Paradox

I recently finished my last Bill Bryson travel narrative...

Ten hours and 903 kilometers after leaving Daly Waters

 we arrived, dry and dusty, in Alice Springs...

In those days Alice (Springs) had a population of 4,000 and hardly and visitors.

  Today it's a thriving little city with a population of 25,000 and it is full of 

visitors -- 35,000 of them a year -- which is of course the whole problem.  

These days you can jet in from Adelaide in two hours, from Melbourne and Sydney in 

less than three. You can have a latte and buy some opals and then climb on a tour 

bus and travel down the highway to Ayers Rock.  The town has not only become 

accessible, it's become a destination.  It's so full of motels, hotels, conference centers, 

campgrounds, and desert resorts that you can't pretend even for a moment that you 

have achieved something exceptional by getting yourself there.  It's crazy really.  

A community that was once famous for being remote now attracts thousands of 

visitors who come to see how remote it no longer is.

Bill Bryson

from In a Sunburned Country

Taebaek is a little town surrounded by green mountains in northeastern Korea.  It's quiet.  Almost sleepy.  Jessica and I spent two hours there one Sunday waiting for a bus home.  The town reminded me of Brevard, NC.  I could envision cafes.  Used book shops.  Coffee bars.  Antique stores. 

                                                                  ...and tourists.  Lots and lots of tourists.

Carrying the label tourist is often considered a badge of dishonor.  Tourists ruin places.  They make a secret little find in the mountains not so secret and not so little.  They come in large camera-toting mobs.  They bring congestion.  Noise.  Crowds.

                                                                  ...and money.  Lots and lots of money.

No one complains about the money.  Money brings development and a new quality of life.  All the octopus you can fit in your refrigerator.  I've realized now that many travelers (tourists) don't necessarily want to avoid tourists.  They want to avoid other tourists.

After being a foreigner for the past 10 months, I view tourists in a completely different manner.  I'm pro-tourist.  They're good for a city.  Even by the busload.

(...still, I hope Gatlinburg burns to the ground.)

Racial Profiling

There's a difference between bad and mischievous...

bad - adjective - not good in any manner or degree; having a wicked or evil character; morally reprehensible; defective; deficient.

mischievous - adjective - playfully annoying; roguishly or slyly teasing.

When I was growing up, the bad kids would fight at lunch.  Usually over a prolonged stare.  Or someone's mama being accused of doing something lascivious.  The mischievous kids would fill book bags with whipped cream as unaware onlookers watched the brawl.

I was never a bad kid.  Just overly mischievous.  Once in middle school I unlaced my shoestrings in Science class and worked them (ever so slyly) through the belt loops of the kid in front of me.  Circled around the metal back of the chair, I closed it with a knot.  When the bell rang, the student (he was one of the bad kids) tried to bolt for the door.  But alas, he was hindered.

For a second, a smirk flashed across Mrs. Cathey's face.  A smirk that said...

                                        "you had that coming you disrespectful little prick."

I thought we left all of that behind when we moved to Asia.

Asian people are smart.  Doctors.  Scientists.  Scholars.  All of them.  Asian students are attentive.  They study (a lot).  They pay attention in class.  They memorize and recite biology textbooks.  For fun.

They're Asian, it's just what they do.

                             ...or so I thought.

People are people.  Children are children.  Anywhere in the world.

When I was my student's age, the boys in my class would gather around the urinal, waiting to see what color Chris Brewington's  pee was going to be that day.  He was taking medicine that changed the hue with each dose.  Last week I walked into the bathroom to find several 2nd graders giggling.  One boy had his pants down, facing the toilet.  The others were watching intently.  I didn't investigate further...just let them have their fun.

People are people.  Children are children.  Anywhere in the world.
  

Heyri

해 리 (Hey-ri) is a very small artist's village north of Seoul.  Just 10km away from the most fortified, and some would say most dangerous, border in the world, Hey-ri was an interesting little find.  

Movie poster from Korean Cinema and Animation Museum

Shoney's Big Boy?

Death Star over Korea

What if...

What if we didn't go home?

What if we just kept travelling?

