Does anyone know why there are green containers full of sand bags all around downtown Seoul? I counted at least a dozen in a single day of walking around.
Are they to set up little defense points in case of invasion from North Korea, which is just a few miles to the north? In case of flooding? What are they for?
One of my accomplishments during my day in Seoul was the purchase of a Casio EW-K3000 electronic dictionary at “Techno Mart” at Gangbyeon station (I guess this is the Korean equivalent to Tokyo’s “Electric Town” at 秋葉原). The dictionary, which I would like to think I got at a reasonable bargain price, will be great for my future studies in Korean language. It has Korean-English, English-Korean, Japanese-Korean, Korean-Japanese, and Korean-Korean dictionaries, along with half a dozen other dictionaries I have absolutely no use for.
I don’t know how common this is in Korea, and I have seen something similar in at least one department store in Beijing, but Techno Mart has separate floors for domestic Korean electronics (for example, computers made by Samsung) which are conveniently located on the 2nd floor, labeled 국내 (domestic, the characters are 國內 and sounds very similar to the Japanese pronunciation K: kuknae J: kokunai) and foreign “imported” electronics located higher up in the building (for example computers made by Sony) on the 수입 floors (imported, the characters are 輸入, used in both Chinese and Japanese but pronunciation is not that similar in either, so I could have never guessed K: suip J: yunyû C: shuru). I guess that is one easy way to remind customers to “buy Korean”. I have another idea, we could turn off all the escalators above the 2nd floor and make anyone wanting to buy imported goods walk up the stairs!
I was in Korea only about 36 hours but saw several protests while I was there. The biggest was in a subway station where Suhee tells me they were protesting an increase in subway prices (I am trying to imagine this kind of Korean style protest inside a New York MTA station). About a hundred men were standing in military like formation listening to an extremely emotional man essentially yell his speech. He was followed by another man’s speech, and then a third man led the entire group in singing some protest song (Suhee was unsure of the song’s name but wrote the following in my notebook: 투쟁가 노동가, whatever that means) The song was sung in perfect unison, and their perfectly unified voices echoed throughout the tunnels of the subway station. I was amazed that the protesters had mastered a special song for “our protest against rising subway prices” but when I asked Suhee what they were saying she said it was the “generic protest song.” Suhee was herself a radical student protester in her undergraduate years, participating in lots of miscellaneous left-wing or anti-government protests and said she had often sung the song.
How cool! Korea has a generic protest song?! I wonder if other countries with a long history of civil protests (Taiwan? Latin America? Poland? etc.) have a similar sort of thing. Suhee claims that it helps build a feeling of unity and community in a group that might not know each-other well. I can’t help wondering what the lyrics are! What lyrics would fit all of the following: a protest against subway prices, an anti-American imperialism protest, an anti-government dictatorship protest, a pro-unification protest, etc.? Anyone know more about this? Or know the meaning of the lyrics? I imagine you would have to keep things really generic. A clue might be in what Suhee wrote in my notebook. I can guess that part of what she wrote, 노동가 means “the worker’s song”, assuming the word comes from 劳动歌 which sounds similar in Chinese and Japanese (I look this up later). More on guessing the meaning of Korean words later…
I guess a lot of Japanese tourists go to Korea. I know Japanese love Korean food, and there is a boom now of Korean pop culture and movies, but I expect any current boom is in no small part thanks to the Korean drama, known as 冬のソナタ in Japan, which became a huge hit on Japanese television. I even found brochures in my hotel for the “Winter Sonata” TV drama tour for 73,000 won which takes you to the various locations that appear in the series (02-774-3345 if you in Seoul and interested).
One clue to the huge number of incoming Japanese tourists was the fact that at the airport, exchanging yen for won is an exceptionally simplified process. They have envelops with pre-exchanged amounts of yen, in my case 30,000 yen (of which I ultimately only used half of during my stay).
