Hi again,
I have a lot to say! This one will be more about Korea. Just a note… I realized that the title to my last entry sounded kind of new age cheesy if you didn't get the reference. I didn’t notice when I wrote it, because it was supposed to be literal…."Flying ahead" refers to me flying 14 house into the future. "The future has no road signs" refers to the fact that there are literally no signs marking the roads (because there is not a single road here with a name.)
This is my address in English characters. Incheon, Seo-gu, Dangha-Dong, Wondang,
Ji-gu, 116L-3LOT, Cho-Won Billa. Do you see a street name? No. There is none. It seems unnecessarily complicated to describe everything in relation to everything else like that, when you could just name the streets, and make it all equal, but there are a lot of things I don’t really understand here (I guess that is one of them). Dong means neighborhood, Wondang Ji-gu is a more specific thing I don’t understand. Cho Won Billa is probably my group of buildings. Incheon is supposedly my city, but basically I’m living in what I can only describe as Korean suburbia (which is what I was afraid of), but it isn’t as bad as it sounds. Korean suburbia is nothing like North American suburbia. My apartment is an hour bus + metro ride (cost $2) from the center of Seoul (population 20 million). I am living in a 5 story apartment building, but down the street from me are huge apartment towers. Across the street from my building is a greenhouse, a rice paddy, and about 3 big dogs that live outside, and hardly ever bark. Down the street from that are more rice paddies, and more green houses. Most of these plots of land produce food for sale, and they are pretty much the size of a Canadian’s idea of a big back yard. A five minute walk from my house in the other direction are many restaurants (meaning more than I can count), grocery stores, bakeries, nooribong’s (singing room’s ie. karaoke), bars, stationary stores, schools (including the one I teach at) ect., ect. So you are starting to see that this is not really like suburbia in North America at all, but it is also nothing like Seoul. A couple of Korean’s have described my neighborhood as country. I feel like I am living on the edge of worlds here…rural, residential, and city, but in Korea there are very few edges, because there isn’t that much space. I know there is real country here, but I think it is hard to find. I like being surrounded by rice paddies. It makes me feel close to my food, which is important to me.
So that was my Neighborhood. This is Seoul. My brother Luke lived at Noryangin metro. This is apparently were a lot of Korean political science students live. There over 30 Universities in Seoul. One specializing in political sciences is near Noryangin. I thought that in a city of 23 million packed in so tight, as soon as I got out of the metro I would feel unbearably overwhelmed, but this was not the case. Other than the thick smoggy air I found the center of Seoul downright relaxing. I found this very confusing, so I thought about it a bit, and this is what I came up with. Most importantly: people are quiet here. Korean’s don’t talk as much in public (the buses, and metro’s are almost silent), and NO ONE talks in a loud voice in public. This is one of the many things that make foreigners really obvious. Another thing: people, on average, are smaller here. This may seem trivial, but when you get to packing the kind of numbers that are packed into a city the size of Seoul this makes a big difference, and finally Seoul isn’t fast paced in the way that New York or Toronto is. I thought it would be, because to my knowledge it was a product oriented city, but Luke’s neighborhood is one big market place. You get off the metro, cross a bridge and someone is selling you everything from spongebaby socks, to tuna sushi, to doughnuts with beanpaste, to a hand tailoring for your suit. There are many roads without cars. Not because there is a law against it, but just because cars don’t usually go there. Actually that may be one good reason for the lack of road signs. If cars drive on the small roads they might get lost, so they simply don’t. As a result tents with vendors of all sorts prevail. It looks like if someone can’t afford storefront they simply get a tent, and set up shop on the street.
Near the metro, in a huge underground building, is the fish market. If you go too close to a vendor here they will take a fish (or sea creature) out of it’s tank and torture it in front of you (I think this is supposed to make it seem more appetizing), but it doesn’t really work on me. Here you see huge crabs (bigger than any lobster I’ve ever seen), and octopuses, clams, and all shapes and sizes of fish. They are all alive when you by them, but the vendors will kill, and skin them on the spot if you ask them to.
To get to Luke’s work you go across the Han River. Under the bridge on one side are old traditional style Korean houses all huddled in close together next to the huge new apartment blocks. I asked Frank (one of Luke’s Korean friends) about these houses. Of course the Korean government wants to tear them down (some things are the same everywhere). Frank told me simply: “The government wants to tear them down because they want the space, but the people who are living them don’t have anywhere to go, because they are poor, so it’s a problem.”
The last neighborhood I will talk about briefly: Itaewon….Western town. Here you can get everything you might be craving as a foreigner (well sort of). Itaewon is like our China town, only it includes a conglomeration of what all foreigners (so Europeans, North Americans, Indians, Africans, Australians ect.) might want mostly interpreted by Koreans. Since the only foreigners here are tourists (although I haven’t seen any), teachers, and American military almost all of the shop owners in Itaewon are Korean. There are shops with really expensive brand name clothes, and shops on opposite sides of the street that say “big sizes: her, and big sizes: him”, there is a cow-boy boot store, although I didn’t find a cowboy bar as of yet, and I haven’t seen any cowboys, of course there is a starbucks, there are burger joints with 10 dollar burgers, and a restaurant called “foreign restaurant” – Amazing! I didn’t have much fun in Itaewon, but I find thinking about it entertaining....oh yeah, how could I forget.. there is a restaurant in Itaewon called "Foreign Restaurant". i took a picture of that. Now that i know how to post it, I'll put it up.
I will end off topic…. Yesterday the vice principal of my school gave me a brand new Tupperware set, and a travel mug. This gift was completely out of the blue, and seemingly for no reason, like a lot of things that happen here. I was actually planning to buy both of those things that day, so it was a happy coincidence. I looked at my mug this morning on the way to work, and I would like to share what was written on it. On the top it says “Open, Open”. So far so good, except in the middle of that it says “clsd”. I wonder: “what does that stand for?” . Then I look at the bottom, and see it says “made in Korea” and underneath that “Good”. This is actually nothing compared to the English written all over the place here. It’s a lot more then just T-shirts, but some of those are pretty funny. Especially when little kids wear inappropriate messages, and no one questions it. The attempt to use English characters in as many places as possible provides almost constant entertainment for the “foreigners”.
So I covered travel to Korea in the last entry. In this entry I covered the places I've been. Next time I’ll have to get the people. That should be fun. I tend one of those people who always takes pictures of landscapes, and then when I go to show them to my friends they just don’t capture what I saw, and my friends wonder: Who was there?, this open field wouldn’t be so boring if there was a face in it. I hope my words capture places a little bit better than my photographs, but if not, next entry will be far more anecdotal. I’ll try to break away from my landscape centric nature.
Lots of love to my friends in Canada, and elsewhere,
Cassie.
