Just a taste

It’s hard to believe that my time at Hanyang is almost over. Yet at the same time it feels like such a long time ago when I first walked into my dorm room/prison cell with that sinking feeling in my tummy about my living quarters. All-in-all it hasn’t been bad, however. My roommate has been awesome and we’ve become good friends. I didn’t actually spend that much time in the room anyway, so it really wasn’t an issue. Most of my time has been working on this film, which, as the title suggests, you will get a small taste of what we’ve been up to.

Let me set it up for you: When our team initially sat down to come up with ideas, there were several of them flying around. One idea was to inquire about the presence of the US Army in Seoul and how the Koreans REALLY feel about it. In the time that I’ve been here, it seems as though (for the most part) they like Americans. At the same time, I’ve also found that’s it quite difficult to get the information you need from Koreans. However, I digress. Some of the other ideas: Domestic Korean adoption and the huge issue of Koreans not wanting to adopt kids from their own country. Apparently some are doing it in secret to avoid the humiliation and shame from their fellow Koreans. A third idea was to do a story on young men going into the Army and the struggles they face. All men in Korea are required to serve 2 years.

It seemed that no one could come up with an idea that made everyone happy. Either there were people on the team (a mix of American, Turkish and Korean) that were uncomfortable with the topic, or just plain didn’t like it. Then one of the Korean students suggested doing a story on migrant workers and the discrimination they face in South Korea’s homogenous society. We finally all agreed upon this story and decided to pursue it with a fervor. Well, at least SOME of us decided to pursue it in such a way.

Anyway, I’m hoping that once this week is out I will get some time to send you production stories, etc., about being on the shoots, the people we encountered, the landlord that screamed at us for filming in one of his tenant’s apartments, etc. The struggles we faced, the miscommunication with the team, the flat-out lack of motivation from some of the team members .. and on and on.

For now, however, I leave you with a short film clip of an interview we did at a migrant worker’s hospital.

I’ll give you a little setup: We’d been searching high and low for migrant workers to talk about their situations and problems as it pertained to being non-Korean. There is story after story about the hardships many face as workers from other countries, and the outright lack of respect and, in many cases, abuse these people get from Koreans. So we thought .. no problem! We assumed there were tons of people that would talk about their situations with us. Not really the case .. or, shall I say, not very easy for us to find. One of the biggest issues we came across was the lack of time for this project. We had to plan our days out very carefully, travelling to the ghettos of Seoul to find the right people to interview. If we could only talk to a few people a day, the odds were against us. And every time we talked to people they seemed to be accepting of their situation, with nothing terribly negative to say. We came to realize that this may be because of the threat they thought we were to their jobs. If they said something negative on camera, and it got to the right people, then they’d be risking a great deal. In one case, we interviewed a gentleman from China who was supporting his family back home. So why would he want to risk that? I don’t blame him. It came down to one very simple part of the equation .. we had to maximize what little time we had with the most logical locations for the type of people we needed to interview – AND we had to rely on our Korean team members to get us to these places. On our last day of interview shoots we nailed it. The Migrant Worker’s Hospital was full of patients that were there because they receive free care when their employer won’t pick up the tab. Although I still feel like we didn’t get as much as we wanted, I do believe we were semi-satisfied with what we ended up filming. Again, time would have been such a great thing to have on our side.

So here’s the clip from the hospital.

Cheers!

Oh! And a very special announcement: Happy BIRTHDAY to Allana! Woot! Woot! I hope you have a FABULOUS day!

Condensing

Picture of a boy with umbrella at the DMZ

I hate blogs that always start with, “I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written in the blog.” But .. I’m sorry it’s been so long I’ve written in the blog. I really am. My time seems to be filled up to the minute every single day. So have about an hour and I’m going to try to condense some things into this one posting.

