World without a Superman

Over the course of the last three days, I have received several emails from MoveOn.org. Here's an excerpt from one Re: No Deal

"The latest Senate health care bill has no public option. No expansion of Medicare. And it does too little to guarantee that uninsured Americans will actually be able to afford the coverage they'll be required to purchase.1

Former insurance executive Wendell Potter put it best: the bill is "a big bailout to the [health insurance] industry."2

But it's not too late to fix the bill. And as Joe Lieberman has shown, just one senator willing to stand in the way can force legislation to be changed dramatically.

Senator Bernie Sanders, a strong proponent of the public option, has already made clear that he's opposed to the legislation in its current form—and he could decide to block it until it's fixed.3

But there's enormous pressure from all sides to pass a bill quickly, no matter how weak it is. Let's show Bernie and other progressives that we're counting on them to block this version of the bill—and we'll get their backs if they do."

I'm curious what they think "blocking this version of the bill" entails beyond defeating health care reform.

Do they think Bernie Sanders will tie Joe Lieberman up Jack Bauer-style and waterboard him until he changes his vote?

Do they believe that some of the Republican Senators are Democratic sleepers, waiting for Bernie to give them the signal to rip off their rubber face-masks and vote for single-payer universal health care.

Do they have worse anger-management problems than I do?

I'm going to go with (c) (though I guess the options presented aren't mutually exclusive).

While I have your ear, can we talk about the other major complaint being made by my fellow leftwing nut-jobs: "We got screwed because Obama didn't want to get his hands dirty." First off: we didn't get screwed. We got a health care reform bill that might-actually-oh-crap-I'm-jinxing-it-pass. And now: since when is governing solely the President's job? Remember when the Democrats were elected to Congress in 2006 because we were fed up with the Iraq war and then they... continued to fund the Iraq war. Maybe in the course of crafting the language of health care reform Congress will rediscover its spine and once again become a coequal branch of government. I, for one, am tired of having a king, a 9-member abortion panel, and a three-ring circus in place of a real government.

This is actually something that has been bothering me since Obama's inauguration. Much of the 2008 campaign felt like Spartacus played backwards ("I'm not Bush!" "No, I'm not Bush!"). The dust settled, and Obama won the popular vote 69.5 million to 59.9 million. In 2004, Bush beat Kerry 62.0 million to 59.0 million (thank you, Wikipedia). Fewer people voted for McCain than Bush. Naively (and this is very naive), that means that 2.1 million people who thought that George Bush deserved a second term also thought that John McCain was not qualified to be President (it probably actually means that 2.1 million Republicans didn't care who won in 2008 and 10.5 million Democrats didn't care who won in 2004 -- I'm not sure which group is farther off its collective rocker; or maybe 2.1 million Republicans died and 10.5 million Democrats turned 18 in 2007; who knows?), and while the rest of us anxiously watched to see how Obama would use his new-found superpowers to save humanity from total annihilation, no one bothered to wonder what those 2.1 million (or the 2.1 million and the 10.5 million) thought, why they changed their minds, or how to convince them never to vote for someone like Bush ever again. Until we answer those questions, I don't feel comfortable saying that the Bush years are behind us (mostly because I'm paranoid and want someone to tell me that a man who thinks war is the latest attraction at Disney's Adventure Land will never ever again be given command of the most deadly military force in the world; obviously no one can ever tell me that and I will continue to be paranoid).

Hopefully you've gleaned my point from somewhere in this convoluted chain of sentences. If you have, I would appreciate it if you could tell me what it is.

Gonna go pick me up summa them humpback whales!

Which, of course, was the plot for "Star Trek IV," which, of course, was subtitled: "The Voyage Home."

Yup. Tomorrow I board a plane for Seattle. I'll be there about three weeks followed by a week at a conference in Cancun followed by a month at Berkeley followed by another week in Seattle before finally returning to Seoul.

Those of you in any of those areas should look me up.

As Kernoff would say:
wooooooooooohooooooooooooooooooooo!

Bad Wolf

Mark this day on your calendar. I finally found something good that came out of the Bush Presidency: it kept Joe Lieberman as far as possible from the Oval Office. Yes, Cheney was an evil cyborg zombie from outer space (and possibly the future), but at least he was up front about it (remember when he shot a guy in the face?).

