Part Two: Flexible Spines, It's in the Bag, Meeting with Eddie's brother

The Theme of this trip will be "happy, happy, Jae, Jae" and in that spirit I include a picture of the Joy Mart

My heart sings with the voice of thick liquid barely squeezing by fatty deposits!

Jae and Ed and I headed off on foot to Insadong (a nice artsy shopping row) and lunch. We wandered a bit and then Jae had to head off to the bullet train to go back down to Kwangju and her parents. Eddie and I headed towards the new bookstore in town ("Something and Lundi") and he looked for pieces for possible translation and I looked for the book I would use in my Survey of Critical Approaches course. I found one and then headed back to email the prof to make sure it was ok. Eddie stayed at the bookstore because his job was a bigger one. I spent the remainder of the afternoon doing coursework and having inexplicable trouble with font-loading in Word, a problem that is also going on today.

Tomorrow Ed is heading off to see some of his teachers. This has cause a big ruckus. There is a pre-wedding exchange of valuables to a Korean marriage and rather than try to explain it myself I will indulge in a bit of copyright infringement.

Before the wedding, the groom's family sent presents to the bride and her family in a box called a Ham. Additionally, the Hamjinabi (person who delivered the Ham) and a small group of close friends of the groom also took a pot of Bongch'i Deok (red bean rice cake) from the groom's family. The bride's family would have a small party for the group, offering them food and drink for their efforts. The ceremony of delivering the Ham has evolved into a major event for friends of the groom, with the bearers "selling" the contents of Ham to the bride's parents. (In recent years, the groups have become very boisterous, demanding large sums of money that they promptly spend on alcohol.)

The Ham usually contained 3 items. The Honseo (marriage paper), wrapped in black silk, specified the name of the sender and the purpose (marriage) of sending. It symbolized the dedication of the wife to only one husband. The wife was to keep this document with her forever, having it buried with her when she died. Ch'aedan was a collection of red and blue fabrics, used to make clothing. The blue fabrics were wrapped with red threads, while the red fabrics were wrapped with blue threads. The two colors represented the philosophy of Eum/Yang (Yin/Yang)

So, as always seems to be the case with me, the issue is Ham. This has to get to Jae's family on the day before the wedding, but Ed can't really carry it around while he is visiting old colleagues. And the option they had come up with, which is really untraditional and had everyone on edge, was to drop the Ham off tomorrow. But that ruins the whole idea of the delivery of the Ham (and I have now lived a complete life if I can type "that ruins the whole idea of the delivery of the Ham" and not be making it up). I have suggested that I take it on my flight and thus protect the sanctity of the entire commercial venture. ;-)

That seems to be where we are at this point.

Ed and I went out and got two beers, some soju and some mango juice and sat in his room, which is 3rd floor and was very warm, drinking and talking guy bullshit until Jae's brother showed up. We drank a bit more and headed out for a bit more soju and dinner. I fell apart at about 10 and slept until 4 or so in the morning. I was able to get back to sleep for another 3 hours and consider that a pretty good job, considering.

And the last pic is of the identity-obscuring bits of rubber that surround the row of love-motels which surround our hotel. They are the things that look like the should be hanging in a car wash. Ed says they are still used to provide protection, but I think they're more like advertising now. In the old days they used to be low enough to hid car license-plates, but now they are creeping up a bit.