Busan Journal, Day 5

Apart from the fish market we explored on our second day, I have not yet ventured down any alleys in search of the old Korea in Busan.  

But we have been down a narrow street or two.  Tonight we ate out at Taco Family, which is two blocks down the main road from the university campus and a block north, at the  dark end of a street of better looking restaurants.

The first thing you notice about Taco Family is the heavy, clear plastic that serves as both an outer wall and a door.  Inside are four tables for four, an inner wall of real glass and wood, two more tables for four, a counter, and a small cooking area.

The owner, cook, and sole employee of Taco Family is the tallest Korean I have seen yet at 6’5” or 6’6”. He is almost too big for his kitchen, but he works there efficiently.  He is also congenial.  He smiled when we came in and said, “thank you for coming back.”

Good times, good décor.  The wall beside our table is decorated with labels from products that go into his “Mexican” menu: a plastic cheese wrapper, labels neatly cut from red kidney bean and sliced jalapeno cans, cardboard sides cut from taco shell boxes, and the like, tacked at jazzy angles with smiley face tacks.

Across the room are shelves like a grocery store with items for purchase: taco chips on the top shelf, tomato sauces, hot sauces, chili powder and seasonings on the second shelf, and so on down to table level.

All of this atmosphere, however, is secondary to the menu itself, which appears on a store-wide sign over the counter. In addition to the standard fare of burritos and refried beans are such  Mexican favorites as lasagna, Greek salad, and fish’n’chips.  Our personal favorite, however, is New England clam chowder in a bread bowl.  Just in case you are skeptical about the chowder, let me just say it is excellent.  We have had it twice – although we took the precaution of scooping the jalapeno peppers off the top before we dug in.

The impressive part is that the cook, owner, sole-employee cooks the clams up with each order.  He also cuts up his fish for the fish’n’chips on the spot.

About halfway through our chips (me) and chowder (her) tonight I realized that we had all of this and Mozart playing over the PA system.  A real touch of class in a place that has it all – friendly service, interesting environment, good prices, and great food.

There is one thing I might suggest changing, however.  If he would just get real paper napkins to replace the role of heavy duty toilet paper that sits on every table, it would mean a lot!

Busan Journal, Day 4

We have not seen enough yet to know whether Busan is typical of Korean cities.  We are told it is different from Seoul, the city everyone identifies with Korea.  But I do not know yet whether the difference is like New York and Boston, whose differences diminish with distance, or New York and Los Angeles, where differences are systemic.  The “New York state of mind” has its counterpart in the “LA state of mind” – without the pun. Perhaps that is the Seoul –Busan difference.  

Busan is built essentially among the hills alongside the Nakgonggang River delta.  A number of streams from the north have over time cut valleys down to the Sea of Japan, leaving high and rugged hills that loom above the urban centers.  The hills themselves are not built up with high-end houses as a similar city in the US would be, so they loom like dark elders over the bright lights of the city landscape.

Because it is built in the valleys, Busan itself is separated into districts by these hills. Add in the fact that there are over 3.6 million people and you have an idea how concentrated with people, streets, and buildings the valleys are.  Chalky gray or tan high-rise apartment buildings dominate certain sections of the city. New high-rise buildings are going up continually.  From my window on the hill, I can see the long arms of many construction cranes down toward the Haeundae Beach-front.

I do not imagine that these things are all that unusual for Asian cities.  Nor do I imagine it is all that unusual for life at street level to give an entirely different impression than my hill view gives.

Immediately out the front gates of Pusan National University the streets are alive with lights, sounds, smells, crowds, trucks, and cars. For an American village boy, the all-out sense blast can be dazzling and daunting. Immediate sensory overload. It is a little like walking in Times Square except, of course, that the signs are mostly in Korean.

In the morning, many shops remain closed and foot traffic consists largely of people with destinations. Even shoppers are focused.  By mid-afternoon, when sidewalks and coffee shops are full of young people dressed up for school, vendors begin to set up tables and lights on the sidewalks to display their wares.  I took particular interest in a pocketbook vendor whose “warehouse” was no more than three feet wide.  Her stock of pocketbooks lined the walls for twenty feet in an enclosed space between buildings. She displayed her merchandise on two metal racks set in front of her crevice with just enough room for her to slip between them to assist customers.

