Wednesday Review #4

British travel writer Simon Winchester decides to visit Korea in the spring of 1987, just before the Seoul summer Olympics brought the infant democracy and rapidly growing economic powerhouse of Korea to the attention of the world. He follows the path (on foot)traversed by some unfortunate, shipwrecked and then imprisoned Dutch men in the seventeenth century from their wreck site on Jeju island, up along the western coast of the country and on to the Joseon capitol in Seoul. Captain Hendrik Hamel wrote of the sailors' struggles and travels, bringing the hermit kingdom to the attention of the Western world for the first time.

Winchester is an evocative writer. He possesses the talent of capturing characters and giving them an easy voice so that you feel as if you are traveling along with him. His research is also impressive, but effortlessly woven into the narrative. I was especially impressed with his passages on the Gwangju Massacre, as I had heard about the incident, but obviously it is much more distant in memory in 2010 than it would have been 23 years earlier.

This book shook me out of the blase attitude I had begun to effect regarding the country that I now call home. Although my life in Korea has become more "normal," he has revived my interest in travel around the countryside and given me some new places I want to visit. The book was a bit of a time capsule, considering that in 1987, South Korea still had a de facto military dictatorship and barbed wire fences along its coastline to prevent a Communist invasion. However, some things about Korean culture remain stubbornly and steadfastly the same.

The one thing I did not enjoy all that much were his (numerous) encounters with prostitutes. Although there is no denying the sex industry's ubiquitous presence in modern day Korea.

Winchester's Korea is one of drama, of melancholy, of change. It is an interesting, sentimental, and fairly balanced little portrait of one of my favorite cultures.

Ko Chang: An Island Paradise

Unbelievably blue and warm, swimming in the water here was more like soaking in a giant, picturesque bathtub.
After we finished touring Phnom Penh, we hopped a bus that would take us through the land border between Cambodia and Thailand on the Gulf of Thailand all the way to the ferry and then on to the island of Ko Chang, Thailand. Ko Chang is rather large, with several beaches along the coast and lots of mountainous jungle and waterfalls in the center. We stayed in a tiny, rusted-out, dirt cheap bungalow with no air conditioning or hot water, located a five minute walk from Lonely Beach for four nights. It was perfect.


Lonely Beach, one of the less developed "backpacker" beaches on the island.
Ok, I did not plan to get a tattoo. Min Gi has wanted to get one for awhile now, although they are associated with gangsters in Korea and are illegal. (He's a rebel about this kind of stuff. Notice the earring.) But I have never been interested in cutting myself for decoration.

However, in Thailand they use a bamboo needle technique that the artist, a friendly fellow named One, swore to us was less painful than regular tats. Rather than cutting into your skin, they set the ink in by poking you about a thousand times with a very sharp needle. It doesn't hurt so much as tingle. Afterward, the area was a bit sore and swollen for like an hour, but we could go swimming later the same day, which I understand you cannot do with regular tattoos. Min Gi really wanted us to get tattoos together.

I decided that I wanted a moon design because my name, Diana, comes from the Roman goddess of the hunt and the moon (Artemis in Greece). I suggested Min Gi get a sun, but after working with our tattoo artist on my design, Min Gi liked it so much, he decided that he wanted the same one. We each got some Thai writing, mine reads "today" and his reads "Diana tomorrow" because of the song we danced to at the wedding.


Showing off our honey-moon moons. Get it? I know, I groan at my own puns, too.
One day, we rented a motorbike to navigate the winding, mountainous roads along the coast of the island. This is very dangerous. However, it was really fun, and Min Gi is an excellent driver. We made our way to one of the hiking paths for a waterfall and decided to check it out.


Min Gi approves of the waterfall.

However, by far the highlight of our time on the island was taking an all day snorkeling boat trip to some of the coral reefs on the surrounding islands. I had never been snorkeling before, but after a bit of adjusting to the pressure of the mask and breathing through your mouth, I was quickly swimming with the fish. I floated along with iridescent, neon, rainbow-colored fish, darting about giant black sea urchins and clams the size of my head. Absolutely incredible.


