October

The birthday season of October has also been festival season in Korea. I don’t pay much attention to birthdays - now that I’m old enough to play gentleman’s hockey in Vancouver without lying about my age.

There’s a new student in my grade one class. She’s tiny, about two feet tall. She calls me “ajashi”, which is a polite way of saying – old man. I’ve noticed that guys my age here really don’t like being called ajashi. They prefer “opa” – older brother. Old men like ajashi. There’s a sense of respect in the expression. But I’m not ready for it.

The only thing I’d ever known about my birthday was that it was also the day John Lennon was born - some music trivia that I picked up from listening to Rock101 in Vancouver. In Canada, my birthday usually falls on the Thanksgiving weekend.

When I moved to Argentina, I found out that it’s also the day that Ernesto Che Guevara was assassinated by the CIA and the Bolivian Military.

This year was the 40th anniversary of his murder. There were a lot of memorials and tributes going on in Buenos Aires, Bolivia and all around Latin America.

I heard an interesting bit of irony. The guy who pulled the trigger, a Bolivian, recently received surgery for cataracts – at a hospital in Bolivia that was established by Cuban doctors.

I watched “Hasta La Muerte Siempre” again. It’s not a bad documentary on Che. Most of it is in English and I love the street scenes from Cuba.

The Latin American Left now has socialist presidents elected in Brazil (Lula), Venezuela (Chavez), Bolivia (Morales), Chile (Bachelet) and at some point hopefully Ecuador will make that list. So hey, Che lives on.

In Japan, my birthday coincides with the Saijo Sake Drinking Festival. Saijo is a university town about a half hour east of Hiroshima. There is a stretch of a few blocks downtown that has a high concentration of sake breweries, five I think. They open their doors and sake makers from all over the country show up to promote their products. They all set up tents and stands in the central park, just a five minute walk from the train station. Everyone in the city is at the festival. You pay $10 (1000 yen) for a shot glass and go off “taste-testing” around the park. By mid-afternoon, no one on the street is walking straight and bodies are strewn about everywhere.

Here in Korea, my birthday is the day that Hangul, the Korean alphabet invented by King Sejong, was officially established to replace Chinese script. It used to be a holiday. But in recent years the “government” has decided that there are too many holidays in Korea. So we worked on Hangul Day.

In late September, we had three days off for Chusok – Korean thanksgiving, and October 3rd was a holiday to commemorate the establishment of the Chosun Dynasty. So we shouldn’t feel cheated, I guess.

At work, things are going smoothly. There are still pending issues but the drama has settled somewhat. I’ll be leaving this elementary school in mid-December and moving on to start at another, which I haven’t seen yet. I’ll continue the same contract with the same people. Just a change of venue, as far as I know.

Last Friday, at Susong Elementary, we had our annual Variety Show. The school rented a huge theatre and over ten express buses. The production was enormous. Being an elementary school, I was shocked. For panicking teachers, Friday was the most important day of their career. The costumes were elaborate, over the top – from Brazilian carnival, to salsa, to traditional “hanbok”, the Korean equivalent of a Kimono, to Nanta – traditional drumming.

Our class performed a short version of “The Sound of Music”. They did ok. The girl with the lead role in our musical also played the piano for the choir in the grand finale. I guess some people just have it in them to perform, even at that age. And it was for a handful of talents like her that the show was for real and not a gong show.

The crowd was a rowdy mass of “everyone else in the school”. It reminded me of the audience on the muppet show. Hecklers shouting, punch ups, cat calls. They did everything they could to tear it down. But all in all, the show went well.

Seeing the roles that all the different kids played, from the brats throwing food from the balcony to the stars of the show, had me thinking a lot about the dynamic between those who entertain and those who need to be entertained; or those who make a contribution and those who don’t. I have nothing profound to say about it. I just couldn’t help but notice.

