May 11 Home again, home again!

I celebrate my 61st birthday today by leaving Daejeon, boarding an airplane, and returning home. Seeing Patti again at SeaTac Airport will be the best birthday present ever. (Yes, it is my birthday at 6 pm when my plane takes off from Seoul, and still my birthday the next afternoon when my plane lands in Seattle, courtesy of the International Date Line. This year, my birthday lasts for, oh, I don’t know, something like 40 hours.)

Although I can’t wait to be home, there are many, many things I will miss about Korea. Here are the top 10:

10. Walking to work, to stores and to restaurants in my very active neighborhood

9. Unfailing politeness
8. The public baths
7. The lights at night

6. The Buddhist temples, especially on quiet days with no crowds

5. The subway

4. The singing and chanting at Hanwha Eagles baseball games

3. The running path along the river

2. Some, but not all, Korean food: bibimbap, pajan, takboki

1. Koreans

So that’s it for my trip and for my blog. Thanks for following along. It was fun for me to keep track of all the things I saw and did. I hope you got a kick out of it too, and that you’ll have your own opportunity to visit Korea someday. It’s quite a place!

May 9 Surprises

Just when I think I have things figured out, Korea and Koreans surprise me.

On Monday, as I was leaving the office, I checked in with Cho Jung Jae about some work we had collaborated on and then said, “See you tomorrow!” as I turned to go. “Oh, no, not tomorrow,” he said. “Why not, aren’t you working tomorrow?” “No, nobody will work. It is International Children’s Day, a holiday.” “You mean the office will be closed?” “Yes, of course.” “And nobody mentioned this to me?” “Well, everybody already knew,” meaning, I suppose, that they assumed that I knew too.

So on Tuesday morning I had time for a run along the river. I was joined by a fellow on a bicycle who had pedaled alongside me on one of my runs several weeks ago. “Hey, Seattle!” he called out. I asked him about the marathon he had just run in Daegu, and we chatted about races and training and how far I planned to run today. He told me his name and age, and asked me mine. Eventually he waved and shot on ahead, and I assumed that was the last I would see of him. But on the return half of my run he was waiting for me with a cold bottle of water and a slip of paper with his name and email address so that we can keep in touch and exchange race information.

I’m surprised yet again by the names of some of the stores and restaurants here. What are they thinking?

And, after twelve weeks, I am still surprised the by typical garb of the ladies who do their power-walking along the river path. The sun visor, the face mask, the gloves, the jacket—it was about eighty-five degrees out when I took this picture.

In spite of the solid education I received at the Museum of Chicken Arts in Seoul, I am surprised by how pervasive chicken images are in Daejeon.

As I try to fit everything into suitcases, I’m kind of surprised by how many good-bye gifts I have received: twenty-six at least, although some of those were given to me to take home to Patti. They are not all going to fit in my suitcase and garment bag, so some will have to be shipped back to Seattle.

And finally, I am surprised by how much I’m already starting to miss my friends here—it was hard to say good-bye to everyone when I left the office on Friday. (But I will not miss sitting on the floor to eat!)

May 4 What Is Your Religion?

The second most popular question in Korea (after “How old are you?”) seems to be “What is your religion?” This is a little disconcerting at first, because in the US it is not a common topic of discussion in the government workplace, nor is it one of the first things asked when meeting a new acquaintance at a casual social gathering. In Korea, the acceptable answers are a) Catholic; b) Christian (meaning fundamentalist/evangelical); c) Buddhist; or d) None. Any answer may be followed up by “Do you go to church?” “What do you believe?” etc. (I have read, however, that it is considered somewhat impolite and intrusive to ask what someone does for a living in Korea. Different cultures have different approaches to personal privacy.)

I had the opportunity to explore two of the four options in a bit more detail this weekend. Saturday was the Buddha’s birthday (or at least the day it is celebrated in Korea.) My friends Cho Han Sic and Lee Im Moo decided it would be a good day to take me to Beopjusa, a large temple complex in the National Park at the base of Songni Mountain. The place was packed with visitors.

The main feature of Beopjusa is a 100 foot high bronze Buddha statue. While the temple complex is 1500 years old, the statue was built just 20 years ago. I personally find the other features of the site, such as the large but graceful pagoda, much more attractive.

Beneath the base of the bronze Buddha is a prayer room with a smaller Buddha and a display of some of the artifacts from the site.

These ancient chicken stamps confirm everything I learned at the Museum of Chicken Arts in Seoul.

