Happy New Year from Cotonou Benin!

I owe you all an explanation.

When I was in high school, I used to joke that my plan after graduation was to disappear for a few years. My friends would all wonder where I had gone until one day, they'd see me in the background of a photo of some dusty African border town that had been published on the front page of the New York Times. (This was back when people still got actual newspapers delivered to their homes).

"Is that…Jake?" they'd ask. They'd look closer and sure enough--a lanky dude with a spot on his head and a doofy grin on his face. "Huh, I always wondered what happened to him," they'd muse, before turning back to their morning coffee.

Well friends, this isn’t a New York Times cover photo (have you ever tried photobombing one of those?), but is probably as close as I’m going to get to that dream (and frankly a lot closer than I ever thought I’d get). Here I am, coming to you live from Cotonou, Benin.

We moved here two weeks ago, right before Christmas and just as a raging global pandemic was hitting its third, and highest, wave in the US.

(I know what you’re thinking—are they morons? And the answer is, quite possibly yes. But Santa found us all the same. The guy really is magic.)

My wife, Devon, had landed a job as Deputy Chief of Party for a USDA-funded project supporting cashew farmers and processors in Benin. And despite the fact that we had both been working remotely since mid-March, supporting cashew farmers and producers is not really the kind of thing that you can do via Zoom.

So, not 24 hours after helping my parents dig out from the nor’easter that had dumped over a foot of snow on their small Connecticut town, the four of us (me, Devon and the two kiddos, 5 and 2) stumbled off of Air France Flight 804 and onto the tarmac at the Cotonou Airport. It was 9:10pm local time, and I was already regretting the flannel and jeans I had been wearing when we left.

We boarded a shuttle which dropped us in front of a large white tent. Inside, the four of us had our brains swabbed (at least it felt that way) and our fingers pricked for our COVID tests. Another shuttle took us to the terminal—a large stuffy room with linoleum tiles and painted cinderblock walls—where we waited and got our passports stamped (immigration kept them pending the results of our COVID-tests). We collected our luggage, loaded it up onto a couple of carts (we had a lot of stuff! Our shipment doesn’t arrive until mid-February) and stepped out into the night.

 We had arrived.

 * * *

A Note: I'll be primarily sending these out as emails (but also posting here in case anyone wants to drop by). My goal here is to send them out once every week or so—to pick up the thread of writing that I dropped when Devon and I moved back from Korea and share a little bit about life with a family in Benin. Hopefully these notes won’t be too long and hopefully they’ll be at least mildly entertaining. If this isn’t your cup of tea, if you have no idea who I am, or if you just don’t care (which, fair enough and no hard feelings), feel free to unsubscribe. If you think you know someone who might be interested in this, they can sign up to receive updates here.

Thanks for reading! And Happy New Year!

All the best,
Jake

Don't Forget to Look Up, or Why I hate Lonely Planet

Over at Foreign Policy magazine, Michael Moynihan launches a broadside against popular travel guides, Lonely Planet and Rough Guide for excusing brutal dictators and whitewashing authoritarian regimes:

"There's a formula to [the guidebooks]: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable rejection of globalization and American hegemony. The hotel recommendations might be useful, but the guidebooks are clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing."

I'm not really going to touch on the political issues here - though I do find the suggestion that by visiting North Korea or Burma (before the recent reforms) you can somehow help ameliorate the lives of people living there naive at best. At worst, telling you that you can visit these places without financially supporting brutal regimes is delusional and grossly irresponsible.

By all means visit North Korea (lord knows I want to). But do not delude yourself into thinking that you are somehow going to peel back the heavily restricted official curtain and learn something "true" about regular North Koreans or that your mere presence there will help promote freedom, as if it wafted off of you like the scent of a red, white, and blue rose (Go America!).

But what really gets me about LP is the way that it's positioned itself as the guidebook for "Travelers," as opposed to "tourists," a distinction made in a recent NYTimes piece, "Reclaiming Travel." Travel is deep, and meaningful while Tourism is cheap, thin, and superficial. Lonely Planet promises that their guide will take you beyond the "Tourist traps," and show you the "authentic" side of whatever country you are visiting - that they can give you an "insider's" understanding of a place that you will be spending a week or a month breezing through. In short, that they will make you a "Traveler" not a "Tourist."

But an incident in the edition of Southeast Asia on a Shoestring that D and I bought for our trip through SEAsia drove me nuts. Somewhere in the section on bus travel through Thailand, the authors write something along the lines of the following: (I'm paraphrasing from memory here since the book is either buried in a box in my attic or at D's house):

If you ever find yourself on a long-distance bus in Thailand, and notice that all the Thais are sitting on one side of the bus, don't silently cheer your good fortune at scoring a whole row of seats to yourself. Thais have an instinctive ability to tell where the sun is at all times of day, and you can be sure that the empty side will be scorching hot as soon as you get going. Suck it up and join the locals on the crowded side.

