Seoul Train

Firstly, let me apologize for the obviousness of the titular pun. Unsubtle or not however, it is appropriate, given that I paid a visit to Korea's capital city over the weekend.

The city that jumps to mind most quickly, interestingly, is Athens. Seoul is much bigger than Athens, obviously, and has the whole Modern Asian Metropolis (MAM) thing going on, but what the two of them do have in common is the pieces of antiquity scattered in a seemingly random pattern throughout the city. Seoul has five (five!) palaces and various other shrines, pagodas, and other bits of history around every other corner.

There's something almost intoxicating about being let loose in a large and unfamiliar city. Every step teases with the promises of wonders as yet unseen. There's a rush of realizing you're going through what is, for you, uncharted territory. Even the mundane holds a special allure. You're not just riding the subway, you're riding the subway in Seoul. Awesome. I love new places. When that new place happens to be the second-largest city in the world? Double-awesome.

I don't think I'd quite realized it until arriving there, but Seoul has long held a special place in my...not heart, as such, but at least my consciousness. My memory of global events from the 1980s is sketchy at best. The first News item I remember is the Challenger explosion in '85. Sitting in the waiting room table at the dentist's office was a magazine (Time, I'd guess, but I really have no idea) with the astronauts on the cover. So that's the first thing I remember from outside my immediate sphere of reference. I also remember, albeit vaguely, the ascension of G.H. Bush to the U.S. Throne, and the 1988 Olympics. The Winter Games in Calgary were a big deal, obviously, taking as place as they did just to the west of Canada, but it's the Summer Games that stick out. You can attribute this to the fact I was eight months older by then (7 and a half years old), but I think it has more to do with the fact that a sprinter by the name of Ben Johnson happened to be stripped of his gold medal for steroid use. Remember that?

It's not to say that I only remember the Seoul Games because of our man on the track, but I think that what Johnson did do was give me a reference point for a city that would likely not have featured very prominently in my mind at all.

I just hope he got to see some of the sights.

Starts with a "K," ends with an "a"

Given my travels so far this year, it seems inevitable that I feel compelled to give my thoughts on a comparison of Kenya and Korea.

The question I find myself asking, however, concerns the best way to do this. The two most obvious option would be a humorous point-by-point look at the two countries in the "Kenya has cheetahs, Korea has chopsticks" vein. While not without merits, this approach runs the risk or reducing everything to its lowest comedic denominator, not something I particularly want to do with this topic especially.

So I think what I'm going to do is just do a kind of free-flowing ramble on the subject at hand and see what bubbles to the surface.

In one of my kindergarten classes the other day, I started humming "In the Jungle" as the students worked on their frog pictures. I was only a few bars in before some of the kids started singing along. Apparently it's one of the songs they've learned. It's also one of the songs I taught my Grade 5s in Kenya. The interesting thing, however, is that my middle-class students in Korea are more likely to have seen a real lion than my Kenyan students, despite the latter living a few hours away from one of the most famous wilderness preserves in Africa. Money, of course, is the eternal variable. The Koreans (and the Canadians, and the Europeans, etc.) can afford to go to the zoo, while the Kenyans at my school were struggling to get enough to eat.

This isn't meant as a "pity the poor Africans" post, nor a "damn those with money" one. If anything, it's more a reflection on the ridiculousness of modern life. The very fact that I can go from continent to continent so easily underlines how truly small our world is. Just because I can, however, doesn't mean I should. The environmental implications of air travel alone are staggering, to say nothing of the potential cultural ramifications of the linguistic imperial propaganda I carry with me. Of course, if I were truly concerned about either of these, I'd still be in Canada. And I'm not. But still.

I'm digressing now, so let's get back to the original Korea/Kenya question. Both make me think, assess myself and my place in the world, but for different reasons. Both make me laugh, and sigh, and leave me utterly exhausted at the end of the day.

The above stream is completely unedited and utterly unprocessed; I take no responsibility for faults of grammar, logic, quality of reflection or any other complaints you may choose to make. By visiting this site you absolve me absolutely of any responsbility and assume all literacy-related risks.


And so it is. More later.

Ask A Waeguk, Vol. 1

Today's question comes from Dave in Georgina, who wants to know how waeguk is spelled. He's also interested in learning more about written Korean in general.

The Waeguk Responds

I'm glad you asked, Dave. As you are no doubt aware, the word waeguk as you see it before you here is a rendering of the Korean alphabet known as hangeul. According to legend (and my Lonely Planet guide), hangeul was invented in the 15th century under the reign of King Sejong. It's a phonetic alphabet, and is widely admired for the simplicity and elegance of its system.

Unlike the Roman alphabet, which uses a strictly linear left-to-right placing of characters, hangeul characters are generally arranged in syllabic groupings, with up to three characters grouped together to be read in a clockwise fashion. For further information on how to read Korean, I suggest you to turn to Google and search for websites written by people who are far more apt at describing it than I am. I recommend Radio Korea's guide to learning the language. For the Korean spelling of waeguk, however, you've come to the right place...

외 국 There, isn't that cool?

The first grouping forms the "wae" sound, while the second composes the "guk."

The system really is very straightforward, and I need to sit down at some point and devote a couple of hours to it.

