Pickups and Throwaways...

Hamming it up • Bad Kwangju-ju in the Monsoon Heat • An Honor I don't deserve • Sammiches Redux • Sir Gaylord and his Queen

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The pics from the pre-weddding "ham saseyo" party turned out pretty badly. They were taken by another photographer and his light meter was focused on the nice bright and shiny outside. Still, to the left is a picture of me during pre-game preparation. Traditionally I would be wearing a dead squid with eyeholes punched in it, but the guys I was with decided it would be too smelly, and I only had one coat and one shirt to get me through three days. I wanted the squid and as a compromise they went out and got me this thing.

After a few beers we headed over to the home of Jae's parents. My job was to carry the box containing the dowry, yell "ham saseyo" (buy this!) as loudly as I could, and only move a step forward if the bride's family provided me with an envelope containing a bill or bills. The yelling also has a secondary point, to let all the neighbors know that a wedding will be happening next day. While Jae's mom would never be so rude as to brag about the upcoming wedding, when my hollering forces the neighbors to pop their heads out (as it did) the wedding is "announced" to them. After that Jae's mom can brag about the whole thing as she had not introduced it. Finally, I was never to give up possession of the suitcase containing the dowry, because that is what they were bribing me to bring in.

We got up to the 5th floor and started hollering at which point the game began. Jae's family started out by basically pretending we weren't there. This gave us a good chance to embarass ourselves, maybe get a little itchy to get inside, and also yell a lot (see above). The family finally peered around the doorjamb. By gesture Ed and I (technically Ed should not have been there, but technically there shouldn't have been a miguk anywhere near the place, and the fact that I was wearing the Ham mask sort of moved everything beyond the merely technical) debated moving away from the door and that brought them out. First Jongkyou tried inviting me in for a drink. This is sort of the formal start of the debate. From then on, probably 15 minutes, we bargained over each step. Jongkyou would wave an envelope in the air, and after much to and froing, decide where to put it on the ground. If the envelope was acceptably close I would step towards it and pick it up. At some points members of the family tried to pick me up and drag me in or push me forward. My considerable bulk compared to the older Korean men, stood me in good stead. They also bribed me with Soju and Kimchee (one out of two, guys!), tried to deke me out with envelopes containing only one coin, and in general tried to hasten my entrance and thus decrease the cost. All for play, of course, since I already had an informal idea of how many envelopes were prepared, but a lot of fun anyway. During the Soju bribing process I comitted my one faux-pas; as I was holding the dowry in my right hand and consequently accepted the Soju with my left.

Oops.

As I got closer to the door things heated up and I took more steps as they laid down more envelopes per go-round. As I leaned down to pick up the last envelopes someone placed both hands firmly on my back and shoved me through the door, to the ground.

Turns out the brute who knocked me through the door was Jae's elderly aunt!

I felt a bit of animus behind the shove and since I still had my shoes on and the shove pitched me into the house it was probably the wrong thing for the old lady to do, but..... soju awaited, so I forgave and forgot!

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The Kwangju Prince Hotel is not only a relic from another time, it's a relic from many times. I asked Ed what it was originally intended to be, and although Ed is Korean, I have no reason to believe he was lying when he told me it was an early attempt at a Western-style hotel in Korea. And if you squint hard enough, wrinkle your eyes so hard it hurts, you can see the outline of this.

The public areas are built in grand-hotel style, high roofs and large spaces. The hotel has gone to the trouble to cover the flourescent lights that are ubiquitous in Korea (typically the bulbs just just hang out there. But the carpet is tatty, the doors are shoe-scuffed by generations of drunken clients, and the shower curtains (how Western!) are a nice idea, but they are exactly one-inch too short to do anything to control water from the shower head - Essentially you have the worst of both worlds. The windows only open a slit, but coffee costs 5 bucks a shot.

I think I mentioned the computers earlier. A nice touch and no doubt this was very popular with visitors when the computers were first installed. But as they run pre-secure Internet Explorer on Windows 98, they are not very useful. Can't hit secure sites, blogger crashes (admittedly this would probably not be a big deal to most business customers), and no plug-ins worth mentioning. All things considered, and the main consideration being that Ed probably shelled out some big money for these rooms, the next time I come to Kwangju I will be staying at a more traditional hotel.

There are also polite lies because things don't work - it is very hot and humid in Kwangju and Jongkyou, Eddie, Jae and I are sweltering with a 1.6 liter bottle of Oriental Beer and some anju on the floor between us. Jongkyou slowly becomes pissed that it is still warm at almost midnite and calls the front desk. He gets (I know because I go down to check) the very sleek and attractive woman who has unaccountably, by western standards at least, been working since before noon. Jongkyou asks how we can get the enormous refrigerator-fronted AC on the ceiling to work. According to our wanna-be stewardess at the front desk the "air conditioning is controllable by the individual controls in each room." A nicely redundant statement. And you can rest assured that if a Korean starts repeating things, they are lying or trying to explain away something inconvenient.

You can't blame the receptionist. She's been there 12 hours already by my reckoning. I look at her and it doesn't take great eyes to see she would like to be somewhere else... in a Korean Airlines stewardess outfit, hell, they make her wear something like that already. But the money sucks and she's working in Gwanju. In a hotel which, as monsoon season approaches, does not have working air conditioning. She has no social status. And a bunch of drunk old men call up to find out how to get cold?

I'd lie too.

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Previously that day I was accorded some sort of honor or the other - or that's what they said. This is still all related to the fact that the families and friends are all boggled that a Miguk would come over solely to attend a Korean wedding. Apparently it rarely happens. Ed partly had me come over as a shield (on both of these trips) but I turned into the tie and crest as well.

Anyway, I became the only Miguk to be invited to see the restored household of the one-time provincial chief. This house belongs to... well, if I understand correctly (1 to 9, against) it belongs to Eddies' uncle, but the government now has a stake. Anyway, since no one could explain the house, it's role in Korean history, or why it was important that I was the first anglo in there...

Here is a picture of the 4-generation family shrine (you'll see the photos of the four generations - men only of course) and one of a building that hasn't been rehabbed yet, but looked great against the varied forest behind it.

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A day or two ago I talked about the weird sandwiches in Korea and theorized wildly and drunkenly (and probably incorrectly) about the "whys" of the whole thing. Of course there are no "whys" to anything, so here is just some "what it looks like":

Note meat on one side and mysterious chopped up crud on other.

Internal View: Look at how the savages cheated on the "western" left side. The "cheese" actually looked like this (when I pulled up the "Soylent Green Miguk Meat Replacement Product" to look):

Nice... you guys deserve everything the Japanese did to you!

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Finally, also picking up another loose end from a previous post - Ed and Jae in their cute-suit Tees: