Well, back in New Hampshire. Lots of rain and wet. Considering that it was monsoon season and rain was expected daily in Korea, it was a good trip weather wise. Much more rain here...
It has taken me a couple of days to finalize this blog, as I have been suffering from a continuation of the GI issues that plagued me on the trip: fevers,excessive sleeping, lack of energy. Another day or two of this and it's time for medical intervention.
Now is the time for a bit of reflection, I suppose, as that is what these journeys are about to a certain extent. I guess I question that to some degree, as a lot of the reason I pursue travel is for the immediate stimulus and surprise, rather than the long term reflective reasons. I believe that is true about me in general on lots of levels. But, reflectively, I'd have to say I enjoyed the trip and am grateful that I was fortunate to go, but Korea did not impress me as did China or Japan. Poor Korea. It is a fine place with friendly hard working people that has been sandwiched between these two east Asian powers playing second or third fiddle off and on for millenia. It's impressive that they haven't let that dim their zeal for overcoming that status. They are still driven in their hyper Confucian nationalistic way to improve. I can't help but think that with the normalization of the current high standard of living that they will ratchet back on their ambition before long. However, with the possibility (probability?) of reunification, they will probably not have the luxury of doing so.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Upgrade!
Business class!
I don’t know how this happened but I am now flying over the sea of Okhotsk on the second deck of a KAL 747. I’ve got no row of seats in front of me and a full reclining seat, video, the works. Maybe the best is that there are only 24 people up here and it has its own bathroom. Just lucky. I checked in with 4 other program participants and the guy asked if I could prefer a seat near the emergency exit (you have to be over 15 and physically able to handle the door,,,) and I said fine, and then he says it is on the 2nd deck, which I have never even seen. I sort of anticipated it was classy up there but it is the nicest set up by far of anything I have done on a plane. Watched one movie so far but wanted to get this down before I went into full recline and possibly nodded off…will try and get photos when I deplane.
Now in Chicago, waiting for my final leg of flying to Manchester. Raining. Probably no views on the way home. Forgot to change my Won at the international terminal so took a bit of a hit, probably $15-20, for doing it in the domestic terminal. I at least was able to do it. Was fearing I’d have to do some kind of Littleton maneuver, which I’m sure would have been worse. Starting to board, gotta go.
Final day
Our final day had an open morning for the shoppers, of which there always seem to be many on these trips, but a number of us went to the Korean War Memorial and museum. It is a very impressive museum, one of the better museums I've visited. On the whole, the Korean museums are very well done. Well lighted, English available, high tech, uncrowded and informative. This one covered virtually every aspect of military history and present day military stuff in Korea. Interestingly, it is across the street from the US base that is right in Seoul that is scheduled to be relocated south of the city. The plan is to make the present base into a large city park. The museum had a nearly full size "turtle boat", lots of early gunpowder weapons, which Korea was the earliest to use extensively to defeat Japan a few times, even though outnumbered, and lots of real airplanes, artillery, etc inside and outside the building.
Outside is an impressive sculpture of Koreans done in the classic Greek frieze style, with smaller figures following ever larger ones marching forward. There is also a moving one of two brothers, one from each side, during the Korean war. I didn't have time to do the entire museum, which was a bummer, and unusual, because most of the time I run out of endurance before I run out of museum.
Had a big farewell dinner on the 27th floor of some building with a nice view, and went through the ceremonies of finishing up. The Korea Society group is staying on for another 3 days.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Back in Seoul
Well, this is likely to be short, got to meet the group soon and yesterday was largely a travel day. We left Gyeongju and took a tour of the Hyundai shipyard. Pretty much a bus ride within the complex. It's the biggest one in the world. Korea is far and away the world's biggest ship builder. Anyway, huge buildings that are really just cranes with roofs lifting a moving sheets of steel to be welded into components for sections that are welded together until it's a ship. THe scale of everything is what does it. The actual building looks pretty straightforward, but everything is so big and heavy. Some 40,ooo people work here in Hyundai city, and they build 100 ships annually.
After that we went to the Korean version of a super Walmart called Lotte Mart. It had interesting architure. 4 levels, groceries on floor 1 then more stuff going up. But each level had it's own parking lot, as you could use ethe parking garage to access any floor. Further, they had huge ramp like escalators that allowed you to take your shopping cart to the various levels. The shopping carts had special wheels that dropped into the ramp grooves and made a brake so that the carts were always stable on the escaltor ramp. That was the best part, I definitely should have been an engineer, this is the type of stuff that catches my interest.
Another tomb made the list of stops, this one a bit different from the others, but mostly becasue of it's rural location and the fact that it still had it's statuary.
Best part of the day, or at lest the most memorable, was beer and bulgogi in a small shop at the end of an alley behind the hotel. It was a point and nod meal. Bulgogi here was fish spam, partially cooked mega noodles in a type of barbecue sausce. It was much better than it sounds, and it was 6000 won for the whole deal, 3000 apiece.
