Ride Home

I decided to do something a little different this post.

I put together a little photo essay about my commute to and from school, I've already gotten a little positive feedback so I figured I might as well put it up here. The tone is different from what I've written so far, I'm interested to hear what you all think.

The young woman’s face is swabbed with makeup. Sharp black lines frame her crinkled eyes and perfectly pink cheeks corner her smile, all teeth. Two friends lean against her back in similar looks of ecstasy, they couldn’t imagine having a better time anywhere else. All because of Aritaum beauty products, says the bus stop ad, we dream of you only.

I pull my hood closer and stare away from the women, fluorescently bright against the dusk. It is autumn now, just cold enough to bring on a shiver and make waiting for a cross-town bus interminable.

First one, then two, then half a dozen buses, their illuminated interiors full of reclining passengers like living rooms floating by. I wait outside, my hands shoved deep into sweatshirt pockets, thinking of my own living room, so remote now.

5614 comes out from behind the curve, its number painted in orange lights upon its prow. I am getting on at the first stop, so I have my pick of seats. The driver greets me with “오서 오세요.” Once the bus becomes fully laden and each new rider must elbow their way onboard, the greetings stop and it’s just a silent run to the next terminal.


At each stop, I look up from my window seat and flicker my glance across the students and salarymen who are coming home from work. Unless clinging to a boyfriend or girlfriend, they all file silently into open seats, leaving the spot beside me empty.

Sometimes their gazes lingers for just a second on my face, the moment’s hesitation that tells me how unusual it is to have a white person ride the bus. Once every so often, if every other spot is full of packages and tired riders, someone will sit beside me, pulling their thighs to the other side of the bench.


Outside, neon brightens the way, advertising karaoke rooms and barbecue restaurants to all who pass by. Every ride back from campus brings a new sign, a new smiling animal mascot who entreats me to descend from the bus and discover how he tastes. Other shops peek out from side streets, single bulbs illuminating shelves smothered with plastic pipes and scooter parts.
The girl beside me, her hair dyed a violent shade of brown, straightens her sweater and stares intently at her cellphone.

My professors say that long ago, everyone read on the bus, before you could plug your ears into music and watch television in the palm of your hand. American singers are piped into my head and I think of how strange their crooning sounds amidst the quivering anthems of pop starlets on the bus radio. Sing to me of the silence down on Bleecker Street, sing to me of summer flings before college, sing the same songs I listened to in my real hometown.

Now my apartment block swings into view, uniform beige and brown towers that house the legions of men and women who work in Seoul. I step off the bus and cast my eyes upward, to where a lit kitchen window can show my host mother starting dinner.


I walk through one last wall of neon, 고기사랑, 안경 1001, and 꽃. Then I am in the courtyard, and the pulsing roar of buses and mopeds is quieted for the night. A little boy, wrapped up in nothing but a taekwondo robe, comes home after class, walking beside me for a moment before disappearing into his apartment doorway.

Fourteen floors later, I am home. My homestay 이모 calls out a hello from the kitchen and asks me if I’ve eaten dinner. For a second, I am just glad to talk to someone else, to explain in halting Korean that everything is alright, for now.

Ssireum

A few weeks ago I tried out ssireum, a traditional Korean type of wrestling. I was at a Special Olympics-esque event on my campus, and the organizers asked me if I would be willing to do an exhibition match with a student from the physical education school. So that afternoon, I and another French exchange student tied on a sapa, (the cloth around your waist) and set about learning how wrestle.

Ssireum has more in common with Greco-Roman style wrestling than with sumo, requiring a lot of heaving and lifting of the other guy. I had a great time, but as you might guess from the pictures, my opponent had about eighty pounds on me and quickly ended my wrestling career. The crowd of children and their parents loved it though.

There was also a tournament for the fathers, which they took very seriously.

The goal of ssireum is to have the other person's back touch the san, while not removing your hands from the cloth tied around his waist. Essentially, you try to knock him off balance or hurl him over one shoulder.

One other picture is of the mothers in their arm-wrestling tournament, which was definitely the most competitive event of the day. Picture dozens of middle-aged Korean women, screaming at each other and shouting in unison for their champion. The students who had organized the event just stood around during the final round, shocked by the competitive spirit that had come out in women who would otherwise have been sitting in the shade, sharing lunch and watching their children play.


And then there is me, that incredulous look started when I first saw my opponent and didn't end until I was on my back in the sand. haha


Once again, I had to rely on my friends for these pictures. Some come from Sophie Corlay, and my picture comes from Nathanael Francisco, both of them exchange students.

Gwanaksan

Overlooking my campus is a mountain called Gwanaksan, which cradles the whole campus in really interesting way. After a month of just watching the green wall around my university, I finally hiked up one of the peaks, which I found out is actually a huge hobby for older people here. A map of the mountains, the buildings in the center are my university, I climbed the peak on the right.

