Shopping in Seoul

Why I cannot make this thing attach photos in a predictable fashion, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Sorry if the funny layout makes you seasick. I wish it would at least add them in the order I asked for, instead of altering them at random, including putting some on top of each other. Technology is for geeks.

Today I went with some friends to market in Seoul. I didn't really mean to shop the whole day, but I actually did a lot more gawking at the scenery than shopping, and so I count it a cultural experience all around. The picture at the end of the line that's supposed to be at the beginning is of Dave, who is from Canada. Calgary, I believe, is where most of our Canadians are from (all from the same school there, a sister school to Ajou). Dave has a son and at least one daughter-- I've lost count of them between stories, but that's my current knowledge of his family--and his wife and son are coming to visit at the end of the summer term. Dave is one of the few people here that properly appreciates our museum trips, so I like him very much. Plus, he speaks some Korean because he lived here for two years twelve years ago, so he was very useful wandering around in the stores. In the middle of the row of pictures are Adam and Anna. Anna you already saw in the fortress wall pictures. Adam is also from Calgary, and is not quite as interesting as Dave because he's not an old geezer of 34 yet and has no children, but he's good fun. Then are Wendy and Cindy, in that order. They are sisters from Utah. Wendy goes to Utah State, I think, and Cindy goes to Brigham-Young. They are extremely nice people, plus as a bonus, Wendy is an international studies major and speaks Swedish. And that is with whom I went to market.

We did, in fact, literally go to market today. All six of us took a bus to Suwon station and then the subway/ regular train to Seoul. The subway acts a lot like a subway in that you use it exactly like a subway and you get on it underground, but almost all of the trip is above ground where you can see what's going past, which is kind of neat. They call it KoRail, and it goes to different cities all over the country like an Amtrak line, but it gets overcrowded so a lot of people stand like on subways. Yes, I stood the whole way from Suwon to Seoul. There's a picture of the above-ground tracks up there that I took while we were waiting on a platform to transfer lines. When you get to a subway station that serves more than one line here, the subway plays a few measures of Vivaldi AND plays a birdcall to tell you the transfer is coming, which was weird but effective and helpful. A nice thing about using public transportation here is that I can charge my student ID with money and use that as a pass for all bus and subway rides. The ID card has a magnetic strip on it that holds that information, so I just have to wave my wallet at a machine on the way into the bus and it deducts the fare from my balance, with a student discount. Bus rides are cheaper here than at home (at least cheaper than in D.C. I can't speak for places like Johnson City because public transportation is just about mythical there), about 85 cents, 80 with the student discount. I'm not sure how the subway/train rate compares because when I've done a lot of subwaying on trips in the states, I've either not paid attention and just let the chaperones tell me what to do, or bought an all-day pass that just lets you ride without telling you how much it would normally count. It was about 1.40 to go from Suwon to Seoul.

We went to the Nam Dae Mun market together. This was a big old marketplace that caters to tourists a lot, so it had many many booths of souvenir-looking keychains, purses and carry-on suitcases, inexpensive tshirts, soccer jerseys, that kind of thing. Like everything in urban Korea, the environment was visually complex enough to make you dizzy after a while. I thought I was pretty good at handling a lot of visual stimulation after getting good at shelving books and clearing stacks at Sherrod, but after a couple of hours in this market, I was plumb worn out from just looking at stuff. Every square inch of space was filled with piles and piles of goods for sale, including people that might take their baskets of vegetables and just sit down in the middle of the narrow street to hawk them. There is one picture of the market above. The vendors do not like to have their booths photographed, so this general picture is the only one I took of the marketplace. Markets here are places in which you're supposed to bargain for prices on things. I bought two things there, but they were both marked fairly cheaply already and I felt weird about arguing over prices in a language the sellers didn't understand, so I didn't mess with bargaining any. We reckoned we might split up while wandering the stalls, so we agreed to meet at the gate where we entered, Gate 6 pictured above, at 1:00 for lunch. The guys immediately split off from us, and after a few minutes Cindy wanted to walk faster so she split off too, and Wendy and Anna and I walked around together.

