One of my Korean students’ favourite pastimes is pulling on my beard. These days, I can’t blame them — circumstances having forced me into (temporary) bachelordom for the first time in years, I’ve made it a project to accumulate as much hair on my face as possible, and even I will admit that the resulting thicket is eminently tuggable. (It’s when the kids figure they can swing from it that problems arise.)

There’s a lurking belief that Koreans can’t grow facial hair. This is profoundly untrue, as anyone who’s familiar with Korean money can tell you; each of the three denominations of Korean won (the 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000) boasts a likeness of an eminent figure from Korean history, and all of them are rocking killer beards. The most impressive is surely the white mop cascading from the chin of Confucian scholar Yi Hwang on the 1,000, but neither fellow Confucian Yi I on the five nor King Sejong the Great (arguably the most famous Korean of all time, at least within Korea) on the ten have anything to be ashamed of — each sports a missile-shaped goatee and full moustache that would make Tom Selleck’s nose pillow bristle with envy.

It is true, however, that in contemporary South Korea, prominent facial hair is a rare sight. (more…)

Exam testing informs every aspect of life in South Korea, and it doesn’t stop even after you’ve finished university

Last Thursday was test day in South Korea. Traffic stopped. Airplane schedules were altered. The military was told to shut up. The best rice cakes in the land were distributed, consumed, and most likely thrown up in anxiety. For nine hours, the universe froze.

The most stressful test of my life was my fourth-year university Anglo-Saxon exam, which required me to translate a chunk of the original text of Beowulf, and for which I studied hard for maybe three days. The stress stemmed primarily from my desire to protect my ego by way of my final average; ultimately, the exam meant nothing.

In South Korea, tests determine the outcome of every major event in your life, and the nationwide university entrance exam (officially, the “College Scholastic Ability Test”), which takes place annually on the third Thursday in November, is the mother of all tests — the doorway through which kids must pass to transform from mute, bespectacled children whose personality is subsumed by their identical school uniforms into burgeoning adults who can wear and drink and study what they want. (more…)

Joel visits South Korea’s most disturbing children’s theme parks in Jeju-do

JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA—Tourists first started coming to Jeju for the natural scenery, the beaches, and the fields of bright yellow canola and violet azalea lining the craters of Halla-san. But its development into a “resort island” has brought a host of other attractions: gardens, galleries, museums, and, most numerously, theme parks, covering almost any subject you can imagine, from green tea to glory-hole sex. The ultimate aim appears to be turning Jeju into a tourist Valhalla, with no square foot of usable space left unoccupied by giant plaster figures or ramshackle collections of junk or animals that have no business being in this part of the world.

Jeju’s many Lands, Worlds and Towns mix Niagara Falls gaudiness, Vegas-style exploitation, confusion about the West and certainty about what vacationing Koreans consider a good time to incredibly strange effect, and they are worth looking at as a barometer of the similarities and differences between how fun is marketed in Korea and in North America.

LOVELAND

Loveland is, at least among foreigners, the most notorious, bizarre and flabbergasting theme park on Jeju. Loveland’s website calls it “a place where sexually oriented art and eroticism meet… where the visitor can appreciate the natural beauty of sexuality.” (more…)

Bestselling novelist Jon Evans’ new blog on the Third World technology revolution, exclusive to walrusmagazine.com

JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA — One very niche effect of the global economic meltdown has been a growing sense, among the ESL community in Korea, that the English teaching gravy train may be either congealing or going off the rails, depending on which metaphor you prefer.

In recent weeks, the South Korean won has taken a pummeling worthy of Jake La Motta, which means sending money home from Korea to pay off debts or stash in savings accounts is now a lesson in the more painful side of international currency exchange and the ways it can screw you. When I arrived in Jeju-do in December 2006, my monthly paycheque of 2.2 million won transferred home would turn into more than $2,200 Canadian. Today, I get under $2,000.

That’s not so bad, but the situation is much worse for American teachers, whose cheque now works out to about $1,680 US. With the free housing and the paid airfare, the ESL jobs here still offer an undeniably attractive deal, but for those who are here strictly for the money, it’s looking less and less like the savings coup it’s been for the last nine or ten years. If things get worse — as in 1997 Asian economic crisis worse — there’s a chance many money-conscious teachers won’t see any reason to continue working here, and just as good a chance that many travel-hungry teachers will realize that if they’re going to be making crap money, they might as well be teaching somewhere they can buy weed and pancakes that aren’t served with kimchi and clams. (more…)

JEJU-DO—Meat-eating in Korea is very literal. Humanity’s participation in the food chain is much less disguised than it is in North America, where people are happy to pretend their bacon burgers or pork tenderloin medallions are magically synthesized for the express purpose of being delicious. In Korean, the word for pork is dwaeji gogi — “pig meat.” Most other meats work the same way: insert name of animal, followed by the word for “meat” — not much in the way of linguistic frippery to disguise the fact that meat is basically dead flesh and ripped-apart muscle.

In an unsettling twist, restaurant signage follows suit. Many restaurants advertise specialties with pictures of their dishes, displayed right underneath jovial cartoon versions of whichever animal gave their life for the food. This is especially true of restaurants serving galbi, pork or beef rib meat barbecued over flaming charcoals stuck into the centre of your table.

The following is series of portraits of these brave ambassadors of personal flavour. As you can see, most of them look downright delighted at the prospect of ending up in your bowels. (more…)

This weekend marked the Korean holiday of Chuseok, the rough equivalent of North American Thanksgiving, and although I hate to engage in a bout of schadenfreude during the festive season, I can’t possibly let the story that surfaced while I was in Canada for a couple weeks go unremarked.

