Coda

At long last, here is my travelog from the trip to Korea last August. Except for the occasional typo or grammatical error that I caught (there are no doubt others), it's unedited. I didn't even take out the occasional swear word or blunt comment about the driving ability of certain Korean women. But I hope it's still somewhat interesting to read, especially with the photo pages I also put up.

And, for Dad, Happy Birthday! I hope you enjoy this gift, though it was promised last September.

A couple notes: the date on this post is April 7, because, guess what, this blog is on Seoul time! Also, due to how blogs are generally formatted, it's in reverse chronological order, so look at the bottom if you want to read from the beginning. Finally, the dates on posts are the dates I actually began writing them, not the date they correspond to—that date is in the title.

Day 14: The Trip Back (25 August 2004)

(Editor's note: this is all that existed of a journal for the last day. As we were just flying and waiting in the airport, I'll leave it unedited.)

[Pak Ik Suh showed up to take our bags downstairs, a taxi van was waiting.]
[Uneventful trip to Tokyo—watched part of WfG, Lizzy annoyed by ditzy girlfriend of army guy.]
[Hung out in Tokyo airport for four hours—walked around, had udon, wrote in journal.]

Day 13: Changdeokgung, Eel, Disco (24 August 2004)

(Editor's note: final set of photos!)

(Editor's note: this post was just now written, many months after the fact. The only text that originally existed was the funny story from dinner. Hence the briefness.)

On our last day in Korea, we returned to a now open Changdeokgung and took the official tour. By this time, I had become somewhat weary of palaces and temples, but it was our last tourist activity of the trip and we enjoyed it without too much complaining from anyone. I don't remember too many details of the tour—we saw a number of different structures with different social functions, described in totally unintelligble English by a diminutive female tour guide with an extremely high-pitched voice. (We would have been better off with the Korean language tour and live translation by my parents.) The palace was quite beautiful; the pictures speak for themselves.

I'm not sure what happened to the rest of the day, but at some point we found ourself back with Mr. and Mrs. Pak, who took us out to an unbelievable eel restaurant. The restaurant consisted of a single enormous room with low table after low table of hungry, eel-consuming people. The smell was wonderful—that is, if you like eel. We had to wait for quite some time before getting a table, but it was well worth the wait. Besides your standard assortment of panchan and Hite beer, there was, not surprisingly, and endless supply of eel. You were supposed to eat the eel by wrapping it up in lettuce or a sesame leaf along with a raw clove of garlic and a choice of vegetables and sauces. At the urging of Pak Ik Suh, I ate until I couldn't stand. Thanks to the raw garlic, my breath was wonderful as well.

(Funny story Dad told at dinner: a while back, just before he returned to Japan and was kidnapped by the KCIA, Kim Dae Jung was in the U.S. for a while. He gave a lecture at the University of Washington, after which a number of the Korea-connected attendees went out to lunch with him. Ignorant of my dad’s ability to speak Korean, Kim carried on a conversation with my mother in which he asked, “Why would a nice-looking Korean woman marry an American like him?” My dad thus has a certain respect for Kim based on his political accomplishments, but his respect ends there.)

After dinner, Pak Ik Suh sent us off with a secretary from his office whom he had enlisted to introduce us to the Seoul nightlife. She selected Juliana, apparently the Club To Go To for people our age. The decor was lush; the music consisted mostly of American hip-hop; and everything was on Mr. Pak, as usual. But there was something decidedly off at this place, and Lizzy and I didn't think it was just because we had never been to a dance club in the United States either.

Overall, I'd say that there more young men dancing (and dancing reasonably well) than you'd find in the U.S. Most interesting: there were women dancing with women and men dancing with men, but no men dancing with women. Almost none at all. The boundaries were, for the most part, clear and unequivocal. This separation proved to be consistent with another strange phenomenon: waiters as catalysts for mixing.

It happened like this. We were sitting around our table having a few drinks, minding our own business, generally being spectators at this place that was foreign to us, more so because it was a dance club than because it was in Korea. It was in this state of detached observance that I was thrust into awkward social interaction. Previously, the waiter had offered to help us meet people if we wanted, which didn't seem unreasonable; I think we had politely declined, but it's hard to tell when there's a person of limited English skill acting as translator. This offer had not prepared me for what happened: the waiter returned to our table with a young woman at his side. He motioned toward me, and she sat down right next to me. The waiter left, and it became very clear that I was supposed to interact with her.

Guess what? I don't speak Korean, and she didn't speak much English. I was able to extract her name, which I can't remember, as well as her age. I also managed to communicate, with awkward combinations of "migook saram" and "hangook saram" and "omoni" and "abogee," that my mother was from Korea. At some point, after Lizzy forced a photograph (see the photos for this day), we headed to the dance floor. She seemed completely frightened and nervous in my presence, which didn't do a whole lot to keep me from being uncomfortable. When the song ended, we started walking back to our table, and she disappeared. I think I saw her practically running away.

The strangeness continued, but with an explanation. The waiter showed up again, this time with another young woman next to him. Having realized I didn't speak a word of Korean, he brought someone who spoke pretty good English, and in fact was an international student at the University of British Columbia. The conversation quickly turned to me asking what the hell was going on.

It was exactly what it looked like: at these clubs, men and women didn't take interaction into their own hands. The waiters served as catalysts for social contact, bringing women to men (and not vice versa). Once the interaction was begun, it was up to the couple to let it go where it may...but only under rare circumstances do they initiate contact themselves. Beyond the method of interaction, I learned something about the motivation for coming to these clubs, which didn't sound that different from the United States. As my informative second delivery put it quite bluntly: girls come to Juliana for dancing and free drinks, and perhaps to meet rich guys. Rich guys come there to meet hot girls.

When this second young woman showed up, Lizzy was whisked away to be delivered to another table. She met a group of nice guys, one of whom called himself Dr. Dance or Dr. Something-or-other, and we ended up dancing with them for a while. (I was, of course, put to shame. They had actual skills.)

Between the palace and the eel and the disco, our last night in Seoul was one to remember.

Day 12: Yonsei, Seoul Foreign School, Not Changdeokgung, Dongdaemun (23 August 2004)

(Editor's note: lots of photos for this day.)

Breakfast: once again, the M. Chereville continental feast.

Dad had a meeting with some lawyers, so for the morning Lizzy, Mom and I were on our own. We took the subway up to the nearest stop (Sinchon) to Yonsei University, in the hopes of finding Seoul Foreign School, where Mia had gone to school for two years, and the missionary compound we all (well, those of us that were alive—Lizzy had neither been conceived nor conceived) lived in for a year. We followed the signs to Yonsei, and after being distracted by a shirt Lizzy had to buy got there without much trouble.

As soon as we exited the subway, we could tell that we were in a college district. All the little shops, the predominance of young people, the somehow more idyllic air reminded me of parts of Ann Arbor and of the U District in Seattle and of Berkeley. The Yonsei campus itself was similarly tree-lined and peaceful—probably more greenery than Central Campus at Michigan, less than the UW. There was a large statue of the founder, a missionary in Korea.

The goal had been to find a direct path toward the south end of Yonsei toward SFS, but nobody seemed to know what SFS was or where such a path might be. So we trekked all the way through the University, out the north gate, and back again through the adjoining neighborhood. After asking more and more people, we finally found ourselves at the SFS gate.

