Postcards from Korea: Street Lights

I enjoy a good street light, and Korea certainly has its share of notable lights. Unfortunately, I failed to capture the base of the lights which frequently sported cool stuff like dragons. Today we return to Busan before our departure on Wednesday morning, so I will add to these photos if I find any that strike my fancy.

I

Our Korean Hotel Room - A Lilliputian Delight

After Marty’s meeting was over on Saturday, he and I left Pohang, but not before asking his Korean colleague to arrange a hotel room for us in Gyeongju, the ancient capitol of the Silla Dynasty, our next destination. Having been limited to western style hotel rooms, we made sure to emphasize that we wanted to try a Korean-style room.

We arrived at the Hotel Concorde in the evening, somewhat disappointed by the absence of anything even remotely Asian in its name. Likewise, its nondescript exterior gave no hint that we were 5,000+ miles from home, and aside from the somewhat grim nightshift staff who stared us while we approached the reception desk, there was little to suggest the Far East in the lobby. We thought that perhaps Marty's Korean colleague had been misled when making our arrangements and started questioning whether we would finally get our Korean-style room.

We took the elevator to the third floor, found Room 319 and opened the door. The light from the hallway cast far enough into the room to show us two pairs of sandals waiting for us near a step that led onto a raised floor; finally, we had arrived in Korea. 

According to our guidebook, Koreans traditionally live on the floor. Consequently, you always trade your shoes for sandals or slippers upon entering a Korean home (or hotel room). Many of the restaurants we ate in required that you remove your shoes before sitting at the Korean style tables, which are so low to the ground that you either sit on the floor or on a small pad on the floor. Sitting on the floor through a whole dinner was particularly challenging and painful for some of Marty's older colleagues who hadn't enjoyed a lifetime of floor-sitting to keep their muscles and ligaments supple. Not ones to be kept far from food, Marty and I had enthusiastically negotiated eating from our floor positions, although Marty had a few less-than-graceful moments when trying to fold his 6'2" frame to fit under the almost legless tables.

We found the light switch to our room and with great anticipation clicked it on. I was a bit dumbfounded when the light illuminated an expanse of yellow vinyl floor that dominated what can only be described as a largely empty room. Yes, the quality that most defines a Korean hotel room is not so much what is in the room but rather what is absent, that is, the bed. Looking around what seemed like simply a box, I admit that I wondered if our quest for a Korean hotel room had been well considered. I do, after all, like a bed.

Marty tried to assure me that when he stayed in a Japanese hotel, a woman came to his room and arranged a futon on the floor for him to sleep. I had little hope that the unenthusiastic staff from the lobby were going to come to our rescue, so we started hunting around the room and found a pile of futons neatly folded and piled in the closet. Each futon had with it a comforter and sheet. The sheet was stiff and starched to the point where I think we could have built a tent with it and not required any external supports. The comforter was lime green with a magenta edge and white nylon cover that completely covered one side and was folded about a foot over the edge and tied to the lime silky material with small bow ties every six inches. It seemed warm and clean, but we were unsure which side was up.

Before I came to Korea, I pictured a futon to be a folded mattress stuffed firmly with about six inches of pure comfort. The Korean futons were a disappointing 1.5 inches thick, and a quick test indicated that we were in for a night full of bone-to-floor contact. By this time we had noticed the absence of pillows, and I remembered that I read something in the guidebook about Koreans sometimes using wooden blocks for pillows. I started wondering if we had pre-paid our three nights in what was increasingly seeming like a torture chamber; perhaps it was not too late to bail.

Not wanting to lose face, I hung in there while we tried to untangle the puzzle of the futon, sheet and comforter. A looming question was whether to sleep on top of the sheet or under the sheet.  While the choice of sleeping under or on top of a sheet may seem trivial, I had found two hairs on the futon cover and was feeling a strong need to know which covers had been washed and which had not been washed since the previous users. Obviously the sheet went between us and the not-been-washed surface, and the identification of that surface was paramount.

Feeling exhausted and close to panic, I decided we needed expert assistance and called the front desk. Realizing that my long explanation in English about how we had never slept in a Korean hotel room and weren't sure how to fix the bed was completely incomprehensible, I finally just pleaded "We need help." That worked. Two minutes later, a young Korean staff member was at our door looking exceedingly nervous. 

