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Dr. Dogmeat to the rescue! I love it. Since the Japanese occupation, Korea’s constantly believed deep in its collective heart that it is unworthy, that its traditions and culture have no real value, while showing the public face of that kind of pathology : blustering declarations, vociferous but shallow, about the glory of the march into the future and the glory of the Korean nation. In ’88, the government ‘passed a law’ with fingers crossed behind its back, ‘outlawing’ the consumption of boshintang, while the only real change on the streets was that more obvious restaurants joined their back alley kin in the shadows.
This is a much better approach, and perhaps a sign that South Korea is finally overcoming the self-loathing brought on by a century that included the Japanese occupation, the agony of the Korean War, and the indignities of being an American lapdog (thanks to the understood need for the 44,000 American troops stationed here in Korea). The nation was (re)built in the last 50 years, and this tiny little dot on the map has the 11th biggest economy on the planet now. (Happy voice) Mad props, you guys! (Serious voice) What a heartbreaking price you’ve had to pay, though.
Maybe it’s a step forward to be able to stand up and say (in Korean) “f–k you, mate. We’ll eat dog if we want. And you can kiss our hairy asses if you don’t like it!”.
Perhaps the collective averting of Korean faces from the recent past is almost over. Koreans have collectively turned a blind eye, and it has resulted in a nation so ravaged by lack of civic pride, by runaway industrialization and it’s concommitant cancers, by a blind forced march into an unclear future, and so completely unable to fruitfully connect threads of its cultural heritage to the realities of the present that I fear for its survival.
I chronicle the symptoms of the crisis here, couched in the rhetoric of an annoyed bystander, padded with attempts at humour, but it’s real, and it’s coming. Maybe Dr Dogmeat is a step towards Korea coming to terms with its own identity, and understanding that there are other strengths than the merely monetary.
Or maybe I’m just talking sh-t. Hard to tell sometimes.
(via Metafilter, and though it hasn’t started as I write this, the discussion there is probably where you want to head next, if you’re interested.)

Object lesson in cultural differences : on the subway today, I attempted to give up my seat to a woman who appeared to be more or less in my age bracket, plus perhaps five or ten years. She gave me an incredibly sour look of annoyance, and waved me back down, while casting quick glances left and right to check whether anyone had noticed our little interaction. I was confused, a bit, as I frequently am, and wrote it off to some kind of weird manifestation of xenophobia, which I usually do.
Turns out that I had offended her. It seems that in this strictly Confucian society, one gets up to offer one’s seat to the elderly. Only. In other places I’ve lived, I have pretty much always had a habit of mock-chivalrously doing the same for women, of whatever age, as that’s the way I was brought up. That’s not the way it works if you’re brought up in Korea, though, and by offering this woman who may have been 40 to 45 years old, I had implied that she was, or at least that she looked, an old biddy.
Ooops. Another success for international relations, courtesy of the wonderchicken.
Get outta my seat…

After reading the mewlings of at least half the participants in a discussion at Fark (a site where I consciously don’t bother with reading the discussions, as they are too often dominated by flailing adolescents and bumptious booby-seeking yahoos for my taste, and it just pisses me off) about the link I propagated below, I got to thinking a bit about how utterly different matters of gender are here, compared to the West.
An example : the over-riding desire for male children, particularly as a first born, coupled with a focus on children, a cult of reproduction, so fervent that women are often addressed not by their given name but as “Mother-of-child’s name” after they’ve squeezed out their first progeny, has created the necessity for some fairly unique legislation.
In the mid-80’s, as mass-produced ultrasound machines became freely available, doctors would naturally inform expectant mothers of the gender of the fetus, once it became distinguishable. This led to a fairly common, but not-discussed, practice of aborting female fetuses, particularly if they were to be the first-born, and ‘trying again’. This led in turn to the government decreeing that, by law, doctors would not be allowed to disclose the gender of a fetus. Many still do, of course, and the number of male births in Korea has outnumbered those of female by considerably more than the natural 106/100 ratio. This will have deep consequences when these boys come of age over the next decade or two.
Those in power would do well to learn from history:

A mainstream media article about Korea, this time talking about ‘booking clubs’. More or less accurate, except for the utterly ridiculous translations of quotes into Amurrican slang. “How’s it going, bro?” reads one such message sent to Mr. Park on a Monday night. “Come quick. It’s a complete girls’ bathtub tonight. Hurry and make your pick.”
This is meant to be an SMS message from a waiter at a club to a patron? Not a chance in hell.
Interesting phenomenon, though.
Book me, big boy…

