Muninn

Ok, I don’t want to seem fixated on the subject of bathrooms here, but I saw signs on the outsides of a lot of restaurants in Seoul which resembled this one. I think the text under the sign (click on the picture for a larger version) says something like, “The restrooms in our establishment are open for the benefit of the public.” (at least that is what I can make out, with the help of my new EW-K3000 electronic dictionary)

This may not seem like a big deal, but if that is what these signs mean, that is very cool! Japan, Norway, the US, most of the places I have visited always have obnoxious signs that say things like, “The restrooms here are only available for use by our customers.” That doesn’t stop every drunk on a late night in Stavanger from using the bathroom at MacDonalds (when I lived there, McDs was open really late on weekends) but still! In Stavanger, and many places I can remember visiting in Holland, Germany, and China you have to pay a fee to get into many bathrooms. Japanese train stations usually put bathrooms on the inside, where only ticketed passengers can get too them.

It may not sound like much but for traveling bums like me on a shoestring budget and those who like to walk around big cities and explore, public trash cans (see my earlier entry) and publicly accessible bathrooms go a long way towards making me happy. I should note, however, that in Japan, both of these are pretty much provided by the ubiquitous convenience store.

So last night I was in an underground shopping mall in Jongno looking for a bathroom. I thought I had found one until I approached the sign and noticed it was a little bit different than what I was expecting. Could Korea, one of the most conservative countries in the world, actually have co-ed bathrooms? The woman on the sign has even done her hair up for the occasion! No, of course not, closer inspection revealed that the sign was showing the way to a small clothes store. They’re messin’ with my symbols and forcing my brain to accept new information! Ah…nothing like traveling to other countries to give one’s brain an occasional jolt.

I was in Korea only about 36 hours but saw several protests while I was there. The biggest was in a subway station where Suhee tells me they were protesting an increase in subway prices (I am trying to imagine this kind of Korean style protest inside a New York MTA station). About a hundred men were standing in military like formation listening to an extremely emotional man essentially yell his speech. He was followed by another man’s speech, and then a third man led the entire group in singing some protest song (Suhee was unsure of the song’s name but wrote the following in my notebook: 투쟁가 노동가, whatever that means) The song was sung in perfect unison, and their perfectly unified voices echoed throughout the tunnels of the subway station. I was amazed that the protesters had mastered a special song for “our protest against rising subway prices” but when I asked Suhee what they were saying she said it was the “generic protest song.” Suhee was herself a radical student protester in her undergraduate years, participating in lots of miscellaneous left-wing or anti-government protests and said she had often sung the song.

How cool! Korea has a generic protest song?! I wonder if other countries with a long history of civil protests (Taiwan? Latin America? Poland? etc.) have a similar sort of thing. Suhee claims that it helps build a feeling of unity and community in a group that might not know each-other well. I can’t help wondering what the lyrics are! What lyrics would fit all of the following: a protest against subway prices, an anti-American imperialism protest, an anti-government dictatorship protest, a pro-unification protest, etc.? Anyone know more about this? Or know the meaning of the lyrics? I imagine you would have to keep things really generic. A clue might be in what Suhee wrote in my notebook. I can guess that part of what she wrote, 노동가 means “the worker’s song”, assuming the word comes from 劳动歌 which sounds similar in Chinese and Japanese (I look this up later). More on guessing the meaning of Korean words later…

I guess a lot of Japanese tourists go to Korea. I know Japanese love Korean food, and there is a boom now of Korean pop culture and movies, but I expect any current boom is in no small part thanks to the Korean drama, known as 冬のソナタ in Japan, which became a huge hit on Japanese television. I even found brochures in my hotel for the “Winter Sonata” TV drama tour for 73,000 won which takes you to the various locations that appear in the series (02-774-3345 if you in Seoul and interested).

One clue to the huge number of incoming Japanese tourists was the fact that at the airport, exchanging yen for won is an exceptionally simplified process. They have envelops with pre-exchanged amounts of yen, in my case 30,000 yen (of which I ultimately only used half of during my stay).

WOW – a moderately strong earthquake just hit me here in Tokyo as I am writing this…lots of horizontal swaying, stopped after about ten seconds.

It first caught me off guard when I handed the exchange clerk my yen, only to be immediately handed an envelop in exchange. He saw my puzzled look and just said, “Count it…”

I just returned from my first trip to Korea. I was only there a single full day and two nights but it was sort of a reconnaissance mission for me. I plan on studying Korean there next summer and the summer after, and hopefully will return thereafter for an extended period of research, but I wanted to get a quick feel for the place before I return to the US and begin my Phd program in the fall. Tickets were cheap and my friend Suhee happened to have her birthday this Friday, so the timing worked out great.

Obviously, being in a country less than 48 hours doesn’t allow for either much sightseeing or immersion into the local culture, but my short time there left me with a rich collection of memories, and the usual assortment of FOB (fresh off the boat) observations.
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