This is my ticket from the museum. It is so absolutely huge that it’s astounding. I remember thinking it was like the Pentagon at the time. Seoul Tower is to the right of here and the Northern mountains are ahead.
I thought it was important for us to see the War Memorial Museum in Yongsan, Seoul, where the American forces were based. It did not disappoint. When we had come outside after being in the museum for 3 hours, I remember saying to myself that it would have taken us 2 weeks to see all of it. There were huge displays inside and outside of real planes and equipment that was used in the Korean War. A huge section inside had rooms and rooms of just Chinese strategies and tactical inventions from hundreds of years ago like how they rolled stones as weapons down a hill during primitive warfare several thousand years ago but then later they gradually developped gunpowder. The rooms presented actual examples of the ancient weapons used over time in many countries whose warfare involved Korea.
There were many interactive display rooms also. You could pretend you were in actual combat. We were in one room where it went dark, and then flashing lights and the sound of gunfire would start, and the recorded voices of what was supposed to be Korean soldiers in the trenches, talking to eachother, wondering what to do, would play. The voices spoke Korean but they sounded confused and scared. During my visit to this museum, I learned that many, many Chinese soldiers joined the Korean War partway through it and they fought on the side of North Korea, making things worse than they were.
It was a museum showcasing how all warfare for hundreds of years had affected Korea. This only cost a few dollars to get into as well!
Outside on the grounds…Absolutely monumental….
Korean Furniture….
I wanted to say that we were lucky to even get beds anywhere over there. They don’t like beds much, as they are a western piece of furniture and not considered to be good for the body. Tables and chairs are western too. Korean parents sleep with their babies and small children until each child turns five. And they sleep on the floor on a special “Korean mattress”, which is a colourful, silky blanket with layers of padding under it, like the bright, red satiny seat cushion in the photo below, only bigger. Many people had Western-style beds when we were in Korea, but many people also had their ‘mattresses’ for the floor as well and they preferred their mattressee. When I visited Sang Hyun, we sat together on his floor. The pillows and blankets weren’t the same as the ones in the West either. There were only expensive comforters and pillows that were like sofa cushions with no pillow cases and there were no sheets to ever be found over there at all. A lot of Koreans ate while sitting on the floor at a short sort of coffee table in their apartments, even though they often had dining rooms like we have. The floors in Korea were made out of different material too, like a thin, smooth laminate. Even their walls weren’t like ours, and they were like the fire-retardant walls you see that are inside of trailers. I never noticed any gyprock while I was there.
So SoJoung gave us a bed to sleep in when we stayed with her, at least. I want to mention that SoJoung was Im SoJoung. ‘Im’ was her family name. All Korean women keep their own family names and don’t take their husbands’ names at all when they get married!
This shows the inside of a traditional house. There are no beds or “kitchen tables” or chairs! The tables in front of the blue screen are low so people can sit while eating at them.
Barley Water….
While in Seoul, I saw many bottles of what looked like water on sheves in their apartments everywhere. The water was ‘barley water’ they made all the time and that’s what they would drink. They put a bit of barley grains in a pot with water and they’d boil it for a while, then they’d save the water it made and keep that water in bottles and drink it. I always heard over there that something was “good for health”, and barley water was a certain staple at the time. Sail and SoJoung had many bottles of it on their window shelves, I remember. We were always told not to use the tap water for drinking or cooking. Everyone had to buy bottled water to cook with or drink.
The Zoo….
The trees had started turning colour and I loved these mountains…. You can see groups of school children in their uniforms everywhere in the pictures. When you came out of the subway station you walked here. Robert is in a striped shirt sort of on the right.
It was exciting to go to the Seoul Zoo on our trip, as I had always wanted to go. We had to go by subway to the South of the city, in the middle of it. It was out of city limits. The huge park complex was called Seoul Grand Park and it had 5 large sections in it. Only one part was the massive zoo. The mountains around it and statues and flowers were nice to look at. The enclosures were very spacious and the animals seemed to be treated well. A few spots were better than anything, like the baby albino tiger with blue eyes – he seemed to be the star of the zoo! How would I ever see one anywhere else? Seeing a real gorilla, Asian sun bears and a real Japanese crane up close was exciting to me as well. We spent 4 hours there and only saw a portion of it. The area was nice too and we had some different kinds of excitement there, as I will explain…
On the way to the zoo outside of the subway station. Many times there were lovely statues in places. Perhaps I couldn’t take time to read about it or perhaps there was no English explanation here, as I don’t know about this statue.
To my surprise and dismay, there was a sky-lift to hop on with scary difficulty to get transported to the zoo, the park complex was so huge. We were able to safely jump on and had to do this while it was moving. It was okay for the teenaged students but not everyone would be able to go on the lift. It was like a ski-lift and was a high jump to get on too.
The lift on the way to the zoo. See how the young students could do it…
This park was near what they called the Seoul Racetrack. I never went, but it was horse races for tourists who wanted to bet. Can you believe Koreans are not allowed to gamble at all? They spoke of lotteries as well but were not allowed to get involved in it. Korea is and was extremely strict about any crimes or drug use of any kind. More strict than in western countries. There was a no-tipping policy throughout Korea when I lived there. Everyone lived the same and did the same things. They all had a lot of pride in their society and culture. One day I was looking out a high window in the city at the people on the street and it occurred to me what it was that I found different there. It was the army consciption that made the difference. All males had to join the army and train for 2 years. Every single one. Some had medical excuses not to go and some leave Korea to not have to go. I found this interesting when I lived there. As I looked down at the people on the street that day in late 1997, and realised conscription affected the men there, it made sense that all the Korean men were extremely disciplined and orderly. All the time. Not only was everybody freshly showered and neat, but they all walked in an orderly fashion and there was hardly ever anyone who stood out from this orderly, neat crowd.
This is the rhinoceros enclosure. There were elephants and giraffes and zebras and hippopotamuses too.A Korean student who was excited to see us foreigners at this zoo.
The photo above was taken because as we went through the zoo, this particular student was exclaiming more than the rest of them every time he saw us. We kept running into him and his group as we walked along. When it was time for me to see the bird enclosure, he planted himself in front of me and wanted to be in my picture. I wish I could have spoken to him, but he really could not speak English and had to go with his group. I like my picture of him and the memories it invokes.
I loved the bird enclosure because of the cranes in it. There were 2 kinds. On the right of this picture is the crane I looked at who was up close. He or she looked me in the eye and it was eery and sad because it looked intelligent. I remember thinking they are such special birds.
This is the gorilla. He only wanted to eat the cheesies thrown to him if they didn’t touch the ground. He had to catch them in the air.We were nearing the end of our trip to the zoo here. A magpie is in the tree.We came out of the zoo here.Someone had called these flowers ‘Korean tulips’ once….
As far as getting Robert’s luggage back when we were in Karak-dong during his visit in January, 1998, we had to get Anthony to get it back after we waited a week. He called Korean Air and was on the lounge desk phone for a long time speaking Korean. We were going to give up when Anthony said excitedly something and “…Han Shin Apat…!?!?!!…”, and I knew if they could find those apartments they could find us. Not long after, Robert’s bag was dropped off. We never could have gotten it by ourselves.
Pollution….
Many people I saw on the streets had little white, yellow or blue masks over their noses and mouths in the late 90’s and often the Korean people mentioned “pollution”. When I said I liked the yellow moon, Anthony had scoffed and said it’s yellow because of the “pollution”. They say I couldn’t see the land of North Korea well at the observatory because of these particles in the air. I did learn they had gas burning in their cars that wasn’t refined as well as it was in Canada and they said it made more bad air. Many times there was a haze in front of what you wanted to see. One businessman told me the pollution is worse in wintertime, and I think it’s because of the colder air. The particles in the air are moving more slowly in the cold air and they can’t move away as well as in the warm weather.
While I was still teaching in Seoul, I read a magazine about how it’s common for some people in Delhi, India or Mexico City to have a ‘carbon ring’ inside their noses. It means if you put a tissue to your nose you will get a black smudge on the tissue. It’s because a person has a black powdery deposit inside his nostrils due to breathing such bad air from the exhaust and emissions everywhere. I had a carbon ring inside my nose while I lived there! Honestly!
Learning the Language….
Even though it’s a good guess to say this is a bar because of the neon lights, I can read that the characters in the middle say ‘maek ju’, which is ‘beer’. I love to be able to read their language.
Once I had gotten lost a week after I arrived in Seoul for the first time and wanted to be able to say Thank You to that bus driver, I voiced my wish to learn Korean to Miss Park downstairs. Soon afterward she gave me a small English-Korean phrasebook. When I travelled to and from classes later I would look at a character on a sign anywhere and find it in my little book and gradually form a word in my head. I learned their 24-character alphabet that way in the next few weeks. What a great relief to learn what the signs said : “…B……….A……….N………” “…….G……..” “Bang!!!” One meaning for “bang” is bread….. It was a bakery! They were everywhere. It was only a Korean bakery and it was harmless. What are these places??? “….B….I……D…….I…..O……” They were just ‘Video’ stores that rented out movies! Being able to read relieved my anxiety while I was living there. Even now, I can read what most of it says but I don’t often know what it means as my vocabulary is lacking.
Also, many Koreans told me they were surprised at my pronounciation being better than they would have expected. I had realised right away that their vowel sounds are like French vowel sounds, and not like English vowel sounds. I could pronounce their words better because I used that French pronounciation of their I’s, A’s, E’s, O’s and U’s instead of English ones. Knowing French helped me speak a third language. And twenty-two years after I learned the words for “garlic” and “onion” I remember to say Man-eul and Yang-pa like it was yesterday….
When I was planning to go there for our vacation in late 1999, I readied myself to say “…..Do you have a/any _________…” This can apply to “…Is there a _________ ?…” as well. So I could easily find out if there was a bathroom where I was or if the merchant had any, let’s say, batteries. I had to know “…issoyo…” I just had to know and say, “…Battery issoy-o…..??…” or “…Hwa-jang-shil issoy-o…” Do you have batteries here? Is there a bathroom here? Of course knowing “hwa-jang-shil” meant “toilet” helped too. As far as being ready to travel there and speak Korean, it helped me to learn that “bang” also meant “room” and it helped me to get my husband and I a room in a hotel or cheap inn. You can’t say “bang” like we would say the bang bang of a gun; you have to say it like you were pronouncing it in French, almost like “bung”. And even Sang Hyun’s name is pronounced “Sung” in English and not “Sang”, like “Sang a song”.
Vacation in 1999….
I wanted to travel in Korea once I had gotten back to Canada in 1998. I planned a 2-week vacation during October 1999 for me and Robert. I read my Lonely Planet travel guide over and over and dreamed of all I would see. And Sail told us to stay with his wife SoJoung in Seollung while we visited Seoul. Unfortunately, Sail was living in the US setting up LG sales of cellphones while we visited, and I had lost touch with Sang Hyun at that time. It was my own fault that I hadn’t been communicating with Sang Hyun because I was afraid my husband would be too jealous of him. I got in touch with him later when I was back in Canada in the year 2000. For our vacation I planned an affordable big trip and used my travel guide, which people don’t need to look at now, to find places and transportation and affordable inns.
Changdeokkung Palace…
All the Korean people said Changdeokkung was the nicest palace because it wasn’t open to the public until recently because it was considered to be a “Secret Palace”. The commoners weren’t allowed to know what it looked like for a long, long time. There was a pond inside the grounds that was scenic and calm and beautiful, with special structures around it. This was called the “Secret Garden”. You couldn’t go and see it by walking around freely. Everyone had to be part of a guided tour at Changdeokkung. The day Robert and I went we could only get in on the Korean tour, so I have no specific knowledge of what the buildings were for and I have to use my imagination about them.
Waiting to go into the palace grounds. I bought Robert a small, cold can of Korean coffee. Just inside the entrance. I had our money and passports under my shirt in a money-belt so my stomach looks bigger than it was. It was hotter there than in Canada for October.The king’s throne was in here.Markers for where certain servants would stand.It was beautiful. I like this picture because of the old Korean man with his hands behind his back on the right. See his funny pants and shoes? The man behind him was a Canadian we spent time with after.This and the next few pictures are of the ‘secret garden’, where the pond is.The sun is so bright there it makes pictures faded.
The wonderful thing was that at the end of the tour the Canadian man started talking to us. His name was Merv and he was from British Columbia and was on a self-planned trip all over Asia. He had been to Taiwon and liked it best. We walked around with him and had lunch in a little ddokbogi (the pounded rice cakes in red, spicy sauce) restaurant. The teenagers ate ddokbogi for lunch commonly so there were many young Korean students sitting there in their school uniforms. These ones were all guys. We only paid around 3 dollars each for our bowls.
More at Changdeokkung Palace.This was nice at the palace.This Korean man could understand what was said about this building during the tour, and he’s looking at his pamphlet.
UnHyeongGung…
Buildings at UnHyeongGung. We came upon it unexpectedly.
While we walked with Merv, we came across another palace called UnHyeongGung. It is small and was really a ‘royal residence’ for some relatives of kings years and years ago. Today it’s a museum of Hanbok clothes and other traditional items. The wonderful thing about this palace was that it was a day that school children and other children had been brought there for lunch. I got 2 special pictures of them in Hanbok dress that day.
Here are some of these children who were dressed up at UnHyeongGung. Merv is on the left.
You won’t believe it, but during our vacation, in most places we went, there were large groups of children on tour to see those sights as well as us. They were all in school uniforms and they all were so excited to see ‘foreigners’ like us. They all waved each time we all were in the same place and they called out, “Hello…!!!…” We both smiled and waved and answered back, “…Hello…!!!…”. We did this all through our vacation and our hands were sore and aching every evening when we were in our hotels or inns or at SoJoung’s. We felt a little like royalty, as Lady Diana, for example, had said one time her hands ached at night from waving and shaking hands all day.
The group of school children, or kindergarten, at UnHyeongGung that day.
Central Post Office, Etc…
Looking out of the window where we bought some stamps….
I do believe the picture above was taken up in the old Central Post Office where Robert and I bought some special stamps. There was an underground stamp market below here and we got some other stamps in it. The picture has a traditional-style gate and I liked the area very much.
SoJoung brought us to the Wedding Hall she designed gowns for. Robert is missing the black belt that is part of his costume.
We were very lucky as part of our trip to dress in traditional wedding clothes! Sojoung was a wedding dress designer and brought us to her place of work in Samseong-dong near the Koex Building. She had the costumes there and we were allowed to put them on. She was scandalised that I couldn’t fit into the tiny white wedding dress she also had there, as Korean women are all built much smaller than many Canadians. Everyone who gets married in Korea has 2 ceremonies: one with traditional clothes and one with a white dress like in the west.
This is across from the Koex Building in Samsung-dong. You can’t recognize the area now, except that the ‘clock’ building is still there in 2019.We went to Olympic Park and this time the grass was still green. I used to love going over the bridge and continuing up over the hill. It was an exciting view to me.The East Gate
I specifically wanted a picture of the East Gate to have all the four gates photographed by the end of my trip. I dragged my husband to Dongdaemun on the subway to get the picture, which turned out very nicely. We didn’t stay there that day but tried to. I asked if they had a room at a western-style hotel near the gate but they didn’t. I had been near there one time with Sang Hyun in 1997 at Children’s Grand Park. It was another wonderful complex in Eastern Seoul. Sang Hyun brought me on the ferris wheel. It didn’t go like our ferris wheels! It slowly, very, very slowly made ONE turn. That way you could see a lot of Seoul and all those granite-covered mountains well, especially when your booth is at the very top for a minute. I find they do things differently and better. In Canada we want the sensation of the ride but over there we’d want the view.
I loved radish kimchi. This is one kind, called ‘chonggak’ kimchi, because the radish has its stem and leaves still attached to the long vegetable. The stem coming out of the rounded radish reminds Koreans of ponytails growing out of otherwise bald heads that many bachelors had years ago. These bachelors were called ‘chonggak’. Eunuchs who served kings in old times actually had their hair this way, I know. Anyway, these pickles shown above are called ‘bachelor kimchi’ or ‘chonggak kimchi’ or even ‘ponytail kimchi’.
Namdaemun Market….
Soon after my arrival in Seoul in 1997, the Korean people told me about a huge indoor/outdoor market that I had to see. They described how many vendors came from rural areas and brought their produce there to sell to tourists and city-dwellers, and they described how these farmers started in the night, at 2 am, every night, to get set up for the day. It was customary at the time, they all told me, to go to Namdaemun Market at 4 or 5 am to get a good deal on what you wanted. What interested me was that there were over ten thousand vendors (!!!) at this market and the beautiful South Gate of old Seoul was outside of it. By the time I finally went to see it at the end of 1997, I had been lucky enough to have gotten a wonderful female Korean roomate and we went there together.
This was in the area of Namdaemun Market. A huge, western-style fountain is on the left and Seoul Tower is in the middle, looming in the haze. This scene is barely recognizable now, as are many areas because so many new structures have been added since 1997. The man on the motorcycle carrying some kind of wares is interesting and seeing men travelling like this was common at the time.A government building or a bank, I can’t remember which, across from the main entrance to the market.
The Korean woman I befriended was Kim Ji-Young and she had been living across the nine-lane highway below, with her parents in the apartment complex there. She worked in the old downtown crunching numbers for ING Direct. She was a highly religious Christian and fell asleep in our room while praying a lot, she prayed that much. She was going to marry a Korean man soon. Thank goodness for me she had decided to live in my institute and learn English more. We talked a lot and went places together and roomed together for a few months. I tried to explain to her I didn’t see eye to eye with the other foreigners there and she didn’t seem to mesh with them either. Maybe she sensed their hatred?
My only picture of Ji-Young. She was gentle, smart and classy. Later I’m going to write about how she helped during my husband’s visit.Korean ‘dates’ and 2 kinds of teaStacks of dried squid and packages of dried dark green sheets of seaweedI couldn’t believe it when I was on a higher floor of a building and looked down: you can see there is a table in the upper right corner selling cooked pieces of pork, unprotected and uncovered, right beside tables of men’s dress pants and kitchen wares.It’s hard to see, but there are sneakers, containers, clothes, actual whole raw fish, and green vegetation of some kind, all close together.South Gate. The most important thing to me was to see this ‘gate’. Around 2013 an insane Korean man set it on fire and it was lost. There are videos of it burning that show how people were so upset that such an iconic symbol was being destroyed. The whole country stopped. It would have been comparable to when Notre Dame Cathedral burnt. It has been rebuilt, but now it looks too new…
Husband’s Visit….
My husband was eager to come and his visit was during the coldest week of the year. We wouldn’t have minded but it was such a damp cold and the worst thing, like I mentioned in a former blog, was that my living area wasn’t heated or insulated. I had to teach just the same during his visit. When he wasn’t shivering under the covers in bed next to the portable, partly broken heater that was provided by my boss, he saw Seoul with me.
Sail from the LG class was instrumental in showing my husband the good things about Korea. He made sure it was a good visit for Robert (my husband). You see, things weren’t perfect from the start, what with the lack of heating, and another thing: Korean Air had lost his luggage! I waited extra long at the airport for him to get off the plane so we could take the subway back to my institute. I waited and waited and waited. No sign of Robert… This is where I ordered a sandwich and it was ketchup and peas. A Middle Eastern man with a white beard and a turban bothered me in the airport and latched onto me, going on in a very animated way, wanting me to try to get him into ‘my country’, and I had to try to get away from him. I read an official pamphlet while I waited that had a huge, long list of countries where people from them were not allowed into Korea at all, period. My husband finally came out where I was and didn’t have his luggage.