I had set everyone to look out for teddy bears for me, because Andy's mom collects them and I'll try to bring her one if I can find it. (Teddy bears are elusive here.) After maybe 45 minutes of wandering, Cindy caught up with my little group and told me that inside a pair of doors to my right and upstairs there, there were some teddy bears I might want to look at, and since I hadn't seen a single one since arriving in the country, I said sure I'd like to go see them. Cindy disappeared again, and Wendy and Anna said they'd wait outside, so I went in by myself to look for the alleged bears. I was trying to look very quickly, since the other girls were waiting on me, so I sort of rushed through three floors of the place looking around for teddy bears. Seeing none, I decided to give up that idea. The place turned out to be huge, a massive catacomb of tourist shop booths, and I could have gotten lost in that place for hours while Wendy and Anna waited, so I went back downstairs to leave. Except then I discovered that with the hurried trip through the massively complicated environment, I had no idea where the door was through which I'd entered. No problem, right? I'd just go out the first door I came to and catch up with them a block down the road. Except then I found that I couldn't find any door at all. I was totally and completely turned around, both by the fact that most of the complicated booths look exactly the same, selling the same stuff, and the fact that a lot of aisles and alleys and areas in Korea are cluttered up such that in the US you'd think you weren't supposed to walk there, so I'd made some turns in the store to avoid going through those places. I couldn't ask directions because a) I don't speak the language and b) other than "somewhere down from gate 6," I wouldn't have been able to say anything useful about where I'd come from and wanted to return to. So I wandered as quickly as I could, looking for a door, any door. Finally I found an exit sign, but it definitely didn't lead anywhere but to something like a loading dock. I felt again like I wasn't supposed to be walking there, so I went back in and wandered some more. I was worried at this point that Wendy and Anna might have given up waiting on me and decided just to meet me at the appointed lunch hour, so I was trying to go as fast as I could, and eventually I found another exit sign. This one, too, put me out on something that looked an awful lot like a loading area with service entrances, but this time I decided just to climb out quickly and plead dumb American if anybody didn't like it. Nobody didn't like it, and it was fine, but when I got back to the street, I had no idea where I was. It was not a block or two away from my original entrance like I'd hoped, and I had no idea how much area the catacomb mall thing covered, so I didn't know how far I could possibly be. So I made my way all the way to the edge of the market, almost out into the city, and found a Gate 5 sign. I picked a direction to try to walk to Gate 6 from there. A Gate 4 sign soon notified me that I'd chosen wrong, so I turned around and got back to Gate 6, retraced the morning's steps, and eventually found the place at which I'd entered the confusing place. Alas, Wendy and Anna were not there. I wandered on my own for a few minutes thinking I'd just do that and meet them for the lunch hour, but I didn't really like being by myself, so when they found me again after some lonely wandering, I was quite pleased. We walked together till lunchtime, and after a while picked up Dave too.

The six of us got back together for lunch and ate in a little Korea restaurant. I had beef rib soup, yum. It would have been interesting and cheap to lunch on foods from street vendors in the market instead of a restaurant, but we'd all stood the entire way from Suwon and then walked around for a long time, and we wanted to sit. There was no room to sit near the street vendors, since benches would consume valuable inches that ought to be used for soccer jersey sales, and so we elected to try the restaurant. (Across the street from the restaurant was the wild fruit-tree-sculpture pictured above. I don't know what it was, but it was interesting.) Cindy had become unenthused with the market fairly quickly and did not want to shop anymore, so she and Wendy split off for the rest of the day and went to a palace. I was of course pretty tempted by the palace, but I've seen several old structures here and only one market (except for the fish market in Busan, but that was all fish and not the same at all), so I decided to go with Dave, Anna, and Adam to Dong Dae Mun market, a little ways away from Nam Dae Mun. Dong Dae Mun is not geared for tourists like Nam Dae Mun, and it was interesting to compare them. I am glad I went to the second market, even though I really didn't need extra shopping time, because it was a lot more like real Korea for locals.

