A semester’s study in South Korea

A pavilion within the Royal Palace in Seoul where Queen Min, the last Korean empress, often went to meditate.

Bibimap, a traditional Korean meal which contains rice, mushroom, carrots, cucumber, garlic, and various other vegetables. Photo: Dusan Vuksanovic.

Locks placed all over the Lovers’ Wall, which is next to the Seoul Tower. Putting a lock on the Wall is for many couples a symbol of their love. Photo: Dusan Vuksanovic.

The Royal Court in Seoul, the Land of the Morning Calm. Photo: Dusan Vuksanovic.

BY NOAH PAPPANO

After 23 hours of traveling by taxi, bus, planes, and finally car, I had made it back to America and safely ensconced in San Diego after dropping 13 time zones and swapping a humid jungle in the height of monsoon season to a desert with Mediterranean breezes. But how did I do all this? And what all happened over there, in Korea, in the Land of the Morning Calm? Well, that’s a long story that I’m still processing. But what do I want to leave you with most?

It never felt real. The whole thing had a dream-like quality. I left GMC on December 18 and flew to Nashville where I was remodeling my friend’s house. I had to wait as Korean spring semesters begin the first week of March. On February 26, as everyone was well under way with the semester, I was going to begin mine in a new land. The first two weeks in Korea were some of the coldest days I had ever lived through. And for me to freeze is no meager task. After growing up in Northeastern Maine, how the hell could it be so damn cold in Asia?

Bibimap, a traditional Korean meal which contains rice, mushroom, carrots, cucumber, garlic, and various other vegetables. Photo: Dusan Vuksanovic.

To add to my adjustment problems, everything was in a different language and the culture was, except the economy being capitalist, an almost complete 180 degrees from my own. I began keeping a journal to record my impressions of being in this strange land. I was the only GMCer who had signed up for the semester and faced this challenge with only my little spiral-bound friend as company.

Wordsworth apparently said that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility. Whenever people ask me how Korea was, I’m at a loss as to how to condense five months-worth of experiences as an expatriate. I’m going to hurl these images at you in a photographic form and hope we can make a tapestry resembling the time I spent there.

Pretty quickly, I began to make friends and settled into a routine. I was studying Korean language broken up into three courses – Reading, Writing, and Speaking – in the language building every day, five days a week, from 9:00 AM until 1:00 PM. I also had a Korean Culture class that met for three hours once a week and a History of English Literature, half in Korean and half in English, that met for two hours once a week. I had never studied a foreign language, but in my class, everyone spoke at least two with the majority speaking at least three. We were made up of a Belgian, a Brazilian, an Argentinian, a Philipino, six Chinese students, and me – the American. We were one of several classes in the building and lumped together by virtue of our knowing nothing about the Korean language.

Hannam University in Daejeon, South Korea, is wildly different from GMC. The school has 16,000 enrolled students and is located in a city of 1.5 million people.

One afternoon I was strolling through one of the downtown areas the kids frequent and popped into a coffee and wine bar called Flower. There my friend Salim and I ordered coffee that smelled like a bouquet of flowers. I saw an attractive lady walk by our table and said under my breath, “Banpanahda.” This did not escape the notice of Salim, who damn near swallowed his tongue. With a strained look of exasperated horror, he asked where I had learned that word. I don’t know how to translate it properly, but basically you use it only when a pretty lady walks by.

Salim and I took the bullet train, the KTX, to Seoul and visited the Seoul Tower. An insanely cold and windy night, we had to wait a long time for our cable car that would take us up because they were swinging too fiercely. This did not deter us. Seoul looks beautiful at night from up high on a mountain. I remember telling Salim that one of the highways below us looked like a river of gold – the cars moved slowly to our perspective like a gently meandering sinusoidal river of light. The hundreds of feet of fence ringing the Seoul Tower haven’t an inch to spare with thousands of locks snapped on it. Couples come here to pledge their undying love by clasping one of these “lovers locks” and then huck the key off the mountain, perhaps the only thing to keep me warm on such a bitingly cold night.

