Asia

An update from the home front

In case you’re wondering what’s been happening here in Korea, I wanted to let you know that I really haven’t had too much to report lately.  Life has been quiet but good for my family.  Last week we had a small get together for my wife’s birthday, and my wife secured a promising job lead with a local accounting firm.  I made it through a hectic week at work.  I put in a few hours of overtime working on an operations management project for my boss, and the end result was well received.  The ongoing project measures our operational performance.  Although some of my colleagues aren’t too happy having their performance measured in key areas, overall my colleagues view the project favorably.  I feel like one part mad scientist squirreled away in a lab, concocting a strange, mystical brew, and one part salesman trying to persuade my colleagues to drink this strange brew.  By the time I leave Seoul, I hope we will achieve full ISO 9001 certification, a international quality standard.  Fortunately, my boss thinks it’s a wonderful idea and is sold on the concept.  It’s much easier to persuade the masses when leadership is behind an idea.  That’s good, because I consider myself a much better innovator than sales man.  I prefer to build nifty things and hand them over to someone to market and sell.  Hopefully I’ll rise to the challenge.

Last weekend my colleagues, my wife, and I went to a barbeque for newcomers who recently arrived in Seoul.  It was a lot of fun, and I didn’t even have to grill.  The conversation was great, and the meal was delicious.  It was nice to finally have a chance to get together with many of my colleagues outside work in a group setting.  It seems as if lately, whenever I run into my colleagues, we spend our time hashing and rehashing work-related issues.  There isn’t much time at work for “water-cooler talk.”  After I returned home from the barbeque, I mowed the lawn in the sweltering heat.  Did you read the nostalgic blog entry I wrote a couple months ago about mowing the lawn for the first time in almost two years?  Well, times change.  It’s now hot and humid here in Seoul, and mowing the lawn is no fun at all.  It is definitely a chore.  I now have to time lawn mowing so that I mow at the end of the day when the temperature has cooled but its still daylight.  Being outside in Seoul nowadays is akin to being in a sauna, albeit much less comfortable.  On Sunday afternoon my family and I visited Lotte World, a shopping center and home to the world’s largest indoor theme park.  It’s one of the better places for families to go when they’re out and about in Seoul on hot and humid days.  Then, on Sunday evening we went over to our friend’s home for dinner.  The food and fellowship was fabulous.  We decided to meet again in a couple of weeks for a barbeque at our house. 

Tonight I went to a community association board meeting.  I was happy that the board agreed to my proposal to invest our extra funds into bond funds and a certificate of deposit.  Currently, the funds are in low-return money market funds, and I wrote up a proposal to invest our funds into higher-yield, low-risk bond funds.  Tomorrow I’ll get started implementing the proposal.  I was also happy to report that we now have a cafeteria vendor, and the cafeteria will reopen soon.  As soon as the cafeteria opens and the funds are invested, I plan to tackle a couple of other important projects for our community.  One is a capital plan for our facilities, which will undergo major changes over the next decade, and the other is redesigning the association’s web site.  I definitely don’t want to take on too much, too soon.

So that’s life here in a nutshell.  I wish we could get out and about more often around Seoul, doing things beyond shopping, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to lately.  Many of my colleagues are on vacation, so I can’t take much time off.  And venturing out and about in Korea now has its costs—it’s still monsoon season, and many Koreans are trying to enjoy the summer.  It’s a formula for a bunch of crowded, unhappy, sweaty people.  I read this morning that 80,000 Koreans descended on one beach in Busan.  That’s crazy!  There’s no way I would take my family to the beach and share it with 79,997 other people.

Korean Folk Village, part II

Tonight I finish my narrative of our trip last Sunday to the Korean Folk Village.

In the early afternoon on Sunday, after wandering through replicas of old Jeju Island farms, we ventured over to an open area where a Korean acrobat on a high wire performed a delicate balancing act.  He did a fabulous job defying gravity, bouncing up and down on the rope, sitting on it, straddling it, and balancing himself on top.  He balanced himself grasping only a handkerchief in one hand and a large white fan in the other.  He used the fan to control his balance, waving it slowly, then feverishly to bring his body back into equilibrium.  Dressed in a white, parachute-like costume, he wore a black Korean-style hat reminiscent of a Korean sage.  He gave a wonderful performance.