It was dark by the time the subway came above ground on our long ride from west to east going from Kimpo Airport to Karak-dong. Robert saw the lights of the massive city and orange lit crosses of churches everywhere very well that evening. I brought him to Anam in Bucheon to meet Mr. Choi one day. One Saturday night we partied at a club/bar in Kangnam and found a small Korean restaurant the next day in my neighbourhood to each have a huge bowl of Korean dumpling soup to cure our hangovers. Was that ever good for making us feel better. The soup had all kinds of things in it like many types of vegetables, tofu, clams and ‘ddok’ (pieces of pounded rice) along with a load of homemade dumplings and the price was only 3 dollars per bowl.
There were many simple places along sidestreets where an older Korean woman would sell her cooking and charged low prices. Men did not cook as a rule in Korea and many men went to these places to have their meals if they weren’t married. If you did buy Korean cooking like that it was very affordable. Sometimes a foreigner like me couldn’t get served. I’ve seen where the Korean people running the restaurant turn away people like me because it’s too hard to understand what they want. Thank goodness I could understand some of the menu that was written in Korean and could speak a little Korean at that time.
At BongeunsaWe both liked those turtles at Bongeunsa. You can tell Robert is freezing! It was damp and minus eleven degrees Celsius.
One morning during Robert’s visit a Korean student from one of my morning classes right at my institute wanted to take my husband and me to eat at a special place in the satellite city to the south of us, Seongnam. After I had taught a few businessmen for an hour that morning in the 8 o’clock class, I went up to my floor to get Robert and we went in the man’s vehicle to Seongnam. It was funny because his van was not a mini-van like you’d see in Canada. He told us it was a MINI mini-van. A lot of vehicles had to be smaller than in North America due to lack of space. It was a bright, sunny day but cold. I didn’t realise it fully at the time, but the man took us to a famous area where you can get special noodles from that region. This restaurant had a glassed section inside where you could see men dressed in white stretching and pulling the homemade noodles. What stood out to us was that it was very cold, but the outside restaurant door was made of glass, and people kept coming in and out and when that door would open the air was freezing! I don’t remember there being any heat in there either. You couldn’t tell because it was so cold with the door opening all the time. We figured the Korean winter was short so everybody just tolerates the cold for a short while and in some cases they don’t bother to use heat or use heavy doors with weatherstripping, etc. I saw Seongnam twice and each time I saw apartment buildings upon apartment buildings surrounded by mountains.
We both went to Kyeongbokkung Palace with Sail and it was good to show it to Robert and good for me to see it again.
Robert and Sail in front of the structure that has the throne in it. Robert is on the left and Sail is on the right wearing sunglasses, in the front.This is the most famous gazebo and pond in Korea.
I know it sounds awful to say, but I’ll never forget about what the Korean diet did at first to both of us. Robert and I were on Line 8 on the subway one morning; perhaps we were heading out to Bucheon for him to meet Mr. Choi, and Robert told me he really needed the bathroom. At the next stop, we got off the train and thankfully found a bathroom. I had memorized where bathrooms were along that route. After a few minutes Robert came out of the bathroom and rushed up to me. His face looked really funny and he exclaimed in an urgent voice, “…Jen!!!…Holy ****!!! There’re stems and leaves in my ****!!! I looked in the toilet and it’s just stems and leaves!!!!!…” He was actually scared. I had forgotten that this happened to me a week after I’d been there. It happened sooner with him. I told him Don’t worry, it happened to me at first too. It is shocking that from the sudden, extreme change in diet it caused that in both of us over there. I should have found more western-style food for him but it was really hard to do that. That’s how different their diet is from ours. No potatoes….no bread….no cheese….
At the corner of the building that houses the throne. What I like is the big black iron cauldron.
Sail wanted to bring Robert to see the Lotte Museum. We did go, and Sail went through all the exhibits with us. Their culture was beautifully showcased in room upon room upon room, on and on. There was a huge section where each room had a large display case or two filled with Korean dolls dressed in different costumes, posing in a variety of situations. A display case was maybe 12 feet by 12 feet. The dolls represented Korean people in many places. Display after display after display we came upon. Sail stood back while we marvelled at so many dolls. A number of displays had the dolls lined up in a true to life courtyard in front of the king and his throne. So many lines of different types of servants and soldiers, there were. A few displays showed the dolls as children all playing traditional games outside and mothers were cooking at pots over the fire inside the grass-covered little houses or hanging out clothes on clotheslines. More and more and more displays of dolls there were. Each doll was around a foot high. I think the entrance to this place was only 3 dollars! I later asked my husband what he liked the best about his visit. He said he liked the doll displays in that museum the best out of his whole visit. Koreans have the nicest, most elaborate museums of anywhere, I think.
It is aesthetically pleasing to the eye in Kyeongbokkung. I never got to see all of it because it’s so big. The palaces are photo-friendly as everywhere you point the camera is a perfect shot.
After we saw the museum we went to a Western-style restaurant called T.G.I.F. and Sail ordered a platter of this and a platter of that along with other items from the menu. He paid for everything even though I did not want him to. One platter had Korean seafood pancakes to eat and they’re not sweet like ours in Canada. This platter had pieces of pancake cut into squares with green onion and Korean squash or zucchini inside as well as pieces of squid and you dip your piece of pancake in spicy soy sauce. I was having trouble eating a piece and couldn’t chew it and Sail had to tell me what the trouble was. I was eating a piece that contained a squid’s eye! And it was big and hard. I had to take the eye out of my mouth and leave it on my plate. Robert laughed about that for a long time afterwards.
Once when Robert was down on the third floor with me where the secretaries and Mr. Kim were, Miss Park took me aside and told me that Robert had good eyebrows. She said Koreans liked big, strong eyebrows on a man, and it was good that my husband had them. It meant something important if a man had pronounced eyebrows, and I can’t remember what it was…. I always find it so funny and so strange that they like men’s big eyebrows and women’s big eyelids. We all never think about those things in Canada.
Solnal 1998….
The week that Robert was in Seoul was Solnal time, or Korean New Year. He and I were invited to Ji Young’s family’s apartment across the nine-lane road for dinner one day. Her parents were very nice and could speak a lot of English. Her father had worked for the government in a high-up job that had to do with international relations. We sat around their dining room table and talked and that huge long table was absolutely full of nice dishes, one after another. I know there were many types of soups. The most beautiful soup was made with eels! I had never eaten eels before because in my area of Moncton they were thought of as gross. That soup was wonderful. Koreans make excellent food with eels and sardines and squid, and everything else for that matter. I had a nice clear turnip soup too. Before we went back to the institute, Ji Young’s parents gave me a set of bronze-cast cranes! They are old and they are precious to me. What a gift!
The tall one is 13 inches high. I love birds and any cranes delight me.
Speaking of Solnal 1998, when Robert and I were going to Sail’s apartment to go sightseeing with him during that time, we got lost. We knocked on someone’s door in Seollung in Gangnam-Gu. A Korean man answered and he was wearing one of their special Hanbok outfits and I could see his family waiting inside in their colourful outfits. I felt so bad for disturbing them while they were performing their rituals for Solnal. I think I had to get the man to call Sail. It was so hard to find a place because they didn’t go by a street and number on that street. They only seemed to name a huge neighborhood and perhaps used landmarks after that to get anywhere. This is another reason it was scary and intimidating for me to use their taxis – there was no western-style address to give the driver.
Sail personally drove us up to Seoul Tower also. On the way, Sail had to stop and ask directions from someone. He stopped and talked to a Korean man. I remember noticing how remarkable it was for them all to live in a homogenous population. Everyone was like a friend or relative and they were all familiar and at ease when speaking to Korean strangers. In Canada many people are wary and cautious of everyone, even a next-door neighbour.
Then on the way once we had found out how to get to Sail’s, I needed the bathroom. You will think I’m odd and obsessed with toilets, but I’m just describing that even using the bathroom was different there. One of the teachers at my institute had told me that some older bathrooms in Korea that were for women had no toilets, but these older bathrooms had an oval ‘toilet’ built right into the floor, so a woman had to ‘squat’ and do her business. Could I imagine the audacity of Koreans, she asked indignantly, expecting women to squat to use the bathroom because their anatomy is a certain way? The woman (from Calgary, Alberta) telling me was resentful and hateful, and looked for anything to run the Koreans down. I pondered what it would be like to have to use a ‘squatter’, and was hopeful after she told me about it that I would never have to use one. The bathroom I found on the way to Sail’s in Seollung had a squatter!!! I wasn’t angry or resentful at all after I used it. Later, I did come across a couple more of them in Korea and I didn’t mind at all. It was just different. Like everything there, it was different. The squatters are probably all gone now.
More about Karak-dong….
On Songpa-daero, the nine-lane highway I lived on, in 1997. On the left is my brick 5-storey building and you can see three apartment buildings, the Han Shin Apartments, sticking up (one is beige and brown and two are white and turquoise) behind it. On the right is where the ‘Olympic Family Apartments’ were. If you walked ahead a few blocks you’d reach Munjeong Station and you’d be going south..
In the bottom of my building in Karak-dong, a person would first wave to the old Korean man who always had his beautiful little dog with him before he/she went up the stairs. He was a security man. They were extremely common everywhere. Then a person would walk up the four flights of stairs, as there was no elevator, and come to the landing of my floor, which had 2 bathrooms and a digital clothes washer. If you kept going up the stairs, at the landing part of the way up to the fifth floor, there were a few clothes-drying racks to hang your wet clothes. This was extremely important there, to have these drying racks, as there were absolutely NO CLOTHES DRYERS in Korea. While being transported across the city, everywhere I went, I saw clothes hung up in the windows of all of the apartment buildings! When I used the digital washing machine, the information was in Korean. We all just pressed some buttons and had to hope it washed our clothes!
If you walked about 8 steps across the landing at the 4th floor and passed the bathrooms and the washer, you came to a glass door and a bunch of footwear on the floor. You had to take your shoes off and leave them there and put on a pair of rubber slippers. Then you could open the glass door and enter our living area. There was a small lounge with a television and a fridge and a phone on a desk. This is where we received our calls from friends and family. You couldn’t just call a restaurant or anywhere and ask a question because no one spoke English. I remember one Canadian teacher yelling into the phone over and over, “…Yong-o…!!!….Yong-o…???…Can you speak English???!!??!!…Does anyone there speak English..!?!!?…Yong-o…???…” ‘Yong-o’ was English. There were many bedrooms beyond the lounge. On the tv, there was a channel that showed The Jay Leno Show and Seinfeld. Thank goodness I could see Seinfeld, but only once a week on Thursday like back home. Other than that we used the tv to see American movies on videotapes we would rent and watch on a vcr. Koreans were always interested in the latest American movies. I saw some of the latest ones while there like G.I. Jane, Murder at 400 and Twister. Only certain ones had been ‘approved’ for them to see. The Korean students watched The Jay Leno Show on Friday nights. Anthony and the men loved it.
One day a foreign teacher said I had better come and see what they do there. I looked out the window and there was a huge crane-like vehicle or machine at the bottom of one of the HanShin Apartment buildings beside where we were. The vehicle was extending a long metal crane or tube up to the window of one of the apartments in that HanShin building. People moved their furniture in or out of apartments this way. A sofa, for example, was shifted through the crane-like tube and it moved down to the vehicle, or maybe a sofa would travel upwards in the long extension if someone was moving into a place. So no one is carrying furniture and bags into elevators at all. They do everything in a convenient and sensible way.
I spent a lot of my time standing here because it was where teachers could smoke.This was what I saw out the window when I had my cigarettes beside that washing machine. This is an auto-shop. Down on the ground right beside this turquoise and white apartment building was where the moving crane was that day.
I want to also say that it was so different being there that when we stood talking by the washing machine having our smokes, the Korean men went in the men’s bathroom and went to the urinals while leaving the door open. The women or anyone by the washing machine could see the men using the large bathroom. I couldn’t believe it!
Robert’s visit ended after the third week of January and I continued on travelling to classes and missing Canada more as well as worrying about the financial crisis.
Autumn ginkgo leaves…these trees had nuts hanging on them too! The nuts were little round hanging balls. Ginkgo trees were everywhere! Many mountains were covered in gingko yellow in October and those mountains had patches of bright red Japanese maples on them also.
Chogyesa Temple…
Five blocks southeast of the North Gate was a temple called Chogyesa. It was considered to be the main Buddhist temple in all of Korea. And the richest one. Even though it was the richest one, it wasn’t as pretty as bright-coloured Bongeunsa and frankly, it wasn’t as nice-looking as the other temples in the country were. But it had a unique character and had a number of very special qualities of its own. And being located in the old downtown near the palaces and next to a neighborhood known for antique shops and Korean tea-drinking added to its authentic atmosphere.
I found Chogyesa by myself one day in December of 1997 and I found that it was so interesting. Chogyesa was right in the middle of the metropolis, with city buildings and streets close beside it. A wonderful thing about this temple was that monks who lived there were often chanting and hitting rhythmic blocks and this was hear knowd over speakers inside the grounds as you walked around and it could be heard outside of the temple too. There were speakers on buildings out at the sidewalk and people walking by on the street could hear the chanting and block-playing. A colony of monks lived at the temple and you could see one of them sometimes. Chogyesa had a long history that I could feel while I looked at the wooden buildings that really seemed to be old and weathered. This was good because all of Seoul’s Royal Palaces and all of the temples in Korea have been rebuilt in recent years to represent all of their original buildings that were destroyed by fire or by the Japanese hundreds of years ago. Therefore, some of these traditional attractions can look fake if their most recent paint job doesn’t look good.
The 500-year old pine tree that was still growing there in 1997 added to the historical aura of the temple along with the various paintings on the prayer buildings. Chogyesa’s wooden buildings had very elaborate golden statues of the Buddha in them but since I was a visitor and a “foreigner”, I didn’t want to be forward and interrupt anyone’s worship time by entering any structures to take pictures. I heard from the other teachers and read tourist information saying that you should ask permission to take pictures in Korea. Most Korean temples have Temple Stay options for visitors who want to learn about Buddhist traditions from real monks and stay overnight on the grounds for a few days. Those tourists can easily see the inside of prayer buildings, but things were different over twenty years ago.
Unfortunately, Chogyesa has now been completely changed and has garish gold-coloured figures scattered throughout it, like most Korean temples have in them nowadays. When I look at current videos of it I feel sad at the loss of the statue of the lion I liked so much(pictured below) and the paintings of km in Inn birds I saw there in the late 90’s.
The sun wasn’t out so my pictures are dark. I believe the 5-storey building on the left was where the monks lived.Since I am an artist I loved the fine art on these structures. There were many, many lanterns bought for “good luck” strung up here.I loved this lion statue…The lower paintings were telling of Buddha’s inspiration, travels and hardships and above them were gorgeous paintings of birds(pheasants, quail and other fowl) that went all of the way around this building. You can see there are Korean names written on the papers attached to these lanterns.This was a 500-year old pine tree and an information board about it and a traditional stand to commemorate it..
Well, I had never imagined what happened next! After I took a picture of this special pine tree, one of the Korean monks appeared and spoke to me! He was so kind and was smiling. He asked if I wanted him to take a picture of me in front of the pine tree. Of course, in my utmost happiness and shock I said yes. After he took the picture I mustered the courage to dare to ask if I could take a picture of HIM in front of it. And he smiled and agreed. I asked him “Do you live here?…” and he said yes, he did live there. And then he had to move on. I can still feel the thrill I had.
This is the picture the monk took. I remember it was cold that day.And here is the precious picture I was allowed to take of him. Korean monks wear a grey suit. Each Asian country has a different coloured suit. Usually we see Buddhist monks in Thailand or Tibet, for example, wearing bright orange.
Exploring with Sang-Hyun…
After my solo visit to Chogyesa, Sang Hyun and I went there on one of our sight-seeing days together. The weather was better that day then when I had gone alone so the pictures were brighter from the sunshine. I bought a few souvenirs too. This made my memories of that day even better than they would have been without the souvenirs and without Sang Hyun. You see, he explained about my Buddhist purse that I bought, and took me to a Korean Tea House nearby.
The bright pink Buddhist purse was only a few inches wide. I think I only paid 2 or 3 dollars for it.
That Buddhist purse had a tiny Buddhist Bible inside. You can see how small it is. If you open it, it really has Korean writing, very tiny, inside on the small pages! Sang Hyun put a few coins inside the purse for me. He said this is for ‘good luck’. One of the coins above is ₩500 (500 Won) and I of course loved those particular coins because of the flying crane pictured on them. They were like 50 cents. It’s funny, someone could look at my 3 dollar purse and say, well, so what?, but it has a lot of meaning for me.
We also went to Kyeongbokkung that day and stopped at his workplace that was across the street from the palace.
I took this picture at the palace that day. I can remember going to Chogyesa Temple with Sang Hyun that day in January 1998. This is the back entrance.
I didn’t fully realise it that day, but Sang Hyun did me an extra favour by bringing me in a Korean Tea House. Going to a tea house in that neighbourhood near the temple is a tourist attraction now. There are rituals to follow and it was complicated, unbelievably. I do remember we sat together and had a cup of green tea. The cups are very small and you sip it slowly.
This was in the tea house area.
Babies…
A few times it was really unbelievable that Korean babies could see I looked different. I would be on a crowded subway car and a woman would be holding an infant a few months old and that baby would be crying and crying. The infant was inconsolable. When the baby saw me he stopped crying abruptly and stared at me! This happened more than once. I couldn’t believe it. An infant! The babies who did this stared at me and couldn’t take their eyes away from me! Staring and staring and not crying anymore. Everyone on the train noticed, of course. And then THEY stared! The people who told me I shouldn’t go to Korea and said I’d be the only person like me on the subway car had certainly been right. I was the only person who looked like me on the whole train.
Everyone has a certain traditional dress and you see many dress shops selling the Hanbok clothes.
This of course made me more painfully aware that I was very different and alone and when it got to me that I missed Canada, I was feeling an alienation that is hard to describe. It’s a wonder I could do what I did, when I look back at it all. Even though I had wonderful Korean friends and loved it I missed reading English or seeing it most of all. There was hardly any English anywhere ever, at all. It gets to you that no one understands how you feel about anything over and over again. I started crying at a park with Sang Hyun once because I saw a few Korean family members laughing and enjoying that park in front of me. He was not wanting me to cry, and didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t help it. By the end of it I missed hearing French too, I remember, as I had studied French for 12 years of my life and my city in Canada was 50% French. Funny, I get annoyed with French while I am in Canada, but everything was so absolutely different and so totally foreign when I lived in Seoul that missing Canada nagged at me more and more once the culture shock had subsided. I did a lot to experience Korea in my five and a half months there though. I would never have chosen to not experience it. There were 2 older foreign English-speaking men I met who lived in apartments on their own and did a few classes for Mr. Kim here and there. They loved Korea and had chosen to permanently live there long-term. One gave himself a Korean name and the other one was from South Africa. I understand those men, but my husband was not legally allowed to work there because his education was different than mine, so I decided to live back in Canada later instead of getting my husband to live there with me. I did strongly consider living there long-term with my husband back then.
Every week while I lived there on Sunday night, I’d go downstairs and over to the next lot where the Han Shin Apartments were to call my husband and then my mother. There was a payphone to use outside. I used a phone card or coins. It was Sunday morning in Atlantic Canada when I called them. I always asked my husband how our 2 cats were. I wrote letters to people back home and their letters took 2 to 4 weeks to arrive. I don’t know how any mail got anywhere, period, as everything was written in English.