Then on Sunday afternoon I went with my friend Kang Yeong Yang and his wife to their church picnic, which was held in a park along a river on the edge of town. The event consisted mostly of playing a little badminton and grilling meat.

Afterwards the men sat and ate while the women served.

Everyone was extremely nice to me and kept giving me lettuce and tomatoes and some kind of root and sliced melon and rice and sweet potatoes. The children had a great time too. The little boys threw rocks into the river while the little girls sat and chatted—in the river.

Between my two weekend religious celebrations I went for my usual Sunday morning run on the path along the river here in town. About three kilometers into my 16k run I happened upon the start of a 10k race which, by coincidence, followed the same route I was running and started just a few seconds after I ran past the start line. So suddenly I found myself in the midst of several hundred very fast young runners who greeted me cheerfully as they blew on by. They were all decked out in appropriate race day attire—shorts and technical shirts or tanks with a race number pinned to the front—while I was slugging along in my jogging pants with my jacket tied around my waste. But everyone seemed pleased or at least a little amused to have this ancient foreigner straggling along. I crossed the finish line proud not to have been last, took advantage of the water station they had set up there, and then continued on at a slower pace to complete the final three kilometers of my run. But the time I spent on the trail with the Korean runners reminded me of how much energy I get out of competitive running, how much I miss it, and also how much work I have to do if I ever want to be competitive again.

May 1 Book Club

This week I spent with Bill Stafford of the Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle. Bill is bringing a study mission of business, government, and education leaders to Daejeon in a year and was here to plan the itinerary. Their program will include presentations from local experts regarding science, technology, transportation, and education. It should be pretty interesting.

One place they will visit is the National Science Museum of Korea, which is located in Daejeon. The museum is a lot like the Pacific Science Center in Seattle except that it includes a large cultural history section (not really science) and it is less interactive. To its credit, they have an outdoor exhibit which includes a larger-than-life replica of the swine flu virus.



Speaking of which, I am already worrying that the spreading pandemic may cause Seoul and/or Seattle to close its airport to international travel just when I am leaving to come home (in ten days!) Fortunately, I was not asked to work in Seattle’s other sister city, Mazatlan. Although, come to think of it, other than the danger of an agonizing death, there would have been some advantages.

Yesterday I was invited by some people at work to join them for book club. Book club is held in a restaurant after work on the last Thursday of each month Instead of everyone reading the same book and discussing it, this group has found it more fun for each member to read a book of his or her choice and then give a brief report on it while everyone eats and drinks beer. Last night three of the five attendees (besides me) were men. There were no reports. Instead we just talked about literature, culture, and travel. They asked me for some recommendations on books to read, and naturally I could not think of any. Perhaps it was the beer.

April 25 Further Adventures with Videographers

What would you show if you had to try to capture the essence of Daejeon in a half hour video? That’s not entirely a rhetorical question—in fact, it’s exactly what Mike and Donna James have to figure out. We’ve already been to a church, a temple, a baseball game, a university, a high school, a research center, and a Buddhist art gallery. We have been to the burial mounds at Gongju, the train station, the subway station, an orchestra rehearsal, the arboretum, a kimchi factory, and the public market where ladies sell fruits, vegetables, fish, and spices of all kinds and colors and smells. We have met with the Mayor, had coffee at Starbucks, and toured a park where, in the sixteenth century, a poet and resistance leader plotted the effort to drive out the Chinese. And of course, we have eaten Korean food in traditional restaurants and from street vendors.

What else is special about Daejeon? Korea has two National Cemeteries (like our Arlington National Cemetery), and one of them is in Daejeon. We visited it with a veteran of the Korean War who still speaks reverently of Douglas MacArthur and the Incheon invasion nearly sixty years ago. The cemetery is a beautiful and somber sprawl of neatly lined tombstones and soaring monuments to those who sacrificed their lives for the freedoms which South Koreans enjoy today.

Daejeon has another special park, Ppuri Park, which is dedicated to memorializing each family surname in Korea. Each name has a monument which recounts the history and significance of the name. (They have Kim, Park, Lee, and a hundred others, but no Chakoian.)

Since the video is about the sister city relationship with Seattle, you would have to show Seattle Park, ideally when it is filled with children from the nearby elementary school—maybe, because the principal knows that you will be filming, dressed in their traditional Korean costumes.

You might want to show a view of the city from a hillside in the morning and from a nearby mountaintop at night.

You’d want to capture the excitement of young people out on the town in the evening,

and also the traditional stores, whole markets dedicated to traditional Korean costumes

and to ginseng, which can be used to flavor food, make tea or candy, or put in huge glass jars to scare the neighbor kids on Halloween.