20 minutes later we meandered over to the village Manor House, where we witnessed a Korean traditional wedding.  The condensed ceremony that took place in the main courtyard highlighted the most intriguing aspects of a Korean wedding.  As the ceremony began, the groom took his place to the east of the wedding altar and faced west, sitting with his legs crossed awaiting his bride.  Symbolic foods lay atop the altar, waiting to be parceled to the bride and groom during the ceremony.  An old sage to the north of the altar faced south and read the vows from an aged wedding book.  A few minutes into the ceremony he called for the bride to come.  She left the Manor House and descended its steps, entering the courtyard with two female assistants.  They escorted her to the west of the altar and helped her kneel on both knees so that she faced east towards her future husband.  As the sage chanted the wedding vows, assistants offered food and drink to the betrothed couple.  I recall that they ate chestnuts, a symbol of the yangban, or Korean aristocracy, and other Korean delicacies.  The bride’s arms were crossed and positioned over her face so that the groom could not see her until the ceremony ended.  Prompted by the sage, the groom and bride stood and bowed to each other.  Dressed in hanbok, Korean traditional dress, they made a handsome couple.  The sage pronounced them married, and the ceremony ended as quickly as it started.  I’m positive that I inadvertantly obscured some vital details about the ceremony, and the ceremony I watched was but a taste of true Korean traditional weddings.  I am by no means an expert on Korean weddings.  Having seen American, Chinese, Japanese, and Austrian weddings, I enjoyed seeing yet another cultural manifestation of an age-old ceremony.  I do not know how authentic it was or whether I recorded it accurately.

After the wedding ceremony, my family wandered to the modern portion of the folk village south of the river.  It stood in stark contrast to the rest of the folk village, filled with amusements and modern architecture and sculpture.  We entered the children’s park and took our son on several rides.  He first rode a roving mechanical dog.  He is a bit apprehensive about getting close to animals, but he had no qualms climbing aboard this “dog” and letting it take him around the children’s park for a couple of minutes.  When we were in Gyeongju last June, I tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to join me on a four-wheeler.  He was too scared, and I rode alone.  This slow-moving “dog” was just the thing he needed to have some mobile fun.  Afterwards, mommy took him on a carrousel for his first carrousel ride, and daddy took him on the children’s train that circled the children’s park.  He had a great time.  He had so much fun that he didn’t nap all day long, and once we finished and went home he was out like a light.  I was so fatigued that I wanted to do the same, but I had to wait until we returned home.

Korean Folk Village

My family ventured today to the Korean Folk Village in Giheung, an exurb of Seoul.  Reputed to be one of the best daytrips out of Seoul, Korean Folk Village definitely lived up to its great reputation.  If you visit Seoul and only have time for one daytrip out of the city, visit the Korean Folk Village.  It is well worth the visit.  Opened in 1974, the village is the most comprehensive of all the folk villages dotting the Korean countryside and cityscapes.  It’s truly a functional village.  I’ve heard that most of the people who work at the village and dress up as peasants and in hanbok (traditional Korean dress) actually live and work at the village.  It’s an intriguing sight to see next to the modern high-rise apartment buildings that end at the village gates.

We saw too much today to document in a single blog entry.  I will continue my story tomorrow or early next week.  We puttered around the house in the morning, until my wife finally lit a fire under me.  I dragged my heels a bit because weekends are sacred to me.  So much happens at work during the week that I prefer to hang out at home and unwind.  My wife and son want to venture further a field because they spend a lot more time at home than I do.  During the drive to the village, we missed the Giheung exit off Interstate 1 and ended up driving down to Osan (the village is situated between Giheung and Osan, closer to Giheung).  We backtracked on an arterial road that paralleled the freeway.  The route to the Korean Folk Village is definitely not well marked, and finding northbound Interstate 1 heading north Seoul isn’t easy either.

By the time we reached the village, we were very hungry, so we stopped to eat at “Korea” Restaurant near the village gate.  We decided that eating at a restaurant with a lofty name like “Korea” surely must be delicious.  It turned out to be a cafeteria-style, limited selection, massed-produced food operation.  All the restaurants near the village entrance are that way.  The food was mediocre at best.  The help was friendly and took a liking to our son.  If you visit the village, you’re much better off making your way all the way to the far end of the village and eating at the open-air village “Bazzar.”  We eventually arrived at the “Bazzar” and noted what other visitors ate there.  It looked delicious!  Live and learn.  I’m sure we’ll go to the Korean Folk Village again when we entertain my family next year, and we’ll eat there.  We’ll spare them the cafeteria-style lunch.

