Short News Update

I have a blogging back log that I am trying to deal with.  Sorry this is not up to the present day.

I am writing this right before going to a briefing on our trip to the DMZ.  Yes, you do need to be briefed before going to the DMZ because it is an ACTIVE WAR ZONE!  And peace, it seems, is a little more fleeting than most people would like to believe.  At least, it is if you are talking to some people.  Other people think that it will never happen.  I am not really sure who to believe.  One thing is for certain.  At the DMZ, where you can literally stare North Korean Soldiers in the eye, appearance and behavior matter.  For both sides.

But more about that after I come back from the DMZ. Now, back to talking about last week.

On Saturday most people were just trying to rest and recuperate.  Heather, Cassie and I visited a cat café.  Yes, it is a café, with cats walking around to be pet and played with.  There were even cats on the espresso machine, which I am sure would not pass a safety inspection back in the USA.  But it was still a lot of fun.  Cat and Dog cafes exist today because many people cannot keep animals in their own apartments.  So they go to these cafes to get their animal fix.  Just like us!

Sunday I went with Cassie to meet up with her old 4^th grade teacher who now works at a Christian International School in Seoul.  That is the thing about going to a small private school, it isn’t weird to still be friends with your fourth grade teacher.  We went to church with him and his wife (international Lutheran Church, same church as last week), then went to visit their school (the wife is a librarian, and he teaches middle school and highschoolers).  The school was what you would expect of a private school back home.  But that is kind of the point.  It is a school meant so that international children do not have to adjust to the Korean school system.  On that note, students with Korean citizenship are not allowed to attend the school, unless they have lived out of the country for at least three years and therefore cannot easily reenter the Korean school system.  Makes me wonder what the Korean school system is like, that it is a problem for people to enter into it. 

After that, we went back to their house for fajitas and caramel apples.  They were extremely yummy.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were pure class during the day.  We talked about everything from Orientalism to colonialism to economics.  Tuesday evening we went to a show called Mizo, a modern Korean musical love story with traditional instruments and setting.   It was a lot of fun, but not necessarily the “traditional” music that I think Marty was looking for.  Wednesday night Heather and I went out for dinner with Juisan, Heather’s buddy, then met up with a few other people from our group and the buddies.  We had a lot of fun talking about accents and colloquialisms.  And I have once again come to the conclusion that English is a really hard language to learn.  But given my failure to grasp even the most basic of Korean, I am forced to conclude that languages are really hard in general, at least for me that is.

I have to get going.  I have to go learn about North Korea

Andrea

Ski Trip

Conclusion: procrastinating on blog posts make them really difficult.  I am going to take these one step as a time.

I guess the easiest way to start this post is to talk about what I have been up to.  On Thursday, we left for our ski and cultural trip.  We really didn’t do anything cultural.  Apparently in years past they have visited a small village on this trip.  Why we didn’t do that this year, I don’t know.  Did they think we were uninterested?  I don’t know.  But honestly, the ski hill was not good enough to justify taking an extra day for skiing instead of seeing Korean culture.  Because I can ski at home.  I cannot see Korea at home.  And I really haven’t seen that much Korean culture yet.

Seoul is like Hong Kong in that way.  It is so clean and modern, that they have cleaned up a lot of their culture right along with it.  Or have hidden it under the rug.  It took us weeks of searching before we found a traditional instrument concert.

Anyways, back to skiing.  Things got off to a rocky start when I and another student got into a sledding crash.  We are both fine now.  We spent the afternoon renting everything from snow pants to ski boots.  We took a gondola up to the top of the mountain for no apparent reason (the chair lifts take you to the same place).  There were sheep there, also for no apparent reason. We rode back down, then had some free time to explore the resort.  The resort was a huge, ski out place.  It was made up of three main building, each with over ten floors.  There were also separate pool buildings, café buildings, and building that I really don’t know their purpose, all connected through indoor bridges and tunnels.  I think they might have been trying to compensate for something…

Finally, after dinner, we hit the slopes for the first time.  For the first time in my life, I went skiing with a snowboarder. Which would have been fine, except her bindings were crappy, so it took three times as long to strap in as it should.  Sigh. 

The hill had about the difficulty level of Lutsen, but the length of about 1 ½ Hyland hills.  Not bad, but the way people were talking, I was expecting mountains.  But they still believed that they needed high-speed lifts.  Which was fine, as it was faster.  But completely unnecessary!

I was lucky in that I got pretty good boots and skis. But some of the other people had water leak into their boots.  The prof’s daughter even got frost-nip.  It was also very, very cold.  Easily single digit wind-chill, so we were all in and out, trying to keep warm.  One of the other students lost his wallet (it was later found).  But all things considered, at the end of the night we were all less than thrilled.  But we ended the night with karaoke, which made everything better.

The next morning, skiing was a lot better.  The sun warmed things up, so no breaks needed.  I also able to ski with some different people, and we spent the morning racing down double black diamonds (orange circles here).  After lunch, we returned to Yonsei, and we all collapsed of exhaustion.