A ‘Paris Baguette’ bakery franchise opened up in our determinedly-crappy-but-slowly-upscaling neighbourhood today. As is the tradition* in Korea, there was a trio of young women out front, gyrating to painfully loud disco music. It is bitterly cold today, so the artificial grins that they are required to wear were perhaps a little more forced than is usual. These girls must dance, non-stop, for anywhere up to 10 hours or so, while exhorting patrons to come and enjoy whatever wares the newly opened shop is flogging. They come from an agency of some kind. Mr. Kim, the proud owner of a new boshintang restaurant, will ring up and say “Yeah, I need three girls tomorrow. No, dancing girls, you idiot. Yeah, all day. Thanks”, and they magically appear with their uberdisco sound system the next day, rain or shine.
The really amusing thing (there’s always more than one amusing thing in my World of Anecdotes, sucka!) though, was they didn’t have a single f–king baguette in the place. At least we got a free bread knife.
*tradition being anything that’s been done for five years or more. ‘Or more’ may extend to a couple of thousand years, but who can tell?

After you get over the initial fear, loathing and ‘stop poking at my ego-balloon’ sensivity of the first few months of culture shock, it’s amazing how many little things you begin to take in stride, things that friends or family would pick up on instantly if they were to come and visit.
One that struck me as we were lazing around watching one of the infinitude of ‘variety’ shows on Korean TV last night (all of the major networks stream on the net live or on demand, by the way, if you’re curious and have a fast net connection : the big three : MBC, KBS, SBS. Even without being able to read Korean, you should be able to find the streams pretty easily…) is the ‘schoolgirl howl’.
This is a sound, that, whiskey-ravaged as I am, I cannot for the life of me reproduce. It is reminiscent of the kind of pre-orgasmic squeals that teenyboppers in the early 60’s would emit when faced with the Beatles, or Elvis, and I suppose, in a deliberately more chaste fashion, that’s what it’s modelled on. It sounds a bit like a very high-pitched : ‘ooo-WOOOO-OOoo!”. The thing is, though, that it’s delivered with clockwork regularity every 10 or 15 seconds, when anyone does or says anything even remotely interesting.
“Oh my goodness I am uncontrollably excited in a non-sexual fashion by the fact that that dog just jumped through a hoop!” is the message, it would seem.
To add an extra layer of weirdness (which I almost never notice these days, having become accustomed to it), this schoolgirl howl is also omnipresent on prerecorded segments! It would seem that they have invented, parallel to the cretinous laughtrack machines in the West, Schoolgirl Howl Machines here (good name for a band!). I imagine the guy in the booth, bored look on his face, cigarette dangling from his lip, pushing the lever for another howl, and twiddling a knob if it needs an extra bit of oomph because the current howl-ee is a member of g.o.d or something.
Practice your schoolgirl howls here…

The new train station nearest to our apartment beehive is about 75% percent finished, and you now go through the spiffy new electronic ticket checkers in the new building. The new signs, in standard yellow and black, are up, and are predictably loose with their interpretation of English. Not terribly amusing are the ones that have been put up here at Bugok and everywhere else as well, saying “Seoul Thorough”, which I assume is meant to mean something along the lines of “Seoul Direct” or “Seoul Express”.
The one that gave me a laugh today, and made people stare at me more than usual, was the sign that was clearly meant to say “Bugok Rolling Stock Yards” but somehow came out “Bugok Roiling Stork Yards”. I don’t know why I found this one so funny, but I’ve been laughing since I came out of the station. A very “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” flavour to that one : “Roiling Stork, Bubbly Lemur” …