Dozens of coffee shops and restaurants and sidewalk hot food stands buzz with customers.  One would think that so much competition in so close a space would drive many out of business, but as night comes on all the eating locations come to life.

What I find most interesting are the streets, shops, alleys where an older Korea still lingers. These I have yet to explore sufficiently to offer comment.  We are seeing the modern Busan overtaking the older Busan. I will take this as a necessary sign of progress, of change that means the life-blood of the city is still pumping.   

Soon I must go in search of the old Busan, the older Korea.

Busan Journal, Day 3

We left Seoul on the KTX, the fast train to Busan.  It is so smooth and quiet that it begins to move with no sensation of moving.  It glides through Seoul past a forest of grey high-rise apartments before entering a tunnel. After several minutes of darkness suddenly the world opens again:  we are out of the tunnel and out of the city, the buildings replaced by farms and hills.

We travel through farmland patterned ingeniously on flat fields or jig-sawed into the small valleys between steep slopes.  The farmland is all efficiently managed. Neatly rectangular plots are bordered by ridges, some of which are long, straight irrigation ditches. Access roads are raised above field level. The larger, flatter areas are divided into these smaller plots.  Every corner and odd space is bordered, cultivated. 

No space is dominated by huge, unbroken fields as one would find in America. In places long, plastic covered green houses stand in close rows.

None of the farm buildings appear to be as neat or as well tended as the fields.  It is hard to distinguish farm houses from other buildings, although the usual kind of farm debris lies in the yards – old cars, old tractors, various beat-up tag-along machines, barrels, buckets, piles of discarded and rusting metal things, variously dull colored plastics (sometimes folded and stacked, sometimes heaped), junk, always junk. Occasionally board and sheet metal fences define areas filled with refuse, perhaps to be recycled.  Occasionally, too, narrow smoke from a trash barrel fire creeps slowly across one of these little valleys like a low-hung cloud.

If one is thinking of values here, if the landscape were speaking, clearly the farmland itself, the cultivated soil, takes priority over human inhabitants.

No livestock visible anywhere. In western New York, cows at least are out in the stock yards in all but the coldest weather.  Here, no trace.

The landscape in mid-February is dun-colored, desolate looking, except for hillsides, which are covered with dull, dark-green evergreen trees.  We pass through higher mountains white with snow, but mostly the snow is confined to irrigation ditches and the north side of buildings and ridges. We have not seen the sun all day.

We pass silently through cities – Osong, Daejeon, Dondaugu, Ulsan – before we reach Busan.  The cities are grey, concrete, industrial.  They remind me of Russia.  No one is out in the farm land, but the cities are busy with construction – high-rise buildings, roads, bridges.

Perhaps it is not an accurate conclusion, but in the cold and desolate light of winter one must conclude that it is a hard life for farmers, as it has always been. One imagines the pre-war look of poverty – poor people in poor housing, poor neighborhoods. 

In Central Gimchen, just below Daejeon , buried among new concealing structures I note occasional, compelling, lovely, heartbreaking pagoda type roofs. To the western visitor, this may be a glimpse of traditional Korea.  In Russia, 19^th Century wooden houses and mud alleys lie just behind the soviet era buildings that line the main roads. Perhaps that has happened here, too, to make progress visible.

Then Busan.  The train pulls in and stops so smoothly the man snoozing in the seat ahead of us does not wake.  Even when the train has emptied and we shoulder our bags down the aisle, he slumbers on.

Busan Journal, Day 2

Chicago-Incheon-Seoul

We arrived four hours early at the deserted Asiana Airlines gate for our 1 AM flight from O’Hare to Incheon/Seoul.  It is hard to imagine any part of O’Hare nearly shut down, but there we were.  We lined up our carryon bags eight or ten rows away from the ticket counter and settled in.  The flight from Rochester, delayed though it was, had still arrived way ahead of our connection.

