mini post before the plane ride

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 검정치마 (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.

more noraebangs than you can shake a stick at

we had a packed day yesterday.

• 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.

burberry rag

hello 5AM once again. they say to recover from jetlag you need a day for every hour you displace...which, given the thirteen hour time difference and my two week stay, might give me just enough time to recover before i have to go back home again. oh well. it means i get to see Seoul at its quietest hour when all the clubbers have gone to bed and the businessmen haven't gotten up yet for their morning commute. Seoul has some very beautiful sunrises, poking between the mountains and the skyscrapers. moments of it remind me of Vancouver, another city nestled in the mountains.

we've been very busy fighting off the jetlag while exploring the city. food! food everywhere tastes so good! even the street meat! sold out of the back of some sketchy guy's van! absolutely delicious! yesterday my dad bought some mandoo (dumpling) and chimpan (dough pastries with red bean paste) and i think the street cred only adds to its deliciousness.


my parents buying ho-dduk from some sketchy guy out of a sketchy van.


yummy street snacks - octopus and squid for sale


this street vendor was really mad that i was taking pictures of him. but first, master the credentials.

yesterday morning we went to Youngnak Presbyterian Church, which was housed in this magnificent old building, and this was pretty much the first time i went to a korean church that actually owned the building it held its services in. often in Canada, Korean churches have to rent beautiful old church buildings from white people, or else buy a converted warehouse (as in the case of Toronto's Youngnak church). the church service offered translation services in English and Japanese, which i thought was pretty interesting, and I should also note that this is the only time in Korea that I ever had a Korean person talk to me in English. it figures. Koreans are really big on the church as a part of their culture, and even bigger on evangelism. i'd love to go into a discussion about this reflecting a fascinating counter-appropriation of western colonial influences on Korean indigenous culture, but i suspect a travel blog isn't the best venue for re-hashing my social science undergrad education.


young nak presbyterian church


i am not kidding you. it's a Korean Mother Mary and Child

after the service we went to Myeongdong (i haven't the faintest clue how to spell this in English) which was an exciting shopping and eating district. my father had planned to just pass through this area, but of course when you're traveling with three women, you can't just "pass through" a shopping area. i have seen so many wonderful t-shirts that just beg to be put on the Engrish website; it's almost overwhelming.


Korea's use of engrish is both fascinating and poetic.

i really don't understand why they love to use random english words here. is it a trendy thing, like the way in North America if we want to sound sophisticated, we slip in French phrases we don't understand ("She has that sort of je ne sais quoi about her, you know?" "Your mom just gave me a deja vu."). Also interesting is the korean phonetic spelling of english words. i don't know how many times i painstakingly read out the korean characters on a sign ("Eh-li-beh-tuh" or "Su-tu-ra-beh-ree Men-go") only realize they are actually english words ("Elevator" or "Strawberry Mango").

most fascinating, of course, is the Korean love of designer labels. So many grown men carrying Louis Vuitton handbags. i'm sure there are a lot of knock-offs (like, i'm sure the street vendor outside my hotel is not selling real Chanel earrings) but i'm sure a lot of them are the real thing, because Koreans really love that stuff here and if the rest of them are anything like my cousin, they can tell if its genuine Coach at a glance. When I passed by an optician's shop yesterday, i definitely saw a Burberry rag that was used to wipe glasses. BURBERRY RAG.

...and yet despite this love of ridiculously expensive brands, it's amazing how cheap a lot of other things are. like socks. really cute socks, all for a buck a pair. i am pretty sure i'm going to fill up my suitcase with only socks as souvenirs when i come back.

to balance out our hyper-consumerist morning, we spent the afternoon ascending Namsan, the mountain providing a startling retreat into nature, smack dab in the middle of the city. it looked like everyone else in Seoul had the same idea - the paths were pretty crowded full of families and children climbing over perilous steep steps that just screamed TORT. still, it was an amazing view at the top, allowing us to see just how far the city spans, the cityline framed by the pretty tree blossoms that cause me such woeful fits of allergies. also, intense moments of acrophobia. Bukhansan is going to be even more interesting when we get to that.
for dinner, we grabbed some bibimbap and kimbap at the Hyundai department store in Sinchon. yeah, i didn't know that Hyundai had a department store either, but if it's going to be anywhere it makes sense that it would be in Seoul. my mission for today is to find some noodle bowls that don't contain octopus. Koreans like to to a lot of weird things to a normal bowl of spaghetti.*

