Seoul Therapy

Seoul is a fascinating city. Each part, each suburb, is devoted to a particular need. Myeongdong has designer clothes, Chungmuro is the place for analogue cameras, Itaewon is the centre for foreigners where you can find Western groceries and the Hard Rock Cafe. Each place has its own flavour, unique in the Seoul sprawl. There are few chain stores - Starbucks and the local Kimbap Heaven make appearances in most suburbs, but mostly it is as far from the dull English high street as you can get. I'd never realised how bland British towns have become until I saw Seoul.

At first it takes some getting used to. It's impossible to go to a mall and pick up everything you need from camera film to clothes to sewing needles. Your day must be carefully planned with a comprehensive shopping list and a subway map to hand. However it's started to become second nature for me - I know where I can find everything, and in each place there's an unimaginable range of whatever it is you desire - if one shop asks too high a price, you turn around and there's another for you to try.

On Saturday, I needed wool. Yes, I have indeed started to knit! My room is filled with half-finished hats and scarves and notes for future patterns to try out. Unfortunately, the huge shopping area close to Paju doesn't contain a single haberdashery or fabric store, so when I run out of wool, it means a day in Seoul. Wool is sold in the Dongdaemun area, in a squat grey building devoted to all things crafty.


The entrance area is filled with tailors' shops, the shiny grey suit material adored by Korean businessmen filling shelves from floor to ceiling. Keep going and you come to the buttons and lace. I've been here once before with a friend, but it's impossible to really know this place, and even though the last time I memorised the route to the wool section, I still inexplicably find myself suddenly staring down corridors of fur and rabbit tails. Turning a corner only takes me to the sewing section where men hunch over sewing machines in their tiny stalls, the walls made of threads and fabric. The clack clack of the machines follows me as I search for some stairs - the only thing I'm sure of is that the yarn section is in the basement, so I need to go down. I finally find some, but they lead me not to the piles of wool I'm hoping for, but some kind of upholstery section. I keep thinking I'm getting close, seeing wool down at the end of the tunnel, but it turns out to be threads or crochet supplies, and I can't find the familiar stalls I shopped at last time. Suddenly, I turn around, and there it is: the stall that sells expensive but irresistable yarns, handmade in Southern Asia. My mind mentally rearranges itself and I understand exactly where I am. Shopping can commence.

It's quite difficult to shop because, despite being fairly first-world-ish in general, Koreans like to haggle. I struggle to haggle. So shopkeepers either love me for accepting the first offer, or hate me for just walking off without even asking for a discount. At least I now know the numbers so I can ask "Olmayo?" ("how much?") and understand the response. And occasionally I drum up the courage to complain in a whiney voice "Bisayo!" - it's too much! Usually the shopkeepers are so amused at my Korean that they drop the price by a couple of thousand Won, which makes me ever so proud. Sometimes they call to their friends busily knitting in the back, presumably saying "Will you listen to this rich foreigner, thinks she can haggle! With me! The cheek!", after which they turn to me, and laugh until I apologise and skulk off down the narrow alley...


My second-favourite stall is owned by a gentleman who is eating his lunch when I arrive. He jumps up to help me match a piece of wool from an unfinished project. The last time I was here with Andrea, we were trying to use Korean numbers, but he, being Korean and therefore naturally over-helpful, decided to use Western numbers. Unfortunately, his mind was ahead of him and he started spouting Spanish at us... Interesting to meet someone here who's learned Spanish - high school language classes usually consist of English, Japanese and Chinese. This time he smiles at me and goes straight into English.


Cheerfully laden with shopping bags, I leave the building, stopping at my favourite fruit stall in the whole of Korea, where you pick your bowl of naartjies and interrupt the seller, who's always playing a checkers-like game with a friend round the side. Judging by the exhortations not to push and to "line nicely", it's also pretty popular with everybody else who passes by.


Meanwhile, Korea has been getting pretty damn cold lately, and nowhere more so than little old Paju, lying in the middle of a wind channel that apparently directs Siberian winds south. The ponds are iced over and it snows every few days, although nothing's settling yet. Unfortunately, English Village is designed for maximum discomfort, so all those drainage-free areas that in summer became dams to be crossed only in wellies, are now scary ice patches in winter. We wake up most mornings to thick fog.


















Yes, that is the sun in the photo on the right... Apparently this is still the run-up to Real Winter - I'm grateful for my Australian Christmas, but dreading, absolutely dreading, coming back to bone-chilling weather...

