From: Peter Wynne-Willson <pwynne@nuri.net>

Subject: Splendid but Small

Date: Monday 1 November 1999 12:57

More extracts from life in the Orient

[NB These are just extracts - spare a thought for poor Ali!]

Wednesday - I think.....

Everything here is so so big. I was wondering whether it just looks it, because the people are a bit on the small side, but no. Things are big. I went into a book shop today which was like the wholesale Sunday Boot sale on each of eight floors of a building. Yesterday I went to an electronics centre with more than 20 floors! All sprung from the emperor-with- inadequacies- big- shed complex if you ask me.

I thought you'd like to know what have been the successes and failures so far in terms of the luggage I carefully assembled.

Firstly, on the success side, this little computer, which I am using now, is the cleverest thing on the planet. I can't quite believe how much it does for me. It may have been a bit of a weight to get here, but my God I'm glad for it. Main failures have been the digital camera which I haven't managed to bring to life, and my prematurely dead specially comfortable Clarks shoes, which lasted one expedition out into Seoul, during which they pinched me for three hours, before splitting completely down the middle at the back, bah, Clarks sensible shoes indeed! Runners up prizes go to the little Korean phrase book, and the nearly finished now chocolate society drinking chocolate [present from Ali] But the outright winner, and the winner of the 1999 most successful travel purchase award, is my bag, my gorgeous, beautiful, a-snip-at-whatever-outrageous-price-it-was bag. It is fantastic, effortlessly combining an awesome practical ability to carry anything, with the kind of battered academic chic that is exactly the image I feel becomes a visiting eccentric, which is obviously my aim. So it was worth it, and will be for years, or until I lose it, whichever is the sooner. [This is in here because Ali thought it was a slight extravagance! - Ed.].........

Anyway, back to the PWW analysis of the Korean character. If I have one reform that I would introduce here, it would be to lengthen all the brooms. They are all flat versions of witches' brooms, but sawn off at about two feet. This is so that those designated to sweep have to bend to exactly 50 degrees throughout. I think this is a deliberate policy perpetrated originally by those same kings that built the palaces, who wished their underlings to be visibly less significant at all times. Frankly, though, it has infected the national psyche. Yumi, my interpreter, has three degrees [the qualifications, not the LP] and yet seems to be sweeping with a short broom at all times, metaphorically speaking. She is quite small, but enough is enough. 'I think Yumi should have a break now' I said, after she had continued interpreting me right through my break. 'Oh, you are so considerate, Professor'. She would say this if I were suggesting I was thinking of stopping beating her. No, the time has come for those handles to grow.

Friday....

I'm getting to know my graduate students really quite well now. There are three of them, all in their thirties. Yong, who lived in Illinois for a while, and speaks good english [insofar as anyone who learnt it in the states can]. He is quite serious, and has the extra duty of class assistant - a kind of jumped-up board monitor role which means I am supposed to send him to photocopy things, and ask him in advance to prepare any materials for my class. This is slightly intimidating, since it makes me feel like I should be using some materials!

Then there is Cheong-Myong, who is the most diffident of the three, and the tallest. She is still slightly anxious I think - always wants to make sure she is doing the right thing. She is what they call an acting major - the others really have intentions to be teachers. There was one moment today when she felt very strongly about something and really shouted. It was brilliant, totally unexpected. So I think once she relaxes she will be good value.

The third is Chi-Yung. She is a particularly impressive student. She has a five year old daughter, who lives during the week with her mother, and is very clear most of the time about what she thinks. Seems to have a natural understanding of the whole TIE approach, and will be good at actually carrying it, I think. She and Young-ai are both clearly part of a new kind of long-handled, if any broom at all, type of Korean women.

Although they do bow when I come in, I am really pleased with the way the atmosphere in the sessions is working. Young-ai comes to most of the sessions, because she wants to know more about TIE, and there is a good sense of fun. I gave them a huge speech about how high my expectations are, 'It will not be enough for our visits to schools in December to be educational, I want them to inspire, to change lives, to boldly go....' I think having an interpreter gives me just long enough to work out the next piece of stirring rhetoric. Sometimes Yumi gets confused and talks Korean to me, and sometimes I get carried away and go on for ten minutes before she politely interrupts. 'Please can I tell them what you are saying?'

