Things I see on the way to work

A couple days ago Will and I were biking to ECC and passed the elementary school for the neighborhood. In the playground we saw what must have been the entire student populace standing in rows and dancing and banging drums in unison to what sounded like slightly modernized Buddhist chants played over a loudspeaker. Will turned to me and said "We live in Korea. Know how I can tell?"

Today I saw a bat about a block earlier on the bike ride. I thought it was a large erratic black butterfly at first because it was 11am on a sunny day, but on further inspection it was indeed a small bat. It moved too quickly to get a great look at it, but as Eliot posted a couple months ago, bats are so cool.

Update: Well, this is embarrassing, but in the interest of emulating others who admit their mistakes I will disclose that the 'bat' I saw was in fact a bug. I got a closer look at one, and it turned out to be a massive moth rather than a tiny bat. Oops. Well, at least I'm in good company with the mistake (albeit in the other direction):

Yet another example of the porousness of certain borders

When discussing what it would take to make Americans stop being so damned apathetic about politics I often say that it would take a global pandemic. Now that I have seen the definition of a global pandemic, though, I think that wouldn't be enough. I think it would take a pandemic that wiped out at least a fifth of the population of the US.

World Health Organization pandemic alert phases

• Phase 1: No viruses circulating among animals causing infections in humans
• Phase 2: Animal influenza virus causes infection in humans, and is considered potential pandemic threat
• Phase 3: Influenza causes sporadic cases in people, but no significant human-to-human transmission
• Phase 4: Verified human-to-human transmission able to cause community-level outbreaks. Significant increase in risk of a pandemic
• Phase 5: Human-to-human transmission in at least two countries. Strong signal pandemic imminent
• Phase 6: Virus spreads to another country in a different region. Global pandemic under way

Given the amount and ease of travel in the world today it is difficult to imagine any Phase 4 disease (such as the Swine flu as of today) not progressing to Phase 6 by this definition unless the initial outbreak occurred somewhere without an airport. Fun thought of the day.

(Note: the title of this post is from a story by David Foster Wallace. As Wittgensteinians, DFW and I believe that pretty much all 'borders' are completely porous.)

Odd seafood and islands

This weekend a bunch of people from the Korean class I used to go to, the Korean friend and neighbor of one of said Korean class attendees, some of my coworkers, and I went to the South coast, a little East of where I was last weekend. On Saturday morning I biked at least 10k to meet up with the rest of the group. Along the way I saw a lot of cranes in the river:
We rented a van and Chris--the Korean among us--drove us three hours down to Tong-Yeong, a city on the tip of a mini peninsula on the Korean peninsula (there are a ton of these). In Tong-Yeong we saw a reconstruction of the famous turtle ships of the 1590s war (see last weekend's post). Inside there were a few displays period naval costumes:
We wandered through a fascinating fish market where all the fish were alive in tiny baskets. It stretched like this for quite some ways. We proceeded to enter a restaurant directly to left of the pictured fish. This was by far one of the strangest meals I've ever had. The most normal element was the huge plate of raw fish, which we dipped in soy sauce and wasabi, so it tasted like sushi without the rice. More interesting was this plate:The orange stuff looked like this moments before we ate it:
The pink stuff was so fresh that it was still moving, and looked like this before being carved up:
I have no clue about the gray stuff. It was the weirdest of the three. It was slimy on the outside and crunchy on the inside. The pink stuff was pretty bland in both flavor and texture. The orange stuff tasted like a mouthful of seawater, only stronger. The next odd dish was live octopus. Really, I don't think it was alive, or at least if it was it was dying, because it was all cut up. They still squirmed around quite a bit, though.

They also still had functioning suction cups, which made them difficult to pry from the plate and each other. One suctioned to my tongue, and I lack the vocabulary and creativity to describe the sensation. Lindsay's reaction is my favorite:From Tang-Yeong we drove onto Yeonhwa Island, a massive island, where we would be staying. On the way Chris asked for directions literally dozens of times. I honestly think he asked for directions almost as many times during this trip as I have over my entire life (seriously; a conservative estimate would be thirty times in the two days). This was especially odd since we had maps and a gps live map in the van. I think he was trying to get a lot of local advice on the best places to go (it is hard to say since the conversations were all in Korean). Also, the tone of voice that Koreans use seems bizarre to Westerners. When asking for directions or restaurant suggestions he shouted in a manner that sounded angry and impatient. Imagine the following conversation:

A: "Excuse me, could you please tell me where the Tang-Yeong fish market is?"
B: "Why yes. You see, my grandfather was a fisherman here, and my grandmother sold fish in the market-"
A: "Right, but where-"
B: [more rambling]
A: "umm... that's a nice story, but could you give me directions please?"
B: [more rambling]
A: "Just tell me where the damn fish market is already!"