When Relationships Go Bad

In Korea, the done thing when dating is to publicly announce your love for each other not with rings or hand-holding or sonnets in restaurants, but by wearing the same clothes.

No, not them! Did I say similar? I said the same.

Like this:

Yes, that's right, lads - Korean women dress their men. Not so attractive now, eh?





















The alltime rock n' roll favourite at English Village was a new family - mum dad and baby - all kitted out in white from head to toe. The baby even had a cap to match the parents', although his had to be tied to his chin with a ribbon!

I was recently confirmed in my growing suspicions by Cait's discovery of, yes, a Couples Store in Seoul, where everything comes in both women's and men's sizes, and often toddler size too... My day was just made so much better...

My Shopping Spree

Cait and I went down to Seoul on Saturday for some long-awaited shopping - not frivolous stuff, I assure you, but a basic human need: cellphones. Yes, I am now connected to the world via a little white box with Korean symbols mysteriously written all over it. And wellies, which are a basic human need in Korea during summer.

So! We'd been up the night before with a bottle of wine and an amateurish curry made from a packet thieved from our boss during tea last week, and then in my case, even later watching The Holiday on TV. It wasn't too early a start, but the lack of sleep didn't help when we ventured out to the bus stop in pouring rain and thick mist. The bus finally came, 10 minutes late as usual (except when we're late, then it's 10 minutes early. Sometimes I think the bus driver just doesn't like foreigners and tries to make it as difficult as possible to catch his bus from our stop.) We headed to Yongsan first.

I wanted to share this photo with you which I took in the subway. Clearly afraid of a repeat of the subway attacks of 2003, Korean platforms are filled with emergency torches, radio contact with ground-level emergency services, and these cupboards containing gas masks and oxygen tanks. Worrying prepared, but quite soothing to know it's all there!

Yongsan is an amazing place, and I was so glad I'd already been there once with people who knew where to go. I was thus able to proudly lead Cait straight to the section we wanted to be in. This was over a bridge, down through the computer section, over a road and sideways into a covered alley where all the cellphone merchants of Korea were gathered. This is one of the weirdest things about commerce in Korea. Instead of spreading out, the Koreans gather all their shops into little enclaves. Everyone knows that if you want clothes you go to Dongdaemun. Electronics are Yongsan. Indian food is Itaewon. Trendy US style shops are in Myeongdong.

Even within Yongsan, each type of electronic product is gathered into certain areas. To buy a camera, you go to a particular floor, where you emerge from the door into an enormous area filled with stalls all selling exactly the same thing at prices within a couple of thousand Won of each other. Musical instruments are on another floor; computers get a building to themselves. The photo on the left is from when a friend and I went to buy our new cameras. You can see the stalls stretching into the distance... all selling the same camcorders and cameras and cases...



Our cellphone section was lined with little shops with dusty displays of the latest cellphones outside. I particularly loved the gold one you can see in the photo, but restrained myself as you could only buy that model brand new and I had to buy second-hand. Shame.

We were lucky enough to stumble onto a lovely man who smiled at us and told us he could only speak a little English, and then proceeded to guide us through the whole complicated process of registering my new phone in my name. In English. Oh, Korean reticence.

Korean phones work on a different system to the rest of the world, so you cannot use foreign phones here, even on Roaming - making for a healthy trade between foreigners. The cellphones don't have removable sim cards and are locked to the network that is connected to the phone manufacturer. You cannot unlock them or change them. I have an LG phone, therefore I am on the LG Telecom network. When I bought the phone the shop owner and I had to fill out a 3 page form which was then submitted by the shop owner to the phone company, then we waited for 30 minutes while they filed everything and registered the phone. And this was just for pay-as-you-go! The phone is now in my name and if it were to break or get lost, I can instantly transfer my number to a new one. Which I guess is cool. It just seems like a lot of effort just to have a simple, second-hand, pretty ugly phone!

Once I'd popped across the road to the Computer Peripherals Market, and bought a webcam (hooray!) and a gig stick for work (teeny tiny little thing that is going to get lost), we walked back over the walkway to the main building, and after just a little stop for Baskin Robbins ice cream (one thing the Americans have definitely gotten right), and a completely unsuccessful attempt to decode the subway station, we got in a taxi for Itaewon - otherwise known as Little America, and, oddly enough, close to Hooker Hill. There is an enormous US military base there and the streets are filled with soldiers and American tourists buying cheap Ralph Lauren and Hard Rock Cafe. Not my scene at all, but Cait expertly led the way through the wet and miserable streets to a side street and then into a lushly decorated Indian restaurant where we gorged on curries and naan bread and delicious dhal to our hearts' content.

