Slice of Life

One of my coworkers was playing with his new camera the other day. Here's a peek into my daily life:



The snack stand outside school.



The secretaries. Sweet ladies but they speak almost no English.





Getting ready. That's Mina, my partner teacher, next to me.





Lunch time!

Obligatory Korean Tourist Spot #1: N Seoul Tower

I mentioned a while back that a college friend of mine, Aaron, came to visit in July. Now, nearly two months later, I have pictures from his visit here. Probably the most notable thing we did (besides eat) was visit the N Seoul Tower.

The road up towards Namsan park and the cable car up the mountain winds past an animation museum of some kind. Naturally, we had to stop and take silly pictures:






The N Seoul Tower is a huge tourist attraction for couples. As people have mentioned before, all along the cyclone fencing (to keep you from falling off the edge of the deck into the relative wilderness below) are locks that people stick there as testaments to their love for one another. You can even buy locks right at the tower.


Stole this from Alex, since I was too lazy to take a picture of the locks myself.

The "ground level" deck was home to a few eateries (some fast food, one a more sit-down, candlelit affair), the gift shop, and basically places to mill and lounge around. The benches are designed to be weirdo snuggly intimate affairs with bends in the middle, making them vaguely V-shaped.

We shelled out about W20,000 to take the elevator up to the observation room, a huge 360* with big windows looking out in every direction. The compass points were conveniently labeled, and by each point was the name of a few major international cities and how far away they were in that direction. I should note that looking west you could see how many kilometers it was to Washington, D.C. and New York City, but not Philadelphia. Alas, city of brotherly love, you'll always be that forgotten middle child.

You could also pay some ridiculous price and get a pseudo-Tarot reading (didn't look like a proper Tarot deck, from what I could see) about love and relationships. N Seoul Tower is really marketed as a couples-y romantic getaway, remember. I'm not sure if it was originally designed to be a romantic date thing to do, or if Koreans started that on their own accord and then the owners of the tower just decided to run with it.


I guess giant futuristic phallic landmarks are pretty romantic....

It also has some kind of modern art laser light show that goes on periodically. I didn't really get it, but then I don't really get modern art in general.


Pretty sure this has to do with the light show.

At some point, I will probably go back to get a better look at Namsan park (Seoul really hurts for greenery, Namsan park is a blessing) and also to leave a lock on the wall for me and Aspie_Dev. I'm a big softie at the end of the day. =P

Another One Bites the Dust

That's two posts in a row with songs for titles. They're just so apropos...

I mentioned earlier that South Korea's former president, Roh Mu-hyun, jumped to his death/was possibly murdered. The one prior to him, Kim Dae-jung, recently passed away (of natural causes). He was born when Korea was still just Korea and constantly advocated for a reunification. It was his "Sunshine Policy" that Roh tried to continue all throughout his presidency.

He was also tough as nails:

Kim was born into a farming family in South Jeolla province in Korea's southwest when the country was still under Japanese colonial rule.

He started a business after the end of Japanese occupation and it survived the 1950-53 war on the Korean peninsula.

But as South Korea's government veered toward authoritarianism, he chose to go into politics and quickly marked himself as a dissident.

After three losing bids, he was elected to the National Assembly in 1961. Days later, Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee staged a military coup and dissolved parliament.

Kim ran for the presidency a decade later, nearly defeating Park, who altered the constitution to guarantee his rule in the future.

Just weeks after the election, Kim was in a traffic accident he believed was an attempt on his life. For the rest of his days, he walked with a limp and often leaned on a cane.

In 1973, South Korean agents broke into his Tokyo hotel room and dragged him to a ship where he claimed they planned to dump him at sea. The would-be assassins aborted the plan following intervention by U.S. officials, who sent an American military helicopter flying low over the ship.

...

Upon his return to Seoul in 1973, Kim was put under house arrest and then imprisoned. His release came only after Park's assassination by his spy chief in late 1979.

Kim was pardoned a few months later. But the drama did not end there.

Weeks after Park's death, military leader Chun Doo-hwan seized power. Five months later, tens of thousands in the southern city of Gwangju — one of Kim's political strongholds — took to the streets to protest the junta.

Troops suppressed the uprising, killing some 200 people by official accounts. Accusing Kim of fomenting the uprising, a military tribunal sentenced him to death. Washington again intervened, and the sentence was commuted to life and then reduced to 20 years.

Kim refused to consider it a setback.

The sentence was later suspended and he left for the U.S., where he lived until 1985. He was 72 when he was elected president.

Expressing his trademark forgiveness and lack of vengeance, Kim immediately sought a pardon for Chun Doo-hwan, the military general who ordered Kim's death in 1979 and was sentenced for mutiny and treason.

Chun was among well-wishers who went to Kim's hospital room in recent days.

But the defining moment of the Kim presidency was his historic meeting with Kim Jong Il in 2000.

That summit — the first between the two Koreas — eased decades of tensions and ushered in an era of unprecedented reconciliation.

Families divided for decades held tearful reunions, and South Koreans began touring North Korea's famed scenic spots. Kim won the Nobel Peace Prize that year.

"In my life, I've lived with the conviction that justice wins," he said in accepting the honor. "Justice may fail in one's lifetime, but it will eventually win in the course of history."

Full article here.

Fight For Your Right to (Snack) Party

Snack parties are a tradition at Sherlock Academy: every time a class finishes a textbook, they have an "achievement test" (aka a final), and then we have the option of having snack parties—a completely useless class where you just eat food and play (English) games.

One of my favorite classes had one today, though they are also one of my more high maintenance classes and always leave me exhausted. Hyperactive 10-year-olds will do that to you.



The kid in the back looks depressed because he failed the achievement test and has to repeat the textbook again. Also because the other kids kind of don't like him.



Boys on one side, girls on another.



They mob me constantly in class. But I like them, so it's okay.

Unfortunately, I'll have to send some of the smarter ones to a new class they're starting soon. So this is the last time this class will ever be together like this.

Who has two thumbs and loves glasses?

This girl!

I went to Namdaemun Market today. While it's a fair subway ride from Minlak-dong, and I could probably wander into Uijeongbu (or just walk about five minutes away from my apartment) and find one, I like the one in Namdaemun.



Since today was Sunday, and I didn't get there until about 5:00 or so, it wasn't quite as big and as crazy as normal. That isn't to say it wasn't big and crazy, though. You could get everything you ever needed from one of these markets: food, clothing, entertainment, cookware, and so on. I thought I would miss farmer's markets in Korea, but honestly, the Q-mart ain't got nothing on Namdaemun. Well, except maybe for mullets. And cinnamon buns.





My first order of business was to pick up a fan. I don't know why we don't carry them more often in the states, it really is a handy thing to have when the weather pushes the 90s. I'm fairly confident that haggling is expected in these places but I'm not 100% on that, in any case I bargained down from ten thousand to seven thousand won on a flimsy little folding fan no doubt made in China.

Inexplicably, there entire main drag of Namdaemun houses an incredible amount of ophthalmologists. And by ophthalmologists, I mean, "glasses and contact lens retailers with an eye chart in the corner." Clearly, glasses are a sort of luxury/fashion statement thing, less a "I need these to get through the world" thing.

I was always under the impression that visits to the optometrist were something that were A) expensive and B) you had covered under your health insurance. Pretty sure they are neither here in Korea: after a quick exchange in Konglish, an attendant sat me down at a machine that looked like a giant microscope, where the technician flashed a landscape before my eyes, sometimes blurry and sometimes in focus. I floundered for a second—how would I communicate to him the usual "better/worse" exchange? But after a minute, he pulled me away from the machine, wrote some numbers down and explained them in Korean—I guess he didn't need my verbal assent to figure out how I fared, because he pulled out some sample lenses and had me read a nearby eye chart. After some tweaking and fiddling, I had a new prescription. "Plus one," he explained. People default to the system they use on contact lenses back home, which of course I can only vaguely remember. -2.75? I haven't worn my contacts in years. But that confirmed my suspicions re: prescription update.

I had two options for frames: expensive ones in a glass case, or cheap ones just sitting in bins in the middle of the store. I opted for the cheap ones, which were obscenely so: 30,000 won, which is about $21 US. Ridiculous! I sprung for two. The lenses ran an extra 20,000 won for each pair, so all told I paid about $70 for two new pairs of glasses. Not too shabby.