SFS had the air of a fairly elite institution, probably more than it had twenty years ago—there had been no guarded gate, no Restricted Access signs toward the parking lot, and significantly smaller facilities. It was lunchtime when we arrived, so there were plenty of kids, from preschool age to high schoolers, running around and doing apparently typical things for kids of their respective ages—elementary school kids running around the playground with soccer balls, seventeen year old boys projecting an air of sophomoric confidence as they walked toward town for lunch, etc. Most everyone was speaking English (no surprise for an English-speaking school); the racial makeup of the place seemed pretty balanced among white, Korean, and mixed-race students (with no doubt the occasional non-white, non-Korean kid).

Next to the SFS campus, as expected, was the old house, inhabited (so said the nameplate) by the same people my parents had rented the place from for a couple years those many years ago—a missionary whom my dad had received training from for the Peace Corps even earlier than that. It looked like a reasonably comfortable place for a young family; I probably enjoyed myself pretty well playing on the school grounds as a baby.

Nostalgically fulfilled, we walked down the hill from the school and found a little place to eat lunch—fairly cheap, fairly simple, fairly good food.

We then hopped on the subway so we could finally see one of the old Seoul palaces we had been planning to tour since our first day. We went to Changdeokgung, home to the famous Biwon palace gardens, only to find that the place was closed on Mondays. Not yet giving up on palaces, we made plans to return the next day.

In the meantime, we thought we would check out the other place we had been intending to visit: Dongdaemun, which once upon a time was a large market where vendors sold clothes, trinkets, food, you name it. The old-timey market is still there, but next door a huge shopping district where (as in Kangnam) the young, hip, trendy people like to hang out. We walked through the old market and looked at the old people selling old-style things, and then found our way to the new, hip, trendy section. As usual, our first priority was finding food.

On the eleventh floor of the Freya department store we found yet another middle-aged Korean lady ecstatic to see our mixed family and Korean-speaking white father—she dragged us irresistibly into her stew restaurant. We had a nice meal with a nice spread of panchan, some stir-fried squid, and a stir-fried pork dish.

Day 11: Escape from Muju (22 August 2004)

(Editor's note: very few photos.)

We woke up that morning to some rather unpleasant weather outside. Dad went for a walk to check out the golf course, and despite his umbrella ended up rather damp. Although we hesitated to suggest it for fear of insulting Mr. Kim, we all felt it would be best to head home to Seoul that day rather than hang around doing nothing in the mountains. Dad called him and met no disagreement—they were thinking the same thing, and probably hesitant to drag us away. Mr. Kim reserved spots for us on the bus, and we confirmed with M. Chereville that we could arrive a night early.

The bus didn’t leave until 3 PM, so we proceeded to spend the rest of the morning doing very little. (I did manage to finish the Kuhn, and Lizzy made some progress in the Dostoevsky, while Mom and Dad watched some more Olympics.) Before lunch, we gathered up all our stuff and got on a shuttle bus. Mr. Kim instructed the driver to take us to the Welcome Center while ignoring Shin Duk’s warnings that there were no restaurants there; we arrived at the Welcome Center, stepped off the bus momentarily with all our bags, realized that there were no restaurants there, got back on the bus with all our bags, and headed back to the main resort town area. We had noodles (tchajangmyun, udon, etc.) at a “Chinese” restaurant (Korean-style Chinese food) for lunch, and made our way back to the Welcome Center, still with all our bags.

Not content to sit in the Welcome Center for two hours until the bus left for Seoul, I convinced Lizzy to go on a walk with me, possibly part-way up the hiking trail to the mountain peak. She reluctantly agreed, and we walked about 200 meters before she gave up and returned to the W.C. I forged on ahead with my umbrella, battling rain and wind of increasing strength. After wandering around for about fifteen minutes trying to figure out what the hiking trail actually was (provided I ended up on the right path, it was actually paved and open to service vehicles, one of which passed me on the way up), I began my ascent. I hiked for about 25 strenuous minutes, holding the umbrella out in front of me like the shield of a Roman soldier, and only once or twice had the umbrella catch on the wind and turn inside out. Having wasted time at the bottom, I had to turn around after taking a few photos. For some reason, I became possessed with the idea of running down the mountain, and with the idea of recording a video of the descent, so...I ran down the mountain, and recorded the entire thing (only 6 minutes) in two 3-minute clips on Lizzy’s little camera. (Only the second half survives because I later had to clear up room on the CF card.) I was sore for the next three days despite a monastic commitment to stretching.

Aside from the bus-sickness I suffered from writing in this journal, the return trip to Seoul was very boring. We made one stop at a rest stop, which is nothing like the ones we have on the West Coast, and even more impressive than some of the multi-fast-food-joint-outfits they have east of the Mississippi. There were about twenty different vendors selling different snacks, from hot dogs to skewered chicken to dried squid, as well as a cafeteria, fancy bathrooms, and a display of various paintings reproduced from Korean historical masterpieces.

Back in Seoul, we took a taxi ride from the drop-off point back to M. Chereville, where we proceeded to do nothing for about half an hour. Then we realized that we could totally avoid doing anything outside of the room for the rest of the night, since Pak Ik Suh had provided us with four illicit army field rations. (How he obtained them, we never figured out.) This would be our first experience with MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat).

Each MRE package (we tried the Pork Chop with Spiced Apples and the Chili & Macaroni) contains one or two MRE pouches in cardboard cartons, some sort of dessert, a packet of instant coffee, some other instant drink (we got a strawberry milkshake and cocoa), salt, sugar, crackers, cheese dip, and, in one, Tabasco sauce. Also included is a chemical heating device: all it takes is a little water and the execution of some rather hard-to-understand instructions to begin a chemical reaction that will turn your room-temperature MRE into a piping hot meal. The food itself was...shall we say...better than one might expect from army rations, but nothing too amazing.

Sufficiently sated from succulent savories, we slept.

Day 10: Muju Resort (21 August 2004)

(Editor's note: and, once again, just a few photos.)

We (successfully!) woke up at 6 AM in order to catch a taxi to the Pusan train station, and subsequently an 8:30 KTX train for Taejon, where we would meet Kim Woo Taik and his wife, Shin Duk, and take a bus from Taejon to Muju Resort in northeastern Cholladuk-do. All went smoothly, and around lunchtime we found ourselves winding up a mountain road to Muju.

The Muju Resort (near the town of Muju) was conceived maybe ten years ago by some grandiosely scheming Korean businessman as both a ski resort and a destination for Korean city-dwellers wanting to get away during the hot summer months. The resort has a few hotels and numerous time-share condominiums. Unfortunately, the business plan wasn’t perfect—in order to maintain cash flow, the owners had to put money into new condos for new customers instead of maintaining the existing buildings, and the result is that (1) the company went bankrupt recently and (2) the condos weren’t in that great shape.

Despite the bankruptcy, the resort area had no shortage of people. College students, young couples, young married couples with babies, mature families, even a group of nuns—all kinds of people flocked to Muju. The resort town had three or four Korean restaurants and two or three Western ones, a “PC-bang” with video games, software for sale, and Internet stations, and a small supermarket. Much smaller than Whistler, for example, but more densely populated.

