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).