Seoul Lotus Lantern Festival

Early in the morning on Saturday the 15th, I headed up to Seoul for the Lotus Lantern Festival. Unfortunately I don't know many details about the festival's history or how it started, but it's an annual event held one week prior to Buddha's birthday (Buddha's birthday is a national holiday in Korea and was on Friday, May 21st this year. We had the day off from school). My impression is that the Lantern Festival sort of kicks off Buddha's birthday celebrations.

The Festival was huge - there was a set schedule with different things going on all weekend. It centered around Bong-eun-sa Temple and the Insadong neighborhood. There was a small 'Festival's Eve Celebration' parade on Saturday night, a Buddhist Street Festival all day Sunday (lots of arts and crafts, food, traditional performances, and Buddhists from all over the word) and the main event, the Lantern Parade, on Sunday night before the Closing Celebration. Everything was beautiful, of course; it was the probably the most colorful festival I've seen yet. I won't bother trying to describe it, just look at my pictures! They also really catered to foreigners - besides the English-language website, there were English-speaking volunteers swarming around with pamphlets and suggestions for things to do and places to go. And at the street festival there were a few tents just for foreigners to do stuff like make your own lotus lantern.

Saturday night I stayed in a hanok - a traditional Korean living area, usually with a courtyard and the ondol underfloor heating system. They're sort of an endangered species now, but in Seoul there's a really beautiful neighborhood of hanok, called the Bukchon Hanok Village. I highly recommend it - I stayed there overnight, at the Seoul Guesthouse, and also rented a bike on Sunday morning and pedaled around taking pictures.

I was completley exhausted by the end of the weekend; I had to check out of the Guesthouse early and had just walked around all day Sunday. Also, I've been trying to save money and I had to work Monday morning, so I took the late night slow train back to Daegu and arrived home around 3am....just in time to get four hours of sleep and teach five classes on Monday!

You can see my pictures from the festival here: http://picasaweb.google.com/kristin.laufenberg/SeoulLotusLanternFestival?feat=directlink

My camera doesn't take very good pictures at night (plus I have no idea what I'm doing with it) so I tried making videos instead. They didn't turn out very well either but you should be able to get the general idea!

Sun, Moon, and Five Peaks

While I was in Seoul for the Lotus Lantern Festival (more about that later), I re-visited a small art gallery that Hyun Ju showed me a few months ago. When we were there together, Hyun Ju bought a really pretty painting, and I've been thinking about it ever since. So on the first day of my trip I went back to the same gallery and bought the painting myself. I didn't know very much about it at the time, but Hyun Ju told me it was a famous traditional image, and I just loved the scenery and colors. Here it is:

This image is a folded screen; mine is just a flat painting.

Besides at the art gallery, I've seen this image in a few other places:

The side of a building in Insadong, Seoul

I've since done a little research and learned more about the significance of this image. According to Wikipedia, it's called Irworobongdo (say that five times fast, if you can pronounce it!) , or Painting of the Sun, Moon, and Five Peaks. It was produced on folding screens in the Joseon dynasty (the last royal dynasty in Korea, from 1392-1910). The red sun represents the king / masculinity / yang, and the moon represents the queen / femininity / yin.

The screens were associated with royalty, royal power, or royal ancestors. In court paintings, showing the actual king wasn't allowed, so instead an empty throne or the image of Irworobongdo would imply his presence there. In real life, the screens were set up behind the king's throne in the palaces; this way, the screens would "... represent the land of Korea blessed by Heaven, symbolized by the sun and moon portrayed in absolute balance. When the king sat in front of this screen, he literally became the central point of the composition and thus the pivotal point from which all force emanated and to which all returned."

So the king was basically the center and driving force of the universe. Any coincidence that these screens were produced during the longest-ruling Confucian dynasty, and the one that really ingrained Confucianism (older than you = automatically better than you, heirarchy as a way of life, etc.) into Korean culture and society?

Changgyeong Palace in Seoul

Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul

Historians think that these screens were once pretty common, but now there are only about 20 left, none of which are signed.

The lady at the shop packaged up my picture really well (bubble wrap, a few layers of paper, tape all around, and then rope all around that, plus a makeshift rope handle so I could carry it home). This is both good and bad - I really want to open it and look at it in my apartment right now, but I'm leaving Korea very soon and I know I'll never get it wrapped up so well by myself. So once I got back to Daegu I just had to put the whole thing in my suitcase. On the other hand, I know it'll make it home safely (I'll probably need a hand saw to get through all of those layers). I can't wait to see it again when I'm finally home in October!

I got most of this information from Wikipedia and this link (no idea what it is): http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkjo/view/22/2200381.pdf
The picture of Insadong is mine and the rest are from Google Images and http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/archives_of_asian_art/v058/58.yi_fig10.html .

Teacher's Day

This past Saturday, the 14th, was a holiday in Korea - Teacher's Day. Whereas Children's Day, on May 5, is a legitimate holiday (there's no school, and businesses that aren't amusement parks or arcades are closed), Teacher's Day just seems like a formality. Koreans thank their teachers, both past and present, and give them gifts. On both Thursday and Friday we had a ton of rice cakes and fruit delivered to Jeil for all the teachers.

Korean students go to school for a half-day every other Saturday, and the 14th was one of those days. I only ever work Monday-Friday, so when I got to school today I found these cute little notes on my desk:




Then in one of my first-grade classes, I got this adorable letter from a little boy. The envelope said, "Please read when you are going to the home."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Ms. Kristen

It's nice teacher's day...So, I am writen this letter.
It is coming Summer. I always thank for your working. I sometimes do bad things. Please, forgive me.
I met you at first time. I surprised and can't speak.
But now, I have brave.
forward, please stay here and teaches us.
I'm sorry to wrote very short letter.