I put this here to break up my text again. Sang Hyun took this photo when we went to Cheonggyesan Mountain in October. I had to buy this Gag sweatshirt because I needed something warmer than what I had brought with me. I wouldn’t have chosen it but it’s all I could find in their high-end stores that fit me.
Other Establishments…
Korean people explained that there were many places called Public Bathhouses that you could go into and have a bath or take a sauna. They described the inside and the towels and soap and possible rooms to go in and what everybody did in them. They said the Bathhouses were common and very popular. I would have loved to go and try it but never got a chance. Many, many times a place had a sign with a picture of rising ‘steam’ on it and I think this meant it was one of these baths. Also, they explained there were Places of Rest, where you would go in and pay to take a nap. They said there was even one of these places behind my institute. I had heard that they did this in Japan but didn’t know they did it in Korea too. Seeing everyone asleep on the subway made me think it was a good idea. By the end of it, I was sleeping on the subway too in the afternoons travelling to Aju from Bucheon.
My jewellery box from the ministers at Sejong Institute. On the mother-of-pearl there seems to be a horse, perhaps? It’s not a common symbol so I don’t know.It opens and has little compartments. It’s around 4 inches high.
Odusan…
One day Sang Hyun had a special treat in store for me. We got in his little white car and drove and drove. It was a Sunday, I remember. We went north and to the west of Seoul. On and on. And on. We came to a satellite city called Goyang-shi and stopped there and visited someone he knew in one of the apartment buildings there. Then we went further west. We were going to an observatory where you can view North Korea! There is Panmunjom, and it is mentioned and shown on the American news a lot. If you go, it is formal and you may be filmed and no jeans are allowed to be worn. I was wearing my jeans that day. Odusan Observatory is one of several places other than Panmunjom along the North-South border to view North Korea that is never mentioned to westerners.
Look at it! It had a viewing area, a museum, commemorative statues and places to honour estranged relatives.
My pictures of the land of North Korea were faded so I didn’t include any here. But it was interesting what I saw there. Korean people were very somber and serious. They were standing outside and inside, staring sadly towards the North. It was really something. There are families who have been separated since the war and cannot see eachother. A few times both countries (it depends on North Korea) have agreed to let some families meet one more time and they are for example, a 74 year-old son who hasn’t seen his 95 year-old mother for almost 70 years! Then they have to say goodbye again forever. It is extremely sad.
Here is the place where food and flowers are put on the altar to honour relatives, dead or living. Here, people were bowing and looking out towards the North so longingly.There were many black and grey brick traditional ‘smoke-signal’ stacks outside. It was common in Korea to see these gazebos. There were sights like this at Odusan, including statues but no explanations to read about them.
Floral and Fauna…
I did learn a little about what was different in Korea about insects and flowers. In my province in Canada, we suffer with aggressive mosquitoes for over 4 months. By September, there aren’t as many as in summertime and in October there are a few that you don’t notice bothering you and then there are none until the end of May in the coming year. Over there, the mosquitoes were smaller than ours and their bites were smaller too. There were a few inside even in November and December but they seemed ‘stunned’ to me, as they weren’t ferocious like mosquitoes back home. On the subject of flowers, you wouldn’t expect to see any in such a crowded city, but it was common to see real red roses that had been planted along the sidewalks. I swear I even saw a red rose growing in such a way on December first! Where I’m from, gardeners pray their rose bushes will live and most of them do not make it through the winter. Small, tame mosquitoes and red roses in the streets…..seemed pretty good to me!
Chuseok…
Chuseok and Solnal are a time to send good wishes and greetings with a card. This would be a Chuseok greeting given to a loved one. See the gachi?
Not long after I had arrived in Seoul, people told me that it would soon be Chuseok. It’s a week-long national, traditional holiday in October where family members make fancy, beautiful food offerings to their ancestors and relatives who have passed away. There are certain rituals they do that last for 3 days. They dress in their unique (families have their own official colours and patterns, like Scottish tartans) satin-like Hanbeok outfits. This was all done again for a week in January when it was called Solnal. Sometimes you hear of traffic jams in China because of people all driving to their hometowns at the same time for Chinese New Year. This exodus also happens in Korea. It goes on twice a year: once during October for Chuseok, and once sometime in January for Solnal. Some westerners think of the October holiday as Korean Thanksgiving and Solnal as Korean New Year. We teachers had a week off for each holiday. Speaking of holidays, I noticed that they had many, many holidays in Korea because they had such an extremely long history. It was mind-boggling. There was Kids’ Day, Grandparents’ Day, and every kind of ‘Day’ you can imagine, as well as numerous historical days to mark independence from Japan, China or Mongolia. Some holidays remembered battles, or kings and queens, or were special religious days for Buddhists or Christians. One time I looked at one of their calendars and the whole thing was peppered on every page with holidays.
One of the reasons males seem to be preferred over females in a number of ways is because during Chuseok and Solnal, the oldest son must perform the ceremonies at home when they bow to their ancestors and make their offerings. Sail talked about this and said it was stressful and a lot of pressure for him because his father, who would have done a lot of this, had passed away a few years before. He told me it was very traumatic for him to lose his father and see him die of stomach cancer. On an off note, stomach cancer was the leading cause of death in Korea at the time, because of the acid and spice from all the kimchi people eat. The second leading cause of death was a car accident. In Canada, our leading causes of death were heart disease first and the second was cancer in general, I believe, at the time.
The ceremonies they perform at these times are strongly connected to Buddhism, I always thought. At one point in the past they all followed Buddhism or a Shamanistic religion. Ancestors are not supposed to be gone forever and are sleeping or have been reincarnated. Sang Hyun told me his parents who lived on the coast to the south of Seoul were still following Buddhism but he was “no religion” himself. In many of the little restaurants I went in there was a dried fish hanging above a main doorway to ward off bad luck. Buddhists did this. Sang Hyun had a dried fish above one of his doorways in his apartment. He said his mother gave it to him and insisted he put it there, even if he wasn’t going to practice Buddhism. Most Koreans had Buddhist beads or symbols hanging from their rear-view mirror in their cars to protect them from being hurt in an accident, they all told me.
I loved the magpies…they are the same ones that live in the western part of North America. They are a large songbird around 10 inches long and they make a loud cry like a bluejay. I had never seen one in Canada.
‘LG’ class….
One of the main classes I had was in Karibong-dong, teaching four businessmen at a building that was run by LG. LG is one of the biggest companies in Korea. My “LG class” was in a large building complex that had a cellphone plant and many offices and a cafeteria in Southwestern Seoul. I knew nothing about any of their big companies when I started the class. And it would have been nice to have been told something about where the class was and who I was going to have to teach when I began this class, and for how long, but I never was told much about anything.
Whenever I went to this LG class, I had to go in the late afternoon on a long subway ride, traveling on and on to western Seoul, but then I had to go on further, south of Yeoido, as well. Karibong was about an hour and 20 minutes by subway(one way!) away from Karak-dong and then there was 15 minutes or so of walking to get from my Karibong subway stop to the LG building itself. It was an industrial and business area that was another concrete jungle like Bucheon was back then. I had to walk through all kinds of streets and even walk alone beside a raised highway after leaving the subway station in order to make it to the LG class. I always had a nice guard to wave to and to speak a few words to outside at the entrance of the LG complex, and smiling, young Korean receptionists to see at the information desk in the building before meeting my ‘students’. This area was where I could buy some warm “bungobang” desserts from a food cart near the LG complex. A bungobang snack is a waffle made into a fish shape, and filled with red bean paste.
I had only been in Korea for about a week when I first went there and was still basically terrified and unsure of myself. That first late afternoon, I found myself in a nice classroom with four Korean men, not knowing what I should say or do. They introduced themselves one by one and told me a bit about themselves. Oh my goodness, I was so nervous. One was an engineer who designed the inner workings of LG cellphones, called Kim Jin Man. He spoke to me very slowly in a soft voice. Another student was an engineer like Jin Man but he was even shier than Jin Man and his name was Pyo Sang-Mun. A third student had very good English and a loud, strong voice. He told me he was a salesman for the cellphones and he was called Lee Su-Il. The fourth man was older and ultra-dignified and he was in charge of a large group of employees there. He was “a superior” to the other men in the class because of his job title, and their society was strict about varying status levels and formalities, but he was very humble, however, in the class. His name was Kim Dae-Sik and he asked me to call him “Joseph”.
Joseph had chosen that English name because he was a devout Catholic. He said there were only two Catholic churches in Seoul and he went every week to the main one in Myeong-dong across the river. He would have had quite a journey just to get to church. At that time, one third of Koreans were Buddhist, one third were Christian and one third were “no religion”. I asked them, What kind of Christian religion? They all didn’t know what I meant when I asked and they’d all say, “Just Christian!”. I was confused. In Canada Christianity was so divided. The different groups seemed to dislike eachother : the Pentecostal people, for example, thought they would be ‘saved’, but other groups like the Catholics or Baptists will not be ‘saved’, and so on.
Thank goodness I could bring photocopies of pages from the books about teaching English as a second language that were in the office at my institute. I at least could have a semblance of professionalism if I had those papers with me to hand out. These four men were eventually involved with me outside of the class. It was my favourite class and one of the longest lasting contracts I had. It lasted 3 months. I had to go there at suppertime every Monday and Wednesday and Friday and it was a long way to travel. I had woken up every weekday at 6 am and had taught classes all day before leaving at 4 pm for Karibong and the LG class. By the time I got back to my building in Karak-dong it was nine o’clock at night! But I always found it enjoyable and looked forward to seeing the men, who had such respect for me and were so funny and interesting at the same time.
Since this area was less modern and less residential, it was less safe for me and I had 2 unusual events happen around here. Six weeks after I started going there a man acted strangely on the street and was saying something to me, but I didn’t know what he wanted. He was agitated. It was fine with me and I was no more scared than usual, but when I told my LG students about that man, they were very concerned and always drove me back to the subway station after the class from then on, so I wouldn’t be walking in that area alone at night anymore.
The signs say you can get pork at these restaurants.
The other ‘event’ was much worse than the man who was saying something foreign to me on the street. I was walking in the crowded Karibong subway station to get to the exit, and a Korean man rushed up to me and swiftly kicked me hard, square-on, in the shin. That hurts because your shin-bone is right there. He hurried away and I noticed a few people looking a little funny, but they quickly looked down and continued on their way. I had a huge sore purple and green bruise in that spot on my shin for a long time afterward. One of the ministers at the Sejong Institute told me this might have happened because the man thought I was an American….. I never did have a Canadian flag sewn on any of my clothing – I probably should have done that.
These two incidents were really out of the ordinary in Korea. Everyone was orderly and never bothered anyone. The LG students were right to be concerned about that agitated man acting unusual and saying something to me in Korean because over there it would be so rare to get harassed or bothered. It would mean there’s something very wrong with that man. I did have a few other awful or odd experiences in Seoul but considering the fact that I might have one oddball per every 10 000 Korean people I saw, I thought that was pretty good!
Smiling receptionists at the LG building in Karibong.
The class had a different feel or dynamic, depending on who came. Sometimes I was with only one of them, or with just 2, or three or all four. In this group, as in all of the English classes I had in Korea, there were a few who were aggressive and talked a lot and wouldn’t give the more reserved men a chance to speak. I had to let the confident speakers talk but I had to interrupt them here and there so I could ask a shy student what he thought of the topic. It was mostly discussions that we had in all of these adult classes. Practicing speaking was important for them. They all had years of looking at English textbooks in school,but needed to listen to native English speakers like me. I found it so interesting that all the businessmen I met in Seoul told me at first that it was extremely important to them that they learn to speak English. The business world was turning “global”, they said. They knew they had to branch out and sell their goods to other countries. This was the way of the future, they all told me. In my remote area in Canada, I had never heard about this. When I read articles lately about their national and global success that has multiplied since I was there, I am truly happy for them all.
They eat short-grain sticky rice. It’s heavier than long-grain rice. I remember Jin Man exclaiming in protest and dismay when I shook soy sauce on my little bowl of rice one time, as they eat it plain, usually, in a separate small bowl.
Mr. Lee was one who insisted on talking and not letting the others speak much; even the older, ‘superior’ Joseph always let Mr. Lee talk uninterrupted. When Mr. Lee wasn’t there, Joseph talked the most and the other two men couldn’t get a word in. After a few weeks of my teaching them, they said I should eat supper at their company cafeteria. I would meet Jin Man when I arrived, usually, and we would talk and eat, like I did at Anam with Mr. Choi. I think it was in that cafeteria that one of my meals was ‘blood sausage’ or pork intestines, which is an old-fashioned meal in my area in Canada but I would never accept to eat it when I lived in Canada. In Korea, I found it was edible and of course it was a moderate amount in a little dish, served with a number of other little dishes, like rice and kimchi and soup. I was so accustomed to eating something objectionable, or foreign to me in Seoul, that I just ate what was given to me. I remember around once a month at a workplace cafeteria like this they would serve ‘curried chicken’ and the Koreans loved it and were very happy if it was on the menu.
One thing I never forget is a sidewalk stand near this LG building that sold “boong-o-bang” for 50 cents each. It was a waffle-like batter poured into a hot metal mold shaped like a fish, with fishscales decorating it, and filled with the red bean paste Koreans ate it as a sweet snack. The person operating the stand was pressing the waffle-iron down to cook the batter and heat the filling, like when you work a waffle-press. So you bought a hot, delicious ‘fish’ to eat that was a sort of dessert. They were really something, and had a crisp outside and a rich taste, but not too rich. I would buy 2 or three at a time. If I look online at places in Koreatown in Toronto that sell boong-o-bang today, they are filled with custard filling, and not red bean paste. Oh, to really be there in Korea and get some!
I looked through many stock photos online and this was the closest to what the area looked like back then.
I do remember sitting alone in the classroom with Mr. Lee one time, and he told me to call him ‘Sail’. It was easier. Later, when I got the hang of his real name, I realised it’s because his name was Su Il. He was very remarkable. He was instrumental to LG’s growth because his English was so good and he had such confidence and presence. They sent him to Singapore and the Philippines and other Asian countries to head up their global cellphone sales. Later, he was a frontrunner in the US and England for these sales. He was the only Korean person I met who knew about the Maritimes in Atlantic Canada, where I was from. He told me he had to know about all of the world when he did research for sales and that he had seen information about Halifax, which is where I went to university.
Many times, Sail would drive me home or close to his home in Kangnam so I could take the subway from there to Karak-dong. This was really something as well! Many Koreans, including Sail, would take a few hours to get to their job and would be at the job for 10 hours, and then they would travel for a few hours more to get home afterward. It’s the same even today. Their days were long like mine were. We would go to the underground parking and get in his car and then when we were leaving the complex, we had to stop for the guard at the gate. The guard would go around to the trunk and open it and check to see there were no company secrets or electronics being stolen. Everyone leaving was checked. There were many, many cars in Seoul and so much population that on the drive, we were in traffic jams the whole time. And all the drivers regularly beeped their horns at one another. I think it was just to warn drivers and say, I’m moving now or Be aware of me. Beeping the horn in traffic seemed to be a habit. I remember being stopped waiting to move a lot and hearing constant car horns. And it would be dark by then so all the buildings were lit up. And of course we would talk the whole time. Sometimes the radio would be on, playing lovely pop songs. The songs were all in their language and the melodies were beautiful. And sometimes Sail would stop at one of Seoul’s bakeries and buy me a Korean “vegetable pocket”.
This picture is just inserted here to break up my text. These types of ceremonies are put on a lot for tourists but I never did see one while I was there. Sail’s wife, So-Jeong, was extremely beautiful like these women.
I knew his spending time with me was mainly so he could further practice his English but I did not feel used and found him helpful to me – he and his wife are the ones who gave me that special red winter jacket I had on in the GuRyeongSan photo. He would also bring me to his ‘house’ and his wife would have cooked a late supper for us. One time it was a rice dish and I told her honestly it was the best, tastiest rice dish I had ever had. She was surpised and said it was just ketchup in the rice. I don’t know what she would have done with the ketchup and rice to make them so delicious.
The best thing of all was that he and his wife had a tiny, white toy poodle! They treated that dog so well. I had never been around a toy poodle before. He was so tiny! Like a toy that would almost fit in your hand. And they fed him fruit! I remember Sail giving him Korean grapes to eat when he begged. They had called the dog ChoRong and Sail told me it meant ‘shining’ like calling your dog ‘Twinkle’, like a star twinkles. Chorong was very smart and he was trained to pee and poop on their bathroom floor so the small amount of pee went down the drain that was in the middle of every bathroom floor over there.
When my husband came to visit in January, Sail insisted on being his “personal guide” while he was in Korea. I have always looked back and thought of how the Korean people would go out of their way to help us and show us their culture even though their society was so ‘closed’ to the world for so many years. Also, a number of them told me they felt it was very important for them to try to make foreigners feel more comfortable in a strange land. Some acted like it was their personal duty to do so.
This is what it looked like in an old outside station, like where I stood when I was lost around Karibong once.
Taking the subway in that region was not very modern at all. In Part 1 of this blog I mentioned that everyone had believed there was no place without English in the Seoul subway system. Well, one day I found a spot near Karibong with no English. I had gotten lost and must have missed my stop one time around 5:30pm on my way to the LG class. I found myself on the outdoor platform looking at the signs. Why were all the signs in Korean only, I thought. There must be at least a name of a neighborhood printed in English here somewhere…. There wasn’t! I knew I had to go in one direction or another, and as I stood on the platform outside, that looked like the photo above, I dug out my complicated subway map that contained no English. Since I had taught myself how to read their language by then, I could find the place that was written on the station’s signs. Then, I looked at my map to see how how I could get on another train that was going back in the right direction. You might think I only had to get on another train going back from where I came from, but I didn’t know which stop I was at. It’s awful when you don’t know where you are and all of the signs are foreign to you and you can’t ask anybody for help. I was so happy that I could read the sign saying Dosan, although I had to look at my phrasebook to identify the Korean characters. It would have been a huge predicament to ask a Korean speaker what to do. No one would have known what I was saying. Knowing their alphabet really came in handy that day.
That old, original subway line had a spot where the train would stop and the lights would go out for quite a while enroute to Karibong. It happened every day in the same place. It was like what happened on a Seinfeld episode once. But wasn’t it worse and scarier if you were in the middle of a strange, huge city and it happened? And what if you’re the only person from a western country, and no one can speak your language and you can’t speak theirs? I did look at the workmen walking around the tracks outside and saw all kinds of buildings just the same while I was on that subway route, since part of the route was above ground, at least. Everyone waited and was quiet during these blackouts and stoppages. No one ever said a word. I was always so glad when that train got moving again. What long days I had. I was up by 6am and home at 9pm. Many days I had 10 hours of travel time alone in that one day.
