The final post from Joel McConvey’s Korea blog, on his return to Toronto, CanadaWinter. I march down the slush-slick sidewalk, at constant risk of wipeout as my neck cranes sideways to ogle the enticing photos of Korean dishes taped up in all the shopfront windows: ddeok bokki, dalk galbi, bibim bap, bulgogi… I linger on the signs in hangeul, puzzling the clusters of characters into sounds and, sometimes, meanings, timing my reading speed, which is nowhere near instant, but is quick enough now that familiar words only take seconds to snap into place: 은행, bank. 여행, trip. 책, book. 약국, pharmacy. I enter a grocery mart and begin trolling the aisles for the ingredients I’ve come for – gochujang, red hot pepper paste; kuk kanjang, soup soy sauce; yellow packets of Ottogi instant curry mix; long red boxes of Pepero, the Korean version of the chocolate and cookie stick snack, Pocky. At the counter, I pay for my items and mumble a shy Korean thank-you – “Kamsamnida…” – followed by a more confident “Thanks.” English is fine here. It is, after all, Toronto.

It’s been almost a month since I returned from Korea to this frozen city, and I am naturally drawn to the corridor that runs along Bloor Street from Christie to Bathurst, referred to on the area’s street signs as the Korean Business Area, but more informally called, simply, Koreatown. In this stretch of a few blocks I find a surprisingly thorough concentration of things familiar to me from two years teaching in South Korea – scents and sounds, but also unexpected details. I skulk around a small market called E-Mart, named after Korea’s ubiquitous giant department store chain and boasting the same yellow-and-black colour scheme. Outside the norae bangs, advertised with the more familiar Japanese word KARAOKE, I listen for strains of earnest, soju-fueled caterwauling. Sitting at a 24-hour restaurant called Bu-ong-ee and slurping a bowl of gamja tang – unflatteringly rendered on English signs as “pork bone soup” – I inadvertently tap my fingers to the beat of the K-pop hits that I often wished to escape in Korea, but that here give me an odd sense of comfort, as though I’m ensconced in a sonic helium bubble that can, at any time, rise up and transport me back over the ocean to the breezy shores and pale, gentle sunlight of Jeju-do. (more…)

A local saying lists three things Jeju is famous for: wind, stone and women. The island certainly has all three in abundance — the wind, in particular, is strong enough to tear off your scalp. In truth, though, the thing Jeju is most known for in Korea is tangerines (also known as Mandarin oranges). Winter marks the beginning of tangerine season, and these days it’s hard to drive a kilometre without passing an orchard tucked behind low stone walls, blazing with thousands of bright orange globes.

I once laughed outright at a hapless young American who’d purchased tangerines at the grocery store, and although I’ll admit it wasn’t very nice, my mirth was justified; in tangerine season, almost every social or commercial transaction conducted on Jeju commences or concludes with a gratis exchange of the juicy little devils. Taxi drivers hand them to you as you climb into their cabs; buckets of them sit out in the staff rooms at school; waiters bring trays of them as dessert; and any kind of major purchase — a jacket, say, or a torque wrench — will just as likely as not be augmented with a couple shopping bags bulging with fruit. It’s a friendly time of year, when Jejuites are visibly proud of the island’s most valuable and abundant crop, and the heaps of tangerines making the rounds seem to contain the very nectar of goodwill within their dappled, vivid skins. (more…)

One of my Korean students’ favourite pastimes is pulling on my beard. These days, I can’t blame them — circumstances having forced me into (temporary) bachelordom for the first time in years, I’ve made it a project to accumulate as much hair on my face as possible, and even I will admit that the resulting thicket is eminently tuggable. (It’s when the kids figure they can swing from it that problems arise.)

There’s a lurking belief that Koreans can’t grow facial hair. This is profoundly untrue, as anyone who’s familiar with Korean money can tell you; each of the three denominations of Korean won (the 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000) boasts a likeness of an eminent figure from Korean history, and all of them are rocking killer beards. The most impressive is surely the white mop cascading from the chin of Confucian scholar Yi Hwang on the 1,000, but neither fellow Confucian Yi I on the five nor King Sejong the Great (arguably the most famous Korean of all time, at least within Korea) on the ten have anything to be ashamed of — each sports a missile-shaped goatee and full moustache that would make Tom Selleck’s nose pillow bristle with envy.

It is true, however, that in contemporary South Korea, prominent facial hair is a rare sight. (more…)

Exam testing informs every aspect of life in South Korea, and it doesn’t stop even after you’ve finished university

Last Thursday was test day in South Korea. Traffic stopped. Airplane schedules were altered. The military was told to shut up. The best rice cakes in the land were distributed, consumed, and most likely thrown up in anxiety. For nine hours, the universe froze.