Here goes:

We started classes a few weeks ago. I’m taking Documentary Filmmaking (which they call “Broadcasting” here, for whatever reason) and Korean Language II. The first day in DF was nothing short of amazing. I’d never had a class with Chang at Ithaca College (although I’m signed up for one in the fall semester), but I’d heard so many great things about him. My first impression is that he’s really passionate and driven about the subject matter, and he expects the same of his students. I think Chang seems to balance somewhere between excitement and utter sadness. The excitement, of course, comes from doing and teaching the thing that he loves the most. The sadness is that most of his students aren’t as motivated as he when it comes to filmmaking. When he’s teaching he’s like an evangelist at the podium. He pounds the board, he’ll stomp on the floor, and he’ll use all sorts of motions (think Jazz Hands) to get his point across. For me, it’s contagious. He makes me want to love it as much as he does .. but again, I can’t speak for the rest of his audience. The poor man lives in frustration a great deal of the time. I think as long as he gets a few students here and there, he’ll be ok.

Korean Language II. When I first walked into this class, and based on prior information, I thought I was walking into an intermediate language class. Since the only word I knew was “hello” [ahn-yahng-ha-say-oh), I didn't think it'd be a good fit for me. However, I was convinced otherwise after the teacher came in told us we should stay anyway. Actually, she didn't say it, one of the Korean speaking students told me since the teacher didn't speak english very well. Then I noticed a few of the other students in the class spoke Korean fluently, which made me a little nervous because I was coming in as a total newbie. I stood up, explained that I didn't think the class was for me and started to leave. However, the guy translating for the "teacher" [sawn-sang-neem] told me that it would be fine if I stayed and that they would tailor it for each of the students. Fortunately I wasn’t the only newb in the class. However, since there’s a good mix of people (6 in total), the newbs (mainly me) get a lot of laughs during our attempts at pronouncing Korean words. It was so good at one point that one of the girls drinking a bottle of water spit it out all over the table from laughing. I don’t think it’s THAT bad, actually. But these are the guys that know how to speak it already. AND they are kids, afterall. In the meantime, I just struggle through it.

Oh .. but here’s a good example of just how good my Korean is: We were taking the subway back to the dorm rooms. When we got to our stop, we headed up to street level to wait for the 2220 bus. Sang, my roommate, was explaining to me that you can’t get on just ANY 2220 bus, but that there’s one that has a certain name on a card in the windshield. The name is: Sah-gun-dong. So to test out my Korean, Sang suggested that when the bus arrived I ask the bus driver, “sah-gun-dong?” I agreed. 2220-sah-gun-dong arrived as I quietly prepared with nervous excitement, saying it to myself over and over. For you see, outside of “hello”, and “goodbye”, and “thank you” to students and teachers, this was my first shot at talking Korean to someone real. A bus driver. The bus pulls up, I walk up the three steps to where the driver is sitting. I pause. I look at him and say, “SAW-gun-dong?” He hesitated for a moment, shook his head and said something like .. “yeah, yeah.” Then as I swiped my bus card, I heard him repeat me and chuckle. Then I heard my roommate, Sang, start laughing violently loud. I cautiously walked to the back of the bus to take my seat. Sang, still laughing, sat behind me. I turned to him and said, “uh .. what’s so funny?” He said, “you just called the bus driver a dickhead.”

I slunk down in my seat until I got over my embarrassment long enough to ask Sang how that could have been possible. He told me I had said, “SAW-gun-dong” instead of “SAH-gun-dong.” That subtle pronounciation made all the difference.

I learned a very valuable lesson that day.

Catching up

We all thought this girl was too cute!

Having fun at Everland

Kids playing soccer at the Hanyang Amphitheatre

Hanyang Plaza — location of many shops and restaurants on campus

View of the ski slope from the resort

The infamous “mat” resort

All the wishes of those that wrote them on the pieces of paper

Egemen making a wish

A cow at Korean Folk Village

Same cow / different angle

A woman selling food at Korean Folk Village

A Korean woman flogs one of the guys in our group

Korean Folk Village

Two girls watch a tight-rope walker

Mannequins in traditional clothing at Korean Folk Village

More Korean Folk Village dress

Woman mannequin in prison surrounded by coins at Korean Folk Village

Incorrectly translated sign: Take care the drop and watch out your step, please!