Interesting, and quite odd. The usual, in other words.
Elementary school students in Busan and other parts of South Gyeongsang province are reportedly singing the praises of Osama bin Laden. School authorities in the province said they are working to discourage children from singing what they called a “Bin Laden worship song.”….The song, reportedly sung to the tune of the theme song of a popular cartoon, goes something like this: “Osama bin Laden, the person I admire most. I also want to be a terrorist when I grow up. President Bush, the person I detest most. I’m going to blow up the 63 building.”
This is very much cut from the same cloth as “Whistle while you work, Hitler is a jerk, Mussolini broke his weinie…” or a raft of other schoolkid songs we half-remember from childhood. The interesting thing to me is that “the Busan Police Agency and the city’s education office on Dec. 7 ordered schools to stop students from singing the song, calling it ‘potentially dangerous‘”. I imagine the scene at the local constabulary…
Corporal Kim is on the sh-t list for not meeting his quota of traffic tickets for the month. The Chief calls him in to his office, yells at him and whacks him over the head a few times with a rolled-up newspaper, then puts him on Elementary School Duty. “If you hear any kids singing that Osama song, Corporal, you bring ’em in, you hear me? Screw this up, and you’ll be hosing down drunks in the back room for the rest of your life!”
Update : Related, tangentially and less amusingly, was the stink over the astonishingly stupid “Hitler Bar” in Taegu a while back.
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Cory at BoingBoing mentions boshintang and links to the Korea Herald. Media mentions are increasing. The Dog Thing will probably hit mainstream North American media in about 4 months….

Korean folks : devote themselves slavishly to their families but will spend 12 or 14 hours a dayat work. Somehow reconcile grand operatic displays of emotional intensity with a finely-honed sense of social etiquette. Are xenophobic, but extremely hospitable. Appear incompetent but achieve incredible successes. Are Confucian, but have disarming instinct for participating in ad-hoc relationships. Are collectivist but are arguably the most individualistic of North-East Asian societies. Are puritanical in public, but earthily sexual in private. Are, when older, serious, self-important and rigid in their public faces, but are free as schoolchildren when drinking with their contemporaries. Relentlessly pursue title and status and wealth, but regard them when achieved as guides for behaviour rather than measures of intrinsic worth. Can be deliberately ignorant of the squalor of their surroundings while acutely conscious of the fine gradations of their relationships with the people around them. Are deeply sentimental but vigorously pragmatic. Believe in the indwelling spirit of all things and put aside that belief when it’s inconvenient. Care deeply for people, but only people that are part of their circle. Believe in romantic love, when it’s convenient. Are sloppily sentimental, but ruthless in business.
Oh, they are fascinating to me. Walking contradictions. And never boring, which, for me, is key. I love these people. That’s why I’m here, again, much as I complain.
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A fine, blue, almost smogless Christmas day here in Seoul, and we took the opportunity to go to Seoul Grand Park, or more accurately, the Museum of Contemporary Art therein. But, of course, those of you who know me know that that’s not the real story : the interesting bit is that I had bondaeggi for the first time while sober, and quite enjoyed it. Bondaeggi is, of course, boiled, seasoned silkworm larvae, ladled into a paper cup from a big cauldron by one of the the ‘bondaegii ladies’ that squat every 10 metres or so along the concourse leading to Gwacheon subway station, and chant ‘bondaeggi bondaeggi bondaeggi’ until they’re hoarse.
It’s really quite yummy stuff, if slightly odd in texture. Leaves a bit of a nasty aftertaste too, but I suspect that’s as much from the grimy looking cauldron as it is from the bugs themselves.
Mmmm…it’s just not Xmas without some boiled grubs, I always say!
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It must be the Xmas season (don’t get me started) but I’m getting all soft and goopy. After calling the pr0n seekers ‘too dumb to live’ there last night, I actually felt a little bad when I found this in my referrer logs this morning. The poor guy clicked on the search result, hoping to find Hot! Hot! Korean! Sexx0ring!, and instead got insulted.
Ah, the power of the IntArWeb thing.

An Xmas present to all you folks who wearily click the link to come here regularly, in hopes that you’ll find something insightful, amusing or just plain goofy that you can tell your significant other over dinner, and equally (well OK not equally, ’cause you sad random bastards that showed up here looking for nekkid pictures are too dumb to live, really) the folks that showed up here via some of the oddball search engine queries I see in my referrer logs : this is a funny and well-written travelogue thingo about Korea (that I didn’t write, ensuring a much lower smart-ass quotient). Enjoy!
(Next week I start with the all porn format)

Found this scan this evening. Apparently the Philippines is another country that has some history of chowing down on the puppies. Poor guy – he was just trying to run his restaurant…

(I wonder if it was the dogflesh that gave him his Freakishly Large Head.)

