Liberation Day

Today was Korean Independence Day (or National Liberation day), which also happens to be one of the very few holidays we get. We celebrated by going to Bong-eun-sa temple, which offers 3-hour temple life tours once a week. The day, known as Gwangbokjeol in Korean, celebrates independence from Japan after WWII.

We were barely inside the temple when a gong was sounded to announce the start of a worship service – but what made it especially interesting was that it was a special service to commemorate Liberation day – and our guide told us that the same service would be taking place in Buddhist temples across North Korea. (The standard line on the divided nation is that all South Koreans want their country to be unified. The conflict was so recent, and to a large extent orchestrated by forces outside of Korea, that many families were separated by the creation of two countries from one. I’ll do a wee potted history of the forced schizophrenia of the Koreas another time).

As part of the tour, we were able to experience a tea ceremony, make lotus lanterns, and be instructed in meditation by a monk. As far as I gathered, Korean Buddhism is different from other forms of Buddhism, both in the meditative practices and in the overall practice – Korean Buddhism (if I understand rightly) is more about searching for answers to certain questions to find inner balance and harmony.

I was struck, as I so often am in Korea, by the juxtaposition of old and new. The temple is 1200 years old, on a mountain in southern Seoul – and it’s right next door to the biggest shopping centre and business complex in the whole of Korea.

In so many ways, some I've touched on before, Korea seems like a schizophrenic country. But a very bewitching one.

In which I attempt to talk about toilets without making any crappy jokes.

It continues to amaze me that a country so developed and technologically-advanced as Korea still has some pretty basic toilet facilities - tourists beware!

Korean toilets fall on quite a broad spectrum - at the top end, you will find decorated seats and complicated-looking control panels which allow you to heat the seat, play a flushing sound to muffle any unpleasant sounds, and squirt water up your bum, should you so desire. At the other end of the scale, you'll find a squat toilet with no loo roll or soap (and if you're especially unlucky, some extra additions...). Most toilets are in building hallways - so restaurants and bars don't have their own facilities. Toilet roll is often found outside the cubicle - either at the exit of the bar, or the entrance to the toilet area - and once used, should be placed in a bin rather than flushed. As far as I know, there's no reason for this other than custom, and it means that many public loos can get quite smelly if the bins aren't emptied frequently enough. 

And while Koreans often wear face masks during yellow dust storms or virus outbreaks, many don't wash their hands after visiting the facilities (they also don't cover their mouths or noses when they cough or sneeze - which surely would negate the need for masks? I wonder when they'll cotton on to that one). 

On the flipside, there are a wealth of public toilets - every subway station has them, and most building stairwells have them. I hear there's even a toilet museum in Suwon... Where you can spend a penny to spend a penny. Or drop off the kids at the pool, then drop off the kids at the pool. Or go to Korea, then go to India.

Koreans also love poo. More on that another time.

Cherry blossoms and Royal Weddings

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself running around Seoul in the rain, trying to find a Royal Wedding ceremony (which was a strange turn of events, since apart from contributing a plate to the excellent Plate Middleton site, I spent a decent amount of time trying to avoid all mention of the UK Royal Wedding a couple of years ago – to the extent that I was en route to Australia while vows were being said and bums were being admired).

But I digress. Twice a year at Unhyeongung Palace in Seoul there is a re-enactment of the Royal Wedding ceremony of King Gojong (the 26th king of the Joseon Dynasty) and the Queen Consort Myeongseong, featuring actors in elaborate costumes, a Royal Procession, and all kind of ceremonies (there’s more info on the whole ceremony here).

It sounded like an excellent way to spend a Saturday. Unfortunately things didn’t quite go as planned – our friend was running late, so we belted it to the palace, paid for our tickets and ran inside...only to find we’d gone to the wrong palace. No problem: the right palace was just a few blocks away, so we sprinted through the pelting rain, paid to get into the second palace...and discovered that the re-enactment had been cancelled due to said rain. Ho hum.

Anyway, we went back to the first palace (which just so happened to be Changdeokgung Palace, one of the most famous palaces in Seoul), and had a wander round and a tour of the secret garden, which was where the Emperor and his household lived. Even in the rain, it was quite pretty. Here are some photies.

...And of course, no post would be complete without some socks - here are my Royal Wedding socks, which I wore specially for the (non-existant) occasion:

The Parting of the Seas

This weekend, I went to a sea-parting festival at Jindo. Legend has it that a tiger once terrorised the people of Jindo, and everyone fled across to a nearby island, Modo. Unfortunately, one old woman was left behind, and she prayed to the Dragon King, a legendary spirit, to be reunited with her family. The sea parted, leaving a narrow causeway for her to totter across and be reunited with her family (although according to legend, she passed away from exertion shortly afterwards).

Once a year, the tide recedes enough so that you can walk across a narrow pathway from Jindo to Modo (or vice versa), and since Koreans love celebrations, they have an annual Sea-Parting festival. I went on a trip down to Jindo for the festival (stopping off on the way to climb a mountain in the dark so that we could watch the sun rise, as you do).

The festival at Jindo was incredible – on the mainland, there were Koreans dancers and musicians, a Jindo puppy petting area, and plenty of stands selling Korean carnival food. But we were lucky enough to be allowed to join the Sea-Parting ceremony across on the island of Modo – well, there was a guy called Moses in our group, so maybe that swung things in our favour.

When we got across to the island, there were several women in a drumming circle, and lots of people with flags massing. When the sea finally parted, the flag bearers lined up along both sides of the causeway, and the drummers slowly paraded across the mile or so of muddy earth. At points the path was fairly treacherous, with slippery seaweed and sudden dips – and when we were about two-thirds of the way across, the sea began to come in again, but at no point did the drummers slow down or lose pace. They seemed to be really enjoying themselves too, and were taking lots of the peace-sign photos that’re so popular across here – and they were delighted to see us Waygooks (foreigners) carrying flags and taking photos.

The walk across was a really surreal, amazing experience. There were lots of brightly-coloured starfish stranded in the mud, and I found what looks like an ammonite fossil. There were maybe 400 people crossing from the island, and thousands waiting on the mainland to join us once the causeway was complete. Lots of elderly Koreans and young families were out digging for oysters and other shellfish - and the whole time the drummers and the flag bearers were advancing.

 

  

It was a tremendous experience (and a bit grander than all those eejits getting trapped on Cramond Island every year).  And that's before I tell you all about the Jindo dog show, and the Tulip festival... But that will be a story for another day.

(Here's the obligatory Korean tourist photo)

An apology

I've been terrible at updating here, and I apologise. Somehow I've been here for 7 weeks, and there's been an awful lot to take in - both in terms of teaching, and with regard to Korean culture. I'll try to do some catch-ups over the next few days!

My sock collection continues to expand.

You know you're in Korea when...

...you get a new phone and a heart is one of the punctuation options.

Not only that, but it's before the apostrophe in the punctuation list.

We Didn't Start the Fire...

Some of you may have heard that one of Korea's neighbours has been getting a bit uppity lately. Back home if your neighbours get grumpy, they usually knock on your door to complain, or shout out the window at you (this option is generally reserved for raucous parties, unless you live in an Oor Wullie cartoon). In Korea, when your neighbours get grumpy they go all out and threaten you with a 'sea of fire'. What follows is purely anecdotal stories of the South Korean reaction.

North Korea has been making vocal threats against the South and her allies since about the day before I left home (and luckily I managed to keep my mum from finding out until after I'd arrived). They've also hacked all of South Korea's banks and national broadcasters, cut off the communication lines between the two countries in the DMZ, and closed the jointly-run factory located just over the border. Despite all this, no-one here seems overly concerned - the North apparently tends to make similar threats every year at this time (the US and South Korean armies have recently completed an annual exercise, and this show of strength probably riles up those crazy Northerners). The banks have been hacked before, a sea of fire has been promised before, and nothing has really happened - life in South Korea is going on much as before, despite the hysteria of the western media.

Pretty much everyone I've spoken to says the same: that this is all bluster, and North Korea are just testing the South. It's unlikely that the North have the capacity for nuclear weapons, and South Korea, the US and Japan all have decent anti-missile protections. There have been a few dissenting voices though:

One kid's mother has apparently been stocking up on tinned foods - although he added that she does this every time there's a scare, and so far to no avail.

One of the Korean teachers at my school is convinced all us foreigners are going to make a midnight run. Which isn't overly reassuring.

And finally, one of my kids today started asked me what the names for the compass points were in English, and when I told him he drew a compass on his hand and said 'North Korea's crazy. Today (a lot of gesticulating and sound effects amounting to bombs and everything blowing up). If North Korea bomb today, I will run south!' Can't fault his logic - I didn't have the heart to tell him his hand wouldn't necessarily be able to locate magnetic North...

Don't worry guys, a fellow teacher and I have an escape plan if war breaks out - we're going to swim to China, and work things out from there. I can already say Happy New Year and nice hat in Mandarin, so we should be fine.

Priorities

It seems that a standard bottle of shampoo or conditioner costs around 11-12000 won (£6-7).

By contrast, it's less than a pound for a bottle of soju, the local spirit.

Koreans have their priorities right.