On the basis of tone, it sounded like Chris started with "Just tell me where the damn fish market is already!" It was the tone of voice you would use with someone who was being incompetent at doing something that they clearly owed you; it dripped with entitlement and impatience. I've experienced this a lot in Korea with various Koreans. I think it is that there is a clear hierarchy, so a well off man in his thirties really is entitled to make demands in situations where I would think of myself as humbly asking a favor. Also, the tonality of English and Korean is just different. Many Korean conversations sound very angry to Westerners when they are really not angry at all. Jeff gave the example of his coworkers having a conversation where it sounded like one of them had been caught with the other's husband, but they were really just asking how their weekends were. Also, Korean sounds whiny. Normal Korean speech has the same tone of the most petulant Western child you will ever meet.

Anyway, we eventually made it to our condo after Chris called three times and had them come meet us to direct us there. [Note: generally Chris was great: he organized the trip, drove for us, acted as interpreter, got us discounts by virtue of being Korean, and is a friendly and generous person. The seemingly angrily asking for directions all the time thing got annoying though.] The condo was a two story cement house that was minimally decorated (bare cement stairs with rebar handrails, etc), but it was right on the ocean.
We dropped off our stuff and took a drive to a scenic point (I thought we were hanging out at the condo, so I didn't bring my camera. Sorry.). Chris took us to a museum of Korean history, European history, Jim Carrey and god knows what else. It had statues of Greek mythological beasts, a pirate ship and transformer rip offs outside. However, none of the rest of us wanted to be inside on such a gorgeous afternoon so we went down to some great rock formations on the ocean just below the museum. After an hour of lazing about and looking at tide pools we went to Windy Hill to watch the sunset. WoW enthusiasts be warned, Windy Hill has some odd rules:
We had dinner at The Meat Rack, which is possibly the best buffet I've ever been to. It had rows of uncooked marinated meat, which we piled on plates and took back to our tables to grill. Meat good.Back at the condo we went down to the beach and made a fire. We sang songs to guitar music and the lapping of the waves 'til about 1am.
In the morning we went back to Windy Hill to get ferry tickets. While we waited for our ferry we went back to the rocks near the museum. There was a cave with cliffs and deep water, so naturally Jeff and I jumped in. Jeff did backflips from where he is standing on the right, and I simply jumped in from the ledge where Colin is standing on the left.

The water was surprisingly warm (i.e. not freezing) and we dried off by about halfway through the ferry ride. The islands in this area were breathtaking, especially when the boat is driven through narrow gaps between them (almost hitting another boat in the process):The ferry took us to Oedo, an island covered in botanical gardens. My favorite part was the Dr. Seuss-esque bushes:(Actually, these last trees look like they come out of Mario rather than Dr. Seuss.)

There was also an odd fixation on ancient Greece. At least the columns were actual columns, both in the sense of actually being support beams and in that they were Corinthian, not some bastard hybrid of Corinthian, Doric, and Ionic.I think the natural island was far more impressive than any of the things planted or sculpted on it:The ferry and drive back were fairly uneventful. I of course had to bike back home across the city. Along the way I finally remembered to document one of the many driving ranges on top of buildings:

Update: The larger newly added photos are courtesy of Scott

Socks

I've mentioned before that Korean grocery stores often strap bonus items onto a product with packaging tape. This week my cereal came with socks:
If anyone wants them, they're yours.

