48 Hours Filming in jeju-do

After filming a commercial for Korean tv here and having it never see the light of day, I was nervous about telling many people that another channel had contacted me for a program. But I just got back from 48 hours in Jeju-do, the same island of the south of the peninsula that I traveled to a month ago. Along with another American student, I spent two days going all over the country filming a travelogue, and as I found myself saying too often on camera, "it was a great time."


Going anywhere with a camera crew is strange, and it felt like a different island from the first time I went there. The best record of the trip is going to be the show when it finally comes out, (I hope!) which should be in about a month. Until then, the full extent of my public embarassment and fooling around in front of a camera will have to remain hidden.

During the course of our days running around the island, they had us riding horses, touring on a great yacht, eating urchins fresh from the sea with some of the island's freediving old women, and finally, meeting up with a hiking club for some mountains.


Meeting the older women (called haenyo) in particular was a great time. These ladies pluck urchins and octopus and all manner of fresh, crunchy things off the seabed and serve them up right on the beaches for tourists. The women above is pouring some hotsauce to be added to fresh seaweed, much better than you might think.


Weirdly enough, the woman who showed us how to ride horses spoke the best English of anyone on the island. That's her in the helmet.


The hiking club was thoroughly surprised that I and the other actor could speak Korean, and spent most of our time together asking about how we managed this seemingly impossible feat. Every time I travel and meet Koreans who are floored when I speak more than a few words, I am reminded that the bar here for white people knowing the language is very very low.

Here is a picture of all of us after we got back to Seoul, the guy on the far right is the other actor, named Paul. The man and woman in the middle are Eung Jeong and Cheol Hoo, our producers. They shepherded us around the island and provided the single piece of acting advice, "act naturally!" like anything that I did was natural to me.


(it occurs to me that we look giant in this picture compared to our Korean producers, they were a little bit shorter, but the difference is more a result of perspective when the picture was taken).

latest Hatchet article

Hello, this is a link to the latest article published in my university newspaper, The GW Hatchet. I am discussing a trip to an expatriate bar in Apgujeong, one of the more upscale neighborhoods in Seoul famous for its plastic surgery clinics.

If anyone who reads these pages ever has a question, just post it and I can provide some more details^^

Travel part 3-Jejudo

The final stop of my cross country trip was Jeju-do, an island that is a three hour ferry ride from the south of the peninsula. Jejudo is normally about ten degrees warmer than the rest of the country, and is the only place that could be called tropical.

Jejudo is famously known in the rest of Korea for three things, stone, women, and tangerines. Stone because it is a volcanic island, replete with carved statues of the ancient residents. Women, because Jejudo for a long time farmed shellfish from the ocean floor as a means of survival. Diving for shellfish, which was done with just a knife and a pair of lungs up until recently, was a job that women were thought to be biologically better suited for, increasing their importance in the community as breadwinners. And tangerines, because there are an unbelievable amount of the things growin on the island. Hanging on tress next to the sidewalks, overflowing roadside stalls every mile or two, we were even given a crate as a desert gift by the owner of a restaurant we visited.




While I did enjoy all of Jejudo's three famous attractions, we spent more time among the natural beauty of the island. Watefalls that pour right into the sea, tumble-down sandstone cliffs, and when the snow got too bad, a great botanical garden, (the trimmed pine trees).


There was one strange stop we made on the island, a replica of the ship that carried the first Europeans to Korea. After learning about a group of Dutch sailors who were imprisoned for a dozen years by the isolationist government, we walked around the nearby cliffs and saw what might have been a shop dedicated to the Netherlands, I'm not sure. The sign is talking about the Netherlands, and I get the windmill, but I'm not quite sure how dinosaurs or a boxing Nixon represent the country. Nearby was proof that the Vikings even pillaged Asia, further testament ot the prowess of the Danes.

Yes, that is an amusement park ride.

my travelogue Part 2

So... continuing my post from a month ago, here is the second part of my trip around the country. There are a lot of windy, barren views in these pictures, but the countryside isn't nearly so lifeless. About three months from now the whole countryside will be a brilliant green due to all of the rice fields.

After heading to Andong, which is a very traditional area near central Korea, my mother and I continue our drive.

Yeosu is a port city that is just about as far south as you can go on the Korean peninsula.

Fishing trawlers lined up off shore to enter the port city, and silos clustered around where they would later dock in the city.


Nearby the city were a few secluded beaches, which looked like they would have been great during the summer. The picture above shows fish drying on a line by one of those beaches, they're abandoned during the winter.

This little guy jealously guarded an old farmhouse by the beach, up until my mother, with her deep for all things dog, convinced him to come up to us. It is very rare to see dogs in Korea, most of the ones in Seoul are strays. Unfortunately, eating dogs is still pretty popular among older Koreans and in certain traditional areas. I took care to avoid showing my mother those traditional butcher shops.

Spicy red peppers are used in literally 90% of all dishes in Korea. The above sacks were about as big as my whole body, deposited outside of a kimchi store near Yeosu. We bought some bulk kimchi there for my host family and for my mother to take back to America. There literally is nothing more Korean than Kimchi in my mind, extremely potent, always available, and not easy for foreign palates at the first bite.

One last picture of Yeosu at night, this is near the hotel where we stayed.