Locks placed all over the Lovers’ Wall, which is next to the Seoul Tower. Putting a lock on the Wall is for many couples a symbol of their love. Photo: Dusan Vuksanovic.

What I will never forget is when the “Hwang-sa” or “Yellow Dust” appeared. Apparently, every spring brings winds from the Gobi desert which blow all across Korea and even over to Japan. The problem with this is that China has extremely low pollution emission standards, so the Gobi is choked with chemicals. The effect for the Koreans is that the skies turn yellow, all the cars and buildings turn yellow, and I, who am not used to breathing this stuff, was walking around with my tongue, palette, and throat tasting like metal. It’s like chewing on tin foil all day long!

One thing I absolutely had to do while there was eat dog meat. After spending my formative years growing up with 22 dogs in a 1500-square-foot house, this would be my act of revenge. I found a restaurant in a little alley and wolfed down a bowl of “boshintang” or dog soup. It was delicious! I was groping for what the taste was like when my buddy, and GMC’s resident, Dusan Vuksanovic supplied the analogy of the taste to pork, which was pretty accurate. Boshintang is delicious and comes in a hot soup. Before I left, I found another alley to a different restaurant and relished another bowl. As Dusan says, “Bow wow tastes wow wow!”

The field trips were intense. We visited the DMZ, the two-kilometer demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. I got to spy on North Korea through a tourist telescope for which I had to pay 500 won (about 40 cents) and heard a report from a South Korean soldier about the area and the history. We watched a short movie about how the North Koreans had dug four tunnels below the DMZ aiming for Seoul. Each time they were stopped, but two of them got pretty close. We got to go into the third tunnel. It was emotional and diabolic. They had tunneled a cave 73 meters underground and 1,645 meters long. We got to walk 265 meters of it. Though it was very hot and humid outside, it was cold 73 meters underground and water was dripping on our heads. I walked all the way to where the South Korean soldiers had blocked off the tunnel with a concrete wall. There were two more behind that one. To the side of a heavily bolted iron door, I spied the next blockade through a small window.

On our way back, before beginning the ascent back to the surface, there was a fountain which collected the natural underground spring water. The English translation read “Drinking Fountain.” This was curious and disappointing to me, as the Korean said “Tongil Yaksu,” which I translated as “Unification Medicine Water.” Two hundred and forty feet underground in a dark, damp tunnel smeared black with coal and yellow with dynamite holes, I knelt down, dipped a gourd into a small basin and drank clear water that prayed for unification. It was a heady, intense, raw experience, to be sure.

In the whirlwind of activities, I’m having trouble getting my head to settle. I certainly have been experiencing a wave of imagistic blowout. In April, I visited Tongyeong, a city on the southern coast, and paddled through Hansando, which is where the famous sea battle between the Koreans and the Japanese took place in 1598. Admiral Yi Sun Shin was the one who had devised the clever Turtle Boats that defeated the Japanese. I had read this story in Pearl S. Buck’s book The Broken Reed. Ten years later, I’m paddling a boat through the battle scene. Then we hung out at the admiral’s old military base. We went to the birthplace of Empress Myeongseong, who was brutally killed by the Japanese in 1895. We went to the palace in Seoul where her death occurred. That was how Buck’s book ended, with the Empress being stabbed to death and burned. My head is reeling from history. Where is the invisible golden cord that connects me to all the fantastic moments of history that I read about when I was sixteen, curled up with a book that dreamed of people long since dead whose passion still breathed?

The Royal Court in Seoul, the Land of the Morning Calm. Photo: Dusan Vuksanovic.

So at the end of the images, when I’m still reeling trying to make sense of it all and people ask me, “Hey, how was Korea?” It puts me in a position where I have to take five months of intense experiences and pack them like a shut up telescope into a response. “Awesome’! I ate dog!”

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Posted by Noah Pappano on Sep 30, 2009 Filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry