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Korea: Culture, High and Low

I love going to museums when I’m visiting another city, and Seoul has a slew of them. The two I went to were the Seoul Art Museum, which has three branches, and the Seoul Museum of History—the civic museum about Seoul itself.

The main branch of the art museum is not large, and in fact it doesn’t have much of a permanent collection at all. My guess is that Seoul got into the “we need to have an art museum in order to be taken seriously as an International City and Important Destination” game a bit late, which might also be why the collection is spread out over three different places; there may not actually be a permanent art museum yet. I went twice, first just to check it out, and later in the week to see a show devoted to Chinese and Korean contemporary ink painting.

What impressed me was not the permanent collection, which is small and not that interesting (give it a few years, though), but the people who were there. I was surprised by all the unsupervised children, who were not yet in school and actually spending time in an art museum. This would be unheard of in America, unless each work of art had an accompanying video game that allowed the player to kill The Blue Boy or blow the head off Mona Lisa. The exhibit of ink painting was wonderful: a curious mix of very traditional scrolls (tiny figures in landscapes of misty mountains, close-ups of pine cones) and very contemporary scrolls (blotches and squiggles, randomly organized). All of the accompanying titles and information about the artists were in Korean, which gave me the unexpected bonus of focusing entirely on the art. I never had a clue what I was looking at, and maybe drew rather unorthodox conclusions about what it was all Supposed to Mean.

The second gallery of the museum, located on the grounds of the Museum of History, had a local show of works by what I think were art students and ordinary, paintbrush-wielding Koreans. This show was terrific—an incredibly diverse range of stuff in all kinds of media, some of it very accomplished. When I’m in a gallery like this, I always play the Choose Some Art Game: if I had to hang one of these works over my couch, which one would I pick? I had narrowed it down to three when I met the nice elderly Korean gentlemen looking at the art. Apparently art appreciation is a group activity, as so many things are in Asia, and I loved the fact that these guys looked as if they had just come off a golf course and were going to head out for a beer somewhere—again, an unlikely sort of group to find in America. We acknowledged each other with slight bows and went on our ways.

The Seoul Museum of History is new, and it shows. It’s highly interactive, with lots of videos, computer monitors, and please-touch-me exhibits. It must be great for kids, and there were parts I thought fascinating, too. I didn’t realize that Seoul was old. The city dates back to the seventh century, and people were inhabiting the area long before that. The exhibit on medieval costumes, from the royalty to the peasantry, was really interesting. As in Europe, certain social classes got to wear certain things, and some of the clothing is very elegant in its Asian simplicity. I can’t imagine that women would be terribly thrilled with the hanbok, the traditional loose-fitting dress that’s very, very high-waisted so that it billows in a not-that-flattering way. (You can still buy these, and there are still shops devoted to them.) But the men’s stuff—loose jacket, comfortable trousers, and straw shoes—looks so comfortable that I wanted to buy a set right then and there.

Which I could not do, judging from the experience of going to Lotte Mart. I stumbled onto Lotte Mart looking for something else, and I am very glad that I did. First, a little background: Lotte is one of the big, and I mean big, retailers in Korea. The upscale department store Lotte is a huge stand-alone building downtown, with another one right next door that’s called Young Lotte—sort of a junior department that’s an entire store in itself. All of this is connected to the huge Lotte Hotel, and in the south of Seoul there’s a huge shopping mall called Lotte World, including even more stores, another branch of the department store, a hotel, an Olympic-size ice skating rink, and an entire amusement park like Disneyland. The whole massive scale of the world according to Lotte assaults you. It’s an awful lotta Lotte.

Lotte Mart, on the other hand, is just your average discount retailer. It looked to be pitched at the American Target or Wal-Mart retail market, and I think it very important when traveling to go see what ordinary natives do—in this case, to see how Koreans stock up on light bulbs, toilet paper, and disposable chopsticks in bulk.

Well, I loved it. Lotte Mart was great. It’s filled with good quality, cheap stuff, and there’s a really complete grocery store right in the store. For those of you from Michigan, it’s a great deal like Meijer, a chain noted for “one-stop shopping,” the kind of place that’s great if your buying list includes mangoes, motor oil, shoelaces, and a gallon of milk. Everything of course was in Korean, but it hardly mattered, because all these kinds of stores are exactly the same: it was exactly like being in Target, except you could buy green tea and dried squid snacks instead of Sanka and Slim Jims. I needed a swimsuit, hoping that I’d find a public pool somewhere, and I went up to the sporting goods store. (To get upstairs, Lotte Mart has an inclined walkway that doesn’t have the “steps” that an escalator does. It’s very cool. I felt like George Jetson.) Salespeople in Lotte Mart all have a “uniform” of sorts, and one of the salesladies swooped down upon me. In retrospect, I can’t figure out 1) how I explained what I needed or 2) how she understood what I needed, but we both spoke the universal language of Citibank Visa, and where there’s a bill, there’s a way. She went though and pulled out every suit on the rack, finding my size and color preference. How did she get this info out of me? Salespeople in Korea are efficiently, even incessantly, helpful—so helpful, in fact, that I felt obligated to buy the suit simply because she worked so hard to help me find it. Then I went downstairs and got stuff for breakfast at Lotte Grocery Mart: juice, croissants (for some reason, you can get fine croissants all over Seoul) pastries, and fruit.

I didn’t shop a great deal in Korea, but when I do shop, I really like going to places where tourists don’t necessarily go. Lotte Department Store might make concessions to foreigners, with English-speaking staff and such, but Lotte Mart really doesn’t, which is what’s fun about it; you’re out there with the masses, buying prawn crackers and moisturizer, and yet it’s not a problem. If you’ve ever been in a discount retailer, they’re all exactly the same, no matter what language the signage is in. This is kind of amazing to me. I wish a Lotte Mart would open up on Guam. I would live there. Listen up, Lotte! There’s a market here! Even if it’s only me!

Korea: Nanta

“What do you get when you cross Jackie Chan with Benihaha?” reads the promotional brochure.

Saturday afternoon Chul and I went to the theater to see Nanta, which the show’s producers translate as “crazy beat.” Chul, more accurately, translated it as “relentless beating.” Both are an apt description of the show.

Nanta is a Korean theater piece that’s (mostly) non-verbal, so any non-Korean dimwit such as yours truly, your loyal and trusty blogger, can enjoy it. It was taken to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1999, where it was a massive hit, and presently a production is playing off-Broadway in New York under the title Cookin’. It’s been playing in Seoul for years with four different casts, where it’s a huge hit with tourists. It’s easy to see why.

It’s kind of hard to describe, but the best way is to envision it is to consider it the stepchild of Stomp and The Iron Chef. You might know Stomp as that theater piece ("play" doesn't seem to be the right word) in which a bunch of actors/athletes bang the heck out of ordinary household objects, impose a total percussive onslaught on the audience, and somehow manage to create very cool theater out of it. The thin thread of a plot is this: Nanta takes place in a kitchen, where three chefs--Head Chef, Woman, and Sexy Guy--and have one hour to prepare a wedding banquet. (For those of you who don’t know, Asian wedding banquets are lavish food affairs, working on the assumption that the happy families invited not only their friends and relatives but the Warsaw Pact nations too.) The kitchen’s manager insists that his Nephew, obviously someone who’s never cooked in his life, be given an apron and a job. This thread of a plot is really an excuse to watch these four acrobatic actors—three men, one woman—bang on pots like Kodo drmmers, throw dishes around and juggle them, engage in culinary taekwondo, and cross The Galloping Gourmet with the UCLA marching band drum line. There is plenty of slapstick and tomfoolery, lots of highly silly audience participation, and a good deal of acrobatics and martial arts thrown in just for the heck of it. After a performance, you understand why there are four different casts: the actors throw off so much energy that they must collapse backstage onto their oxygen tanks after the final bows.

I was the only Caucasian in the audience that I could see, though Chul claims that there were many, many Japanese there as well. (It is interesting that Caucasians can’t really tell Koreans and Japanese apart, but Koreans and Japanese can.) We were all howling with laughter, even audience members that I assumed were normally proper and reserved businessmen, because the show is great fun and the actors are so winning. They actually do chop vegetables up there onstage, though the program assures us that "No vegetables were harmed in the making of this show." (Even so, I was hit by a carrot slice, as we had seats in the front row.) And at the end of the show, when the cutest chef took his bows with the rest of the cast in front of me and Chul—he was of course a full-grown man, but “cute” is exactly the right word to describe him—he looked me straight in the face, grinned as broad as you can possibly imagine, and said, “Thank you!” to me directly through all the applause. I was just charmed.