Jumping off the second story of the tour boat. I can fly!

I tried so hard not to get sunburn, but I forgot about the backs of my legs while facing down with the snorkel mask and got a pretty nasty burn that faded to a tan you can still see, one month later. Min Gi got burned because he foolishly thought his browner complexion would protect him. He underestimated the power of the sun that close to the equator.

All in all, this was the most relaxing portion of our trip, and the most beautiful views of nature. I would definitely return here for another round in the future:

Ko Chang Album

Jack of All Trades

My husband is on a mission to find out what his true passion is.

After being a computer programmer for a contracting company to Samsung (and getting fed up with the extensive hours and Korean work culture) and then owning his own networking/computer repair business until the world economic crisis dried up contracts, he's decided he no longer wants to do anything with computers for his career. For awhile, he thought he might want to own a bar or restaurant, so he had taken a job as a bartender and that's how I met him, but he's since realized that it's a pretty unhealthy lifestyle. About a year ago, he happened into a nine month contract as a temp for the Department of Labor which brought him a steady salary doing data entry and site visits, but he quit that job so he could take enough time off for the wedding preparations and then our honeymoon.

Although he is now picking up odd jobs with friends, this has left him with a lot of free time. He has started filling it with new hobbies.

One day I came home and was greeted with the question, "What do you think about wire art?"

"Wire art?"

"Yes." He shows me some pictures online. "I want to learn how to make it. I ordered a book about it!"

"Sounds great, honey."

A week later, I find Min Gi on the floor of our bedroom with beads and earring backs and pliers surrounding him. He is making jewelry. Over the next few weeks, he repairs my two broken necklaces and makes three new pairs of earrings for me. Thank you, honey.

"I found a soccer club that meets on Tuesday nights near our apartment!"

"Great, hon!" And let me kiss the knee you've scraped up.

Next, he begins visiting the library every day to read about American culture and study English. He even gets his first library card. He is very proud of this (and rightfully so... library cards are AWESOME). Let's read together, honey.

This weekend he announces that a mutual friend of ours has offered to teach him to play the guitar.

"But you don't have a guitar."

"He has an extra one that he will let me borrow."

After one lesson this Saturday, our house has been filled nonstop with the irregular strums of a beginning guitarist. You're doing so well for just two days, honey!

He hasn't found it quite yet, but at this rate, I'm pretty sure he'll figure out what it is that he truly loves doing. Or at least we'll both be entertained...

I love this man.

Sunday Health Progress 3

This was not a healthy week for me, ladies and gents. On Tuesday (my birthday no less), the yellow dust (황사) arrived and settled in for the next three days. William at dollop of solipsism has a nice post from last year, explaining what yellow dust is. In short, it is an evil, sulfurous devil-cloud from the deserts of China and Mongolia that blows across East Asia with the heavy winds. A while back, it wasn't such a big deal and folks in Korea and Japan hardly noticed it. But thanks to China's raping of the environment rapid development over the last 20 years, many of the natural barriers that used to contain the sands on the mainland are gone, and have been replaced with concrete and steel towers of doom that spew forth pollutants at an alarming rate and attach themselves to the particles that now pelt Korea, Japan, and even sometimes affect the weather across the Pacific.

I tried to limit my exposure, even skipping taekwondo, knowing that my immune system had only recently recovered. Alas, the freezing rain on Thursday did me in, and I came down with a nasty sore throat, completely lost my voice (so I missed work Friday), and have been seriously congested for the last two days. I even had to cancel the birthday party Min Gi and I had planned to host today... darn.

As such, my best intentions health-wise were shot to heck, and I've been subsisting on sweetened crackers (고소미), ramyeon, and gallons of water. I feel better today, now that my body has been able to rest a bit, but I'm not even going to bother with weighing in because my system is screwy (and my salt intake so unusually high), so it won't mean much.