(those of you who communicate with me in other ways have probably heard this several times already; I apologize, but I can't sleep right now, and I feel this intense desire to spread the word that Joe Lieberman is a spoiled brat)

Gravy or grave?

Yesterday (or maybe it was two days ago now; I have no idea how time works any more), on the Daily Show, Mike Huckabee started talking about the first Christmas:

"This is a story like [people have] never heard in church... It's the story of an unwed teen mother who goes into labor far away from home... This has got to be the most humiliating, horrifying experience..."

Yeah. That's the only story I've ever heard in church on Christmas Eve: that the incarnation was cool, and all, but the real heroes of the story are Mary (who probably thought she was going to be stoned to death for her part in all this) and Joseph ("A man really has to love a woman to agree to raise another man's child." -- Keith Mars).

I don't know if this means my hometown pastor is ahead of the curve or that Mike Huckabee is wrong and my church experience is the common Christian one. At the very least, it's another reason that I really really really wish I could still unreservedly consider myself a member of the Episcopal Church (where you will find said hometown pastor) with all of their gay-ordaining, gay-marrying shenanigans. As it is, I guess I'll have to root for them from the fringe.

Because religion is exactly like the World Series.

More time! More distance! (less cow bell)

Killing time before meeting one of the professors to discuss a course I may or may not teach in the fall, I happened upon a stone bench with the following inscription:

"In memory of [woman whose name I can't remember] of Detroit, Michigan who dedicated these hills and valleys to the Christian education of Korean women."

I expected better of Obama's America.

Oh, Canada!

One of the windfalls of Rebecca's visit was that, flipping through the "Lonely Planet" book she got me before I left, we found the paragraph about the supermarket with the widest selection of western goods in town. After she left, I tracked it down and was delighted to find that they carry not only oatmeal and raisins (of which my parents and Rebecca had bee shipping me replenishments every few weeks) they carry...

...Canadian maple syrup (at about $50 a liter, which is only twice what I remember paying for it back in New Hampshire! Al Gore hates me right now. Kernoff's probably not too pleased, either). I returned there this weekend to actually buy a jug (I thought I could do without at first, but there is no methadone for the maple junkie). As I wandered through the aisles trying to decide if I needed anything else, I noticed that (unlike the last time I was there) they also had a supply of Tillamook cheeses (for those of you reading because you met me in New Hampshire and not named John Turner, Tillamook is the Cabot of the Pacific Northwest). It was shelved just beneath this:



I checked the ingredients list. It is what it says it is. Though, in keeping with the "eating is a non-local phenomenon" theme of the store/this post, this packet came from Spain.

time and distance

One day, during my first year at Dartmouth, I was putzing around the kitchen in my Whitman College T-shirt when my Chinese (as in, at this point, he'd been in the US for a handful of months) roommate came down the stairs. He looked at my shirt and said, "ah, you went to White Man College?" This was especially awkward, because some of us actually called it that behind its back.

This morning, as I was getting my morning coffee, Kyung Kiu noticed my Dartmouth College travel mug and commented on the seal. I started explaining it to him: "See, this is supposed to be an Indian, and here's the Bible beaming down knowledge..."

The history of Western academia is messed up.

Errata: It's also possible that I'm the one who is messed up (see the comment section)

mad/angry/confused scientist noises

For a while now, I've been intending to write a post about how I seem to be living on top of a naturally occurring Van de Graaff generator.* I mean, there's a naturally occurring nuclear reactor in Africa, so why not? Seriously, most mornings when I get up and turn on the faucet to get a drink of water, I get shocked touching the stream of water (not the faucet fixture) to check that it's cold enough. It could be that, after years of hang-drying my clothes, I've forgotten how much static electricity driers deposit in our clothes, and, when my arm hairs all stood on end as I put on my freshly laundered running shirt this afternoon, I thought "well, duh; that must be it!" Then I remembered:

I hang-dried (hung-dried?) my running clothes last night.

???