Older Korean people never seem to stay inside and watch TV or retire in the American sense of the word. All throughout the day, convoys of older women and men, outfitted in violent shades of pink and blue, hike up the mountains around the city or bike for the whole day. Once the sun goes down, the men fill up barbecue restaurants all around the city and drink soju over chunks of spiced thickly-sliced bacon.

Hiking is weird fun here, maybe it's the fact that they leave trails full of rocks to be leaped over or that everyone drinks rice wine and passes out once they reach the summit, but its a hobby worth looking into.
Along the path, you can see small piles of pebbles that are stacked loosely. I think the practice has to do with Buddhism, but I don't know for sure.


The view from the top is pretty amazing, every so often, you hear someone shout "Yahuuuu!" from the top. Kind of like a glorious yodel of victory, but it confused the heck out of me the first time I heard it.

Autumn is starting in Korea, a little bit later than in America. It's supposed to be the most beautiful season, with none of the oppressive heat of summer or the bitter, dry cold of winter. There are enough mountains rising around Seoul so that you can see the foliage changing from almost anywhere in the city.

The tradition for hikers who have come down from a hard trek is to drink makkeoli, a milky rice wine that is really popular in rural areas. Supposedly, the liquor restores the energy you lost hiking, there are a lot of similar folk medicine/food remedies for problems in daily life here.

I found out that Koreans with a stomach ache will try to squeeze all the blood in their arm to the point of one finger, then prick that finger with a needle to release the black blood inside, (just a drop or two). I have never seen the black blood, but I have heard people swear it comes out and that it helps.

Linguistics!

Sorry for the long silence, I've been reluctant to post without having any good pictures.

Anyway, life in Korea continues much the same, just as busy, just a little colder as autumn arrives. Learning a language that evolved seperately from the Romance languages results in a lot of interesting terms that can't be translated or just simply don't exist in English. For instance, there is a common term in Korean for the time during a change of seasons and for days in which the temperature can fluctuate a great deal from the morning to the night. Both terms are regularly blamed for flu/cold symptoms during this time of year, bringing up the interesting question of whether more people get sick here than they do in America, just because English lacks those notions.

Sometimes the vast language differences can be bridged in fun ways. Tonight, I had dinner with a group of Korean friends at a tak kalbi restaurant. I would post pictures from Google, but it wouldn't do the food justice. Essentially, tak kalbi is spicy chicken mixed with rice and roodles, cooked over a central burner on the table and shared between a group of people. Over our meal I was introduced to some new comers and set about meeting people. As the youngest member of the group, I was obligated to speak in honorific terms to the people around me and make sure their glasses were always full. Mistakenly speaking in more informal language may sound like an obvious mistake, but with Korean, the word structure is very similar. When I would speak to a woman two years older than me as if she were my same age, she would give out an aggrieved cry of dismay. Being a foreigner excuses a lot of social faux pas, so they were just enjoying giving me a hard time, but I am learning, slowly.

Incidentally, the language difference based on age is the reason why Korean people will ask someone's age within minutes of meeting them for the first time. Just being a year older can make a great deal of difference. This age-finding imperative also comes up when people get into fights. The equivalent of saying "let's take this outside" is "how old are you," the implied message is "you're younger than me, so watch yourself."

Like I said before, there are times when learning the intricacies of the language can be fun, there are then times when it is anything bit enjoyable. There are three ways to say "good night" in Korean, all meaning exactly the same thing. The only difference is when they should be used, "anhyunghi jumunuseyo" to a mother, father, grandparent, "jal jalleyo" to an older sibling, business contact, and "jal ja" to a close friend or younger sibling. The same levels of greeting are used for "good day." I am a person who really likes saying hello, at all times of day and to strangers, if possible. Since coming to Korea, I really just got tired of being criticized for speaking too formally or too informally. When you are about to go to sleep and instead get a lecture on jondemal, the intricacies of honorific vocabulary, it can be less the pleasant.

While I said that there are ways to translate "good day" into Korean, it is actually the same expression as "hello" and "goodbye" meaning literally, "please have peace." The English fixation on having time-appropriate greetings doesn't show up in Korean. Conversely, Korean has a wide range of ways to say "my stomach is full." Seoul isn't a very gluttonous place, but for some reason, I will never hear my friends or host family end a meal without a sigh and a cry of "peh buloh." The are other ways, meaning, "I'm so full I could die" or, "I can't eat more," mroe varied than show up in English. Speaking with French friends here, I was interested to hear that "I'm full" is much less common/colloquial in their language, implying a. that eating to the point of fullness is less common or b. that announcing one's fullness is less important/accepted. All of the lessons from Anthropology 101 are coming back to me.

I apologize again for the lack of my own pictures, but I can't have a post of solid text.
Here are my host mother and brother at the jeongyejeong, (Seoul City Canal/Stream) last winter
My host brother looks mildly surprised, this is a common emotion for him.