This week, therefore I will get back to my goals I set last week, hopefully with greater success. I have been able to devote more focus and time to my writing this week by stopping watching television shows I just don't care about anymore (there are a few, like Lost, that inspire me creatively and so I just don't want to give them up--yet).

I have also been ignoring things I don't really care about and spending more time on the things I know I do. This feels amazingly freeing. I am very inspired. More than I have been in a few months. Enough so that I might actually be excited about moving back to the U.S. in some ways.

Here's hoping this week is better!

Good Reads from the Blogging World This Week #1

I've been reading a lot of good stuff on blogs, so I thought I'd share some of my favorites from this week with you!

First up, Jason of Kimchi Icecream posted about Cultural Taboos and Native English Teachers in South Korean Public Schools, which is a must-read for teachers new to Korea. He summarizes many of the things I've had to learn "the hard way," such as why work parties are important and how it is best not to be so confrontational, and includes some humorous vignettes of his own mistakes.

Next, Ask a Korean! scores big for directing my attention to two different stories of great interest to me: a humorous article about the history of famous Asian Men-Western Women couplings from another blog, Yellow Fever! The Definitive History of Asian Men Dating Outside Their Race, and a Wall Street Journal article about a swing tribute band that played at Japanese internment camps during World War 2, A Tribute Band Like No Other Swings to Remember Life Behind Barbed Wire.

Dating in Korea's Grace lays the smack down on white male expats who feel the need to aggressively object to Western women dating Korean men in A rant on you, Mr. White Guy. Rock on! Reminds me of my own trouble with that demographic back when I was dating.

In non-Korea-related blogs, Everett Bogue who writes a minimalist living blog, Far Beyond the Stars, wrote some great advice about making money from blogging, The Simple Guide to Making Money Online. While I don't really intend to make money off Going Places, I am interested in using my blog as a platform for launching my writing career in other ways and his suggestions are quite useful for that purpose as well.

Share in the online love!

The Wedding Ceremony

Yes, I realize this is more than two months after the fact. Sorry.

Our swing dance club, Asurajang (아수라장--it means "messy place" in Korean), was the site of our ceremony and buffet. The lighting is just awful, but our friend Juno managed a few decent photos:


Of course, the photo session at the nearby Buddhist Temple during the day by our friend Julian turned out much better.

We had a 25-minute, completely bilingual/bicultural ceremony. Our Aussie friend Leah and Korean friend Hayoung serving as bilingual MCs. The ceremony consisted of a dance performance by my sister to Leona Lewis's "Bleeding Love", a speech from each of our younger brothers that left us a bit weepy, a bowing ceremony to my parents and Min Gi's mother and cousin (the oldest male relative), reading our vows (written by me, translated by Ju-ick) to each other in Korean and English, and then a dance performance from Min Gi and I to "I Love You More Today Than Yesterday," choreographed by our friend Gong-Bi.

After the Korean buffet dinner (which was cheaper catered at the club than a less yummy meal would have been at a wedding hall), there was a swing dance party on one floor, and drinking/toasting relatives on the buffet floor. Min Gi and I only lasted until about 10 p.m., but good times were had by all.

We got to share our day with so many friends and family members that although it seemed over so quickly (compared to the amount of time we spent planning), it remains forever in our memories and hearts. I cannot thank our guests, family, and friends enough--who all supported us in various ways, from assisting with the decorations to taking pictures, gratis, to showing my family around Daegu and Seoul. I'm still all misty and emotional just thinking about it.

Reflections on Genocide

Excavated mass graves at the Choeung Ek site. Each of the 29 graves contained remains of more than 100 bodies; the largest had almost 400.
Located 17 km outside of the capitol city, the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek have been preserved as a memorial to the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge against the Cambodian people between 1975 and 1979. Similar execution sites have been found throughout Cambodia containing the remains of more than 2 million people brutally executed by the Khmer Rouge. Min Gi and I visited in the early morning, just as the school children were biking to the nearby school.


