eldest daughter?" AUNT 2: "She's twenty-five." AUNT 1: (pause) "They sure do marry late, nowadays, don't they?"
She then assured my mom that she made a good choice in raising her kids in Canada - raising daughters in Korea is expensive because you have to pay for the plastic surgery.
Things i learned from my long lost family members: 1. My Korean name is actually Japanese (!!!) 2. My appreciation of soju is genetic. 3. So is, unfortunately, our (lack of) height and, more unfortunately, my neanderthal eyebrows that make every esthetician shudder in horror.
apparently one of my relatives, on the left, is actually a ghost
dinner was at a (Koreanized) Chinese restaurant, a banquet of multiple courses, most of which consisted of seafood. so many tentacles in one sitting! i basically had the entire ocean in my bowl. come on, gloria, eat around the eyeballs. luckily the final dinner course was chajangmyun, my favourite noodle bowl, wonderfully seafood-free. and i really shouldn't complain about my tentacle-triggered gag reflex: on our way home, we passed a restaurant that specialized in boshintang, as in, stew made from dog. when my mother told me this, my sister and i both instantly turned green in the face. thank goodness our family decided to go chinese that night instead.
yesterday morning, we explored the Hongik University area, which was full of yummy Korean restaurants, hip clothing stores and clubs to suit the artsy student population. i finally was able to do a little record record store shopping and picked up the latest release of this korean indie band that i like called ê²€ì •ì¹˜ë§ˆ (the Black Skirts). my favourite single from them has this awesome shoegazer-influenced dream pop feel that isn't typical in Korean pop music.
today's bathroom self portrait comes from the Korean city of Suwon:
no, i didn't sneak into the little boy's room. the stall in this women's washroom outside Suwon's magnificent Hwasung fortress seemed to be a family stall which had a miniature toilet and a miniature urinal right next to the regular toilet. apparently the mayor of Suwon was so disgusted with the state of public washrooms in general that he underwent a major bathroom reform, and now the city of Suwon has the cleanest bathrooms in Korea.
it was hard getting a good picture of the other toilets, but i think you see the general arrangement.
i watched a man delivering a cart of propane tanks on his motorcycle have a very bad day in the rain, stalled on the shoulder of the highway.
we wandered through the market at Namdaemun, where a man dressed up in a woman's hanbok dress complete with false breasts called to me in Japanese to check out his wares (people seem to think i'm Japanese here - my sister says it's because i wear ugly shoes, but i'm sure it's because i have the world's most startlingly bad Korean accent). My father also surprised us all with his ninja-stealthy haggling skills in the market.
i bought some nifty new glasses at a shop, which was a pretty interesting experience. i basically got a free eye examination and my optician got a free English lesson, because my dad decided it was time for me to be a man and try to navigate through the eye exam on my own without translation help. Despite many language barriers, the good news is that my glasses turned out perfectly, and dirt dirt dirt cheap (unlike in Canada, where i'd have to drop $400 on a pair that i'd have to wait three weeks for). The bad news is that it is clear that law school has worsened my eyes to the -10.00s now (shakes fist).
we ate at a deeeelicious restaurant (Koon-gi-wa-jib) where you take your shoes off at the entrance (while a dozen businessmen in suits file past you to meet their chauffeurs tending to their mercedes), and you are seated in one of those private rooms lined with rice paper walls and you sit on a bamboo mat on the floor. Then you are served dozens of different banchan (side dishes) in bronze bowls along with elegantly prepared abalone and the most tender kalbi i have ever eaten in my life. it's also probably the most expensive place we've eaten at so far, and it still came out to less than twenty bucks a person. have i mentioned how amazingly cheap Korea is?
banchan, as far as the eye can see!
we walked along the trendy yet historical Bukchon Hanok Village, which was where all the nobility class yangban and government officials originally lived, close to the palace. in other words, where my peeps would have lived, had we not been ousted by the Japanese (shakes fist again).
we also did a tour of Gyeoungbokgung Palace, which was where the King used to live, during the Joseon dynasty. it was originally built in the 1300's but parts of it kept getting destroyed (ahem, ahem, JAPANESE OCCUPATION...) We had the loveliest tour guide, a retired Korean banker who felt he had benefited so much from the country that he wanted to give back, and also practice his English. i really can't describe the palace grounds in words, but i did take some photos.
Our guide ended our tour by telling us why Korea is awesome. 1. Good King Sejong invented the Korean alphabet in the fifteenth century, which was a system so logical and uncomplicated that it has reduced the illiteracy rate in korea to less than 1%. 2. We keep getting invaded by countries, over and over and over again (ahem, JAPAN), but we're still around. I think our tour guide mentioned our amazing skills at sucking up to major foreign powers (ahem, USA) and i think that's an important diplomatic skill. 3. The King had a special toilet.
but the most magical thing that i must tell you about is the JJIMJILBANG.
i'm not quite sure what "fomentation" is
I have been contemplating this in my head for a long time but I cannot think of a English equivalent at all. i think the closest concept we have is a spa, but that raises notions of white fluffy bathrobes, white marble walls, white upper class privilege prices, and cucumbers placed on your eyes for no reason that anyone can understand. At a jjimjilbang, first of all, they store all your clothes and you wear the most ridiculous outfit of a bright orange t-shirt and red shorts, so you can't hold any illusions of being a bored rich housewife at a luxury spa. Secondly you pay something like ten dollars and then you can spend hours there, even stay there all night, so you have all kinds of people (especially families and young people on dates) hanging out there, not just bored rich housewives.
while there are spa elements there, like baths, saunas, and services offering massages and "padicures" (sic), the emphasis there seems to be on relaxation (My father thinks this is because Koreans don't know how to relax in an unstructured manner). this means jjimjilbangs have all sorts of Korean things that North American spas don't have, like:
movies
a cafeteria that serves beer, ice cream, and pogo sticks
karaoke rooms (noraebang)
sleeping rooms - included a room designated for snorers
a bookshelf of manga comic books to bring into the sauna
STARCRAFT
i am not kidding you, there really was a gaming room. i spent most of my time dozing off in the various therapeutic rooms, like the salt room (apparently it is therapeutic to lie on a bed of heated salt), the charcoal room, the jade rooms, the ice room, the clay room, the oxygen room. i also checked out the baths full of naked elderly Asian women, where i discovered that contrary to popular belief, the sag factor is a real concern for all of us when aging. my favourite part was the massage chairs (massages by a robot! for a dollar!) and the signs everywhere telling koreans to be nice to the foreigners, who will probably not be very good at Starcraft.
i think what excites me the most is that i am pretty sure there is a korean jjimjilbang in Toronto, which i'll have to check out when i get back to Canada. You'll all come with me, right? I sure hope it has a Starcraft room.