Next up on the hit-parade : an item a couple of days ago on MBC News talked about a new trend amongst the parents of elementary school children – forcing them to undergo a surgerical procedure which severs some bits of muscle that control the tongue, thus apparently ‘lengthening’ it. You might well wonder why a longer tongue would be such an valuable asset. I certainly did.
Well, it seems there’s a widespread belief that us foreign dogs have much longer tongues than the average Korean, and this evolutionary quirk gives us the ability to pronounce English (and presumably other languages) with more facility. A little radical body mod on the kids will stand them in good stead for pronouncing English, is the thinking.
I don’t really need to rant about this, do I?
I will note though, that almost without fail, throughout their entire elementary, middle and high-school careers, Korean kids are taught completely incorrect phonemes to approximate sounds that exist in English and other Euro languages, but not in Korean. By the time they reach adulthood, if they continue to study English, their pronunciation is so deeply and permanently mangled that it’s very difficult indeed for them to correct it. This is perpetuated by the universal habit of using a whole host of Konglish words written in Hangul script on television and elsewhere (like ‘news’ which in Korean is ´ºÁî, which is pronounced ‘nyoo-juh’), which forces and perpetuates mispronounciation, and annoys the crap out of me.
A decent education system, with well-trained teachers, and practice, will improve kids’ pronunciation of English and other foreign languages, not surgery. Grrrr.
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In a move so representative of the general silliness of many decisions of the Korean government that it seems like it ought to be parody, they have announced that they will be outlawing pojong mahcha (street food vendors) during the World Cup next year. People are up in arms, as there is a long tradition in Korea of sitting on the benches beside these carts, in summer to take the air, and in winter huddled inside the plastic sheeting that serves as windbreaks, and snarfing down some dok boeki or soondae or other yummy treats. But what people’re even more up in arms about, and justifiably so, is that street vendors will still be allowed to sell hamburgers. To the big fat hamburger-addicted Waeguk who will show up in droves and demand “Burgers! Give us burgers, you bastards!”, presumably.
Clueless old men in the government, scratching their scurfy scalps, going (in Korean, of course) “Huh-yup, dat’s what dem foreigner’s’ll like. They’ll feel all ta home if we only allow street vendors to sell hayam-burgers!”
This is the same sort of inexplicable dissociation from reality that has resulted in “Visit Korea Year 2001” seeing less visitors than actually showed up in “Regular Old Year 2000”. This despite all-singing, all-dancing commercials starring the erudite-but-terrifying prez, and which inexplicably only seemed to actually air within Korea, which when you stop to think about it, kind of defeated the purpose.
Update : Apparently, the legislation will also allow for the sale of ‘sandwiches’, which will presumably please the French tourists as well and their insatiable appetite for croques monsieur. Thanks fishstickchronicles for making me dig deeper into the madness…
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A Korean friend recently explained to me why there are so freakin’ many crosses glowing in the night skyline of any Korean city, not even outnumbered by the Giant Glowing Bowling Pins of Pusan (recently reRomanized ‘Busan’, but I’m Old Skool HanGul). There are a lot of Christian churches in Korea, and a lot of Christians. The problem seems to be, though, that Korean folks have a marked tendency to be fractious about…well, pretty much everything. Why do you think the Korean War is still officially unfinished? Anyway, most churches apparently tend to have internal dissension about details of dogma, and fracture into sub-churches frequently and parthenogenetically. One of the concommitant beliefs in this constant splitting and recombining of congregations is a conviction that regardless of the actual size of your churchlet, if you have a bigger, brighter, or more clearly visible cross, you somehow win the dogmatic argument. You are presto-chango more Holy.
Thus, crosses galore.
As always, this story may be apocryphal, but I have heard it a few times from various Korean people.

Kimchi as Light Emitting Vegetable Diode. Not only is Kimchi God’s! Own! Health! Food! (or so I’m constantly told), it is in fact a Side Dish Semiconductor. How cool is that?
(Pretty goddamn cool, is the answer, of course. Why else would I have asked?) via memepool

This thread on Metafilter is about boshintang, and links back thanks to y2karl to my post a month or so ago about it. This Herald Tribune article is a relatively reasonable take on the subject. An amusing quote : “…many Koreans are answering [with] a defiant phooey.” I cringe to think about some of the verbiage that is going to be flung around as this “Koreans=Dog Eating Barbarians” meme starts to propagate. Again.
sh-t, I used the word ‘meme’. Ten minutes in the penalty box.
Dec 15 update : The Anti Dog Meat Movement headquarters. “Japanese eat whale meat and Korean eat dog meat. Two countries are co-hosts of 2002 FIFA World Cup. They said that this worldcup will become a ‘green Worldcup’. Is this the truth? What is our next step?” My suggestion for your next step, kids : shut the f–k up. Warning : some nasty imagery ahead, if you follow that link.