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Although in my experience, Koreans often seem to be skilled beyond measure at cheapening and vulgarizing just about anything to which they lay their hands, owing perhaps to the mercantilism-at-any-cost modernization of recent decades, Sorak San National Park, and the countryside around it, were a pleasant revelation to me.
An astonishingly beautiful place, organized and modern. The air is clean, the water’s clean, and I was surprised and bemused to observe that, as far as I could tell, at least, the Koreans seem to be better stewards of their forest resources than my fellow Canadians. I saw nothing that could compare with the vast, brutal areas of clearcut in British Columbia. In a tiny little country, with 49 million people crammed into it, there’s more of what appears to be virgin forest in the 275 kilometres or so between there and the smoke-shrouded urban hell that is here than I had ever expected.
We spent some time at Naksan Sa, one of the Buddhist temples in the region. The temple buildings and gardens perch amid fragrant pines on a bluff beside the sea. It is a testament to the upheavals of Korean history that it has been rebuilt no less than eight times in the fourteen centuries since it was first constructed. The entire coast in the region is lined with a three-metre fence, topped with razor-wire, a legacy of the latest upheaval 50 years ago. Sokcho and Sorak National park are disconcertingly close to the North Korean border. Soldiers patrol the beaches, along the inside of the fence. North Korean spies are kept out, but the people who live along the coast are kept in. It was surreal to see a gun emplacement, draped with camouflage netting, hidden in the rocks beneath the hermitage at the temple.

Sorak San itself (‘san’ means ‘mountain’, and derives from the Chinese character ) is as beautiful as any place I’ve ever seen, although even in the shoulder season, it’s mobbed by huge crowds. The day we spent there, bushwalking and generally wandering about, there were literally thousands of high school and middle school students, in enormous groups, repeatedly shouting “hello!” at me, which is always something I enjoy immensely, in much the same sense that I enjoy having my nipples sandpapered.
But it takes more than boisterous schoolkids to ruin my ki-buen. We spent the days in the mountains, and the evenings at the hot springs/waterpark/public bath near our condo, which was incredibly clean, modern, well-designed and well-built. A testament to what Korea could be like with a little more attention to detail, a little more pride in workmanship, a little less focus on the short term. A preview of what Korea will hopefully be, in a decade or two.
Our brief holiday was an unqualified success, and I look forward to going back and spending some more time there when this semester finishes.

We’re home. Korea’s a pretty goddamn nice place, after all.
It’s got to be the fifth circle of hell for those who appreciate the fine art and science of architecture, though. If I see one more mock-St. Peter’s onion dome or one more Castle-Auuuuuughh-esque turret on one more purple-painted f–k-hotel, I’m going to run screaming just over there near the couch, then run screaming back.
Not that you folks would actual hear my screams of aesthetic dismay, but I’d tell you about them later.
That’s what the web’s all about, right?
(Note to self : explain the f–k-hotel reference, and the fact that we did not in fact stay in any of those over the last couple of nights…)

In the Chosun Ilbo newspaper this morning : around a hundred North Korean refugees were rounded up by North Korean agents in China recently. “Rounded up” is the appropriate phrase to use, as not only were these people, amongst whom were children and grandparents, bound hand and foot with wire, but holes were punched through their septums and rings inserted, like cattle, to lead them back to the f–king fatherland.
Is this front page propaganda, or did it really happen?
Who knows any more? Recent experiments by the scum in power in America have shown pretty conclusively that propaganda doesn’t need to be subtle to be effective, just emotive. And the image of these poor, hungry people, strung together via iron rings passed through their noses, blood dripping down their upper lips as they are led back to the living hell that is North Korea, is certainly emotive.
But this comes a week before more visits between separated families are scheduled to happen, and not long after the South Korean envoy returned from an extended and fruitful visit to the North, so it seems unlikely that the report is sheer propagandizing, perhaps.
My vote is that it did happen, and the Chinese allowed it to happen. Aren’t people great? Don’t you just love them? Sweetness and light, beauty and peace, follow us all the days of our lives, don’t they?
Like f–k they do.

So we’re having lunch, and one of my Canadian co-workers, who has a tendency to talk more than his fair share of sh-t, is yammering on about how half of the women in Korean prisons are there for adultery. I’m about to call ‘bullsh-t’ when one of our Korean colleagues chimes in and verifies what he’s saying. The laws still regard adultery as a jailable offence, but the only people being prosecuted, for most part, are women.
Apparently it’s commonplace, when a wife in this country is discovered to be cuckolding a husband, for said husband to press charges, and for the wife to be prosecuted and sent to jail. This in a place where there is an omnipresent, enormous, but largely invisible sex industry, and where men are almost expected to take a mistress when they reach that magic socio-economic stratum where simple whores are no longer de riguer. Or at least not in front of the guys.
I just start getting a handle on this place, and then something comes along to make me realize how deeply I don’t get it.