After lunch we went to “Seonangdang,” a religious shrine where one can pray to the village guardian spirits and ask them for favors.  Traditional Koreans, like many peoples around the world, carve ancestral totems out of wood.  They remind me of the totems made by the Native Americans and First Peoples of the Pacific Northwest, although Korean totems are bit more free spirited (no pun intended).  Korean totems can be whimsical and a bit chaotic with laughing, asymmetrical faces.  They also follow the curvature of the wood so that they occasionally lean.

We then went to the ceramic village, where I bought my first kimchi pot (I mean a ceramic jar, not kimchi-flavored marijuana).  As the national dish of Korea, kimchi is held in very high esteem in Korea.  No meal would be complete without a side dish of spicy and sweet cabbage, radish, or cucumber kimchi.  Even the Italian restaurant where my wife and I dined on Friday served sweet pickles as a kimchi substitute (western restaurants in Korea often serve sweet pickles in lieu of panchan, or side dishes).  I’ve wanted to buy a kimchi pot for quite some time.  Mine is not too big, perhaps one gallon.  It’s not large enough to adequately make kimchi, because it’s easier to make in bulk.  To make kimchi you would need to buy a monstrous 20-gallon kimchi pot.  Although I paid more for the pot than I needed to pay, I was happy to buy a pot from the ceramics shop where it was made.  I saw the artisan who made my kimchi pot making another ceramic pot, and I saw the mud used to make my kimchi pot.  Buying from the source is worth more to me than buying an anonymous one in a market.  This one had character and an identity.

We made our way slowly through the village.  We visited a Disneyesque replica of a typical traditional Korean peasant farm, and we stopped to watch two elderly women in hanbok making silk.  I had never seen how silk is made.  One woman boiled silkworm cocoons, killing the silkworm larvae.  She separated each larva from its cocoon and cast it aside, and she helped a second woman unravel the silk cocoon.  The second woman spun the raw silk thread around a spinning wheel.  The silk-making process was utterly fascinating.  It’s amazing that such a manual, unglamorous process ends with the creation of one of the world’s most luxurious fabrics.

We moved on to an open area in the middle of the village.  We came upon a couple of traditional Korean games, arrow throwing and see-saw.  We saw some Koreans trying to throw 3-foot long straight sticks into narrow jars.  The game simulated the old Korean game of arrow throwing.  (Arrow throwing is akin to the American carnival game of throwing baseballs into small holes).  We also saw Korean see-saws, thick planks straddling sacks of hay.  My son enjoyed giving it a try.  Daddy put his foot on the plank and bounced him up and down.  He laughed and held on for dear life as daddy bounced him on the see saw.  He then took over and did it himself.  After that, we made our way to the “Bazzar” and stopped for ice cream.  I really liked the atmosphere of the “Bazzar” filled with old buildings and workers in peasant clothing serving customers in the open air.  At that moment, Seoul seemed so far away.

We left the “Bazzar” and crossed the Arch Stone Bridge, a picturesque bridge straddling a calm river that divides the village.  A water wheel mill next to the bridge is absolutely idyllic.  We wandered along the shore of the southern bank of the river.  I discovered my son is an adventurer like his dad.  As I crossed over a foot-wide footbridge to take a picture of the Arch Stone Bridge, he started to follow me!  Mommy caught him and helped him to the edge of the bridge.  I came back and took him with me partway across the bridge so mommy could take a picture of us together.

We then wandered through a group of farmhouses modeled after those found on Jeju Island (made with volcanic rock).  For the first time, my son saw farm animals he knows well but had never seen before—rabbits, chickens, pigs, goats, and geese.  His eyes lit up as he saw the real version of animals he reads in story books and sees as toys.  He especially liked the rabbits.  The geese were quite unruly.  We stood about ten feet from them, but four of them decided to come after us.  We backed away quickly and moved out of their territory.  I would have liked to scare them away from my family, but geese are notoriously temperamental and I decided to be non-confrontational.  If a goose comes after you, don’t confront it.  It could attack you.  I remember hearing stories of geese attacks in Seattle.  I wasn’t about to get bitten by a goose and end up getting rabies shots.  That would have been a lousy end to a beautiful day.

To be continued…