I think Susong Elementary is massive for an elementary school – well over 60 teachers and between 1500-2000 students. Of the lot, only one apart from myself is not Korean. She’s a little white girl named Elena. She just joined my English class, confirming what I’d figured – she’s Russian. There are only a couple of reasons why a Russian single mother would be living permanently in Korea. As for Elena, having blonde hair, blue eyes and an ability to speak Korean fluently, it’s not a stretch to say that she could be famous when she gets older – if her mom looks into television.

Moving on, the monumental “Summit Meeting” between the leaders of North and South Korea took place this month. I didn’t really follow it. I haven’t read the paper in weeks.

It was significant in the sense that it’s only the second time such a meeting took place since the ceasefire in 1953. I think the last meeting was 6 or 7 years ago.

Because the last meeting took place in North Korea, it was Kim Jong Il’s turn to travel this time. The fact that he insisted they meet in the North once again and refused to come to the South offended people here.

South Korea has an unpopular president with two months left of his term. His government has been completely scandalous. Many called this a stunt to help his party win the election. Nothing will be settled on the North Korean issue without the US being involved at the front and center of it anyway. So I didn’t pay much attention. - It’s hockey season.

I’m still planning to do the DMZ tour though, sometime next month. The North Korean tours that I looked into were just too expensive.

October 20th, 2007

A beer is not the solution to this crisis but it can’t make it any worse.

My friend Jim from Lelanau County, Michigan told me when the table of life is suddenly flipped upside down and things are moving faster than you can process them, take a hot shower and shave. Or if you’re standing in a bus terminal at midnight and the ticket window has closed for the night, have a beer. The familiar. In God, George Burns and John Denver were talking in the bathroom about this.

If you’re ever lost and cold in CheonJu Jeollabuk-do and don’t know where to turn, I know a place you can warm up, get a hot meal and two beers for under $10 in the middle of the night. Is this useful information? In the big picture, probably not. Tonight, it was useful.

There are hundreds of Jeollabuk-do’s and thousands of useless road maps in my head. There are times I’d love to press a delete button and wipe it clean, start from scratch, move home and study accounting – my best mark in high school. But all roads do not lead home. They start from there. They led to today and spray off further into an abyss.

One thing about the road, and the abyss it leads to, is that, with persistence, there will sometimes be a pub you can duck into. There’ll sometimes be a table empty in the corner. There’ll sometimes be a woman with deep lines on her face who knows that waitressing is more than just a job and she’ll wipe your table and bring you a beverage. You can sit back, take a deep breath and you will be home. You may not like the music but you will be home – until they clean the grill and turn out the lights.

Most cats sitting alone with a beer in a pub at 2 am have a rollercoaster ride of a story to tell. And no one on a Saturday night out in the city wants to hear it. And thank god for that. He doesn’t want to tell it. He’s thinking of tomorrow, looking into the abyss – where to remember yesterday with clarity is to trip and fall and lose your glasses in the dark.

Take the lesson and run. Sober up. Leave the details behind.

The bus is now rocking back and forth. The narrow winding road follows a stream and splits the valley down the middle. Farmland on both sides stretches flat to the base of the mountains which take an abrupt steep climb and wear a dense forest, like fuzzy green walls of a gorge.

The road is lined with little black tents, a few feet high, millions of them in long rows and columns. They’re meticulously built and seem cared for more than the farmhouses falling apart alongside of them. They shelter the ginseng crop.

At full tilt, we snake through tons of small communities, crammed together in clusters with a bus stop. An old woman with a sack of sweet potatoes hobbles off the bus. An old woman with a sack hobbles on. Onions.

We pass groups of old women hobbling along the road with sacks, hunched over with their chin about a foot off the ground and their rump pushed high up in the air, their eyes sucked deep into their skull and their faces tied up in knots.

They seem to live oblivious to the massive development and progress in the cities. It must scare them. Then again, maybe nothing scares them. Homes are three wall shacks with a dirt floor and a tin roof. Any scrap piece of wood, stone or sheet metal becomes a part of the house. A strong gust of wind could come along and blow the whole town down. It’s zero degrees today. Winter is coming. They’ve survived plenty and are busy readying for more.