The bridge in which the above sign is referring

Performers at Korean Folk Village

Another traditional building at Korean Folk Village

——————————————————–

Ok.

So I’m going to attempt to make a MAJOR update to the blog today, since I have some time to do so. Please forgive the long delays between postings .. as they keep me very busy between classes and field trips.

June 24 (Continued)

After a long, hot day in the park, the group loaded on the bus off to our next destination: Yangji Pine Resort. It was close to dark when we arrived, so we took our bags up to our rooms and immediately went downstairs to the back deck (which faces the slopes) and had dinner. Dinner was Korean BBQ again, with just a little bit of beer and soju wine mixed in. We sat at a long line of picnic tables, appreciating the atmosphere. I got up from dinner and was feeling a bit tired, so I headed up to my room to lay down for a bit. The room was long and narrow with a table and chairs on one end and a tv sitting on a tv stand on the other. There was a very small kitchen near the table and a small bathroom near the door. No beds. Instead there were a series of mats stacked along the wall. With plenty of floor space, I had a variety of hard surface areas to put my “bed” upon. I grabbed my mat, dropped it next to one of the walls and drifted off. I woke a few hours later and went out on the deck to take in some fresh ski resort air. Egemen (pronounced egg-uh-men), my Turkish film partner (see pictures), came into the room and asked if I wanted to join the whole gang in his room next door because they’d all gathered there. I accepted the invitation and went over. He was right, pretty much everyone was there along with a few faces I didn’t recognize. Everyone was drinking and having a good time, so I decided to join the gang for a little while so they wouldn’t think the old man was non-social. As things started to become a little too rowdy, I went back to my room to go to bed .. or at least tried to go to bed. Every few minutes it felt like someone was coming and going from the room. The door would open, the lights would come on, they’d see me sleeping and leave. At one point I felt the presence of a few other people that had set up their mats next to mine. I was assigned a roommate, so I thought maybe it was him and someone else that had decided to crash in our room .. so I didn’t think anything of it. I only slept for a few hours because my neighbors sleeping next to me were uncomfortably close. Within my personal bubble, if you will. At some point I couldn’t sleep any longer and the sun had started to come up. I sat up, looked over to see who was sleeping next to me, and it was a couple of Korean dudes I had never seen before. So with logical reasoning I had deducted that they probably joined the “party” as a couple of passer’s by and someone offered to let them use our room. I shrugged it off as no big deal. I looked across the other side of the room and saw Egemen splayed out on his mat in such a way that seemed to imply that he had had a pretty good night. Better him than me. I got up, went to the balcony and looked at the fog hovering over the ski slopes as I waited for time to pass to have breakfast. When that time finally came, I showered and went downstairs to join the rest of the gang. A sad bunch, indeed. Shortly after I sat down, one of the guys in the group sat down next to me looking like he’d been run over by a truck. He took a bite of food, leaned his head forward, put his forehead in his hands and proceeded to fight the urge to vomit. Thankfully he didn’t.

We left the resort shortly thereafter and went to Korean Folk Village. It’s a decent sized park with traditional buildings, crafts and performances. When we arrived, we first had lunch, and the staff gave us a small tour to certain areas of the park, allowing us to explore the rest on our own after a while. We casually walked around, exploring all of the interesting structures, people in costume and traditional activities. A noticed a few of the signs in the park had poor english translation, so we found that to be rather humorous. Near the entrance of the park is a tall stack of stones wrapped in twine with small pieces of paper wrapped around it. The purpose of this is to write down a wish and wrap it around the twine and wait for it to come true. The time came for us to leave, and once again we all loaded onto the bus and headed back to Hanyang University. This bus ride was a little bit different, however. This bus was equipped with a full karaoke system, complete with a large screen LCD TV in the front. Quite fancy. So the staff went around the bus asking people if they wanted to sing, to which I promptly declined. I did have a good time watching everyone else sing though .. at least for about 5 minutes. I found that at around the 6 minute mark I was thinking of worse situations to be in so that I could keep it all in perspective. Wow. And it’s amazing who WILL sing. I, at least, have the common courtesy to not want to ruin anyone’s life with my voice. Others seem to have that courtesy function turned off because they went for it. And when I say they went for it .. they WENT for it. I do have a feeling that I’m going to get suckered into karaoke at some point anyway. You just can’t avoid it here.

