JEJU-DO—Meat-eating in Korea is very literal. Humanity’s participation in the food chain is much less disguised than it is in North America, where people are happy to pretend their bacon burgers or pork tenderloin medallions are magically synthesized for the express purpose of being delicious. In Korean, the word for pork is dwaeji gogi — “pig meat.” Most other meats work the same way: insert name of animal, followed by the word for “meat” — not much in the way of linguistic frippery to disguise the fact that meat is basically dead flesh and ripped-apart muscle.

In an unsettling twist, restaurant signage follows suit. Many restaurants advertise specialties with pictures of their dishes, displayed right underneath jovial cartoon versions of whichever animal gave their life for the food. This is especially true of restaurants serving galbi, pork or beef rib meat barbecued over flaming charcoals stuck into the centre of your table.

The following is series of portraits of these brave ambassadors of personal flavour. As you can see, most of them look downright delighted at the prospect of ending up in your bowels. (more…)

This weekend marked the Korean holiday of Chuseok, the rough equivalent of North American Thanksgiving, and although I hate to engage in a bout of schadenfreude during the festive season, I can’t possibly let the story that surfaced while I was in Canada for a couple weeks go unremarked.

I refer, of course, to reports that North Korean Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is sick, or, even more serious, dead—and has been so for as long as five years. The unsubstantiated rumours, sparked by Kim’s absence at celebrations marking the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the DPRK, say Kim may have suffered a stroke, and one report by a Japanese scholar claims the DL died way back in 2003 from diabetes and that a core team of military officials has been ruling ever since, using Kim dummies for public appearances. (more…)

The Olympics are a cesspool of hypocrisy and cold, slimy greed

JEJU-DO, SOUTH KOREA—I’ve read that the Olympics are producing some thrilling moments this year. I wouldn’t know.

During the lead up to the Games, when China blocked journalists from accessing websites such as Amnesty International and the BBC, there was a huge media kerfuffle about broken promises and the absolute need for a climate in which reporting could be done freely and without restriction. The Olympics, the argument went, are about cultural exchange and openness, and limiting access was hostile to the very spirit of the Games.

Yet here I sit in Korea, five days into the Olympic media orgy, and if I want to watch an event or a feature from my home country—because let’s not be naive: the Olympics are also very much about nationalism—I’m shit out of luck. Every attempt I’ve made to access Olympic content on an international website has been a failure, and in general, my quest for online Olympic coverage has been by far the most strangled Internet experience of my life. Not since the sweaty-palmed days of my Catholic school dances have I been so thoroughly denied.

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JEJU-DO—For many, a big part of the expat experience involves drinking, and especially drinking in bars. Be they mysterious, seedy, elegant or anarchic, watering holes for wanderers have a certain romanticism attached to them, a fuzzy, seductive corona of myth that frames them as hubs of intrigue, sex and adventure.

In spirit if not style, the archetypal expat bar is Rick’s Café Americain, the nightclub from Casablanca where Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick, delivers (or doesn’t) some of cinema’s most memorable lines. Peopled with refugees, soldiers, sketchy men and alluring women, the club is a magnet for foreigners stuck in the Moroccan limbo city of the film’s title, those running from war and waiting for a ticket to elsewhere, who in the meantime while away their time drinking cocktails and listening to Sam play his sad, sad songs.

In every place with more than a smattering of foreigners, there is a foreigner bar. This, I expect, is one of the first things many people discover when they begin travelling, especially those who do it alone and seek the comfort of speaking to people in their own language, or at least a linking language that allows them to meet in a conversational neutral zone. Some people seek foreigner bars out, some people find them by accident, but the general rule is that they’re places where travellers (especially backpackers) can go to get shitfaced drunk and try to sleep with each other without worrying too much about culturally-appropriate behaviour, and to look for Western-style breakfasts, beat-up guitars covered in stickers, djembes for impromptu hippie jams, personal-size pizzas, scuffed board games, used guidebooks and copies of On the Road, and advice on how best to score hash without ending up in a dingy prison wherein they will be considered valuable foreign currency worth their weight in cigarettes. (more…)

JEJU-DO—The sun is broiling, the humidex is high, and in Korea that means it’s time for a nice, hot bowl of chicken soup. Just as people in the West associate certain foods with holidays, so do Korean people enjoy special meals during particular seasons. July 19 in Korea was Chobok, the first day of Sambok, a period that spans the three 복날 (pronounced “bok-nal”), or “dog days,” which Koreans believe are the hottest of the summer, and which are usually spent eating things that most North Americans would consider perfect fare for a cold winter night.

The consumption of hot dishes to beat hot weather is tied to Asian medicine, which suggests eating hot foods causes perspiration, cooling the outside of the body, while warming and rejuvenating the inside, thereby fighting fatigue brought on by the scorching heat. The Sambok tradition dates back hundreds of years to the dynastic period, when farmers believed that exhaustion caused by working too hard in the heat would lead to a bad harvest; they took the Sambok period off to vacation in a cooler locale, often somewhere in the mountains or by the seaside. (more…)

Just a quick note to point anyone who’s interested to a piece I wrote for Culture+Travel, a magazine that covers some cool, off-the-radar stories from travel destinations around the globe. This one’s about haenyeo, Jeju’s famous women divers, who free-dive — that means no air tanks — for seafood off Jeju’s coasts. A guy named Ian Baguskas, which is an awesome last name if ever I’ve heard one, took the photos.

