Places | Muninn

Seodaemun Prison Museum

I did a little sightseeing yesterday, joining two friends on a trip to the Seodaemun Prison History Hall (서대문형무소 역사관) near Dongnimmun (독립문) station and inside the Independence Park. The museum is dedicated to recording Japanese torture and cruelty towards the “patriotic ancestors” of the independence movement. The prison in question, built by the Japanese just prior to annexation, continued to be used well into the postwar period, but it is now overwhelmingly used as a symbol of colonial atrocities and you will find no mention of its postwar legacy. I think many of my observations about the place have been shared by others, including some of the comments made by an Adam Bohnet here.

Technorati Tags: Korea

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A Few Notes on Traffic in Seoul

I don’t drive in Seoul so I don’t have to face any traffic jams and such. The subway system in Seoul is fantastic, easy to use, and is very cheap compared to Tokyo and even New York and Boston. The network is in my opinion far superior to New York and Boston. One of the things I find most annoying about New York is its annoying design which effectively segregates the East side of Manhattan from the West side and has such inconvenient connections that almost everyone has to go through Times Square to get anywhere interesting.

Though the nasty smelling and polluted streets of Seoul will fill your nostrils alternatively with the scent of sewage, tobacco, and car exhaust, Seoul subways are also far cleaner than New York’s smelly and dirty subways, where conductors occasionally yell at passengers, make bizarrely grumpy announcements, and the summer months are plagued by cars whose air conditioning is broken. The one thing that we can all appreciate about the New York subway is the fact that they very conveniently run 24 hours.

Since I have only been in Korea for a week so I shouldn’t be too confident about my observations but two things I have noticed so far about traffic rules: First, as if the pollution isn’t bad enough, scooters and motorcycles often drive on the pavement. This is perhaps partly because many of the streets make it difficult for them to cross over to the direction they want to drive. They billow out foul smelling exhaust from their tailpipes and I’m not the only one to cough and hack as they drive past. The scooter exhaust mixes with the smoke that flows out from street venders selling various kinds of orange colored food. In Taipei I remember them sticking on the road mostly, often in the hundreds as they collect at intersections. Some of the streets in central Taipei even have “no scooter” streets (such as the one near the central train station).

Secondly, red lights seem to be optional in Seoul when they are by crosswalks. On many occasion I have been happily crossing the street at a crosswalk with a green man showing (and a red light for cars) and the cars will drive by me (albeit somewhat more slowly) both in front and behind. I know they must be annoyed at waiting for pedestrians, but this can’t be a very safe practice. I like to be able to cross crosswalks when the man is green without having to be too paranoid about being run over.

Dexterity and Chopsticks

At a dinner recently, I was told by a Korean friend of mine that the now famous Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk recently claimed that the Korean metal chopsticks (which I find admittedly relatively hard to use in grabbing greasy noodles and other slippery food items) have developed the dexterity of the Korean people to such a high extent that it allows them to be better at the detailed work of science at a microscopic level.

Ah yes, I found Hwang’s quote online here :

Their secret weapon? A mastery of wielding steel chopsticks. “This work can be done much better in Oriental hands,” he says. “We can pick up very slippery corn or rice with the steel chopsticks.”

It has been mentioned many other places as well, including a Wired news article. Also, it apparently isn’t just manual dexterity, it is our very mental capacity for concentration which is at stake here in chopstick use:

To use chopsticks, the use of some 30 different joints and 50 muscles is required. The use of chopsticks thus stimulates the cerebrum far more actively than does the use of a fork. The everyday practice of using chopsticks is said to enable people to improve vital developmental functions, such as muscle control, coordination for handling small objects, and mental concentration. It is a well-known fact that practicing certain hand movements during early childhood, such as playing with string or molding clay, are helpful for developing the brain. Some have conjectured that the reason Korea was able to become a global leader in semiconductors, despite a late start of some 30 years, was because of its people’s manual dexterity, which is especially well suited for delicate work. Moreover, they claim that such manual dexterity is a product of Korea’s chopsticks-user culture. A similar interpretation is used to explain the exceptional success of Korean athletes in such sports as golf and archery.