After settling into our room, we went down to Manson House—I couldn’t determine if the name was Western- or Korean-derived—for lunch. I was actually less satisfied with this meal than any of my prior ones, mostly because my bibimbap was luke-warm and the air conditioner was on but totally unneeded.

Indeed, the weather was overcast and not particularly warm at the Muju Resort. For the time being, it was fairly pleasant to walk around, but the rain would be forthcoming.

After lunch, the six of us (Mom, Dad, Lizzy, Woo Taik and Shin Duk) walked up to a little park named “Green Pine Bath” or something like that. It was pretty, nice, and exceedingly small, and about two minutes later we found ourselves at its northern boundary and the entrance to the Muju Golf and Country Club. Anticipating that the older folks might not be as quick or as ambitious walkers as we, Lizzy and I broke off from the group and went exploring.

We walked all around the Muju resort town, first downhill from the park to town and around the downhill end of town to a little lake with a walking trail. At the start of the trail was a small cafe which had a very loud speaker blaring “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.” As we began the walking trail (which, in stark contrast to the supermarket and restaurant and PC-bang and other developed parts of the town had no people), the rhythmically ambiguous introduction to “My Girl” was clearly audible, though we were at this point surrounded by trees and a nice view of the little lake. We continued on the lake trail, occasionally stopping to use exercise equipment by the side of the trail (everything from a bench press to incline sit-ups), and eventually came to a turn-off into the woods. Unable to read the sign, we took the road less traveled.

This little trail was the closest thing we saw to wilderness during our stay at Muju. There were still no people present; we were sufficiently far away from the cafe that the only sound in the trees were squirrels (dahlamjee) and birds, and the path was not, in fact, paved. The trail went maybe a quarter of a mile uphill and a quarter of a mile downhill, and we found ourselves back on the main lake trail. A few hundred meters more, and we approached the cafe from the other side to the sound of “Under the Sea” from Disney’s The Little Mermaid. No joke. Sebastian the Crab was in fine form.

We completed our loop of the resort town and found our parents, once again, watching the Olympics on TV. (In case I hadn’t mentioned it before, at no time is our family more excited than when watching a suspenseful archery competition.) We continued watching TV (I made some progress in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as well, Lizzy in Crime and Punishment) and soon it was time for dinner.

Sometime in the late afternoon/early evening, a rainstorm had moved in. Fairly strong rain and fairly strong winds meant it was time to haul out the umbrellas for our trip for a restaurant for dinner.

Unsatisfied with lunch despite Shin Duk’s assertion that Manson House was the best place to eat, I convinced the group to try a little Korean place I had seen during our walk through town earlier. It was a nice little place, and the panchan was the best spread I had seen yet. Along with some rice and bulgogi, it was a very satisfying meal.

On the way back from dinner, we stopped to check out a rock concert series that was supposedly going on at the resort (ending, in fact, that night). The stage (just outside Manson House) was occupied first by a single emcee dressed in what looked a little like pajamas and some funny-looking sunglasses. He was soon joined by an artistic-looking man with shoulder-length hair, who said a few hellos as the emcee walked to the side of the stage. Two other men then took control of some audio equipment to the side of the stage, and the show began.

A pre-recorded accompaniment in the synthesized balladic Asian pop style began pouring out of the speakers, and the man with the hair, on cue, began crooning into the microphone. His voice was fine, but the music was pretty awful. After the romantic, soulful first song, he moved into a rockin’ tune with equally bad synthesized accompaniment, apparently a rock song from the U.S. that I didn’t recognize. As the final song was beginning and my body language was clearly indicating I wanted to leave, we began walking away, even managing to tear away Mr. Kim, who was blissfully engrossed and totally oblivious to our strongly negative (but thoroughly amused) attitudes toward the music.

Back in the room: more reading, TV-watching, and finally some sleep. (My yo smelled badly of human sweat, but I was able to suppress the odor by covering it with an extra comforter, and no sleep was lost.)

Day 9: Haeundae Elementary School and Market (20 August 2004)

(Editor's note: yet more photos!)

We began the day with another breakfast overlooking the water at the Camellia Restaurant, with a plan to find Haeundae Elemntary School, from which little Chong Tahn had graduated in 1959. Once satiated, we went to the front desk and asked around. Sure enough, a middle-aged man who had grown up in Haeundae was handy, and he pointed it out to us on our tourist map.

According to his directions, it was located not too far from the beach, just past the main downtown area. We walked along the beach, where things had changed significantly since the day before. The storm had moved on, and we saw teams of young men with shovels clearing all the piles of sand that had piled up on the sidewalk. Additionally, the McDonald’s and Coca-Cola beach umbrellas that we had seen tiling the entire beach in a Seattle P-I filler photograph a couple weeks prior (something like this) had begun reappearing, as had the hordes of people.

We walked past the main beach area, past McDonald’s, and into town through an interesting market area where Dad had purchased grapes and ojingo the night before. We would explore this area more later on; now we passed all the carts of fruit and seafood and clothing stands and clothing stores in a relative hurry.

Haeundae Elementary was not hard to find. We just headed in what seemed like generally the right direction, asked a few people, and soon found ourselves on the school grounds. The old building had been torn down and replaced with several new ones. In front of what looked like the main building was a statue of a mother and the slogan, “If you want to please your mother, study hard and listen to your teachers,” along with a statue of the Korean military hero Li Sun Shin, who had hundreds of years ago repelled Japanese invaders with his ingenious turtle boats. While we were examining these statues, two people emerged from the building, surprised to see visitors, particularly American visitors.

We soon learned that the two people were the principal of the school and an administrative assistant, Although she was on her way out, she was so excited to learn that my mom was an old graduate that she invited us in for tea. We entered the building, which was not brand-new but in very good shape, and put on slippers.

We went first to the principal’s office, where the assistant brought us cups of some kind of iced tea—perhaps green tea mixed with barley or corn tea. With a smile that had not left her face since we entered the building, Mom talked about all kinds of things with the principal, from what she was doing now to how she had hurt herself on the playground once upon a time. Although I couldn’t participate directly in most of the convseration, it brought me a strange sense of happiness and nostalgia—vicarious nostalgia, I guess—watching my mother revisit her childhood.

The principal also took the step of asking her assistant to look up Chong Tahn’s transcript. She returned without a hint of trouble with a photocopy of a book page last touched in 1959 by some administrator or teacher. Chong Tahn had received almost universally high marks, was designated an Honors Student, and clearly had a bright future ahead of her.

Watching Mom walk around the school, I couldn’t help imagining little Chong Tahn (who must have been very small and very cute) running around the old building, full of energy and curiosity and the kind of keen intelligence that only a child can have. I wish I could travel back in time just to see it.

The principal showed us around the main school building. Unlike the school my dad had taught at in Yosu many years ago, class sizes were down to thirty or thirty-five students, and the facilities were first-rate. We spent some time in the “etiquette room,” where students learn how to act in situations ranging from a traditional Korean dinner to hoisting the flag properly. We also saw the library, which had a number of Samsung PCs as well as children’s books, textbooks, etc., whose color scheme Lizzy thought seemed more like with manga comic books than the textbooks you find in U.S. elementary school libraries.

