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.

Anarchy in the S.K.

Seoul National University students are a reserved bunch of people, on average. No one shuffles to class in pajamas and a t-shirt like they might at GW, no couple dares to do more than hold hands in public, and the chic daily dress code leaves me looking like a country bumpkin. So when I heard that the music department was putting on a rock concert, I had to see exactly how some of the most tightly wound students I've ever met manage to cut loose.


I went to the concert this past Friday night with some other international students and a Korean friend. From the stares we got as we entered the hall, I don't think many foreigners come to the shows.

The music department at SNU, like every other department of the university, attracts some of the most talented young people in the country. Since the band deserved a screaming crowd, my friends and I had to oblige, even if the rest of the students there seemed to have a different way of enjoying rock concerts.


Picture half a dozen foreign students yelling their heads off to covers of Fall Out Boy, the Vines, and "Myeongdong Calling" (rather than London, Myeongdong is a district in Seoul) as well as a bunch of homegrown rock songs, (don't know if they were covers or the band's creation). The rest of the audience gave us a wide berth, creating a ten foot buffer zone between the rest of the SNU students and the crazy foreigners.

The guy in the black shirt just above has to get a lot of credit for getting us excited, he was a drummer for a different band who just couldn't stop jumping around. He and a friend seemed ecstatic that there were exchange students there who seemed to love the music as much as they did.The bassist works in the international sutdent office, I barely recognized her out from behind a desk and up on stage. The biggest surprise was the singers for the two bands that played that night, two guys about my age who acted as though the audience was thousands, not a few dozen. In between writhing on the floor during solos and screaming out a pretty good Bon Jovi impersonation, they managed to jump down from the stage and dance with us.

It was great to see that Korean students have the same love of live music and personal expression that exists on my home campus. I have to say that seeing such a different side of the student body reassured me that I wasn't studying with the pressurized human automatons that a lot of stories at SNU had me believe.

The fact that many songs were in English really threw me for a loop. There were some other international students and many SNU native students there who can understand English, but I was the only native speaker there. Here I was, five thousand miles from home, listening to the same songs I used to play on my ipod on the way to high school.

I'm sure the SNU student band isn't the only one of its kind in the country. Somewhere out there are other bands who belt out solos of 80s glam rock to an audience that may not even understand what they are saying, but who still love the songs.

(photos courtesy of a friend of mine, Iris Youh)

B-Boys, TV

I wanted to wait until it was sure that I was getting this before I posted, but I filmed a part for a tv show on Channel SBS this afternoon. I got a call this past Wednesday from an SBS producer who got my number through my homestay broker. They were putting together a show in a series of educational/entertaining variety shows that are pretty common here. Essentially, I and two other foreigners ate a lot of Korean food until we were stuffed, then chugged a bottle of this medicinal syrup they use here for upset stomachs, all on camera.

The syrup didn't really do anything except leave a strange taste in my mouth, but the producer apparently liked what I did. There was a lot of exaggerated "I'm way too full" acting involved, nothing too complicated. As I was getting ready to leave the little studio where they did the filming, the producer asked me if I would be interested in doing other acting for them, as a part time job. Needless to say, the idea of getting paid to do really weird/interesting things on camera really appeals to me. I got pretty decently paid for the three hours of work today, and I should get about as much as I would tutoring English if they decide to call me back in the future.

I realize that the only reasons why I interested the producer was because I am very obviously a foreigner and can speak a bare minimum of Korean, acting ability doesn't really come into play. I felt a little guilty after she offered me the job because she didn't say anything similar to the other two people who worked on the show, a Malaysian guy and a Japanese woman. Both of them had perfect Korean, maybe a little too perfect for a show that is trying to demonstrate how foreigners interact with a new culture. I will mention it in the future if I ever get a call back from SBS.

In case anyone is able to watch the clip in Korea, (it should be about ten minutes), it will be on channel SBS in early October, I still need to hear about the exact date and time. I will also try to upload it here.

Later in the day, I went to the KB B-Boy World Masters 2008, an international B-Boy competition that goes on at the Seoul Olympic Stadium. Eight teams, including China, Japan, Netherlands, Korea, and France (defending champions) spent a few hours breakdancing in front of a wild crowd. Unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera and no clips are up yet on Youtube, but there is some good video up from last year's competition.

(official poster)
Korea is pretty famous for its breakdancing, I certainly wasn't disappointed. I was surprised at how many other artists they had performing besides the b-boys. Big Bang, Mighty Mouth, and a few others, all really popular Korean pop artists. The lineup made for strange audience, young girls and middle-aged women who were there for the boy bands, and a crowd of 20 somethings who were there for the b-boys. Either way, I had a great time. They have a half dozen or so similar international competitions here each year, so hopefully I grab my own video and upload it in the future.

In case you are wondering, a Korean breakdancing team was the winner, with the Americans coming in second (we were robbed, as were the French). Breakdancing at this level is pretty incredible, headspins for a minute at a time, double back flips ten feet in the air, it's not really dancing at that point, but it sure is fun to watch.

Doctor Fish

I promised someone that I would talk about another unique experience I've had here, having my feet eaten by fish voluntarily.

At many spas and a few cafes in Seoul there is a sign that says "Dr. Fish." Dr. Fish, as they are called, are actually a species of fish that love to eat dead skin from your feet, dead skin and nothing else, (fortunately). For about five dollars you can go to a cafe, have a drink, and talk with friends while these little guys go to work.

The only picture I have is actually one that I didn't take, I was so distracted during the experience that I forgot to take any shots. This is one that I got from Wikipedia, but it looks the same.

It looks a little strange, and it feels like nothing else in the world, but it's definitely worth a try. I would say the closest sensation is having your feet licked by dozens of scratchy little cat tongues. A funny part of the experience if you do it with friends is that you get to see who has the most dead skin on their feet, as the fish are highly selective about what they eat. When I went, one girl attracted an unbelievable amount of fish, but kept insisting it was only because she wore heels a lot. Funny stuff