And of course, if you were an avid golfer like Mike James, you would have to do at least one segment on the growing popularity of life-sized virtual golf.

It has taken me almost three months to absorb Daejeon. How do you show it on television in thirty minutes? Good luck, Mike and Donna!

April 22 Adventures with Videographers

On Monday morning I had the opportunity to spend about an hour and a half with my friend Professor Cho’s current events class at Chungnam National University.

The class is conducted in English, and rather than simply lecture the students, I used the opportunity to ask them questions and then to discuss several topics with them. It was fun, for me at least. We covered a wide range of issues, including gender dynamics in Korea (why is it that Korean men don’t cook? One student said that he certainly does, and expects to cook for his wife; several of the women students immediately offered to marry him); reunification with the North (which students generally agreed was inevitable, difficult, and maybe not such a good idea); and the global economic crisis, which concerns them greatly (with some difficulty I convinced them that it was not entirely the fault of the US, although Ronald Reagan does bear a major share of the blame.) Three of the students were from Malaysia and one from China, which made the discussions even more interesting. They all seemed bright, thoughtful, and well informed.

The rest of my time this week has been spent with Mike and Donna James, two very fun and highly professional videographers from Seattle who are creating a half hour video about Daejeon to be shown on Seattle television. I have been accompanying them on their schedule of sight-seeing and interviews, which has been educational for me and maybe somewhat helpful for them. In the first few days of their visit, they have interviewed students and faculty at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (known as the Korean MIT and a very impressive place); explored cancer research at the Korean Research Institute of Biology and Biotechnology, which has a joint project going with the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle; talked with high school students at a public school specializing in foreign languages; and of course, checked out the fans, ballplayers, cheerleaders, and food at a Hanwha Eagles baseball game.

Probably the most dramatic contrast came on Sunday. We started the day at an evangelical mega-church (7,000 members, 3,000 of them children) here in Daejeon, interviewing the head pastor in his plush office and then attending the service. It was rollicking and intense in the same highly choreographed way many fundamentalist services are conducted in the US—the loud music, the videos, the charismatic calls.

From there we went to Dong hak sa Temple, where the head priest (a woman) made tea for us while she sat crosslegged on the floor and patiently explained the Four Noble Truths.

In the main temple, worshipers meditated in silence. In the courtyard outside, throngs of tourists like me snapped photos of the red and pink lanterns that had been hung in celebration of the Buddha’s birthday on May 2.

April 16 Signs and symbols

After more than eight weeks in Korea, I actually spent time this week with “foreigners.” I was invited to a dinner and talk at the Solbridge International School of Business. The invitation came from Prof. Emanuel Yi Pastreich, an American and friend of Mayor Park; the faculty members I met and spoke with were from many countries with many perspectives on business and business issues. The evening’s guest speaker talked about advanced technology research and the need for international networks of exchange in order to manage to increasingly high costs. From there we went on to discuss the applications of technology, market forces, various roles of government, and social and cultural impacts. I realized that (except for Patti), these were the first non-Koreans I had met and interacted with since coming here. I am glad that my experience thus far has been so intensely and exclusively Korean, but I also enjoyed the wider range of perspectives in a very interesting conversation. A French-Canadian professor who specializes in management issues related to biotechnology firms and who has been in Kuwait the past two years was fascinated by my experience at the Hanwha Eagles game. We will try to go together to a game in my final few weeks.

Another realization I’ve had since coming here is the power of symbols. When you don’t speak the language, symbols can take on a whole new level of usefulness—stop, men’s room, exit, etc. Most symbols seem to be pretty universal now, and we take them for granted. For example, when I see a cross on the top of a spire (a pretty common sight in Korea), I can assume that there is a Christian church beneath it.

One major exception to that is the swastika. Imagine walking down a street in a Seattle neighborhood and seeing a large swastika painted on the side of a building. You would immediately report it as graffiti of the most offensive sort. But not so in Korea.

The symbol itself is actually thousands of years old, showing up in Bronze Age pottery, and the word “swastika” originates in Sanskrit, meaning a lucky or auspicious object. It was incorporated into Hinduism and later Buddhism, where it represents universal harmony and the balance of opposites. Since its adoption by the Nazis in the first half of the twentieth century, it has virtually disappeared in the west except when dredged up by neo-Nazi groups as an emblem of anti-Semitism and white supremacy.

In Korea, however, the symbol retains its original Buddhist meanings and it’s not unusual to see a swastika on Buddhist temples and even on stores or businesses. No matter how often I see it, to these western eyes it’s still very jarring.