After saying our goodbyes, the principal handed us off to one of the teachers to show off the science building. I sounded out the name of the building from the Hangul—“ae di son”—and a light bulb went on. In this building there was plenty of lab space (lab space? in an elementary school?) in several rooms, including the “Science Room” and the “Invention Room.” We went on to look at the gym, which was spacious and included many volleyball courts, but no basketball hoops. The teacher informed us that the gym is open to the public early in the morning before school starts, and that the Olympic volleyball team practiced there.

Mom’s transcript included her former address, so after finishing our tour of the school, we walked back toward town and found the district office, where we hoped they could help us locate the old house. The resident map expert pulled out an ancient map of Haeundae and found the location. Unfortunately, it seemed to be right in the middle of a bunch of hotels. Rather than touring the Marriott, we decided to get lunch.

We went back to the market area in search of a place to eat, one better and less expensive than the options in the swank hotel. We saw a number of seafood places, but we were in the mood for something simpler and less expensive. We found a really inexpensive local chain that specialized in mandu, something I hadn’t eaten since my arrival in Korea. On our way out, we glanced at a display showing the owner of the chain being interviewed on a local TV show about his restaurant idea (quick, good, cheap Korean food); a moment later, he walked out from the back room talking on a cell phone. This was our brush with celebrity for the day.

A satisfying meal prepared us for...more vegging out in the hotel room.

Actually, we delayed our vegging for a little while longer. The hotel was on Dongbaekseom (Dongbaek Island), which isn’t really an island anymore so much as a tiny peninsula, and most of the “island“ was covered by a nice park with a walking path. The only notable thing about the park was our encountering the remains of a shamanistic ritual. Down from the main path in a rocky area inhabited by a statue of a mermaid we found several melted candles and a disintegrating head of a roasted pig, evidence that shamanism never left the Korean peninsula despite the encroachment of Buddhism and Presbyterianism.

So...after vegging out in the hotel room (rather shamefully, I might add—everyone else was passed out on their beds while I read and composed emails), it was time for dinner. We walked back to the market area and searched fruitlessly for a while to find a place that matched our current cravings. Coming up short, we found another location of the same chain we had eaten at for lunch and sat down. Quick service, however, was not forthcoming, and, having noted previously that the other location was practically empty that evening, we returned to the same place where we had eaten lunch. We finished our meal, grabbed some apples and a Korean pear from a fruit vendor, and headed back to the hotel.

Having already written the next part of the story in an email, I include an unedited excerpt of it below...

“Lizzy and I, having been prevented by the lifeguards and the buoy-supported rope from venturing farther than about two inches into the ocean water, decided to go swimming in the hotel pool. I called up the front desk, got transferred to the swimming pool desk, and confirmed (after being switched to the English language speaker) that they didn't charge money to swim in the pool. (This surprised my dad, who remembered being charged for everything at hotels in Korea.) We got in our swimsuits and headed for the pool. As we got near, there was a desk with a sign-in book. As we started to sign in, the woman working at the desk seemed to indicate that they required swimming caps—and that we could purchase them for a mere 4000 won (frickin $4 each). We had changed, and had come all the way from the fifth floor, and we wanted to swim, so...we charged it to the room. Once we got in the pool, feeling very stupid wearing stupid-looking caps and grateful that nobody else was around, two kids walked in, totally capless, and we felt cheated. We thought perhaps that we didn't really need the caps, and that the desk woman was just trying to sell them...anyway, Lizzy and I both were quick to misdirect our miscommunication-caused anger at the woman herself, and vowed to try to get our money back. When we finished swimming and returned to the desk, however, all we could muster were feeble (and very polite) attempts to understand what the policy actually was and to express that there were people in the pool without caps. She had no idea what we were trying to say, so we headed back to the room. But back in the room, we realized that we had in our frustration and embarrassment taken the locker keys with us. So I returned with the keys—but brought along the caps and the nearest convenient native Korean speaker I knew.

“It's all very stupid and not a big deal, but the whole experience was so frustrating for me that I finally begin to understand what people with limited language skills must go through--Americans outside the U.S. and non-English-speaking immigrants in the U.S. I felt rather ashamed that my initial reaction was to get mad at the people I was speaking to for not understanding (and, indeed, feeling like I was being cheated). You talked about being unable to capture my own feelings in words...this was far worse; this was a total inability to arouse in another human being anything resembling the thoughts brewing between my own ears.”

The final strangeness of the evening was that my lower right eyelid swelled up like a balloon. It must have been some kind of allergic reaction to the chlorine (exacerbated by rubbing), the latest manifestation of my skin’s hyperactive histamines.

And so I went to bed, puffy-eyed and reeling from the swimming cap episode, in anticipation of a 6 AM alarm and a KTX train ride to Taejon.

Day 8: Haeundae and Pusan, Part 1 (19 August 2004)

(Editor's note: photos for Day 8.)

Getting out the door before 11 AM is often a struggle for this family, so we were all pleasantly surprised when we made our 6:30 AM train from Kyungju to Haeundae with time to spare. The train ride was pleasantly drowsy, although I did manage to finish up Harnessing Complexity, and there was plenty to see out the window with Typhoon Maggie wreaking some minor havoc on the countryside of southeastern Korea. The rain really was quite torrential at times, and when we arrived at Haeundae around 8:30 AM the storm was still going strong.

We took a taxi from Haeundae Station to the Westin Chosun Beach hotel, the most Americanized place we had stayed so far. The room is pretty small, but quite comfortable. It has no ondol floor, allowing you to (gasp!) walk right in with your shoes on. There are even 125-volt U.S. power outlets on the wall next to the (current—they might change it next year) Korean standard of 220 volts. And, of course, an Ethernet jack on the wall, but we had to pay for this one.

We had breakfast at the Camellia Restaurant in the hotel, which was a little pricey but pretty good—and the view alone, of the stormy waves crashing against the beach, was worth the price alone. Exhausted from waking up at 5 AM, the parents headed up to the room and napped while us kids wrote postcards and letters in the lobby area.

Once we finally got in the mood to get out of the hotel, we headed to the bus stop and boarded a bus for Pusan. (Given the less than perfect weather, we guessed that tomorrow would be better for a day at Haeundae Beach.) In Pusan, we walked through the Jalgalchi shijang, a huge seafood market that dwarfs anything Pike Place Market has to offer. Everywhere we turned, some middle-aged woman would try to grab our attention and drag us into her little seafood restaurant. We resisted for a while, but once we had seen most of the market one particularly persistent woman—one who had approached us on our way in, and had commented that "we look handsome because we have Korean blood running through our veins" or something like that—grabbed my mother by the arm, addressed her as "omoni" (older sister) and sat us down for a pleasant lunch of freshly killed, freshly roasted fish (with the requisite panchan, of course).

We stumbled briefly through a disconcertingly deserted underground shopping center before stepping on the subway for the return trip. Back at Haeundae, Mom and Dad vegged out in the hotel room for the rest of the night while Lizzy and I took a walk on the beach.

The weather had cleared up by this point, so the people had begun returning. We saw, as in Kangnam, an increasingly large number of young, hip, beautiful (well, some of them) people. I had changed into my swimming trunks, but there remained rope-tied buoys all along the beach. These—along with the whistle-happy lifeguards and the debris in the water—made swimming pretty much impossible. But we dipped our feet in, and enjoyed the walk.