He lingered at the stair looking into the room while Marty and I babbled away in English and gestured helplessly. He seemed to come to some realization of his own, searched through our closet and darted from the room. We looked at each other wondering if we had been abandoned. He came back just as suddenly and provided us with two, thankfully normal-looking, pillows.

Still standing at the stairway, he gestured that we should put the futons on the floor and lay the sheet on the futons. With that, he bolted, never to return again. Seized with a panic that all of our questions had not yet been answered, I had to stop myself from running after him. His look of terror in the face of our babbling English brought back memories of my own challenges in France, and I couldn’t help but show him mercy.

Sympathy aside, I was still unsatisfied that there was a clean sheet between me and all potentially-not-washed-since-the-previous-user surfaces, so we hunted through the closet and found another stiff-as-cardboard sheet to put between us and the comforter. We then laid down on our creation and faced the reality that there was no way in hell we were going to get a good night sleep with our bones jamming into the floor. We went back to the closet, rustled up a couple more futons and started all over, this time with a two futon base.

With the bed emergency over, we had a chance to look more closely around the room. It wasn’t entirely empty as there were various cabinets, a vanity, a table and a light box pushed to the edges of the room. The furniture gave one the same impression that one gets in a daycare or a kindergarten of having been built for people who are much tinier than the average adult. While Koreans are probably on-average shorter than their western counterparts, they are not so short as to require Lilliputian-size furniture. Again we realized, the furniture was designed for life on the floor.

The vanity offered a tissue box and a can of mosquito-cide, which was simultaneously comforting and disquieting. The glass-covered box labeled “EMERGENCY IMPLEMENT” on the wall held a piece of coiled rope and the instructions to “Please use like the picture to put in a handrail of balcony.” If I understood this correctly, in the event of an emergency we were expected to hang from a flammable rope attached to the balcony. Should we be relieved or alarmed?

Korean floors are heated, which feels quite nice when sitting on the floor. The futon in combination with the heated floor gave the impression of sleeping on an oversize heating pad. I imagine this would be a lovely sensation in our 55 degree bedroom at home, but in our overheated hotel room, I couldn't help but feeling like I was being grilled. I had to flip myself over regularly to keep from getting overdone.  Marty, who has an acute fear of colds and drafts, liked the feeling of being cooked until well done during his night as a human barbecue.

We are actually experienced floor dwellers. In a recent allergy fit, I removed our box spring and bed frame at home, and we have been sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Before this trip, I thought it just made our bedroom look like apartments I have had that were furnished with that just-out-of-college-and-don’t-have-any-money style. Now, I know, however, that our bedroom at home simply has an Asian flair and now, like Asian-Western cuisine, can be fashionably referred to as “fusion.” Korea has saved us from yet another fashion faux-pas, and we are feeling pretty hip.

"Emergency Implement" (top) and mosquito-cide (bottom)

Facing a room sans-bed

Furniture not built for a giant

View from Gyeongju Hotel

Postcards from a Korean Supermarket

Having posted on Facebook a lot of photos featuring street markets in Korea, I didn't want to mislead you into thinking that they don't have modern supermarkets. Here are some inside shots.

Lunch Counter

Korean Spam

Korean Junk Food

An Asian Do

While wandering the streets of Pohang by myself the other evening I ran across a Korean hair salon, recognizable by its barbershop pole featuring women, instead of the traditional red and blue stripes, whirling around the spinning pole. Despite the fact that I was desperately in need of a haircut, I walked by the salon, too lily-livered to jump into foreign cosmetology. Instead I gathered my courage by visiting a street market and purchasing five clementines, having learned that purchasing four, for unknown reasons, was not satisfactory to the friendly clementine merchant. With the false sense of courage that is derived from a successful commercial transaction in a foreign language, I plunged into the hair salon with reckless abandon, ready to take on negotiating a haircut.

Fortunately, the hair stylist was alone this late in the evening, so there would be no witnesses to my ineptitude. I stuck my head in the door and quickly communicated my need for a haircut by holding my bangs between my two fingers. The cosmetologist bravely assented to my wordless request and motioned me to come in and take off my coat. She sat me down in the chair in front of a surfboard-shaped mirror and said "Cut?" I nodded yes and tried to indicate by grasping my bangs between my two fingers that I wanted about a half an inch taken off. She appeared unfazed by my gesture and my inability to communicate and held out a pair of scissors and an electric clipper, indicating that I should choose between the two. Not wanting to restrain her artistry, I shrugged my shoulders non-committally, and she unhesitatingly chose the shears.