Nanta is flat-out hilarious. I highly recommend it, should it come to your neck of the woods. Productions have toured the States and Canada, and if you’re near a performing arts center, you never know. If you want to look at its Korean website, here you go: www.nanta.co.kr.

Korea: Sanchon

I had one meal that was especially memorable in Seoul. All the food was memorable, as I love Korean food, and, as you might expect, Korean food is best in Korea. But this meal really stands out.

My friend Chul treated me to a set lunch at a restaurant in Insa-dong that has gotten press over the years for its food—the New York Times reviewed it in the 1980s, for example. It is called Sanchon, and it serves Korean temple cooking. You find Sanchon down one of those narrow, secretive alleys off Insa-dong proper, make a number of left turns, getting thoroughly lost in a maze of little alleyways, lined with tiny shops and tinier plots of bamboo. You enter a door of a nondescript building with a traditional tile roof, and suddenly frantic, urban Seoul disappears and you’re in a Korean country inn: big wooden beams set in whitewashed walls, low lighting, rolls of calligraphy script on the walls, low tables scattered about with pillows for sitting on, a pile of shoes at the door (note: always take off your shoes in a private Korean interior), and a staff bustling about in such a quiet and serene way that “bustle” doesn’t seem to be the proper word.

The owner of Sanchon was a Buddhist monk for eighteen years, and “Korean temple cooking” is thus the Buddhist Korean food that you’d get in a temple. As such, it is entirely vegetarian, and it avoids most of the really strong ingredients of Korean cuisine—garlic, onions, peppers—that make Korean food so assertive but would theoretically upset the Zen spirit of a Buddhist monk. You’d think that this might limit the range and taste of the food. Oh, anything but.

Traditional Korean music plays in the background as you’re escorted in your stocking feet to your low table. Tables sit about a foot and a half off the ground, and you sit cross-legged or with your feet tucked to a side, on a low pillow. Immediately the green tea comes in an earthenware teapot, and you feel awkward with the tiny cup that you, clumsy Westerner accustomed to the 7-Eleven Big Gulp, would liken to a thimble. Chul pours the tea, and then your wooden bowl comes, made from the zelkova tree, as Korean Buddhist bowls would. (A bowl would be a monk’s only possession, and he would carry it from temple to temple.) Then the food starts arriving. And arriving. And arriving.

You probably know that Korean meals—indeed, Asian meals—aren’t organized around a main course, big side dish, and salad. Instead, lots and lots of little dishes come, and you share everything. Obviously, this means you slow down a great deal, as you take little bits of things at a time. If you’re a Westerner, if the mode of dining doesn’t slow you down, the chopsticks sure will. For Koreans, a meal is a social experience; good conversation is part of the deal, and you really shouldn’t dine alone. Finally, I suspect that in a Buddhist restaurant, contemplating your food--the beauty of its presentation, and the labor of the workers who grew, cultivated, and cooked it--is also part of the experience. So the table is covered with dish after dish after dish, only one quarter of which you can identify. So what? It’s Korean, it’ll be delicious. Dig in!

Here’s what you get, according to the Sanchon menu: “Wild sesame and rice gruel.” Don’t let “gruel” put you off and give you visions of Dickensian squalor here. This is sort of a very tasty porridge, like a not-sweet rice pudding. (Porridges of various traditional sorts are a Korean staple. There are entire restaurants devoted to them.) “Tofu: beancurd made with pure saltwater.” Comes in slightly salty broth with vegetables. “Turnip mushrooms, peppers and other vegetables, wrapped in thin vermicelli pancake.” “Seven wild vegetables, each with its own seasonings.” “Kimchi.” Well, of course, both hot (chili peppers in the pickling marinade) and "white" (mild, no chili peppers). “Fresh lettuce in seasonings.” “Three kinds of deep-fried seasonal vegetable pancakes.” These were a distant relative of the French omelette, and they were absolutely wonderful. I could gorge on these, though I suspect that gorging would be most un-Buddhist. “Special chopsuey made with a variety of mushrooms and vegetables.” My guess is this is an awkward mis-translation; chop suey is American, of course. This was a delicious stir-fry of sorts. “Small potatoes glazed with soy sauce and taffy.” I don’t know what’s quite meant by "taffy," but let me assure you that it doesn't mean the saltwater confection you get in Atlantic City. It was a sweet soy glaze, enough to have the consistency of a very light taffy. The potatoes were soft from being roasted, and the glaze made them taste like sweet potatoes, only better. “Seasonal Buddhist monastery vegetable favorites.” I have no idea what any of them were, but who cares? This dish was so good, it made me cry. “Seasoned wild mountain roots.” Ditto. I have discovered that in Korea I will eat anything put in front of me, whether I can identify it or not. Some of the roots were a kind of mushroom or fungus the likes of which I have never had. They were like Michigan morels, but not really. (Now that’s a helpful description.) They looked like ginger root, but were earthy like mushrooms and seriously good. “Steamed rice, beans, millet.” A blander dish to cleanse the palate, maybe. “Soybean stew with mushrooms, turnip, red peppers, beancurd, etc.” “Traditional temple tea made from Oriental medicinal herbs.” To be drunk in the event, I suppose, that this meal isn’t healthy enough already. “Traditional snack made by mixing mugwort or beans with sticky rice.” Now this sounds strange, and it was. Taste-wise, it was mildly sweet and very good; texture-wise, it was close to a birdseed-coated marshmallow. And, of course, various soy sauces for dipping bits of food in. All of this food in little bowls means that your table is just covered with stuff, and there are so many dishes that you don't know what to try next. No hurry; if you don't have to go back to work, you could sit there for hours. And that's what we did. 