By this point it was time, of course, to eat again. In our first venture into a U.S. franchise, we entered (cue ominous chords) McDonald’s. All the familiar symbols, menu items, smells, colors were present—even the presence of Hangul didn’t really throw me off—but something less tangible made for a rather surreal experience. I had spent my time here eating Korean food—which is about as far from McDonald’s as anything else—with Korean people, and this sudden juxtaposition of the Korean language and young Korean people with that most American of institutions was rather jarring.

Furthermore, we ran into a minor language problem with the cashier. We had no trouble expressing our orders (she understood “number five,” “number seven,” and “two fish fillets, just the sandwich”), but when we said we wanted the order to go, she asked if we wanted “cupcakes, two hundred won,” or so we thought. We shook our heads (surprised that McDonald’s served cupcakes in Korea) and she repeated it one more time. (We also noticed at this point that she hadn’t asked what kind of drinks we wanted—we ended up getting Cokes, which was okay with us.) The price came up on the display—12,800 won—so we handed her 13,000 won. She repeated, “cup cakes, 200 won,” and din’t give us any change. We guessed at this point that maybe it had something to do with the fact that our order was to go, so we shut up and went to wait for the food. When the food finally arrived and I looked to see where the cups were for the drinks, it hit me that she was trying to say “cup tax,” not “cupcakes.” And all was resolved—they used reusable cups for eat-in patrons, and charged 200 won for to-go orders. (A better way to do things, I think.)

Back in the room, we enjoyed a greasy meal of fish fillets, bulgogi burgers, ojingo (squid), grapes, and Coca-Cola.

Day 7: Kampo, Storm (18 August 2004)

(Editor's note: there are photos.)

Today The Dude picked us up at the early (for us) hour of 9 AM for a trip to the coast. We had seen on the news the night before that they were predicting 100 – 300 mm of rain today. (For those not acclimated to the metric system: that’s a hell of a lot of rain.) We brought along umbrellas (it hit me recently that the etymology of umbrella is just Latin “little shadow”...so it doesn’t really have to do with rain, but with sun (Editor's note: but I digress.)) and a sense of adventure.

Not very far along the road to the coastal town of Kampo, Mr. Kim stopped off at...another temple. The entrance fee was something like twice the entrance fee for the National Museum. The National Museum was quite extensive and interesting; this additional temple was in comparison a waste of time and money.

A little farther down the road, we stopped at a far less expensive and far more interesting attraction. The sign on the road said (aside from the Hangul) “Shilla Kiln,” and, sure enough, inside the shop were a couple of guys with pottery wheels and large quantities of clay. Right before our eyes, one of them (evidently the elder and more experienced one) grabbed a hunk of clay, threw it onto his wheel, and began working. During the next few minutes, we saw a Shilla-period pot form upon the wheel. He didn’t actually mean to keep this one—it was for demo purposes only—so he let us bend and twist the clay in our hands.

We went along the road some more, and saw the remnants of a structure built by King Munmu (who was buried at sea) and his son—this one free of charge. We started heading for another temple, but we had The Dude turn around the car instead and continue on our way to the coast.

The drive itself was one of the highlights of the day. We were surrounded by green mountains covered in mist, with the occasional house or rice paddy or town. I imagined tigers roaming the forests and thatched roof cottages along the road, but you’ll find no tigers today, and only the occasional thatched roof cottage contrived for tourists’ amusement. Someday I’d like to spend some time wandering through the mountains of the Korean countryside, but we haven’t had the time during this trip.

Mr. Kim dropped us off at the grave of King Munmu, which we were told you can see the remains of when the tide is low enough. The rain had not yet started in force, so the lack of people and the comfortable temperature made for a very pleasant walk along the rocky beach. There were small tents set up by various vendors all along the beach—during parts of the year stronger for tourists, there must be thousands of people giving these people lots of business, but today they seemed to spend most of their time securing gear in anticipation of rain and high winds.

After our walk, The Dude took us to a sashimi restaurant, which was good (if you enjoy eating strange sea creatures raw) but not how I would choose to spend $100 on a regular basis. I noticed they had unused Ethernet jacks all around the building.

We were fairly tired (for no good reason) but also anticipating the rain, so we elected to walk around briefly but head back to Kyungju as soon as possible. We walked around the breakwater by the restaurant, where fishermen were securing their motorboats. The motorboats had an interesting inboard motor that folded up so they could easily bring the boats ashore; they were all on land and tied down tight. Beyond the boats were large piles of concrete objects serving to protect the fishing boats from the waves. As we walked along the barrier, we saw insects running in every direction, apparently sensing the oncoming storm. About twenty feet out to sea, fish were jumping as well. We were the only tourists—and of course the only Americans—in sight. I said to Dad, “There’s a storm brewing,” and on cue the rain and winds began just moments afterwards. We ran to the taxi and started the drive back.

We stopped briefly at the lake near Kyungju, where Park Chung Hee once said, “Let there be a resort,” and there was a resort, and he saw the resort, and the resort smiled at him. The resort area is upscale Kyungju, no doubt where wealthy Seoul businessmen come for conferences and time-wasting.

Having had enough of Kyungju, we stopped by the train station and changed our 4 PM ticket to Pusan for one at 6:30 AM. Finally, we said our goodbye to The Dude, a goodbye consisting primarily of 100,000 won, and soon were passed out on the floor of our hotel room. Besides a walk to a place for dinner (pork kalbi and pibimbap) and to pick up some famous Kyungju bread (turned out to be a tasty concoction filled with sweet bean paste), we spent most of the rest of our night on the floor of our hotel room.

Day 6: Kyungju City Sights (17 August 2004)

(Editor's note: more photos!)

We began with a fairly relaxed morning, as The Dude (whose name turned out to be Kim Sang Jin) wasn’t scheduled to pick us up until 10 AM. Dad, Mom, and Lizzy took walks around the area while I showered and caught up on my journal, and we had some ramyun for breakfast that was provided by the nice Pension Forever owners.

First, Kim dropped us off at the Park Hotel, which seems to be an old Western-style hotel from the Japanese colonial era (maybe the 1930s). They had a ondol-style room for 68,000 won, not bad for four people. The room is pretty small (“cozy”), just fine for a couple of nights in Kyungju. After settling in the room, we headed down to the coffee shop and shared a couple overpriced breakfast items, which luckily came with wireless Internet access.

Our first Kyungju sight was the Cheonmachong, or “heavenly horse tomb,” so named for the form of one of the artifacts excavated from it. The Cheonmachong is thought to be the tomb of a Shilla king, and contained a number of ancient Shilla artifacts. Also, the tomb was air conditioned, which perhaps was more appreciated today than any prior day. The heat and humidity were pretty oppressive.

We walked around some of the other tombs of Shilla kings, and then to the Cheomseongdae observatory, which was constructed by . An English-speaking volunteer guide informed us that the observatory was built using 362 stones, one for each day of the lunar calendar, and was 27 stone layers high, corresponding to the fact that Queen Seongduk, under whom it was built, was the 27th ruler of Shilla. (Or something like that.)

