We are a planning species.
We hopped the subway in rush hour and headed down to Seoul Station to catch the bullet train. The bullet train runs at speeds of almost 300 kilometers per hour which are, I think, a bit above rush hour speeds in the States. I have a lovely avi file of this which may or may not work the way I am forced to upload things around here.
MOVIE
The south looks much more traditional than the north. The houses have temple/palace style roofs even if some of them are jarring colors (primarily bright blue and a more muted red) and made of modern materials. There are farms scattered about and the kind of run down outbuildings that are associated with them. And of course, every so often, jutting up out of nowhere, apartment forests and heavy industry. The smog is not as bad as in Seoul, but it is still pretty gruesome. Oh, the place is Gyeong Ju City and it is very pretty
We wandered around for hours in the museum here which contained lesser versions of the displays we had seen in Yongyam. The Korean obsession with the tiles on the roofs of palaces has to be experienced to be understood. I'd say fully one-third of one building is dedicated entirely to roof tiles and to the tiles that rest on the face where roofs end.
This is a shot of the recreated pagodas on the patio between the museum buildings.
I found the fire on the other shore of the river to be more interesting. I couldn't tell if the fire was to burn off crop-stubble or had been accidentally set, but over on the right you can see three farmers(?) attempting to douse (or control) the fire with bowls of water.
We walked on to the Anapji Pond which seemed a bit barren. Appropriate, since most of it was gone.
TWO LONELY BUILDINGS ON THE LAKE
Then it was on to the world's largest Kimchee pot (Ed claims it is the first known observatory in East Asia)
and a park full of tombs. The tombs are interesting.. stone centers covered over with enormous humps of earth.
FInally it was off to our "condo" which is basically a big, ugly apartment in the middle of a construction zone. I posted last night's stuff from its PC Bang, which was a nightmare.
32 meg computers and surrounded by 8-million screaming Korean kids who were all playing computer games. The mouse didn't work initially, requiring a reboot, and it never functioned properly. This resulted in my doing some clumsy work in Blogger that has half the fonts in my last post at an invisibly small size.
I went to try to fix it this morning, but the PC Bang is closed.
POSSLQ's illness returned, but was miraculously cured. Ed purchased a bottle (vial?) of hideous brown liquid and despatched POSSLQ to the bathroom to take it. 3 minutes later she starts yelling frantically, "bring me a chaser, bring me a chaser." Ed rushed in with a glass of water and she slugged it down. Two minutes later she exited the bathroom and declared herself cured. And somehow was.
Even though a later inspection revealed that she had consumed, in all, about 10 drops of the medicine which remained, virtually untouched, in its bottle on the bathroom shelf.
TRAMPLING ON KOREAN FLOORS
I can't be the only western person who, when all the Koreans are out, is tempted to put my shoes back on and stomp all over everything in spiteful glee? But I pretty much fight that kind of urge back as ungenerous and culturally insensitive. It is this kind of urge that plays itself out on every page of Michael Breen's "The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies." The title is amusing enough with its amusing implication that the author can speak to all of this. This is an implication that seems unlikely to be accurate, since Breen has problems with understanding most of Korea.
Breen has formula that he uses throughout the book.
He begins by accusing Koreans of some racial deficiency (i.e. they don't have as large a personal territorial imperative), then he quotes some anecdotal evidence from an un-named friend, and finally he pulls the "some of my best friend are Koreans" card to establish that he is not a bad guy, and neither are the 'house' Koreans.
This is not to say, of course, that there aren't differences between how Korea as an uninvolved social mass will treat you compared to how individual Koreans will treat you. This is true in any country and in Korea the difference is particularly stark. But Breen just continues to note new or different manifestations of this difference with amazement and shock. Breen intellectually understands where this comes from, the 5 Confucian relations determine that Korea will run this way as they are all essentially personal in nature (with the exception of relationship to the state). But physically and emotionally he is consistently surprised and upset by it. Breen lived in Korea long enough that he should no longer be concerned by what happens on crowded subway cars. It took me about two day to figure out rush hour was going to be crowded and hectic and that the lack of personal relationship between me and any other commuter was going to mean we pushed past each other with roughish unconcern. To Breen this is an unendurable daily torture which he says cannot be gotten used to in even 20 years (p. 27).
That speaks to a certain lack of flexibility.
And his tone is, to use a literary term, shitty. Anyone who can drop a line like "It is too insulting to suggest that an entire people are barking into the pillow" (with its sly hidden insinuation that such a suggestion only goes slightly beyond just insulting enough) (p. 11) is not happy with his subject.
Anyway, I'm only 50 pages in and while I enjoy his snarky tone I can't say I like his argument. Breen does make one interesting claim that I will be able to check. I read in one place that the Koreans say "Have you had rice today" as a greeting because rice is so culturally important to them. In Breen I read that South Koreans say this because of the starvation that was widespread after the Korean War. It turns out Breen is right.
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