Tea is a natural follow-up to a good lunch and so we headed to Insadong where, yes, all the tea sellers and tea shops of Seoul are gathered into one long street. The main street is currently being renovated and the buildings are very modern, but the side streets are something special - little hanok buildings line narrow alleys filled with green trees and trickling streams. It was still raining however, and so Cait and I simply ducked into a little cafe which defied the promise of its narrow glass doorway to stretch into a calm space with chunky wooden tables, lilies and trees, ending in a tiny courtyard which really should have been too small for the amount of garden squeezed in there. Cait was mostly preoccupied with fixing her phone's ringtones and settings - and then the lovely girl fixed mine too :) I think I might be getting too old to understand phones? :)


By now it was nearly 5pm, we had been in Seoul for six hours, and we were wet and tired, and my feet were cold. We decided to soldier on to Myeongdong where we hoped to buy wellies. We'd been half-heartedly looking for these for weeks, asking everyone we saw wearing them where we could find some (mostly America...) But now the rains were starting, and we were envisaging teaching classes for two months in wet takkies. The hunt was on.

Most stores laughed at us when we pointed to the little kids' froggie wellies (what's wrong with an adult wearing rubber shoes painted in rainbow colours? Huh?) Eventually, after climbing to the seventh floor of a clothes department store, we saw two Korean girls very stylishly flaunting their wellies (sorry, rain boots) and plucked up the courage to stop them. In flawless English, one gave us the directions to a store in the back streets of Myeongdong. I think the store assistants were a bit taken aback when two very wet foreign girls came rushing in, grabbing wellies from the window display and asking for Big Size Please? Thankfully they didn't bat an eyelid at our elephantine feet. Hurriedly buying socks from a street vendor, we retreated to a coffee shop and sneakily snuck our new boots on to our feet under cover of the table. No funny looks from the Koreans around us, but then, this is a nation where the girls will interrupt a conversation in public to check their faces in mirrors. Perhaps changing your shoes isn't such a big thing.

Once our frozen feet were safely ensconced in warm socks and boots, and our tummies full of caramel mocha latte, we were on our way to our bus stop in Hapjeong. Within 40 minutes our bus pulled up outside EV and we wandered off to bed.

And yes, it was still raining.

Welcome to the Asian summer ;)

Making a Lotus Lantern (and other tales of trial and tribulation)

On Sunday, bright and early (well, 9:30am anyway) I met a group of friends and colleagues at the bus stop and we headed down to Seoul for a long day of cultural immersion. It is Buddha's birthday on the 2nd of May and so this weekend there was a festival at the Jogye-sa Temple in central Seoul. The pivot of the festival is the making of lotus lanterns - the lotus is a symbol of purity, as it grows from the mud and dirt to become an exquisite flower. Lighting the lantern illuminates the darkness in the world and in our hearts, and the candle inside represents wisdom.

We made our way to the Temple to register for the workshop at noon. I'd booked our places on this a few days before - the festival organisers try to include foreigners, and there were hundreds of non-Koreans wandering around the place - not just curious Westerners, but also Buddhists from Asia and further afield. Taking our seats at the long U-shaped tables, we were given a basket to share between pairs. Each basket contained a selection of papers, some paste, a ready-made paper-and-wire lantern and some directions.


We began with great enthusiasm, learning how to rub the pads of corrugated papers and blow at them to separate them out with great tenderness. Each slight piece of paper was a rich colour that paled to white at one edge. We set to twisting edges into points. After about half an hour, Cait and I poured our lovely, perfect petals onto the table to count them - 35 petals! Hooray! Until I checked the instructions and told Cait with rather less than total glee that we were aiming for 80...

When we finally felt we had enough, we started to glue the petals to the lantern. This was harder than it looks, and I kept being told by one of our lovely, patient attendants to push the petals up close to the lantern - I was being far too gentle with them, apparently.

Half way down, I decided against the red that I had so carefully picked out earlier on - and had to make a whole second batch of deep purple petals. Happily Caitlin used up my abandoned red, but having to go back to twisting petals again had me swearing never to make another lantern in my life! So much for Buddhist calm and serenity. I think we were supposed to be taking the opportunity to meditate, and here were these foreigners, red in the face, puffing and swearing about the trickiness!

