Comparing and contrasting Daejeon and Portland
Last night I met a couple people from Portland (there seems to be a lot of us here). Strangely, one person I met grew up in Castle Rock, Colorado, half an hour's drive North of Colorado Springs (actually, the two towns are threatening to merge together because they have been expanding so much). He then went to Lewis and Clark college in Portland, OR, where he was a philosophy major. He and his wife actually flew to Korea on the same day as me from the same airport (Denver International Airport), though we were on different flights. Also, this is their second year in Korea, so they've been here a year and three months. Quite the coincidence, nonetheless. Anyway, meeting people from Portland got me thinking about the city.
Portland and Daejeon are of a pretty similar size. Daejeon's population is 1.5 million, while the Portland metro area has 2 million residents (only .5 million in Portland proper), though Daejeon has nearly double the population density. Both cities also have cherry blossoms and river front parks with bike paths.
Today Will and I biked over to the campus of Chungnam University--one of about a dozen universities in the city, and probably one of the largest and most prestigious--for the cherry blossom festival there. Cherry blossoms are bitter sweet for the Korean people because on one hand they are pretty, but on the other hand they are a reminder of the Japanese occupations of the country.
The festival mostly consisted of people coming to see the streets that are lined with blossoms and a few street vendors.
I really enjoyed the campus. There are sculptures everywhere, many of which are good or entertaining.
In some ways it looked like any college campus anywhere.
Other parts are pretty distinctively Asian.
This ROTC poster combined with the cherry blossoms made me think of prospie week at Reed. (Reed ROTC: because killing Arabs is fun). Oh, prospie week. Good times.
Other fun signs included a classic Pedophiles Area sign--which isn't quite as good as the ones in Europe where a man in a hat is holding the hand of a girl who clearly is trying to pull away--and the omnipresent 'information' signs where the only word in English is 'Information'. So helpful.
After leaving the university, Will and I biked downtown to the bike path along the river. We saw a couple dozen cranes on the way.
A strange thing about Koreans is that they haven't really made up their minds about how pedestrians and bicycles should pass when going in opposite directions. It seems that traditionally everyone stayed to the left, even though cars all stay to the right as in the US. The crosswalks are all labeled so that pedestrians should all stay to their right, though. Apparently there was an effort to get people to change to staying to their right, but it didn't take and now everyone is just confused and awkward every time they pass each other. The bike path along the river is particularly confusing because it has arrows going each way at different points. In some places the arrows are actually overlaid on each other, both faded but distinct, so that the directions are about as clear as the Scarecrow's from the Wizard of Oz. We managed not to crash into anyone despite the confusion. We also thankfully managed not to do this:
After the 20k+ ride we went shopping, giving me the opportunity to document one of the oddities of stores in Korea. Stores here all promote items by strapping a free product to them with packaging tape. Sometimes the extra bit is more of the same, like single serving carton of orange juice strapped to a two litter bottle of orange juice. Sometimes, however, there is no obvious connection, like jerky and crackers coming free with cases of beer:
Also in the store, there are lockers for any possessions that you don't want to carry with you while shopping. There are also lockers to keep your small pets, which look pretty much the same but with airholes.
We saw another Korean oddity on the way back from Lotte Mart. For some reason apartment buildings here don't have freight elevators. In fact, the elevators are all tiny and have low weight capacities. Given this, and their penchant for having thirty story apartment buildings, Koreans have come up with an interesting system for moving into and out of apartments:
Oh yeah, have I mentioned that in Korea people have no problem painting all over buildings? The building number can be seen from a quarter mile away, and sometimes there are pictures too.
4 comments:
I think its amusing that the ROTC poster says 'ROTC'. While Americans sometimes adopt Asian characters for things like tattoos, it doesn't seem to me that you ever know what they mean unless someone (usually the person with the tattoo, who learned it from the tattoo artist) tells you. Asian countries, on the other hand, seem to adopt English characters for a lot of things. Do you have any insights into this phenomenon?
If you look closely at the picture you can see that "Reserve Officer's Training Corp" is also written in English. You have to remember that English is the trade language for most of the world right now. Most of the official signs in Korea are also written in English as the language for non-Koreans to read. The ROTC poster was probably meant to be internationally understood, though I can't imagine why (it's not like an exchange student is going to join the Korean army).
On the other hand, some of the use of English here is just like the random use of Japanese script on t-shirts in the US. There are orders of magnitude more t-shirts with English written on them than there are ones with Hangul letters, and most of the shirts are completely incoherent. People have English writing for the sake of it being English writing, irrespective of content. I saw baseball caps for the Colorado School of Mines at a gift shop: obviously the content doesn't matter. This phenomenon I can't really explain, other than that looking Western is a bit of a fad in Korea right now.
I remember seeing a tshirt in Korea that said "It's style, not content, and I'm content with my style." It struck me as quite weird because of it grammatical correctness and accurate use of two different words that are spelled the same - but was still something I don't think any native speaker would wear. I also thought of Landon and his saying during renn fayre that the content didn't matter at all. I still remember it because of how strange it was.
Eliot, that t-shirt you saw demonstrates a grasp of English orders of magnitude better than any I've heard from Koreans here. I think native speakers might wear it. And yeah, I immediately thought of what I said during Renn Fayre too, even before I read that part of your comment.
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