The European writers always had

their 'wanderjahr', their year of

wandering in their youth.  

I'd like one of those, even at this late date.

-Frances Mayes

from A Year in the World

Cultural Diversity (and no, I'm not talking about black people)

Obvious statement #412: When moving to another country, one must adjust to new ways of doing things.

Jessica and I have been in Korea for nearly 10 months.  Sometimes it feels like 10 days.  Sometimes it feels like 10 years. 

If you’ve read this blog with any regularity, you’re aware that we have experienced what I feel certain are the customary frustrations of living in a new and foreign place. 

     You don’t speak the same way.

     You don’t eat the same way.

     You don’t socialize the same way.

     You don’t use the bathroom the same way.

In Korea, when you enter a merchant’s store, of any type, you can count on one thing: the shopkeeper WILL hover over you.  I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the Korean way of being attentive and ready to assist the customer.  It bothered us at first.  But it’s just customer service.

It’s the thought that counts.  I suppose.

But when you look like me...

6’6”.  White.  Red beard.  Of obvious non-Asian ethnicity...

...you can count on two other things happening: First the store clerk will ask you a question in Korean.  It’s probably something along the lines of “what are you looking for?”  But who knows?  Shrug shoulders.  The question (I think) will be asked again, and most likely a third time, as if you just didn’t hear what he/she said.

Second the store clerk will observe what you are looking at.  Last night it was rain boots.  He/she will point to one pair, as if to say “Do you like these?”

     Shake head “no.”

     Just looking. Thanks.

Points to another pair.

     No.

A third.

     No.

Finally you just walk away, content with the fact that your feet will remain water logged for the rest of the rainy season.

                                                                        ...I think it's time to go home.

Book sample 1

Ask any Korean to point out Buseok on a map, and you’ll get a variety of blank stares, nervous grins, and apologies.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak English.” (In perfect English, mind you.) 

Koreans have an odd sense of size when it comes to developed geography.  Seoul, a city that 10.42 million people call home (24.5 million if you consider the outlying suburbs and urban sprawl), is a big city by any standard.  But what I found interesting is that cities on the peninsula, no matter their relative expanse, are not cities by Korean standards unless they resemble an area like the capital. 

On the other end of the spectrum, Buseok is small.  Tiny.  By any standard.  Not worthy of even a speck on the map.  According to the last census taken by the government, Buseok claims just over 100 residents, 25% of which are cows, chickens,  apple trees, and a mean looking pack of dogs that no one but the local restaurateur seems to be able to do anything about.  Needless to say, the little countryside farming community where I taught English to elementary students does not exist to most Koreans.  If someone, by chance, has ever heard of Buseok, that knowledge is generally filed away in some peripheral part of the brain, alongside other useless tidbits of information like the politics of Al Sharpton, who the latest castoff of The Bachelor was, and the plotline of Grey’s Anatomy.

Except for the small number of school age children, the residents of Buseok are either old, or older.  There is one very small elementary school and one middle school of similar proportions.  Older students attend high school in Yeongju.  Dorms are provided, which most teenagers are thrilled about, as they do not have to go home everyday to the little clearing at the foot of Sobaek Mountain where they grew up. 

Foreigners have no reason to visit Buseok.  Most Koreans have no reason to visit Buseok.  

So understandably it is something of a novelty, reminiscent of a roadside attraction in the Arizona desert, when someone like me, a 6’6”, pale white, red bearded American, strolls into town.  My predecessor at the elementary school (the middle school has no foreign English teacher) was a black South African lady.  She held the same post (outpost to be precise) for 7 years.  Given that the school only extends as far as 6^th grade, most, if not all, of the students had never seen someone like me.  So tall.  Or hairy.  Gorilla-esque.  It was a bit intimidating for such small children.  Spending five days a week in Buseok was an adventure.  For me and the students.  However, with adventure comes risk.  Risk of the unknown.  Risk of contracting exotic diseases.  Or in my case, when you couple a tall American with easily excited Korean children, the risk of being inadvertently punched in the nuts.  