At this point I'm largely illiterate in hangeul, but I am slowly improving. I'm able to pick out certain menu items, and I can recognize a few other words as well. I'm slowed down considerably, however, by my inability to self-correct when reading. If I'm reading in one of the languages I do speak, for example, even if I come across an unfamiliar word I can be reasonably confident in my ability to read it correctly, be it in French, Spanish, English or even German. If it sounds strange when I read it I can reread it and ascertain whether I've made a mistake or whether the word is incorrectly or unusually spelled. Given the modicum of Korean under my belt, however, I have no way of checking whether I'm even ascribing the proper phonetics to the characters as I read them.

Many of my students are at the level where they mix up "chicken" and "kitchen." I'm still at the level where I mix up "chicken" and "hydrangea."

New Feature

In the 1800s, travel was restricted to the upper middle classes or to those who traveled out of necessity, be it for work or war. In Victorian England, it was customary for young adults with money to do a "tour of the Continent" as a rite of passage. The number of Western visitors to Asia, however, was considerably lower. Of those brave souls who did travel to the Orient over a century ago, only a tiny number had blogs, laptops and internet access being far more prohibitively expensive than they are today. For example, an 1894 IBM Thinkpad with teak inlay, ivory keys and a polished silver tracking ball cost the equivalent of a house.

Today, though, it would seem that just about any educated adult with a hankering to see the world can and does set off to do so, and as often as not will set up a website to detail their adventures. It is true, my friends: I am not the inventor of the travel blog.

On the other hand, it is my hope that I am the first to offer your very own personalized Canadian Answerer of Questions Relating to Korea service (CAQRs).

Ask A Waeguk will allow you do direct all of your Korea- and Jeff-related questions to me, where they will be posted and answered in a prompt, entertaining, and sometimes accurate fashion. Want to know what it's like to have random children come up and talk to you because of the colour of your skin? Ask a Waeguk! Want to know what Canadians do in Korea on a Saturday night? Ask a Waeguk! Want to know where to get good bibimbap in Pusan? Ask a Waeguk! For that last one, actually, you might be better off asking somebody who's lived in this city for more than 9 days, but the idea is clear.

Ask A Waeguk : You've got questions. I may even have answers.

Waeguk (n): Clever, handsome foreigner full of witty, perceptive and insightful observations pertaining to life in South Korea.

The Streets of Pusandelphia

I have a theory, which is still being refined, but the essence of it is as follows: anything one needs in Pusan can be bought from a street vendor. As I've been here for less than a week, I can't yet state it conclusively, but a short list of items available for purchase on the street would include:

-books
-vegetables
-sandals
-kitchen utensils
-puppies
-umbrellas
-fish, live
-fish, dead
-clothes
-songbirds
-CDs
-octopi, dead
-octopi, live

Rest assured I will remain vigilant and keep you, my faithful readers, apprised of any major additions to the above. Any city in which one can purchase both octopi and puppies without having to set foot in a store is a city worthy of the name.

안 녕 히 치 서ㅣ요!

On Language and Groceries

When one's entire knowledge of a language can be counted on two hands, communication becomes interesting. A smile seems to help a lot, but can only go so far. A typical exchange at the grocery store, then, may be summed up thusly:

Jeff: "Anheong heseyo (hello)!" + big smile
Cashier: "Anheong heseyo," +"koreankoreankoreankorean?"
At this point, I pull out the big smile again and shake my head, on the guess that she's asking if I want a plastic bag. I do know how to say no, but I don't want to commit myself in case she's actually asking me something completely different, like if brown is my natural hair colour. So far, the smile + head-shake has worked fairly well, and leads to the next bit, as follows.
Cashier: "koreankoreankorean?"
Jeff: Head-shake + smile. Please note that I don't use the big smile this time, for the simple reason I want to come across as a reasonably sane and intelligent foreigner who simply doesn't speak any korean, rather than as a foreigner of dubious sanity and intelligence for whom a trip to the grocery store is equivalent to a trip to LotteWorld, the Korean equivalent of DisneyWorld.
This second head-shake is based on my presumption that she's asking me if I have a customer loyalty card, which I do not.

(In the interests of full disclosure, it should be noted that my ability to decode even these two simple questions rests in my fortunate circumstances of once having a cashier who spoke some English, and was therefore able to communicate with me more fully.)

Finally, our transaction concludes with me looking at the digital display to see how much I owe, and taking out the appropriate amount. I finish with a hearty "khamsa hamneeda (goodbye)" and stroll off into the distance, impressed to no end by my ability to relate to people of all cultures.

안 녕 히 치 서ㅣ요!

The First 48

First impressions of Pusan? Big, noisy, a little smelly, but more or less what I expected. If anything, that's what has surprised me most of all so far- the lack of any major surprises.

When it comes to minor surprises, however, there have been several. When using a shower in a Korean love motel, always check to see where the drain is. If you find that it's outside of the shower stall, you're better off not using a shower mat, as it will become submerged in no short time.

If you want to be able to watch episodes of last year's American Idol, turn to Korean TV. The same applies for Home Alone (in June, at that!), Star Wars, Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, and various other seemingly random selections of American cinematography. All in English, with Korean subtitles.

Stay tuned for further updates...right now, my stomach is growling to the point I suspect an aide is running straight to Kim Jong-Il to warn him of strange sensor readings.


안 녕 히 치 서ㅣ요!