Adventures in Solitude

My school had Friday off, so I went off on what I consider a trial run for my future travels in Asia. I had been wondering if I could still travel in the manner I had in Europe in the summer of 2006. It looks like I can, at least for three day stretches. On Thursday I got on a train at 11pm and tried to take a nap until I arrived at Busan at 2:30am. Busan is the second largest city in Korea. It is in the SouthEast corner of the country on the ocean. I wandered downtown for a little while and tried to see what sights I could at night, such as the busan tower (a tower on top of a hill from which one can have a good view of the city when it is open, presumably), a couple statues, and bridges to one of the nearby islands with nice views of the myriad harbour (to reference another song by The New Pornographers). In a stretch of downtown there is a road where every intersection is a variation on these shifting lights:After exploring I tried to walk across the city to the intercity bus terminal. I took a wrong turn and ended up going down a mini peninsula and back up it. During my walk I had nice views of the full moon and the neon lights that light up any Korean city. I also had a pleasant walk along the craggy coast. As the predawn light lit up the flowering hills I saw that some good came out of my unintentional detour.
Had I been only a little slower I would also have seen the sun rise over the ocean or a park instead of through the buildings, but oh well.
I then passed through the industrial district, which is the part of the detour that I was not so happy about. Almost a third of foreigners in Korea are cheap migrant laborers, largely Russian or African, who do dangerous and dirty jobs that Koreans don't want to do, such as the many Russians I saw on their way to work at the fisheries. By the time I got back to the proper route I simply got on a subway instead of trying to walk the other 10k to the bus station. I slept a bit on the bus to Jinju, a moderately sized town. I mostly went there to see the city's ancient fortress, which is surrounded by modernity:Inside the extensive fortress walls, I became aware of how provincial Jinju is when hundreds of people said hello to me or shouted about me to their friends because I am a Westerner. I'm amazed at how openly people will stare at anyone who looks different from them. If I saw someone who had purple skin I would certainly look at them, but I would be subtle about it so as not to be rude. Here, everyone just stares (I've had this happen plenty of times in Daejeon too, but I felt like two thirds of the people I saw in Jinju had that reaction). I understand it from the children, but adults, far from telling their children to stop, stare right along with them. School children from kindergarten through high school would giggle amongst themselves and then one of them would come up to me and say hello, or hi teacher, and they would all laugh. Sometimes they would have short conversations with me: "How are you?" "I'm doing alright. How are you?" "I'm fine thank you. Where are you from?" "I'm from the United States." Others would simple shout to each other "waegook!", which means foreigner. Several groups of young women (I would guess college aged but they might have been in high school or older than me) asked if they could take their picture with me. They said I was handsome, which I think had a lot more to do with making their friends burst into fits of giggling than anything to do with how they thought I looked. All in all, it was one of my most intense feelings of being a minority. It's uncomfortable enough being singled out by your skin color and other superficial qualities when the attention is positive; I can't imagine how horrible it is to be noticed like that in a negative way. Other than being treated like the first white person all of the people there had ever seen, the fortress was interesting.
The Jinju fortress is most significant because it was the site of one of three victories that Korea had over Japan during the Imjin war in the 1590s. A super brief history of the war: Japan had been newly reunited by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who decided to go on a war of conquest of pretty much all Asia. The first step was to acquire a land route into China, and so he decided to conquer Korea (this is probably the most embarrassing part of the whole embarrassing war for Korea: it wasn't even about them). Japan conquered about two thirds of Korea in the first twenty days, including both Seoul and Pyongyang, before facing a devastating naval loss. They were then slowed down when their five to one numerical superiority was not enough to take Jinju, and hence South Western Korea. The Japanese slowed down at this point, but came back with overwhelming force and slaughtered over 70,000 people at Jinju a year later before being driven off the peninsula, mostly by the Chinese (this is overemphasizing Jinju's importance in the war, but if you care enough about the details you can look it up yourself). Anyway, there are some monuments to some of the war's Korean heroes. The Korean commander during the siege of Jinju was Kim Si-min: There is also a shrine to a female entertainer who seduced a Japanese general and them pulled him with her over a cliff to their deaths. She is also commemorated in this relief:
There were several other images of the war:
A museum had also been built inside the fortress walls. This is one of my favorite kinds of building in Korea: it is clearly modern but also has strong influences from ancient times. It manages to incorporate tradition and modern conveniences and advances without being phony (like the fake columns of neo classical buildings):
The museum had some nice reconstructions and artifacts, like this example of 1590s siege weaponry:It also had an animated 3d movie about the battle, which was pure propaganda unlike anything I've seen in a museum except in the propaganda museum in Nuremberg (which is, ironically, itself a piece of propaganda, but it would be hard to make a museum about Nazis in the current political climate that simply stated the facts without inserting any opinions, and specifically without thoroughly denouncing them). In the movie all the Koreans were brave and noble defenders of their homes while the Japanese leadership was purely evil and the Japanese soldiers were cowardly. Watching the movie you would think that the Koreans won the war, not just that battle. I did my best to keep my opinions of the film to myself, but there was a point where I actually laughed out loud because the dying general sees himself and his family in a field of wheat, ala Gladiator.

After viewing the fortress I ate a meal of eels in a restaurant along the river. Eel tastes pretty much like mild fish. I ate everything you see pictured below, but not the second round of side dishes that were brought out a few minutes later. Korean meals involve far too many side dishes to eat (and usually several of which I truly don't want to eat), which seems a bit at odds with the country's history of Buddhist influence, where great pains are made not to waste any food.
It was then time for another nap in the buses to Jirisan National Park. At the entrance to the park there is a magnificent temple complex with more than thirty buildings.The path up to the temple complex was lined with lanterns, and even the parking lot (above) was nicely decorated.
There were many larger than life (1.5x to 2x sized) statues:There were also equally interesting paintings on the outside of the buildings that housed the statues:...Pagodas, both old and new:...truly ancient monuments:...oversized and heavily decorated musical instruments:...this building with tree trunk support beams:...and other Buddhist stuff:[Note: I am fully aware that there are far too many pictures here. The scary part is that I was selective about which photos I posted. I take way too many pictures of stuff like this. You should see the number of pictures I took of The Acropolis...]

From the temple I went a couple kilometers up a bamboo lined stone path to a waterfall:
As the sun set I backtracked a little ways to a campground, which had a bunch of balanced rocks.I learned at this point that about 90% of the national park was closed for the season, so I will have to come back later to climb South Korea's second highest mountain. I went to sleep and was rather cold despite wearing all the warm weather gear I own and eating peanut butter straight from the jar (sound familiar, European Hobos? I have a lot more warm weather gear with me now though). I got up at about five to walk back down. I took buses and trains to Yeosu, a small city on the center of Korea's South coast. Yeosu is famous for being the base of operations for the admiral who sank most of the Japanese fleet in the 1590s. Here is a reconstruction of his military headquarters:I wandered the city for a while, visiting places like an island that is one big botanical garden.The island has a cave called Dragon Cavern. Legend has it that it was once filled with thousands of centipedes and so the locals stayed away. One day a female pearl diver who was ignorant of the area entered it and fainted at the sight. Her husband and the villagers used fires and smoke to make the centipedes pass out, and the smoke made the cave look like it was inhabited by a dragon. This story was conveyed to me by a volunteer at the island who was eager to be my guide. Here he is in his shiny suit below the island's lighthouse:He asked me to look over the English on his notes, which was pretty much fine, and he told me about a few other sites on the island, such as the 215m long barefoot walk, which is designed to help the blood flow, but from the looks of it the blood will be flowing outside our bodies, not in it:After leaving the island I wandered the city again and ended up on the park that overlooks the island. I'm pretty sure that this is not the path that one is supposed to take up there, but it worked:The path through backyards and ridiculously sloped vegetable fields came out at this gateway overlooking a not yet completed bridge:(Don't tell Sarah Palin about this bridge to nowhere or else she will adamantly support it until it becomes a national laughingstock and then she will claim that part of what makes her a maverick is that she was against it from day one...)
The bridge is one of many construction projects in the city in preparation for the 2012 world expo in Yeosu. There are posters, bumper stickers, building fronts, etc everywhere promoting the expo. If the Daejeon 1993 expo is any indication it will mostly give them weird looking buildings that are trying to look futuristic but end up being nearly abandoned and looking silly fifteen years later. Of course, at least Yeosu will get a new bridge out of the deal... Anyway, the park had lots of monuments, flowers, and pretty views.At the bottom of the park was this house made from a larger destroyed house. Notice the bathroom tile on the garden wall and that the door clearly was once inside. In the evening I took a bus to a much larger island also connected to Yeosu. At the tip is another pretty big temple complex. I arrived after nightfall, so I hiked by the light of the nearly full moon up into the mountains by the sea and slept out. It was a nice night: I didn't have to put on warm clothes until about one a.m., which was the same time I moved locations because my first choice was more steeply sloped that it looked like and I kept slipping a little down hill. At four thirty a.m. I was awoken by the sounds of a group of Korean hikers. I got up and joined them on the top of a mountain to watch the sun rise through the mist, with views in all directions from the highest point on the island.(In this picture I look about how you would expect one to look after doing what I have described above for the previous few days.)Partway down the mountain there was a Buddhist temple complex. The temples I saw this weekend are the most impressive and least commercialized ones I have seen so far in Korea. I have to say that building places of worship partway up a mountain so that one has to climb hundreds of stairs through imposing gateways will definitely increase the awe factor. It helps when pretty much no one else builds on any mountains, so that temples are high above the secular world.This temple had a thing for turtles.Of course, I should talk, given my obvious (from picture frequency) obsession with dragons.This temple also featured several narrow crevasses that one had to pass through to enter different parts of the temple complex.The many lanterns might be permanent, but might be in preparation for Buddha's birthday on May 2nd. Tripod!...and so many turtles:...more random Buddhist stuff:This adorable old man seemed oblivious to the fact that his hat said 'princess' in sparkling script.On the rest of the way down the mountain I had a nice view of the fishing nets in the ocean and of the quintessentially Asian act of hanging seaweed up to dry on clothes lines on the roof: Restaurants and street vendors line the steep path from the bus stop up to the temple, and both carried interesting sea food:
Well this has been my most ridiculously long post to date. I need to be less adventurous, less diligent about taking pictures, or a better self editor when it comes to narrowing down which pictures to include. And to think my last post was on microblogging...