Obviously more stuff has happened since then, but I’ll write about that later.

It is not even 1pm, so to say good night would feel a bit wrong.

Good Afternoon!

Andrea

My Life as a K Pop Music Video

It is rare that you get to meet a living, breathing stereotype.  I have had the pleasure to meet not one, but a country full of them.

Welcome to South Korea, the land of the Cute, K pop, and untempered Confucianism.  An odd mix, but it seems to work here.

Korea has its own brand of the Kawaii lifestyle, originally a Japanese idea that was then exported to the rest of capitalist Eastern Asia.  Kawaii is the name of the cute, happy lifestyle that is now associated with eastern Asia.  If you are still confused, think hello kitty and anime, and you are just about there.  Elena and I went out to buy soap, and the first stuff we found was in the shape of a teddy bear.  The only staplers available in the stationary store are in the shape of ladybugs.  And it is difficult to find hairbands that do not have oversized buttons attached to them.  ]

The cute life translates, for women, into a desire to look small, young, and almost childish.  Oversized sweaters and boots or pleated miniskirts fall along these lines.  Big eyes are valued, as is clear skin, leading to the explosion of the makeup and facial care industries.  High-pitched voices are also valued, to the point where phone operators will chirp in artificially high voices.

We are staying at Yonsei University in Seoul, one of the top universities in South Korea.  Apparently, they only accept the top 1.5% of scores on Korean University entrance exam (like our ACT or SAT).  That makes them better than their rival university, which will accept the top 2%.  Of course, there is variation within different majors, anywhere between the top 0.5% to 1.5%, depending on the popularity of the major.  Majors that prepare you for civil service are the most popular, as tradition dictates that the highest honor jobs are governmental jobs.  Yay for Confucianism, which values education, statecraft, and standardized tests!

Upon arrival, we were paired up with “buddies,” Korean students who are supposed to help show us around.  They have actually been, for the most part, pretty awesome.  They are all very sweet and friendly.  In their spare time, they do things like dance, sing and go to photo art exhibits.  And we do cute things together, like going ice-skating and playing board games at restaurants and such.  And they are all creepily fashionable.  And they are always smiling and happy.  It is like some of the K pop music videos.  It is wonderful though, meeting people again and actually getting the feel of a place.

Now life here is not cute and fun all of the time.  Like I pointed out, academics here are extremely high stakes.  Koreans also fulfill the stereotype of studying very very hard for a very very long time.  The library here at Yonsei has not only a café, so you don’t have to leave for meals, but also beds, so you don’t have to leave to sleep.  And yes, these beds are in use during finals week.  There are also kiosks, where you can reserve a chair to study in in the library.  You even get a recite, saying that for the next two hours, you own that chair.  This obsession with study has translated also to our class, in which we have been given a lot of reading, plus an intro level Korean class compressed into four lessons.  No, we are not just learning “Hello” and “thank you.”  We are learning verb conjugation and sentence structure in a new alphabet.  I don’t care haw easy Korean is to learn.  You cannot learn a new language at this level in four hours.  And I don’t want to spend too much time out of class working on it, because, well, I am in a new country and want to do cool things.  All in all, we are in class anywhere between 5 to 6 hours a day.  But it is only for 3 days a week.  Then we get day excursions to do cool things like ski.  I can’t wait to go skiing!  Which is why I should not feel guilty about working right now.  Oh, the ongoing balance between work and play that is present in all study abroad.

So what have I been up to besides class?  Well, lets see. We got here on January 2^nd, and I can’t for the life of me, remember what I did that night.  I don’t think it was very interesting.  Mostly unpacking and watching the new Sherlock.  Actually, yeah, that is all I did.  And laundry.  We have laundry machines now. The next day, Elena and I got lost, sent a package and found pasta all before noon.  We then had orientation, met our buddies, got a campus tour, got a nearby area tour, ditched the tour and went with our buddies to a photo booth store and burger king, went out to dinner, got Jamba Juice, had a global meeting, then went out again with our buddies.  Very fun day.  Next day was a city tour, where we visited Gyeongbok Palace (remember, Korea was its own independent kingdom for thousands of years), the Blue House (like the White House, only Korea gave it a blue ceiling), Insadong, a neighborhood of artsy shops and tea houses, and Gwanghwamoon Square, the site of large statue of Great King Sejong, creator of the Korean alphabet (before that, the Koreans used Chinese characters with their own pronunciation). 

The next day we went to the International Lutheran Church.  Claire (my buddy) and Minwoo dutifully came along with us, though I assured Claire she didn’t have to.  I was kind of expecting the Vine all over again, since the Christian community in Korea (an impressive 25% of the population) is notoriously evangelical.  In fact, it was more like a small town Lutheran church, complete with middle-aged white guys coming up to you and asking “Where are you guys from?” The pastor was actually from Mankato, and knows the family of Lisa on our trip!  We got talking to another family for a good 10 minutes after the service.  When we left, Minwoo and Claire asked us who we were talking to.  They thought we had found someone that we knew! They were stunned to hear that we had only just met these people.