*for those of you whose middle school science teachers sucked: a Van de Graaff generator is a contraption for generating hilarious amounts of static electricity (and then performing neat tricks like pretending your a Centauri from Babylon 5 or Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars)

Note to the galley:

My junior year at Whitman, the intercollegiate debate topic was something like "Resolved that the Federal Government should substantially change it's policy towards Indian Country in one or more of the following areas: ...." Early in the year, when we had no idea what anyone was actually going to say (beyond that it would involve Indian Country and "one or more of the following areas") someone produced a file whose index contained the following two entries:

"You say Indians are just like us: that's racist!"
"You say Indians are not like us: that's racist!"

(There was also the litany of evidence arguing that anything less specific than "Lakota" was racist/not racist). Every now and then, I worry that I'm going to cross that line on this blog. Obviously, there are some assumptions that were safe in America, but have nothing to do with the way things are done in Korea (e.g. I'm pretty sure "personal space" isn't much of a concept over here). On average, that makes me uncomfortable. I know how to live in America - I've had 28 years to figure out (note the lack of the word "perfect") the art - so any time I comment on how things are different over here, it's going to read like "things are different over here and I don't like it."

Several times since arriving here, I've ordered something I've never had before at a restaurant. It arrives. I examine it. I start eating it in a way that makes sense to me and allows me to figure out what, exactly, everything is and tastes like. Invariably, I'm eating it wrong, and the waiter/owner feels the need to point this out. Sometimes this is as unintrusive as the porridge lady pointing out that I have an empty bowl into which I can ladle my porridge (instead of eating it straight out of the big bowl with the ladle). Sometimes it involves the owner dumping the sauce that came separately with my meal onto my meal before I have decided whether or not I actually want the sauce (today's sauce had ice crystals in it - Koreans apparently aren't fans of warm noodles - so the answer was probably going to be "no thanks"). I'm sure this is somehow related to the man who helped me hoist my suitcase up the stairs in the subway station the day I first arrived here (incidentally, the exact same thing happened when I was helping Rebecca carry her luggage earlier this month). Kyung Kiu described it as a need by elders to treat every young man as if he were their son. Therefore, let's just pretend that I wrote about it and that I said something with an appropriate amount of sarcasm.

While we're talking about noodles, can I just point out that Korean noodles are long. I'm pretty sure the characteristic unit in question is the meter. They are also very thin, meaning that, when you order a bowl of noodles, you don't actually get a bowl of noodles so much as a Gordian Knot of food. Unfortunately, unlike Alexander, all you have is a spoon and chopsticks, so good luck (did I mention that they're very elastic, so teeth literally won't cut it, either?).

Finally: the noodles were blue and the title of this post was meant to make some of you think of "Note to the galley: Romulan ale no longer to be served at diplomatic functions." It probably didn't do that.

So, yeah, I guess this post is about noodles.
And my fear of making normative statements about people.

Schrodinger's meat

I'm sure you've noticed that there weren't any posts during the month of October. October was not a good month. About a week after my last post I had a total breakdown of the (to quote Boromir) "whatthefuckamIdoingheregoddammit" variety and came within a mouse-click of buying a one-way ticket back to Seattle. I obviously (or not, given that not many of you are in a place where you'd bump into me on the street if I had) didn't, but was never really comfortable with the "why." The best I could come up with was that Korea was just another obstacle (along the lines of Whitman College's first year Core and my thesis defense) erected between me and what I want by people who don't even really know me (that's not an entirely fair characterization: I loved my first year Core class). This attitude did not lend itself to engaging with the rest of the city, and I spent a lot of my free time either pretending I was still a grad student or consuming books and DVDs.

So, in summary:

I spent a lot of September being sad,

and a lot of October being angry.

Then Rebecca came and stayed for a week.

Having someone to explore Seoul with me broke my shell. In eight days, we did everything in the "Seoul" section of Lonely Planet's Korea book that I thought looked remotely interesting. We did noraebang (Korean karaoke, which Rebecca says is very similar to Japanese karaoke -- otherwise known as karaoke -- but, as I pointed out earlier, Korean culture puts a lot of effort into explaining how it is not Japanese culture). We hiked Dobongsan (Seoul's Mt. Cardigan). We saw a paper lantern festival. We found a good district for international eating (and the vegetarian buffet I was trying to find when I stumbled onto that porridge joint). We had the following experience (twice, actually), which I am going to Fox Newsify to clarify the narrative:

Scott and Rebecca sit down at a restaurant.