After that, we followed The Dude’s advice to have some neng myun at a place called Pyongyang Neng Myun. We had a fair amount of trouble finding it, but after asking a number of people, we found ourselves deep in an alley surrounded with many different clothing stores, eating establishments, hardware and electronics stores, and seemingly many of the Kyungju young people. The neng myun was very refreshing, especially after walking for far too long in the oppressive heat and humidity.

After the neng myun, we hit the railroad station to buy tickets for our future trips to Pusan and a resort near Taejon, and then returned to our sight-seeing. Still suffering from the heat, we went to the National Museum, which was shockingly similar to the museum in Seoul, but with a slightly greater emphasis on Shilla and the local Kyungju artifacts. I also had my first drink of Chilsing Cider, which turned out to be approximately the same as 7-Up.

Returning to the sauna, we toured the last few standard tourist attractions of Kyungju: the Gyerim (“chicken”) forest, an ancient giant icebox (Seokbingko—“stone ice storage”), and the Anapji palaces built at the unification of Koguryo, Paekchae, and Shilla under the Shilla banner.

Lizzy developed a strange stinging sensation on her foot, which she initially thought was a splinter but began to suspect was in fact some kind of poisonous plant. So, rather than walking the long, soupy distance back to the Park Hotel, we got a taxi. We lay on our ondol beds for a while, watching the Olympics and munching chocolate-covered almonds bought at Costco back in the States, got some bulgogi and toenjang tchigae at the hotel restaurant, and returned to the room for more vegetation and journal writing.

Day 5: To Kyungju, Pulguksa, and Sokkuram (16 August 2004)

(Editor's note: again, photos.)

Today we switched home bases, taking the bullet train (KTX, or Korea Transit eXpress) to Kyungju—or, more accurately, to East Taegu, and transferring to a plain-old, less impressive train from Taegu to Kyungju. Outside of Seoul, Korea is much less like the future: we saw some somewhat run-down cities that reminded my mom of Seoul thirty-five years ago. Korea is very mountainous, and there were some spectacular views from the train. (In the tunnels, I made some progress on Harnessing Complexity by Axelrod & Cohen, a pretty good summary of the complex systems perspective applied to social science and business management. (Editor's note: isn't that exciting?))

When we arrived in Kyungju, a taxi driver wearing a baseball cap and glasses, probably in his sixties, approached us and asked if we needed a ride. We told him we were going to Pension Forever, the place that Pak Ik Suh’s secretary set up for us, and he looked really confused. After we consulted with the Pension Forever website at the tourist information booth and he discussed the location with a fellow taxi driver, we hit the road, though he had never heard of the place and didn’t really know where he was going. After about fifteen minutes, we ended up on a narrow, narrow one-lane road adjacent to an open drainage channel which Mom seemed to genuinely fear we would fall into. After backtracking a few times, we finally found ourselves at Pension Forever

Pension Forever is not in fact a hotel, with access to taxis, the city, etc. but rather some getaway cabins for middle-class Koreans wanting to get away from the city for a while. If we had a car, it would be very nice, but there is no way to get anywhere easily from here. Our taxi driver, whom I have begun referring to as The Dude, said he had been driving since 1969 and had never heard of the place. The owners of Pension Forever seemed sympathetic to our inconvenient location, and said that they had actually warned Mr. Pak’s secretary that the place was not appropriate for us (to no avail, apparently). We decided to take The Dude's suggestion and visit the the Sokkuram Buddhist grotto and the Pulguksa temple during the evening, spend the night at Pension Forever, and transfer to a hotel in town in the morning.

REMEMBER: use this photo

Sokkuram was a long drive up, up, and up a mountain, and up again about a 7-minute walk through the woods. It was built around 800 by some of the early Korean Buddhists, and consisted of a large stone Chinese-style Buddha surrounded by the usual entourage of figures carved in the walls. Quite impressive.

Pulguksa was a fairly extensive temple with many rooms, many gold-plated Buddhas, towers, etc. Cf. a Korean history photo book near you.

On the way to P.F., The Dude took us to a little Korean restaurant with three elderly ladies who were pretty entertained when the migook family showed up. They provided a running commentary about how handsome my dad was, how nice the kids were, how nice the mother was, etc., etc. Very friendly folks, much more down-to-earth than the Seoul urbanites.

The Dude is quite a character himself, with a distinctive low country guttural voice, a resounding laugh, and a fervent love for what Park Chung Hee did for the country back in the Sixties and Seventies. (Pulguksa! Sokkuram! He he he he he he!)

Day 4: Chun Jung Bae & Itaewon (15 August 2004)

(Editor's note: just a few photos this time.)

Breakfast: at M. Chereville again, except I slept in and didn’t really feel like eating, as some combination of the massive amounts of food and the medicine I was taking gave me diarrhea. (Editor's note: I think I'll just leave that in.)

The first thing we really did that day was to have lunch with Chun Jung Bae, my dad’s old friend from when they worked together at Kim & Chang, and now the leader of the ruling Uri Party in the National Assembly. For such an important guy, he had an extremely soft-spoken, polite demeanor, as did his wife—you woudn’t think anyone this quiet could make it as a politician, but I guess in South Korea people were fed up enough with the corrupt politics of the past that this nice guy was able to finish first.

(Chun drove one car, and his wife drove the other. His wife was a slightly better driver than the previous two wives, but a little over-cautious. In past years, it would have been pretty much unheard of for a VIP to drive his own car, but times they are a-changing. And Chun’s just that kind of guy.)

More history on Chun: he worked at Kim & Chang for a few years before quitting to defend political prisoners, including my mom’s brother Chinyung, at a time when this was a rather dangerous thing to do. He was featured in a BusinessWeek article earlier this year.

The lunch was a fabulous North Korean (Kaesong)-style meal, with hundreds of dishes, including rice porridge (chapsal), nurungji, and lots of other great stuff which I can’t remember specifically.

That afternoon, Chun and his wife dropped us off at Shinsa-dong, the district I was born in. We walked around and eventually found the house my parents had lived in. We tried to find the hospital I was born in, but couldn’t (it probably isn’t there anymore anyway), but did find a driving range in the middle of this crowded neighborhood. They built it on a hill, which had the nice side effect of automatically returning the balls. We made use of their bathroom and water cooler, and went on our way back to M. Chereville.

That night, we had dinner at Uridul Iagi (Our Story) Korean Family Restaurant, a place that’s much better than “family restaurants” in the States. We had pumpkin soup, some other panchan, buckwheat noodles and vegetables, tukbokum (dandelion) salad, and chapsal sogogi (meat breaded in glutinous rice) with finely chopped chives.

Day 3: (D)MZ & Feats at the Paks' (14 August 2004)

(Editor's note: look at the photos!)

Breakfast: granola bars, yogurt, and orange juice.
Ear: pretty much cured, just some residual congestion. The medicine did a great job.

We departed at 7 AM by taxi for Doksu Palace, which seems to be a meeting place for all kinds of tour buses going on all kinds of tours. We got on our bus, run by I Love Seoul Tours, and headed for the DMZ.

We first went to Paju City, which has the ticket office for DMZ tours, some public monuments (including an altar and a gallery of photos featuring George W. Bush at some ceremony) and, oddly enough, a (disused?) amusement park with a merry-go-round and small roller coaster.

