Pilgrims and Indian Food

Given that Seoul is just about as far from Plymouth Rock as geographically possible, Thanksgiving is not exactly the most important of celebrations in Korea.  I went to work and when I asked my classes if they knew what day it was in America, most students were clueless.  Much like Halloween and the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving seems to be an American experience that has not made the jump across the Pacific.

To celebrate the Pilgrim and Indian-themed holiday I did the next best thing to a turkey dinner surrounded by family:  I went and got Indian food.  If I couldn’t honor Squanto’s farming skills I could at least be thankful that another group of people also called Indians make delicious food.  I’m actually going to go to a Thanksgiving dinner at a bar frequented by foreigners on the weekend but until that rolls around I’m more than happy to ditch the turkey and pick up some naan bread.  This is Thanksgiving, after all, and if a good piece of garlic naan isn’t something to be thankful for, I don’t know what is.

Is This Miami? No, It’s Eurwangni Beach!

It’s been over a month since my last three day weekend and it’s going to be another month until the next one.  Needless to say, this isn’t exactly conducive to seeing Asia.  I’ve started developing a sort of cabin fever with regards to Seoul.  I’m seeing lots of the city but I’m really itching to get out of it and see something different.

This weekend I decided to head over to Incheon and check out the beach.  Incheon is either a completely separate entity from the Seoul metropolitan area or else it’s a gigantic suburb with a few million people.  I haven’t made my mind up about that quite yet.  Either way, it’s home to the international airport and there’s not much reason to go there unless it’s time to catch a flight.  One thing Incheon does have going for it outside the aviation industry is a coastal location.  Seoul is pretty close to the ocean but it’s just far enough to make regular beach trips pretty inconvenient.  I visited the beach in Busan, Donghae, Ulleungdo, and even Taiwan, but I went all summer without ever once visiting Eurwangni Beach, the beach in Incheon.  I hadn’t heard the greatest things about Eurwangni, after all the area is more famous for its enormous tidal mudflats than its white sand.  But my craving to do something outside Seoul coupled with Eurwangni Beach’s semi-convenient location had me all ready for a beach day in November with Paul, a coworker of mine.

To get to Eurwangni, I had to take the train to Incheon International Airport, which takes a little over an hour and a half.  From the airport I got on a bus and rode that about twenty minutes until the bus stopped at Korea’s best attempt at a beach town.  The beach itself was nothing special.  The water was a murky shade of light brown and the ground was more muddy than sandy.  The coast off the sand, however, was actually pretty interesting.  Paths along the shore led through rock formations and cliffs.  The tide pools. crashing waves, and cold air all reminded me a lot of the coasts of places like Scotland or Normandy but since I’ve never been to either of those places this comparison could be completely untrue.

After Paul and I had our share of exploring tide pools and rocks we headed back to the airport to catch the train back to Seoul and discovered a pleasant surprise waiting for us by the train entrance:  an ice skating rink!  Where else in the world besides Korea would there be a random ice skating rink in the middle of an airport?  Nowhere, that’s where.  Paul and I laced up our boots, took to the ice, and quickly realized this ice skating rink was made of fake ice.  The ground was some sort of mystery material that we tried our best to slide on but ended up mostly stomping all over.  I’m still not entirely sure why they gave us ice skates and not roller blades, which would have made much more sense, but that’s Korea and sometimes things over here are just a little bit different.

Peppero Day is a Korean Holiday Based on Snacks

November 11 is more than just a day when millions of Americans will say “11-11 make a wish,” each thinking they were the first to make the November 11 – 11:11 connection.  In Korea, November 11 is a holiday celebrating what else but snacks.  Not just any snack food, mind you.  November 11 is Peppero Day!  Peppero for all!

What is Peppero, you might be justifiably asking yourself right now.  Peppero is essentially a Korean trademark infringement on the popular Japanese snack called Pocky, those long, skinny sticks with different flavored candy coatings.  The reason Peppero Day is celebrated on November 11 is because when you hold up two Peppero sticks they look like the number 11.

Celebrating Peppero Day is pretty simple.  The only thing anyone has to do is give another person Peppero.  That’s it, the end.  While it might sound just about as exciting as other holidays like Arbor Day or Columbus Day, my students got really into it.  They were giving Peppero to their friends, teachers, and anyone else they ran across.  I even got Peppero from one of my six-year-olds (that would be four-years-old in American age).

I’m still not too sure about why Peppero Day is so popular.  Peppero is an okay snack but I would put it more on the lines of a Mr. Goodbar or a Krakel.  They’re both delicious in their own right, but do you ever go out of your way to get one or just wait until the giant Hershey’s variety bags roll around?  I imagine Peppero Day has something to do with a brilliant marketing strategy by the Peppero makers.

I Went to the North Korean Border and I Got a T-Shirt

This weekend I went north of Seoul to the DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone dividing North Korea from the South which is also, ironically, the most heavily militarized place on Earth despite its name.  Ever since the ceasefire agreement between the North and South at the end of the Korean War in 1953, the DMZ has acted as a political and cultural boundary keeping the Soviet-led communists in the North from being influenced by the American-led democracy in the South.  Logistically, it’s next to impossible for me to visit Pyongyang, the major city on the North side, so I did the next best thing and took a trip to the Joint Security Area straddling the border.