Ugh. Today was supposed to be the day that I got caught up on everything — and I even skipped a field trip to do so, but unsurprisingly I’m getting distracted with all kinds of other things because of faulty camera equipment. The video camera they gave us has a faulty port on it and I’m unable to digitize the video we’ve shot up until this point. Yay! Apparently the school knew about it but failed to tell us. Now we’ve wasted a bunch of time trying to troubleshoot the issue. I can’t win on this damn blog.

A day at the park

June 24

I’m finding it very difficult to keep up with the blog. My days are full with classes and my evenings are full with either meetings about the classes or outings with professors and/or students. By the time I get back to my dorm I’m ready to go to bed so as to get an adequate number of hours of sleep. I shall do my best, however, to get caught up.

Today is the first big field trip day to a giant theme parked owned by Samsung. Well, there are two parts to it actually: Everland and Caribbean Bay. Everland is your typical overpriced/rollercoaster style theme park — complete with all the bad food that you’d expect to find in such a place. Caribbean Bay, from what I hear, is a giant pool that has a massive wave making machine. I guess it has some other cool stuff, too, like the ability to boogie board or surf .. or whatever. I opted to go to Everland since I’d left the leopard print speedo at home. It was all or nothin’, baby, and I went for nothin’! Oddly, they require everyone to wear a swim cap too. Sadly, I didn’t have one, so the choice was obvious.

We all load on the bus at Hanyang and head over to the park, which was about 1-1.5 hours away. On the way there we had a fabulous events coordinator who provided cheerleading the entire way. She’s the person that makes the seating arrangements on the bus so we have new Korean friends to meet when we go to our assigned seat. She’s also the person that gets everyone riled up with local trivia and games, to keep us entertained during the long ride. I love these people. They remind me in a way of Club Med or Carnival Cruise activity directors (you get the idea). Anyway, after a painful 1.5 hours, we arrive at the theme park. Since a lack of communication seems to be a pattern at Hanyang, we were almost faced with the possibility of not having the option to go to Everland. I started to become slightly panic stricken. What would I do? No leopard print speedo! No swim cap! Fortunately the powers that be got it all worked out and two groups were created. The water park group and the theme park group. Once THAT was settled, then it was just a matter of the staff to get us tickets to get into the park of our choice. So we wait and wait and wait. Finally, one of the staff of Hanyang said they had the tickets, but it’s going to be another hour before we can get into the park. You can imagine the sudden mood shift of 30 20-somethings and one ..ahem.. 40-something. On top of that it was brutally hot. I’ve found that EVERY day in Seoul is hot and muggy — which is my least favorite kind of weather.

— More Soon —

That first day …

June 22nd:

It’s my first official day in Korea, and I’m awake after having slept about 5 hours. The dorms seem pretty quiet, as there aren’t many people on the 8th floor with me. Just us crazy international students mixed with a few Korean students. My roommate, Sang, still hasn’t arrived yet. Since this is a “down” day after the long trip, I decide to try and get somewhat settled, unpacked .. all while getting a little more sleep.

There’s a knock at my door. It’s an American kid. He tells me that several of the international students were all getting together that day to explore a part of Seoul. I declined, telling him it had something to do with being old and tired. He cheerfully accepted my excuse and moved on. I continued checking out the dorm building and the immediate areas to find out the what/where/when.