We get off the bus in Jinan. Everyone is sitting around in the parking lot of the bus terminal, watching, forever waiting for something. No one has showered in years. People smile, which I notice ‘cause I live in the capital, and are incredibly friendly and helpful. Here, even the bus drivers seem to love their life immensely. The streets are full of debris and lined with banners. It looks like we just missed a big pig roast and county fair.

It’s October. Good times. Hot, sunny days for walkin’ and cold nights for sleepin’. The harvest has passed. Food is plentiful and it’s festival season.

Jeollabukdo

Left Seoul for the weekend to check out some more of the country. Here are a few pics.

We stayed in JeonJu City as a base point and ventured around the province from there.
JeonJu is best-known as the birthplace of BeBimBap. Every Asian city is famous for some kind of food, which seems to trump any other purpose for going there. I knew that everyone at work would be asking me if I tried the famous bebimbap. So for that reason, I didn't.

JeonJu is also famous for being the birthplace of the Josun Dynasty.

We went to the JeonJu Hanok Villiage, which is a neighborhood in the city where all the old wood and tile buildings survived the war and urban development. With so much of Korea being demolished and replaced by huge apartment blocks, it was worth a walk around. "Hanok" is the old-style house.

The Korean drama - always a dead end around the corner

A traditional tea house in JeonJu City

Gyeongijeon

This palace was built originally in 1410.
Inside there is a portrait of Yi Seong Gye – the founder of the Josun Dynasty, whose family was from JeonJu.

This is a portrait of King Sejong (1397-1450)

He was the inventor of Hangul - the Korean Alphabet.

Bamboo Garden

Near entrance to Maisan Park

These are used to make a local medicinal tea.

Jeollabuk-do is a province two hours south of Seoul. It’s known for rice and ginseng crops. There are tons of large parks. Most of them have a mountain full of hiking trails leading to a temple at the top and barbecue pits at the base. It was a matter of picking one.

We hiked to Maisan Park. The translation is “horse ears mountain”. The peaks actually look more like horse ears when seen from the town of Jinan on the opposite side. The east peak, Sutmaisan, is considered male. The west peak, Ammaisan, is considered female. Both ears are conglomerate rock which is not common in Korea. Up close, the sides are full of large holes where the rock broke away and fell into the ravine.

The first temple is Unsusa. It features the largest seated Bodhissatva statue in Korea.

The temple at the base of the rock face is called Tapsa. There are 80 stone pinnacles – all made by the Buddhist Yi Kap Myong (1860-1957). Some of them reach 15m in height. No cement was used and yet they never fall apart.

Yi Kap Myong

Exiting the park, we had a black pig barbecue while waiting for our bus. It definitely tastes different from your standard pig. But I can’t say whether or not it was better.

The whole time we ate, I kept thinking of Jon Soderman’s farm in Stanley, New Brunswick. We played a lot of music out there in the University days. Apart from some chickens he never really had a lot of animals. But he did have a Vietnamese black pig – which is a freak of nature in Eastern Canada and to Jon he was more of a pet than dinner.

We headed back into JeonJu City on a little bus full of townies. I remember arriving in JeonJu the night before. Coming from Seoul, it had a quaint, small town feel. I figured we could just get around on foot. But now approaching it on the country roads with our new travel companions, it was like leaving the farm for a Saturday night in the big city. What trouble can we get ourselves into?

JeonJu is famous for a few traditional rice wine restaurants where you order a kettle of the wine, called “makoli”, and they literally fill your table with food and snacks. These aren’t nachos, though. Some of the plates were recognizable. Others didn’t look like food.

The bar was full of loud old men – the only female being the woman in the kitchen. There were fishing boots and hip-waiders at the door. So I’m guessing this is not the cool thing for young people to do on a Saturday night these days. But, being an old man myself now, I guess I fit right in.