Last day tomorrow, flight out Wed. AM.
After that we went to the Korean version of a super Walmart called Lotte Mart. It had interesting architure. 4 levels, groceries on floor 1 then more stuff going up. But each level had it's own parking lot, as you could use ethe parking garage to access any floor. Further, they had huge ramp like escalators that allowed you to take your shopping cart to the various levels. The shopping carts had special wheels that dropped into the ramp grooves and made a brake so that the carts were always stable on the escaltor ramp. That was the best part, I definitely should have been an engineer, this is the type of stuff that catches my interest.
Another tomb made the list of stops, this one a bit different from the others, but mostly becasue of it's rural location and the fact that it still had it's statuary.
Best part of the day, or at lest the most memorable, was beer and bulgogi in a small shop at the end of an alley behind the hotel. It was a point and nod meal. Bulgogi here was fish spam, partially cooked mega noodles in a type of barbecue sausce. It was much better than it sounds, and it was 6000 won for the whole deal, 3000 apiece.
Last day tomorrow, flight out Wed. AM.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
King for a day!
Good morning. I'm developing a routine here in Gyeongjue of sneaking out of the room with the laptop, taking a walk and then blogging the previous day. Thatis, if you consider two days in a row a routine...we're out of here today. Off to tour Hyundae Industries and then cruise back to Seoul. 
Yesterday was a day of tombs, temples and museums with a bit of teacher fun stuff thrown in. Lots of ancient Korean history here. The Silla royal family is the one credited with unifying the peninsula during the Chinese Tang dynasty, 700 something. This place is their home base, with many palaces and tombs related to their kings and queens. I got to wear a King's outfit that they had at this place where school field trips go to makes little pagodas made of soap and do rubbings of various hitorical thingns. I did the royal observatory and the great bell.
We started at the National Museum, or at least this city's version of it. Even though much smaller, the collection here was very accessible and I enjoyed it much more than the one in Seoul. Of course in Seoul I found a spot on the 4th floor where I could just sit and vege as I was ill. Here I was into the Buddha carvings and again, the skill of the curators to display the artifacts in some pretty spectacular architecture. In the back of one off the four buildings there is a collection of headless Buddhas, kind of an interesting approach... They didn't have any particular explanation for it, but had 3 overall themes. 1- that if a buddha statue is going to break, it will be a tthe weak point, the neck. 2- When the confucians came in and took over for a century or more off and on, they sometimes went on anti Buddhist rampages. (Bamiyan revisited...) 3- The Japanese, of course. Japan is a real historical bogeyman here, and not without reason. Their occupation from 1910-1945 is too recent and the effects too obvious for it to go away. It shows up time after time in place after place.
We got to go into a tomb that had been excavated. There is a section of the city that has these grave mounds and his one has been set up to allow visitors to see the construction from inside, along with some displayed artifacts of the king buried there. The crown I am wearing is representative of the style, and the robe is from paintings, which they commissioned regularly. (That last fact Ii believe is not accurate for the Silla, but is for the Josen, different dynasties.) Got to climb to the top of one after lunch, where we found beer cans and cigarette butts left from someone's lunch...
Went up a long and winding mountain road to a Buddha grotto. After conquering Korea, the Japanese had disassembled it to remove it and reasssemble it in Japan, but thendeecided to stay and colonize the whole peninsula. So they put it back together bt had a pile of leftover parts. Sounds like me and a car repair project. It was nice but too touristy for me.
On and on- to a Buddhist temple halfway down the mountain. Found out that the hanging fish in the Buddhist temple are rattled around from the inside...I'll have to Google that one.
Cool ending to the day was unexpected! AsI was sort of waiting around with a bunch of others organizing for a bit of socializing, i hear some one say "Fitz!" and I get this big kiss and hug. It was Blanche from my China trip. Ii knew that she was in Korea somewhere, but meeting in the lobby of the same hotel was quite a coincidental shock! Anyway, Mimi, from my Japan trip is co leading a trip with her and their group is here at the smae time. I ended up leaving my gang and joining up with theirs for a coffee and some catching up.
Drove up this windy mountain road to a Buddha
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Morning in Gyeongue!
