Just a quick note to point anyone who’s interested to a piece I wrote for Culture+Travel, a magazine that covers some cool, off-the-radar stories from travel destinations around the globe. This one’s about haenyeo, Jeju’s famous women divers, who free-dive — that means no air tanks — for seafood off Jeju’s coasts. A guy named Ian Baguskas, which is an awesome last name if ever I’ve heard one, took the photos.

You have to marvel at a country that, when looking for a way to show its commitment to peace, chooses to blow something up. That’s North Korea, which this week detonated the cooling tower at its controversial Yongbyon nuclear reactor as a way of saying, hey, we’re laying off the nukes. As a result, the U.S. has removed the DPRK from its list of states that sponsor terrorism and lifted some economic sanctions.

Not everyone believes the explosion means much, which is no surprise, given the North’s history of grandstanding, bloated rhetoric, lying and misguided attempts at image management. There are skeptics who say getting rid of the tower, which the New York Times calls a “technically insignificant structure, easy to rebuild,” is pure theatre, signifying nothing about more important disarmament efforts and perhaps suggesting that the North has done what it intended to at Yongbyon: produced enough nuclear weapons that the plant is no longer needed. (more…)

JEJU-DO—Coincident with the US beef kerfuffle sizzling in South Korean politics right now, I’ve been learning a lot about barbecue, through marathon grill-out sessions with my American friend Mark, his trusty portable Weber and his copy of grill maestro Stephen Raichlen’s fat BBQ bible, How to Grill.

According to Raichlen, when cooking beef, the ideal setup is to have a so-called “three-zone fire”—a situation in which the charcoal is distributed such that one area of the grill is super hot (for searing), one medium hot (for through cooking) and one cool (for when you need to save the meat from immolation). What can now be confidently called the political crisis in South Korea, spurred by US beef imports, has put SK’s president-for-now Lee Myung-bak squarely over the hot zone of the metaphorical grill, and the question now is how long he can burn before he has to jump off completely. (more…)

JEJU-DO—Restrictions on importing American beef into South Korea were set to be lifted this week—as of my writing this post, the government has delayed lifting the restrictions, but given no details on how long the delay will last—and from the shitstorm the move has caused, you’d think they were about to start selling American-made heroin cakes or child prostitutes from Miami. The Korean media is filled with beefy editorials, stories about beef-related protests, beef-laced apologies from politicians, warnings about killer beef diseases, and celebrations of pork as a nationalistic, non-insanity causing alternative (due to an outbreak of H5N1, chicken is also out).

The uproar is ostensibly a public health issue, spurred by the spectre of a frothy-mouthed demon cow bent on infecting the whole Korean population. Critics cite the potential dangers of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) , which most of us know as mad cow disease, as reason to uphold restrictions on US beef imports, especially high-risk material like spinal cords and brains (yum!). (more…)

JEJU-DO—History usually gives Gutenberg the credit, but some sources say Korea invented movable metal type. Good old Johannes didn’t start pouring his molds until about 1450, but in 1234, during Korea’s Goryeo period (from which the country’s present name derives), a guy named Choe Yun-ui is said to have used movable metal type to print the Sangjeong Gogeum Yemun, a collection of ritual books. The earliest extant book printed with metal type is a Buddhist text called the Jikji Simcheyojeol, from 1377, also a Goryeo document. Clearly, it’s not just kimchi we have Korea to thank for.

This little bit of history is consistent with Korean’s incredible respect for language. On the various occasions when I’ve asked my students who they consider to be a great Korean hero, an overwhelming majority of them cite Sejong the Great, the Joseon-era leader who invented hangeul (or hangul), the Korean alphabet system that’s still in use today, and which linguists generally recognize as one of the best writing systems ever created. Imagine asking a seven-year-old from Kamloops whom they admire and having them answer Tommy Douglas, because of the way he revolutionized health care in Canada, and you get a picture of just how revered Sejong and his invention are in Korean culture. (more…)

JEJU-DO—I’ve been meaning to respond to a reader of my post on weird Korean stuff, who suggested that I should have included kimchi. There’s a good reason I didn’t. For every item on that list, I’m sure you could find at least a few Koreans to vouch for its weirdness—someone to say, “Listen, I agree with you: It’s a little off that my kid wants to stick his finger up your ass.”