Instead of touristy stuff, Dong Dae Mun has all kinds of things that real people might really want to buy for everyday life. It is the biggest marketplace in Korea, covering every back alley and tunnel in a good-sized area of Seoul. Where Namdaemun's stalls alternated between key rings and purses, Dongdaemun's were organized largely by category, with a bunch of food places in a row, then a bunch of places selling stuff styled as US Army gear, then a bunch of seamstresses, a bunch of subzero sleeping bags, and so forth. We were tired still from the morning, so we decided we'd only take about an hour here. Adam went off by himself, because he really wanted to find some cheap brand-name-clone clothes to supplement the clothes he'd brought from home. I just wanted to watch Korea go by, mostly, so I decided to follow Dave around. Dave is good for following because he's taller than me and speaks some Korean. Anna followed me following Dave; she went really quiet for this segment of the day and the trip home, so I think she must have been really tired. Dave was looking hard for a good deal on a mink blanket, which I'd never heard of but Anna was familiar with it. She's from Wisconsin and he's from Canada, so it must be something people in cold countries truck with. We spent most of this time looking for Dave's blanket, which we never found because it turns out they only sell them in wintertime, but he found a really nice lady selling other kinds of blankets who's going to try to bring one in for him on monday.

Then we went home. There is a picture of a big ornate gate up there that looks just like the big ornate gate at the fortress wall in Suwon from last week. This gate was sitting near the entrance to the subway for the home trip. There was also a big gate like this near the other market. It seems, then, that there are big old city gates for most or all of the big old cities, even if maybe they don't have walls in place anymore. I never saw a fortress wall in Seoul, but I saw a couple of gates. I didn't see a gate in Busan when we were there on the field trip, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one. Busan is a port city instead of an inland city, so it might be that it never had a wall because it was too busy going fishing.

James asked me when I first got here about the poverty around Korea, and I told him I really hadn't seen it much, because I'd just been on campus and in the airport, and the people in those whereabouts were pretty much exactly like most people in Johnson City. I've seen more of it now, and I saw a good bit of it wandering around behind Dave in the second market today. That was probably the most educational and worthwhile thing about today's trip, was just seeing what the country looks like behind all the bright colors and rock bands on street corners. That's why I'm happy with having skipped the palace, though I might try to con somebody into going back to the palace with me. Most of the merchants selling blankets or tshirts seemed fairly well-off, but others probably have trouble putting food on the table. Small-time back-alley cooks, women working long hours in the hot sun sewing beads to cloths, elderly men and women with baskets of potatoes and heads of lettuce sitting in the middle of the street to try to sell them because they can't afford a booth. Several times, we saw men crawling through the streets pushing collection baskets in front of them, scooting on their chests on little rolling platforms a few inches above the ground, their legs dragging uselessly behind them wrapped in heavy rubber to protect them from the pavement. There are not any drunk homeless people hanging around, though, not in the back alleys or around the subway or anywhere. I don't know if that means the Koreans have ways of taking care of their people, or if they just keep them really well out of sight. I suspect the latter might be the case, but I don't know. One of the Korean students in the ISS program says that they have a big problem in the countryside with poor people lying across the road to try to committ suicide because they can't feed themselves or their families, but I've not seen anything like that personally. I'm not going to take any pictures of this side of things, so if you're reading along, just know that there's a backside to a lot of the scenes I do post for you.

You must really like me a lot to have read all the way to the end of that whole long thing. Extra points on your Sarah Fan Club log sheet. I like you too. :D

experiment

James advises that I should make sure my pictures are big enough for printing later, so here I am trying posting a bigger one. I'd made the others little on purpose for less material to be posted, but I think the actual files are nice and big. I haven't done anything to make them smaller except to choose "small" as the uploading option to put them on this blog, so I hope that they are okay for later. Since this "big" picture is not too enormous, I might make the future pictures big so you can see them better.

What you're looking at is, in fact, a bowl of kimchee sitting next to an Outback Steakhouse coaster. That's because after the fortress wall, Jo and Debra and Anna and I were craving western food, so we went to an Outback. The brown bread they served is one of the yummiest and most comforting things I've had here, mmm. Anna ordered a steak, Jo and Debra had pasta dishes, and I had chicken served over rice. And Koreans apparently can't help putting kimchee with rice, even in a western restaurant, so this came with it. We thought this was very funny, and I hope that you also enjoy it.

