Korea road trip

Oh, Korea, the land of mountains and apartment buildings. The land where the most high-tech toilets – with electronic bidets – stand right next to the old school squatters in public washrooms. Where public service employees are unbelievably polite (airport security officers will bow to you before searching you), while the average pedestrian will show no concern for your personal space and will push you right aside on the sidewalk while they spit. We’ve been seeing a lot lately, and it’s so hard to keep up with all the cities we’ve seen in the past few days, but I’ll try to sum it up:

Jinju

A cute small town where the waters are so serene they look like glass, with monuments and sights telling more stories about the Japanese invading Korea, which seems to be a favourite pastime of theirs (both the Japanese’s invading and the Koreans’ story-telling). The story told over and over again here is the one of the brave Nongae, a geiseng (Korea’s version of geishas), who during a battle against the invading Japanese, used her skills to charm a Japanese general down to the water before killing him by dragging him into the water, drowning herself in the process as well. That’s the kind of heroine that Korean stories like to feature – a woman who is patriotic and courageous in her self-sacrifice, but only in a manner that doesn’t challenge traditional conventions of femininity. There is a shrine here dedicated to her in the middle of a beautiful garden


Jinju also apparently has a lot of schoolgirls

Busan
Although not as populated as Seoul, this large city has a population the size of Toronto. We pass some seafront newly built oceanfront condos worth some three million dollars apiece. Despite its giant urban size, it’s the nature not so far from the city that I particularly enjoy. There’s a park around here that leads to Haeundae Beach. The trail here traces the coastline through the woods and cliffs, a bit like the Wild Pacific Trail on the side of the ocean on Vancouver Island. We walk along the rubber covered path overlooking the ferocious ocean waves and find ourselves ending up on a dock at the foot of the expensive condos where there are old men fishing nonchalantly next to the “No Fishing” signs. Nearby there is a picnic of old halmunis hallabujis who are drunk and singing Korean folk songs, so loudly you can hear them from the other side of the park. My mom wants to avoid them, but I kind of want to stick around and listen to them sing. Koreans sure love to sing.






some cute halmunis. these once weren't singing

Our hotel features a hot spring spa on top of the roof. I have to say, sometimes I love luxury, especially when that luxury involves being able to dip my body in hot soothing spring water while looking at the ocean below.



For dinner, we meet up with my aunt, who lives in Busan, and my grandfather, who is actually a Canadian citizen but is staying with my aunt for a while. We eat at a Japanese restaurant that does not serve any donkatsu or teriyaki anything, but does have California rolls for twenty-five dollars. Meanwhile, a flute/guitar/guitar trio plays Toni Braxton covers in the lobby. Odd place. My grandfather asks me how we’re enjoying our mother country. He asks us if we’ve gotten into the gaming culture yet, because that’s what we are good at. I am not sure if I’m understanding him correctly.

Ulsan
We hike through a wooded path along the oceanside cliffs leading to a famous rock under which, according to legend, an old king asked to be buried, so he could become a dragon and protect his homeland from Japanese invasions (you see, we have to worry about that sort of thing a lot). It’s a beautiful view, and you have to work hard to get to it – up and down the perilous steps, cautiously along the cliffs in the middle of the fierce ocean wind which blows so hard I’m worried it’ll carry me off into the sea. And yet there are men standing at the heights of the cliffs, chipping away at the stones with their tools, right in the middle of the wind. Either the locals are especially brave, heavy, and wind-resistant, or they don’t have very good labour laws here regulating workplace safety.





We stopped by one of facilities belonging to Hyundai, the name that white people love to mispronounce. There were more thousands and thousands of Hyundai cars lined up in the parking lot – a surprisingly incredible sight. The facilities also contained a sort of a shrine (they called it a memorial, but I found it awfully shrine-like) dedicated to the founder of the Hyundai corporation. People around here really like him. Not only was he credited with helping to transform Korea from a poor developing country to a First World country, but he seems to be everything that Koreans love about a national hero: a patriotic (check) patient (check) hard-working humble optimist (check check check) with a firm footing in capitalism (check) but enough respect for communism to tap into unconventional markets (like Cuba, the Soviet Union, and North Korea – check), who in whatever spare time he managed to have, pursued athletics (check), poetry (check), and taking care of his entire extended family with a strict but loving approach (emphatic check).

