Seoul is a huge city. That fact cannot be understated. It’s different than any other city I’ve ever been in. There are no houses, no multi-families. There aren’t any townhouses or adorable little apartments overlooking the river. Seoul is a full of apartment complexes that are astonishing in their size. They house enough people to fill a small American town. The complexes are full of 20-story buildings; over a dozen of them. In terms of efficient housing, it’s hard to think of a better way of packing people together in such a small space. In addition to this, Seoul doesn’t look like the average American city in any way. The downtown is not full of astonishingly large buildings. Even if it was, one would be unable to tell, as the numerous apartment villages block the view. Instead of the “traditional” setup with a size taper proportional to the distance from the city center Seoul is perpetually 20 stories tall. The Seoul metropolitan area is the second largest in the world. Put simply, there are a shitload of people here.
The most obvious thing about these people is that they’re all Asian. This may be an obvious statement, but it is shocking how homogeneous the Korean population is. This is made abundantly clear to any White person wandering around Seoul. While walking around the historic National Palace my Korean friend informed me that one of the little girls visiting the site yelled out “foreigner” in an excited voice as I walked by. It was driven home when walking in the traditional Korean shopping district he pointed out how many White people there were walking around. Including me, we totaled 3.
This is not to say that people treat you poorly for being White. Hell, the average Seoul citizen might see upwards of 2 White people a day. It’s more like you’re an interesting oddity. And to be fair, I understand. By the second day there I would become notably excited whenever I saw another White person. It’s almost like the games you play as a child in the back of a car on a long road trip, the difference here being that instead of looking for a cow pasture or Michigan license plate you’re looking for somebody without black hair, or who might actually get a sunburn. And if you were playing White people jeopardy, seeing a Black person is like picking the daily double.
Despite all my fun being the final space in “weird things to see in Seoul bingo” it was about time for me to leave for Daejeon to start school. One final thing I needed to acquire was a few passport photos for the forms I would need to fill out when I arrived. To do this, my friend took me to a photography studio near his house. One thing you notice in every house in Korea are the large framed family photos. There is the standard full family picture as well as a picture of the adult children taken around the start of college. In addition, there may be pictures of every possible combination of two family members. For fun, they might even throw in a picture of the family pet. The national love of portraits means that there are cheap photography studios on nearly every corner. The one my friend took me to seemed fairly straightforward. My friend explained that I needed a few passport photos. The man told me to sit down. He then barked orders at me in Korean while motioning for me to tilt my head to the left or right about 2 degrees. It was reminiscent of the elementary school photographers who would make you sit on a stool and turn your head until you were eventually looking over your shoulder while saying “Great. Just a bit more. Yeah. Just a smidge more. Just a bit. Good. Gooood. Just a bit more. Perrrrrfect!” 30 minutes later I held the pictures in my hand. They were about what anybody would expect from passport photos except for one aspect. They had been photoshopped. I have to admit that while light photoshopping on a portrait may make sense, the reason behind photoshopping passport photos to improve somebody’s appearance escapes me. In addition, this wasn’t a minor touchup. I ended up looking like an overly airbrushed magazine cover model. It was just like one of the examples that you see on the internet where the person has lost a leg or has an arm sticking out at entirely the wrong angle. This worried me. I was concerned that perhaps I’d be apprehended at the airport, documents in hand, with somebody shouting at me that the picture presented clearly wasn’t of me. I pondered this point for a while. In the end though, I’m pretty sure it won’t matter, because as everybody knows, White people all look alike.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Arrival, Getting Lost, and Naked People
So I’ve decided to start a blog (which I hate with a fiery passion) on my trip to Korea. I do this out of a sense of self-preservation because rather than spending all my time telling everybody individually how my trip is going, I can shout it into the ether that is the internet, feel content in my efforts, and go out drinking instead. So in the direction of that noble cause, I present you all with the first few days of my Korean adventure.
My trip got off to a blistering start, with an all-nighter the night before designed to help prevent jet-lag by screwing up my sleep schedule enough to just slip into Korean time. I must say that at this point it has worked quite well. Besides one night of going to bed around 9 PM, I have found the transition pretty easy. However, not everything went so smoothly. The most obvious example of this would be one of my friends confusing the date of my arrival, meaning that I was stuck at the airport calling around with a borrowed cell phone attempting to get somebody I knew in Korea to come collect me. Luckily another one of my friends living in Incheon (a city just Southwest of Seoul) came to my rescue. With a posse including his mother and sister we went out for bulgogi, a Korean beef dish that one cooks at their table. I was informed at this time that his house was too messy, so my friend, his sister, and I would be sleeping in a bathhouse. This is clearly not something that would happen in America. In fact, the whole bathhouse experience is bizarre enough that it warrants its own paragraph.