After I paid, the clerk gave me a slip and told me to wait about an hour. I nodded, grabbed a business card, and wandered around the market some more. By now it was nearly six o'clock—dinner time. I had some tteukbokki from a street vendor and meandered a bit.

A word here about street vendors: they step it up a bit from American ones.



All of those umbrellas? They are attached to plastic lawn tables, which in turn are under the purview of one street vendor or another. Beyond junky snack food, you can get legitimate sit-down meals, complete with soju. (Pretty sure there's no Korean word for "liquor license.") Quite literally, a movable feast.

After I ate and wandered the side streets, I returned back to the optometrist's to pick up my hot new eyewear.




These might actually be hipster glasses. Jury's still out.

The world is fresh and crisp again. Huzzah, Korea.

History Lesson

Today is Korea's Independence Day. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Korea spent about 35 years under the rather oppressive rule of Japan.

Korea spent a lot of its history being everyone else's punching bag, pretty much. In 1905, Japan more or less bullied Korea into signing the Eulsa treaty, which made Korea a protectorate of Japan. Five years later, Japan full-out annexed Korea. Korea didn't regain sovereignty until Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces at the end of World War Two. Even then, Korea still got the shaft, as most Americans know (since Korea doesn't really get a mention in history classes until the Korean war). But still, much preferable to living with the Japanese, who were prone to violently beating protesters (sometimes to death) and destroying whole villages based on rumors of hidden insurgents. Forget about freedom of the press. Koreans learned Japanese at school and had Japanese names. Granted, there are two sides to every story—you can argue that Japan forced Korea to reject feudalism and embrace technology and modernity quicker than they would have otherwise (prior to colonial rule, Korea was extremely isolationist), but atrocities are atrocities.

Korea hasn't exactly forgotten about this, and their relationship with Japan seems a bit odd. On the one hand, some of my students will tell me that they want to go to Japan, and they love anime about as much as geeks in America do. On the other hand, you have movies with less-than-flattering portrayals of the Japanese, like Fighter in the Wind and 2009: Lost Memories. Koreans go crazynuts when international sporting events pit them against Japan. I think they're also a bit resentful of the fact that when Westerners think of "(East) Asia," they think of...Japan. As one of my friends put it, "A lot of Japanese culture comes from China or Korea. It's just that the Japanese market themselves really well."

I've never really been a cheerleader for Japan (despite being in the anime club in college). I don't get the fascination that some of my fellow geeks have. Korea's own ambivalence has rubbed off on me and now I'm even more tepid.

That being said, the day was uneventful for me. KBS was airing some kind of documentary piece about Korean WWII veterans, but otherwise things were pretty sedate. Normally, this would be a day off from school, but since it's a Saturday, no dice. There's no "token day off" practice here like we have at home when a holiday falls on a weekend. Maybe Koreans are out drinking even more than normal, but that seems to be it.

K-movie Recommendations, Part Two

So by now, hopefully, you've seen The Host. If you haven't, queue that up on the Netflix list because it's a really good movie.

While East Asian cinema has a reputation for being rather bizarre and gruesome, there's still plenty that's pretty tame and mainstream, with plenty of nods to Western culture. For example, Kim Ji-woon's The Good, The Bad, The Weird. Yes, that is a nod to Sergio Leone's classic Western, which Kim Ji-woon has obviously seen. And The Good, The Bad, The Weird is indeed a Western...set in 1930s Manchuria. Bonus points for using music from the Kill Bill soundtrack.



Song Kang-ho, the father in The Host, plays "the Weird," Yoon Tae-gu, who steals a treasure map from a Japanese official. The Good, Park Do-won, is after the map for a Korean nationalist group (remember, in the 1930s, Korea was still an unhappy colony of Japan), while the Bad, Park Chang-yi is after it for a mob boss. (The actor who plays Park Chang-yi plays Storm Shadow in the new G.I. Joe movie, actually. Never mind that Storm Shadow is Japanese.) It's a solid action flick with a sense of humor and a tight story. No weird, gruesome violence, just good old-fashioned gun-slinging. It came out in 2008, so it should be in the states by now, though it will take a bit of looking.