Foreign Film Friday

A foreign film review by Chris White

__________________________________

AFTER LIFE

Written & Directed by Hirokazu Koreeda

Nearly a decade after Albert Brooks suggested that each of us must prove his mettle in an after-life court of law (DEFENDING YOUR LIFE, 1991), Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda imagines us starring, post-mortem, in a supernatural film of our life’s happiest moment.

 

AFTER LIFE is a richly imagined, completely original, and deeply moving film for an age when most understand the story of their lives as cinema.

 

The first part of the film is about each character remembering, deciding, and then choosing a memory that will follow them into eternity.

 

This is an agonizing choice for some…very easy for others. Some choose simple moments, while others pick more dramatic, obvious moments. Yet in each character’s choice, we see ourselves, our own lives…our own life-defining stories.

 

The second part of the film plays like a behind-the-scenes, making-of documentary about each character stepping in to the literal role of their life.

 

Koreeda smartly supports his documentary-styled narrative with a parallel story…that of a quasi-romantic relationship that develops between two after-life facilitators/social workers. And it is in this sub-plot, that he gives voice to the concerns of the still-living.

 

This is fascinating filmmaking from one of the world’s brightest and most honest filmmakers.

1998 \\ Color \\ 118 min.

Artistic License

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Japan

Photoblog 3

Bananas

Geoje-do ("Go-jay" Island), South Korea

by Jessica Hollingsworth

Yessssss

Photoblog 2

Hahoe Folk Village

Andong, South Korea

by Jessica Hollingsworth

Mask Dance

Mask Museum

Foreign Film Friday

__________________________________

A foreign film review by Chris White

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Written & Directed by Sofia Coppola

One might imagine the set of Sofia Coppola’s spare masterpiece as a solemn place…she and cinematographer Lance Acord speaking gently to each other…stars Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray flirting quietly in the wings…crew members whispering breathlessly that this might be the day father Francis comes to visit…

(In fact, if you are Aaron Sorkin, that’s precisely how you’d imagine it.)

The reality, I believe, is much better: a slim crew camped out in a high rise Tokyo hotel for a few weeks making a movie. Their aim? To capture the tiniest, most fleeting…the most indelible moments of an accidental friendship between two lost souls.

LOST IN TRANSLATION is often mistaken as a fish-out-of-water, romantic comedy. It is not. It is better. It is a patient meditation on how people cope in this new, small world we share. Indeed, it is a film about taking care of each other…about being with each other.

Johansson and Murray have never been better than this. And neither has Coppola. The film sweeps you up from first frame to last. It befriends you. It stays with you.

It is a rainy Saturday movie for people who like to wander, but don’t like to feel lost.

2003 \\ Color \\ 104 min.

Focus Features

COUNTRY OF PRODUCTION: Japan

Currently reading...

"Every cultural instinct and previous experience tells

you that when you travel this far you should find,

at the very least, people on camels.  There should

be unrecognizable lettering on signs, and swarthy

men in robes drinking coffee from thimble-sized

cups and puffing on hookahs, and rattletrap buses and

potholes in the road and the real possibility of

disease on everything you touch -- but no,

it's not like that at all."

Bill Bryson

from A Sunburned Country

Photoblog 1

Weekend in Daegu

by Jessica Hollingsworth

Gettin' Down to Business

"In Winter, Hammerfest is a thirty-hour ride by bus

from Oslo, though why anyone would want to go there

in winter is a question worth considering.  It is on the

edge of the world, the northernmost town in Europe,

as far from London as London is from Tunis, a place of dark

and brutal winters, where the sun sinks into the Arctic

Ocean in November and does not rise again for ten weeks."

from Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe

These are the first words I read from travel author Bill Bryson.  I've been smitten ever since.  One of my dreams is to write a travel book about my own experiences abroad.  

Well, I'm not getting any younger.  And our time in Asia is quickly passing.  8 1/2 months down; 6 1/2 to go.  So I've decided to take a break from my blog and spend the month of June making a major dent in the beginnings of my story.  But don't worry.  ...in Korea will continue.  Jessica has agreed to take the reigns and treat you to her photos of Korea.

See you in July!