Big excitement looked like it was going to come this evening. I noticed that Ally McBeal is on on the US Forces TV station, the only one in English. Most of it is unbelievably bad, although has some curiosity value. I now know the number to ring if I have any questions about my anti-anthrax vaccination, and that I might get a 'dishonorable discharge' if I ring home on a government phone 'even if it's my Mom'..... Then after all the excitement Ally McBeal never came on yesterday. There was a tribute to Payne Stewart instead. Still, heigh-ho and la-di-da.

Sunday

My plan was to have a lazy day in the flat, but that was thwarted by the builders' Sunday working. They are here seven days a week, putting a few more stories on the top of the Chungsong Art Villa, as we call our humble home. I decided to go to an event I had seen advertised in the paper. The British Education Fair, at a big hotel in Seoul. This is a kind of travelling roadshow with representatives from lots of British Universities, looking for overseas students, and it was in Seoul for the weekend. The reason I had thought I would go was that several students had already asked me about possible further degrees in England, and I don't really know anything, so I thought I could get information. In particular, Yumi, of three degrees fame, not content with studying a three year MA at the Shakespeare Institute, wants to do another one, and was wondering about Exeter! This is presumably because her current letters only qualify her to be my interpreter, whereas if she becomes the world's leading expert on Shakespeare she might feel able to carry my lovely leather bag.

Anyway, the hotel is not very near a tube station, so I thought I would take the chance to go away from the flat in a different direction. Up to now, I've only really walked the different routes to the nearest tube station. Going the other way I found quite a good little playground about 10 minutes away, and a very nice looking, though closed for Sunday, ancient tomb with wooded garden, about 20 minutes walk. Also some better shops, a McDonalds and Pizza place, all of which may come into their own when the family arrives. Obviously I myself am now king of Korean food, and wolfing down octopus tentacles, silkworm larvae and the odd bear claw with the best of them, McDonalds, pah! Although it is quite nice, sometimes.

My route to the hotel took me through the trendy shopping bit of Seoul, Myong Dong [silly joke deleted] This was fun, and quite promising for Christmas shopping. I've checked out over the time quite a lot of the centre of Seoul, which is really completely bewildering. The scale of things is too much to absorb. The electronics centre I mentioned before, had the floor space of the rag-market, on each of its 20 floors. Within this, stalls are crammed in and piled high, and in all parts of it customers are squeezed almost constantly at the level of New Street on a Saturday [I put in these home-spun references to help you to get the picture!].

My favourite part of Seoul for shopping so far is called Insa-Dong [No, stop it] This is a small road, with rows of gloriously low buildings - the only ones in the city centre really. It is the crafts and antiques section, with a few galleries, and bars and street stalls. On Sunday it is closed to traffic. I was there on Saturday night with my students, who continuing their permanent mission to keep me happy, were trying to take me to an exhibition. Unfortunately, my class had run over by an hour and a half, because I got a bit over-excited, and so the gallery was closed. Undeterred, we went to another gallery, then up some stairs which no non-Korean would even have thought of going up - round the back of a building, with only a hand-written note indicating anything was up there. What was there was a single room, about the size of our front room, with four tables and little low sofas. In the corner was crammed a gas cooker and fridge and a small person. The walls were lined with rough paper-coloured paper, scribbled on by arty visitors, and the two ceiling lamps were shaded by similar parchment rolled into a fat cylinder, glued to the ceiling at one end, and tied with a string at the other, looking like my attempts at present-wrapping. It occurred to me that this cheap but fantastically effective lamp-shade, if in Habitat, could be £17 or so. Almost interesting, that. The room was very warm, heated by two old cylindrical paraffin heaters.

This place was a 'tea-room'. You buy a drink, or some food, at a little more cost than you might expect, and can then stay there for ever, as long as you are engaged in sufficiently earnest discussion. Yong and Cheung Myong introduced me to Korean rice wine, dried little fish and a spring onion pancake/omelette thing, and I did my best to be arty/political cafe-societyish with them. Again they refused to let me pay.