I was starting to come down from my market success high and had at this point noticed that I hadn't exactly chosen a high end salon. Somebody else's black hair was on the floor around the base of my chair. Likewise, there were little hair clippings unrelated to me on the weighted plastic-covered mantle that held down the apron she had draped on me. I started to look around more closely, desperately hoping that I would see one of the those cylinders of green barbicide packed with sanitized combs that are standard at any American hair salon. Nada. I started to think about Marty's niece Willa's cosmetology book that was loaded with color photographs of diseases and vermin and started wondering if I had been a little rash.

Before you get the wrong idea, let me assure you that South Korea is a highly-developed, very modern, clean country. Every fifth person on the street wears a mask over their mouth, indicating that they have a cold or other communicable disease that they are trying not to communicate. Our hotel lobby and other public places have hand sanitizers readily available. When Marty and I used the subway in Busan, there were four sanitary workers armed with spray bottles who ambushed unsuspecting travelers with forced hand sanitizing. And let's not even get into the butt-washing toilets.  Basically, Koreans seem perfectly clean and free of excessive head scratching. I reassured myself with these thoughts and rationalized that having someone else's hair within close proximity to my body is not a particularly life threatening situation.

My Korean clipper chose to spritz me with water, although a shampooing sink was nearby, and confidently started cutting away, no questions asked. Initially, her style seemed identical to my American experiences, and I relaxed. Once she finished the first go-round in her reassuringly familiar style, she started clipping more rapidly and randomly all around my head in a frenzy of Olympic-level haircutting. Now you may remember that I had tried to indicate that I wanted a half an inch taken off? One and a half- and two-inch pieces of hair started to fly off. She was going for it.

This isn't my first encounter with foreign haircutting. The best haircut I think I ever got was in Germany where I was completely unable to communicate with the stylist, my German being only slightly better than my Korean because I happen to know the word "kindergarten." I loved my haircuts from Gerome, my French hairstylist who was almost everything you expected a male French hairstylist to be. The one thing Gerome was not, however, was talkative, so I once made the mistake of trying a different hairstylist in the hopes of getting in a little French practice at the salon. The Guadeloupan hair stylist whom I foolishly substituted for Gerome certainly talked a lot more; in fact whatever she was talking about clearly agitated her so she babbled on rather violently, paying little attention to where her shears were landing. Needless to say, I contritely returned to my quiet, little Gerome.

In Gambia, we had no professional hairstylists, so I relied on the skill and goodwill of a friend. While traveling outside of Gambia, however, I was once desperate enough to try cutting my own hair with the itty-bitty scissors on my Swiss Army knife. For fashion reasons, it's probably best to avoid the Swiss Army cut, but when one is bathed in sweat and buried under a hat in the blazing West African sun while coated with many layers of sunscreen, it's really too late to care about one's hair.

I should also note that I got a buzz cut once when starting a long distance bike trip that was going to require three months under a bike helmet. No one from home, except Marty, ever saw this cut because I wisely got it after saying goodbye to all friends and family that I may have wanted to see again. Curiously, my hairdresser at the time got great pleasure from shaving my hair to a half inch length.  In hindsight, perhaps I should have found that alarming. More recently, I had a tatoo-covered male hairstylist who shampooed by rubbing my head rather too vigorously in the same place, over and over again. I thought for sure I would have noticeable hair loss in that one spot.

This is all just to say that for someone with rather unremarkable hair aspirations, I have had my share of hair adventures. I figured I could handle whatever Korea was willing to dish out.

After the whirlwind of shearing, spritzing and snipping, my Korean hairstylist started blow drying what little was left of my hair. While blow-drying she used her second of three English words and looked at me and said "Shampoo?" Knowing that I was covered with tiny little hairs that would get every where, I quickly said, "Yes, please." She blithely continued blow-drying, leaving me wondering if it was just a tease.  When it was all done, she declared it "Beautiful!" and I paid $7 and went on my way.