I don’t believe there is a Korean person alive or dead who would concede that kimchi is weird. Nor, having lived in Korea for more than a year, am I able to do so. (Smelly, yes; weird, no.) In Korea, kimchi is more than a foodstuff. It’s a national icon, a cultural treasure, a palpable expression of the country’s feisty spirit and determination throughout history to grow and protect its own unique soul—to resist wholesale assimilation into the more megalithic cultures of Asia, through culinary defense. It’s a cure-all, a protective shield, a magic balm and a goddess of plenty. Without kimchi, Korea would not be the same country—there might be a nation in the same place, and it might even be called the same thing, but it would not be Korea. (more…)

Behind the toilet isn’t usually the best place to look for treasure. But at the Kimnyong Maze Park, a “symbolic hedge maze” located just outside the fishing village of Kimnyong on Jeju’s northeast coast, that’s where you’ll find it. It comes in the form of one Frederic H. Dustin, the seventy-eight-year-old founder and proprietor of the park, who planted the first sapling for the maze with his own hands, and who happens to be the foreigner who’s lived in Korea independently longer than any other — a kind of Ur-waygookin who predates the explosion of the ESL industry by at least a couple decades, and therefore has a lot of interesting stories to share from the time before it was common for white people to enjoy eating fermented cabbage in sour hot pepper-and-fish paste. (more…)

JEJU-DO—I was pleased when I clicked on the thumbnail cover of the new print issue of The Walrus and found John Reardon’s “Kim Jong Il: The Script Notes.” In planning posts for this blog, I’d recalled my trip to Beijing last October, when my fiancée and I visited a tiny shop above a hostel near the Sanlitun district that had recently been turned into the new home of Pyongyang Art Studios, a place to buy propaganda booklets, cigarettes, posters and various other trinkets from the DPRK. A lot of the stuff was pricey and of questionable value beyond kitsch, but I jumped at the chance to purchase a small green volume entitled Great Man and Cinema, a collection of anecdotes about Kim Jong Il’s contribution to the study and production of movies, published in 1998.

Kim’s affection for the celluloid art is well known. There is a famous story about how Kim, wanting a director who could fully realize his vision of a perfect socialist cinema, kidnapped South Korean filmmaker Sin Sang-ok and forced him to create a series of movies based entirely on his own whims.

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(Formerly Ten Essential Korean Oddities; title changed because I could use $300,000.)

JEJU-DO—Calling another culture’s products or practices strange is always risky business—one man’s emetic is another’s hors d’oeuvre. I always cringe at shows like Fear Factor, not because it pains me to see women with plastic boobs heave said boobs at the prospect of eating grubs and such, but because it promotes a fear of the unfamiliar that contributes to cultural alienation and prejudice. (“Like, eew, Iraqi Camel Spiders—those crazy Arabs will eat anything!”) (more…)

JEJU-DO—Just weeks after the New York Philharmonic tried to bring a little harmony to Pyongyang, Kim Jong-il has once again begun making noise about attacking South Korea.

In statements from Pyongyang released this week, the rotund little North Korean despot has insulted new South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, threatened “catastrophic consequences” if Lee continues to push for stronger ties with Washington, and, in a flourish of rhetoric that makes him worthy of comparison with Iranian president (and sometime blogger!) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, pledged to turn the South to “ashes” with military strikes.