Scott points to what he wants on the menu, points to himself, and says "I am vegetarian" (still the only complete sentence I can say in Korean; see the whole disengaging from the city thing).

Gesticulating occurs; maybe a waiter who speaks English is called; Scott thinks he's managed to convey what he wants and what he wants removed from it.

The food comes with meat or something that looks kind of like meat and Scott can't tell what it is still in it.

Scott gets annoyed.

Rebecca reminds Scott that everyone is doing the best they can except that there's this three-foot thick solid lead language barrier standing between him and everyone.

The moral of this story is twofold:

On the small scale, I'm either going to have to keep eating the same three things over and over and over and over again, or I'm going to have accept that I can no longer control what I'm eating as perfectly as I would like to. I think I have chosen the latter. That's where the title of this post comes from. There's only meat in it if I'm absolutely 100% certain there is meat in it, in which case, it's so obvious, I can just pick it out and eat around it.

On the large scale, I think I'm also going to have to accept that, for the next two years, my life just isn't going to make sense. The things I want and the things I have chosen to do are not going to be at all related in any way that I can see and that's just the way it is.

I don't know what that means for this blog. It's probably not going to be a very good guide for anyone who ever wants to visit this city -- more engagement will happen, I'm sure, but it's no longer really a priority for me (and in less than five weeks, I'm going back to the States for three months) -- but I guess that's not really what this was ever supposed to be. I will try to do a better job of conveying to you that I have not been kidnapped and dragged north of the DMZ.

There. I've done it. I've written a post apologizing for not posting. My slide into the dustbin of digital background noise begins...

...now.

This is not where I work.

This is Gyeongbokgung Palace, the largest of the royal palaces in Seoul. It's actually closer to Ewha than my previous adventures have taken me, but you have to change subway lines to get there and that's my excuse for taking a month to make this most obvious journey. It's pretty clear once you get off the subway that you aren't going anywhere 'normal.'


This is a replica of an ancient, Guardian of Forever-style gate. According the placard, anyone who walks through it "will never be old forever" (those people standing around it first walked through in 1972). I've seen too many episodes of the Twilight Zone to believe anything good can come of that.


These stone lamps as you walk up to street level also are not ordinary fixtures of Seoul subway stations (at least not the five or so that I've seen in my time here). Interesting side bar, as I made my way down this hall, I passed a group of Korean Cub Scouts leaving the palace. They looked remarkably like our Cub Scouts, right down to the ridiculous Webelos symbol (while I techincally know what a 'Webelos' is, I will deny it upon questioning). I then passed a handful of teenage girls wearing what looked like US Boy Scout uniforms. I don't know if that means Scouting is a co-ed venture in Korea, or if they were 'adult' (they looked a little young for that) women leaders like we have in the States. Or maybe Korean Girl Scout uniforms look like US Boy Scout uniforms. I don't know.

The first thing you see leaving the subway is the entrance to the Seoul National Museum. I didn't go in today, but I should soon. Assuming I'm interpreting the English signage correctly, "in honor of the 100th anniversary of the opening of the first museum in Korea" admission is free for all of 2009. The second thing you see (or, at least, I saw) leaving the subway is this.



These are South Korean beefeaters. Each of them carries an Eastern halberd, a sword, and a bow (I didn't see if they had any arrows) at their hip. There were about six of them stationed before the gates of the palace. They stand like statues, both in that they are at rigid attention and (just like the beefeaters) in that tourists have no compunction agains treating them as props for photographs.


The throne room is immediately opposite the gate.




Like pretty much everything else here, it is constructed of wood (my electronic guide device tells me that it's all pine, other woods being unworthy of royal construction). One unfortunate effect of all this is that none of it is particularly ancient. The oldest structures here date back to the 1870s, and many are even younger than that. Guide-a-tron characterizes Korean history as periods of construction punctuated by the Japanese showing up to burn everything down again. I don't know enough about the history of the area to say how fair that characterization is (when the recording got around to telling me about the invention of Hangul, it said "this has been considered the most important academic achievement in the history of Korea; now we can write our own language in our own characters, instead of Chinese characters; if we could not do this, we would continue to be a colony of other nations without our own identity;" guess we're all still subjects of Rome...except for you, Marilia).

Speaking of which, just to the west of the throne room stands what used to be the offices of the royal cabinet, where Hangul was supposedly unveiled for the people.