It is genuinely hard to kill time.  We read, walked around, ate snacks, watched.  Gradually, the waiting area began to fill up.  I remember looking up once to discover that a nearly empty room had suddenly filled.

Not surprisingly for a flight to Seoul, the passangers were mostly Asian. Families with small children, old couples, college and high school age kids traveling by themselves, women and men in business suits – just lots of folks. 

Had we been able to understand any language but English we might easily have listened in on dozen of conversations.  Without knowing the languages, I can often distinguish Chinese from Korean or from something else.  

Still, it all seemed normal somehow.  After years of exposure to international students, the rapid exchanges of conversation, incomprehensible though it all remains, was somehow comforting to me. I credit my many Asian daughters and sons with making me feel at ease both there in the waiting area at O’Hare and on the Asiana flight to Korea.

The flight was as free of trauma as a fourteen hour flight can be.  The real troopers on board were the parents with small children, of whom there were many. One poor woman, seated near the bulkhead in front of us, was on her feet for hours on end while her children sprawled across her seat to sleep.

When we arrived at Incheon, we began to feel the need for English more acutely, if only because we were tired and wanted to move more quickly than our incomprehension allowed.  We were nearly the last people off the plane and we were nearly the last ones from our flight in line through immigration.   

By the time we arrived at baggage claim, our suitcases were circling around nearly by themselves.

We were not sure what we would find once we cleared customs and walked out into the arrival area.  But before we even located the driver who had been sent to drive us into Seoul, Ahn Mi-Sook appeared out of the crowd and gave Donna a big hug.  

 She does not speak much English and we speak no Korean, but we know her from her trip to Houghton last June for her son’s graduation.  Now she is family.

She had come to the airport to welcome us to Korea.  We will learn what it means to be in the minority in the next four months, a first lesson in cultural adjustment.   But at the moment it does not seem so bad; Mi-Sook got us started off on the right note.  She has given our experience a loving face. And that has made a world of difference.

Busan Journal

As a preschooler I began having a dream about falling.  I was always standing on the second floor landing when the railing gave way to my leaning and I tumbled forward into that empty space, crashing toward the floor beneath. I don't know how that dream ever ended.  I always woke up as the railing collapsed, terrified.

I have had two major fears my whole life, that is, two beyond everyone's fear of being thought stupid, ugly, or uncool. One is the fear of heights and the other is the fear of closed spaces.

As a challenge to my fear of heights I used to jump off the high board at the swimming pool.  It would sometimes take an hour or better to get up the nerve to climb to the platform.  Even then, sometimes, I would look down at the water so far far below and climb back down the ladder.  But when I succeeded, it was with great concentration on entering the water upright, feet first.

I can relive it in my mind even though it has been years since I took that step of commitment.  There is the decision to act, which is actually the first step out into space.  Then there is the fraction of a second before gravity grabs the feet in a big way.  Then the plummet, arms waving to keep the torso from tilting forward or backward. Just when the rush in the chest signals heart attack, contact!  The cold braking embrace of the water.

And then, for a moment, I realize I am alive and I could do it again.

Nothing bad ever happened to me jumping off the high board, although the possibilities of real pain could fill a medical book.

Just to show I could do it, beat the heights, I climbed to the top of St Paul's Cathedral in London this past October following my son, who shares my fear of heights, and his wife, who doesn't.  The fear is still there, I realized during most of the climb.  As I looked out over the city from that ity bity walkabout 400 feet or more above street level, hugging the stones in sheer terror, as I fought the fear:  this view is worth the trip.  Cool!  Now let's go down.  Now!

This is roughly the situation we're in now.  My wife's fear of heading for Korea for four months is like my old fears of falling through the railing on the landing.  There is no reasoning with fear like that.
My own fears are more of the high board variety.  In a few hours we will board the actual jet that will take off for Seoul.  It is, in fact, a tin can with wings and lots of thrust.

This is the point of commitment.  We will take that step out into space and wait for the adrenalin rush to catch hold.