At Paju we switched to another bus, this one housing people from several different tour companies, and headed for the Third Infiltration Tunnel. Over the years, the ROK has discovered four different tunnels constructed by the DPRK under the DMZ, this one, the Third Tunnel, headed straight for Seoul. The proximity of Seoul to the DMZ (< 50 miles?) is rather unnerving—the central hub of South Korea’s infrastructure would be the first thing destroyed in the event of renewed war.

We walked down a long, steep ramp to reach the tunnel, which we were allowed to walk through for several hundred meters. The tunnel only had enough clearance for people about 5' 6" or smaller, so I had to duck slightly the whole way. In several places on the tunnel wall DPRK troops had smeared coal, apparently so that their government could claim that they were mining, not trying to invade. (In fact, there are no coal deposits anywhere near there.) At the tunnel entrance there was a theater where they showed a bad propaganda video featuring tacky computer graphics, tacky music, and a tacky American announcer voice reading a bad (practically ungrammatical) translation of tacky words hoping for peace.

After the tunnel, we went to Dora Observatory, where you can look through binoculars toward the North. Here, and in every other location with views toward the North, we were not allowed to take photos. (It made me wish I had a camera system built into my glasses so I could sneak a shot...oh well. Maybe in a few years.)

Finally, we went to Dora Station; the plan was to reopen the train line through the North through here, and the station is in great shape, but no trains go through.

It was strange looking at war relics in tourist attractions for a war that’s technically still going on. Normally, you’d make trips like these to locations of battles long past—here, there may well still be tunnels being made, and another war is always in the back of people’s minds.

After our trip to the DMZ, we were dropped off in Itaewon, which Lizzy described as “the run-down part of Chinatown, only in reverse,” which I condensed into a new name: Migukdong (“Americantown”). There were a number of trashy-looking American women, a bunch of soldiers in plainclothes, and lots of Koreans selling lots of trinkets. We found a nice little Korean restaurant (hard to find among the Subways, Burger Kings, Steff Hot Dogs, etc.) and had some pibimbap (Lizzy), neng myun (mom), pibim neng myun (dad), and bulgogi (me).

We took the subway back to M. Chereville, and recovered for a little while before setting off once more to...eat again. We headed to Pak Ik Suh’s for quite a feast, including: panchan (wild sesame leaves, sea pens, pindaetuk, sashimi, honeydew melon, eel, cucumbers), an eggplant and mushroom dish, steak with a nice sauce, and squid cooked whole. (We learned later that Pak Chung Im was extremely ashamed of the meal because she had forgotten to serve rice. I don’t think we could have fit rice into our stomachs if we had it available.)

Day 2: Ear Infection, Mom's Old House, and Crazy Good Vegetarian Food with Kim Woo Taik (13 August 2004)

(Editor's note: photos for Day 2.)

Breakfast: same stuff at M. Chereville.
Ear: more painful.

In fact, during breakfast I started to feel faint and nauseated. I got up to go to the bathroom lest I blow chunks, and as I walked, my vision started to go black. I sat down before I succumbed to fainting, hitting my head on the ground, etc., but all was not well. So we decided I should head to a doctor.

Pak Ik Suh, already having demonstrated too much kindness, phoned an elementary school friend of his who happened to be an ear, nose, and throat doctor. Ik Suh came out to M. Chereville and drove my mom, Lizzy and I to the doctor’s office while my dad headed to Kim & Chang, his old law firm, to do some actual work on an actual case. (Note: doing actual work on an actual case means he can deduct his plane fare and that day’s expenses from his taxes. Woohoo!) Anyway, the doctor took a look at me, bringing us to...

Technological advancement anecdote #2: the doctor, though he needed his secretary to help him operate his Windows-based account management system, had a tiny video camera with which he could show me my throat. He stuck the camera down my throat, did a freeze frame, and showed me some marvelously swollen tonsils covered in a pus-like discharge. Truly disgusting.

One somewhat humorous conversation:

Me: "Does he think it’s a bacteria or a virus?"
Pak Ik Suh (translating): "Bacteria? Virus?"
Doctor: "Bacteria."
Pak Ik Suh: "It’s a bacteria."

So...I needed antibiotics. Not just antibiotics, apparently; he gave me a prescription for no fewer than five pills to be taken three times daily for three days.

Oh yeah, Pak Ik Suh paid for everything at the doctor’s before my mom or I could do a thing. Sneaky bastard.

Mr. Pak’s wife, Chung Im, picked us up at the doctor (as Ik Suh had to go to work) and dropped us off back at M. Chereville. We went to a place called the Herzen Bräu Haus for lunch, which had beer (which we did not have) and cheap Korean food. I had neng myun, which was fine, but my mom was unhappy with her kim chi biji tchigae, as was Lizzy with her kung gook su.

After lunch, we had our first experience with the subway, which turned out to be an incredibly well-organized, modern, clean, and efficient way to travel. We took the green #2 line one stop from Kangnam to Seoul National University and transfered to #3, which took us to Kongbokdung, an old palace near Kim & Chang.

The three of us had about an hour before we were scheduled to meet my dad, so we decided to walk toward where my mom lived with her aunt during high school. The neighborhood is right near the Blue House (president’s residence) and the prime minister’s residence, so there seemed to be an unusual number of police officers about—there were large groups of them sitting on riot shields on the sidewalk in various places. We eventually found my mom’s old house, only it had been largely torn down and replaced with a rather dilapidated structure that looked like it was about to be condemned. Pretty cool, though, for my mom to see where she had grown up.

We took a taxi back to Kongbokdung and met my dad. After recovering with some cold water and playing with Kim & Chang’s fancy color-whiteboard-with-inkjet-printer-attachment, we walked to the nearby history museum. We spent maybe an hour in the museum, which was full of interesting artifacts from ancient and less ancient Korea.

We had dinner with Kim Woo Taik, with whom my dad co-authors a book on Korean tax law, at a marvelous vegetarian place called Chaegundam, which claims to imitate the food of monks. I doubt the monks ate like this...to give a sample, the meal included: black sesame porridge, mul kim chi (sweet cold soup), salad (Japanese-style), cold noodles, ginseng, sweet potato and zucchini tempura, mushroom soup, some mysterious sweet drink, and a multitude of teas, cold and hot.

I was in too much pain by this point to really enjoy the meal, but Lizzy called it the “best food she had ever tasted.”

Before the meal, Woo Taik picked up my dad and Lizzy, and his wife picked up my mom and me. She was a pretty bad driver, but more impressive was her inability to the find the restaurant for about an hour. We eventually did get there, of course. (I’m overgeneralizing, I’m sure, but the standard pattern for going out to dinner is that half our party gets picked up by my dad’s friend, a Korean man, and the other half by his wife, and the wife...can’t drive.)

Day 1: Min Sok Chon (12 August 2004)

(Editor's note: check out the photos for this day.)

From now on, this journal will be organized around what we eat. To begin...

M. Chereville provided what they called a continental breakfast, but instead of the sugar-infused pastries of the one you get at, say, a Motel 6 in Idaho, there was decent bread for toast, hard boiled eggs made in a spiffy egg-boiling machine, highly processed meat, cereal, and juice. The presence of eggs, in my opinion, made the breakfast. Unfortunately, swallowing food was getting pretty damn painful. I hoped it would just go away. (Editorial note: I think I meant I hoped the pain would go away. Not the food.)