When I stumbled upon it, it was in special decor.


The historical society (or whoever) in charge of the palace was reenacting a feast for the king and his advisors. It was a very colorful display of historical regalia, and I got to see a guy pretending to be king carried in on an open-air sedan chair, but the ceremony itself was actually kind of boring. Despite having a full compliment of musicians present (about 15 woodwinds and 15 strings), the bulk of the ceremony was conducted to recorded music with narration. Here are highlights from what I stayed long enough to see.


More swords and halberds (always more swords and halberds).





The aforementioned wall flowers, er, musicians.



It's good to (pretend to) be king.



Hail to the king, baby!

Spiritual beliefs seem to have factored into a lot of the ornamentation and some of the construction of the various buildings in the palace. The Chinese zodiac featured heavily into the stonework surrounding the buildings.




Guide-a-tron routinely mentioned "the traditional Asian practice of geomancy." Every direction has a guardian spirit (Black Turtle guards the west) whom the corresponding palace gates were somehow supposed to invoke. The gates also had dedicated purposes according to what direction they faced (one for the king, one for the queen, one for the bodies of those who died in the palace...). According to one placard, Seoul was chosen as the site for the capital because it was "geomantically favorable."

The ornamentation of individual buildings was also spiritually guided. Every ridge of every roof (and there were often eight of them on a building) featured this procession of creatures marching off the edge.



I'd first noticed these statues on the rooves of the temples in the shadow of the burial mounds (excuse me, Brian, the barrows) at Samneung last weekend. I didn't know what they meant at the time. Thanks to Guide-a-tron, I can now say that the dragon at the back represents the king, the leading figure is supposed to be an ancient Chinese Buddhist monk, and somewhere in there is the Monkey King. Like the geomantic guardians, these are supposed to ward off evil spirits. I'm going to assume that it's the Monkey King who does most of the actual warding. Everyone else is just his entourage.

Beyond the functional buildings (throne rooms and cabinet offices), the palace is a hodge podge of ceremonial buildings associated with different monarchs who constructed them, lived in them (often while the Japanese were busy burning down the rest of the palace), and tried to impress foreign dignitaries with them.



This pavilion-on-a-pond served primarily the third purpose.



This was a sub-palace devoted to consecrating the burial portraits of dead Emperors (according to Wikipedia, Korea declared itself an empire in the late 19th centure to assert independence from China).



Here is a complex where the king lived while the main palace was being reconstructed post-Japanese mayhem.



Here's a building the king once used to house "many thousands of books" (this one's for your coffee table book, Mom).


I get the distinct impression that the stairs want to eat me (or rescue me from the Swamps of Sadness...)



This is just pretty.


The National Folk Museum of Korea also shares grounds with the palace. Like the Seoul National Museum, it is free for the remainder of 2009. I was too tired to museum walk by the time I got there, but they did have an outdoor complex with statues (!) that I wandered through before calling it an afternoon. Most of them were ancient totems from various regions of Korea. Their placards all say that they were placed just outside of villages to ensure propserity and guard against evil. Their different styles and constructions are meant to reflect the diversity of a disunified ancient Korea.



Does anyone else remember Harry Belafonte's appearance on the Muppet Show?


I'm glad to see that some concepts (namely, the fear of clowns) are universal across all human cultures.


Apparently, so are vampires. (Recall that the placard I mentioned above said that these totems were supposed to represent the good and friendly spirits of the community they guarded. Maybe there is room for fans of "Angel" on this blog, after all...)


The placard beside these statues talked about how statues (and natural rock formations) resembling male and female genitalia were prayed to for fertility (and to bring male children...) I like to think that, somewhere out there, John Ashcroft's head just exploded.


I'm not sure how ancient or traditional these were, but I thought this depiction of the Chinese zodiac as warriors was pretty cute.


It's good to see he can still get work after "Return of the Jedi."


I didn't realize that any of the Long Patrol were stationed out here.

