Impressions of Korea II

Before we arrived in Seoul, we learned that there would be a lot of “yellow dust”. Here, “yellow” is not an adjective, but a part of the noun. There are never days that I am aware of where there are warnings of “green dust” (that would indeed be more unsettling). The dust is in fact yellow though. It is invisible as you walk through the labyrinthine streets, but when you get above the buildings, where you can look a distance, one can see that the otherwise beautiful granite mountains outside of the city are washed out with a yellow haze. We forgot and left the windows open that night. In the morning, we were greeted by a distinctive grittiness coating the room.

In America, low quality food is something one must work to avoid when eating out. Not true in Asia. Korea and Japan seem to simply have higher standards for their food. The most ironic part of all this is that the primary culprits and representatives of American bad food are (while not the shining examples of good food) proof that fast-food can be prepared in a way so that at least to tastes and appearances, it has not been made with all the disregard of a three year old slapping dirt and sticks onto a plate. The big American players for a market share in Korea’s communal stomach: McDonalds, Dunken Donuts, Baskin and Robbins, KFC, Starbucks, and Burger King, are all surprisingly large and clean inside. The employees look cheerful and clean themselves for the most part, not greasy, tired, and stressed as their American counterparts do. The restaurants are almost all very large. Most have at least three stories. On the first story is the counter, on the second and third are the seating areas. At Baskin and Robbins you are given a menu and a place to sit before you order. At McDonalds the hamburgers are delivered looking like genuine hamburgers and not, as my colleague described it, “looking like they were just run over by a truck”, as is the norm in America. Dunken Donuts was found to have the freshest coffee beans in all of Seoul recently, and the store features doughnut flavors such as broccoli and carrot. By far the largest Starbucks I have ever seen in the world have been in Korea. One was four stories high and packed full of people.

One final note. There is a certain vision that going into an American fast food restaurant in Asia one will behold crowds of fat, homesick Americans, seeking some solace in a Big Mac or Mocha Frappachio. This however is certainly not the case. Entering a McDonalds at 10:30 in downtown Busan to satisfy the craving of one of my colleagues, I saw one table of Americans, and probably 80 tables of young, hip Busanites chatting away over burgers.

Impressions of Korea I

It is the late morning in a loft apartment near the Sillim metro station. The apartment is already hot having spent the morning intercepting the yellow, dusty light before it could reach the undergrowth of the city streets. Looking down from this canopy, one can see an old man hobbling along the street. Down another direction are children dashing toward a grotto like playground. Somewhere in the distance is the sound of an electric saw, the banging of metal. A ripping sound, as if the film of the placid movie that had just been playing was rudely ripped apart. The air-raid sirens. It takes a minute for the world to come back into focus. But gripping the window sill with a sweaty hand and looking outside, it is clear that nothing has changed. A few building over an old woman is hanging her laundry, without the slightest hurry. As if an invisible and impermeable box were enclosing the loft and confining the ear drum tearing sound within. Outside the world is still peaceful.


There is a certain nocturnal cityscape that only exists in Asia. There is no doubt that Asian cities use far more blue and green tinted lights than there yellow-centric American counterparts. This lends deep-sea sort of look to the city which is only accentuated by the humid air, which in turn blurs the starkness of the lights, their illumination instead contributing the a glowing haze. Standing on the roof of the largest department store in the world at 9:00 and looking down, the air feels thick, as if the lights of the city have lent it weight. Looking down one feels as if one is looking down into some phosphorescent tide pool full of glowing alien corals and pulsing, skittering crabs.

The Earth from top to bottom.

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/images/stories/oap-landsea-oceans-100608-moderate.jpg

The Memorizer.

The student is a memorizer. It is his shumi (hobby). To the shame of most Americans, he can name every American president in order as well as every US state and its capital. He knows every country in the world and its capital as well.

How does he set about doing it? Does he simply sit down at home and test himself over and over again, map before him? Does he try to memorize a single fact each day?

A Dangerous Threshold.

As one who views comfort as largely a product of contrast (in this case the contrast between what one has and what one had, or would like to have), I have lately been disappointed by the intimation that there may be depths of suffering which no later relief can truly allay. This may at face value seem like an obvious statement. Surely, victims of childhood abuse often spend much of their lives trying to recover. But I wonder if the suffering cannot be simpler than such examples that are inseparably tied to the byzantine way that we react to other human's actions toward us. Reading the biographies of explorers who endured physically crushing experiences in the Antarctic or the Amazon, one finds that even in cases where the relationships between the individuals remained positive and where there were no fatalities, the explorers often are reported to have experienced recurrent depression the rest of their life (though perhaps people prone to depression are more likely to want to become explorers). To the naïve mind, it might seem that returning home safe from such brutal conditions would allow one to truly appreciate the comforts of civilization. Apparently though, this is not true in many cases. Does pain and stress warp the mind permanently? And if so, where is the threshold where we enter the region where we are doing permanent damage to the fine interplay of neurtransmitters and hormones.?

This idea is an often over-looked theme in The Lord of the Rings. Though critics often dismiss the work as a “school boy’s” idea of war, they forget that the conclusion of the novel, despite the fact that the protagonists win the war with only one of the principle characters dying (and he already an old man), is not necessarily a happy one. Despite the prosperous condition that the Shire returns to after Saruman’s death, Frodo is slowly forced to accepted that he can never return to the life that he had, and that his experiences carrying the ring will always follow him. He has permanently changed. One cannot help but wonder if this theme comes from Tolkien’s own experiences during WWI, where post-traumatic stress disorder featured prominently in the aftermath of the war.

Differences I

Stroll through a park in Japan. What do you notice? It is true that it is generally cleaner and that it is probably a bit less noisy, but based upon stereotypes almost anyone would have made these guesses. The bag of salty squid crackers that you were eating has made you thirsty and with the empty wrapper in your hand you go to look for a drinking fountain and a trash can, all the while noting other small differences between this park and one in your home country. After about twenty minutes of walking you will realize that this entire five acre park does not contain a single trash can or drinking fountain. You see a public restroom and speculate that you will at least be able to find a trash can inside this. Frustration begins to awaken in you as you realize that not only is there no trash can in the restroom, there is also no apparatus for drying one’s hands. Now with damp hands you continue on your search. Depending on your determination, it could be hours later that you finally give up, put the wrapper into your pocket and walk home. It is then that you suddenly realize that I set you up with that bag of crackers.

The Complex Logic of Shoe Removal.

Enter a Japanese school and you will be asked to remove your shoes. This in itself is not so surprising, many Japanese buildings require shoe removal, including some restaurants and athletic areas. What seem like straightforward rules though, "Come to school, change into indoor slippers when you enter" quickly become more complicated. For example: in practice, it is possible to not remove your shoes, provided you arrive in slippers and enter through the back. In a hand-wavy sense, the vector field which describes the social pressure to remove shoes is not conservative. Two paths are not always equal when it comes to removing shoes.

Furthermore, as gyms are usually a separate building from the high school, attending assemblies and sporting events requires one to walk outside through the dust, yet one is not required to change back into outdoor shoes to do this. Perhaps we should admit certain outside areas to what we consider "inside the school". After all, there are certainly architectural features that suggest the notion that we are still in the "school" during these transition periods. There is clearly a lot of intuition required to understand the exact times when one must remove one's shoes. It was be interesting to create a map that showed the topography of shoe removal, just as one might use different colors do indicate different ecosystems in a given area.