This was a prime example of a total dining experience. It wasn’t just the food. It was the place, the atmosphere, the conversation with Chul, the attentive and nearly silent service, and of course the food. I expect that we all gather specific meals in our lives to remember; committing the details down in print will help me remember this one. But even if I hadn’t, I should guess that I would not forget it soon.

If you’re interested: www.sanchon.com. You may click the link to an English version of this page, and learn all sorts of interesting things about Buddhism, Korea, cooking, and Buddist Korean cooking.

Korea: Snapshots

I am on the Number 2 line of the Seoul subway station, heading from Cheungjongno toward Itaewon to have dinner with my friend Chul. I’m not sure of the stop, so I stand by the doors, over which is a handy map of the entire system that I can check and ensure that I’m heading in the right direction. The car is full of Koreans, all of whom are quiet in the way that people are normally quiet in subway cars when they’re not with anybody they know. Opposite me is an older Korean gentleman, impeccably groomed as all elderly Koreans seem to be, who smiles and motions to me to sit down next to him, thinking that I missed the empty seat next to him. I return the smile and point to the map, as if to say, “Thank you very much, but as an American in Seoul, I’m kind of dim, and I want to make sure I’m going to the right place.” He seems to understand this, and once I’m assured I’m heading the right way, I sit down. This pleases him. As he gets up to leave at the next subway stop, he smiles again as he waits for the door to open, tosses a strawberry-flavored hard candy into my lap, and disappears into the station.

I am in the Seoul Art Museum buying an admission ticket to the galleries. In front of me are four Korean girls, all about twelve or so, three of them in matching school uniforms. They see me and immediately are overtaken with shyness; apparently they are not used to seeing Americans who are not on television. The study of English is very big in Korea, and one of them says to me, quietly and apprehensively, “Hi.” I smile broadly and say “hi” back. She says, “How are you?” I say, “Fine. How are you?”, but apparently they haven’t gotten quite far in their studies. They prepare to leave, and she says, “Have a nice day.” I say “Thank you,” which they seem to understand. As they leave, they begin giggling in the usual way of adolescent girls, speaking to each other rapidly in Korean. I am guessing that they are saying, “It worked! It worked! He answered!”

I am in a noodle shop about to have a light dinner. The menu is in Korean, of course, but outside the shop there are pictures of all the dishes, so I simply point to one and my waitress understands. I know that I am getting something in broth, but I don’t know exactly what; I figure that all the Korean food I’ve ever eaten has been tasty, so it hardly matters, I will probably like it. I do, I really do. It is Japanese udon noodles in a chicken-y broth with ginseng and lots of vegetables. As simple as it is, it is just delicious, and it comes with the usual accompanying side dishes: kimchi, pickled radishes, pickled garlic. The wait staff are watching me while trying not to; the restaurant has no Western silverware, and I will have to use chopsticks. I have a fair amount of experience with them, so I dig in, and slurp the broth, following the lead of the other customers. There is a nearly silent but palpable sigh of relief as they see me pick up the chopsticks and maneuver them into the kimchi, and for the rest of the meal, they pay me no mind whatsoever, as if a random Caucasian in the noodle shop were the most natural thing in the world.