I wrote above that I was involved outside of the class with these men. It wasn’t only Sail. After quite a while of knowing them in the small way that I did, I tried to “set up” Sang-Mun with Hee Nam, my secretary and friend, Miss Park, who took me to Seoul Tower once in an earlier blog. I went with Hee Nam to meet Jin Man and Sang Mun, I can’t remember where, and we talked and probably got something to eat. Unfortunately, Jin Man was married, and not surprisingly Hee Nam told me later she would have been interested in him, but not Sang Mun. He had no personality. I remember her thanking me for honestly trying. On the last day of this class, the students presented me with a gorgeous high-end scarf and a European soft leather wallet. We all walked to a “sum” restaurant and Jin Man went to a little nearby store at my request and picked up a bottle of traditional, sweet rice wine for me to have with the meal. We had pork lettuce-wraps and of course they would not let me pay for anything. Then Joseph personally took me in an expensive taxi, a black taxi that hardly anyone took, all the way to Karak-dong to the Karak Hotel – not for something seedy! The basement of that hotel had a dance floor and loud music and expensive fruit platters and liquor. Beautiful Russian women would dance on stands in skimpy clothing. I could not judge. It’s the way it was.
Joseph kept telling me that night that he was very thankful for what I had done to help him with his English, although I am still baffled by this. I felt I hadn’t done any kind of an effective job at all, as I always felt when I was teaching in Korea. Joseph paid for everything that night. It would have been expensive. One day Kim Jin Man told me at LG that I had helped him! In his cautiously-slow, sweet voice he described a business call he had to make to a supplier in a Scandinavian country. He was so excited he was able to tell the person on the phone in English that the electronic parts they sent him were no good. He was so pleased and he said couldn’t believe he had been able to make that call. He said it was because of me.
I wanted to show that Seoul was so different at night. The lights were amazing, but they are just beginning to come on here.
Sail told me a story one evening that was similar to Anthony’s sad one. Sail had a great love that he was passionate about in the past. Everyone must go to a government building in Seoul to check their national genealogy registry with 3000 years of history before they decide to get married. They have to check officially to see they aren’t too closely related before they are allowed to be married. He and the girl were not allowed to get married. He had to find someone else….
Gasan Digital Complex….
I must write that all of Karibong, even the name, is now gone. I was looking for it on Google Maps in 2018, and wondered why I couldn’t find it. They changed the whole huge area into a modern business area and shopping mecca. It’s called Gasan Digital Complex now. They think of it and a few neighborhoods beside it as a tech city. This new tech city goes on and on with many streets with tall, huge glass buildings and beautiful malls. Near there as is a sprawling Chinatown of sorts there too. It wasn’t like this at all during my time in Seoul.
Attitudes…..
I've always been interested in people's attitudes and perceptions. My thesis at university was about attitudes towards mental illness. The most fascinating thing I heard from anyone in the LG class was part of a sort of mistake, I think. In one of the classes in Karibong all 4 of the students were standing up with me near the blackboard while I wrote English words on it. We got on the topic of people from other countries. Sail burst out saying that Koreans were disgusted with western people like me because they can smell our underarm sweat! He said a few extra sentences describing their horror at our 'smell'. I had never thought of something like that, but I can see why it's true! We North American caucasians all need 'deodorant' to put under our arms but Koreans do not! There are no sticks of deodorant for sale there. There's no deodorant section in any of their stores. They don't sweat the same way as we do. They don't need 'underarm deodorant'. Poor Joseph was looking so funny after Sail blurted that out. Joseph thought, I think, that Sail shouldn't have said that. I wasn't insulted at all. I had never thought of it before, actually. I told them that Caucasian people notice that Africans have a strong body odour. Many of us find it offensive, I told the students. I don't mean African-Americans, I mean people directly from Africa. It's true. I do believe the Korean people probably don't need underarm deodorant because of their diet. At the time I thought it must be a 'racial' thing. But when I lived there and was eating their diet, my sweat didn't smell anymore either! I noticed that. Is it the kimchi? Or race?
Seoul Churches…
More fascinating than the billions of neon lights at night were the lit up crosses on buildings that housed churches all over Seoul. I can never find a picture of a neighborhood with lighted crosses everywhere to show people what it was like. It was amazing though. In the daytime, there were some churches with steeples here and there. But at night, the crosses on all of the churches were lit up. You couldn’t see there were places of worship in a lot of non-descript buildings in the daytime. But everywhere you looked at night, there were bright orange crosses in spots where you wouldn’t know there was a Christian meeting room or ‘church’. There were so many of these orange crosses everywhere that it was magical. Every night.
This is the flag of South Korea. If you read an article that explains the meaning of each line and each colour you will be reading for a long time. Even palace buildings are placed strategically and these placements themselves have meaning and are in line with specific mountains. This is supposed to be pleasing to someone’s ‘line of sight’.
Aju Middle School…
Another class that started in the fall of 1997 was the Aju Middle School class. It was always at 2 in the afternoon on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I’d go after being in Bucheon with Mr. Choi. Aju was near Asia Park around the Sports Complex subway stop, 4 km northwest of Karak-dong. I was really weary when I’d arrive at the Sports Complex station from such long rides to Bucheon and most of the way back. I remember it wasn’t a busy time at 2 o’clock in the subway. One time on the way out of the station on the stairs a Korean man was exposing himself to me and he was crooning something in Korean to me as he did it. I had to think quickly and decided in an instant, without stopping, to go right past him up the stairs. I was so rattled I couldn’t even do any teaching in the classroom for a long time once I made it to the school. I was so disturbed. Who could have done anything to help me? No one could have.
This reminds me of that stairway I had to climb to get outside of the Sports Complex station.
There were wonderful things about the Aju school experience, but not necessarily the people. A stern-looking Korean principal was involved and he seemed to be in such a horrible mood and even mad at me when I saw him. The students were a class full of 15 year-olds with an attitude. After the first few classes they all flat-out refused to open their English books so I couldn’t get any lessons done. Each week there were less and less of them coming to class and one day I looked out the window and most of the boys were playing ball! I do remember some of them even now. I do believe they were so tired of studies and I can understand but I didn’t know how to get anywhere with them. I tried buying a cassette tape of their favourite new English singer, Mariah Carey, and trying to get them to translate the lyrics of their favourite songs with me. I tried playing ‘Hangman’ where they came up to the blackboard to take turns guessing the letters and guessing the mystery word and no one spoke at all. I tried writing my own funny dialogues for them to take turns reading. None of this was enough. A funny time, though, was when they got me to try to properly pronounce all their names! There was one obnoxious boy called Ta-Bom and I tried and tried but it sounded like ‘The Bum’ when I’d say it. Did they ever laugh at that. They all roared laughing over and over because I’d try saying it again, over and over and each time, it was apparently wrong! They really got a kick out of me trying pronunciations. I never got it quite right.
Two girls in my Aju class. Everyone wore a uniform – in my area of Canada students don’t have to wear any.
One time I went to another classroom down the hall and found the Korean girl who was hired at the same time I was. She was supposed to teach another class at the same time as me and I wanted to know if she was doing something right. She told me she was beside herself having the same trouble as I was having! And she was Korean! So I had to give up and grin and bear it.
In the area, there were many trees and there were some cicadas singing in them. I was told that a few months before that time of year, all summer long, the cicadas were more plentiful and would have been even louder. One of the kids at Aju drew a little picture of an ugly big winged insect to try to explain a cicada. They aren’t found in my area of Canada and I only just heard a few outside the school in the trees. It sounded like part cricket, part bat and it was loud. A loud, constant metallic humming. The branches of big trees were hanging over the street near the school. I would sit in Asia Park, where there were more trees, before the class would start. One day it was so beyond beautiful in the area because it was the peak of their autumn foleage. The temperature was perfect and winds were calm and I saw coloured leaves that were so perfect everywhere I looked that day. The leaves were gently falling.
There were apartment buidings near the school and more trees than in other areas. It looked like this when I looked up.
Chaebols…
Not long after I arrived in Seoul, the Koreans explained that there were big companies unique to Korea called chaebols, and they are considered conglomerates. Chaebols are so powerful because they have, for example, automobiles, banks and grocery stores and other endeavors in the same company. They all owned their own national baseball teams. Samseong, Hyundai, LG, Lotte, Kia, SK, were some. Over the years the most successful one will move up in the top spot, and the order of who makes more money changes over time. Lotte makes snacks and has a few large hotels and malls and other sub-companies. LG is known a little in Canada for appliances but over there they made cellphones and had other companies under them on the go. I remember Sail telling me in class that LG stood for Lucky Gold Star.
The Lotte Department Store and Lotte World in Jamsil near my institute were places I went to sometimes. I found it interesting that since Korea had such a population and not much space, the department store had a number of floors so it wasn’t flat and one-story like Canadian department stores and malls. Our malls took up a lot of space and were spread out over a lot of land. Even our parking lots in Canada took up a lot of space. It wasn’t like that there. And there was no sense trying to buy clothes in this beautiful store, or anywhere else there, because my frame was naturally large and everything would have been too small for me.
In the Lotte Department Store on the jewellery floor.The Lotte Hotel in Jamshil then. Lotte World and a museum were beside it. The Lotte Department Store was connected to it, as well as a wonderful amusement park also.
The Lotte World complex was so entertaining you could live there forever. The mall had a huge indoor skating rink and there were eating terraces. I bought a box of donuts in there one day and they were the nicest, most delicious donuts I’ve ever had. Truly! I seem to remember they were similar to honey-dipped and there were sugar donuts in there too.
Across the street from the Lotte complex in Jamsil, pronounced Shamshil, was Sokchon Lake, a man-made lake that looked like glass. The Lotte Amusement Park, that had elements of Disney World, was sticking out into this lake. I took pictures one day in the area but never went into the amusement park. The pictures were beautiful just the same when I was standing outside of it.
I got close to it by just standing on the path around the lake.It was quite a park….The trees hung down to frame the pictures.Now there are more buildings around the lake than this.This looked like a restaurant.There was even this decorative gate to go through to get back to the street.
These maples were everywhere and they were all red in October. There were forests of them on the mountains.
BonGeunSa….
Soon after arriving in Seoul, I looked at a tourist map and found there was a Buddhist temple in Kangnam called Bongeunsa and I really wanted to go see it. I headed out alone one day and took Line 8 to Jamsil and switched to the Green Line and went around 5 stops on it to Samseong-dong. This was where the famous Korean Trade Center is. But since there was no Google Maps to help me and Seoul was so huge and confusing, I went all the way around that immense city block trying to find the temple. I asked a few people where it was. I called it Bong-EUN-sa. No one knew what I was saying and it’s a wonder I came across it at all after going very far out of my way. I realised later it’s because they pronounce it Bon-GEUN-sa! See how tricky and frustrating it can be? Even my pronounciation of the B sound wasn’t right. I think I was supposed to say the B sound with a bit of a P sound simultaneously. I could never do it no matter how I tried.
The first thing I saw was this information board outside of the temple. It said this temple was originally built 700 years earlier. Most buildings and statues weren’t original because of Japanese invasions, where fires were set to destroy Korean art and there have also been several wars through the years that caused the destruction of special landmarks throughout Korea.
My first time there, it was a nice sunny morning and it was an exciting area to be in. The temple was set in the bustling city streets but when I was on the grounds, there was no traffic noise, like being on the palace grounds and hearing no sounds of the city. As you walk around a temple’s grounds, you hear the monks chanting and you hear them hitting a special wooden block as they chant. This chanting and the rhythmic, hollow sounds of the wood blocks being “played” is coming out of speakers as you walk around looking at the colourful buildings at Buddhist temples in Korea. It’s so peaceful and beautiful. Worshippers are bowing outside of the main buildings and going inside to pray and meditate. I was so thrilled every time I went there. I couldn’t believe how wonderful it was. I went to BonGeunSa at least 4 times while I lived in Korea.
Two elephant statues were at the street entrance – you enter the grounds by going in between the two elephants.Every large temple has ‘temple guardians’. You walked through a covered wooden gate and there were two guardians on each side. (The 2 elephant statues were at the initial opening at the road.)One of the main halls. You can see the paintings on the outside, a decorated ceremonial drum, and of course, a rack of shelving for shoes.I loved the colours painted on the structures.Some temple buildings have a fish hanging from a bell at the corner.
A while ago I watched a video with a recent tour of this temple. It has changed. Some nice parts are gone, and like most other temples now in Korea, they are offering ‘Temple Stays’. A traveller can pay to stay overnight and have classes on Buddhism and eat what the monks eat, among other things. The temples in Korea need the revenue, I know, but they shouldn’t have made these temples overly modern and so brightly painted that they look garish. It’s so good I saw Bongeunsa before they wrecked it.
It’s a rabbit! These buildings seemed utilitarian so left them alone. The Trade Center is in the background.
There is a movie called “Seven Years in Tibet” starring Brad Pitt. In it, the Brad Pitt character had befriended the Dalai Lama in Tibet, and he was building the Buddhists a new temple. There was a huge delay during the building while all the people, who were Buddhists, had to ‘save’ all the worms that had been dug up, and carry them on spoons to safety, because in Buddhism all living things need to be treated well. Even worms! So this white rabbit in the picture above was living at the temple and must have had a good, safe life, I imagine. One morning when I was there, a little flock of sparrows was chirping and flitting about. Birds were enchanted with Korea too, it seemed. I was always so happy such a massive city still had birds and animals in it.
One of my visits was after a snowfall. There was a section with commemorative animal statues like these turtles. The morning sun is glowing pink-gold on everything.Everywhere I looked there was a photo opportunity!A few of the main halls, a stone pagoda and some Korean worshippers. This is where I saw the sparrows playing in the morning sun.
As in the picture above, Korean temples had rows of paper lanterns in the courtyards, hung up. There was a rectangular piece of paper hanging down from each lantern. A person would donate money and write his or her name on that piece of paper to ask Buddha for good fortune. So the coloured lanterns were everywhere. I had never ever heard of such things and had never imagined such sights and sounds.
This was just a statue I liked that was at a drinking spot. You can see a little turquoise cup for your water. This statue was about 5 feet tall.A very old huge metal bell is in here. There are old bells at many special spots throughout Korea. The designs on the bells have meaning and the bells represent important parts of royal and Buddhist ceremonies.This small building was so nice with clear paintings of Buddha and blue, green, yellow and rust colours.Many people say this is their favourite picture of all. I think this area is gone now forever.
The finale of the whole temple was a yard with a 30-foot tall statue of Buddha, 2 lion statues and a large stone lantern in it. I had always wanted to see such things. It was incredible to me that I lived near such a place.
Northern Seoul….
The whole area near Kyeongbokkung Palace in North Central Seoul has so many cultural sights. It’s full of tourist areas and relics. The road leading up to the palace, where the North Gate is, has 2 statues right in the middle of the busy road that are of utmost importance to the Korean people. One is of a famous, former general who defeated the Japanese once using extreme cunning and bravery, called General Lee. He is wearing a long suit of armour in the style of a robe. The other statue is a huge gold-coloured likeness of a former king, King Sejong, who created the unique Korean alphabet so his people would have their own language, separate from Chinese. He is sitting in a big chair or throne. These two statues are in the middle of the wide 10-lane road. Near this road, southeast of the statues, you’ll find a two-storey ‘Liberty Bell’ protected in a traditional-style structure that represents the Koreans’ final escape from Japanese rule once and for all. There is a national holiday once a year to celebrate this independence and reflect upon it.
My photo of General Lee in his robe of armour. He was very impressive, presiding over the traffic and sidewalk crowds.King Sejong. See how the distinctive mountain behind him is so large that it’s sort of looming in the background and seems so closeby? It’s the same mountain that’s behind Kyeongbokkung.
There were numerous places and things over there which seemed to all have the same name, but that wasn’t necessarily the case at all. The English teachers pronounced ‘Sejong’ from my Sejong Institute class with a soft ‘o’, as in the way we would pronounce the o in the word ‘wrong’. Really, one of the businessmen staying at my institute in Karak-dong told me once very sternly, you have to pronounce Sejong with a hard ‘o’, as in the word ‘bone’. Some people and places called Sejong could have different ways of pronouncing the ‘e’, or the ‘o’ or sometimes the even the consonants. It does seem to me that the “Sejong Institute” where I taught the government ministers had the same pronounciation as the King Sejong in this case, with a hard “O”.
I must mention one morning when I emerged above ground in downtown central Seoul from the subway, I was stunned by the great ‘looming’ northern mountain that is behind King Sejong in the photo above. Not only was it’s size so impressive, but the morning sun was colouring the patches of granite on it a soft, pinkish-gold colour. I was taken aback by it, it was so striking. How could a mountain that was so far away seem so immense when there were hundreds of buildings between me and that mountain, I remember wondering to myself. That particular mountain is called Bukaksan, not to be confused with the group of mountains behind it further to the North, called the Bukhansan Mountains. ‘Buk’ is ‘north’. Many places are confusing, as the names seem similar to foreigners.
This was part of a monument to King Sejong. (On that main road where the statues of General Lee and King Sejong are located)
A tall brown brick building near the General Lee statue is the Kyobo Life Insurance Building. It’s in my photo of General Lee above. The Kyobo Building had the biggest bookstore in Korea in the bottom of it when I lived in Seoul. I went in once, and bought a bird guide in Korean and some New Year’s cards with artwork on them, like Korean folk art of cranes and deer and peach trees. There were no English books except study guides. Their ‘New Year’s’ wasn’t the same as Western New Year’s traditions, as it is related to their own unique holiday about it, and the date is never January first.
This historical relic was in the road beside the Kyeongbokkung Palace complex. I thought it was interesting but don’t know what it represents. It’s seven times as high as a car!
One time I walked around the North Central area of Seoul east of Kyeongbokkung Palace and going northward. The whole area was so interesting. I almost made it to the official Korean Presidential House but I got creeped out because this area was heavily guarded more and more as I walked, so I turned around to return home after a while. The reason for so much security is that not long before that time, a group of North Korean assassins was found very close to the Korean president. They had almost gotten to him. I did see some wonderful things that day.
Northern Seoul. It looks like any western area, except that is a mini-bus coming toward you on the road. You can see a church with a steeple further back. There is a learning center for kids on the right (Talk n Play).No one I showed this picture to ever knew about this small temple-style building and it wasn’t mentioned in any info when I tried to find out about it for over 20 years. I always thought this building was for female monks because I saw a woman outside of it when I came across it that day. I found out recently it was a Zen Centre and that it isn’t there anymore – a new Zen centre is in its place now. In this picture, the white railing has shapes of sitting Buddas cut out of it and I love that.This was across from that Zen centre pictured above. It seemed to be the entrance to an elite property.You can see a few tiled roofs and little stores selling fruit out front… This is Northern Anguk-dong, where I walked and took pictures one day.
Japan and China…..
The Japanese built a few large colonial-style buildings in Seoul when they ruled over Korea in the early 1900’s. These buildings are not liked by Korean people. Japan invaded and pillaged Korea and ruled over them many times over the past centuries. They captured artists and potential workers in Korea and brought them to Japan to do artwork and to do hard labour. Probably they took other groups like writers and musicians and scientists. When I read the news from over there in the last 22 years, there are many articles about disputes they have with Japan all the time. They argue still now over certain remote Korean (Japanese?) Islands. Each country is bound and determined these islands belong to them. There are Japanese school textbooks with incorrect and biased history statements about what went on between Korea and Japan through the years. Korea is always upset over this. The forced labour where captured Korean citizens built things that benefited Japan for years while the workers got no pay has been in the news from Korea a lot lately in 2019 and Koreans want restitution for it. The ‘Comfort women’ are the saddest of all. Hundreds of Korean girls were captured by the Japanese government during the Second World war and taken far away to camps where they had to sexually service Japanese soldiers while Japan battled its western enemies. The stories those poor old women tell/told are horrendous. It is going on and on and will never be really settled, it seems. There are other ongoing disputes as well, like boats being in the wrong waters and the proposed disposal of nuclear waste by Japan to be dumped in the water between the two countries .