Think about this. Thais have an instinctive ability to tell where the sun is at all times of day."  Thais are magical, in possession of some mystical knowledge that has been lost to Westerners. They all sit on one side of the bus not because they're hot, but because they have some magical ability that you don't. You know, the magical ability to look at the fucking sky you moron.

This mindset is destructive for a number of reasons. It fails to recognize a culture for what it is. It forces that culture into a box based on the pre-conceived notions of the traveler/guidebook writer (in this case, that Thai = mystical). When people visit a country expecting to have certain "authentic" experiences ("authentic" being something they've defined for themselves before even stepping foot in that country), the tourism market in that country naturally caters to those expectations, whether or not those expectations bear any resemblance to reality. (Which is fine by the way, Thais gotta make a buck).

But this mindset also requires nothing of the traveler. That NYTimes article I spoke about above came fairly close to enraging me though, in principle, I agreed with its recommendations: Get lost, wander around, talk to people, learn something about the place you are visiting and about yourself. These are all things that I try to do when I visit a new place, and things that I think, makes a trip more worthwhile and more fun. So why was I so mad at the NYTimes piece?

It was the way that this Traveler vs Tourist setup is used by LP and others that made me angry. "Traveling" requires people to think - think about yourself, think about where you are, about why the people there do what they do. It is only by thinking that we can learn anything about ourselves or the country we are visiting.

But by telling its readers that Thais have an instinctive ability to tell where the sun is at all hours of the day, LP  is telling its readers that they don't have to think. That they can just put everything Thais do (sitting on the same side of the bus) into this pre-conceived "mystical" box, and that's that.

In addition to LP, so much about the "Travel" industry is predicated on showing you what's "authentic" in a country. Eat at this authentic restaurant, go on this trek to that authentic village, look at this authentic temple. This is authentic culture. You don't have to think about anything, because we'll tell you how it is. By selling you on the idea of turning you into a "traveler," these books are just turning you into a tourist.

My Summer Vacation! (Finally)

At the end of July, Devon and I were lucky to have her Mom and sister Ashley come to visit us for a week and a half.  We hit the usual touristy areas Seoul and Busan, the less usual, but equally as touristy Geojedo and Oedo, and the unusual, and not very touristy, but spectacular Jinju.

I took pictures of everywhere we went - well most everywhere since I came down with a minor bout of gastroenteritis which turned into an acute gastroenteritis halfway through our trip, caused by either the slices of raw chicken or 9 month old margarine that I had eaten the week prior.  Whatever it was, it put me out of whack and in a mood that wasn't very conducive to taking pictures.

Still, I persevered, and with the help of Korea's finest medicines, managed to drag myself and my camera out of our various hotels.  These photos (more can be seen at http://picasaweb.google.com/melvillj) are the result of that trip.

We started our journey in Seoul shopping along crowded artisan streets, in jam-packed markets, and in the swank downtown area with all the famous brands.  Somewhere in between, we managed to ride a cable car up to the top of Namsan, one of Seoul's many mountains and the only one with a 497 meter tower on the top where we were treated to a view of the full enormity of Seoul.

Like I said...Seoul is BIG

I'd always known Seoul was big - some 40% of Korea's population lives in or around the capitol, but to seeing apartment stack after stack dissolve into the summer haze put a new perspective on the size.  I can climb a mountain in Gwangju and on even the haziest days see where the city ends and the farms begin.

After Seoul, we jumped back to Gwangju for one last day of teaching before the official vacation started.  As soon as school let out, we were on our way to Busan, Korea's second largest city and home to it's most famous fish market.

In Busan, we eschewed the tower on the mountain in the middle of the city and instead wandered through the maze of alleys of the Kukje Market.  We didn't buy much beyond the odd pair of socks and the lunch we ate sitting on tiny plastic stools in front of a gregarious ajumma serving us noodles in plastic bowls in the middle of one alley.

It was in Busan that my "mild" case of whatever it was I had turned "acute," and so we went to the hospital in search of aid and stronger antibiotics.  When we arrived, a very helpful nurse who was obviously used to dealing with lost and stricken foreigners ushered me into her office and told me I'd have to wait for 45 minutes while the doctors finished their lunch.

I had mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, I really appreciate a country that places such a strong emphasis on lunch while at work.  It shows that at least someone has their priorities in order.  On the other hand, being told to wait 45 minutes with an acute case of whatever it was wasn't fun.  I'm just glad I didn't ruin their meal.
An hour later, we departed the hospital with my stronger antibiotics and headed towards Beomeosa, Busan's largest and most famous temple.  It's located about a half hour outside the city by train, and right as we got there the weather decided it would start to rain.  Hard.