I have not gotten into kimchee much. I am trying to be a very good sport about Korean food, seeing as it's everywhere, but I'm also trying not to culture shock my stomach too much by overloading with spicy food. The meat and rice is different enough. I can't put a finger on how it is different from plain meat and rice at home, but it is definitely not the same, nor is it the same as if you get meat and rice from an oriental restaurant. In some cases, it's been different enough to make me a wee bit queasy. Not usually spicy without the pepper paste and kimchee and stuff added, but different. Among other things, they often mix in with the meat and rice these weird noodles that appear clear. I don't know what they're made of, but they're entirely too much like eating plastic bracelets, and I'm not overly fond of them but they're in just about every dish I've had here. I'm doing better than some of the europeans, though. The people from Holland are used to having potatoes as the major part of every meal, every day, and this stuff has not been easy on them at all.

fortress wall text

Okay, it would not let me add any words to the pictures posted, so you're just going to have to flip back and forth to see what I'm talking about. It also added the pictures backwards, so they come in a funny order for storytelling. Foul device.

On sunday, some friends and I went to see the old fortress wall in Suwon. My friend Debra found it in her tourist book, and it looked nearby and inexpensive and easy to find, so off we went. Many of the people in the program went to Seoul for the day, but we thought we had no clue where to start in Seoul and that we'd do better to let them scope it out and report back to us, so we did the wall instead. We thought that it would be a neat little relic kind of thing, like a fragment of an old wall from some war or other. It is in fact neat, and it is in fact an old wall that they built for battle, but it is definitely not a fragment. The wall turns out to go the entire way around old Suwon. It is 5.7 km long, which I believe is around four miles, and it took us all day to get around the thing and see it. People have looked at us funny since we came back and said we did the whole thing; apparently that is not a common thing to do. We didn't realize how long it was till we were halfway around, though, and so we decided to just keep going rather than backtrack to a place we could get off. The wall is mostly 18th century, from what I gathered from the few information signs that listed dates, and some of it, mostly the ornamental woodwork, has been redone recently. It has all kinds of neat bastions and lookout towers and crenellation and secret entrances and arrow holes and places to pour molten lead on people outside. Some of the high-up pagoda-looking structures are apparently common places for locals to visit to relax, meditate, feel a nice breeze, and take a nap. You have to take your shoes off to climb into those, and the wood floor of them was worn smooth and soft by the many many feet that had walked around them.

So, the pictures. The first one there (in a stupid place because I'm allergic to technology) is of three people I walked with, but not the three people that I went with. The three people I went with are in a picture lower down. These people are Ellen, Roy, and Paul, and they are from Holland. They were actually out looking for the beach. They couldn't find it, and while looking for it, they happened upon a spot right in the middle of the fortress wall where we just happened to be already standing. So they walked the second half of it with us. They are all very nice and good fun to be around. I don't have a better picture of them for you, alas. Paul has his back to you in the foreground, Ellen is talking to him, and Roy is almost hidden behind Ellen.

Next is me in a doorway to one of the buildings. I'm hunched over in the cheerleader pose because the door is not tall enough for me to walk through, which I thought was interesting so I took a picture of it. Koreans are not tall, and they might have been a little bit shorter in years before modern nutrition, but not that much shorter, so I'm not sure why they made their doorways so little. It's not uncommon. I've also got a picture of me hunched over in a tiny doorway at a temple we saw on the fieldtrip.

Next are the people I went with. They are, in order, Debra, Anna, and Jo. Debra is from Silver Springs, MD, Anna is from middle-of-nowhere Minnesota, and Jo is from Milwaukee.

The round building there is a guard tower that we went inside and all the way to the top. It doesn't have steps to climb to the roof. Instead, you go through this dark little passage that spirals up the building for several layers. It was super cool, and I got really excited. You can see the spiral construction a little bit where the roof does not go straight across; the place where it suddenly dips down is where the top layer ended and we came out onto the roof.