By the way, good news. I am no longer the fattest man in Korea. This is in part because I am pining away, walking an estimated 47 miles a day, and unable to get access to any Nutella, but also because I saw him. He was wearing Baden-Powell shorts, despite temperature in forties, had bright red hair and was pushing a sit-up-and-beg bike through an ant-nest tube station. Clearly British. We were swept in opposite directions, so I will never know for sure.......

Anyway, back to today. The British Education Fair was in a vast hotel, with huge rotating doors, and shiny bowing doormen. It was set out like the exhibitions at those events that Women and Theatre perform at, with behind each desk a beautiful Korean interpreter in traditional dress, and a generally not so beautiful representative of a fine British University. Not actually any elbow patches, because these were the people from the Universities' 'International Offices' which I suppose they all have. I went to the stalls for Warwick [quite chatty, thought Seoul was lovely, the toilets are so clean compared to Taiwan which is a dump, apparently] Birmingham [hadn't got a copy of the prospectus for 2000, only old ones from last year, couldn't wait to get home, and was a bit scared in Taiwan because of the aftershocks] Manchester [rather sniffy, wanting to make it clear that it was unlikely they would readily accept students for PhD, unless they stated very clearly what their area of study would be - there's a revolutionary thought, thank you for that!] and Exeter [extremely helpful. I now have the number of someone in Seoul who has just completed an MA there, related to Shakespeare, and an e-mail address for Peter Thompson - some other Professor! - so I actually can give Yumi some useful information] Another mission accomplished, back on the subway and ready for the next challenge. Just another day in the high-achieving life of your man in the Far East.

Coming back here another way, I checked out the route to the small but attractive-looking mountain which rises up from the end of the road where the flat is. There are a number of picturesque mountains within Seoul itself, covered in trees and very steep-looking, and just at the moment a wonderful mixture of colours. I have this one ear-marked for an assault tomorrow. It did rain today though, so I will see how it dawns, and then decide. Any rain that falls, which has so far been very light, seems to clear the streets in a way that nothing else can. I have no idea where people go, since every corner of this place is full, but most of the Koreans do seem to disappear. They must be lying in very big piles inside the buildings. Whatever, when the rain comes the streets are left clear for Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Only me in fact, because Korea being Korea, the dogs, even the mad ones are not mad enough to brave the streets, and risk being caught by the cook. I expect mad dog is a particular delicacy. 'See special foam on mouth'. Anyway, long may it rain, I say.

I've spoken to Eddie a few times on the phone, and managed to send him a story, which Ali successfully printed off and read. He is very funny indeed on the phone, but it's a slightly mixed blessing being able to speak to them so clearly. The other night I woke up and heard a noise in the flat upstairs, and was halfway out of bed, to go and see which of the boys had woken up before I caught myself. Sad. I'm glad I did, though, because I think the Russian professor of music above may have been a little unreceptive!

Monday Afternoon The first of November - the very same month during which the family is coming to Korea, hurray!

This is the nearest thing to being Kate Adie yet. I am writing this, huddled in one room of my apartment, the rest of which has been occupied by five men in uniforms brandishing a range of weapons. They are the actual builders, the ones previously only seen in the half-light of the entrance alley, or heard banging on the roof through the long days. Early in the morning a second Han River came down the stairwell which is common to all the flats, none of it appeared to come into mine, but the electricity went off, and since I alerted the authorities it has been the source of a great deal of frenzied speculation and experimentation.

Jeong Hwan [my administrative assistant - I hope you're keeping up] was due this morning anyway, to help install the washing machine, which had been sitting in the kitchen. It is too big to fit through the door of the utility room, so together we had to lift it through a window. That was surprisingly easy, and so it is now in the right place. We plumbed it in as well, now all we needed was some 'Jongiga' - electricity. By fiddling with the fuse box we got everything but lighting, and it seems likely to me that some water has got into the circuitry, and buggered it up [to use a technical international builder type term]. JeongHwan fetched the building chief - a suitably edentulate and wise man, with a good line in inscrutibility. He fiddled for a while and got a younger builder, who dismantled most of the light fittings. We seemed to agree that I would not use the lights, and he would bring someone to check tomorrow. I've already got candles, because the lights are all a bit bright, so that's not the end of the world. Anyway, clearly the plan has changed while I was out, and he is now back with reinforcements. I've just realised it's easier to work with them chatting in my flat, than when they're at loose, hammering on the roof!