I am walking the beautiful walled street that runs behind Deuksogung Palace in central Seoul, certainly one of the loveliest walks in the city, when it begins to rain lightly. Then heavily. I am getting soaked and I have no umbrella. I run for cover, such as it is, under one of the gingko trees, which I share with two young Koreans, obviously boyfriend and girlfriend. Like all young Koreans, they want to practice their English, so they ask me hesitantly where I am from, do I like Korea, why am I visiting; they are surprised and very pleased to discover that I am here on holiday. The young man’s umbrella is so small it hardly keeps the two of them dry, and though they offer to try to squeeze me under it, I politely decline. There’s no point in us all getting drenched. They walk off to their next appointment, and I stay put a few minutes, wondering if the rain will let up and if I should just make a run for it. By this time the street is nearly deserted, as everybody with any sense has gotten out of the rain. But then the couple returns, flushed and out of breath, and holding a small umbrella that they apparently have just bought from the nearest street vendor. I thank them profusely as they insist on giving it to me, and the young man says (and I am willing to bet that he rehearsed this along the way), “This is for you because it is my birthday, and I want everybody to be happy.”

I ask you: after an encounter like that, how could I not be?

Korea: Neighborhoods

Like all big cities, Seoul is a city of neighborhoods. I certainly didn’t see all of them, but I wandered happily around a great number of them in the walking vicinity of downtown and my own subway station (Cheungdong-no, for those of you who know the city at all).

First, my neighborhood—I like to think of it as that, even though I was only there for a week—doesn’t have a name that I know of, and it’s very much a working Korean neighborhood, filled with fruit stands and little tiny restaurants that seat maybe ten and where many Koreans spend their evenings in animated eating and conversing. Walking into downtown, though, one passes the Agricultural Museum and the Seoul Museum of History, the headquarters of Asiana Airlines, a big office branch of Citibank, which, like Starbucks, seems intent on inhabiting the entire known world. What road is it, you ask? Heck if I know. Few roads are signed or even named, and even odder is the fact that addresses are assigned based on when the building was built as opposed to numerically by location. So 23 might be next to 6045 might be next to 778 . . . one begins to see why business cards have detailed maps on them, and why people navigate by buildings rather than street addresses. I stayed in the Golden Bridge Building, next to the Reit-K 14 Building, whatever that is.

Itaewon is neighborhood that Americans might know, because it’s where the big U.S. Army base in Seoul is. At one time, it was on the outskirts of town, but Seoul, the Asian City That Ate Korea, has spread all around it so that now it’s in the heart of the city proper. It has all the usual fast food chains, sometimes with strange menu items. McKimchi burger, anyone? Leave it for now to say that Seoulites’ attitude toward the American military presence is, shall we say, ambivalent, but they certainly like the military’s penchant for Korean souvenirs: little theater masks, leather coats, Korean flags, military stuff. You name it, Itewon sells it.

Insa-dong is a street and area of traditional crafts—a bit pricey, but oh so beautiful. Here, entire little stores are devoted to jade jewelry and carvings; wonderful Korean kites; paper and paper goods, including some of the most beautiful wrapping paper I have ever seen—if I bought it, I could never bring myself to use it for its intended purpose; Chinese chops, which are official letter stamps that Koreans adopted; fans; antiques; and everything else that defines Koreana more traditionally than Margaret Cho does. (Let me hasten to add that I love Margaret Cho.) I sent a hand-painted card to my mother, and it was hard to part with.

For plain fun, however, it would be hard to beat Namdaemun and its great street market. Here’s where Koreans shop for their household goods—kitchen stuff, lots and lots of cheap clothing, toiletries, leather goods, towels, luggage, everything including the kitchen sink. There are an enormous number of products featuring Korean teen idols. Can you say Tiger Beat in Korean? Interestingly, no matter where you are, the concerns of thirteen-year-old girls remain resiliently constant. Much of the stuff in Namdaemun seems to be cheap Asian tat, which is part of the fun: you find yourself thinking, how many things can Chinese factories produce? and then asking, why am I buying knockoff Calvin Klein jeans? And of course they’re knockoffs. If the ten-dollar price doesn’t clue you in, the spelling “Kalvin Clein” ought to. The narrow streets of Namdaemun are closed to vehicular traffic, so you are arms a-jostle with wonderful noisy shopping Koreans. It looks exactly like what a street market should: slightly organized chaos.  Americans who seek to develop that loveliest of marketing euphemisms, the “festival marketplace,” would do well to take a look at Namdaemun.