One of the first talks I had with the businessmen at Votra was about how expensive Japan is. The man explaining told me that if you take a plane from Korea to Tokyo, Japan, your taxi to your hotel in Tokyo from the airport will cost more than your plane ticket from Korea to Japan! Many Canadians for years tell me “I would really love to go to Japan….” I say it’s not very cost feasible because everything in Japan costs 5 times more than it does in Canada. When I was in Japan in 1999, a drink that would cost a dollar in Canada cost $5 in Japan, and so on.
Decorative wall at Kyeongbokkung Palace.
With regards to feelings about other countries, a businessman who was staying at my institute told me not long after I first arrived there what Korea thought about China. He said the Chinese army had a million soldiers at that time. He told me that China was going to be a very strong force soon and also that China would soon have so many soldiers that they could be a strong enemy of anyone, let alone Korea. They were wary of China, not in the same way Canadians are, as they thought of them as a physical threat. Most Canadians, on the other hand, think more of China as oppressing and controlling their people and committing human rights violations (I do not think about this in the same way as many Canadians do, however). Those businessmen were so interesting and they taught me a lot. On a side note, they told me they don’t like to eat with Chinese people because “the Chinese” have bad table manners. They pick their bowl of soup up and drink out of it, the Korean men said. I would never have had any experience knowing who from where eats what way at all. I found it was hilarious to listen to these impressions of their neighbours. One time a 63 year-old man who was half-Japanese was harassing me and wanted to sleep with me. A couple of Korean businessmen said, “It’s because he is half-Japanese”, very matter-of-factedly when I told them about my problem. Even more interesting to me was when a businessman explained you can tell the difference between a Korean person and a Japanese person by their teeth!!! He said the Japanese have crooked, bad teeth, because they eat too much seafood (!), but the Koreans have nicer teeth.
They all said they could easily tell instantly who was Korean, who was Chinese or who was Japanese. I can’t tell easily at all. Also, everyone over there was in awe of my eyelids! Many of the women would say to me immediately, “I love your eyelids!!!” and I heard “your eyelids are beautiful!” a number of times from Korean women. Korean women loved western women’s eyes because we have distinctive eyelids, and they don’t. I remember I would chuckle to myself all the time about it, thinking about all those years I hated my thighs, or my hair colour or my nose, and I had never thought about how I have “striking eyelids” at all! I would have given my eye teeth to look like a Korean woman instead of the way I always looked, even if I did have good eyelids.
Age….
I had forgotten about this, but the whole time I lived there almost every Korean person would ask, “How old are you?” when they first met me. I met so, so many people over there and as soon as they met me they would ask my age. Many times it was the first thing they would say to me! I couldn’t believe it, because in my culture it’s extremely forward to do that. Especially to a woman or a stranger. I came to realise that it’s because their society is strict about many, many rules. One steadfast rule in Korean society is that if someone is older than you, you must address them a certain way. If the person is younger than you are, you address them in a different way than if they’re older. Your bow will be different when you greet them if the person is older, than if they are younger than you. They didn’t have to say things a certain way to me or bow a certain way when they’d greet me but perhaps they always asked this when they met anyone, then. They were just so accustomed to asking.
Even their birthdays are complicated. It’s unreal. They told me in the west, like in Canada, a person’s age begins as soon as he’s born. In Korea, traditionally a baby’s age can begin at conception, so that adds 9 months to a person’s age over there. Additionally, and this was fascinating, a person can be just born and will already be considered 2 years old because of other factors, like the month of birth. So I said I was 28 years old, which I was. If one of them told me he was 30 years old, he very well could be 28 or 29 in his ‘Canadian age’. I had never imagined there was a ‘Korean age’ that was calculated differently from someone’s ‘Canadian age’. Nothing was the same as in Canada there.
Shops in Insa-dong
Insadong is a popular tourist area not far southeast of the North Gate and Kyeongbokkung Palace. There are antique shops everywhere. I looked in one shop but I never had much money and knew I wasn’t allowed to take most antiques out of the country, so I never bought anything there. In the picture above, there are 2 replicas for sale of some ancient statues that have been found on an island in the south, Cheju Do. The ancient Korean people created statues like this and they were found all over that island.
I chose this picture to represent a few historical sights I visited in Seoul in the fall of 1997.
Back then, Seoul had 5 palaces and an enormous shrine in its central downtown. I visited a gorgeous palace that I’d say was my favourite called Changgyeongkung twice by myself. It was large and full of trees and the same types of buildings as Kyeongbokkung, but you felt more relaxed on the grounds. You were aware that the massive city was teaming outside, but you could enjoy the paths and see couples taking wedding pictures everywhere dressed in wedding garb and listen to stories you were told by the people about the royalty. One popular story associated with Changgyeongkung tells of a queen’s jealousy, and another story is a queen’s kindness, and so on. There was a wall around a big area that enclosed this palace with gates like at Kyeongbokkung, but there was also an ancient sundial to look at that the king’s men had created to tell time hundreds of years ago. I had never looked at a real sundial before and you could see that if there was a certain shaded area, it was after noon, etc.
There was never an English explanation of anything in the museums and at the special sights so you had to use your imagination a lot. Was it that the king’s servants made that sundial, for instance? Was this, for example, the real “_____”, or a replica?
This is the ticket stub from visiting Changgyeongkung.
Then there was a special shrine, called Chogmyo, with writings of one of the kings enclosed in a number of long tiled buildings with columns. The Koreans reenact an old procession to honour these writings and that king at certain times of the year. The grounds were impressive and visitors felt the importance and the history of it all when they visited. You are aware of the site being sacred when you’re there. Most of these tourist places over all of Korea are part of UNESCO’s historical protected world sites, and have Korean pine trees, ponds and birds, old men playing “Go”, 500-year-old pine trees and women in shiny ‘traditional’ dresses throughout. When I was at the end of the sight-seeing at Chogmyo Shrine, before I left, I was in a wooded area with a pond nearby where people were relaxing and a small flock of ‘painted’ chickadees were flying together in the low branches of a tree, almost like they were playing and chasing eachother. I was thrilled because I had never imagined a colourful chickadee before! They were so sweet!
Here’s what those chickadees looked like.
Can you imagine how hard on the head it was trying to get used to being there? Three of the main palaces were called Kyeongbokkung, Changdeokkung and Changgyeongkung. That’s confusing. I had to try to get all that type of stuff straight. If the names of places all seemed the same to you, you wouldn’t be able to navigate the subway system.
Bucheon…..
My boss filled in all my days in no time at all. No one wanted to travel too much but I did like it. I remember thinking, ‘It’s hard but at least I’m not in this building(institute in Karak-dong) with these awful Canadians and Americans’. Travelling so much made my days extremely long. After a few morning classes at the institute in Karak-dong, on Tuesdays and Thursdays I was supposed to head out in the 8am morning rush for a satellite city called Bucheon. Later it became an actual city. Bucheon was between Seoul and Incheon. Incheon was famous in the Korean War because a famous US general, General MacArthur, did some strategic work there during the Korean War and it helped the allies to not be losing so badly. The Koreans were so grateful for a famous offensive he did in Incheon that turned the tide of the war, that they have a statue of him in Incheon. Incheon is on the west coast of Korea beside Seoul. I took the subway, bus and taxis to get to Bucheon twice a week for a few months to be the private English teacher of a man who was the head of an Anam Semiconductors plant.
The manager of the plant was Mr Choi. He was extremely nice and also fascinating. To go so far west, outside of Seoul limits, and then take a bus or taxi through those packed streets was exciting, and I for sure had to get slippers out of my locker for this job before I started. Some jobs had a third party recruiter who was involved in getting you the job. Unfortunately, the recruiter for this job was not nice. I remember a pushy, unreasonable Korean woman being at my first meeting with Mr. Choi, and I was accepted for the job. However, when I went for my first day of teaching him, that woman was there, and when she saw me she ragged at me and nastily told me I didn’t look as good as she thought I would. Well, my clothes were okay, although she said they weren’t, but I had travelled through concrete and dust and heat for a two and a half hours to be at the plant! So I was somewhat disheveled. But Mr. Choi was laid back and eager to talk. He’s the one who told me he picked out those cubes of cheese at the buffet in the US.
I wanted to convey that Bucheon was a real ‘concrete jungle’ at the time.
My school didn’t allow me enough time to make it to Anam for 10am because of the long travel time to get there so I was supposed to pay for a taxi to make the trip shorter when I got to the Bucheon subway stop. I didn’t like to spend my money on the taxi instead of the bus but I took a taxi sometimes. The main trouble was that no one called taxis; they hailed them. I couldn’t believe I could physically hail a taxi before I did it. I had to do it, but it was hard for a timid, nervous girl to do. Then when I’d get in that taxi I’d say ‘chik chin’ for ‘go straight’ and ‘orencheok’ or ‘wencheok’ for go left or right. I think I had to say ‘Yogi’ when I wanted the driver to stop. ‘Yogi’ meant ‘here’.
So many times I took the bus to the plant, and I can remember seeing the huge signs and banners everywhere with “IMF” appearing here and there. Sometimes they were rallying about it and a man would have a loudspeaker. The stock market crash was such a big deal for them, as it would be anywhere. The government announced in October that all Koreans should collectively turn their gold jewellery in to certain offices to help with the financial trouble. They did and it did help, but it shows the desperation. The ramifications of that help was not apparent yet when I was living there and there was still panic and fear and shock all over.
Mr. Choi talked to me in a huge, nicely furnished office. I wanted to learn his first name. He told me it was Yong Kyu. When we talked, he told me he had travelled to many countries for business purposes. He had gone golfing on his off time in the Philippines and they all had to carry umbrellas to keep the sun off them on the golf course, it was so hot. He found the heat there unbearable and he was someone who could stand heat way better than I ever could, as his skin looked nicely tanned but it was his natural skin colour. Knowing this helps me to have something to say when I meet a Filipino person. I tell the Filipino person about what Mr. Choi said about the umbrellas and the heat over there when I talk to him or her, and it shows I’m interested in the Philippines and Asia on the whole. Mr, Choi was in the US and described seeing an NHL hockey game while he was there. He said the energy was intense and it was very exciting to him to experience that, and see the fights for the first time, since they don’t have much hockey in Korea. He told me, as a few other Korean businessmen did, that in Germany you could pay and go to a ‘secret’ theater and watch actual people having sex in front of you on the stage! I had a number of classy Korean men with money who were well-travelled describe these places in Germany to me. I never hear about that where I’m from, I can assure you!
The subway entrance I used all the time was below the tall buildings. Across from there now is a massive mall associated with Karak Market. The trees along the sidewalk had large leaves that looked like maple leaves, but the trees had peeling bark that had black or grey sections.
It was very complicated to do this class. The Anam company must have been paying a fortune for Mr. Choi to not be so ‘Korean’ when he spoke to investors from other places. The horrible recruiter woman spent time coaching me on how to pronounce Mr. Choi’s name properly before I had my first class alone with him. English speakers say Choi but I had to understand the way two vowel sounds ‘soft O’ and ‘eh’ would sound if you spoke those two vowel sounds together quickly. It was not easy. The way it was pronounced in Korean was nothing like the way we would pronounce it in English. And I say ‘poor Mr. Choi’ sometimes when I mention him because he was very set in his ways when it came to speaking and I couldn’t make many improvements. I think they should have left him alone, myself.
Everyone you met gave you a business card. We English teachers were no exception. This was my business card!
The Anam class was the one I was going to when the subway train would come out of the underground and I would see the 63 Building with the morning sun on it, along with a million other buildings surrounded by mountains. The sky was “high” and I could see the great river running through the city. Bucheon was very far away and it took over 2 hours to get there. Then after teaching Mr. Choi I would travel all the way back to Eastern Seoul and go to other classes for the day as well. Mr. Choi drove me all the way across Seoul once to buy me a special, swanky meal at the restaurant of the Hotel Intercontinental. It was beside the Trade Center in Kangnam-gu. Poor Mr. Choi kept saying it was a French restaurant, but in the end I found out it was an Italian restaurant called “Firenge”. I know we had a bit of Italian ice cream for dessert. I think it cost over $100 (Can) back in 1997 just for MY meal. I did confess to him that day in the car that I was married. He was told I was single, because the bosses of insitutes and recruiters thought it was good to tell potential clients that female foreigners like me were single, hoping that, what?, we would be available to the men physically? It’s funny, these people trying to get Korean customers to hire their English teachers all made up fake resumes to hand out to companies about the ‘teacher’. My fake resume said I had been teaching at various companies for a year or sometimes two years AND that I was not married. A male recruiter, the one who taught me how to take the subway, once asked, “…Could you say you are not married?…Could you?…Could you please say to them you are not married?…” before one of the interviews. It was awkward to be honest and tell Mr. Choi I wasn’t single – I really didn’t know what was expected of me. Mr. Choi was nice about it but seemed genuinely confused as to why they lied to him.
One day, he asked me if I wanted a personal tour of the plant below us. I did! I had to stand by myself for a few minutes in a tube-like, elevator-like device like you would see on Star Trek. In there, strong wind currents sucked all particles of dust off me. Then I was allowed to go see the workers putting the delicate micro-chips and circuit-boards together. After our ‘class’ we’d go in the elevator to the lunchtime cafeteria and have a meal. I always loved the company cafeterias because they served you a tray full of authentic Korean food. It was a service for employees so no one paid anything to eat at company cafeterias. Once I had fresh raw squid slices with spicy sauce in there. Once I had sesame paste/dip with my food. They couldn’t get enough of that special sesame dip (like a paste). Also, one time, Mr. Choi said he had a wonderful surprise for me : we were going to eat at that cafeteria with 2 Scottish men, and I would feel at home talking to these English speakers, he said. Ha ha I couldn’t understand what those 2 men from Scotland were saying at all! It was worse than making do trying to communicate with the Korean people. And I couldn’t make any Koreans or Mr. Choi understand that either! In Korea, the people didn’t realise a ‘foreigner’ like me could find an English speaker from another country hard to understand.
Around town…
A street stand that sold cigarettes and newspapers. I had to go to them often. And I was hungry for news – there was hardly any English in news or tv or signs.
I had written in Part 1 that I felt it was bad for me to be in Korea when I first got there. I came to realise after being there for 3 months that it was a good thing. Now that I’ve been back in Canada for many years, I believe it was the best thing that ever had happened to me. It took 3 months for me to be physically able to handle the food and the time change. I had my friend, Sang Hyun, and lots of sights I could see. The traffic outside of my ‘institute’ didn’t bother me anymore after 3 months either. One strange thing I always remember was in the taxi that first day when I was first in Seoul going to my institute, we passed the colossal Olympic Stadium. I had never seen a stadium like that in real life or on television, but I had had a dream about a structure like that years before. In that dream I had years ago, I fell backwards off the top of the stadium and I woke up when I fell. It had been a strange nightmare. I thought this was a bad thing: Oh Oh…there’s a stadium like the one I had that nightmare about, I thought. This had added to my sense of foreboding while I was there at first but I got over it after 3 months, thank goodness. One day I noticed I felt okay and comfortable, whereas I hadn’t been okay before.
If it was rush hour, when the doors opened or closed it could be a bad thing for a female…
I added this photo above because I wanted to start explaining about ‘subway perverts’ here. A week after my arrival in Seoul, Bronwyn from the plane-ride over, called me. She was beside herself! She said when it was her first time on a bus, a Korean man had pressed himself against her for a long time on the crowded bus. She couldn’t do anything, as it was crowded and all those people on the bus wouldn’t know what she was saying if she had tried to get help. She said at that time she was so beyond discouraged she wanted to leave Korea. She was so upset on the phone.
When I took the subway one morning in 8am rush hour, not long after that, it happened to me. It was so packed in the subway car, for a few stops we were frozen on the spot and could not move an arm, even. My hands and arms were frozen where they had been when more people getting on had created this traffic jam of people. A Korean man took advantage of this and was shoving his body closely against mine, moving with the sway of the train, over and over. No one could move. No one spoke English. I think he quickly went away and was lost in the crowd afterwards. It is awful and you do feel violated.
One time when the subway car became this packed and my arms were frozen, I moved my hand, since that’s all I could move, and I grabbed a man’s private parts! He was not a pervert, and I felt bad and hadn’t meant to do that. I couldn’t help it! It was so packed, worse than sardines in a can. No one ever made a sound and everyone always quietly endured such things.
Seoul Tower…
Picture of the sunset and the Han River and Seoul Tower. I remember looking at the sky a lot. I loved looking at the moon when I was there. To me, it seemed different over there.
Another time, I was going to spend time with ‘Miss Park’ in the evening. She was a nice secretary who worked at my institute. She’s the one I called when I became lost on the bus that time. I mentioned to her it was so nice to look at the lights of Seoul at night, like for instance the Seoul Tower had colourful lights at night. I had just meant it was great to see the tower lit up green and pink at night, along with all the other lights of the city. She thought I meant I wanted her to take me to the tower that night! She scrambled to find a person who could do that. She found a Korean guy who had a car and was willing to do it. So, when I went downstairs to the third floor of my buiding to meet her, she said we would go with this guy in his car to Seoul Tower. This was a wonderful thing because the tower was a main attraction, and I loved going through Seoul in a car because I could see everything that was above ground(not like if I was underground on the subway). It was terrible though, for Miss Park, because ‘the guy’ wanted to date her, and she didn’t want to date him. Because he did her this big favour, he wanted something from her in return. I felt even worse than feeling I had been an imposition or inconvenience, if she was being pressured by this man to go out with him. I tried to explain to her but explaining anything over there was difficult. She was a nice friend and I wish that evening had gone the way I intended, with us just eating and shopping and looking around.
In the tower, this is the view of the north – you can see those mountains that are behind Kyeongbokkung.
It is highly worth it to go to that tower. You see the whole city with surrounding mountains from the viewing area. You see everything, all over everywhere. I could never have imagined such a tremendous view of any city, ever. It is absolutely spell-binding.
The secretaries…
These are the 3 women who helped run the place for Mr. Kim. Miss Park is in the middle with the round face and glasses. ‘Julia’ is on the left here and Miss Lee is on the right. The photo is double exposed, unfortunately.
It’s funny when I think of it, but Miss Park used to come upstairs all the time, to tell me I had to start a new class, and she’d call me “Covec!!!” Ha ha! She accompanied me to classes sometimes if they thought I would need help. I tried to tell her she had an exotic beauty, because she felt she was unattractive. One time the two of us spent the afternoon together. Her father was in one of the hospitals there. He had had a stroke. I went with her to this hospital to see him, and then we went to her home where she lived with her parents. It was very interesting. In this hospital, we walked down many hallways and passed many rooms. Room upon room upon room we passed. In every room was a stroke patient and relatives were at every one of the beds, working to physically move the limbs of the patient up and down or back and forth. They were doing this in every room and at every bed and there were hundreds of people in that huge section. We don’t do that here at all. I met her sick father but couldn’t say anything in his language. Then we went to her ‘apartment’ and her mother only spoke Korean and it was unreal – she said, with her daughter, Miss Park, interpreting, that she was excited because she had never had a foreigner in her house before.