I've been up my mountain, which was a great success. It's only five minutes from the flat, closer than I had realised, and one of several within the city limits. It's called Umyon San, which means 'Sleeping-Cow Mountain', it is 300 metres high, and like all of the hills I've seen here is covered with trees. The paths were less artificial than I expected, no concrete or anything, just made into steps at times using logs, with the occasional rope bannister at the steep parts. Some of it was very steep - the norm for the hills seems to be for them to rise quite suddenly, with rather perfect looking rounded shapes. Very quickly you get past enough trees for the city to disappear from sight, and gradually the roar of the traffic subsides too. It is actually very like the Lickeys, but steeper, and with summits, instead of ridges. Nor does it have the level of blissful solitude that the Lickeys achieves!

Most of the people walking there today were on their own, like me, but there were quite a few of us. They don't acknowledge each other as they pass. I did to begin with throw a cheery 'annyong' at people, but I sensed it was an intrusion. Didn't stop me doing it of course.

As you go up, there are various little extra creations. Plenty of benches, and sitting places, a few watering stops, quite a few exercise areas, with little bits of assault course equipment, and a couple of badminton courts - the highest of these at about 290 metres! There seemed to be two types of people there. Those involved in contemplation, and those involved in exercise. In both cases it seems a very deliberate course of action. They are there for a reason, and they are maximising the value of the exercise by supplementing it with 20 press-ups and a quick knock-up with the shuttlecock, or whatever. I noticed this when I said to my students I was going up a mountain. 'Ah, you want to exercise, to get fit?' well in a way... 'You like to hike' .... Really I just want to climb a mountain. I don't think the 'because it's there' argument would have carried much weight with Confucius.

One wonderfully surreal moment was going round a corner and hearing a Baritone Italian Aria echoing down a valley. Seemed quite well sung to me too. The singer was visible through the trees, and I'm not sure whether his purpose was to get an appropriate effect and spirit, or to build his lung capacity by singing while climbing steep hills, or if he just had too many complaints when he practised at home. Either way, when I caught up with him I said good singing, good singing, and he grunted, looking rather appalled. I suspect that this was my first major faux-pas. Somewhere in my Korean etiquette book there must be a bit I didn't read - 'when on mountains, do not commend a Korean on his opera singing. This can result in serious loss of face'. I puffed on up.

At the top, I had expected the trees to stop, in a sort of monk's tonsure, but there was still a thin surround, even there. You could see large chunks of the city below through gaps, but it is a cloudy day, and so I expect the view is often more impressive. Even today it was quite something.

The summit seemed to say a lot about Korea. There was a huge, perfectly formed cairn, about the size and shape of a decent wigwam, but slightly fatter. It reminded me of a ten foot version of one of those cones of incense. Also there were some nicely placed benches, a couple more pieces of exercise equipment for real enthusiasts, a single granite gravestone [one exercise too many, I expect] , a noticeboard with pictures of the Pope and Mother Theresa, a sawn off lamppost, with a plastic clock at the top, and a bright blue telephone box, complete with broom - short handle of course.

I did a little bit of contemplating, and a token wiggly bit of exercise, in a spirit of cross-cultural willing, worked out that it was about 5.00 AM in your world and not a good time to risk a phone call, looked at the view and turned back. On the way down I saw a fenced off area with a sign saying 'Danger, Mines', and a nice little picture of a man stepping on one. It seemed implausible somehow, but I did stick to the path anyway.

The builders have now rigged up some makeshift lights for me to put in the power sockets, which still work, and gone back to bang the roof. I think they are bringing the electrician tomorrow, but not 100% sure. We reached the kind of impasse in the discussion where all you can do is shrug at each other and agree to leave it unexplained. This is fine if you are making small talk about your family, but a little disconcerting when the discussion in question is what not to do to avoid electrocution. I'm certainly going to stick with my candles in the meantime.

I spoke this morning to the head of drama at the American high school here, where I might be doing a demonstration lesson later in the week. I expect that will warrant an e-mail if it happens! Certainly Mimi Kim sounds promising material.......

Apologies for the quantity of this again, but you've all got little recycle bins if you want to use them

With love to you all, and please pass on my regards to those netless technophobes who are in line for a single postcard, if they're lucky.

Pete

 

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