After church, we met up with more people and their buddies and went skating.  Unlike Shanghai, skating is actually a thing here, and the rink was so crowded that there were multiple collisions, mostly involving us and little children. 

The next day (yesterday) was our first day of class.  Being in class from 9 to 4:30 with only a lunch break does not make for a very interesting blog post.  We had dinner with Annika’s buddy.  Then I watched K Pop in preparation for an upcoming project, and felt really bad about myself.  K pop idols work for years on singing and dancing, while continuing their schoolwork and developing a quirky talent.  They barely have time for a social life, let alone sleep.  And then you start wondering what you have done with your life…

Don’t get me wrong.  It doesn’t sound fun.  But it is an accomplishment.

But, so is traveling around the world, and studying to be a doctor, and all that stuff!  And on Thursday and Friday I get to go skiing.  That is something else that I am decently good at.  And it will be fun. 

It technically isn’t nighttime yet, but I really don’t know how else to end this blog post.  I guess it is night somewhere in the world. So…

Good night.

Andrea

Big Brother

If I was to make a map of the relative strength of government influence on daily life in different areas of China, if would probably consist of concentric circles, radiating out from Beijing. There would also be a lot over Tibet, but that is a different story.  Bottom line, Beijing has a very, very different than Shanghai.

The first hint that we weren’t in Kansas came when we got to the hotel.  Up until this point, our first order of business when we get to a new place is to get on the internet and check facebook.  In Shanghai, this meant using a VPN, a virtual private network, which allows my computer to believe it is in Minnesota.  This is how most international students get around Chinese Internet censorship.  In Beijing, the government blocked our VPN.  No getting around censorship in Beijing.

We have been going through the same tour company for over 20 years.  20 years ago, there were only government owned tour companies.  So by extension, we are still working with a government tour company.  The old tour companies serve two purposes: show tourists the major sites, and make sure they don’t go anywhere else.  Although security has lightened up a great deal, there are still remnants of this mindset in the approach of our tour guide.

Bruce, our tour guide, acted more like our nanny.  Despite the fact that we told him that we did not want a wake up call (he asked), we got a wake up call two mornings in a row.  I am pretty sure that Marty got made at him for that, and after the second day we did not get a wake up call anymore.  Either out of concern for our weak western stomachs, or with the knowledge that he got some profit if we went to a restaurant that he organized, we were discouraged from eating street food, a suggestion we quickly ignored.  And none of us got sick, thank you very much. We were also actively kept away from the area of town with the universities, and kept us busy almost constantly.  By the time we had a free day at the end of our trip, we were all absolutely exhausted.

We were taken to a lot of government cultural shops, were the goods were three times the price as at a market and comparable quality.  They gave us presentation on how (insert product here) was made in a very, happy, quaint way.  Then they assured us about the quality of their products and took us into a large showroom.  Again, though he never said it, it was obvious that Bruce got a bonus if we bought something, and because of that encouraged us to buy. 

This is nothing new.  We went to a carpet factory in Turkey and a marble factory in India.  But before going to these places, we were assured by our tour guides that there was no pressure to buy, and that we were visiting mainly to see how these products were made.  It was also interesting, that the silk production we saw in Turkey and in India was much more gritty and in not as nice buildings as in China.  I am not suggesting that India and Turkey was worse.  On the contrary, it felt a lot less artificial.

Ill let you make your own judgments.  But to me, it all felt very artificial.  I am going to echo what Andrew said once we got to Korea.  If the most important when visiting a place, the thing that we will remember for years and tell our grandchildren about is the crazy things that we did, the culture that we experience and the people we meet, then most of Beijing was a complete waste of time.

I guess this is the point that I actually talk about what we did.  We started with Tiananmen Square.  We went to the Forbidden City, and after a fair bit of begging on my part, Bruce let me, Chaia and Heather walk around on our own (we had seen everything before, plus we talked about it in Art history class).  We saw the National Treasure briefly, and looked at some very ornate clocks.  Then we went to Temple of Heaven.  That evening we went to the Kung fu show, which had some very impressive martial arts, and a very cheesy plot. We spent a day at the Great Wall, which was super cold and windy, but really fun. Then we were at the Bird’s Nest where they were building a mini ski hill, and Water Cube, where we lost Marty for an hour.   The next day we spent at the Summer Palace, where Bruce got us out of paying 10 yuan to see a Buddhist temple.  We went to a Beijing Opera, but the main singer was only marking her part, not singing it properly.  Which was very disappointing.  We went to a government pearl store, a jade store, a silk store and a tea store.  On New Years, we had Peking Duck and went to an acrobatics show because we were uninvited to a fancy government party at the Great Wall.  We celebrated New Years in the Hodel’s room.  The next day we had free, and a few of us checked out a church nearby, then relaxed.  The next day we headed out.

I really don’t want to write more about Beijing.  I think it was my least favorite part of this trip, in part because I have done everything before, because it felt so fake, and because I never saw any part of the city that was not a tourist trap.

Good Night

Andrea