Early morning here outside the Hilton here they are having the 2009 “Save the Hair” symposium. Once again, I wish that I could figure out how to put the photos where I want them…
Yesterday was a long day on the bus. I felt a bit better though, and didn’t run out of energy until dinner time. Today I am up at 5 and walking around and sitting at the bus-stop typing. Pretty geeky, but there is practically no one up and around but a couple of joggers and cab drivers. More and more as I sit here, however, well past 6 now…
Yesterdays big event for me was the triptych Koreana, one of those places that just felt really cool. It’s a bit of a long story, but I’m sure I can brief it down. Back in the 1200’s, just before they did the metal type thing I talked about yesterday, Buddhist monks made wooden carvings of all the religious texts and put them into a huge library. It took over 20 years and there are over 80,000 of them. Not small, either. Each is about 1 foot by 30” and weighs about 8 pounds. They are all carefully marked and numbered. To keep them preserved, they took logs to the ocean and soaked them in sea mud for some period, to soften them and get them salty and mineraled enough to keep bugs away. Then they carved them and stored them, and this is the cool part, they located the “library" up on a mountain side where the breezes and mountain air would keep them preserved. So there a four large buildings just filled with these ancient carved boards. The “library” is surrounded by a temple compound with monks and other support facilities. I’ve always loved moving through big university libraries in the book stacks, but this is yet another step beyond, since the odor is kind of like an old barn. You can’t go in but the buidings are well ventilated and the old wood smell of these 80,000 carved boards all carefully shelved in a building made just for them in this beautiful place is really cool. I circled each buiding twice sticking my face up to the wooden "bars" and sniffing. I cannot think of an equivalent in Biblical, Koranic, or Talmudic writings, nor could the other teachers I conversed with. No idea about the Vedas, if that is even the correct term. Anyway, it’s a really neat collection of 800 year old boards…I was affected.
After that we made rice taffy at a village, ate a few times, walked around some lotus ponds and fed Koi, the huge goldfish they keep in the ponds here. I'm sure we did more that that as well, but still battling the intestinal crud, and the Buddhist temple was the star by far.
Yesterday was a long day on the bus. I felt a bit better though, and didn’t run out of energy until dinner time. Today I am up at 5 and walking around and sitting at the bus-stop typing. Pretty geeky, but there is practically no one up and around but a couple of joggers and cab drivers. More and more as I sit here, however, well past 6 now…
Yesterdays big event for me was the triptych Koreana, one of those places that just felt really cool. It’s a bit of a long story, but I’m sure I can brief it down. Back in the 1200’s, just before they did the metal type thing I talked about yesterday, Buddhist monks made wooden carvings of all the religious texts and put them into a huge library. It took over 20 years and there are over 80,000 of them. Not small, either. Each is about 1 foot by 30” and weighs about 8 pounds. They are all carefully marked and numbered. To keep them preserved, they took logs to the ocean and soaked them in sea mud for some period, to soften them and get them salty and mineraled enough to keep bugs away. Then they carved them and stored them, and this is the cool part, they located the “library" up on a mountain side where the breezes and mountain air would keep them preserved. So there a four large buildings just filled with these ancient carved boards. The “library” is surrounded by a temple compound with monks and other support facilities. I’ve always loved moving through big university libraries in the book stacks, but this is yet another step beyond, since the odor is kind of like an old barn. You can’t go in but the buidings are well ventilated and the old wood smell of these 80,000 carved boards all carefully shelved in a building made just for them in this beautiful place is really cool. I circled each buiding twice sticking my face up to the wooden "bars" and sniffing. I cannot think of an equivalent in Biblical, Koranic, or Talmudic writings, nor could the other teachers I conversed with. No idea about the Vedas, if that is even the correct term. Anyway, it’s a really neat collection of 800 year old boards…I was affected.
After that we made rice taffy at a village, ate a few times, walked around some lotus ponds and fed Koi, the huge goldfish they keep in the ponds here. I'm sure we did more that that as well, but still battling the intestinal crud, and the Buddhist temple was the star by far.
On the road!
Surreal nightmare at the moment, but comical. It’s 3:10 AM on July 4th and I am lying in bed at a Korean ski resort next to a guy named Ed who teaches outside St. Louis. Nice guy, but he has sleep apnea and snores like a chainsaw. I’ve now been sick for three days and am struggling through palace and museum visits trying not to lose it in he bus or in my pants… I’ve read about these types of things but have never experienced one myself. I just can’t seem to shake this bug. Decided that today was the day that I would go for the bip bap bop, a traditional Korean meal that usually contains meat. In fact, we had two big meals today, both which I ate about a cup or two of rice and vegetables. One was this spectacular buffet of stuff, but sadly, I could not take advantage. We are traveling south and then east, and will end up close to the east coast today. On the way we stopped at a restored palace and shot arrows. That was fun, [pretty kid like but it was absolutely a tourist fun thing at the restored palace thing… Then we continued south to a museum on the site of the fist known place in the world to produce metal type, beating Gutenberg by about 70 years. Both are UNESCO world historical sites, which seems to be big here, but I get thee feeling that Unesco is kind of a brand name” for authentic and important tourist site", kind of like piece of the park service in every congressional district…Still, I enjoyed the museum. It had the steps of making metal type all depicted in life size animated diorama form. The talking monks Adam’s apples moved, which I thought was a sign of high quality animatronics. The museum had lots of wood block prints as well, very intricate, all Buddhist texts, most training stuff for teaching new monks. The oldest metal printed book from this place is in France somewhere. The archery and the print museum were the main memories of the day although I did enjoy looking out the bus window between uncomfortable bouts of nausea.
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