The "Magic Tree" where Khmer Rouge soldiers would hang a radio to blast propaganda to drown out the cries and screams of the prisoners. There was also a "Killing Tree" where soldiers supposedly smashed infants' skulls against to save money on bullets.
A Buddhist stupa was constructed at the site to honor the dead. The stupa contains many of the remains found in the grave sites, including clothes and bones of the victims, preserved as a religious monument. There is also a small museum on the grounds which includes a small documentary movie theater and some of the weapons used for execution.


Clouds reflected in the tiered stupa
After spending about three hours walking around the grounds reflecting on the events that occurred at the site (we were the first ones there and there were very few tourists until just before we departed), we went into to town to see the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. The museum is housed in the former Khmer Rouge prison, S21, that served as a holding and torture center for people later executed at the Choeung Ek fields.


Classrooms converted into tiny brick holding cells.
The prison was a former secondary school. It was eerie to see how starkly the cheery, yellow-tiled, institutional floors contrasted with the preserved cells and torture devices and other exhibits. Of the estimated 17,000 prisoners, only 12 were known to have survived, four of whom are still alive today. One documentary at the museum had a former Khmer Rouge soldier and a former prisoner touring the site again, together, describing the torture techniques that were used.


An individual torture room for the most "dangerous" prisoners.
Overall, the morning was sobering and a little depressing. I learned a lot about Cambodia's dark and recent history, and I hope to learn more in the future. What's so unimaginable is that the United Nations allowed the Khmer Rouge oppressors to represent Cambodia's interests until 1993. Western countries' role in the atrocities in Cambodia (and other parts of Asia for that matter) make me ashamed of my country.

The Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Genocide is impossible for me to understand.

It took a long time for me to accept that reality. When I was young, I thought (naively) that I could figure everything out if I just thought about it long enough. I wanted to believe that we could study these mistakes and learn from our collective historical mistakes. I believed in the power of humanity to improve itself. That "world peace" was possible--and even could be achieved within a lifetime.

I remember reading everything I could about the Holocaust and Stalin's regime to try to understand how people could participate in mass murder. I very quickly realized that the perpetrators of the worst violence were not all psychopaths. It's too easy to simply label the soldiers "evil"--they were often relatively normal, somewhat idealistic young men and women. Even the leaders maintained a distance from the worst of the atrocities, making it less immediate. And after awhile, one stops feeling like there is a big difference between 2,000,000 and 2,000,001 people killed.

I still don't know how to reconcile the existence of such evil with my understanding of people, who I believe generally act in ways they believe are good and right. No one is the villain of their own story. But then, how do these things still happen? I don't know. I really don't...

Phnom Penh: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Min Gi finds a missing piece of a temple outside the National Museum.
If Cambodia is a country of extremes, then Phnom Penh is an appropriate capitol. PP has some amazing riverside restaurants and awesome cultural sites (though they kind of pale in comparison to the Angkor sites), but it's also a very dirty city, full of in-your-face poverty. While dining, we were constantly approached by children selling things and beggars missing limbs. I had read about this before I came--often these children and disabled persons are serving an abusive boss who takes most of what tourists give them in exchange for (substandard) group housing. But bighearted Min Gi found it too difficult to resist giving something to the people. I do not begrudge him this, although I warned him we weren't really helping out that much and reinforcing the exploitation of these vulnerable populations.


The Royal Palace dominates the center of Phnom Penh's cityscape.
After our day of touring the sites in the city, we tried to visit the Apsara Arts Association, a nonprofit organization that trains street children in traditional Cambodian dance. However, when our tuktuk driver, Maak, took us out to the theater, they were closed until March! We were a bit disappointed, but then Maak suggested that we visit an orphanage instead. He took us to buy a 50 kg bag of rice for a donation, and we went to the National Action Culture Association (NACA) Orphanage to spend an hour or two with the children.