When I did Kyûdô archery in Japan, I was told that the fact I came from Norway, which is made up of a “hunting and gathering people,” contributed to the speed of my improvement in skill. If only we used metal chopsticks in our hunting villages along the fjords.

Second Full Day in Korea

I’m slowly getting settled in here. I went shopping for basic living materials today. I had a success rate of 3/4 today for getting my meaning across in Korean. First getting my luggage from the hostel to the dorm I had to navigate a taxi driver. I would like to thank my old 初めての韓国語 textbook that I studied in Japan for the taxi survival Korean needed to achieve this miracle. My second conversation was to ask where they sell lots of electronics in Seoul since my friends and I all need adapters for our computers fit the wall outlets. I knew there was a place full of stuff like that from my last trip here but couldn’t remember where (it was Yongsan Electronics market).

My third conversation was a complete failure. In my painfully broken Korean I tried to explain to a bewildered electronics salesman that the outlets in the wall are different in the US and Korea and we wanted to buy a little piece to make our electronics (which can handle the conversion without a transformer) fit the wall here. The poor attendant stared at me throughout the entire exercise like I was asking him for directions back to the moon. When I finally finished what I thought was an explanation, and asked him if he had such adapters, he said, “Ya ya, show me your camera.” I tried again but he had this look in his face which seemed to say, “If I just stay completely still maybe this freak will not know I’m still here and will go away.” Ok, I completely botched that one.

I moved onto fresh prey at the next electronics store. After drawing a detailed, albeit barely recognizable collection of pictures of the plugs and wall outlets in Korea and the US and a picture of how the adapter would fit together with our American plug, I showed it to the next attendant and said, “I want to buy this.” He said it was called a Pig’s Nose or something and pulled out one from under the table. When we said we wanted several he ran around to other stores and collected them up and sold them to us for a thousand a piece. Excellent.

First Report from Korea

I’m sitting in small café called “Fango” at Seoul University’s Language Education Institute (LEI). I arrived in Seoul yesterday and I’m here until mid-August to study Korean.

A storm is raging outside while some ’60s-sounding Norwegian song (the second one in less than half an hour!?) is playing over the café speakers. Although I’m not sure when this blog posting will hit the net, at the present moment (June 1st), I’m homeless. The room in the International Student dormitory that I was supposed to move into this afternoon is still occupied by the resident I was to replace. After going to the dorm and discovering my room still occupied, I was informed by phone the details by the LEI office and summoned back to the school for consultation on my predicament. There were some half dozen things about this program that had already angered me so I was prepared to take a hardline with the office administrators about my dormitory predicament.

I was completely disarmed when the dormitory administrator told me, “he took complete responsibility” and offered to let me stay in his room in the same dormitory that evening if the former resident had not moved out by the evening (he is apparently trying to get a ticket out of the country). “I’ll take the floor and you can have my bed.”

It isn’t the first time I have experienced generosity here. If I stop too long on the streets with a map in my hand someone offers, in English, to help me find my way. At the airport, a random stranger stepped up to tell me I was trying to use a phone card in the wrong brand phone and then walked me over to the correct phone. Today, after discovering that the buses don’t give change for a 10,000 won note when you pay a 900 won fare, the bus driver refused to drive on without me and told me he would wait while I popped into a nearby convenience store to get some change, which I promptly did.

I spent a wonderful couple of days in Takarazuka hanging with Sayaka‘s family. We made a trip into Osaka to give me a look around the city and in addition to recovering from jet lag, I felt like I was being fed delicious food constantly.

Here in Korea, I’m completely lost. I had some bizarre Korean-Japanese fusion food yesterday at a “Hot Noddle” shop where I ordered some Kimchi Udon and Fish Dumplings. I wanted to order a drink but the only option on the wall menu was “Cock / Cider” (this item was only written in English) and I wasn’t 100% confident that they meant Coca-cola.

In all of my half dozen or so “in the field” conversations in Korean so far, I’m suffering from a huge problem: I’m usually getting across, in some way or other, what I want to say in my broken Korean and perhaps a bit of wild gesticulation. Then, after kindly complementing me on my horrible language skills, they reply to me in lightning fast Korean and I have no idea what they are saying. Asking them to slow down reduces the speed to something a little bit short of Mach 5 but still too fast for me to distinguish one word from the next.

