3 Days in Korea: June 4-7, 2006

Our trip from Tokyo to Frankfurt was broken up by a stop over in Korea for the maximum 72 hours. We arrived late afternoon at Incheon airport, a vacuous modern construction sitting on salt pans and mud flats about one hour outside of Seoul. After a few mixups with bus and train tickets we managed to catch a swish bus into Seoul and then a KTX high speed train down to Busan (about 3 hours), arriving late and exhausted but warmly welcomed by our friends whom we had first met at a bath-house in Japan: Greg (from upstate NY) and his wife Heejung (from Busan) and their 1 1/2 yr old baby, Kaelem.

Soccer:
Heejung`s family are landlords for a neighborhood bath-house where they live in an apartment over the bath-house. We went directly up to their apartment to watch a World Cup build-up match in Germany, a friendly between Korea and Germany with Heejung`s brother and mother. The Koreans, we discovered, were extremely excited about soccer and the World Cup. Perhaps it was leftover football fever from being hosts of the last world cup, but the tv/media and the streets were all filled with soccer images and high hopes for the Korean team. There is a fairly long and complicated dance and soccer chant that most Koreans seemed to know and Heejung and Kaelem had been rehearsing. It`s not uncommon for couples to walk around in matching shirts and his and her outfits (these are young couples by the way) and the red soccer shirt was a prominent example of “couple t`s“ that we saw everywhere. The day after watching the game with Heejung`s family her brother gave Craig and I each our own t-shirt which proudly exclaims “Reds, Come together!“ (Craig`s wearing it in the photo). Later, at the airport leaving Korea, we were given Korean flag tatoos, little mobile phone cleaners and even a face-pack cosmetic thing somehow connected to the Korean soccer team. We were sorry not to see them go through, and I confess that I still haven`t worn my shirt yet.

We spent our short time in Korea catching up with Greg and Heejung, getting to know baby Kaelem, spending one day in the city and the next day we took a trip to the mountains to visit an area rich with history and temples. We also visited some more bath-houses too. Here are some brief impressions of the trip.

People:
The Koreans we met were pretty lively and friendly. Language remained a barrier, but unlike many Japanese people, language did not stop them from trying their hardest to communicate. Maybe that`s why they often came across as a bit direct and aggressive. Though I`ve always thought Korean society is fairly conservative, the women seemed pretty fiery and strong. They were generous spirited people as well, and everyone liked to give advice and warnings, from how to eat foods (use your spoon more often than chopsticks, don`t pick up the bowl, mix the rice in everything...) to how to bathe in the bath-house to helping us switch the outside light off at the apt. we stayed at.

On the streets, every single person stopped to smile and cuddle baby Kaelem who was an instant celebrity with his mixed Korean-American background. We had come to know the ways most Japanese also admire Western faces, but the adoration the Koreans showed Kaelem far exceeded all this. Strangers ran up to pick him up and hug him, taking him by the hand and walking down the street together, both men and women were smitten.

Food, Toilets and Traffic:
Korean food was pretty tasty, a thousand variations of kim chee served with every meal, yumo black soymilk, lots of beef and stirfrys and soups with the rice mixed in. I always knew it was spicy, though I was surprised to find it spicy both going down and coming out. Both of our stomachs suffered for a week after just the three days in Korea. Korean toilets were a puzzle at first. In public toilets, you took the toilet paper from a large roll in the entrance before going into the stall, and after use it was all thrown into the trash bins instead of being flushed down, which made for some pretty stinky toilet stalls at times. Aside from the toilet, we spent a bit of time in the car as the traffic was pretty bad in Busan. The roads were congested, and wide city streets suddenly forked or lifted up or tunnelled down. Red lights were just a formality and even big trucks would slow down a bit and then push straight through them.

Baths:
We had two bathing experiences, one in the neighborhood bath-house below Heejung`s family and one at a large hot spring. The baths were pretty similiar to Japan, we had a hot pepper bath in the hot spring that could only come from such a kim chee loving country, and the saunas were very hot. There was a woman who gave massages and gruff scrub-downs in the local bath-house. I went in one morning and waited my turn despite the slightly intimidating sounds of pounding and slapping of the bathers skin. I had several layers of skin scrubbed off and my limbs twisted round awkwardly (it felt good afterwards though). I rinsed off and had a final soak and went out to the changing rooms. I was fully changed when the massage woman came in and very persistently tried to tell me something, maybe something about my hair as she kept waving her hands around her head. Clearly, there was something I had not quite done correctly, and though I didn`t really get it, I got undressed again and went back in and washed my hair again to see if that would placate her, which it seemed to do.

All in all, the short trip was a great diversion from the long travelling and a neat peek at some of life in Korea. We were fortunate to see the city and the countryside, old temples and newer places, regular family life, and spend time with our good friends too.