Dongne

We arrived at our apartment in Seoul last Thursday, over a week ago. Our classes at Yonsei University's Korean Language Institute (KLI) don't start until Monday. So what have we been doing with ourselves for over a week?

Well, for starters, we had to clean the apartment and unpack. The apartment was actually quite dirty, and some of it couldn't be cleaned until we had found and bought appropriate cleaning supplies. Getting fully settled took a few days.

We also had to go shopping. Since we're only staying for 3 months, our intention was to avoid purchasing too many things. Erma's mother graciously provided us with a lot of basics, but we still ended up needing to buy some knives, trash cans, an iron, a blow dryer, and the like.

But most of the time we've spent exploring our neighborhood. Seoul is divided into large administrative districts called gu (구 區). Our district is Seodaemun-gu (서대문구 西大門區), "Great Western Gate District". It's located just outside of the old Seoul city walls, which no longer exist, where the large western gate entrance to the city once stood. (Dongdaemun and Namdaemun, the eastern and southern city gates, still exist.)

Gu are further subdivided into neighborhoods, called dong (동 洞). Our OfficeTel is located in Daeshin-dong (대신동 大新洞). This neighborhood sits just to the southeast of Yonsei University, which is itself in the foothills of the mountains that frame the north side of the city.

The OfficeTel's main entrance is on a rather large, busy, and noisy street, which runs past the main gate of Yonsei University about a quarter mile to our west. The street, Seongsan Street, looks like this:


The reason traffic is so light is that this picture was taken during the Chuseok holiday. Lots of buses run down this street, including the one that took us over to Gyeongbuk Palace on Chuseok.

More appealing is the back entrance of the OfficeTel, located on a small alley. The immediate neighborhood is full of upscale little cafes, restaurants, and bars, tucked discreetly into the nooks and crannies of the surrounding buildings. In the bottom floor of our OfficeTel there is a La Bonne Tarte (라 본느 타르트 Ra Bonneu Tareuteu) pastry cafe and a fancy wine restaurant called Côte (꼬뜨 Kkotteu). Erma's standing on the pastry side, of course.


Looking up and down the alley the view is like this:



Within two minutes' walk are, in addition to inexpensive Korean restaurants serving simple fare, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, French and German restaurants. A short block from us is a cafe called Princeton Square. There comfy seats are surrounded by full floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and what wall space is left over is decorated with American college banners. Here we recently purchased cups of hot chocolate for just shy of $8 each. Erma finished off the latest Harry Potter novel while I, with the help of the electronic dictionary that was a gift from Erma's mother, worked my way through a short newspaper article in Korean on Seattle Mariners pitcher Cha Seung Baek.

Severance Hospital, which is part of Yonsei University and one of the best hospitals in the country, is very close by. On one occasion we saw a medical helicopter take off from the rooftop helipad.


Yonsei University is the result of a merger between Severance Hospital and Yonhi (연희 延禧) College. (The name Yonsei is a combination of the first syllables of Yonhi and Severance.) Here's a picture of Lance on the old part of campus, where the ivy-covered brick buildings look very much like those found at the older American universities on which Yonhi was modeled. The statue is of Horace Grant Underwood, a protestant missionary who founded the school (originally Chosun Christian College) and served as its first president.


About a 10-minute walk away is the bustling Shinchon area, an amazingly vibrant neighborhood with an incredibly high density of cafes, restaurants, bars, and amusement-park stalls where a young beau with good aim can win a giant stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh for his girlfriend. At night the sidewalks are so packed with young people out having fun that you can barely move. The signs, many neon, form a multilingual forest canopy over the streets.



Shinchon is also the location of the closest Metro station to us.

Here is a satellite map of the area where we live. Some of the places mentioned in this entry are tagged.


View Larger Map

If it doesn't appear properly, you can follow this link instead.

[Note: The Romanization of the title of this post was corrected from Dongnae to Dongne on March 14, 2008. The Korean word for 'neighborhood' is 동네, not 동내.]

Igeup

The placement test results are out. I'm in Level 2 and Erma's in Level 4. (There are six levels in all.) That seems about right; I've taken one 9-week summer intensive course 2 years ago, and these Yonsei courses are 10-week intensive courses. Classes begin Monday.