Around 4:30-ish or so, Sang had finally arrived. A tall, skinny (all Koreans are skinny .. so it should go without saying) kid with a mouth full of metal and a look in his eye that said, “uh .. you sure you’ve got the right room, pops?” (in Korean, of course .. but I don’t know how to translate it to Korean yet). He was joined by his brother, who stopped in to the room to chat a bit, but left shortly thereafter. A pleasant fellow that had a pretty good grasp of the English language. Sang and I sit on our beds across from one another, trying to get adjusted the language barrier, which was a matter of a few minutes. So there Sang and I sat, discussing the differences in culture and the US, and how the US is seen by Koreans (guess what: it’s not favorable. I know .. BIG shocker, right?), how the Koreans are seen by the US, etc. Sang is very interesting in that he’s probably one of the most polite people I’ve met and he takes long pauses before he responds to your questions in english. It’s so deliberate, in fact, it just adds to just how polite he really is. A little more background on Sang .. he’s a biochemsitry major at Hanyang University and is in his Junior year. He has at least one sibling that I know of who we call “Stephano.” His father was in advertising for Hyundai (if I remember correctly) for a number of years, and is now in management. His mother is a concert pianist.

At 6pm I was to meet Professor Chang in the lobby of the dorms with everyone else that was here to take his class, including a few others like Sang and his brother. We all meet at the rendevous point and Chang takes everyone in his car in several loads over to the Baskin Robbins in nearby “College Town.” Once the whole group is there, we head off for a Korean BBQ restaurant within short walking distance. Once we get seated and settled, we’re all sitting at a very long table that have grills in the middle of them, spaced evenly among us. The waitress takes our order and comes back shortly thereafter with big slabs of pork, which she tosses on the grills. She then takes a pair of scissors and cuts the pork into smaller, more manageable pieces. In the meantime, Sang and his brother are sitting across from me explaining how the Korean BBQ process works. Once the meat is cooked, you take a piece of lettuce and place the meat in the center of the leaf. You then take various other foods that are in small dishes scattered around the table, such as kimchi, red paste, rice, etc., and put it on and around the meat. You then roll the lettuce leaf into a small ball and jam the whole thing in your mouth. After carefully observing, it was my turn. I got everything into the lettuce leaf, rolled it up and took a bite. Sadly I couldn’t get the whole thing in my mouth so I received a bit of ridicule for it. My 2nd attempt was a success, however.

After dinner, Chang suggested a small, quiet bar called “The Heavens” for us to hit. Again, the whole group piled into this place, sitting around a long table and Chang ordered more food and drinks for us. It was here I had my very first taste of Soju, a grain wine native to Korea. Not too bad. Still at the bar, Chang had us start a silly game of 3-6-9, of which I won’t go into the details. It was intended to be one of those team building moments, I do believe (correct me if I’m wrong, Sarah).

We didn’t stay long at the bar as some of us were interested in seeing this giant retail store in Korea called E-Mart (think Wal-Mart on steroids). When we pull up to this place, the outside resembles a fairly decent size hotel. As we pull into the parking garage (which makes up one of the many floors to the store), we’re greeted by a parking attendant who waves us in the proper direction. As we pass him, he gives the car a bow. My first thought was, “man .. you don’t see THAT at Wal-Mart.” We park, grab a cart and head in. Now let me tell you something about these carts .. all the wheels on them rotate. ALL the wheels! This is handy for moving a cart sideways when you need to get out of someone’s way. The only carts I’ve seen have the static wheels in the back and you have to lift up the back of the cart to move it sideways. Not in Korea. These guys have it figured out. Anyway, the store is quite magnificent! Floor after floor of consumer whore bliss. Customer service is beyond anything I’ve ever seen in the US, and many of the women are dressed in these Austin Powers-ish outfits, for reasons I do not know. It seems to work, however.

We left the store and hit a gas station before going back to the dorms. Again, the customer service at the gas station is beyond anything I’ve ever seen. They bow to you when you pull up, they offer you a drink, and upon completion of filling up your car with gas they give you a small gift. This may be a small pack of tissues or anything of that nature. The pump attendant was someone Chang was familiar with, so he struck up a conversation with her .. of which I picked up maybe a few words like, “hello” and “thank you.” Chang mentioned she’s from a poor family and is working to raise money to go to school. I think Chang is inspired by her dedication.

It was back to the dorms to settle in for the night. The next day was gonna be a big. Orientation followed by a day at one of the local theme parks. Everland. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love theme parks in hot, humid weather.

