A Sunday Stroll

A Sunday Stroll

Picutres

1. Korea, like Japan, is well known for its cherry blossoms. Down in Gwanju they have a festival for them and its is incredibly bueatiful. Up here, where it is cooler we do not have the mass of cherry trees they do in the south but there are a few scattered around. These blossoms, outside a little farmhouse in the country, are the first I have seen this spring.

2. When I walk and drive in the c0untryside here I often stop and look at the old tumbeled down buildings that somehow litter the landscape. It is amazing to me, that after thousands of years of war, strife, invasion and colonization that there are any old buildings left, but here they are. How long has this wall stood on this spot? How long have people been living in this village? A hundred years, a thousand?

3. Rural village, street scene. No stores, no schools.

4. A couple boys enjoying there sunday off.

5. The dog.

Finally spring has come to Korea, well at least up here in the far northern reaches of the peninsula. Down south the weather has been great for a couple of weeks now. In Gwanju the cherry blossoms are already out and in Busan people have been enjoying temperatures in theT sixties for a couple weeks now. It has been so much warmer that my buddy Greg down in Pohang, about two hundred and fifty miles south of here, has been seeing mosquitoes in the fields and his apartment.

Up here, in the cold and snow of the far north, we have, just last week, seen significant snow fall both the mountains and in town. While the migratory ducks and geese have been flying over us for a week, heading to their summer homes on the taiga of Siberia, the land here has been locked in the tight embrace of winter.

But today, just today, spring finally arrived. When I got up around eleven I could feel, by putting my hand outside of my window, that the wind was finally blowing from the south, bringing with it the warm air of the tropics. Well, not really the tropics, but it was a lot warmer than it has been.

That being said it was time for a stroll around the countryside. I grabbed my friend Connor and Aubrey and Paul and headed for the countryside to take in the sights and sounds of early spring.

Walking along, climbing the pass of Chundaesun mountain, we could hear birds singing, and on a few trees, the first pale green buds of spring poked their way out of their winter homes.

snow

Finally, after almost the whole winter with no snow, we have a little bit of white stuff in the neighborhood.
From my window I can see the mountians. They look like someone has taken pieces of black construction paper and folded it, like orgami, rubbing the creases with their fingers so they are sharp and defined. Every ridge, every peak has these sharp triangular edges on them.
After whatever great artisit it was that made the lines in the mountains was almost satisfied they had to make it more incredible.
Over all these sharp lines, over all the angles and creases, the artist sprinkled a heavy layer of wet white snow.
In places, above the tree line, there are thick fields of pure white. Lower down the slopes the artist has stuck in pine trees, sprinkling the white with pinpricks of black and grey.

Chick Corea in Korea

Pictures
1 and 4
Luckily enough the U.S.-Korea FTA (Free Trade Agreements) were taking place in Seoul this past weekend. The FTA is vehementaly opposed by almost every union and worker in Korea as they see the agreements as a vehicle for the U.S. to totally flood Korean markets with U.S. products and therby costing them their jobs.
The cool thing about all of this was the great protest that Greg and I got caught up in in the street as throngs of people stormed out of the subway and shut down traffic on one of the main streets in the city.
It was cool to see the banners and hear the chants as people fought the police. In my mind though though the need the sixties, as my friend Greg says, to really be able to counter the lines of riot police.
To protest successfully they should have showered the police with bricks, bottles, and stones rather than try to force the line of plastic shields and helmets with their bare hands.

2. Even in the middle of a city of twelve million, you can still find pockets of old Korea as this picutre from my hotel window shows.

3. Late at night in the red lite district.

Chick Corea in Korea

10.0.07

This past weekend I was incredibly privileged to go to Seoul and see one of the best jazz duos of all time play in a very small, intimate venue at the Seoul Arts Center.

I have long admired Chick Corea and Gary Burton, a pianist and vibraphonist who helped to revolutionize jazz in the mid-seventies and it was one of the high points of my time in Korea, and maybe my life to be able to see these two in concert.

The concert hall holds about two thousand people and has three levels. When we arrived, right at show time, the space was about half full facing a small stage on which was placed Chicks piano and Gary’s vibraphone.

When the two came out it was like a spark of light as the elite of Seoul and the hard core jazz fans there applauded wildly, knowing that they were in for a fantastic treat, and what a time it was.

For over two hours, through three encores, the duo played song after song; some new, like Alegria, and some old like Crystal Silence. On and one they played and the music seemed to float like air from their respective instruments.

For piece after piece Chicks hands flew over the piano keys totally from memory. Only once, for a brand new piece did he need sheet music, and then only very little. Every piece was known by him from memory and you could see how absolutely passionate he was about his music.

For Gary it was almost the same. Time after time his mallets banged out perfectly pitched melodies from an instrument that looks so simple, but in reality is terribly difficult.

The music was almost like a duel as the two experts flew at each other time after time, complementing each others playing with increasing speed and skill, the notes flying back and forth as the melodies flowed like a deluge from the stage. It was incredible!

Journey to a traditional village

Pictures-
1. Even though the roofs are now made of non-traditional plastic, at least the layout is the same as it would have been for an upper class home about a hundred years ago.
2. Old walls, houses, mountains in the background, and a desterted country road, a nice early spring shot of Korea
3. How long has this tumbling wall, this narrow path been in this spot?
4. A very traditional house. If I would have gotten closer you could see the crumbling rice paper in the windows.
5. A friendly puppy coming over to take a look while I was shooting pictures.