A bathhouse in Korea is very much unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in America. To begin with, you pay, and then the men and women separate. Next, you walk in and take off your shoes (something I’m rapidly getting used to) and place them in a locker. You then proceed to exchange the shoe-locker key for a clothing-locker key in a bizarre and surprisingly inefficient process. Additionally, you are given a baggy pair of shorts and a shirt. Perhaps you wander into the bathroom, where you notice that in each stall there is an ashtray, as well as bad poetry/maxims posted on the door for your reading and contemplating pleasure. So far, not so strange. It is at this point however that you notice the large number of naked men wandering around, blow-drying their hair, cleaning their ears, etc. This is clearly the part that your Korean friend has been carefully warning you about the entire time, as “You may be uncomfortable. Korea is very different from America.” After stripping down and storing your clothes you proceed to the shower, sauna, and hot tub room. It turns out that Koreans have a strong affinity for heat, so pretty much everything in the country is somewhere in the range from hot to cook-you-alive. This includes the food, the floors, the seats on the subway, and the 100 degree Celsius saunas. While almost everything in this room is boiling hot nobody seems to mind very much, as it is, much like everything else in this country, “good for your health.” The best way to describe the place would be to imagine the bathhouse scene from Eastern Promises, but with less tattoos and knife fighting and more Asian people. After spending your time in the saunas and hot tubs you get redressed in your baggy clothing and head down to sleeping room. Down there they have multiple places to eat, televisions always showing Korean soap operas, swings, hammocks, cave-like cubby holes, more saunas, heated floors, and pads to sleep on. This is also where you meet back up with the opposite gender. It is clearly a place that groups of friends and couples go to hang out and sleep for the night. What is less expected are the many families that spend the evening sleeping on the floor of a bathhouse rather than the beds of their own houses. This whole bizarre sleeping arrangement would all be fine and good if it weren’t for the incessant snoring on the night I was there. Three old men were keeping me awake each sounding like either the traditional suffocating pig, the less traditional blowing bubbles in milk, or the even more strange blowing raspberries in a walrus’s stomach. Needless to say, I did not get much sleep.
I mentioned earlier that pretty much everything in this country is deemed good for your health. This cannot be understated. At various points, I’ve been told of soup that is good for cancer, digestion, and “men’s health.” I’ve been told that drinking water with your meal is bad for digestion, and that sitting halfway in a hot tub is a good method for losing weight. To imagine how universal this is here, it would be like walking into a McDonalds in America and having a friend tell you that cheeseburgers are good for headaches, fries are a good treatment for gout, and McNuggets cure lupus. I have a strong feeling that I will come back to America as the healthiest man in the country.
At any rate, that seems to be a good summary of my first 12 hours in the country. Seeing as at this rate I'll end up with something the size of the collected works of Dickens by the time I'm done I certainly won’t be updating quite so often. Keep tuned anyways. Up next: free unsolicited photoshopping.
My trip got off to a blistering start, with an all-nighter the night before designed to help prevent jet-lag by screwing up my sleep schedule enough to just slip into Korean time. I must say that at this point it has worked quite well. Besides one night of going to bed around 9 PM, I have found the transition pretty easy. However, not everything went so smoothly. The most obvious example of this would be one of my friends confusing the date of my arrival, meaning that I was stuck at the airport calling around with a borrowed cell phone attempting to get somebody I knew in Korea to come collect me. Luckily another one of my friends living in Incheon (a city just Southwest of Seoul) came to my rescue. With a posse including his mother and sister we went out for bulgogi, a Korean beef dish that one cooks at their table. I was informed at this time that his house was too messy, so my friend, his sister, and I would be sleeping in a bathhouse. This is clearly not something that would happen in America. In fact, the whole bathhouse experience is bizarre enough that it warrants its own paragraph.
A bathhouse in Korea is very much unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in America. To begin with, you pay, and then the men and women separate. Next, you walk in and take off your shoes (something I’m rapidly getting used to) and place them in a locker. You then proceed to exchange the shoe-locker key for a clothing-locker key in a bizarre and surprisingly inefficient process. Additionally, you are given a baggy pair of shorts and a shirt. Perhaps you wander into the bathroom, where you notice that in each stall there is an ashtray, as well as bad poetry/maxims posted on the door for your reading and contemplating pleasure. So far, not so strange. It is at this point however that you notice the large number of naked men wandering around, blow-drying their hair, cleaning their ears, etc. This is clearly the part that your Korean friend has been carefully warning you about the entire time, as “You may be uncomfortable. Korea is very different from America.” After stripping down and storing your clothes you proceed to the shower, sauna, and hot tub room. It turns out that Koreans have a strong affinity for heat, so pretty much everything in the country is somewhere in the range from hot to cook-you-alive. This includes the food, the floors, the seats on the subway, and the 100 degree Celsius saunas. While almost everything in this room is boiling hot nobody seems to mind very much, as it is, much like everything else in this country, “good for your health.” The best way to describe the place would be to imagine the bathhouse scene from Eastern Promises, but with less tattoos and knife fighting and more Asian people. After spending your time in the saunas and hot tubs you get redressed in your baggy clothing and head down to sleeping room. Down there they have multiple places to eat, televisions always showing Korean soap operas, swings, hammocks, cave-like cubby holes, more saunas, heated floors, and pads to sleep on. This is also where you meet back up with the opposite gender. It is clearly a place that groups of friends and couples go to hang out and sleep for the night. What is less expected are the many families that spend the evening sleeping on the floor of a bathhouse rather than the beds of their own houses. This whole bizarre sleeping arrangement would all be fine and good if it weren’t for the incessant snoring on the night I was there. Three old men were keeping me awake each sounding like either the traditional suffocating pig, the less traditional blowing bubbles in milk, or the even more strange blowing raspberries in a walrus’s stomach. Needless to say, I did not get much sleep.
I mentioned earlier that pretty much everything in this country is deemed good for your health. This cannot be understated. At various points, I’ve been told of soup that is good for cancer, digestion, and “men’s health.” I’ve been told that drinking water with your meal is bad for digestion, and that sitting halfway in a hot tub is a good method for losing weight. To imagine how universal this is here, it would be like walking into a McDonalds in America and having a friend tell you that cheeseburgers are good for headaches, fries are a good treatment for gout, and McNuggets cure lupus. I have a strong feeling that I will come back to America as the healthiest man in the country.
At any rate, that seems to be a good summary of my first 12 hours in the country. Seeing as at this rate I'll end up with something the size of the collected works of Dickens by the time I'm done I certainly won’t be updating quite so often. Keep tuned anyways. Up next: free unsolicited photoshopping.
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