I can’t wait. More soon.

I have arrived

30+ hours of travel time with very little sleep makes Johnny a tired boy.

The flights were relatively uneventful. I had a little bit of excitement in Albany when they had asked for volunteers to give up their seats because of weight restrictions. I knew they’d be pretty interested in me giving up my seat, AND it would get me a $200 voucher on Continental. Now, I’ve heard all the stories of people getting free tickets and vouchers for giving up their seats, but not so with me. I’ve come so very close to getting them but for some reason I’m denied every time at the very last moment. I thought the Albany flight was my time. I was wrong.

Long layover in Jersey, so I thought I’d take advantage of the time by trying to find a watch battery for my trusty Fossil watch that I haven’t worn in years. After attempting to find a battery at 3 different places that sold watches, I was finally told the watch retailers aren’t allowed to keep the equipment in the airport to install watch batteries. I guess those very tiny screwdrivers pose too much of a temptation to the would-be hijacker. In any event, I’d also found a Swatch store, who’s staff seemed to turn up their nose and answer me with a, “we can only change the batteries in Swatch watches.” Feeling somewhat embarrassed and ashamed, I shuffled out of the Swatch store with my head hung low, covering my Fossil watch with my opposite hand as all the brightly colored Swatch patterns around me seemed to mock me during my hasty retreat. I finally gave up the battery search and went back to my gate, which turned out to be a pretty good journey, since I’d veered so far off my path to look for a damn battery. I ran into Allison at the gate, who is also a fellow IC student. We chatted for a while before being approached by Laura, who is yet another IC student enrolled in this program. So the three of us bonded over the big journey before us and were all on the same flight to Tokyo, where we met up again to go through Japan security. However, all of us had 3 different flights getting into Seoul. Allison would go first, then me, and finally Laura — all spaced a few hours apart.

I arrived in Seoul around 7:45pm or so, which was 20 minutes later than I should have arrived. There were foggy conditions so we hovered over the Seoul airport for a while before landing, which at this point felt like an eternity after being on planes all day. I was to meet Chang (the professor) at a designated location after getting through customs, etc. Immigration, baggage and customs were all painless. I then exchanged my currency and went to the meeting area. I looked for Chang, but didn’t see him anywhere. I was then approached by a Sarah, who had asked if I was John from IC, because I had that deer-in-the-headlights look about me that apparently said, “I’m John from IC.” However, I don’t look like your typical college student, so she’s either THAT good at finding ‘em, or someone had given her a description of me prior. And it’s not like I stick out in the crowd here or anything. Sarah mentioned that Chang was dropping off some other students that had arrived earlier and was stuck in traffic. The plan was for him to pick me up and take me to Hanyang University, then come back to pick up Laura and bring her to the school. Instead, we decided to combine the two trips and waited for Laura to arrive a few hours later. After Laura met us, we took off for Hanyang, about an hour away from the airport, while Chang and Sarah gave us the brief list of things that we should be aware of while in Seoul — one of which was to avoid the Western restaurants such as Outback Steakhouse, Applebee’s, etc., as they are all very overpriced. Apparently it’s the cool thing to go to those places, so the prices reflect it as such. The car ride to the University became rather quiet after a while, as the weary travelers were pretty well spent. When we arrived at the school, we quickly unloaded our bags and went to our assigned rooms. The sign on the door of my room has my name on it and another name: Sang Min Jeong. Sang has not arrived yet, but I expect that he probably will today at some point. The room is very tiny, almost like that of a prison cell. The walls are dingy and it’s pretty well worn in from the many years of use. I’m going to attempt to put a small video clip of it in the blog, so check out my ‘cell.’ When Chang helped me bring my bags up to my room he felt the need to mention that the girl’s dorm rooms were so much nicer in the building next door. So in an attempt to liven up my room a bit, I put my awesome Target cowboy sheets on the bed. It was probably around midnight before I got to sleep. I woke around 5AM, probably because everything is still disorienting and unfamiliar.