*yes, i know that "normal bowl of spaghetti" isn't historically correct since asians invented pasta first and Marco Polo only stole it from us to bring back to Italy, so really, the "normal bowl of spaghetti" is what you find in Asia, not East Side Mario, but still, it doesn't change the fact that i'd love to have a good bowl of noodles that don't contain anchovy eyes or octupii...


view from partway up the Namsan mountain

bathroom self-portraits: korea

seoul, south korea
this was the bathroom in my hotel room.



another shot of the bathroom in my hotel room. fancy sink.



incheon, south korea

at Incheon airport. the engrish signs in korea read smooth and poetically, like haikus

the hills are alive with the smell of ddukbokki

well, it's five AM on Sunday morning, and i'm still fighting against the horrors of thirteen hour jet lag, particularly exacerbated by that screaming baby on my flight who had the extraordinary lung capacity to keep going all night. my biological clock, by the way, has been smashed to pieces. to quote Patton Oswald, i'm going to instead have an imaginary baby called Ten Hours of Sleep a Night.



so i write to you from the future, although my body *feels* like it's 4PM Saturday afternoon. my experience in Korea so far has been pretty mind-blowing. Up until now, every thing i ever knew about korea was from my parents' stories (who had left the country when it was still a developing national with an impoverished economy in the 1960s and 70s), and from the Korea soap operas. so far the Korean soap operas haven't lied - everyone does look identically pretty and young, and people do spend a lot of time passionately yelling at each other. but it blows my mind to see it all in real life. Korea is a totally fascinating world where paradoxes meet: hyper-capitalism thrives right alongside third world country standards of social welfare - where you see people in trendy designer suits sporting trendy designer handbags stepping around shoeless emaciated beggars dragging themselves on a board along the bustling street. Magnificent ancient Asian gates and huge statues from Korea's folklore stand alongside ultra-modern skyscrapers and giant billboards selling shoes. You breathe in the strong smells of the city that alternate between delicious street food like ddukboki...and sulphuric sewer, equally strong.



and all the korean people. i suppose it's not that surprising to see a lot of korean people in korea, but i have never lived in any place with so many korean people. i've been to north york where the overwhelming majority of people were asians, but there is nothing like being awash the sea of homogeneous faces like the streets of seoul. so many hipsters glasses, even on the old ladies. we've started playing a game of "Spot the White Guy", where you find the one caucasian pedestrian on the street, and then you wonder if he's a tourist, someone's world-savvy spouse, an english teach trying to find himself, or just plain lost ("hey, wait, this isn't Spadina...").

we've been getting a lot of stares ourselves on the streets. my sister thinks it's because we aren't dressed fashionably enough. my father says it's because we're just so beautiful. my mother is convinced that it's because of my tattoo - she claims only gang members have tattoos here. me, i think that they just know that we're ee-seh, just like i see chinese tourists and our eyes meet, and we just know in an instant of a mutual recognition that we both really, really, really suck at speaking in korean.

we did a two-hour tour of Seoul yesterday, which is just really huge, about two or three times the size of Toronto. we walked through the crowded street markets of Insadonggil, where i discovered that in all twenty-five years of my existence, i never learned how to say "Excuse me" in Korean, because nobody ever says it when they ram into you unexpectedly. we went up the in-city mountain Namsan past throngs of schoolchildren all in identical uniform all enjoying the escape from the city into nature as well as the breathtaking view at the top which lets you survey the whole cityline. we've walked past all sorts of delicious street food vendors, and yes, we went to McDonalds where i ate a bulgogi burger. i'm working up the courage to try the kimchi bulgogi pizza...




Mr. Pizza: Love of Women.

Thoughts at Toronto Pearson Airport

And here I find myself at the airport bar again. come three hours before international flights, what garbage. Now I have three hours to kill.

There are three classes for Korean Air: Economy, Prestige, and Morning Calm.

The Korean Air desks are right next to KLM's desk for Amsterdam Schipol. More of my past/future juxtapositioning.

Haven't eaten any dinner because I've been too busy packing. I should probably grab my last chance at western food in a while (cheeeeeeeeese!).

Oh my, tell me that screaming baby isn't going to be on the same plane as me...

today i leave for korea!

a punk version of 애국가, the national anthem.