The most stressful test of my life was my fourth-year university Anglo-Saxon exam, which required me to translate a chunk of the original text of Beowulf, and for which I studied hard for maybe three days. The stress stemmed primarily from my desire to protect my ego by way of my final average; ultimately, the exam meant nothing.

In South Korea, tests determine the outcome of every major event in your life, and the nationwide university entrance exam (officially, the “College Scholastic Ability Test”), which takes place annually on the third Thursday in November, is the mother of all tests — the doorway through which kids must pass to transform from mute, bespectacled children whose personality is subsumed by their identical school uniforms into burgeoning adults who can wear and drink and study what they want. (more…)

Joel visits South Korea’s most disturbing children’s theme parks in Jeju-do

JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA—Tourists first started coming to Jeju for the natural scenery, the beaches, and the fields of bright yellow canola and violet azalea lining the craters of Halla-san. But its development into a “resort island” has brought a host of other attractions: gardens, galleries, museums, and, most numerously, theme parks, covering almost any subject you can imagine, from green tea to glory-hole sex. The ultimate aim appears to be turning Jeju into a tourist Valhalla, with no square foot of usable space left unoccupied by giant plaster figures or ramshackle collections of junk or animals that have no business being in this part of the world.

Jeju’s many Lands, Worlds and Towns mix Niagara Falls gaudiness, Vegas-style exploitation, confusion about the West and certainty about what vacationing Koreans consider a good time to incredibly strange effect, and they are worth looking at as a barometer of the similarities and differences between how fun is marketed in Korea and in North America.

LOVELAND

Loveland is, at least among foreigners, the most notorious, bizarre and flabbergasting theme park on Jeju. Loveland’s website calls it “a place where sexually oriented art and eroticism meet… where the visitor can appreciate the natural beauty of sexuality.” (more…)

Bestselling novelist Jon Evans’ new blog on the Third World technology revolution, exclusive to walrusmagazine.com

JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA — One very niche effect of the global economic meltdown has been a growing sense, among the ESL community in Korea, that the English teaching gravy train may be either congealing or going off the rails, depending on which metaphor you prefer.

In recent weeks, the South Korean won has taken a pummeling worthy of Jake La Motta, which means sending money home from Korea to pay off debts or stash in savings accounts is now a lesson in the more painful side of international currency exchange and the ways it can screw you. When I arrived in Jeju-do in December 2006, my monthly paycheque of 2.2 million won transferred home would turn into more than $2,200 Canadian. Today, I get under $2,000.

That’s not so bad, but the situation is much worse for American teachers, whose cheque now works out to about $1,680 US. With the free housing and the paid airfare, the ESL jobs here still offer an undeniably attractive deal, but for those who are here strictly for the money, it’s looking less and less like the savings coup it’s been for the last nine or ten years. If things get worse — as in 1997 Asian economic crisis worse — there’s a chance many money-conscious teachers won’t see any reason to continue working here, and just as good a chance that many travel-hungry teachers will realize that if they’re going to be making crap money, they might as well be teaching somewhere they can buy weed and pancakes that aren’t served with kimchi and clams. (more…)

JEJU-DO—Meat-eating in Korea is very literal. Humanity’s participation in the food chain is much less disguised than it is in North America, where people are happy to pretend their bacon burgers or pork tenderloin medallions are magically synthesized for the express purpose of being delicious. In Korean, the word for pork is dwaeji gogi — “pig meat.” Most other meats work the same way: insert name of animal, followed by the word for “meat” — not much in the way of linguistic frippery to disguise the fact that meat is basically dead flesh and ripped-apart muscle.

In an unsettling twist, restaurant signage follows suit. Many restaurants advertise specialties with pictures of their dishes, displayed right underneath jovial cartoon versions of whichever animal gave their life for the food. This is especially true of restaurants serving galbi, pork or beef rib meat barbecued over flaming charcoals stuck into the centre of your table.

The following is series of portraits of these brave ambassadors of personal flavour. As you can see, most of them look downright delighted at the prospect of ending up in your bowels. (more…)

This weekend marked the Korean holiday of Chuseok, the rough equivalent of North American Thanksgiving, and although I hate to engage in a bout of schadenfreude during the festive season, I can’t possibly let the story that surfaced while I was in Canada for a couple weeks go unremarked.

I refer, of course, to reports that North Korean Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is sick, or, even more serious, dead—and has been so for as long as five years. The unsubstantiated rumours, sparked by Kim’s absence at celebrations marking the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the DPRK, say Kim may have suffered a stroke, and one report by a Japanese scholar claims the DL died way back in 2003 from diabetes and that a core team of military officials has been ruling ever since, using Kim dummies for public appearances. (more…)