WOW – a moderately strong earthquake just hit me here in Tokyo as I am writing this…lots of horizontal swaying, stopped after about ten seconds.
It first caught me off guard when I handed the exchange clerk my yen, only to be immediately handed an envelop in exchange. He saw my puzzled look and just said, “Count it…”
I just returned from my first trip to Korea. I was only there a single full day and two nights but it was sort of a reconnaissance mission for me. I plan on studying Korean there next summer and the summer after, and hopefully will return thereafter for an extended period of research, but I wanted to get a quick feel for the place before I return to the US and begin my Phd program in the fall. Tickets were cheap and my friend Suhee happened to have her birthday this Friday, so the timing worked out great.
Obviously, being in a country less than 48 hours doesn’t allow for either much sightseeing or immersion into the local culture, but my short time there left me with a rich collection of memories, and the usual assortment of FOB (fresh off the boat) observations.
Continue reading First Trip to Korea
Watched the news tonight on the national TV channel here. A 30 minute show giving us a summary of the news we need to know. Of this 19 minutes was used for domestic news. The dominating top headline was the marriage of Denmark’s crown prince Frederick (around 10 minutes but it seemed to last forever). The top international news item was the release of detainees in Iraq.
My last day in Mie last Saturday was partly spent in the town of Ueno, part of the old Iga area. I have uploaded some pictures here. The town’s tourism board has maximized on Iga’s reputation for being the home of one of Japan’s famous ninja clans. Various city officials are dressed in black or pink ninja outfits, which sometimes mix strangely with their hats or white shoes. Signs are covered in throwing stars, there is a ninja udon noodle shop in the park, and I brought home some ninja throwing star cookies as a gift for a friend…
Continue reading Poets and Ninjas
I spent my first day here in Mie prefecture on a fun and fairly random bike ride with Hiroshi (I uploaded some pictures). It was a wonderful experience through some beautiful countryside. Lots of charming little villages, quiet and cool mountain roads, and vast dark green tea fields. Things didn’t wrap up quite the way we expected and we ended up coming home exhausted…by train.
Continue reading Mie Bicycle Trip
I added an entry at my libraries and archives reference site for the Yokohama Archives of History. My friend Youngsoo, who is studying hygiene in 19th century foreign settlements in Japan often spends time in their archive and I joined her and Hye Kyong for a day there to familiarize myself with their collection. It is only 10 minutes walk from Chinatown and across the street from Yokohama’s pricey Scandinavian restaurant. In addition to some fixed exhibits on the opening of Japan and the foreign settlements in Yokohama, they have public access to extensive historical archives. They also have some open stacks, which include lots of old English-language newspapers which I will have more to write about later.
In addition to hanging out in their reading room, where Youngsoo’s major discovery of the day was the massive tome on “The History of the Yokohama Sewage System”, we checked out their current exhibit on the “Don Brown collection” of books and documents that they house.
I enjoyed meeting my friend Tony Laszlo for lunch in Hiroo last week when I made a run down there for a month’s supply of Norwegian goat cheese. A grocery store there that tends to the families of the many embassies in the area (including the Norwegian one) sells the big full size blocks of the toxic brown substance I love to cover my sandwiches with. Although our lunch of tea-flavored gruel was no match for a post-lunch snack combination of his rye bread and my cheese, we enjoyed a good talk in the park at Hiroo. We also stopped by the Tokyo Metropolitan Library which has its central branch in the park. I love this library and used to hang out there when I was studying Japanese in Yokohama years ago. Apparently they have wireless access in the library now, but I think you need an account with some commercial service. Also, I’m told they have a lot of materials in their closed stacks which you would normally only find at the Diet Library. So if there is anyone who is tired of the lines and hassle there, you might want to try the library in Hiroo, with its view over the park, as an alternative. Tony and I happened to get there while the cherry trees were blossoming outside. Today the blossoms have mostly fallen, covering much of Tokyo’s concrete in a thin blanket of pink petals.