Teaching

Koreans take education very seriously – most kids will go to after-school classes every day of the week, sometimes late into the night. The university admission test is a huge deal – on the day it’s taken, flights are re-routed, and cars are fined for honking. There are even boarding schools for kids who are due to take the test within the next year, where there are classes seven days a week. Apparently the majority of teen suicides happen in the weeks surrounding the test date.

I work in a hagwon, which is a private school for kids to come to after their day classes. All the kids take English names, and come 2-3 times a week. We finish classes at 6pm every day, but I think there are other schools which teach later into the night - it can be tough, because (understandably) the kids are sometimes knackered and bored by long days at school. But at the same time, most of the kids’ English is better than my French - even the tiny ones know some vocab, and can say the date and weather.

I arrived on Monday afternoon, and on Tuesday at 8.30am I had to report for my first day at school. I teach kindergarten classes in the morning, and older kids who come for extra English lessons in the afternoons. The mornings are broken into 20-minute lessons, and my classes normally have about 30 kids each, split into Korean age groups 5, 6 and 7 (Western ages 4, 5 and 6 - Koreans mark age as the year of your life, so for example newborn babies are 1, because they're in their first year of life. And to make things more confusing, everyone gets a year older on New Year's Day - so it's possible that a kid born on 28th December will be 2 years old within a week of being born).

My afternoon classes are much more of a mixed bag – I have Phonics classes every day, and then a range of ages and abilities for the rest of the lessons. My oldest class is Exploring Debate, with kids aged about 13/14 – so far we’ve talked about things like eating disorders, and homeschooling vs traditional schooling. Exciting topics in April include cosmetic surgery (more of which in another blog post) and, only a couple of months late, Valentine’s Day. The older kids are great, because for the most part they have a good enough grasp of English to joke about, or get into interesting conversations (even if the subject matter is not exactly what teenagers want to chat about). The young kids are very, very sweet - they get very excited about foreign teachers, and are always dead keen to volunteer for speaking in class - although sometimes I think they get caught up in the idea of sticking up their hand and screaming 'I CAN DO IT', and don't realise that means they actually have to come up and say something.

I also had one wee girl (aged about 7/8) who needed help spelling her own name in a test.

Anyway, we were studying invitations and excuses in one class - here's what the students gave me:

Let's talk about socks, baby

You can buy all manner of socks at every local shop – and there are even specialist sock shops in the Hongdae area of Seoul. It’s polite to take off your shoes when visiting a restaurant, someone else’s house or a school, so I assume that Koreans have turned to socks to express their personal wackiness. Here are some of the cool socks I’ve encountered so far:

First impressions

Well, I made it to Korea! After jumping through many many bureaucratic hoops to apply for my visa, losing my bank card the day before I was due to leave, and nearly missing my connecting flight due to a snowstorm, I finally made it to the Land of the Morning Calm.

So far, the country has almost perfectly matched my expectations. It’s a sprawling urbanisation  – all the buildings are several stories high, and a lot of businesses are in tower blocks, so you learn quickly to look up to find things. It also has a distinct taste for the kitsch. The Seoul subway is a perfect embodiment of this contrast – one the one hand, there are several inter-connecting lines, all with air-conditioned cars, and announcements in both Korean and English – not to mention that the entire system is accessed using a digital payment card. On the other hand, TV screens in each car play cartoons, anime or visuals of trains speeding through tunnels in between stops, and a happy wee tune is played to announce each stop.

I live in a studio room within the school, and from what I understand it’s fairly typical of Korean accommodation. I have a large fridge-freezer, a washing machine which also plays a jolly little tune when it finishes a cycle (jingles are a big thing here. Washing machines, subway cars, corner shops – you name it, it has a jingle) two gas rings, a microwave, and various heating/cooling/dehumidifying appliances. As far as I know, Koreans tend to live with their parents until they are married, as the cost of buying or renting accommodation is prohibitive. Those that do move out will probably live in a studio flat like mine.

I live in Yongin, which is a satellite city of Seoul – the city has a population of almost a million, and has exploded in size over the last few years. It’s at the end of one of the Seoul subway lines, and many people live in Yongin but commute to Seoul, or nearby Suwon. I’ve barely begun to explore Yongin, and Seoul itself seems similar in scale to London – with the same distinct neighbourhoods, such as Hongdae (the main university area), Itaewon (a multi-cultural area with lots of expat bars and restaurants) and the infamous Gangnam.

There’s such a lot to talk about in terms of Korea; the culture; my school; the political situation (North Korea is getting up to hi-jinks at the moment – you may have heard), but I’ll get to all of these things soon.

I’ll finish this inaugural blog with a story from last week at school: in a class of 8 year olds, one of my kids gave me a note in Korean. When I asked the Korean teachers to translate it, it said: ‘Teacher! My book is downstairs in the hall. I love you!’

People here are very friendly.