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…)

BERLIN—Damn you football—I wish I knew how to quit you.

It’s true what they say about soccer being the world’s game. They love it everywhere. And so, every week, it seems, I’m presented with another Trottable football occasion.

This week I was in Berlin with a couple college friends who hail from Chicago, Odom and his wife, Helen. And hit me in the groin and face and call me Shirley if Wednesday night didn’t present another football derby. This game was a biggie: Manchester United versus Chelsea, the English derby for the Champions League trophy. I couldn’t pass it up, especially for my devoted readers in England for whom this was the last big chance of the summer to cheer for their boys. You know, cause the national squad didn’t make the UEFA Euro finals. I swear, chaps, that’s the third-to-last time I’ll bring that up. Promise.

This is the last you’ll hear from me on soccer for a while. Roland Garros hits Paris next week (don’t call it the French Open), and then, uh, the Euro tournament starts, and, um, you’ll be getting football dispatches from me every single day. Frack. It never ends…

Without further ado, the 2008 Champions League Final, via Berlin: Beifall und Spott (ie. cheers and jeers) (more…)

Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford’s new book, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China, is one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever read. Duguid and Alford have compiled twenty-five years of personal history, observation, photographs, travel narratives, and recipes into a collection that illustrates just how rich and varied non-Han Chinese culture is today, and just how endangered. In a year when China is in the news more than ever, the book serves as a reminder that the country is more than its capital city. I spoke with Jeffrey and Naomi a few weeks ago at the Random House Canada offices.

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Your own personal history is woven throughout this book and one gets the sense that these areas have been important to you for a long time. So why this book now? Why wasn’t it, say, your second book? What has changed politically, or in your own experiences, that made you want to write this book now?

Naomi: Well the ones out earlier, we put bits of those things in them—in our first book, Flatbreads and Flavors, we managed to squeeze Tibet in there, there was a lot of Xinjiang in there, and we started the book with flatbreads from Kashgar. But even now on our sixth book, we think this is lucky to be able to write about somewhere that is relatively so far out. So to have a contract even after a track record of six…that’s got to be our answer, partly. This has always been an interest of ours.

Jeffrey: in fact, a long time ago, Naomi wanted to do a book on Tibet. And I kept saying no way in the world…

N:…will anybody ever publish it. Stones and Silk, I thought. That would be a title.

J: Our editor was working on our second book with us, the one on rice, and she said, “you know, I’m okay to have my feet in the mud…”

N: “…in the rice paddies…”

J: “But please not over my knees.” (more…)

SOWETO—For my money, which lately consists of fistfuls of rand with pictures of buffalo gracing the bills, no sporting event invites greater tension and drama than a local derby. So when I realized that I would still be in Johannesburg for last Saturday’s match between the two giants of South African soccer, the Kaizer Chiefs and the Orlando Pirates, both based in Joburg’s predominantly black township of Soweto, it was an obvious must-Trot experience.

No matter how big a match gets, no matter how high the stakes, whether a league championship, a world final, or a match between college rivals, the contest against a faraway side is a shared experience for the local fans. While a Red Sox vs. Yankees “Armageddonâ€? series may induce more coronaries in New England than a mandatory government program to provide intravenous injection of chowder (those crazy liberals!), the respective communities on each side experience the drama, for the most part, with their comrades in fandom. (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…)

Kibera is the Zsa Zsa Gabor of slums: famous for being famous (it was featured in The Constant Gardener), its beauties and blemishes endlessly exaggerated by local and international media alike, Kibera’s half-million or so residents play host to a small army of earnest NGO’s, exploitative religious groups, intrepid journalists, bedazzled tourists, and visiting celebrities eager to connect with the other side of the tracks—like Barack Obama, who passed by on his way to his grandma’s in 2006.

I like it, too. But it had been a couple months since my last visit (my appreciation for the place is predicated on not having to stay), so last weekend I decided it was time for another incursion.