You have to marvel at a country that, when looking for a way to show its commitment to peace, chooses to blow something up. That’s North Korea, which this week detonated the cooling tower at its controversial Yongbyon nuclear reactor as a way of saying, hey, we’re laying off the nukes. As a result, the U.S. has removed the DPRK from its list of states that sponsor terrorism and lifted some economic sanctions.

Not everyone believes the explosion means much, which is no surprise, given the North’s history of grandstanding, bloated rhetoric, lying and misguided attempts at image management. There are skeptics who say getting rid of the tower, which the New York Times calls a “technically insignificant structure, easy to rebuild,” is pure theatre, signifying nothing about more important disarmament efforts and perhaps suggesting that the North has done what it intended to at Yongbyon: produced enough nuclear weapons that the plant is no longer needed. (more…)

JEJU-DO—Coincident with the US beef kerfuffle sizzling in South Korean politics right now, I’ve been learning a lot about barbecue, through marathon grill-out sessions with my American friend Mark, his trusty portable Weber and his copy of grill maestro Stephen Raichlen’s fat BBQ bible, How to Grill.

According to Raichlen, when cooking beef, the ideal setup is to have a so-called “three-zone fire”—a situation in which the charcoal is distributed such that one area of the grill is super hot (for searing), one medium hot (for through cooking) and one cool (for when you need to save the meat from immolation). What can now be confidently called the political crisis in South Korea, spurred by US beef imports, has put SK’s president-for-now Lee Myung-bak squarely over the hot zone of the metaphorical grill, and the question now is how long he can burn before he has to jump off completely. (more…)

JEJU-DO—Restrictions on importing American beef into South Korea were set to be lifted this week—as of my writing this post, the government has delayed lifting the restrictions, but given no details on how long the delay will last—and from the shitstorm the move has caused, you’d think they were about to start selling American-made heroin cakes or child prostitutes from Miami. The Korean media is filled with beefy editorials, stories about beef-related protests, beef-laced apologies from politicians, warnings about killer beef diseases, and celebrations of pork as a nationalistic, non-insanity causing alternative (due to an outbreak of H5N1, chicken is also out).

The uproar is ostensibly a public health issue, spurred by the spectre of a frothy-mouthed demon cow bent on infecting the whole Korean population. Critics cite the potential dangers of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) , which most of us know as mad cow disease, as reason to uphold restrictions on US beef imports, especially high-risk material like spinal cords and brains (yum!). (more…)

JEJU-DO—History usually gives Gutenberg the credit, but some sources say Korea invented movable metal type. Good old Johannes didn’t start pouring his molds until about 1450, but in 1234, during Korea’s Goryeo period (from which the country’s present name derives), a guy named Choe Yun-ui is said to have used movable metal type to print the Sangjeong Gogeum Yemun, a collection of ritual books. The earliest extant book printed with metal type is a Buddhist text called the Jikji Simcheyojeol, from 1377, also a Goryeo document. Clearly, it’s not just kimchi we have Korea to thank for.

This little bit of history is consistent with Korean’s incredible respect for language. On the various occasions when I’ve asked my students who they consider to be a great Korean hero, an overwhelming majority of them cite Sejong the Great, the Joseon-era leader who invented hangeul (or hangul), the Korean alphabet system that’s still in use today, and which linguists generally recognize as one of the best writing systems ever created. Imagine asking a seven-year-old from Kamloops whom they admire and having them answer Tommy Douglas, because of the way he revolutionized health care in Canada, and you get a picture of just how revered Sejong and his invention are in Korean culture. (more…)

JEJU-DO—I’ve been meaning to respond to a reader of my post on weird Korean stuff, who suggested that I should have included kimchi. There’s a good reason I didn’t. For every item on that list, I’m sure you could find at least a few Koreans to vouch for its weirdness—someone to say, “Listen, I agree with you: It’s a little off that my kid wants to stick his finger up your ass.”

I don’t believe there is a Korean person alive or dead who would concede that kimchi is weird. Nor, having lived in Korea for more than a year, am I able to do so. (Smelly, yes; weird, no.) In Korea, kimchi is more than a foodstuff. It’s a national icon, a cultural treasure, a palpable expression of the country’s feisty spirit and determination throughout history to grow and protect its own unique soul—to resist wholesale assimilation into the more megalithic cultures of Asia, through culinary defense. It’s a cure-all, a protective shield, a magic balm and a goddess of plenty. Without kimchi, Korea would not be the same country—there might be a nation in the same place, and it might even be called the same thing, but it would not be Korea. (more…)

Behind the toilet isn’t usually the best place to look for treasure. But at the Kimnyong Maze Park, a “symbolic hedge maze” located just outside the fishing village of Kimnyong on Jeju’s northeast coast, that’s where you’ll find it. It comes in the form of one Frederic H. Dustin, the seventy-eight-year-old founder and proprietor of the park, who planted the first sapling for the maze with his own hands, and who happens to be the foreigner who’s lived in Korea independently longer than any other — a kind of Ur-waygookin who predates the explosion of the ESL industry by at least a couple decades, and therefore has a lot of interesting stories to share from the time before it was common for white people to enjoy eating fermented cabbage in sour hot pepper-and-fish paste. (more…)