Someone once suggested that I would have to learn how to say "I'm not from here" in Korean. My Mom's response: "No he won't." Twice today (once at the palace; once on the street looking for dinner) I was approached by college-age girls who had been assigned by their English teachers to "interview native English speakers." The questions were what you'd expect from a foreign language class: "Where are you from? What do you think of Korea? How do you like the food?" Then, as I was leaving the folk museum, I was suddenly surrounded by a gaggle of five year olds chanting "where are you from?! where are you from ?! where are you from?!" (they were almost shouting it). After I told them, they ran off and did the same thing to a group of blonde Canadians just entering the museum grounds. Aside from the various shop and restaurant owners who don't even try to interact with me in Korean, this was my first direct experience with "you're not from around here, are you?"

Final story:
Like I implied above, I tried to be a bit more adventurous with dinner today and actually jotted down the name of a Happy Cow-recommended restaurant on a subway stop between Ewha and Gyeongbokgung. Unfortunately, I only jotted down the subway stop (because why would you make a city so dense you can't see all the cross streets from any given corner?) and I wrote down the name in Western characters, rather than Hangul (making both the signage and the college girls somewhat useless as guides). I did find a place to eat, though. It was a "traditional Korean porridge restaurant." I had sweet pumpkin porridge (think butternut squash soup only thicker and sweeter and they give you hot sauce to put in it). They served it to me in a big bowl with a wooden spoon that was too large for any human mouth, a set of chopsticks, a 'normal' Korean spoon (Korean spoons have handles twice as large as US spoons), and a bunch of little side dishes. Failing to notice that one of the side dishes was, in fact, an empty bowl, I tried to eat the porridge directly from the big bowl with the wooden spoon (which, as I said, was larger than any human mouth). My waittress stopped me in the middle of my second bite to demonstrate how civilized people use the wooden spoon to ladle the soup into the empty bowl and then eat it with the normal spoon.

That's right.

They gave me a PhD.

PS This must be one of those "mountains" everyone keeps mentioning. I'll refrain from making the obvious comment about the trees that go all the way to the top.



PPS It happened again: as I left the subway heading towards the palace, someone started trying to sell sunglasses.

I'm only washing this hand because I'm pretty sure he's washed his.

We moved into our new offices this week. I'll get pictures this weekend. There's lots of glass. I'm told that the offices in the NBC show "Numb3rs" might be an apt analogy; maybe also Superman's Fortress of Solitude except....

New offices mean people.

Yes,
I get to work with people now!
We may even have group meetings.
It's very exciting.

A part of all this excitement involved a tour of the new facilities by Professor George Smoot. He's the Nobel Laureate who signed on to direct this rag-tag bunch of plucky and individualistic physicists. I got to meet him today. He got the Nobel Prize for his work on COBE, the satellite that first observed the anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background. That's one of four observations that make my work at all possible. The other three are (in chronological order): Edwin Hubble discovering that the Universe is expanding ("and, once again, the rest of humanity is made to look stupid by a Swiss patent clerk"); Penzias and Wilson discovering the CMB ("that's not bird crap, it's a space...thing"), and the Supernova Cosmology Project/High-Z Supernova Team (depending on which side of the "I want a Nobel Prize so bad, I will cut you" fight currently going on in the hallowed halls of academia) discovering that the universe is not only expanding, it's accelerating ("Gravity, UR doin' it wrong"). Heady stuff, but not heady enough to sacrifice personal hygiene. However, according to this link, George Smoot, PhD made a guest appearance on an episode of "the Big Bang theory" which also guest-starred Summer Glau. And I shook his hand. I'm now two degrees of separation away from Summer Glau which makes me three degrees of separation away from.... wait for it.... Joss Whedon!

This is for all you people who fear that my blog is degenerating into a "Lord of the Rings" fanboy convention. Fans of "Buffy" an "Firefly" are welcome here, too (fans of "Angel".... we'll just agree not to talk about it).

Seriously, though:
New office. Pictures coming.

30 minute Fellowship of the Ring - part 4 of 4

more Nickel Creek, vidooch (the youtube handle of whoever produced that uber creepy "Obama in 30 seconds" video), Bruce Springsteen (that's the Boss to you), and our very own Planck Walkers

30 minute Fellowhsip of the Ring - part 3 of 4

with Bombadil (seriously, that's the band's name), Tracy Morgan, Jefferson Airplane, Murray Gold (composing for Doctor Who), and Lemon Demon. Spaceships and explosions courtesy of Babylon 5.