You are probably wondering about the results. Well, the best way I can describe it is to say that I look like a teenage Asian boy with attitude. No Korean woman I have seen has a haircut like this. In fact, while traveling on the bus yesterday, I finally saw a Korean with a haircut like mine. Sure enough, this teen, whose gender I found myself debating, sat in the back row of the bus, just behind me. I imagined him wondering whether that middle-aged Caucasian in front of him was a man or a woman. Gender-ambiguity aside, it's a technically good cut and well worth the $7. I've done far worse in America, and androgyny is under-rated.

My Feet's Feat

While wandering on my own through a small park in Pohang yesterday, I discovered a path with various stones set in concrete. There were sections of the path with small, sharp stones in pretty patterns; other sections had large pieces of granite that reminded me of narrow curbing. One section had stones divided by rounded logs. Women had taken off their shoes and were walking along the path barefooted to stimulate their feet. Curious, I removed my shoes and started down the path as well.

You probably can guess that I have not been walking stone paths my whole life, and this personal insight was rather obvious to all witnesses. I suspect that the woman who laughed heartily when she saw me negotiating the stones might just have recognized me as a newbie. She got me laughing too, and I ungracefully fell off the stone curbing, much to her continued amusement.

While the large stones and logs were fun and comforting to the feet, I will confess that I found the sharp stones rather painful and unpleasant, and I could only negotiate them with jerky and tentative steps punctuated by lots of ows, ouches and yikes! They almost did me in as I contemplated quitting my cross-cultural experience to avoid further pain. I hung in there, determined to get the full benefits that I was sure this Asian tradition would deliver.

I convinced myself that I enjoyed the experience once it was over and even walked back through the stones to get my shoes. (Plus all the Asian women were doing laps on the rocks, and I didn't want to look like wimp.) I can't say that I reached any higher level of enlightenment from the my one-time experience, but it was a positive enough experience (or perhaps I was simply stubborn) that I did undertake it again when later in the day I found another stone path along the riverwalk.

Curious about the benefits of torturing one's feet with little stones, I googled "Korea feet," and inadvertently discovered that there are all kinds of videos featuring people's feet. They include samples from one guy's video collection of Korean, Japanese, American and Canadian women's feet, several videos with titles referring to ugly feet, including one claiming that Katie Couric has ugly feet, and one showing the effect of inbreeding on feet. I can only conclude that perhaps there is too much leisure time in the world.

A more precise search suggested that these unusual footpaths might be a reflection of reflexology: the belief that applying pressure to various points in the feet can help other parts of the body and promote general health. There are a lot of critics of reflexology and its health claims. I stake no claims as to its efficacy, but it was kind of fun, in a masochistic kind of way. Here is my path:

Arriving in Busan, South Korea

Marty and I arrived in our hotel room in Busan, the second largest city in South Korea, 26 hours after having left our house in Durham. We were in remarkably good shape as flying west is much easier than flying east in terms of jetlag. Our flight was unremarkable except for the snack that was provided on the leg from Tokyo to Busan, which included a cleverly wrapped piece of sushi. In fact, it was so cleverly wrapped that the Korean gentleman next to Marty had to explain to him how to unwrap it in such as way as to roll the separately-cellophaned seaweed around the rice ball. The complex cellophane puzzle was a remarkable demonstration of Japanese engineering. Toyota would have been proud, and we were happy to transition to Asian cuisine.

Upon arrival at our very western, upscale hotel, that Marty's travel agent must have felt would ease our transition to Asia, we were assigned room 3007. The bellhop in his rather limited, but enthusiastic English, pointed out that the 007 of our room number must indicate that Marty was "Bond" and I was "Bond Girl." Perhaps it is only in the Far East that Marty or I could be in any way associated with James Bond. One couldn't help but be charmed, despite our obvious inadequacies for the roles.

Here is the view we enjoyed from our hotel window:

Mea Culpa

The last couple of days I have posted my Korea photos and some comments on my Facebook page, but I have concluded that I am an unenthusiastic Facebook user. The inadequacy of Facebook and the stimulus of Korea have prompted me to resume my blog, which I have shamefully neglected since leaving France. For those of you who were regular blog readers before my hiatus, I thank you for your interest and apologize for my inability to finish my stories from France once we moved back to New Hampshire. I had intended to share more stories and photos with you, but I was easily distracted from the task once we left.  Perhaps one day I will re-visit the unfinished French blog postings, but for now, on to Korea.

In case you are curious, here is what I initially faced when trying to negotiate my blog in Korea:

Yikes!