They were so eager to see us and perform some of the dances they were learning. The girls just loved touching my hair and skin and holding onto every available part of me. The boys fought each other to play rock, paper, scissors with Min Gi. Although it was a little strange visiting the orphanage as a "tourist" site, we felt much better after spending some time entertaining these very eager children. I did not feel comfortable taking pictures, since we were only spending one day there and not actually volunteering, but I won't ever forget those kids.

I encourage you all to consider donating or sponsoring a Cambodian orphan through the CamKids, the Cambodian Children's Charity. If you are going to be in Cambodia and would like to volunteer with NACA, you can e-mail the director: naca.orphanage@gmail.com. They are also looking for corporate sponsorship and to be picked up by a larger NGO if you are associated with such and looking for a good project.


An advertisement for the Korean pop group, SHINEE, performing in PP.
We had learned in Siem Reap that Korean tourism to Cambodia has increased dramatically in recent years. Apparently, the "Korean Wave" is real, but it only exists in SE Asia. Last year, in Vietnam, I heard a lot of WonderGirls. This year, Min Gi and I saw a bunch of young people dancing the "Sorry Sorry" dance in the main park in central PP. (Coincidentally, Brian has brought some Korea-Cambodia issues to light in his blog recently.)

I have elected to save the Killing Fields and Toul Sleng Genocide Museum for their own post. Until then, enjoy the rest of our pictures from our last few days in Cambodia:

Phnom Penh

Floating Village near Siem Reap

The Floating Village moves with the tides.
One afternoon, our tuktuk driver, Tee, offered to take us a few kilometers out of town to see the floating village on Tonle Sap, the largest lake in Southeast Asia. Originally founded by immigrants fleeing Vietnam during the war who were unable to afford land in Cambodia, the village is completely self-contained, with a school, church, basketball court, and alligator farm.


Yes, that's right. An alligator farm.
Unfortunately, pollution in the lake threatens the livelihood of these already impoverished fishermen, and tourism (and the begging of tourists) has become one of the few sources of income needed to sustain their way of life. Perhaps my awakened interest in simple living recently was partially inspired by what I saw in Southeast Asia--people living lives with so few of the amenities that we believe are "necessary" these days.


Children paddling home from school.
On the boatride to and from the village, T and the boat driver spoke with us about the economic situation in Cambodia. The government is viewed as very corrupt by the people. One example of their corruption is that they don't allow independent tour boat operators; they will only allow certain companies (who probably bribe the government officials in return for huge kickbacks) to operate the boats and while they collect a huge fee from the tourists, the boat operators make a pittance.

To see the rest of the pictures along with some I took from around the town of Siem Reap, click here:

Floating Village Tour and Around Siem Reap

It would not be until we got to Phnom Penh that we would understand how recent and deep the wound the Khmer Rouge cut through the heart of this beautiful, once-supreme Khmer kingdom of Cambodia truly was. I wonder how long until she can recover and when my country, the U.S.A., will recognize its own horrific contributions to the nightmares that people living in Southeast Asia still remember...

Visiting Pohang with the In-Laws

Look at my snazzy new facebook and tweet buttons. Yay! Anyhow, on with my story...

On Sunday, the weather was cold and windy, but quite beautiful. Min Gi and I joined his family and went out to Pohang, a small seaside industrial town.


We ate giant crabs (대게). Expensive (what you see here was 150,000 won for the five of us), but very delicious.
Then we drove to the easternmost point on the Korean peninsula, Homigot (호미곶), where a giant hand sticks out of the sea and another out of the plaza near the lighthouse.


I will defeat you, giant sea-hand!

High-five!
Then, Min Gi and I went hiking on Waryong, a small mountain park behind our apartment building. (I also forgot my camera, so all of these were taken on his phone camera... ha!)


Enjoying the view.

Pohang