The Entrance to the Temple

The temple was beautiful, but the antibiotics hadn't kicked in and besides it was raining, so you'll have to settle for pictures from the last time Devon and I went to Busan (it was much sunnier).

The temple in the Mountains.  Note the sun

The next day, we headed to Geojedo where we'd finally get to see Oedo.  In case you don't know, last summer Devon's parents visited us, and the one place Devon and her Mom wanted to see was this island - described in guidebooks as somewhere between "Paradise" and "Heaven."  It was a private island that some guy turned into an opulent tropical garden paradise and opened to tourists.

The entrance to Paradise

But last year, with some apocalyptic traffic and a ferry that didn't take cars, we were forced to skip the island altogether.  Devon and I made it as far as Geojedo earlier this year, but didn't have enough time to cross the island and quite frankly had no clue how to get to Oedo, and so we left it unseen.  This was the one place Devon wanted to visit before she left Korea.

Somehow we figured out how to get there, and boy oh boy were the promotional materials right.  It was Paradise - beautiful blue sky, lush green vegetation, and statues of every kind everywhere.  I was reminded of the real estate magazines I used to flip through as a kid, dreaming of owning a villa on the French Rivera or some Mediterranean Island somewhere...

Mediterranean Dreams

After being dragged kicking and screaming off of Oedo, we booked it to Jinju, a smallish city about halfway between Gwangju and Busan, located on the beautiful Nam River.

Jinju by night

Way back when, Jinju was the sight of a huge fortress and a couple of ferocious battles with the Japanese.  The first ended in glorious victory for the Koreans, the second a couple of years later ended in crushing defeat and the deaths of some 70,000 Korean soldiers and civilians.  After the battle though, Non-gae, a Korean "professional female entertainer," drowned herself in the river with one of the Japanese Generals. 

Brave woman

With both the first victory over the Japanese and the story of Non-gae, Jinju has taken a special role in the Korean psyche (the Japanese brutally colonized Korea for 35 years back in the early 20th century).  Today, the fortress has been rebuilt and a museum highlighting both Korea's long history and the 16th century war with Japan has been added.  Both are pretty interesting. 

View of the fortress

But Jinju was more than just forts and museums.  The best part was how small the city seemed.  Families wandered around the fortress grounds at night, enjoying whatever respite from the heat of the day they could get.  I wandered along the river banks (the antibiotics finally kicked in), and stumbled across a summer festival, complete with a battle of the bands competition and children playing in fountains.

The right way to beat the heat

Far from the crowded chaos of Seoul, or even the bustle of Gwangju, Jinju felt like a real community.  I felt like everyone in the city was out that night, walking along the river and enjoying the reflections of the bridge in the river like so many stars.

My favorite picture from the whole trip

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Check out more pictures from the vacation here

Deluge

Monsoon season has started, and with it has come my nightly 4am wake up to crashes of thunder rolling through curtains of pouring rain.

These days, I just roll over and go back to sleep, or I stay up and watch the lightning bounce off the buildings outside our window, but a year ago, when D and I had just arrived and still gawked at the squids and octopuses (octopi?) in the tanks outside of the restaurant across from our school, I would panic.

Not the cute panicking of a ten-year old hiding under the sheets until the loud noises stop, but the paranoid panicking of a (nearly) full-grown man who in a half-awake delusion is utterly convinced that the North Koreans are dropping bombs on his new home.

I'd lay awake for what felt like hours, listening for any sign of Kim Jong-Il's fearsome infantry as they swept through Gwangju, rounding up all foreigners to be sent to a concentration camp somewhere, lest they be spies of the hated imperial dogs. I'd run through a mental checklist of the things I'd need if I wanted to escape – a pocket knife, some rope, my camera in case I saw Dear Leader or anything that might interest the CIA, and maybe a bottle of water. I'd plan my escape route – there's a mountain behind our apartment that I could run up and hide in for a couple of days, though surely the Communist army would search the woods once they secured the city. I figured I had a couple of days at most to try to get to the coast and find a fisherman who could take D and me to China or Japan. (Seriously, I planned this stuff out).

These days, I enjoy the crashing thunder when it wakes me up. I expect the nightly downpours that drown the city every night and carry an umbrella whenever I go out. And I no longer freak out when North Korea threatens to turn Seoul into a "Sea of Fire" as it did recently after they were accused of sinking a South Korean ship. The Koreans I work with aren't worried, and besides, Gwangju is a long way away from the border, and close to the ocean, so we'd probably have plenty of time to escape to China if Dear Leader gets any crazy ideas.

One year already?