Next is Roy, Debra, and Ellen filling water bottles at a spring. Instead of public water fountains here, they have places where natural springs pour water, and it's clean and safe to drink. I think this is interesting, that it's safe to drink from the springs, because you don't drink from the tap. Inside buildings, you drink filtered water from these filter machines they have in hallways and the like, but outside, you can drink from the spring. Sometimes it's a place like this one where it has a lever that you can use to turn it on. Here, we filled our own bottles, and they also provide public ladles that you can fill to drink from. In other places, the water pours into a big stone basin, and the plastic ladles are floating on the surface or sitting on the edge.

Then a picture of the steps at the end of the wall where we entered it. The wall is way above the city all the way around, set on a really steep hill, so you have to climb aways to get on it. It winds through the mountains around the city, so there are really massive steps in some parts of it. Debra is training to run a marathon next year, and she counted the steps on the wall as her workout for the day.

Then is a picture of the underside of one of the pagoda-looking roofs. This is what the traditional architecture looks like in Korea, and not just on the walls; we've seen it several places, and I suspect it is pretty universal. The bases to the structures are made of stone, and these roofs are made of wood and placed on top, painted with flowers and dragons in beautiful colors. The outside of the roof is usually dark tiles, as seen in the picture below.

Next is another lookout thing of some sort. So actually you can't see the dark tiles, but it's backlit so it looks dark, and that's the effect you get when you can see the tiles. That's me on the steps looking very small.

Then is a view of the round fortress building that both ends of the wall run to, standing in one doorway and looking across to the other. This is sitting by itself on a roundabout in the middle of downtown Suwon, and when the taxi driver dropped us off here, we all thought "That's it? The whole thing?" I was excited about it anyway because I like castley things, but I had hoped for a wall to climb on, or at least a sign of some sort to tell me what the structure was about. Then a few minutes later we found the wall, and six hours later we felt silly for having wondered why there wasn't more to it. You can't see it really well in this picture, but on the other side of the far entryway, there's a crowded commercial street scene happening. Once you got on the wall, the world kinda slowed down and was beautiful, but here at the start, it was right smack in the middle of all the day's activity.

Last is the roof of the entryway I'm standing in when taking the previous picture. Lots of dragons painted, and while it's a little dark here, the colors are bright and beautiful. All of the colors in Korea are bright and vibrant, even the graffiti. You think I'm joking at that, but I may bring a picture soon of the beautifully colored graffiti on a wall on campus.

In case you do not know, you can leave comments on the posts if you are particularly moved to do so. So you can vote on your favorite picture, or something like that.

fortress wall pictures

back

Okay, I am finally writing something again. I have many adventures to write, but they will have to come as I feel like posting them, because I am plumb worn out from practicing my korean alphabet and want to go to bed early. I promised I would write about my first day of classes, so I will post that now.

To recap, it is now monday night. I got here last tuesday, had a big old orientation all day wednesday, thursday through saturday set off on a field trip to various parts of the country, spent sunday climbing around Suwon, and today was the first day of classes.

My first class is modern korean history. It should be pretty interesting, I think. It is about modern korean history, and since Korea is rather old, modern means 1392-present. I think we're to focus on the nineteenth century and later, though, with most of the time on the Japanese occupation of the country and the post-WWII division. The teacher is a lady from the Korea institute at Harvard. She is a nice Korean lady who speaks English well but with a pretty heavy accent and who came to class pleasant and well-organized, just like I reckoned she'd be. There were some amazing comments flying around over the weekend, with people whispering in hushed awe that there would be a Harvard Professor! teaching one of the classes, speculating about what kind of strict old gentleman with a posh Oxbridge accent this would be. I think some of the students are disappointed that a Harvard Professor! would turn out to be a regular human being. I like her. She got us all excited by putting on the syllabus, below the required two books, "All required reading materials will be available in a packet at the copy center." We reckoned that meant we didn't have to buy the two books, but it actually turns out to mean we have an enormous packet of photocopied excerpts to get along with the books. We had two reading assignments tonight, both of which were pretty interesting. Tonight I learned about what made the Yi dynasty hold together so well for 500 years (everybody was watching everybody else like a hawk, basically, so nobody got too corrupt), and what ancient Korean people thought was important in the education of women (how to serve their husbands, mostly, and how to behave well).