Classes start next week so I have plenty of opportunities to get a bit more accustomed to daily life here, assuming of course, I have a place to live sometime in the next few days. I’ll post this and other postings when my laptop gets some internet access.

UPDATE: The resident I was to replace moved out this evening so I am moved into my room in the international student dormitory.

Map of my Daily Life

For friends and family who may be curious, the awesome satellite feature of Google Maps can now bring you a map of my daily life here. Except for Korean, most of my classes are in Robinson hall and Divinity 2. Except for groceries and to hunt for food in the Square (slightly to the SW of the map below) I rarely leave this small geographically delimited space these days. Click here or on the map image below for large detailed satellite photo with my own comments. Here is also a link to the map at google maps.

The End of An Age

In less than 24 hours I leave Japan for the USA. I have been here almost two years, mostly as a scholarship research student at Waseda University’s Political Science department studying Sino-Japanese relations history with Hirano, Kenichiro (平野健一郎). He has been incredibly kind to me, supporting me both in my studies with him, and in the half year or so I stayed on and did various smaller things such as helping edit a collection of essays Toyo Bunko, being an English conversation partner for a retired prime minister, traveling around East Asia on my limited savings, and helping out with various things at Waseda’s Contemporary Asian Studies Center of Excellence as a research assistant. Today I’m getting together with a group of good friends for a last gathering and tomorrow morning I leave Japan to begin the last step in my formal education: a PhD in history.

This blog will change accordingly. At least for a while there won’t be any more first hand stories of my experiences in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and China and probably more academic sounding babble as I dive into my studies. The frequency in postings will probably drop somewhat (not that it was ever high to start with). I plan to be in Korea next summer and the summer after studying Korean language but I don’t know when my next extended stay in Japan will be.

China Trip 1: A 34 Hour Travel Day

I’m going to post a few things about my recent trip to China. See also Sayaka’s recent postings on our trip. July 23rd, 2004: I’ll post this next time I have a net connection. I’m currently in Qingdao (pictures here), a coastal city in China’s Shandong province. Getting here was a thirty-four hour adventure that began in Takarazuka, Japan.
Continue reading China Trip 1: A 34 Hour Travel Day

Open to the Public?

Ok, I don’t want to seem fixated on the subject of bathrooms here, but I saw signs on the outsides of a lot of restaurants in Seoul which resembled this one. I think the text under the sign (click on the picture for a larger version) says something like, “The restrooms in our establishment are open for the benefit of the public.” (at least that is what I can make out, with the help of my new EW-K3000 electronic dictionary)

This may not seem like a big deal, but if that is what these signs mean, that is very cool! Japan, Norway, the US, most of the places I have visited always have obnoxious signs that say things like, “The restrooms here are only available for use by our customers.” That doesn’t stop every drunk on a late night in Stavanger from using the bathroom at MacDonalds (when I lived there, McDs was open really late on weekends) but still! In Stavanger, and many places I can remember visiting in Holland, Germany, and China you have to pay a fee to get into many bathrooms. Japanese train stations usually put bathrooms on the inside, where only ticketed passengers can get too them.

It may not sound like much but for traveling bums like me on a shoestring budget and those who like to walk around big cities and explore, public trash cans (see my earlier entry) and publicly accessible bathrooms go a long way towards making me happy. I should note, however, that in Japan, both of these are pretty much provided by the ubiquitous convenience store.

Messin’ with Symbols

So last night I was in an underground shopping mall in Jongno looking for a bathroom. I thought I had found one until I approached the sign and noticed it was a little bit different than what I was expecting. Could Korea, one of the most conservative countries in the world, actually have co-ed bathrooms? The woman on the sign has even done her hair up for the occasion! No, of course not, closer inspection revealed that the sign was showing the way to a small clothes store. They’re messin’ with my symbols and forcing my brain to accept new information! Ah…nothing like traveling to other countries to give one’s brain an occasional jolt.