The first real "Korean" image I have is from our first bus ride to Gwangju from the airport.  We were sitting in huge pleather-covered chairs, trying to sleep in the blue light from the HD TV at the front of the aisle.  I gazed out of the window at the night rolling past, hoping to catch a glimpse of the country I had moved to.  For a long time I just watched the highway fly by, orange concrete surrounded by black.  But then we drove by a city.

Endless rows of buildings towered over skinny roads, tall and narrow and long.  Electric signs crowded the buildings, neon red and green and yellow flashing like a mini Times Square on every block.  "This is so cool," I thought as the neon swirled past in the night.

* * *

One year later and I still find myself thinking that.  Sitting on top of a mountain at midnight, gazing out at Gwangju's orange and purple lights that twinkle in the haze while friends chitchat in the shelter behind me.  Launching roman candles in the middle of a bustling traffic circle with children and grandfathers into the night sky, the cacophony of a festival mixing with the smell of gunpowder and horses.  Watching fishing boats chug around the blue waters of the South Sea from a sleepy beach town as an ajumma picks onions across the road behind me, I think  "This is so cool."

I'm lucky, in a way, that living in Korea still retains enough of the "exotic" to provide fodder for stories that friends back home will find interesting.  But it's not when I'm eating soup made from congealed pig's blood or dressing up in a hanbok at my boss's request that I really feel satisfied.

For a long time - since at least high school - I knew that I wanted to go abroad.  I didn't just want to travel, I wanted to live and work in a different country.  It's why I studied International Affairs, and it's why I went to GW.

When I stand on top of the mountain, and think about where I am and what I'm doing and how much I simply love my life right now, I'm awestruck.

To be two years out of college, and in the exact position you hoped to be is a strange feeling.  There's a sense of "Mission Accomplished" sure, but I'm also acutely aware of how lucky I am to be here.  For so many people here, and for so many friends back home, the job is a stepping stone, a temporary stop on the way to fulfilling their career or life goals.  Maybe I'm generalizing a bit too much, so I may get into trouble, but it seems that while most people my age are where they hope to be at this point in life, they're not where they hope to be in life--not yet.

Standing on top of that mountain, I realize that this is it.  This is where I want to be--in life.  Period.  I spent the better part of the last seven years trying to get here, and I love it more than I ever thought possible.


It's incredible to have reached a goal.  It's thrilling to have been so right in setting that goal. But it's also a little scary.  What if this is it, and it's all downhill from here?  What if I've peaked too early and I have to spend the rest of my life working some dreary job chained to a desk as my friends trot around the globe and live glamorous expat lives abroad? (not that desks are all bad, I have many fond memories of desks)

But then some shopping center's lights will be shut off, or a car screech will jolt me back to reality and I'll notice the lights from the farms twinkling off in the distance and I'll think to myself, "This is so cool."

Don't worry, we're OK

Hello,

Devon and I are coming up on finishing our first year here, and I was in the middle of writing a post looking back when I got a bunch of messages from friends and family back home all asking essentially the same thing: "Are you alive?"  So I figured I'd deal with those first.


This whole incident started back at the end of March when a SK warship the Cheonan broke in two and sank after an explosion near the Northern Limit Line (the maritime border between the two countries-disputed by the North since it was unilaterally drawn by the Americans after the Korean War), killing 46 South Korean sailors.  Reportedly, it was highest number of South Koreans killed in military action since the end of the Korean War.


After a lengthy investigation, the South formally accused the North of sinking the ship (not that the outcome was ever in doubt, a ship blows up in disputed waters along the most militarized border on the planet, and you'd be forgiven for jumping to conclusions).  Reaction was swift: propaganda speakers were erected (threats were made to blow them up), economic ties were cut (except for a multi-million dollar joint venture industrial park at Kaesong), and the US Secretary of State planned a visit to Seoul.  All very serious stuff.

So I stand on the front lines of one of the more recent international crises in history, and I have to wonder - should I be scared?  I decided to ask some people who had more experience dealing with an unstable tyrant - my Korean partner teachers.

"Do not worry," said Alex, the director of my school.  "It is just Lee Myung-bak (the President of Korea) trying to scare the old people into voting for his party."  I remembered that Korean provincial elections are June 2nd, and immediately had flashbacks to 2004 and the constantly changing terrorist threat level.

"It is not something to think about," said Luna at lunch.  "I think about when will I get married?  When to have a baby.  What the weather will be like."  (At first I thought she meant for the weekend, but later I realized she meant global warming).

"This always happens," said Mickey.  "We are used to it.  Every three or four years, something happens.  And it never leads to war.  Only arguing."

"It is the same thing always," Ellie reiterated.  "Every time there is an election, the politicians exploit it to scare the people into voting."

Jay just laughed at me and started making plans for the weekend.