He’s backed up his words by expelling 11 South Korean officials from an industrial park in Kaesong north of the DMZ, and by launching a volley of short-range missiles in the West Sea, where dozens of soldiers from both sides died in naval skirmishes in 1999 and 2002. He’s promised to suspend all relations with the South if Lee doesn’t back down in his resolve, and even gotten his state-controlled KCNA news agency (which, oddly, I can’t seem to access from here) to declare that the peninsula is on the “brink of war.” (more…)

JEJU-DO—One of the weirder things about living in a country as ethnically homogenous as Korea is that you constantly, and in earnest, get to refer to people as foreigners. As in, “Can you believe what that foreigner is wearing?” or “This place is lousy with foreigners!”—statements that would easily get you branded as a racist or a bigot or just a prick if you uttered them in Canada, but which sound completely natural here when used to refer to oneself and anyone else who doesn’t consider pickled radish kimchi to be a perfectly reasonable breakfast food.

This can be partially attributed to Koreans’ own tendency to call out foreigners whenever they encounter them. Walking along the street on Jeju-do, it’s common to see a Korean person look at you with mild surprise, turn to his or her friend and exclaim something like, “Oh my, a foreigner!” then giggle like they just farted in church. The Korean word for foreigner is 외국인 (pronounced “Waygookeen”), and since it’s one tidbit of Korean that most foreigners recognize, this practice is roughly equivalent to walking around, say, Spadina and Dundas in Toronto and exclaiming, “Whoa, check it out—Chinese people!” then tittering conspiratorially to your friends to express the utter strangeness of such a thing. (more…)

SOUTH KOREA—According to a recent study, South Koreans spend an average of seven percent of their annual income on private education for their kids—about US$253 per child, per month. Often, though, it’s a case of quantity over quality. Concern about the standards of education, and especially ESL, is a common theme in public debate; education was a defining issue in last year’s presidential campaign, and new South Korean president-elect Lee Myung-bak has promised to make it one of the focal points of his presidency.

The hagwon system is often fingered as a main offender in promoting poor teaching standards. “Hagwon” is a Korean word meaning something like “private institute.” Although they exist for just about any subject you can think of—math, art, music, Lego—the majority of them offer ESL, which in turn accounts for the whole “teach English in Korea” phenomenon that my fiancee Amy and I dove into just over a year ago. Parents want native English speakers teaching their kids English, so hagwons pay for Westerners from a select list of countries to fly over and try their hand at teaching. Usually, the only requirements are that you are white, that you have a University degree of some stripe and that you have no criminal record (and even that last one is new, part of recent changes to the process of applying for a teaching visa prompted by the hoohah about the accused swirly-face pedophile). (more…)

JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA—Every year on Jeju-do, a small island off the southwest coast of South Korea, thousands of people get together and set a mountain on fire. That’s the point of the Jeju Jeongwol Daeboreum Fire Festival, which this year fell on March 1. The idea is to celebrate the first full moon of the lunar new year (the Korean word “Daeboreum” translates as “Great Full Moon”), and to recreate the traditional annual burning of harvest grasses to exterminate harmful insects and ensure a frutiful year.

That’s the official line, anyways. The truth is that it’s a great excuse to stage a spectacle that brings hundreds of tourists to Jeju from the Korean mainland, and to ratchet up the media attention for Korea’s tourist industry (which, while nowhere near as muscular as those of China or Southeast Asia, does a decent business among Asian travellers). And, you know, to set stuff on fire.

For Western-looking foreigners, Korean festivals have the added bonus of making you feel like a coked-up rock star with an eight-foot neon boner that shoots lightning. Within fifteen minutes of arriving at the site—an idyllic grassy hill sandwiched between highway and ocean—I’d been cornered by a hungry Korean television reporter wanting to know where I was from, what I thought of the event, what my wishes were for the coming year. By the end of the evening, I’d been photographed (by my best guess) around seventeen thousand times, danced with dozens of women dolled up in traditional Korean garb, been introduced to the mayor of Jeju, and granted the privilege of joining the Druid-like caravan of people allowed to carry torches made of bamboo and gasoline-soaked rags to the base of the hill in order to light it up. I may as well have been David Beckham for all the fanfare. (Although, I must say, I’m glad I’m not.) (more…)

Joel McConvey’s World Famous in Korea will start on Friday March 14.