I met a couple of friends at the army base in Seoul bright and early for a 7:30 AM bus departure.  We went on a tour with the USO so we were able to go places you can only visit with army escorts.  The drive from the center of Seoul to the Joint Security Area at the DMZ only took about an hour, which is kind of strange to think about considering much of that hour was spent stuck in the chaos that is Seoul traffic.  Our bus was stopped outside the Joint Security Area entrance and an escort hopped inside, instructing us of where we were allowed to take pictures and how we were allowed to interact with the North Korean guards we would be standing only a few feet from.  He also gave us a brief history of the war and told us what life in the villages along the base is like for the Koreans who have lived in the area longer than the DMZ has been around.

Our first stop was the border.  We went into a small building that looked more like a bright blue trailer than anything else and found out this was the conference room where officials from both sides meet.  The border goes through the building so anyone who walks past the center of the room crosses over into North Korea.  Needless to say, I did this and can now technically say I have been in North Korea.  The room is packed with tables and chairs and is occupied by a couple of guards to make sure we didn’t run over to the North to take on Kim Jong-il.  Outside the conference room, more guards were standing directly across from one another on both sides of the border.  Seeing the guards was the first surprising moment for me, not because they had their fingers wrapped around loaded weapons but because I was seeing a North Korean person for the first time ever.  It was an odd feeling putting faces to the stories always playing on the news.

The next stop was a lookout point that offered a view of Kijong-dong, the propaganda village north of the boundary.  The village is the home of the (former) largest flagpole in the world and loudspeakers playing broadcasts about the wonders of North Korea.  Kijong-dong is also, apparently unoccupied for the most part.  Many buildings are just shells that make the area look prosperous.  This part of the tour was the most interesting, in my eyes, because other than the propaganda village there was no development in sight.  Mountains surrounded large fields and it was impossible to tell what was North Korea and what was South Korea.  As different as the two countries are politically they really are the same geographically.  Seeing the mountains rise up in the distance made me realize that North Korea is an actual place, not just an idea or story, and that place is much closer to my apartment than I ever thought about.

After the lookout point we got back on our bus and went to the Third Tunnel, a tunnel the North dug under the border.  There were many tunnels discovered but this one happened to be close to the Joint Security Area so it’s the one we saw.  Inside there was nothing special to see, it was a tunnel and that’s about it, but the fact that I was standing in a remnant of the Korean War was pretty neat.

Our last stop was Dorasan Train Station, the end of the line for all South Korean trains.  This station is designed to be the entry into North Korea if and when reunification ever happens and provide a railway connection between Seoul and Pyongyang.  When we got inside we paid 1,000 won (or about $1.00) and bought a “ticket” headed for Pyongyang, allowing us to go out onto the platform and see the actual end of the line.  The station has a giant sign on the wall that says “Not the last station from the South, but the first station towards the North.”  From what I saw this really was the last station from the South.  I’ll believe it truly is the first station towards the North when I can put my ticket to use and hop on a train to Pyongyang.

From Dorasan Station we boarded the bus again and headed back to Seoul.  The trip wasn’t terribly long but it was well worth the visit.  Not visiting the DMZ in Korea would be akin to not seeing the Eiffel Tower in France.  To celebrate our visit to Korea’s equivalent to the Eiffel Tower a group of us went to grab some dinner.  Where?  The only place to eat after spending a day on the border: On the Border.  Nothing goes better with a trip to the Hermit Kingdom than margaritas and chimichangas, after all.

A Very Korean Halloween

Halloween isn’t the biggest holiday in Korea.  It really isn’t even a holiday at all in fact.  This means that I spent October without seeing pumpkins, costumes, or the witch-themed decorations that litter American stores for the entire month.  Because the school I work at is an English academy, there is at least some effort to introduce the kids to certain parts of Western culture and Halloween was one of those things the students got to see.

We had a Halloween party at my school and the students got to dress up.  Some of the costumes were interesting, to say the least.  I had many male witches, a bride, an elaborately costumed Spiderman, and a belly dancer with an outfit far too revealing for a ten-year-old.  One boy who came as a vampire even brought a bottle of “blood” to put on people when he bit them.  I came dressed as Harry Potter, a costume that consisted of a vampire cape, nerdy glasses, a magic wand, and a Gryffindor badge and lightening scar to complete the look.  The entire getup cost about $10 and took about two minutes to put together.  It ended up okay, everyone knew what I was but I don’t think I will be winning any costume contests this year.

To get the kids excited at the Halloween parties I played them The Nightmare Before Christmas, Hocus Pocus, and the Thriller video, all of which they loved, and I had them create ghost stories.  They did not quite understand the concept of making ghost stories scary, so those turned out to be completely unrelated to Halloween but they had fun nonetheless.  During each class we also went trick-or-treating to the other classrooms where the students got candy.  They were instructed to sing “Trick-or-Treat, Smell my feet, Give me something good to eat!” by their Korean teachers rather than to just say “Trick-or-Treat!” making this process take a lot longer than it should have, but the students were happy and it got me out of doing an actual lesson so I can’t complain.

Outside my school the Halloween atmosphere was nowhere to be found in the entire city of Seoul.  I wanted to celebrate the holiday anyway so I went on a Halloween boat cruise out around the coast in Incheon.  This boat was filled with other foreigners who also wanted more Halloween in their lives.  The boat itself was a almost like a gutted out ferryboat that was refilled with a nightclub.  It sailed around for a few hours while the sun set and then all the passengers were loaded on buses headed to Hongdae for a night of more festivities after they were done drinking at sea.  While it wasn’t quite the same thing as seeing trick-or-treaters wandering the streets back home it was oddly comforting celebrating a very big part of American culture.