I looked out the window and realized that I hadn't heard the squadron of fighter jets fly over Gwangju any more than was normal.  Seoul was still bustling, and the local mega mart hadn't yet sold out of duck tape.  For now, I feel fine.

Gwangju News - Blossoms to Bottle Rockets: Jinhae’s Cherry Blossom Festival

This is the second of two pieces I wrote for the Gwangju News, a magazine for the international community in our city.  Since the pieces haven't been published on their website yet, I'm posting them here for everyone to read.  If you want to see the piece as it appears in the magazine (including pictures), let me know and I'll give you the .pdf.  Enjoy! 

* * *

We arrived on a crowded city bus from Masan, rambling down a hill covered in fluffy white trees. The driver stopped at a wide traffic circle, and we were swept off with the rush of passengers onto the sidewalk.

My girlfriend and I had come to Jinhae to welcome spring, continuing a tradition begun as students in Washington, DC, where we would walk hand-in-hand in the shade of freshly-blossomed cherry trees, jostling with hundreds of other bumbling tourists for the same prized view of the Jefferson Memorial across the Tidal Basin framed by that one perfect blossom-covered branch. 

Though the Jefferson Memorial was some 7,000 miles away, we were determined to carry on our tradition as best we could – which meant jostling with hundreds of other tourists for the same prized view from the top of Jehwangsan at Jinhae's Cherry Blossom Festival.

Held annually in the smallish port city just outside of Busan, the festival commemorates the beginning of spring, and the life of Admiral Lee Sun-shin who defeated several Japanese invasion attempts in the area. Various cultural events are held throughout the two-weeks of the festival, though the main event is the streets and hills of Jinhae which explode in pink and white for only a couple of weeks.

The festival conjures up mental images of an idyllic walk along the picturesque Yeojwacheon stream, your companion's face dappled by the shadows of cherry blossoms as you munch on snacks purchased from a truck. Or maybe you dream of climbing Jehwangsan's 365 steps (one for each day of the year) to take in the sweeping view of the city from the top of Jinhae Tower, stopping to snap a few artistic shots of lovers feeding each other kimbap on a bench under a branch of white flowers. Don't feel like all those stairs? That's okay, there's a rail car that shuttles up the elderly, infirm, and out of shape, though you'll miss the fortune tellers and palm readers that ply the shady steps to the top.

As we wandered through the streets, shaded by the ubiquitous cherry trees, we soon became distracted by the carnival-like atmosphere going on around us. There was food everywhere. Men spun cotton candy like Rumpelstiltskin and ajummas flipped pa-jeon loaded with peppers, scallions and squid as giant cauldrons of soup bubbled next to them. Men pulled fish and shrimp, octopus and squid, sea cucumbers and those weird red pinecones from boxy blue tanks and served them under a tent with a bowl of maekgoli. Entire sides of pigs roasted over open charcoal next to a tent that may or may not have served whale and roasted baby chicks (I didn't ask).

But not everything resembled an exotic foods show on cable, on every street corner stood a cart peddling familiar snacks. Dried cuttlefish hung from hooks, awaiting the jaws of a shredder. Vats of bundigie (silk worm larvae) bubbled infernally next to roasting corn, and skewers of mysterious meat rotated delectably over electric burners.

We washed down our lunch with a couple of beers in the center of Jungwon Rotary, watching the people enjoy the afternoon. Young lovers took photos of themselves, oblivious to the teenagers playing soccer with an empty coconut next to them. Children frolicked, playing with balloons, bubbles, and their newest carny prizes while making faces at the foreigners.

Our beers finished, we ventured into the tent-city once more, hoping to win one of those helicopters the kids were playing with at one of the carny games. The weighted cans seemed to magically repel the baseballs we threw at them, the basketball hoop seemed too small for the ball, the BB gun didn't shoot straight, and the eel we dropped into the water swam into the wrong divider.

At night, we settled back on the lawn in the rotary to watch the final night of the festival. The smell of roman candles mingled with the traffic cop's whistles and the whinnying from the speakers of the horse-drawn carriages. A small child, barely old enough to venture out of his stroller, waved around a roman candle that had only seconds earlier been launching sparkling white bursts into the sky. We ducked. An ajossi glared at us for an uncomfortably long time, then offered us some of his smoked cuttlefish.

The morning after, we woke up early. The streets were quiet and mostly empty from the night before – as if the whole city had stayed up too late playing with fireworks. Even the cherry trees showed signs of hangover – many of them had lost their petals, and so the sidewalks looked like they were covered with snow in spots. Roving bands of youths threw them at each other – a springtime snowball fight.

I bent down to throw some at my girlfriend when a cloud of white and pink exploded around me. I ran down the street after her, already plotting how I'd get her back next year. 