Nice siding, was my first thought on arrival. Brand new sheets of aluminum glittered everywhere in the sunlight, formed into long lines of shack that had sprouted up to replace the hundreds burnt down in January’s violence. The old festival atmosphere I knew and loved, of fish cookers and CD pirates and preachers and hair-weavers all spinning a raucous economy out of thin air, was back. No more machetes and smoking ruins. The riots were but a dismal memory; now, the only people running amok with evil designs were barefoot toddlers. Even the alcoholics had cheered up. (more…)

KRUGER NATIONAL PARK—Hemingway, furious, would have shot me in the head. Orwell would have offered dignified applause, acknowledging my restraint and humanity.

Here we were, nine of us—including two of us brandishing powerful .458 calibre hunting rifles—tracking a herd of elephants on the southern edge of South Africa’s immense Kruger National Park. One of our guides, Lourens Botha, had spotted the herd in a nearby valley. Marching quickly across the African forest, we scaled a hill next to the valley and descended onto a rocky ledge. Beneath us, a mere twenty metres away, were elephants—lots of elephants. They were enjoying a substantial breakfast, ripping large branches off the trees with their powerful trunks. And they were standing right out in the open.

Lourens and his partner, Obakeng, both young guides from the park’s Berg-en-Dal lodge, confirmed the elephants hadn’t noticed us. They put down their rifles, rather than passing them along to one of us to line up a shot. They unpacked some juiceboxes and cheese and crackers, and we enjoyed a light breakfast alongside eighteen pachyderms doing the same.

No, we didn’t shoot the elephants. The .458s that Lourens and Obi carried were for protection only—a required precaution for a walking tour in the park. And watching these creatures tear up the forest floor in impressive fashion, and trample large swaths of bush in their wake, I never once felt the impulse to fix them in the cross-hairs of the rifle and pull the trigger. Nothing about that hypothetical encounter struck me as sporting. (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…)

PRETORIA—There’s a drink here in South Africa that they call “creme soda.” It’s probably like the cream soda you’re familiar with, only it’s a bright, shocking, emerald green.

Mostly, creme soda is used as a mixer for a drink they like to call a John Deere, usually taken as a double (especially if you want to, you know, act like a man) with two shots of 86-proof cane sugar alcohol. The resulting highball cocktail — whose name comes from the obvious colour association as well as the fact that it runs you over like a lawnmower — is delicious, refreshing, and quite deadly. Ordering a first round of John Deeres is commonly called “hopping aboard the cane train,â€? so stated because once you climb aboard the train, you generally ride it to the very last stop, occasionally waking up in the back seat of a strange car in an equally unfamiliar underground parking lot. True story. (more…)

JOHANNESBURG—I get a lot of fantastic fanmail here at camp Sportstrotter. Devoted readers wondering how I get to file dispatches from Vancouver Island, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, and now, Johannesburg. “I can’t believe The Walrus sends you to all those amazing places!� they write. “How do they afford it?�

Well, I can tell you that the Sportstrotter is one of The Walrus’s greatest editorial priorities, and in addition to my embarrassingly opulent salary, I also have a practically unlimited travel budget. It’s clear that The Walrus understands that the future of Canadian journalism lies in semi-serious ramblings on the world of sport, posted weekly to a web site under a name that includes the word “trotter.� All hail the dauphin of the Great White North’s media sphere!

So here I am in Johannesburg, South Africa, the richest city on the continent and also one of its most dangerous. Jo’burg has seen the most substantial post-Apartheid integration in South Africa, but this mixing of the former oppressor and oppressed classes—the wildly wealthy and the desperately poor—has bred great resentment and violence. So, with the Sportstrotter fiancée working on a project here and logging long hours, and the streets not exactly safe to wander, I’ve been spending my daytime hours in the highly secure gated community (yes, barb-wire fences and all) across the street from our apartment, using their amazing gym and eating the fantastic food that Jo’burgers are lucky to enjoy on a daily basis (Springbok carpaccio is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted). (more…)

On my way to LAX I passed a Pollo Loco that was no ordinary fried chicken extravaganza. It was a warning.

Leaving Los Angeles is confusing. Like Twitter, it holds so much promise. As soon as I land and see would-be The Hills cast members I am comforted. Surely being proximal to those whose biggest problem is running into old frienemies at Vice will rub off. I can walk their walk, talk their talk. (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.

(more…)