Namdaemun is also the capital of Konglish printed t-shirts. Konglish is clearly a close relative of Japlish, and both describe Asian attempts to use English, not necessarily correctly, but to just use it. Sometimes the grammar is off, and sometimes the context is off. Sometimes everything is off. A random sampling of slightly askew Konglish, all things I actually read on actual t-shirts worn by actual people: Better Than Milk?, Bovine City Super Slab, Summer Cool Basic Happy Trend, Juicy American Girl, and the clear winner: I Am Cat-Like Robot.

The other wonderful thing about wandering around downtown is that everywhere you turn, there’s another palace. There are five in central Seoul. Much of each palace’s grounds was torn down by the occupying Japanese, and even if the palaces once took up lots of room, they remain modest affairs. I don’t mean that as a slight; they are marvelous. There are lots of separate buildings rather than one big marble monstrosity set in the Royal Grounds Cunningly Designed to Impress, and they are primarily wood. They are the first palaces I have ever seen (not that I’ve seen that many) that I would happily move into. Just roll up my futon, spread it out, have a book or two to read, pull the paper windows shut, and take a sweater. It is a lovely thought.

Korea: First Impressions

Sunday, 7 August

Korea seems to be largely inhabited by Korean people.

Furthermore, they primarily speak Korean to you. Or, more accurately, perhaps, at you.

Seriously, Seoul does not have a very large expatriate population -- maybe 200,000 out of the 18 million that live in the metro area. (That’s right: metro Seoul is about the size of metro New York.) That means that Korea is very, very, very Korean and still getting used to being an international place. In many ways, this is its charm and the reason for going: it’s not like anything you’re used to.

The countryside is everything you expect from Asia: hilly mountains going off in the distance, little farmhouses with tile roofs, and lots of green. If you’ve ever seen Chinese scroll paintings, you know how the artists tend to paint with the ink so that the hills sort of waft off into the hazy distance. Korea really looks like that.

Incheon Airport, where all international flights arrive and depart, is in Incheon, about an hour out of Seoul, so you take a bus into the city. This gives you an opportunity to look at the often beautiful countryside and try to figure out the money. The bills are bigger and in different colors. (When will Americans figure out that paper money that’s all the same size and color is actually sort of stupid?) The coins are bigger and heavier, too, and the basic monetary unit is the Korean won. 1,000 won equal a dollar, so the prices you see posted are numbers way bigger than you expected. A cup of cappuccino is 4,000 won, and so on. You feel rather rich in Korea, the way you spend money.

You also feel at home. Kind of. The presence of Starbucks, for good or ill, does that to you, and apparently the Koreans have abandoned ginseng tea and taken up coffee with a vengeance. There is plenty of English in signage, so you have no problems getting around. (The Seoul subway is the most heavily and sensibly signed system I have ever seen, and it makes getting around a breeze, even for someone who doesn’t speak a word of Korean. And, boy, is it clean.) At the same time, the primary mode of communication is of course Korean hangul, the chicken-scratch-looking script that actually may be the most effective and sensible writing system ever invented. You realize how much you rely on the written word when you can’t read a lot of it, everywhere around you, and Korea abounds with signs and advertisements.

Because Seoul is a now very major, world city that modernized rapidly, it looks rather Western: skyscrapers, big corporate headquarters, Kentucky Fried Chicken. But behind all the usual let’s-make-Asia-look-like-Wichita urban design attitude, in its details Seoul is very, even relentlessly Korean. The busiest roundabout downtown circles around a 14^th-century city gate, all gussied up in the beautiful Korean traditional architecture; when the night bell rang, the gate was closed, and the city was walled, so it was all snug and tight for the night. Old men dressed in what look to be white yoga togs, spotless and impeccably groomed, have impeccably kept hats -- a sure mark of a Confucian gentleman. The streets are lined with Chinese gingko trees. Little alleys lead off major roads and promise little restaurants filled with kimchi pots and sizzling at-table burners for bulgogi, Korean barbeque. Fruit vendors are everywhere, selling truly beautiful produce. (I have decided that Korea is the world capital of peaches, the most delicious I have ever eaten.) And wherever you look, there they are: Koreans getting on buses, playing with their kids, having a smoke, chatting amiably in the sometimes guttural, sometimes nasal, thoroughly foreign-sounding Korean. I have never been in a place where I could not 1) speak the spoken language or 2) guess the written language by having familiarity with the script.

This is going to be fun.