To get to Jinhae, get on city bus #760 at the stop across the street from the Masan Express Bus Terminal. After 20 minutes, get off at the big traffic circle. The Cherry Blossom Festival is held every year for two weeks at the end of March to the beginning of April.

Gwangju News - Miracle on the Mountain:Haeinsa, Temple of Dharma

This is the first of two pieces I wrote for the Gwangju News, a magazine for the international community in our city.  Since the pieces haven't been published on their website yet, I'm posting them here for everyone to read.  If you want to see the piece as it appears in the magazine (including pictures), let me know and I'll give you the .pdf.  Enjoy! 

* * * 

We left the city limits and soon we were driving through freshly-plowed fields still shrouded in early-morning mist. It always surprised me how suddenly Korean cities ended without any of that suburban sprawl that I was used to back home. The towering futuristic apartment blocks gave way to old farmland so abruptly, it was as if they had been dropped in from space, squashing some poor farmer planting rice and seriously ruining his day.

The bus continued onwards through the idyllic countryside. A couple of ajussis in front of us chattered like schoolboys, pointing out the window at unknown sights as the bus drove on. Muddy brown rice fields spilled down the side of the mountains before settling into valleys. A girl in a pink sweatshirt watched us indifferently as we passed through her small farming town: a cluster of houses and sheds, a mini-mart, a school, a salon and a norae-bang. The two-story buildings were dusty and faded, and I was reminded of a drive through the town in the Shenandoah Mountains in western Virginia where my Mom grew up.

After an hour or so, we arrived at a bustling tourist village nestled in between two large mountains. A short hike through the woods brought us to the entrance to Haein-sa, one of the Three Jewels of Korean Buddhism. Haein-sa, the 1200-year old temple of Dharma represents the teachings of Buddha. It is home to the Tripitaka Koreana, the oldest and most complete collection of Buddhist scriptures carved onto 81,258 wood blocks sometime during the 13^th century.

Tourists and the faithful shuffled through the gate and up the steep stone steps to the entrance. An elderly woman stopped at the top to bow before entering the temple courtyard that was bathed in sunlight.
Administrative offices, an information center and two separate gift shops occupied the buildings surrounding the courtyard. In the center, a large maze-like design was made from stones set into the ground. Parents walked through the labyrinth slowly and quietly, with their hands together while their children scampered around the twists and turns, peals of laughter ringing through the courtyard.

The woodblocks are kept in four 700-year old storage halls at the top of the temple complex. Inside, tall racks of woodblocks stretched down the long halls loaded with hundreds of woodblocks. Official-looking people walked around, warning us to put our cameras away; there would be no pictures of the woodblocks. A man hawked prints in the courtyard.

Though the halls' varying shades of brown were aesthetically simple by Korean temple standards, the methods to construct them and preserve the woodblocks are surprisingly complex.

Large windows were spaced at even intervals around the buildings, and when I peered into the darkness for a better look at the woodblocks, a soft cool breeze blew through thick wooden bars that obscured my view—strange because the air outside was perfectly calm.

Our guidebook noted these methods and others, and with some awe pointed out that they have yet to be matched by modern science. An attempt was made in the 1970s, but was abandoned after test blocks began to mildew.

That I was peering through the windows at these blocks in the first place struck me as the greater miracle. These blocks had survived 700-some years of Korean history: the fires that had destroyed the temple time and again, but left the storage halls untouched, foreign invasions that sought to wipe out Korean culture but ignored the woodblocks, and a civil war that bombed and shelled the country into rubble but spared Haein-sa because of an insightful, observant Korean pilot who remembered what treasures it held.

It's easy to forget the length of Korean history when most buildings I see were built in the last 60 years, when ancient temples still smell of fresh paint, and when Gyeongju seems more modern resort than historical capital.

Peering through the bars at these woodblocks however, I saw tangible evidence of that history. Just as the Gutenberg Bible is remembered not only as the first printed copy of the West's Holy book, but as the beginnings of a printed revolution that would culminate in the Enlightenment, the Tripitaka Koreana seems significant not as a complete, errorless copy of Buddhist scripture, but as proof of an ancient history, cultural relics to remind Koreans of their past.

To get to Haein-sa, take a bus from Daegu's Seobu Bus Terminal (1.5 hours) to Haein-sa. When you arrive, walk back down the road, then follow the signs up the path to the temple. Admission is free. Temple stay programs are available, call (055)934-3105 for information.

Discovering the Korean Spirit: Jiri Mountain

They say that the spirit of the Korean people flows from here at Changwongbong, the summit of Jirisan, the highest mountain on the South Korean peninsula.  It was easy to see why.  Even in the haze of the mid-afternoon sun, we could see for miles, the mountains stretching beyond in fading shades of blue until they disappeared.  From where I stood, 1915 meters above sea level, I was not only privy to one of the most spectacular views in the country, I was also the tallest person this side of the DMZ.