I had to pick something I wanted this woman, Miss Park’s mother, to make for me to eat before we went. I was not fussy, but I knew I should pick somethinh, so I picked a vermicelli dish they often eat called ‘japchae’. Her mother presented that to me, and she was so worried I wouldn’t be suited. Of course, everything was perfect. I had a little phrasebook and chose the phrase, ‘I ate so much I’m going to burst!!!’ to tell her. The phrases were limited. Miss Park’s family lived to the East of Olympic Park. I saw when I was in her bedroom that she had Korean furniture all inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which is a tradition there. It was amazing to me just to even see the bed and bureau drawers with these decorations. Their furniture was black or dark brown, and like a lacquer style when it had the mother of pearl on it. And because Seoulites never got enough sleep, Miss Park fell asleep later when we were in her room. This would be strange in Canada, if someone invited you over but went to sleep during your visit, but I tried to understand. Everything was different there. And I didn’t mind. I should mention Miss Park’s first name was Hee Nam.
Seoul Tower at night!
I should mention that no one from outside the country was allowed to enter Korea for many, many years. No one could leave Korea and no one could come in. It was only in 1970 they started allowing foreigners back in and letting people out. This is why when I was there most people had never seen a foreigner like me, and the women I visited were so thrilled to have me inside their place. We have to consider the reasons for things and think of all the angles and realise why people are the way they are.
I should also mention that there was heavy censorship there. Only a few songs by certain musical groups were allowed. Now it would be harder for the government to stop people from hearing or seeing certain things now that the internet is around. Only certain movies were approved for them to go see or rent. When I was there, I found that the people had been allowed to hear a few older Elvis songs, like ‘I Can’t help Falling in Love With You”, and they had been allowed to hear a few songs by John Denver and a few Anne Murray songs. They had never been allowed to know about The Beatles. I couldn’t imagine never knowing about the Beatles! One man said I must be upset that John Denver was killed in that plane crash while I was in Korea – “You must be very upset…” He thought, like they all must have, that we all just listened to John Denver and Anne Murray over and over in Canada.
Most of the time, many little bowls are used. They eat kimchi at every meal.
Can you tell what these dishes are? I am not totally sure myself! Many Korean dishes are low-fat and they eat a lot of vegetables too. I found it hard not having potatoes and Canadian bread. In the grocery stores, potatoes were expensive and their bread was heavy and yellowish-orange. I figured they put eggs in their bread since it was like that. It was not enjoyable bread to eat. If I bought a sandwich at the convenience store that said ‘peanut butter’, when I went to eat it later it was a thin, light peanut butter-flavored cream that was in between the strange yellow bread slices. When I thought I bought a strawberry ice cream once, it was red bean flavour instead. Red bean is a common old-fashioned dessert in Korea. Often if you bought a cake or bun of any kind it would have a sweet red bean filling. I didn’t like it a whole lot then but would love to have it now. However, at the time I was so disappointed that my ice cream wasn’t strawberry that day. I remember feeling such culture shock, especially over the food. Good thing I could eat rice and kimchi.
Kimchi
Kimchi is at every meal in a little dish. Everyone’s kimchi is a tiny bit different and probably each batch is a little different. It is fermented, spicy cabbage, radish, squash, cucumber or other vegetable. Here in Atlantic Canada we call the main cabbage they make most kimchi out of ‘chinese lettuce’. Traditionally they left it to sit in big clay pots for a few weeks or stuck it in these pots in the ground to ferment at a specific temperature like around zero degrees Celsius. Sang Hyun told me years after my time in Korea, that he buys a trailer-load of Korean cabbage, like what would be on a transport-truck, every year to have enough for the amount of kimchi his family needs for a year. All of the families from a big apartment complex get their cabbage delivered on the same day, he said, and it’s a big event. He has to store it and probably have it prepared too. It is such a huge business over there it is unimaginable to me. Presently in 2019, 50 million Koreans over there eat kimchi 3 times a day….. My mother told me once that the Italian-Canadians here in my small city went to the train station once a year to buy special Italian grapes that we don’t have for sale here. The grapes are/were in the train cars on the tracks at the station. The way Sang Hyun described it to me was that it was a similar endeavor for the Korean people, where the whole Korean neighborhood arranges their kimchi-cabbage buying at the same time with trailer-loads of the produce needed by everyone.
These are traditional kimchi pots. This was so different and cheap. The long pieces of ‘ddok’ are in a sweet, spicy sauce and served with carrot and green onion and ‘fishcake’. It’s called ddokbogi. Ddok is rice that has been pounded and pounded into a soft shape and it’s put in soups and dishes like this.
Early in the morning in the kitchen in the basement I would eat a lovely, interesting, healthy bowl of soup made by the agumma, and when I got to the bottom of the bowl I would see that there had been many little tiny dried whole fish in what I had just eaten! A Canadian breakfast does not involve fish or even soup for that matter. I’d almost give my eye tooth for her cooking now though. The agumma served some unique vegetarian dishes I never knew would have existed. She had cut up garlic stems fried in a delicious oil. Oh those were so good and likely healthy. We can’t buy the stems here in New Brunswick, Canada. In the basement, when I sat and ate at one of the long dining tables, I was told to say, “Mashi-seyo…!” and it means “It’s delicious!!!” Once when I first got there I was given a bowl of cold cucumber soup that is delicious as well. They eat this type of soup, or cold noodle dishes, to help them cope with the heat of summer. If I try to make these kinds of dishes myself they are never the same as what I had over there.
You never knew all of what you were eating. I put this because of the description above about the tiny dried fish all through my soup. However, this looks like fermented soybean-paste soup (Dwenjangguk). It was ‘murky’, with some of the soybean paste staying separate from the rest of the broth, and when you stirred it, it got all mixed up again, and then the two broth parts would separate after a minute. When I had it, it felt like I was eating a magical cure for feeling sick or cold.
The chocolate bars were made in Australia or Indonesia, the package info said. I remember I could get ones from Effem Foods, like Mars, Snickers and M&Ms. They were less sweet than chocolate bars sold in Canada. I noticed that. And I thought it was because everything was not about eating junk and unhealthy treats in Korea. When I lived there, a lot of them would buy a dried squid to munch on instead of a bag of chips. The dried whole squids, which were everywhere, were tougher than leather. I never could chew them, try as I might. And there were no potato chips anyway, just rice crisps. It was so different being in the snack isle and seeing it was mostly shrimp flavoured rice crisps in large bags for sale.
There was a McDonald’s about a 10 minute walk away from my building. They sold a Korean food menu with Korean-style burgers called bulgogi burgers so some Koreans would get one of those instead (KFC did this also, as well as other western chains). The bulgogi burgers were just a hamburger with sweet Korean soya-sauce based sauce on them. I was so thrilled when I went to McDonalds to have familiar food. I found the big macs were a little bigger than what I get in my city in Canada. Maybe even though it’s a world-over franchise and all items are supposed to be the same everywhere, the CEO’s of McDonald’s thought they’d better not skimp on the sizes of their food items in countries that don’t even want big macs and french fries. I went with Sang Hyun once and he could hardly eat the french fries. He said he couldn’t believe how fast I could eat my french fries. “You eat the potato very fast….!!!…”
Once I walked past what was supposed to be a pizza on display in the window of a restaurant in Karak-dong and it was ketchup and corn on the ‘pizza’. When I got a ‘sandwich’ in Kimpo Airport, it was ketchup and peas. I ate it anyway. They never did have much dairy to eat in their past, and you could see it wasn’t considered a main food group then. Good thing I never liked milk much. And they didn’t refrigerate eggs! We are trained to put eggs in the fridge, but it’s not necessary. I would notice eggs outside of a fridge everywhere. Sometimes they gave me quails’ eggs to eat. They tasted like chickens’ eggs but the shells were smaller and heavily spotted. I had never eaten tofu before I got there, but it was commonly eaten in Korea. At that time they didn’t eat any cheese, and one man told me he was in the US at a fancy buffet, and took a whole bunch of tofu cut into cubes to eat, and when he tried one of them, they were really cubes of cheese and he couldn’t eat them!
I did love their food but I didn’t like their favourite thing. It was really special for them to have cut-up squares of real seaweed in soup. This was so coveted that kids had it for their birthday lunches. I didn’t like it because it was slimy to me. I don’t like eating seaweed much in any form, even though sometimes I don’t mind dried ‘kim’ on the outside of rolls of kimbap. They acted like this seaweed soup was the most wonderful thing to ever eat. And pregnant women were supposed to eat a lot of it because of the high nutrient value of it. I was so relieved at the time I was not a pregnant Korean woman.
Eating there was never boring. It is strange to be eating and try to ask ‘What is this?’ and not have a concrete answer most of the time.
This is showing the cut of pork used in a Korean barbecue, or ‘Sam’, pronounced ‘Sum’.
The reason the pork barbecue that you cook yourself in a pan built into the table is called ‘sam’, and pronounced ‘sum’, is because that cut of pork has three layers. ‘Sam’ means ‘three’. ‘Three-layer pork’. A number of businessmen brought me to have Sumgyobsal, or three-layer pork. It was wonderful and so different. And they never let me pay. After you cooked the pork at your table, you would take a perilla lettuce leaf (similar to romaine lettuce) and wrap your piece of pork in it. You put a piece of garlic and a few other vegetables like mushroom and onion with it, and a special spicy sauce and put it in your mouth. You have kimchi on the side and a bottle of beer with many ‘sam’. And over there it was all done the old way, where people sat on the floor to cook and eat. I was certainly not accustomed to getting on the floor to eat or getting up from the floor after I ate. Everyone said it was too expensive to get beef, so they recommended pork instead. Back then, a person would pay $15 for their ‘sam’.
Sejong…..
I hadn’t been there very long when my boss told me he was going to take me to a new class. Oh my goodness, it was a true honour to experience what was going on. I went with the owner of my institute, Mr. Kim, whom all the teachers hated with a venom, in his van outside of Seoul to the south. We went to a fancy, grand building that looked like a huge library that was sitting on manicured grounds set back from the road. It was the Sejong Institute. We had to talk to a nice man who was in charge who reminded me of David Suzuki. I was going to be the new English teacher for a group of government ministers who were on sabbatical! It was such a huge deal. The other teachers were very envious. I went there once a week on the bus and the bus wasn’t crowded. It was a more rural or underdevelopped area and very lovely with the mountains everywhere around me. There weren’t any apartment buidings in that area. I knew I was heading towards Seongnam. When I got off the bus, there was a long wall to walk along, and a guard at the gate. I would smile and wave at the guard and walk past groomed grounds with trees, fields and shrubs to the library-like building. I’m trying to remember if I was allowed to wear my sneakers in there and I can’t remember.
The men were friendly and curious. They told me one day at first about how if a Korean man had a daughter, he had to pay for her wedding and buy the new couple a new house/apartment to live in. I said I paid for my wedding and it was only $1000 because I had a small wedding at Justice of the Peace. And I said it wasn’t customary for the parents to buy a couple’s whole house. They were not impressed that they had to do this. One of them in particular was in the process of doing that at the time, they said. He told me he had to spend perhaps $150 000 for a wedding and a ‘house’ for the couple back then. They were very good at explaining this type of thing and what great classes they were. I would draw a not-so-perfect map of Canada on the chalkboard and explain about where I lived in Canada and about windchills, for example, which they did not have. They were very interested in moose. They couldn’t imagine such an animal. One time after class I went into a big lounge with the ministers where they could all sit in a sunroom looking out at the grounds. Some of them were playing Korean checkers. The game was called “Go”. I could never have seen such a game being played in my small city in Canada, where there were only 2 Koreans back in Moncton – one was a physician and one ran a TaeKwonDo school. It seems to me that to play ‘go’, two men would sit opposite eachother at a big white square-shaped table and move many black and white round, smooth stones around the board. They took it very seriously. I felt so fortunate to have such experiences and see these things.
Grounds of the Sejong Institute near Seongnam.
I couldn’t believe I was walking to such a place to help teach those men English when I was on those perfectly groomed grounds, walking alone up to the Institute. One day I was trying to watch a chickadee in one of the Asian pine trees and I had stopped to see it, and a guard came and thought something was wrong. I kept saying the word meaning ‘bird’ and he was wanting to understand for a few minutes and couldn’t. When he realised I was looking at a bird, he was disgusted and went away shaking his head. I still remember it’s “sae” for bird.
At this place and in some other grass fields around, older women were working in them, and it looked like they were weeding the fields. Maybe some older women I saw like that were picking special plants to take home though, and not picking weeds to get rid of? In the subways and on the streets, a lot of older women were cleaning the floors and steps and sidewalks meticulously. I saw this a lot and I wondered if they had to do this for a little government money.
This is the grass field. I took the picture in November. Trees looked almost ornamental in Korea.
One of the ministers, Mr. Wu, had me over to his “house” in Tangsan in western Seoul for supper one time. His wife must have cooked all week! She had likely never had a ‘foreigner’ in her house before. He had asked me beforehand if I wanted anything specific. I asked for mashed potatoes. I remember telling him how I missed cooked potatoes. When I was sitting there with them, the wife said she had whipped the potatoes for a long time and she had put ‘corn’ butter in them! So they were very rich and special. I had just wanted a boiled potato with a little margarine, but that wasn’t possible, it seemed. There was enough food on the table for an army – bowls and bowls full of nice dishes and everything was absolutely beautiful.. If only she knew I would have simply loved a decent sandwich. She shouldn’t have gone to all that bother. So many Korean people were very good to me while I was there. I always tell Koreans now when I meet them how much I love the HanGuk saram (Korean people). It’s because of people and places like the Sejong Institute and Mr. Wu that I am always so thrilled to meet a new Korean person and I always want to help them or give them something, to give something back in some way.
The library-like building at the institute
The Sejong class ended after only about 6 weeks and on the last day they presented me with a Korean jewellery box inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I didn’t want a gift and felt I didn’t deserve one. I’m appreciative of everything I did with the ministers, though, and I always felt that I hadn’t done anything to help them with their English.
The picture is dark, but Mr. Cheong is giving me my jewellery box. All of the Korean people were classy, and all the ministers had a great ‘presence’.
IMF !!!!
There was a terrible problem brewing in Korea before I got there. And it got worse and worse. It was the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. The Crisis had a profound effect on me. To be in a strange land alone and have the stock market crash right after you arrive is pretty unsettling. I had never ever paid attention to World Affairs or Stock Markets and had never studied economics. But soon after I arrived their currency, the Won, lost most of it’s value very quickly. The teachers were all affected because we needed to eventually take our money back home and in this crisis our money, when exchanged into the currency of our native countries, lost more than half of its value. The people there were affected because all the companies over there were losing a lot. A lot of companies, the people and the government were panicking. Every day we all checked the newspapers to learn how much more trouble the won was in. It would say one US dollar was trading at 1600 won on the worst day and at 1300 won or 1200 won afterward. It was better if the number was below 900 won. It was supposed to be at 500 to 700 won. Everywhere I went from October onward, there were banners on the street about it. There would be Korean writing and the letters IMF were always on the banners too. It’s because the International Monetary Fund gave the country a large bailout to help them. This was a huge thing for all of them. Their pride was at stake and they all stuck together and paid those millions back to the IMF soon after. I couldn’t believe it when I read back in Canada they had paid the money back. The currency for exchange purposes never did get back to what it had been when it was good, even today. Before 1997, you could get a lot more for your money when you changed your funds. It was okay if you were IN Korea, but if you left the country it was bad.
I always had a stack of these bills in my room. On payday I got 113 of them or so. Quite a stack! I thought of each one like it was a twenty dollar bill.
The reason I say the crisis had a big effect on me is because it’s very stressful to think your money is lost just by bringing it out of the country you’re in. I could not save any money. I went home with a few hundred dollars instead of thousands. I still look at exchange rates and I especially check rates for Asian countries to see if there are any problems. They have said, and they did announce at the time, that corruption of higher-ups in certain Asian companies, especially Korean ones, led to the Financial Crisis.
The IMF fiasco made it a bad time to be an English teacher there. Many companies were cancelling their English classes for their employees all to save money. Many bosses like mine were withholding our pay. I heard some awful stories about people like me waiting a few months to be paid, and they were still waiting when I left, and I shuddered about it. My boss, Mr. Kim, was acting funny about it too. I didn’t hate him the way the others did. He was really hard to relate to but he liked me, thank God. He was not at all like the Korean people I met there. Someone had urged me to buy him a box of loose Korean tea when I got my first pay because it’s customary to give gifts to someone like that(after all, he was my ‘sponsor’ there) when you meet them. I did give him a special box of Korean tea. It was $15 back then in 1997. He seemed pleased, at least. Before I left early in February of 1998, and broke my contract by leaving, he had paid me while the others were still waiting for their monthly pay. As it was, my pay was one week late and we were all stressed out holding our breath waiting. Other people we knew there, like I said, were not as lucky as us. That’s the main reason I left. I felt it was getting bad and the Crisis was in full swing.
Snow….
It was never windy or stormy while I was there. From September 1st, 1997 to February 14th, 1998 was when I lived in Seoul. There was rain just a few times, and I know I had bought a huge, high-quality umbrella, but hardly remember using it. The sky was always so blue and there were hardly any clouds ever. When it snowed in December and January, it was always that it snowed in the night, and you’d wake up to a lovely blanket of snow on everything. They only got an inch of snow at a time! So they think snow is romantic and nice.
Just a little bit of snow would fall. Maybe they have 10 inches of snow accumulation in a year.
The cold was damp and there was no heat where I stayed. My boss had given me an old electric heater to have beside me while I slept. It had 2 metal bars that were supposed to heat up and glow orange to heat you up. Only one of my metal bars worked. And the windows had gaps where there was open air. I did get used to that cold and thank goodness my body was made for cold climates. Temperatures by the third week of January were the coldest, with a high of minus eleven degrees Celcius on a few days.
Their heat, if it was in place, was too hot for me. In their apartments they had the floor heated up and I think it was from gas coming into their places, like natural gas lines. Their stoves were all gas-operated. We don’t do it that way in my area of Canada. Stoves are electric stoves in my city. Once I got on a bus and just about died putting up with the billowing heat coming from the floor.
Once I had to travel to a far-away location and it was the second day in a row that there was the one-inch snowfall in the night. The whole city was practically at a standstill. My bus was very very late. I waited and waited. While I waited, I saw a few cars go by slowly with snow-chains on their tires. I had heard of doing that but had never seen it. They certainly had no winter tires or snowplows. A Korean man in my building had exclaimed earlier that morning, “…Ohhh…We’re getting a lot of snow this year!!!…”. They could never imagine my hometown with well over 200 centimeters of snow in a year!
GuRyeongSan….
The student called Anthony I talked about previously brought me places and he was always interesting and kind. One day after the snow had come, he drove me west of Karak-dong to a small mountain. We hiked up the mountain trail and came upon a small, beautiful temple in a clearing. Everything was breathtaking. I peeked in a small shed-like building that had candles lit and buddha statues in it and took a picture. It was the only picture I took of the inside of a temple building in all my time in Korea. There were always people praying and practicing their religion at the temples I visited and I did not want to offend them. On the way down the trail I was watching a big, black squirrel with tufted ears in the trees. Anthony couldn’t believe anyone would be interested in an “ugly” Korean squirrel, ha ha!
The woods looked like this in Korea. In Canada the forest is wild and is full of underbrush in comparison. This is what I saw on the hike up the mountain that day.This is what it looked like when we came upon the temple….Though small, the main building was beautiful, and the dragons on it had shiny gold balls in their mouths… Oh! And the reversed swastica at the peak of this building is the symbol for Buddhism. The reversed swastikas were on all temples everywhere.