I refer, of course, to reports that North Korean Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is sick, or, even more serious, dead—and has been so for as long as five years. The unsubstantiated rumours, sparked by Kim’s absence at celebrations marking the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the DPRK, say Kim may have suffered a stroke, and one report by a Japanese scholar claims the DL died way back in 2003 from diabetes and that a core team of military officials has been ruling ever since, using Kim dummies for public appearances. (more…)

The Olympics are a cesspool of hypocrisy and cold, slimy greed

JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA—I’ve read that the Olympics are producing some thrilling moments this year. I wouldn’t know.

During the lead up to the Games, when China blocked journalists from accessing websites such as Amnesty International and the BBC, there was a huge media kerfuffle about broken promises and the absolute need for a climate in which reporting could be done freely and without restriction. The Olympics, the argument went, are about cultural exchange and openness, and limiting access was hostile to the very spirit of the Games.

Yet here I sit in Korea, five days into the Olympic media orgy, and if I want to watch an event or a feature from my home country—because let’s not be naive: the Olympics are also very much about nationalism—I’m shit out of luck. Every attempt I’ve made to access Olympic content on an international website has been a failure, and in general, my quest for online Olympic coverage has been by far the most strangled Internet experience of my life. Not since the sweaty-palmed days of my Catholic school dances have I been so thoroughly denied.

(more…)

JEJU-DO—For many, a big part of the expat experience involves drinking, and especially drinking in bars. Be they mysterious, seedy, elegant or anarchic, watering holes for wanderers have a certain romanticism attached to them, a fuzzy, seductive corona of myth that frames them as hubs of intrigue, sex and adventure.

In spirit if not style, the archetypal expat bar is Rick’s Café Americain, the nightclub from Casablanca where Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick, delivers (or doesn’t) some of cinema’s most memorable lines. Peopled with refugees, soldiers, sketchy men and alluring women, the club is a magnet for foreigners stuck in the Moroccan limbo city of the film’s title, those running from war and waiting for a ticket to elsewhere, who in the meantime while away their time drinking cocktails and listening to Sam play his sad, sad songs.

In every place with more than a smattering of foreigners, there is a foreigner bar. This, I expect, is one of the first things many people discover when they begin travelling, especially those who do it alone and seek the comfort of speaking to people in their own language, or at least a linking language that allows them to meet in a conversational neutral zone. Some people seek foreigner bars out, some people find them by accident, but the general rule is that they’re places where travellers (especially backpackers) can go to get shitfaced drunk and try to sleep with each other without worrying too much about culturally-appropriate behaviour, and to look for Western-style breakfasts, beat-up guitars covered in stickers, djembes for impromptu hippie jams, personal-size pizzas, scuffed board games, used guidebooks and copies of On the Road, and advice on how best to score hash without ending up in a dingy prison wherein they will be considered valuable foreign currency worth their weight in cigarettes. (more…)

JEJU-DO—The sun is broiling, the humidex is high, and in Korea that means it’s time for a nice, hot bowl of chicken soup. Just as people in the West associate certain foods with holidays, so do Korean people enjoy special meals during particular seasons. July 19 in Korea was Chobok, the first day of Sambok, a period that spans the three 복날 (pronounced “bok-nal”), or “dog days,” which Koreans believe are the hottest of the summer, and which are usually spent eating things that most North Americans would consider perfect fare for a cold winter night.

The consumption of hot dishes to beat hot weather is tied to Asian medicine, which suggests eating hot foods causes perspiration, cooling the outside of the body, while warming and rejuvenating the inside, thereby fighting fatigue brought on by the scorching heat. The Sambok tradition dates back hundreds of years to the dynastic period, when farmers believed that exhaustion caused by working too hard in the heat would lead to a bad harvest; they took the Sambok period off to vacation in a cooler locale, often somewhere in the mountains or by the seaside. (more…)

Just a quick note to point anyone who’s interested to a piece I wrote for Culture+Travel, a magazine that covers some cool, off-the-radar stories from travel destinations around the globe. This one’s about haenyeo, Jeju’s famous women divers, who free-dive — that means no air tanks — for seafood off Jeju’s coasts. A guy named Ian Baguskas, which is an awesome last name if ever I’ve heard one, took the photos.

You have to marvel at a country that, when looking for a way to show its commitment to peace, chooses to blow something up. That’s North Korea, which this week detonated the cooling tower at its controversial Yongbyon nuclear reactor as a way of saying, hey, we’re laying off the nukes. As a result, the U.S. has removed the DPRK from its list of states that sponsor terrorism and lifted some economic sanctions.

Not everyone believes the explosion means much, which is no surprise, given the North’s history of grandstanding, bloated rhetoric, lying and misguided attempts at image management. There are skeptics who say getting rid of the tower, which the New York Times calls a “technically insignificant structure, easy to rebuild,” is pure theatre, signifying nothing about more important disarmament efforts and perhaps suggesting that the North has done what it intended to at Yongbyon: produced enough nuclear weapons that the plant is no longer needed. (more…)

JEJU-DO—Coincident with the US beef kerfuffle sizzling in South Korean politics right now, I’ve been learning a lot about barbecue, through marathon grill-out sessions with my American friend Mark, his trusty portable Weber and his copy of grill maestro Stephen Raichlen’s fat BBQ bible, How to Grill.

According to Raichlen, when cooking beef, the ideal setup is to have a so-called “three-zone fire”—a situation in which the charcoal is distributed such that one area of the grill is super hot (for searing), one medium hot (for through cooking) and one cool (for when you need to save the meat from immolation). What can now be confidently called the political crisis in South Korea, spurred by US beef imports, has put SK’s president-for-now Lee Myung-bak squarely over the hot zone of the metaphorical grill, and the question now is how long he can burn before he has to jump off completely. (more…)