It was an arduous journey to the top, made harder still by the bottle of soju and six rolls of kimbap weighing my pack down (three each chicken and tuna), but for once in my short mountain-climbing career, I didn't feel completely out of my league.  Looking back, I suppose the fact that my chest was heaving like a toy boat in a tempest and my legs were cramping from the strain of the first hour of hiking should have told me that I was in fact, out of my league.  But the the ajummas I passed on my way up the 60-degree trail looked like they were having a harder time of it than I (nevermind that they were 40 years my senior), and so my confidence was buoyed.  Usually, they're passing me as I huff and puff up an endless flight of stairs.  Score one for youthful exuberance.

We camped at the Rotary Shelter, described in promotional materials as little more than a hut with no toilets or running water, perched precariously on the side of a mountain.  In reality, it was a log cabin with stinky toilets perched precariously below Bopgyesa, one of the highest temples in Korea.  The only water source at the shelter was a spring bubbling from a rock a mere 30-meters uphill, at the entrance to the temple, making a midnight drink impractical, but for those with enough foresight to fill up their bottles before embarking on the two kilometer journey to the summit, it was a heavenly gift.

Rules at the shelter were rigidly enforced: lights out at 8pm, no eating or drinking inside the bunks, and boys and girls sleep separately.  At first the early bedtime sounded ridiculous (were we at summer camp again?), but the effort of hauling myself 1600 meters up the side of a mountain made me too tired to complain and most of us were fast asleep on the hard wooden floors of the shelter when the lights went out.

Early to bed, early to rise, and the next morning we awoke to watch the sun rise from a specially-built balcony at Bopgyesa.  I had to forgo my usual morning coffee due to a lack of hot water (powdered latte doesn't dissolve as well in cold water), but the rich reds of the temple against the pale blue mountains was enough stimulation to wake me.

An early-morning hike to the summit found me for the second time in as many days scrambling up a trail more suited to goats than reckless twenty-somethings.  Someone recounted a legend about a group of North Korean soldiers hiding on the mountain after the Korean War.  It took the southern government something like four years to find the communists in the rugged terrain.  I believed it.

Just before the summit, the trail devolved into something resembling a rockslide more than the well-traveled path that it was.  We scrambled up the rocks with the help of one heavy-duty rope, dragged ourselves up one final flight of stairs, hauled our aching bodies to the top of a small rocky outcropping, and gazed down at the morning mist hanging in the pale blue valleys below.  We followed the lead of those around us and kissed the stone marking the top, the Korean spirit filling our tired bones.

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If you haven't seen my pictures from this weekend, go look at them now!

Cooking Korean

I recently decided that after nine months of living in Korea, I had better start learning how to cook some of the local food.  There's only so many times you can have pork with ginger and soy sauce before it starts to get old, and since Koreans seem able to cook a wide variety of dishes with what's available at the market, I thought I'd give some of those dishes a shot.

I found a helpful website (which I urge those of you playing at home to try out as well - www.mykoreankitchen.com) with a ton of Korean recipes written for the foreigner in mind (they're all in English).

For my first forays into the wide world of Korean food, I tried to recreate some of our favorite dishes from school (where Devon and I are lucky enough to be served lunch every day).  I figured this was a smart bet for two reasons: one, we could be fairly confident we'd like whatever it was I was making (no surprises like squid or silkworm pupae) and (I think more importantly), we'd have an benchmark to see how close my attempts came to "authentic" (aka. ECC cafeteria) Korean cooking.

I selected two meals: a spicy chicken and potato stew and bulgogi perhaps Korea's most famous dish.

Last night, I made the chicken stew, and for the most part it was good.  I added an extra cup of water to the recipe because the stew looked too thick while it was cooking, which wasn't such a good idea--turns out I don't know more than a Korean when it comes to Korean cooking.  It came out thin, and though it was flavorful, the flavors weren't as strong as they should be.

At school it comes in a thick, heavy sauce that's amazing on rice.  The blistering red-pepper paste contrasts beautifully with the caramelized sugars to create a dish that is both runny-nose spicy and dessert sweet.  This is perhaps the least "Korean" of the food we eat at school, though it may be because it's a chicken dish (most Korean food seems to have pork, beef, or the oceanic bounty in it).

For dinner tonight, I tried my hand at the bulgogi, sort of a stir-fried marinated beef dish.  The marinade took longer than I had anticipated to prepare, because of all the chopping and grating, though maybe it was just because I was unprepared.  Hopefully next time it'll go smoother as I work the kinks out.

Both dishes were easy enough to prepare though the chopping took long enough.  Once everything was ready though, they were incredibly easy to cook 5-minutes in a wok for one, an hour over a low flame for the other.

