Chick Corea in Korea

Pictures
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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

My Birthday in Seoul

Pictures
1. The riot police and their bus full of fun, on guard against any trouble in one of the nicer parts of town.
2. Just a monk walking down the street. A five thousand year old religion on a modern metropoli Edit Posts s.
3. All dressed up in neon in one of the many red light districts in Seoul
4. Three Seoul rookies with cameras ready to go.
5. The round bed of love that I got to sleep in for two nights, incredibly hard.

My Thirty Third

18 February 2007

Well finally it was here. After waiting thirty-three years I finally had my 33^rd birthday. Yippee.

I had been planning to meet my friend Greg, who is working my old job done in Pohang, up in Seoul for some well-deserved R.R. for a while now. In fact we had both been looking forward to getting together for quite awhile and finally the big day came when we thought we would be partying with around fifty million Koreans, all celebrating my birthday.

Well not really celebrating my birthday, they had another reason to celebrate, along with a fifth of the world’s population. You see, by a total quirk of fate, this year my birthday happened to fall on the biggest celebration that will hit Asia in 2007, the Lunar New Year.

This year is the Year of the Pig here in Asia and millions of Asians are looking forward to it.

The Year of the Pig, which comes around only once every twelve years, according to the Chinese zodiac, is the best year to be born. According to the tradition every animal in the zodiac has a purpose, a sign and the pig is the symbol for good fortune and prosperity. To have your birthday on the actual day of the lunar New Year, well that is probably the best luck you can have. Millions of people have been waiting for twelve years for this moment alone and birthrates here in Korea, and Asia, are sky rocketing as people are using every means available, including fertility treatments, to have children in this, the most prosperous of years.

Getting to Seoul was pretty easy as most people in Korea look at this holiday as a time to be home with their families. Much to my disappointment there would be no celebration in the streets, no fireworks or spitting dragons to delight the crowds. This holiday would in fact be pretty quiet, a time for reflection and family instead of a massive party. That is for everyone but us.

I met Greg in the train station, he had taken the KTX high-speed train up from Pohang, and we immediately started shopping and celebrating.

After checking into our hotel we hit the electronics mart and the foreigner district where we met some friends, had beer and some Indian food before heading out on the town.

And that, because my mom reads my blog, is where it all ends.

Inje Ice Festival

pictures
1. Ice fishing, Korean style. This little plastic hut they use to cut the wind would last about ten seconds on a Minnesota lake.
2. Being that this is the year of the pig, fitting we should see a bunch of ice blocks in the shape of the wonderful animal.
3. Rack upon rack of drying pollack.
4. So this was kind of wierd. On the river ice was placed a giant pool into which were relesed a kind of trout or salmon, I never could get a straight answer. The brave men in the pool hunted around, scaring the poor fish into the corners and then kicked them to death with their boots, charming.
5. Just a random child with his little faux animal hat.

Inje Ice Festival

25.2.07

On a cold brisk day in the middle of January we decided to head up to the Inje Ice Festival. I know I know, it is not the type of ice festival that those of us in Minnesota are accustomed to, in fact it was pretty lame compared to what we are used to. What we think of as ice, huge sheets covering lakes and rivers to a depth of several feet, safe for cars where people have little huts on where they spend the short winter days and long nights fishing and drinking, well that is just unknown here, in fact, ice like that would probably scare the Koreans out of their wits, but it is the only ice we have and we were determined to enjoy it.

After a long bus ride, longer than it should have been, up to the mountains high above Sokcho, and a walk through snow on a sunny but cold day, we finally came to the site of the gathering.

A patch of river had frozen, in itself quite a surprise considering how warm it had been this winter, and there, in the bright sun of a midwinter’s day, the festival was in full steam.

Well, not really. As far as festivals go in Korea, this one was pretty damn small.
On the sheet of ice were drilled a few holes with some little plastic windbreaks were some people were fishing with handlines, for what I do not know. The river seemed pretty small, too small to hold anything but a few small trout, and I never did see anybody catch one in the short time I stood in the wind watching them.

After a short while I headed downstream, or upstream, I don’t really know, past the fairly large crowd of people using incredibly sharp stakes that they were driving into the ice while sitting on sleds to push themselves along. Because I was in a fairly dark mood, angry at almost all things Korean I longed to see someone, while they were jabbing their modified ice pick into the frozen river, instead pierce their foot, it was a dream left unfulfilled.

Moving further along the ice I did marvel at the wonderful site that the city of Inje sits in. With jagged peaks all around, Inje sits in a high pass, the site of the road to Seoul. It is very narrow; at this point there is barley enough room for a little town and a small two-lane road. Stretching up the flanks of the mountains were pine trees, and above the tree line, you cold actually see good, solid snow, like what should be down in the valley where we were if we had had a good winter.

A little farther along, really at the midpoint of the festival grounds was the oddest, actually the most gruesome part of the festival. A small type of swimming pool had been placed on the ice, kind of like a little kiddie pool but bigger, and in it were four grown men, stomping around, splashing and kicking. I moved closer through the crowd to see what all the excitement was about.

What I got to see was an example of animal cruelty that I have not really seen for quite awhile. Into the pool were released some fish, a kind of trout or salmon I presume, I never really did get to see them clearly. As the crowd egged the men in the pool on, or at least I presume they were egging them on, I don’t know enough Korean to decipher what they were saying, the men pursued the fish in the confines of the pool, driving them into the corners where they proceeded to kick the fierce animals into submission.