Near the mountain, while on the road in places, there were tunnels through some hills for cars to travel through. I had never even seen one of those tunnels before. Everything was interesting. Their building materials were not even the same as ours in Canada. There wasn’t any ‘gyprock’ for walls. It was some other material, similar to what is in a trailer or mini-home in Canada. There was a lot of granite making up buildings. Back then, a Korean businessman told me, if they wanted wood for a structure or furniture, it had to be ordered from a country that was far away, like Malaysia or an island far away in Asia in the south.
I mentioned their ‘houses’. I put house in quotations because they mostly all lived in apartment complexes. They had to buy the apartment and not rent it, like you can buy a condominium. It was their place to live and bring up their children once the parents had bought the apartment for the newly married couple. We do not do this in Canada because we have lots of room and space. We take this for granted.
If you look closely you will see two dragons sticking out of the building holding gold balls in their mouths. There are 2 lion statues here and a lot of granite as well.Me on that day. A Korean couple had given me that trendy, thick winter jacket.It’s nice to have this picture of Anthony. He was very short, I remember.This is the shed-like building that I saw and therefore got a picture of the inside.I was excited to see inside the shed. There were satin lotus flowers, candles, paintings and little statues in there.A bunker for the army on the trail, possibly used in the Korean war. Army trainees have to practice in the mountains today, as all men must be trained in case of another Korean War.We looked out at this Kangnam neighbourhood and the large lumps on the grass are what their graveyards look like! If someone is buried, they make a huge hump of earth over the burial spot.
Anthony told me later that the mountain was called GuRyeongSan and I thought, well, so what? He told me it means ‘Nine Dragon Mountain’. I thought that was such a nice name.
Inside a courtyard at Gyeongbokgung. It’s a magnificent place to go and is currently one of six palaces in Seoul.
Gyeongbokgung Palace…
Gyeongbokgung Palace is a very large, beautiful complex. The king’s throne, 2 ponds and a pagoda-style museum are inside. When you face the front of it, you can see extraordinary mountains behind it. North Korea is around 50 kms beyond those mountains, a Korean businessman once told me. I told him that my grandmother thought I would be shot by a North Korean soldier and he laughed. Of course, it wasn’t really funny though. There were 100 000 US troops stationed in South Korea at that time. We would see evidence of this here and there. The Koreans all thought my husband was a US soldier when he visited because he had a military-like haircut.
This is the most important sight in downtown Seoul. It’s the North Gate of old Seoul and the entrance to Gyeongbokgung Palace. A Haitai statue is on the left in this picture. There was another one on the other side of the gate also but it’s behind a bus.
A bit of orientation to Seoul is required here. If you are facing the North Gate above, beyond it you will see the northern Bukhan mountains behind the “pointed” mountain in the photo above. When I was in Seoul, if I could see the north, where these distinctive mountains were, then behind me would be south, then, where the Han river was. As long as you knew that, you knew a little about where to go. Many times, knowing north, south, east and west was enough for me to get my bearings.
This represents climbing mountains in Korea in general, but I don’t know which peak this is. Many people climb the mountains Bukhansan or Inwangsan and can view Seoul from above like this.
I was on a ‘working vacation’. I went to see special places on my days off. I didn’t need much money. Entrance fees to large, beautiful places were only a few dollars. To get here, I had to go to my subway station in Karak-dong and go on the pink line for about four stops, then switch trains in Jamsil, and go for many stops on the green line, and then switch to the orange line to get to Anguk-dong and walk from there to the entrance of this palace. There was a lot of stamina needed because after this journey you were walking around the palace grounds, and had been going up and down many steps in subway stations and you still had to get all the way home afterwards too.
This is a statue of a mythical creature called a Haitai, sitting outside of Gyeongbokgung. Looking at the picture above you’d never realise that this statue, including its base, was 18 feet tall! They told me a Haitai guards the palace from fire. There was a Haitai on each side of the main palace doors. This is to the West of the North Gate. I loved this particular mountain, Inwangsan, because of its granite. The mountains in Northern Seoul were so huge and they loomed above everything.
Gyeongbokgung was one of the first tourist sights I saw in Seoul. The ponds had huge, gold-coloured koi in them and I could feed them crackers. There were several large courtyards where soldiers would have stood in designated rows in front of the king in their colourful uniforms. There were spots in these courtyards where the king’s scholars and advisors would have stood, wearing their tall black hats. Huge columns came down from high walls surrounding the courtyards. A special peach colour was on a lot of the walls, houses and chimneys inside Gyeongbokgung, creating a peach colour theme throughout the palace.
(Above) This is a picture showing how tall the columns were. My husband and Sail Lee (from my LG class) are standing beside them in January 1998.
The building that contained the king’s throne. Look how small the people are. Sail and my husband are talking together at the bottom of these stairs in the middle.Traditionally, certain animals and fictional creatures were featured around palaces. I loved this one. Perhaps it’s a horse? There were many statues representing other creatures.
On each of my visits to the palace, I walked from section to section to section of breathtaking houses. Some were for the queen and her ladies in waiting to live in. Some were for the king to hold examinations (Koreans still have an extensive exam system in schools today) of servants and workers. There were so many special buildings, and you could see decorative chimneys too. These chimneys were all part of a technologically advanced heating system. In ancient Korea, a floor was heated by having a fire in the chimney and the heat from it was channelled underneath the floor through ducts and therefore the room was warmed. The buildings in Gyeongbokgung all have granite floors and they are all raised up like they would have been back in 1500AD to allow heated air to go underneath them to heat up the floors.
The old heating system is used today but it has been modernised. Many floors are heated in Korea in the winter. It’s called “ondol”. If you really like heat, you would absolutely love it! It’s very warm and luxurious.
This is my absolute favourite photograph I took in Korea. It was taken next to a garden that was made for the queen. The garden is called Amisan. Several decorated chimneys are in the picture also.I was fascinated that many palace roofs had the same row of animals on them. I was told they were based on animals in ancient Chinese culture.
CheongGyeSan…
One day Sang Hyun brought me on the subway to a nearby neighborhood, Yangjae, where there were many flowers and plants for sale. We walked along a sidewalk towards a small mountain. We went past some men who were busy with a huge steel vat of white liquid. The vat must have been over 3 feet wide. Sang Hyun told me they were making tofu – right along the busy sidewalk! We had to walk right beside the vat, as the area was very crowded. Many times you had to squeeze by products. And sometimes, like on that day, I would walk past a huge dead ‘skate’ for sale on the sidewalk. Some Koreans liked ‘fermented skate’ (large sea creature with ‘wings’). We made it to the mountain and there was a hugd yellow ginkgo tree forest growing around a small Buddhist temple, as the leaves were turning colour for fall. Sang Hyun and I sat under the ginkgo trees and talked and relaxed. It was a wonderful day.
Sang Hyun that day. (Oct. 1997) Me at that time. Sang Hyun took the picture. Digital cameras were not around then. I had cut my own hair because I was broke and I was scared to go to a Korean hairdresser.Sang Hyun was very interested in taking pictures of the ginkgo trees. An old man was walking in the forest collecting these leaves while we were there – the ginkgo ‘has health benefits’, the Koreans told me…Temple buildings were always covered in paintings depicting the life of Buddha. Paintings, ceramic roof tiles, bells, wood and granite. Always so beautiful.
Buildings…
At that time there were no skyscrapers in Seoul. There was a gold-coloured building with 63 floors that was the tallest one in the city, called the ’63 Building’. It was in the business area of Yeoido, which was comparable to Wall Street, they said. Yeoido was far away from Karak-dong and also housed the National Assembly Building of the government and was the television and entertainment center of the country. News companies filmed there and had their headquarters there. If I was going to see a Korean celebrity, they all said, it would be in Yeoido. I was given a morning class there for 3 mornings a week. I had to find a certain building after walking from a subway stop and it was a Financial subsidiary of Hyundai. I was the personal English teacher of the head of this branch. He would drive into the circular driveway in a chauffered car and all of the staff were in uniform and bowed to him. Secretaries had to bring me and him coffee. If they hadn’t, I can’t imagine what would have ever happened. At this building, as in many others, I had to go to a big locker room when I first got there and switch into a pair of slippers provided to me(found in ‘my’ locker) and leave my sneakers in the locker provided to me while I went upstairs.
It was exciting to take the subway across the bottom of Seoul again to get to Yeoido, almost like going all the way back to Kimpo Airport, and what a feeling I had getting out in such a unique district. There was a statue of a bull, to replicate a bull statue on Wall Street, outside one of the places I would pass on my way to Hyundai Financial. Most importantly, I want to say that the subway stop I used in Yeoido had 160 stairs. I counted one time because I noticed there were more stairs than in other stations. To get there I had to transfer twice so I used the pink line, the green line and the purple line to go there and also to go back. I loved it but every day I spent many hours travelling toand from classes – more time travelling than in the classrooms.
This is what Yeoido was like then with the sun shining on the 63 Building.
In the neighborhood beside mine, to the west of Karak-dong, was a tall distinctive building called The Koex. It meant Korean Trade Center, or Exchange. They were very proud of it. It had a zig-zag shape. A few other modern buildings there had fancy architectural designs like a hole in the top (Jogno Bldg in old downtown) or one was called Glass Tower in Gangnam and it had an oval shape.
Koex Building. I passed by here in Samseong-dong when I visited a wonderful temple (BonGeunSa) in the neighborhood a few times. I lived to the left of all of these buildings in this photo. In the middle is the Koex Bldg. which has the stripe down the middle of it in this view. In the middle on the left is Olympic Stadium.
Classes
I had other places to teach on a regular basis and early in the morning I was supposed to teach right on the third floor of the building I lived in. Usually, I just had one particular student in these early, early classes. It was ‘Anthony’ Lee, who was a civil servant residing in our building while he studied English to be able to advance in his job. He worked nearby so he went to work after this early class. A lot of the people had to try to learn English before work. And they had longer work hours than people in Canada did.
Since Anthony and I were alone in most classes, we mostly just talked for him to practice speaking. His English was good. He was, I think, 39 at that time. When we were sitting there alone, each at a desk, he told me why he was single. When he was a lot younger, he said, he was in love with a girl. And she loved him. But her father said ‘no’ and would not let her marry Anthony because Anthony was poor. Anthony said he was poor and had to hunt rabbits on the mountain near where he grew up when he was a child. He said in that classroom to me, “Now I have money. I am not poor now. But she married someone else and it is too late”. I was so caught up in the story I said he should go and find her, even now, and get her to go with him and I was sure she would leave her husband to be with her real love…. Anthony said it was out of the question. I said again he should find her. He shook his head and said in such a serious voice, “You do not understand Korea…..” I think he was also a little amused that someone wouldn’t understand their collective consciousness and complicated, strict social rules. I like their society but it would take years to even be able to understand the rules about bowing, or to be able to pronounce their words like they say it, let alone be able to feel comfortable with how to act as a woman in their society.
Most foreign people like me were always teaching kindergarden classes only right at their institutes. I liked businessmen or adults in general better. At least I could listen to wonderful, interesting stories the businessmen told me, even if I did have to pay around a dollar for a subway or bus ride to get there. I had one-time jobs as well. I would have to try to find the place I was going, first of all. One time a female Korean teacher and I were late at a kindergarden because it was so hard to find and the older Korean woman who had ordered us went up one side and down the other of us, telling us off in Korean for a long time. She was yelling at us after we were done trying to teach the alphabet to the kids. This class was just sprung on me and I didn’t even know where I was. The Korean girl who was supposed to be my teaching partner said, “We’re fired!!!!’ afterward. A building like that was chock full of screaming, unruly little kids and we couldn’t do much with the ones we were assigned to. I wanted to say ‘g’ is for green grass, but realised they don’t have much grass there….. Maybe I should have had a bunch of new ideas like, “Green like the seaweed!!!!”
Once I had to go near the Kyeongbokkung Palace up in an office building and stand up in front of a large classroom of strangers whose were eager to be ‘taught’ by a real English speaker. No one told me who the group of Korean people were or what I should talk about. They just said, “Teach the class!”, as usual. It worked out because I talked about my impressions of Korea. They were thrilled, thank goodness. I was terrified.
Sometimes people were somewhat rude or not suited. Korean women were not the same as men back then if I had to teach them. The women were at a disadvantage – they seemed to have not been taught English as well as the men were and I think Korean women hadn’t been encouraged to speak English in the same way as the men had been. The men usually communicated better in English than the women there did. Sometimes a woman with money who didn’t have a job came to take classes at my institute – the ones who did this were called ‘Housewives’ by the secretaries. When I talked to a few, it was interesting because one had travelled to Egypt and one had tried to have a sheep farm as a new immigrant in New Zealand but couldn’t succeed. The one who had been in Egypt said not to bother trying to eat the food there.
The women were less enjoyable to me. They had good pronounciation, I noticed, but were not using their ability as far as speaking goes. Their seriousness made them hard to talk to. Men had been given more confidence, I found, and some caught onto speaking English better than others. I think companies and schools didn’t put as much effort into helping the women speak English because not only were men more important, but Korean women didn’t work at all during their child-rearing years. Everyone did the same, predictable things there. Every woman stopped working when her first child was going to be born. Most women returned to the workforce when their children were grown up, but the men could stay at their . Almost every Korean did the same things in life – someone would learn and learn and study and study every day all day and go to university, then get a job, preferably an office job. There were other rules too. A Korean person would be ostracized if he or she didn’t do the same as the others. One Korean businessman told me if everyone is reading a book on the subway, a Korean person will feel he should take out a book and start reading it too. He said it goes back eons ago to Confucianism. There are so many facets as to why things are the way they are there.
Fruit…..
I had to mention the fruit. When I was first there and walked to the subway station or bus stop, women were selling fruit and fish and other items on the sidewalk. At first, they had fresh dark purple grapes for sale. The grapes had a rich taste and the peeling on the grapes was very thick. The people there peeled their grapes, but I ate the thick peeling. Someone told me each month had a fruit featured because it would be harvest season of a certain fruit every month. I know grapes were featured first, then it was the month of huge Korean apples that tasted like Golden Delicious apples. Then it was Korean pears and I know tangerine-like oranges came out and persimmons were in season in the fall also. When I was first in Korea, and visiting a pond, there were Korean ‘dates’ growing on a big ‘date’ tree. You could find bakeries that sold ‘date’ bread. It was like eating the most beautiful raisin bread you had ever eaten. The Asian pears were absolutely humongous and only cost 2 dollars each. They were selling a truckload of apples or pears in the streets all the time. They sold them along some sidewalks or outside of little stores too. One Sunday night I was leaving Sang Hyun’s apartment and still didn’t have any money so he sent me home with a basket of persimmons to help me that upcoming week. I had never eaten a persimmon before. The flesh is like a jello consistency.
I will always remember being given those persimmons in a basket from Sang Hyun. They are not commonly eaten in my area of Canada.
Olympic Park…
I went at first to Olympic Park. It was near Karak-dong and was made to hold the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. So there were a number of stadiums and there are also some historical sections in the park.
This was a bridge over a pond but it’s winter in the picture so the water has been drained. They have taken the koi out for the winter too. The hill on the right is part of the ‘earthen wall’ explained below.There were a lot of modern sculptures throughout the park, as each one was donated to them by a country that participated in the 1988 Olympics. The Peace Gate at the entrance is behind the thumb.There is a stadium to the right in this picture. The big hill is an earthen wall made by Korean natives to protect themselves 4000 years ago.More of the Earthen Wall. There is a little museum behind here to view more about it.
Olympic Park was a short subway ride up Line 8 to Jamsil. It was pronounced Shamshil. We had to walk to the park from there in 1997. I liked walking there. A Chili’s Restaurant was on the way. A few times I went to Chili’s and it was so nice to get non-Korean food for a change. It was so good but extremely expensive, as all trendy Western restaurants there were. Across from the Olympic Park entrance were two large glass churches. I think it said they were Methodist. There were 2 of the glass churches together – one tall one and one longer, more horizontal one. I went in one once just to say I was in a glass church! One time another teacher and I walked from Jamsil to our building in Karak-dong and it took 3 hours, but that distance was considered to be short in Seoul.
This is the tall glass church across from the entrace of the park. I think it has over seventeen stories!This is a popular modern sculpture there.
I used to come to this park in wintertime when I was lonely. The views were nice of apartments in the next neighborhood and I was accustomed to walking in parks and looking at trees in Canada.
Apartment view at Olympic Park Other view looking south from Olympic Park
This is what I saw when I looked out of the window of the airplane after the pilot said we were about to land in Seoul. The hundreds of apartment buildings looked funny when you were so high up in the air looking down at all of them – like tiny beige matchboxes. I had never imagined anything like it.
I didn’t know anything. I knew nothing about Korea. Perhaps that was best. Here I was on a plane from Canada to Seoul. It was my first time on a plane and I didn’t know anyone in Korea or anyone on the plane. I was completely alone and didn’t mind.
I was used to doing things alone, as I had gone away to University alone, but this was a very big deal to me because I had spent my life living in “The Maritimes”. The Maritime Provinces of Canada are small land areas that stick out into the Atlantic Ocean. “The Maritimes” include islands too. I grew up and lived in this Atlantic area, in New Brunswick. The forests and lakes and ocean views are lovely in these provinces but any cities in this region are small. This means low employment and I had always said, “There’s nothing there”.
It was unusual for women or anyone from my remote Atlantic province to go alone to live and work in Asia. I had signed a contract teach English in Seoul for a year. And I was leaving my husband to go there. You see, in New Brunswick I could not find satisfactory employment. The economy was poor and I couldn’t use my degree, so all I had to do was get through a year of teaching English…and I’d have lots of money saved from my job in Korea…surely to goodness I could do that. I gave my husband instructions on how to pay the bills and I waited so eagerly to be able to get on a plane to Seoul. After all, I had always wanted to go to a far away place.
People told me not to go. “You’re going to be the only person like you on the subway…” “People don’t leave their husbands to go do that…” “You’d better like rice. That’s all they eat!” “You might not want to go there. I think that’s what M.A.S.H. was about!” My grandmother thought it was dangerous and prayed and prayed that I wouldn’t end up going. She told me this when I went over to her house to say goodbye.
Of course, I did not know all or anything about what Koreans eat, and I wasn’t sure if M.A.S.H was about the Korean War (wasn’t it about Viet Nam, I thought?) and how could my grandmother be right, since she worries too much about everything? As far as leaving my husband to go, it didn’t feel inside like I shouldn’t go. It felt like I should go. I did believe in fate and in karma and Tarot cards and those types of things and I felt underneath it was my destiny to go to Korea. On the surface, I needed money and would save a lot of money, but underneath, I felt compelled to go. I had planned to have $10000 at the end of the one-year contract to be able to pay off my $15000 student loan.
I was getting ready to leave in the morning so, so early and saw on TV they seemed to be saying Lady Diana had been in a car accident and was dead. It was an early report at 4am Atlantic time. By the time my father came to take me to the airport, it had been confirmed. She had been killed. Such a larger than life figure would never do more great things. And she was so beautiful and caring. I took it to heart and at that point thought it was a bad omen to be going so far away and taking on this huge, life-changing trip when such an event had just happened. I couldn’t exactly change my mind at that point but started to have doubts and fears about my journey and destination.
The plane was close to landing and when the pilot said we were over Seoul. I looked out of the tiny window and I just remember seeing clusters of similar-looking apartment buildings on the ground below. I just saw many, many plain-looking apartment buildings in rows at first, as the plane descended and headed toward the airport.