Journey to a Traditional Village

2.3.07

March second was a wonderful holiday, a day that the state of Korea celebrated the 1919 uprising against Japanese by working as any normal day, constructing buildings and driving taxis well us English teachers got the day off to go explore yet a little bit more of rural Korea.

Conner and I went out at our usual time of around noon and hiked over Chun-dae-sun mountain, a little hill that lies just to the west of town and on our way to a very traditional farming village that we had seen many times while on the bus to Sorak but had never explored.

Like previous hikes I had been on the weather was nice and warm. I even got to take off my coat for a while and get some much-needed sun on my winter white arms.

It was a good feeling; it always is, on a decent spring day. You get to see some bright blue skies and feel the warmth of the sun on your body, warmth that no indoor heater can hope to match. It always makes me feel really good.

After strolling along a few empty rice roads, the cement paths through the rice paddies, we came to a very nice little village, framed by the mountains to the west, north, and south, and the opening to the sea a few miles away to the east.

It’s a nice village and was worth exploring for a day. A couple of hundred fairly traditional houses, some nicer than others, a few, in the far edges of the village abandoned and sinking slowly into decay.

Of course, the houses were not as old fashioned, as I would have liked. Most of the homes, instead of having the traditional roofs of slate or rice straw were topped with molded plastic shingles but at least the walls had the old style mud dabbing on them and the roofs were at least framed with nicely painted and decorative posts.

Bens Class

This is a class of little people that I teach three times a week and are alot of fun. They all have made really tremendous progress in thier English skills in the short time that they have been my students.
We play a lot of games, hide and seek and kick the can are very popular right now but dodgeball is running a close second as they start to get the hang of it. They are cute kids and it is a real joy to have them start to use English more and more as they get comfortable with it.

The Festival that Wasnt-Sorak-san

Pictures-
1. These are prayer tablets, written with the hopes and reams of many people stacked outside a statue of Buddha.
2-4. Some shots of a temple on a midwinter day.
5. The mountains of Sorak-san with some weather moving in.

The Festival that Wasn’t

Sorak Snow Festival 2007

One of the things we look forward to here in Korea is the plethora of festivals. Every weekend it seems there is a new festival celebrating something, kimchi, fish, ice, and mushrooms. It seems like everything on the peninsula has a festival for it. Down south they even have a mud festival in the early summer and a festival celebrating the lowest tide of the year where some mudflats get exposed to the salt air.

Here in Sokcho we are lucky enough to have a snow festival celebrating, you guessed it, snow, and on a bitterly cold day Paul, Aubrey, and I headed out to the Sorak-san Park with great excitement, looking forward to a real festival atmosphere.

When we got off the bus at the entrance to the park we found our way in with what seemed a smallish crowd of people, at least for a Korean festival, and headed towards the main clearing where we expected to see tents and displays showing the beauty of the winter season. We were sorely disappointed.

I don’t know about you but when I hear the words “snow” and “festival” put together I expect it to be in the winter, with the possibility of some poor weather. Where I come from this means that any festival in the winter would have made provisions for cold, wind, and snow. Twenty-degree temperatures with a little wind would not have slowed things down one bit. One only has to look at the eelpout festival to see a true winter festival.

Here in Korea it is another thing entirely. Throw a little wind and chill into the mix and bang, no festival. Down come the tents! The exhibits, well they are just a distant memory. In other words, the festival was, well it wasn’t.

Needless to say, while the festival did kind of suck, well the fact that there was no festival sucked, I did get some great pictures of what is fast becoming my favorite part of Korea in the winter.

A Day at the Museum

One of the things Greg and I had plans to do while we were in Seoul for my birthday was to hit a couple of museums.
The first one we hit, and the one that I most desperatly wanted to see was the Korean National Museum. Not for the Korean artifacts, no I wanted to see the exhibit of paintings that had been sent over from the Lourve to celebrate one hundred and fifty years of Franco-Korean relations.
It seemed to me that the Lourve had known that I would be in Korea for this exhibit and had included, amongst a bunch of minor landscapes, my most favorite painting in the world, one that I had previously seen only in books, Thomas Gericualts work, "The Raft of the Medusa".
All in all the exhibit wasnt that good but I stood transfixed in front of the Medusa for at least fifteen minutes while the line of people behind me became angrier and angrier at the waygook holding up the line, admiring the lines and brillant use of shading that Gericault used to depict the survivors of a shipwreck off the coast of Senegal fighting through cannibilism and thirst trying to signal to a British ship on the horizon.
After the Lourve exhibit we headed over to the main museum for a taste of Korea, but I am ashamed to say, I quickly became bored and basically forced Greg to head over to a place that I had already thourghly explored, the Korean War Museum.
While not the best war mueseum I have ever been too, the Imperial War Museum in London easily takes the cake, it is cool for all the neat machines that they have sitting outside. From the Scud missles to the Russian equipment captured during the Korean war to the mamouth B-52 with two smaller planes parked under its wings are pretty cool to look at.

Picuters
1. In the subway station outside the museum is a mosiac depicting the building that houses the treasures of Korea.
2. These are punishment sticks, used until early in the twentieth century to keep slaves and peasents in line.
3. A little boy as tired of the Korea National Museum as I was at this point.
4. A North Korean infiltration boat used to run spies and commandos up to the shore of the south in the early 1980's
5. A Mig fighter flown by a defector from the North in 1983