Shikdang

Today was rainy. Erma and I took our placement tests at the Korean Language Institute. All of the new students gathered in a large auditorium where we received verbal instructions in, serially, Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese. (A guy sitting near me, looking at a Russian text, was presumably out of luck.) Then we all separated into small classrooms where we took a written exam and had one-on-one oral exams with instructors. The whole process took about two hours. Our assigned class levels will be posted tomorrow.

After the test, the two of us went over to the main student center on Yonsei campus to have lunch in the dining hall. The student center was pretty old and run down. The dining hall itself was large and grimy. Most of the space was filled by long rectangular tables with white plastic chairs. At the back end of the room were a number of windows where you could pick up a brown plastic tray and some silverware, and get served a meal. After looking at a few of them, we chose this one:

We each helped ourselves to a small bowl of radish kimchi and a small bowl of bean-sprout broth. The worker behind the counter brought over, and put on each of our trays, a sizzling iron tray of kimchi fried rice.

Then we looked around to try to figure out where to pay. It wasn't obvious. By this time it was well after 1:00, and there were not too many students getting food, so there was no big line that we could just get in. The few other people we saw getting food were just sitting down and eating. The meals couldn't possibly be free, could they?

Finally, we spotted a woman sitting at a wooden desk in a far corner of the dining hall. We approached her with our trays of food and asked if this was the place to pay for our meal. "You didn't pay yet?" she said in surprise. We were, it turned out, supposed to pay her first, get a little meal ticket, and then use the meal ticket at the counter to get our food.

I took the two meal tickets back to the counter, where I found a plastic bucket at the bottom of which a whole bunch of similar tickets were forlornly clustered, and dropped them in.

The meals cost 3000 Korean won each. At current exchange rates, that about $3.25.

While we were eating, we looked around and realized how the system is supposed to work. When you enter the dining hall, you should immediately turn left. As you walk along the wall, there is a menu of today's dishes, and a glass-fronted cabinet in which you can see samples of each of the meals available, with prices. Here's the meal we got:


The sign says "철판 김치 볶음밥 & 후라이". That's kimchi fried rice and "hurai". "Hurai" is the Korean pronunciation of "fry", and means the fried egg. (This is a case where the English "F" sound, absent in Korean, is replaced with "H" rather than "P".)

The more observant of you will have noticed that the counter where we got our food has an orthographically bizarre name. Here it is up close:

There are three scripts involved here, and a trilingual pun. Let's start with the last two elements, 토랑. This is written in the Korean alphabet, Han-geul, and spells out "torang".

At the beginning is a Chinese character, 世. Chinese characters aren't used much in Korean writing anymore, but they are still used occasionally in signs or in certain formal settings to write Korean words that have historically been borrowed from Chinese. This Chinese character writes a word meaning "world", pronounced "se" in Korean.*

The middle element is, of course, the English "apostrophe s".

So what does the whole thing mean? Well, it appears to say something like "World's Torang", which has the look of a name of an establishment. But "torang" is not a Korean word, as far as I know. The trick to understanding it is to pronounce the whole thing in Korean. Then you get "Se + seu + torang". (The vowel transcribed here "eu" is a very short, whispery vowel. Its presence is necessary because Koreans cannot pronounce an "s" sound at the end of a syllable.) This pronunciation differs by only one consonant from "reseutorang", the Korean word for restaurant, which is borrowed from French.

What we have, then, is an establishment name that puns on the French-borrowed word for restaurant while incorporating a Chinese character meaning "world" and an English possessive form.

I wonder if any of the Korean students who see the sign ever think about this?

[Footnote added September 28]
*I've just discovered that the 世 is the Chinese character used to write the second syllable of Yonsei University. In this context it's got nothing to do with "world". So "Yonsei's Torang" is a better interpretation than "World's Torang".

Yagu Shihap

Today we went to a baseball game in Seoul. There are two Seoul teams in the Korean professional baseball league, the LG Twins and the Doosan Bears. (Teams here, as in Japan, are named for the companies that own them. My favorite Japanese team name is the Nippon Ham Fighters of Hokkaido.) They share a stadium, originally built for the 1988 Olympics, in the Jamshil area of Seoul.


The baseball season here, as in America, is winding down. We figured we'd better see a game before classes start, and today, the day after Chuseok, seemed a good time to go. The LG Twins were hosting the SK Wyverns of Incheon. Before the game Erma and I decided to root for the Twins, since (1) they are the local team; and (2) facing the first-place SK team, they were the underdog. (The Twins, incidentally, have a logo that is, in my unprofessional legal opinion, sue-ably close to that of the Minnesota Twins.)