Then suddenly it was time to go through the tunnel to get off the plane and into the airport. And it hit me like a ton of bricks – the heat and humidity. And the heat and humidity were constant for another month to come. Kimpo Airport was the only international airport in Korea at the time and it was huge but it wasnt new or especially modern or nice. I had never been over there or anywhere, really, so I thought it was pretty exciting. I was with a girl who was on the plane from Ontario, called Bronwyn, who was nice and seemed to know things about Korea whereas I knew nothing. She was friendly and I appreciate the advice about being in Korea she that she gave me and I still remember her kindness. I can’t remember much of what she said about Korea but I know she told me, “Don’t blow your nose in Korea!”. However, I got off the plane knowing nothing of what was waiting for me…
This is only about 20% of Seoul. Karak-dong, where I lived, is to the left in this picture. You can see Kangnam in front and the Koex Building, which is the Trade Center. It has a stripe down the middle of it.
Karak Market
I was with the young woman from Ontario called Bronwyn in the “arrivals” section at the airport. A Korean man was holding a sign saying “Bronwyn”. We waited. No one showed up for me. Terrifying, really. I was so scared and upset, not knowing any of the language or the continent of Asia and I only had about sixty Canadian dollars! I didn’t have much money to bring with me and the ‘recruiter’ back in Canada had told me I wouldn’t need any, because all of my meals were supposed to be included, according to my contract. I had borrowed the money from my mother for the plane ticket as it was. Most people in Korea were only paid once each month, I was told at first. In Canada nobody was paid once a month; everybody was paid once every two weeks. So it was very bad, I felt, to have to live there for a month with only forty-seven Canadian dollars. (I had paid $13 for the taxi.)
I got in a taxi with the Korean man who met Bronwyn and Bronwyn herself, as the two of them had agreed together that they would help me, thank God. Bronwyn got out of the taxi after a short while, where she would be working and living, and I continued on in the taxi with this Korean man who was paid by English institutes to pick up and deliver foreign teachers to their bosses. I was so terrified. I didn’t know who this very foreign stranger was or what his job was. I had no clue about Seoul or Korea. The man, however, was very nice. I loved Korean people right away, despite being so thoroughly scared over there at first. They were all so nice and inquisitive. He told me his last name was Kim and he was trying to orientate me a bit to Seoul but it would take me 3 months to feel somewhat comfortable in Korea.
My long taxi ride that day was during my very first few hours in Korea. The heat was new and strange to me while I sat there, and I can’t forget the overwhelming, unending traffic and the endless concrete buildings and seeing so many signs everywhere with bold Korean characters only on them. And I can’t forget the heightened anxiety I felt at first. It was just too foreign to me all at once.
I enjoyed talking to Mr. Kim during this taxi ride. And I could see Seoul for the first time on this ride too. We were going most of the way from West to East across the southern half of Seoul along the humongous river that crosses the city. It took around an hour to go by taxi from Kimpo Airport to my address in SongPa District and it only cost me $13 from Bronwyn’s departure, which was near the airport, to my stop. In my city in Canada, that taxi would have cost an awful lot more.
I got to my building, such as it was, and I had jet lag like crazy, but was supposed to start teaching immediately! I talked briefly to a few Canadians and right away everybody asked, “Why are you here?” because they all hated it there. They completely and absolutely hated Korea. Most of them, I found, were there as a sort of escape from problems they had back home. I did not feel negatively about Korea or its people while I was there. Also, the Canadians who were at my institute didn’t like me, much to my chagrin, because they had a bad attitude towards people who were from Atlantic Canada…I wasn’t from an important place, where people were with-it, apparently, according to them. This made it worse for me at first, when I was already struggling with my extreme “culture shock” as it was.
This is the view from the fourth floor window of my building, looking toward the Karak subway station.
My institute was in a plain, red brick building that was 5 stories high. The “institute” was on the third floor of the building, where there were classrooms, offices and meeting rooms. I slept on the 4th floor with other foreign teachers and with Korean people who paid to stay there while they worked and went to English classes. The Korean students who paid to live right at the institute could practice speaking English with the teachers in the common areas of the 4th floor and have discussions with them in order to learn to speak better.
The trip over for me was even longer than Bronwyn’s because I had even further to travel. Over 1000km more than she did. Around 20 hours of flight time in total. The time-change is around 11 or twelve hours because Korea doesn’t use Daylight Savings Time and we do. So I was accustomed to sleeping when they were having daytime. This made it difficult to function in a work environment.
I had to go in a small classroom that first night and talk to a Korean adult student and another foreign male teacher. As far as teaching went, a pattern emerged right away, in that I had to talk about the differences between Canada and Korea in most ‘classes’. I listened to Korean businessmen, mostly, tell me all about Korea the whole time I was there. I learned so much over time like their heating systems, how and what they pay for their children’s weddings, their religions, their history, their food and attitudes, and so much more. Thank goodness I was allowed to sleep eventually that evening in a tiny, tiny room with paper-thin walls and no insulation to outside. I had air-conditioning at first because I wouldn’t ever have been able to sleep at all without it for the first month. The most striking thing to me was the noise of the traffic. I noticed that I was living on a nine-lane road that was a main throughway. In the night I would wake up at 3am, especially at first, and I would lie there wide awake listening to that traffic. The unpopulated province where I was from had only 600 000 people in the whole province, and at that time, 1997, Seoul had 11 million people or some estimates gave 15 million when they considered people coming to the city from other places in Korea or Seoul vicinity to work or sight-see. My city in Canada had around 55 000 people at that time. Imagine me there.
This gives you a sense of the magnitude of the number of buildings and traffic. I could always see the mountains surrounding the city as well. I loved it. This is a view of the Central part of Seoul and I lived at least 10km from here. The area was not quite as built up as is pictured here back then though.
There was another unexpected and noticeable thing in Korea that first night for me. Along with the humidity there was a horrible, strong smell of something I had never smelled before. I thought at first it was all of Korea or all of Seoul that smelled. I found out from one of the Korean people later that the horrible smell was coming from a huge abattoir across from the nine-lane highway below me! The largest agricultural market in all of Korea was attached to it, hence the name Karak Market. In the heat and humidity the smell was worse. This was another negative thing that added to my feeling of alienation in Korea at first. I laid there in bed that first night feeling like I should be awake instead of sleeping, and had the traffic roaring downstairs and that horrible heavy smell, and the heavy humidity in the air also. I did think all of Korea must smell like that at the time, and it was a ‘rotten’ odour hanging everywhere. Since there was no insulation in that building, as was the case in many buildings there, and the windows weren’t ‘up-to-code’ like they are in Canada to keep out cold, the traffic sound was even louder and felt closer than it would have back in Canada.
The next day I would have to go out into that huge city………
The Subway….
A subway car. My closest subway line was Line 8 and it was new and very modern. I looked at the advertisements on the walls a lot and always wondered what they were saying. Most ads were for cosmetics. I also had to hang onto the stirrups hanging down when the car was crowded.
On one of my first days there, my boss (who was creepy and aloof – I did not get a good feeling at all when I met him) sent a Korean man to show me how to use the subway system. I knew there was a subway, but I was scared to take it. Growing up I saw on television and the news that the subway was dangerous. That’s all I knew. I really was scared to go see. I went on a subway ride with the man explaining. The subway system in Seoul is one of the biggest and most complicated in the world. It was around 65 cents to go quite far. And in Toronto the subway cost three times that at that time. The subway map was very daunting with 9 lines crossing eachother, and maps were mostly in Korean, making it even worse. Now, over 20 years later, the map has twice as many lines crossing eachother. They all said the Seoul subway has English everywhere so not to worry.
Map of Seoul (2019). I lived in the bottom right-hand corner near Karak Market Station and Munjeong Station. The subway lines are on this map. The line is pink on this map going through where I lived showing Line 8. 1cm is around 2km.
I lived along a nice new Line 8 called the pink line to Moran or going south to a new satellite city called Seongnam. It took me a while to know I lived in Southeastern Seoul. That 9-lane highway outside my building was a main throughway eventually going to another major city, Busan, at the SouthEastern tip of the country. Their subway system was modern, clean and orderly. When I travelled outside, which was usually all day, I took the subway a lot and saw what they do. Everyone is neat and freshly scrubbed in the shower with not one hair out of place. They do not generally speak on the subway and they actually used it as a chance to sleep on weekdays because they were working long hours with not enough sleep at night, so you’d see them sleeping sitting up a lot. I noticed that and thought it was certainly different. You just wouldn’t see that in the Maritimes or anywhere in Canada. When I was walking in some long hallways to get to the subway car, I could smell garlic and sweat and kimchi and perhaps car exhaust and it made another unusual common smell there.
Try as I might to purchase a ticket at the counter, the poor man behind the glass hardly ever knew I was saying Karak Market. I tried saying it so many ways…
The nicest thing about the subway was that sometimes it is running outside, not underground, and you see views of the river and neighborhoods on your way.
An example of a subway car running above ground. (This is a modern picture and I don’t think it was taken in Seoul.)One of my most cherished memories is of sitting so long going many kilometers across the city on the subway in the morning, and suddenly coming above ground and seeing the morning sun shining on the gold-coloured 63 Building. There’s nothing like seeing that. You can see the 63 Bldg on the right in the morning sun in the distance here.
The bus…
I still had to take buses as well to get to my teaching spots. My first outside job, given to me on one of my first days there, was to take a bus 78-1 to Kangnam to ‘teach’ businessmen who worked for a Scandinavian company called Votra. I didn’t know what I was doing at all or where I was. I just explained to these Korean men about Canada, and showed them the few pictures I had brought with me of my family back home. One of them, when I was first there and in shock, explained to me that in Korea they have a saying when they talk about the weather. If the sky was blue and mostly clear, he said “We say, ‘The sky is high today’, to someone when we meet them”. I had learned my first Korean saying.
I used several Korean sayings to break the ice with other Koreans from then on. They thought I must have been all right if I knew those things. One saying was “Sum Han Sa On” meaning their Seoul weather in winter has 3 days of cold, then 4 days of warmer as a rule. Someone like me could only know this by talking to a Korean about it. There was also a saying meaning somebody was not too smart, “Deok Mori”, meaning ‘chicken head’. The young Koreans loved that and would laugh when I’d mention I knew that saying. My favourite was “See a ‘gachi’ in the morning, and you’ll have good luck all day”. It meant it was good for business to see a magpie in the morning, especially for a store owner – it meant many customers will come in the store that day.
I heard and saw magpies all the time in Seoul. That was exciting to me because I had always been a birdwatcher and in Eastern Canada where I am from there were no magpies. Magpies are only found in Western Canada. They are a large, loud, black and white bird related to jays and crows with a bit of purple and blue iridescence on their wings and tail. They were all throughout Seoul flying around the tops of buildings while they cried, especially in the morning.
A Korean magpie or ‘gachi’
This first class I just wrote about, Votra, was in Kangnam-gu, which was a trendy new area, they said. A Gu is a huge neighbourhood. I had to pass the bus driver a note written by one of the secretaries from the Institute so he’d let me off the bus at the right place. It was fascinating taking the bus there. There were so many businesses and office buildings and apartments. And the mornings in Seoul were so wonderful. The sun would shine a light orange glow on everything. You could see such a wide endless area of blue sky and mountains in the distance everywhere, some with granite on them, surrounding this city of neverending buildings. It was breathtaking.
I went to Votra on weekday mornings to talk to some businessmen in a small boardroom. There were papers for me to copy from English-As-a-Second-Language books and bring to class to give students. Students were supposed to take turns reading paragraphs out loud and then we could discuss the not-so-good topics. A lot of the time in all classes we would all just talk about the way it was in Korea, so I learned a lot. Also, I would try to explain where my home in Canada was. I drew pictures on a blackboard like a map of Canada to do this. I noticed most Koreans assumed that all of Canada was the same everywhere in every region. They didn’t see that if 2 places are 3000 km from eachother, they would have different temperatures and different geography. At the time, I figured they must think think like that because their country wasn’t big and vast like Canada was.
This is near Yeoksam in Kangnam, where I would go on the bus to Votra. On and on the buildings and traffic went…. I remember seeing many places that sold cars here and a movie theater.
One day I tried to return to my building on the same bus I had been taking. I had been in Korea for a week. The bus was moving along as normal, and there was a recorded woman’s voice announcing something over and over. This is what happens on the subway and buses, so I thought nothing of it. After a while I realised no one was on the bus anymore! And suddenly the bus was pulling into a rural-looking place with chickens on the ground! I was so beyond upset. I could not speak ANY Korean and the middle-aged bus driver could not speak English. Terrifying. Absolutely terrifying for a 28 year-old woman from a small area in a foreign country who could not tell them anything and could not understand what they could say. And I was so new to Seoul I didn’t know any areas at all yet. I went with the bus driver to a desk in a small rudimentary building and I made a gesture that looked like I was dialing a phone and holding a phone receiver. He knew right away what I meant and handed me a phone. I called the main secretary at my place and she explained to the driver how to bring me ‘home’. I sat on the bus in the seat trying to look out the window and I had tears coming down my cheeks. I was so upset over this mishap and could not speak the language – I don’t know what upset me more, the fact that I was lost, or that I could not communicate my problem. The driver turned back toward me to look at me and pointed up to the ceiling of the bus, pointing, pointing and pointing. Ha ha, my goodness – he thought I was sweating, not crying, and he was trying to tell me to use the little personal fan above me to cool off! He saw me wiping my tears away and thought I was wiping sweat away trom my eyes! I sat there alone, crying on the bus, feeling so terrified, embarassed, helpless and frustrated all at the same time. And, when the driver let me off the bus, I said ‘thank you’ in English but vowed to myself I would learn how to say Thank You in Korean. I was so grateful and so wanted to thank him. So that was the first thing I learned how to say and I didn’t wait long to learn it. But I also learned how to write it and read it in Korean. And I kept on learning more of the language after that.
Kimbap….
This is what their Kimbap looked like. In my area of Canada we call it ‘sushi’ but that’s not what it is. They sold trays of it everywhere and it only cost a dollar or $1.50 for a lot of fat rolls – the best you’d ever eat.
On my first full day there, another Canadian who knew I didn’t have much money for the next month said I had to get some kimbap. In Korean, rice is ‘bap’ and seaweed sheets or laver is ‘kim’. So it’s a filling covered in sticky rice and rolled up with a seaweed sheet and sliced. In Korea, they are big, fresh and cheap. I found I liked ketchup and mayonnaise on them. Honestly, it’s really nice. Usually the inside of the roll had a piece of cucumber, a piece of carrot, some scrambled egg and a piece of pink and white ‘immitation crab’ meat.
I ate in the basement with groups of Koreans at first because it was free at the Institute. A nice lady cooked and cleaned for us. She couldn’t speak English and was friendly. We called her ‘Agumma’, as that means ‘middle-aged female server’. She mopped all the floors with just water and baked huge sardines for us in hot sauce. There was an old man downstairs who guarded the door and he had a sweet little dog with him all the time. They were lovely people, but could not speak a word of English.
I found out at the start no one could give me a fork. It took me a whole month to be good at using chopsticks. I loved it. I could pick up a single grain of rice at a time to eat once I could use them. If we went to an expensive Western restaurant we could ask for a fork. There were many convenience stores and they had Korean rice wine and beer for sale in the coolers. Some of the ‘soju’, or Korean rice wine, cost LESS than a bottle of water! And outside, you could always find a cigarette stand selling a pack of 20 Korean or American cigarettes for a little over a dollar. Korean beer was very good and the bottles were much bigger than ours. With the cheap taxis, subway fares, beer and cigarettes I was in heaven.
This vendor has rice snacks for sale
I went to vendors in trucks or stands everywhere. A few times I bought rice snacks – you could get a huge mixed bag of rice crisps and rice puffs in different forms for a few dollars. My tooth broke from the crunchiness of some of it once and the dentist who fixed it charged a third of what it would cost in Canada. Sometimes the blue Daewoo trucks that were everywhere drove in the streets announcing to the people to come buy Korean pears, seafood, eggs, or any other wares. We often heard the loudspeakers doing this or we would often hear car brakes screeching and then a loud crash from the nine-lane road outside, meaning there had been an accident. Sometimes a fight between Korean men would break out below our windows of the building we lived in where the auto shop was – many problems seemed to be about a parking spot. Also, a few times I looked out at the nine-lane highway at nighttime and saw a severely drunk man was crawling home on the ground along the highway. He would flounder and yell while he crawled. Because the liquor was so cheap this happened, they said.
Sang Hyun….
I had run out of money and was so despondent, not being able to relate to the other English speakers in my building and having no one to talk to on my off time. I went and sat outside my building in Karak-dong. The most amazing thing happened that evening. It was nice and warm and calm and around September 9th, 1997. I was sitting on a piece of concrete after suppertime feeling so sad. A Korean man who was around my age stopped to talk to me. He said he lived nearby and asked, “Why are you sitting alone like this here?” I did not know how to begin to explain. I remember distinctly he said he wanted ‘a foreign friend’ like me and asked if I would want that too. In Canada or most other Western countries a man stopping to talk to you like that would have alterior motives, but I strongly sensed it was safe, even good, to make friends with this person. He asked if I wanted to walk up the street and get some chicken. I had no money for a meal and cautiously followed. He was so nice and down to Earth. He told me he was engaged and would soon be married to an elementary school teacher who lived in Suwon, which was a city with a historical fortress to the south of Seoul I had heard of. He had travelled by himself to China and Australia a few years ago, he said.
The meal was so interesting – a little restaurant that sold ‘smoked chicken and pickled radish’. They called them Chicken Houses. I looked and saw he was spending 6 dollars on me and it bothered me but I explained about my situation as much as I could. I didn’t know then, but Korean society doesn’t think of money the same way we might. They are happy to pay for you, as they often insisted on with me. They said always, “I asked you to have dinner here with me so I must pay”. Not too many would ever be dishonest or money-grabbing.
Baek Sang Hyun (A picture taken 20 years after I knew him. I copied it from Facebook.)Small residential street where Sang Hyun lived in Karak-dong behind my building.
After we ate the chicken he asked if I wanted to come to his apartment nearby that he shared with his brother, who wasn’t there often. I took a big chance it could be safe to do that and went. He showed me a videotape on a vcr that had his two trips on them. He said after he graduated from university, he wanted to pat a panda bear in China and he wanted to bungie-jump off a cliff in Australia. He did those things and showed me videos of both. It was entirely safe! That night I saw a picture of his fiancee. She was so beautiful, like a movie-star or model. While I was in Korea, Sang Hyun would call me every week to ask me to do something like go eat or go sightseeing or go to a large mall, anything. He had a nice sense of humour and is smarter than I realised – he was an engineer for the government at that time. Now, he has an even higher position and travels giving seminars and speeches about how to deal with waste in Korean cities.
When he would call me, the secretaries always answered and passed the phonecall upstairs to our lounge but they did this reluctantly. They always tried to get rid of him and didn’t believe I was friends with him. They did not want strangers taking advantage of me or bothering me and protecting me was part of their job. No one there understood that we were friends and doing good for eachother. He told me once he had no one in Seoul, like my problem I had there as well. His male friends had moved away to work or get married. His family lived far away. More than that, he couldn’t be free talking to Korean women, he said, because of the strict rules in their society. He was happy he could swear, drink, and smoke with me even though I was a woman. He could tell me anything he wanted. I was like having a male friend, which he didn’t have at that time. I listened to him but it was difficult to understand. In my Canadian society the roles of women and men were more equal. His family name was Baek, and he would always say when he called me and I got on the phone, “…I’m Back..!!!…” so it would sound like “I’m BACK now from somewhere” as a play on words.