Our family seems to have a special connection with Hyundai. My grandfather apparently was one of the founding members of Hyundai’s automotive department, which shatters my belief that my family was working class in Korea. He was the manager over the entire department, dealing with auto maintenance at a time when Korea was still getting used to the idea of cars. Then our family moved to Canada where all that meant jack squat and my grandfather become a mechanic for Greyhound.

We also took a tour of the shipyard, which was not something I ever thought I’d want to do, but it was pretty crazy, these enormous ships being built up on dry land. We weren’t allowed to take photos, but there’s no way that I’d be able to fit the gigantic structures into my viewfinder.


Gyeong-ju
This used to be the capital of the ancient Silla kingdom, also when Buddhism began to be all in the rage. We visit Buddhist temples and monuments and huge statues of Buddha made up of stone and sometimes of gold. Now it’s a lot of old style buildings and mountains everywhere. Really quaint – but a whole new world from Seoul and Busan. Roosters run randomly across the median, and I feel like every public bathroom here is a squatter. Also, there are ancient burial mounds all over the place, across the street from parking lots and bread stores. Kind of surreal.



Things became even more surreal when at a small roadside restaurant just outside of Gwangju, we ran into Sandra Oh’s relatives. My family is pretty close to her family back in Ottawa, so it was pretty random to run into her cousin in Korea, who happens to be the spitting image of Sandra’s father.

For dinner tonight we actually discovered a vegetarian restaurant. In Korea. This is unbelievable. When I told my family, ten years ago, that I was going to try being a vegetarian, they just did not understand the concept and kept sneaking fish in my food (which is why now I eat all meats except fish). Vegetarianism is not a modern Korean concept – we like to think that’s what white hippies do (no offense to my white vegetarian friend). I’m pretty sure even Buddhist monks eat fish. Anyway, apparently it does exist, and this restaurant was delicious and creative. Even if they did cheat a little and serve a bit of fish at the end of the 10 course meal.

mother's day sightseeing

ughhh...having a cold and allergies at the same time is a deadly combination for your sinuses. i sound like the dead right now. still, we managed to see a lot today. being sunday, we first went to the English church service at Saemoonan, which was the first church established in Korea during the 1880s by the missionary Underwood. it was also the church that my mother's family attended in the 1960s, and it brought back a lot of memories of her and her grandmother, as well as the pastor who led the church at the time. we also got to pass by my mom's old elementary school, which was right around the corner. i tried to picture my mom as a little girl, walking down these streets, but it's hard to imagine the same person who constantly reminds me not to enjoy my vacation too much because i have bar ads coming up.




after church, we went to the Korean National Museum, which is something like the fifth largest museum in the world. it was pretty huge, and we only had time to explore a portion of it, so we focused on the history of korea. i have to say, it was pretty enlightening to learn about the thousands of years of Korean civilization, but the most interesting thing i learned today was that while i can't speak fluent Korean, for some reason i seemed to have picked up some Chinese.


ninja stars. korean style.



a ten-storey pagoda built, like, a thousand years ago. koreans are pretty amazing

after the museum, we browsed through the dongdaemun markets, particularly the pyunghwa clothing market, but i found that unless you have a burning desire to buy skull-printed suspenders or ridiculous hats, there wasn't much for vintage clothing shoppers like me. we did enjoy perusing through the various designer stands at Doosan Towers, which was amazing simply because of its sheer size - imagine a Bay Street skyscraper, filled with clothing shops.

by then, my cold had overpowered my excitement for fashion so we headed home, walking along the Chunggyechun stream. This is a particularly beautiful part of Korea, a stream that runs through the downtown core. it used to be a stinky place where people would dump their garbage. then the government filled it up and built a road over it. then the next government decided to open up the stream again, clean it up, and open it to the public as a nice canal to walk along. it sure beats garbage river or cement city any day.



look how ridiculously fat i've gotten on this trip. it's a wonder i didn't break the rocks i was walking on to cross the stream.

okay, going to bed now. i have some epic backpacking ahead of me for the next few days and there is a korean-war style battle going on within my body right now...

bathroom self-portraits: seoul and jejudo

washroom at Doosan tower (doota!), seoul, Korea.

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.

korean music

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.

jeju island: so much better than being stranded on the LOST island

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.

limited!

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.


DSCF 6303
I’m wanted.

there's an ocean in my bowl

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.