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My Dairy of Korea Travel June 13, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Aquarium, France, Hotels, Japan, New York, Restaurant, Seoul, USA , trackback

No sooner does midnight flight 007 take off for Seoul than the stewardesses change from military uniforms and New York-style indifference to flower-patterned kimonos and oriental manners: quick, short bows at every contact. A “heavy snack” is served: hors d’oeuvres (ginseng root), a “starch” course (”France fried potatoes”), bulgogi (marinated beef), and kimchi (fermented pickle of cabbage). The menu reproduces a Yi-dynasty (1392) embroidery of the mythical bird Bong Hwang, which “luckily foresaw coming catastrophe of the country.” The pilot’s English and Korean are indistinguishable, but the all-night TV advertising of duty-free products is mercifully silent.

The seven-hour lap to Anchorage ends with a shocking—it is 2:00 A.M. local time—outburst of rock music. When we are airborne again, a midnight-blue dawn begins to break over the shimmering lights of the city and harbor, but we plunge into darkness for the remaining eight and a half hours. The approach to Seoul at sunrise replicates a Chinese painting: morning mist, glittering wet land in the low tide along the shores of the Yellow Sea, sinuous rivers, humped mountains with terraced rice-paddy slopes. The green of the valleys, parceled by irrigation ditches, is far richer and deeper than the summer landscape of the upper New York State I have just left. As I deplane, a bowing stewardess thanks me for flying with them

Travel GuidebookIn the dense traffic from Kimpo Airport to the center of the city, mammoth trucks threaten to crush my tiny taxi. The road signs, on the south bank of the Han River, are in Korean and English, and the ubiquitous “dong” (as in the one with the luminous nose), meaning street or area, is probably all the Korean I am likely to learn. The buildings, new high-rise monstrosities, and the poetic willow trees lining most of the road, could hardly be more incongruous. The only reminders of an earlier time are an old man pushing a cart, a woman with a load strapped to her back, and another, younger one, carrying a basket on her head. The Han is wide but shallow, as the sandbars and dredging machinery indicate. Crossing the last of several low bridges, we begin the steep ascent to the Sheraton Walker Hill, where the desk clerk says that I was expected yesterday, a confusion attributed to the crossing of the International Date Line, and have been written off as a no-show. While waiting for a room, I window-shop in the basement among the watered silks, lacquer wares, bamboo trays and mats, lavishly costumed dolls.

Fixtures and furniture are scaled to the small Korean body, which makes for awkwardness in the bathroom. My sixteenth-floor window looks toward the Han in the center, to a large new section of the city on the right side, and wooded and farm lands extending to the Chinese-shaped mountains on the left. Immediately below is an Olympic-size swimming pool and a large red balloon trailing a Coca-Cola advertisement.

The headline story in the English-language Korea Herald is devoted to a U.S. General’s announcement that “GIs in Japan are ready for Korean action, the North being capable of invading the South, and the United States committed to defend the Republic of Korea.” The General “sincerely hopes” that “no situation will develop on the Korean peninsula that will require the use of nuclear weapons,” which is another way of saying that they are already here. A sheet inserted in the Herald, “Aid to Current English,” lists as today’s word assignments “orchestrate” (nothing to do with music), “break,” and “broke.” The examples for the last two are: “Can you break a bill of 10,000 won” (pronounced wawn), “Give me a break,” “The company went broke,” and “Someone broke wind.” The Korean versions of the first three of these sentences are the same length as the English originals, while that of the indecorous last one is twelve lines long. “Dear Abby” is the feature of the other English-language newspaper, the Korean Times, which also has an article attributing AIDS transmission to “homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians”; several letters to the editor protesting the false picture of Korea in MASH; and a report from Japan on the replacement of workers by robots, a process the Japanese Labor Ministry justifies not as economy but as part of “the search for higher precision and quality.”

The Romanization of the Korean language follows two radically different systems, with the result that the Ministry of Education’s maps and those published according to the international McCune-Reischauer method do not conform. The M.O.E. replaces k by s, p by b, ch by j, r by 1, n by r, and adds the silent English e to o, as in “Seoul.”

Walter Gillessen, the German resident music director of the Korea Philharmonic, whose 255th subscription concert I am to conduct, talks to me about his recent trip in the south. The country is an armed garrison on wartime alert, he says. This does not surprise me: early this morning I watched a long convoy of open trucks rattling beneath my window, transporting soldiers in camouflage uniforms. Moreover, a blackout has been announced for 9:30 P.M. tomorrow, and a midnight curfew is always in effect, foreigners and hotel nightclubs exempted. All newspapers are censored, which is to say that Rim Young Sam, who advocates democracy, is never mentioned in them, while every word of the dictator President Chun is reverently reported.

Gillessen says that while only a year ago the orchestra’s principal players were European, the personnel is now entirely Korean. He advises me to stay away from local inns unless I have a strong sense of adventure: the floor beds and pillows are too hard for sleeping, and cockroaches are abundant.

To Inchon, returning by way of Chilbo Temple and Suwon. Since tomorrow’s rehearsal has been canceled, I try to cancel the driver who was to havetaken me, but he says, “I wasn’t coming anyway because tomorrow is my day off.” Willows border both sides of the Seoul-Inchon expressway, but they do not conceal the “industrial miracle” of faceless factories and apartment houses behind. The man in the tollbooth bows to me as my driver pays the token.

Unlike the people of Seoul, many Inchonians are dressed in the style of an earlier period, the men in loose white blouses and pants fastened at the ankles, the women in long skirts and turbans, carrying their children on their backs. The harbor is said to be the largest in the world in tonnage as well as area, but it has few docks, all short; large ships are anchored offshore, where smaller ones load and unload them. The waterfront is a long row of restaurants whose street levels are aquariums of squid, eel, crab, lobster, and fish of every size, stripe, design, color. When the customer points to his choice, the proprietor scoops it out of the water with a net, serving it, cooked or raw, in second-story dining rooms.

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