That did not, however, put off the Koreans. Sitting next to Che (24, small-faced), Leigh (23, pale-haired) and Caitlin (22, blonde), I got a taste of true celebrity. We had a continuous line of Koreans brandishing cameras with ridiculously phallic zoom lenses that should be declared weapons. My embarassed friends did their civil best to smile and look foreign for their stalkers, who called out requests and instructions without qualms, but after a couple of hours I was feeling really sorry for them! I thought that after a few weeks of English Village we'd be a little used to it, but it's actually so intrusive that I think it'll always be difficult.

Bear in mind that these are mostly not professional photographers or photojournalists, but ordinary Koreans out for a day at the Festival. (We did have KBS hanging around at one point - that's the Korean Broadcasting Service - but more on that later...)

At the end of two and a half hours of twisting and pasting and tucking and patting I had to admit I rather liked my effort, and even got Mike (my friendly boss) to take an extra-cheesy shot of me and mine!

I then turned my attention to the street festival. It ran the length of one rather long street which had been closed to traffic for the day and was now lined with stalls. There were all sorts of things happening - traditional games, painting, incense rolling, bead stringing, acupuncture. We even came across a stall offering "Free dental care and face painting!", with lots of tourists gathered around taking photos! My first adventure was a tea ceremony. Mike and I took off our shoes and sat on a mat in front of a lady in traditional dress ("hanbok").

After respectfully bowing our heads to her and receiving a bow back in welcome, she started a complicated system of heating bowls and cups and adding green tealeaves to a pot. I tried to keep track, but have to admit I've no idea what the system was. The end result, on the other hand, was absolutely delicious, and served in the teeniest little cup! Luckily, the teeny little cups kept coming, in between ceremonial cup-cleansings and -heatings and -replenishings. Weirdly, the taste changed with each cup, even though I swear the tea leaves came from the same bag each time! After a while I began to worry that we were being impolite and overstaying our welcome, although Mike was sure that they were used to foreigners and would tell us when to leave - and sure enough, after about 6 or 7 cups of tea, our hostess bowed her head to us, we gave her a cheery "kamsa hamnida!" and stumbled to our feet. What a lovely custom! Makes our second-hand teabags and a splash of milk seem barbarian!

There were lots of Buddhists from around the world not just wandering around the festival looking, but also marching down the streets, singing or playing drums and generally livening things up :)
After a while we returned to the Lantern-making Workshop area where the head of the Buddhist organisations in Korea was awarding prizes to lantern makers. To my great surprise, I was one of the 15 "Most Beautiful Lanterns"!! A friend managed to squeeze between the newspaper photographers to take a pic of me with the other Awardees :) I was really surprised because there were some stunning lanterns around, as you can see from the picture!
My prize was a lovely box made of handmade paper.

Later on in the evening we made our way to the side of the parade route to a specially designated foreigner seating area, where we watched the many organisations march and display their lanterns. Some were large groups from universities or schools carrying hundreds of brightly lit individual lanterns in the shape of fish and birds and lotus flowers. Others were Buddhist monasteries and temples who had spent months fashioning huge animals and Buddhas from paper, lit by massive generators on wheels.
















Some of the biggest roared and trumpeted, and had moving heads and legs! The work that must have gone into them astounds me.

The participants were so happy and excited, waving and shouting - often when a school came past our section, the children started pointing and shouting "Hello! What's your name? Pleased to meet you!" and then laughing hysterically! As one of my neighbours commented, it was sometimes like we were the ones on parade, or on display in a contained area for the Buddhists to come and see! My English Village colleagues and I took great care to smile and wave back, and shout "hello!" to all the kids, knowing how thrilled it makes them to see they've been understood in another language.

One of my Korean co-teachers had told me on the Friday before that she'd been to a Buddhist high school and so was a master at lantern-making. She'd been taking part in parades like this one since she was tiny. Surreal moment for me - I'm so used to religious schools in Africa and the UK - Roman Catholic, Anglican, Muslim madrassas - but I'd never even thought there would be Buddhist schools! At least, not one that taught all the usual subjects and treated Buddhism as a CofE school in England would treat Christianity! Another blow to my Western preconceptions :)

A sobering moment for me was the Sri Lankan delegation, very big by the standards of the parade. The young men who made up the "Sri Lanka Young Buddhists Association" were dressed not in red and orange robes like their barefoot Indian counterparts, but in army fatigues. It amazes me that Buddhism, essentially a peaceful way of living, has been turned into an organised religion in this one country, and used as a pretext for war.