If any of you at home want to try either of these out, I'd recommend the bulgogi.  It isn't as spicy as the chicken dish and most of the ingredients should be readily available.  If not at the supermarket than at the local Asian market.

If you decide to make it, just follow the recipe for the marinade and dipping sauce.  To eat, just wrap it in lettuce and enjoy (the recipe calls for rice paper and perilla leaves, which are good, but unnecessary for enjoyment).  Serve hot and enjoy!

  Just don't forget the rice...

Engagement Special

Mom, Alysse, Megan, Kalli? Remember how you joked with me before I came to Korea? How you said I'd come back with a wife and a kid?

Well, stop laughing. It's not as funny when it's true.

In my defense though, I was tricked. Turns out you can't trust a seven-year old Korean girl, no matter how innocent she may appear.

I suppose I should explain myself a bit before wedding plans get made. Last Friday our school had a big celebration for the preschoolers who graduated to elementary school. After the graduation ceremony was a "variety show" featuring groups of preschoolers in ridiculous outfits dancing suggestively to selections from the canon of Korean and American pop while foreign teachers danced competently behind them.

Sprinkled between the dance routines were short skits starring both preschoolers and the foreign teachers.

My skit was about helping foreigners. I was told to go onstage, recite a few lines, then repeat what Lily, my 7-year old costar said to me. Easy enough.

The skit opened at an airport. Exhausted from a long flight and alone in a country I knew next to nothing about, I met Lily at the gate, a friendly Korean girl who offered to help me learn the ropes. "I'm so glad to meet someone who speaks English! This is my first time in Korea, and I don't know anything! Can you help me?" She said something in Korean to the audience and agreed.

After a lengthy bout of Korean speaking, she asked me if there was any Korean I wanted to know. Whatever you just said, I thought, but decided to let it wait. "Greetings," I answered. "I want to know greetings."

"When you greet someone in Korean, you say 'Sarang-heyo!'" she said as she hugged me.

Weird. On the plane, I had read in my Korean culture book that 'sarang-heyo' meant 'I love you.' And I certainly wasn't sure I was supposed to hug everyone immediately after meeting them. But then again, I'd also read that Koreans are a very friendly and welcoming people. And anyways, when an adorable girl hugs you, you hug back. "Sarang-heyo!" I said dutifully, as the parents chuckled quietly.

Later, we went to a restaurant and ate some sort of delicious rice dish while Lily said something to the parents. The food was so good I asked Lily how to say "It's delicious" in Korean.

"Nah-wah kyeol-hone hey-jwoh" she answered, down on one knee with her hands raised, palms up.

I paused. This whole knee thing was strange, I thought. But what did I know? I was a newcomer to a strange and foreign land. Their customs were different from ours. If they got down on one knee to praise the deliciousness of the food, who was I to judge? Maybe it was some sort of legacy from the poverty following the Korean War, kind of like thanking your host for preparing such a delicious, life-sustaining meal.

I could feel the parents watching me. How would I react to this strange new custom? Would I refuse to partake? Would I mess it up? I decided it was better to just follow Lily's example. I got down on my knee and raised my hands, palms up like she showed me.

"Nah-wah kyeol-hone hey-jwoh!" I said as loudly as I could, beaming at Lily proudly. 

I'd done it, my first cross-cultural learning experience! I had eaten a strange and delicious food, and complimented the chef in her native tongue! Maybe this whole cultural assimilation thing wasn't so hard after all! The audience cheered wildly.

In a flash, it was over. While I was congratulating myself for having successfully navigated a small part of Korean culture, Lily was snapping a pair of pink fuzzy handcuffs around my wrist. Before I could even grab my suitcase, Lily dragged me off stage left to the sound of the parents hooting and hollering.

"What was with the handcuffs?" I asked Monica, one of the Korean teachers backstage.

"Do you know what you just said?" she asked, laughing. "You asked her to marry you." 

I'd been duped!

Instead of being about how to help foreigners, the skit was about how to trick them into marrying you! It all made sense now. The too-friendly girl at the airport looking for the first foreigner to step off the plane looking completely and utterly lost. The knowing smiles and laughs from the audience as I greeted her. It was all just an elaborate guise to trick a foreigner and find a husband! And I fell right into her devious little trap!

I'm going to see what I can do to work this out over here. Devon's not too happy about my engagement to a seven-year old student, and I'm already feeling intense pressure to impress Lily's parents.

But if I can't figure this out and break the engagement, Mom and Dad, you might be getting some angry phone calls from a couple of Korean parents wondering where their future son-in-law is. If that happens, just pretend to not speak English and hang up. Go for some random language that nobody speaks, like Korean. That should fool them.