30 minute Fellowship of the Ring - part 2 of 4

and here we feature the Muppet Movie, Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire, Nirvana, the Dandy Warhols, Led Zeppelin, and Ray Parker, Jr.

30 minute Fellowship of the Ring - part 1 of 4

music in this one comes from Aquateen Hunger Force, Babylon 5, and Nickel Creek

...curiosity will drive him...

...he shall walk the PATHS OF THE DEAD.

Samneung Park is two stops beyond the Olympic Park on Subway Line 2 (the Seoul Train, if you will [why has it taken me so long to use that joke?]). The park is not very large, but features three burial mounds for ancient monarchs: King Seongjong (1457-1494), his third wife, Queen Jeonghyeon (1462-1530), and his second son King Jungjong (1488-1544). According to the tourist pamphlet they gave me, King Jungjong "succeeded to the throne after his elder brother, King Yeonsangun, was dethroned in a coup." I'm going assume that's why Yeonsangun didn't isn't featured in the family plot. This pamphlet is about all the English signage (beyond "bathrooms, this way" and that wasn't in English so much as in "man" and "woman" symbols) I could find, so this is the extent of anything intelligent I'm going to be able to say beyond "oooh, pretty". In fact, to my untrained eye (it's a sonic screwdriver, not a bullwhip), the temples looked pretty identical, so I'm going to proceed to conflate them based on which pictures of what turned out best.


Each of the two kings' mounds overlook one medium and one small huts that look exactly like what we as Westerners have been taught to expect from Eastern architecture.





Here's a peak under the eaves of the medium-sized one.



Inside, there was a table.



Again, absent any English signage, I can't really say why. However, the one near King Jungjong's mound did feature a picture which leads me to believe that there are still ceremonies carried out here from time to time.



The small huts contained engraved tablets. The tablets looked freshly polished, however, the characters on them do not resemble any other Hangul characters I have yet seen.




Wikipedia tells me that Hangul was developed in the 1440s. Perhaps these characters were still in use at the time our subjects ruled.

The mounds themselves tower over the huts. They are, after all, mounds.



They are fenced off at the base, but there are paths so that you can climb King Seongjong's and Qheen Jeonghyeon's. At the top, you find a smaller mound guarded by a coterie of stone soldiers, goats,







and what I choose to interpret as cows.



Between the mounds, there's a sylvan network of paths and benches where you can sit, nap (I actually saw many people sleeping on park benches; I don't think it has the same connotation here that it does in Central Park), or run around like a five year old. In my two hours enjoying the trees, I was twice fortunate enough to look up from my book as a tide of five year olds broke around my bench. It was very amusing.






Incidentally, if you're standing at the base of King Jungjong's mound and turn exactly around, this is what you see.




In addition to the shock of "OMG, I'm living on another continent!" I've also been party to the shock of "OMG, I'm living in a ridiculously huge city!" There's a story that I meant to tell on my Olympic Park post. I forgot it then, so I'll tell it now. At one point as I was riding the subway, a man stepped into the middle of my car and began addressing everyone. At first I figured he was the Korean version of the man I'd seen on the Berkeley campus talking to no one in particular about Jesus. He was wearing what looked like a sponge mitten on his hand with which he started to polish the hand rails around him. Okay, maybe he was on the janitorial staff and was just asking us to let him do his job. No, he's still talking to us, and doing a pretty piecemeal job cleaning. Oh good grief, maybe he's trying to explain how Swine Flu is going to kill us all if we don't spray everything with rubbing alcohol every five minutes. Now he's drawing on the wall with a crayon. Now he's wiping it away. It was at that point that he produced a bag full of the sponge mittens and started trying to exchange them for money. The truly funny part of this story is that he actually sold a few. The truly high-larious part is that, after he left, another guy walked into the car and tried the same routine with neck ties. Nothing like that happened today. I have yet to decide whether this belongs in the "Korea" or "big city" circle of the culture shock Venn diagram.

PS Apparently, Great Cthulhu is moonlighting as a professor of film studies and Shingu College.





PPS In response to Jeremy's comment: the going rate for souls (er, soles) can't be that much. Open air shoe shops are by far (as in orders of magnitude) the most common commercial fixture on any given sidewalk leaving Ewha. I may, in fact, be living on prehistoric Brontitall.