5.15.2010
Saturday
Your student
In Mo Kang wrote...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I always thought this particular student was too cool to like the teacher - he never even spoke to me before! Now he's my new favorite and will be getting lots of candy, of course.

Decision Made

About two weeks ago I had to report my decision to my school: would I renew my contract and stay with them another year, or not? I've obviously known since I arrived that this was coming, but as the months went by I kept thinking that at some point I would KNOW, with certainty, whether or not I wanted to stay or go. I really expected to have strong feelings about it - definite homesickness and being tired of teaching, or really loving Korea and having no doubt about staying one more year. But as the months went by I still could not make up my mind - there were just too many issues and people pulling me in each direction.

I thought maybe I would have more time to make a final commitment, but after I got back from Jeju-do my school asked me to tell them my decision. It was so, so difficult but I told my school no, I wasn't coming back next year. I'm still second-guessing myself - wondering what I'm going to do with myself at home next year and knowing that I'll miss Korea and everyone here like crazy. To make things worse, a lot of my friends have decided to renew their contracts, so many of them will be staying here after I leave. But at the same time there are a lot of things about Korea that just get on my nerves; I'm definitely homesick after 8 months away; and a two-week vacation between contracts just wouldn't be enough. I won't rule out ever coming back here - it's a very comfortable place and the money is great, but right now I can't imagine staying another full year in Korea, at least not without a longer break.

That leaves me with less than four months to soak up all the experience and culture that I can here in Korea. If you've been reading this blog you know that I'm off on some adventure at least a few times each month, and now that the weather is cooperating tours, festivals, and plain old sight-seeing are back in full swing! I think between last March and the middle of June I have had or will have only about three free weekends! There was my weekend in Seoul with Hyun Ju; the spring flower festivals; Jeju Island; a free weekend trip sponsored by the city of Yeongcheon (Yeongcheon hosted the Starlight Festival and invited some Daegu foreigners to visit the festival and stay overnight in a beautiful lodge for free!!); the Daegu Herb Medicine Festival; and last weekend a big group of us took the train to the town of Cheongdo to visit a wine tunnel. This was really cool - it's an old railroad track through a mountain, and now they age Cheongdo's famous persimmon wine there. The wine was good, very sweet and dry, and the cave was a nice cool place to hang out and drink on a hot day.

University students of herbal medicine participating in an herb-chopping contest, at the Daegu Herb Medicine Festival.

Entrance to the persimmon wine tunnel in Cheongdo

Anyway, the list goes on - this weekend I'm going to Seoul, the weekend after that I might be going camping, then there's a free city tour of Daegu and the surrounding area, then back to Seoul to visit the DMZ, then an overnight temple stay, then my sister will visit...Sometime near the end of June I hope to take a breath and catch up on my sleep.

And the biggest excitement of all will come after I leave Korea - I'm planning a big backpacking trip with my friend Diana, another EPIK-er not renewing her contract. Plans are still in the works, so I'll just say that so far I've bought one plane ticket for August 16th from Korea to Hanoi, Vietnam, and another one for six weeks later from Singapore to Chicago! It will probably take the rest of the summer to figure out what will happen in between!

Please check back later for more pictures from Yeongcheon, Cheongdo, and everything else! I'm constantly trying to update, organize, and caption them but I can't keep up!

If you don't have a cell phone, you might as well be homeless.

Korean's lives revolve around their cell phones, to a much greater extent than American's. Absolutely everyone here has a cell phone, including the elderly and kindergarten-aged children. Everyone is constantly using their phones and can't seem to bear separation from it for even a second. I know people say this at home too, but trust me, it's nothing compared to what you see in Korea. The teachers at Jeil have to collect the students' cell phones in a little bin each morning and return them all at the end of the day. You can't walk down a street in Korea or through the underground shopping areas without passing a cell phone store or kiosk every fifteen feet. And it's not unusual for me to be on a crowded subway car, taking a look around, and for every person within my sight to be using their cell phone - talking on it, listening to music, texting, or watching TV. Every single person.

Part of the reason for this is that cell phones in Korea do so much more. I've only experienced the tip of this iceberg, but for example I know that when shopping online, you can use your phone number like a credit card and charge things to it. The charges will show up on your monthly bill. And when I bought my train tickets online (to visit Seoul later this month), instead of printing out paper tickets or picking them up at the station later, I had the option to have the tickets sent to my cell phone in the form of a text message. If I need to show my ticket at the train station, I could just show them my phone with this text message on it.

The cell phone technology here is amazing, years ahead of what we see at home. And if we do use some of the same technology at home, it's safe to assume that the Koreans thought of it first and have already been doing it for years.

Once again, the New York Times comes to my rescue with an excellent article on the topic that summarizes everything and gives examples much better than I could. You can start to get some idea of what cell phones mean in this culture by reading this article:

“In South Korea, All of Life Is Mobile”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/technology/25iht-mobile.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

The reason I bring all this up that Korea is as obsessed with cell phone charms as it is with cell phones; your phone isn't complete without something hanging off of it.

One of my favorite Korean dishes, bibimbap, in the form of a charm

An example of phone charm-collecting gone bad

An accessories store in Korea (these three pictures are from Google Images)

This is one aspect of Korean pop culture that I've totally bought into - I'm obsessed with cell phone charms now. Besides anything with funny Engrish text on it (which I'll get into later), they're my favorite thing to collect here. I went on a little phone charm spree today - here are some of my latest acquisitions:

Sometimes they’re just too funny and weird to pass up (in case you were wondering, the little tag on the topless guy in the inner tube says “Cute Fellow”).

My collection is up to 12 now - don't worry, I don't use them all at once! My cell phone is currently sporting a blue penguin that I picked up at the COEX Aquarium in Seoul.