Then I had the first day of Korean language. This was a bit of an adventure getting started, for there were too many of us taking the class to put us in one room together, so they divided it into an A section and a B section. During the online registration, naturally everyone who wanted beginner level signed up for the A section, to make sure we really really got the beginner's basic stuff in case there was a difference between the two sections. So they said they'd put us all in one room the first day and then split us into sections, so at the appointed hour we all got into one room and waited to be divided. A teacher came in, wrote some names on the board, and then said that everyone whose name was not on the board should go to the other room. Since none of our names were on the board, every single one of us went to the other room. There, another teacher started to call roll. Getting no response to the first several names, the teacher worried that we couldn't understand her accent and started to write the names on the board. Well, they were the same names as the one on the last board, and half of them were people we knew weren't taking language at all (a surprising number of these students are not taking any language). So it turned out they had an incorrect roster of some sort, and they quickly split us in half and will separate us for our real sections tomorrow.

I thought that I would leave the first lesson with phrases like hello, please and thank you, my name is Sarah, et cetera. Nope. Instead we learned the alphabet for two hours, and now I know ten vowels and fifteen consonants. That may not sound like very much, since for everyone reading this it has probably been a long time since they learned the alphabet and it's easy, right?, but it just about made my brain melt. It took intense concentration for that time to keep up with which new strokes stood for which unpronouncable new vowels, and what they did when combined with consonants, and where you place them in relation to each other, and how to identify a whole string of them stuck together on flash cards, and so on. I think I'm getting it pretty well for a total beginner, but lord it moved fast, and every time I thought "Surely that's enough new stuff for today," the enthusiastic teacher would cry "Five more!" By the end of the class period, I suddenly realised that she was laughing at me, and it was because the muscles propping me up had totally given way and I was sprawled across the table on my belly as I tried to decipher the letters she was holding up.

There were about ten students in the room, and a bunch of them already knew either some spoken korean or at least the alphabet, so they were getting things on the flashcards faster than I was. There is no shame in being a beginner, but I'm not used to being behind the rest of a class, and so it was a little frustrating to watch a couple of things go by while other people yelped the answers. I suspect I'm getting it at least as fast as they did the first time, though. Bah. It gives me a new appreciation for the frustration people get at home when Dr. Caton leaps to a brand new interval or chord progression. The woman today actually taught a lot like he does. I think I will like it very much, especially as I get caught up with the other students. The other section went much more slowly than us, only getting through the ten vowels and four consonants. It is possible that when they redo the sections, I will have the less speedy teacher. Even though I have catching up to do, though, I think I'd rather have the fast one. I lagged a bit today, but I was not floudering, and as long as I'm not floundering, I'd rather get through as much as I can in the few weeks I'm here. Partly that will help me get around town, and partly I think it will just help keep me interested in learning the material every day. I'd be depressed if it took me a whole week to get through this alphabet, with eight or more hours of class time spent repeating "Ah, Yah, Aw, Yaw, O, Yo, Oo, Yoo, Eu, Ee." I am glad that we are learning the alphabet first instead of going straight to spoken words. If we got words before the letters, it would be awfully tempting to visualize the words with roman letters and remember them that way, which would make life harder reading things down the road.

After class, I walked down the street to the bookstore for a history text, and to my delight found that I could pronounce a lot of syllables on the Korean license plates and other signs. What they mean I have no clue, but I'm getting to pronounce them. It's been very curious to be here with everything written in a different alphabet. It's not like just not being able to understand the language, as I feel when I look at Spanish instructions and the like on US products. It's like being completely illiterate, and that is a very funny feeling, because I'm not used to being aware that I can read. Being illiterate makes you unable to participate in the world. If I get a chance before I lose that feeling, maybe I will muse on it and write something.

And that is the story of classes today.

Someone said before I left that they knew I wasn't coming here for the scenery. They were correct in that that did not go into my decision-making process, but the scenery does not hurt. If the internet will behave, I will attach a few pictures of what Korea looks like.