The highlight of the evening: looking down the street to see billows of smoke above the heads of the crowds! We worriedly started looking for the nearest exits, but then the smoke got closer and cleared, and we saw two enormous dragons, waving their tails and lifting their heads to breathe smoke and fire, with a soundtrack of terrifying dragon cries! It was the most incredible float I've ever seen in my life!


The next day, Cait and I arrived in the teachers' work room for the beginning of the new week, and a Korean co-teacher turned to me to ask if I'd seen the morning's paper? When I said no, she laughed and said I'd better find one, because we were all in it! Duly excited, Cait and I saw a discarded paper by a computer and paged through it until we found a little insert that told of the foreigners taking part in a Korean festival and how multicultural Seoul was! The picture must have been taken by one of the phallic lenses and shows the four Southern Africans - Che, Leigh, Cait and I (down at the end)! Not only that, but a brief statement Che made to the KBS photographer had been shown on the evening news! (I told you he was going to come up again) All in all, some very excitable foreigners made their way to the meeting that morning!

My night in Seoul

On Saturday, Leigh, Caitlin and I ventured out to Seoul. We were supposed to be meeting some other people there, but then bumped into one of them in the Village - they'd been and returned already! Feeling adventurous and brave, and discovering that Leigh had been out there once before, we decided to go anyway, so off to the bus stop we went. The bus ride was a nightmare, as on the first four stops we picked up most of the local population, then as we hit the express section of the journey on the highway, we also hit traffic, and sat on the overheated bus for ages in a stop-start nightmare. Apparently nobody gives up seats here either - if you're lucky enough to get one you must deserve it - and Leigh had to persuade a mother with a sleeping child to take hers...

Arriving in Seoul, we walked down to a place called Hongdae - an abbreviation of Hongik Daehakgyo, or Hongik University - and therefore achingly hip and full of students as well as a huge contingent of foreigners who go there because Itaewon, the other nightspot, has too many foreigners... yes, it's a bit of a catch 22. We descended beneath the street to our first bar, Zen Bar, which turned out to be a gorgeous den with a big rectangular bar in the centre, deep comfy bar stools on the edges, and low tables by the walls. A massive flat screen TV showed hip-hop music videos and one wall was covered in a mural depicting Buddha as a black hip-hop DJ :) Very interesting! It wasn't long before the girls sitting next to us started talking to Leigh about their university courses, and a lad from the table behind us approached Cait and I clutching a bottle of Jack Daniels and a tot glass - to practise his English. After a couple of shots, I'm not sure my English was a good thing for an English learner to be listening to! Also, the level of English in Korea is fairly low compared to other countries I've been to, and the lack of attention paid to pronouns, articles and l's and r's means that it takes a while to tune the ear to Korean English. Hard work for a Saturday night. :D

After meeting so many Koreans, I was a little disappointed when other foreigners started turning up, but we ended up following them to a couple of other places to dance, none as pleasant as Zen Bar :)

It also started to rain, a freezing, hard rain, and as none of us had brought coats or umbrellas, the locals were treated to the sight of three foreign girls running screaming from shelter to shelter. What can I say, we're representing South Africa here in Korea... We ended up looking rather drowned - hence this picture:

Public transport is difficult to use to get to Paju between midnight and 6am so at 3am when we wanted to go home, we had to wave down a taxi. It amazes me that you can use a taxi to get somewhere it takes a bus 1 hour 45 minutes to reach... but the driver seemed amenable and we all bundled inside. Now, I'm not sure what happened exactly, I think I may have dozed a little, but the next thing I knew, Caitlin was gesticulating wildly and trying to communicate in a mixture of mime and broken English with the driver, and I didn't recognise any of the landscape outside the window... yes, we were lost. The driver stopped in the middle of a 4 lane highway (road rules are optional in Korea at the best of times, so at 4am there's really no rules at all) to ask a police officer for directions, which meant we three had to all sit up straight and look professional and sober, but even the policeman's directions couldn't get us home. We drove around for about half an hour, none of us recognising any major sites (unsurprising as we've only been to the edge of Paju town itself once since arriving), until finally somebody gave us directions that led us.... around the corner to the Village gate. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we had been driving around aimlessly for close to 45 minutes less than two blocks away from the Village. Three cheers for the clueless foreigners.

However, there is a silver lining: I am absolutely determined to (a) get a good map, and (b) learn at least basic Korean very soon....