The only other notable thing about M. Chereville was the inability for the shower to produce water of a consistent temperature. Part of this was probably a small tank, but even the first shower of the day was pretty hard to deal with. In the future, we’ll all be having sex with robots, but shower water will still freeze and scald us, I fear.

Oh, and they were very helpful in directing us to the correct bus toward the Min Sok Chon (Korean Folk Village).

The Korean Folk Village, unlike Seoul, was a charming trip to the past. Yes, there were souvenir shops and restaurants by the entrance, but the village itself seemed an authentic representation of the Korean lifestyle of...well, not that long ago. (Everything changed here within the last fifty years, accelerated by Park Chung Hee's 1960s & 1970s centralized development--basically national socialism...but I digress, besides being unqualified to discuss such historical matters...)

The Min Sok Chon began around the time that the ROK government decided to tear down all the old traditional houses and replace them with ugly industrial-looking tin-roofed huts. A number of structures were bought up, shipped out, and rebuilt on the site, so they’re all the authentic item; many other structures are reconstructions. The traditional house—for which you could get a much better description elsewhere—consists of a small number of small rooms. The kitchen area typically has two or three pots—one for rice, one for cooking hot stew or soup, and a third perhaps for hot water—heated by a fire underneath. The rice would be burned on the bottom, so people would mix the burnt rice with hot water to eat (nurungji) and to make a tea (sungnyung), the taste of which is often emulated by barley and corn tea (poricha and oksusucha, respectively). Seeing this stuff in something akin to a quaint theme park makes you think it must have been hundreds of years since people lived like this—but, no, it was in my mother’s lifetime.

The village also had a pretty extensive yangban (upper class person) complex, complete with statues of visiting scholars having a conference, servants’ quarters, a daughter’s study house (interestingly, with a thatched roof), etc.

Lunch was wonderful at the Min Sok Chon. They have a number of different types of food being cooked at different stations. Dad had neng myun, a cold noodle soup on ice; Lizzy and Mom had pibimbap. I was feeling pretty awful due to the infection in my ear (and now the swollen glands), so I had that which cures what ails you: samgetang, a wonderful ginseng chicken and rice soup. It made me once again ready to face the day.

After lunch there were a few shows: first, a group playing traditional music and performing the accompanying dance and march (nongak, “farmer’s music”); second, pubescent girls lifting each other high into the air on seesaws (nultigi) while performing various acrobatic feats; third, a highly skilled and garrulous tightrope walker that looked like he had been doing it for about fifty years.

When we got back to Kangnam, the first thing we did was find a yakbang (drugstore) to get something for my ailing ear. We got a generic-looking decongestant that would prove to be totally useless. Then, we went to a restaurant recommended by the yakbang lady's recommendation.

The restaurant turned out to be a really expensive kalbi restaurant that prided itself on only using native Korean beef. Korea doesn’t have a lot of room to raise cows, so Korean beef is far too expensive (and probably tastes the same). We ordered a fair amount of food that didn’t cost very much—some pibimbap, panchan, etc.—but we ordered enough meat to boost the bill to 100,000+ won ($100+). Oh well, it tasted good.

(Note about transliteration: within the last few years, the government adopted a new system of transliteration in order to avoid using diacritical marks on the Roman alphabet. It sucks, and will probably contribute to even worse mispronunciation of Korean words than before. Kangnam is Gangnam, which is okay; Kim is Gim; but...get this...Kyungju is Gyeongju, and Sokkuram is Seoggulam. Oh, and they apply the rules inconsistently sometimes, so you get Seokgulam, Seoggulam, Seokkulam, Seokguram, etc. depending on what paragraph you’re reading. What the fuck?)

After dinner, I took the yakbang’s crazy pill and felt insanely drowsy within about ten minutes. I crawled into bed, fell asleep...and woke up at 4 AM, my ear feeling worse than ever.

Day 0: Seattle to Seoul, via Tokyo (10-11 August 2004)

We—Robert "Bob" Arthur Baskerville, Tahn Chong Baskerville (중 단?), Elizabeth "Lizzy" Marie Baskerville, and Edward "Ed" Barnet Baskerville—set out in a shuttle bus from 3018 NE 96th Street to Sea-Tac Airport at 9 AM PST on 10 August 2004. We had plenty of time at the airport before our 12:45 PM flight out to Tokyo. All went smoothly, although the pain in my right ear that had started the evening before got worse. (On that front, the worst was yet to come.)

I spent much of my plane ride reviewing basic Hangul in Fred Lukoff's introductory Korean book (an ancient copy from when my dad was studying it in college), the better to sound out words whose meaning I do not know. (Except for the English transliterations...more on that later.)

Our flight to Tokyo arrived right on time, and we had an hour and a half to kill at the Tokyo airport. I was struck by the drab grayness of the place—I had expected something a little sexier—and also by the age of the little shuttle bus that took us from the plane to our connecting gate (the need for the shuttle probably had something to do with the rampant construction going on). That's all I know about Japan.

By the end of the plane ride, swallowing food was causing my right ear to hurt rather badly. I hoped it would just go away.

We arrived in Seoul on time as well—about 8 PM Seoul time, on Wednesday, 11 August 2004—and eventually found my dad's old friend (and former English student at Yonsei University), Pak Ik Suh. He drove us from Inchon to Seoul (maybe a little under an hour drive), and we arrived at our hotel, called M. Chereville—a typically trying-to-be-Western-but-conspicuously-weird-to-a-Westerner name. (Actually, it's somewhere between a hotel and a condominium, a "serviced residence" that seems to cater mostly to business types.)

M. Chereville is near the subway station in Kangnam, a recently developed area south of the Han River (‘kangnam’ means just that; old downtown Seoul is north of the river) where young, hip, beautiful, probably well-off people seem to frequent. The room was equipped with all the modern accouterments (air conditioner—everything is excessively air-conditioned in Seoul), high-speed Internet (four Ethernet jacks in our apartment), etc.

First anecdote about the fast pace of change and modernization: I had purchased two power adapters in Seattle so we could use our devices on Seoul power outlets. In our room, the first thing I noticed was that the power connector didn't match the adapter I had purchased. Maybe I had made a mistake, I thought, but when I showed it to Mr. Pak's daughter Claire, she said, “Oh, that would have worked two years ago.” Apparently the government mandated that everybody change their power systems from 110V to 220V with a different connector, and it just happened. You can’t pull that shit in the United States.

Mr. Pak began our trip with excessive generosity, and this was to continue unabated, unrelentless, and totally impervious to resistance. Besides picking us up from the airport (which is a good hour and a half from where he lives), he handed Lizzy and me each 150,000 won (about $150) and a bunch of Hershey’s chocolate bars.

Prelude

So, we've just finished up our third full day in Korea. What's to say? My soon-to-be-hackneyed phrase: it's like a trip to the future. But it's much more than a trip to the future. It's a trip to the past, a trip to the present, and, more importantly, a trip along other axes, of which geographical ones are not the most significant. That said, the distance along certain other dimensions are almost negligible.

Before the analysis, some episodic recollections.