Here's a map of the stadium. The blue area behind home plate is "designated seating" (지정석), the red area is "infield seating" (내야석), and the green area is "outfield seating" (외야석). Only for the blue area does the ticket specify a particular seat; the other areas are open seating. (This picture, like all the others on the blog, is clickable for a larger image.)


When we went up to the ticket window, however, we had to specify not just one of these three areas, but also which team we were rooting for. LG fans sit along the first-base side, SK fans along the third-base side. Unfortunately, we were told that the designated seating tickets for LG were sold out. Rather than get cheaper tickets, we opted to sit on the SK side instead. The ticket seller nearly fell out of her chair when she heard that. I don't think many people casually switch sides like that.

Baseball wouldn't be baseball without snacks and beer. Here's one of the snack tables just outside the ticket windows. Lessee, you got your dried squids, your dried cuttlefish, your dried fish rounds, your gimbap (김밥, rice rolls wrapped in seaweed), and ... what's this? Peanuts!?!?


The stadium definitely had the intimate, simple feeling of a minor-league American ballpark. We were sitting pretty close, fifth row. SK is in red, LG in white.


The odd thing about the way the seats were numbered is that they within a section they were numbered contiguously, rather than starting over from 1 in each row. Erma says this is typical for Korea. Actually makes it pretty hard to find your seat. (This picture was taken after the game had ended. That's why the seats are empty.)


There was a pretty nice center-field electronic scoreboard. Erma and I learned quite a few Korean baseball terms from it.


The major difference in the game experience is the crowd. The fans in the infield seating sections form loud, regimented cheering sections. When their team is at-bat, they chant, sing, and move their arms in unison constantly while drums beat and whistles blow. If you saw any of the Korean team matches during the 2002 World Cup (held in Korea and Japan), you may be familiar with this Korean style of team support. In this picture you can see the thick sea of home-team fans in the red seating section. (Although we were told the blue section was sold out, there are lots of empty seats.)


Here's our team's cheering section, considerably smaller. The cheerleader stands on a raised platform and leads the crowd with cheers, hand-motions, and sharp blasts of his whistle.


There were huge posters opened across large swaths of the empty outfield seats. I don't know if fans brought these, or if they are supplied by the teams. Maybe the stadium is never full enough to prevent them from being displayed.


Oh yeah, almost forgot about the beer. These two guys look like they came right out of a Simpsons episode. They are selling Hite, a Korean brand, from giant kegs strapped to their backs. The kegs are, of course, decorated to look like baseballs.


In the middle of the sixth inning it was, apparently, the Sixth Inning Stretch. Nobody around us in the stands stood up, but all the ballplayers marched out onto the grass and did some useless-looking exercises.

The two sides did not fraternize.


Those of you still in suspense about the outcome of the game will be relieved to know that the LG Twins won. They had a really good foreign pitcher named Okseupeuring (옥스프링). I guess his real name must be Oxspring or Oakspring or somesuch. He held the Wyverns to just one run. The Twins capped their scoring with a two-run homer in the 8th inning by first-baseman Choe Dongsu 최동수. Here he is, after the game ended, bowing on the big screen to the crowd during a post-game on-field interview.


Here's a picture of me and Erma at the game. We had a good time.


Although this was definitely a Korean-flavored experience, the overall impression one has is of how similar the game of baseball is wherever it is played professionally.

I've now seen baseball played in four countries. (Yes, that includes Canada.)

Opiseutel

Erma and I are living extremely close to the Korean Language Institute (KLI) of Yonsei University, where we will be taking classes beginning next Monday. It's less than a five-minute walk from our apartment building to the classroom building.

I say apartment building, but that's not exactly what it is. These are furnished studio apartments, originally designed for business people on lengthy stays away from home. (Erma's father rented one when he had a temporary year-long assignment in another city.) They are pricier than many other living options. Ours is rather bland -- it won't win any prizes for character -- but quite large, modern, and comfortable.

Our particular "apateu" (아파트, Korean for apartment) is an OfficeTel. The word is a blend of "office" and "hotel". In Korean, though, it's called opiseutel (오피스텔). Korean has no "F" sound, so when pronouncing foreign words with "F" they generally substitute a "P" sound.

Here's a view of the back of the building, the side we usually enter on. As you can see, the building is quite new.


The hallways are quite nondescript and institutional-looking.


There's this fancy security system. No keys. Every apartment has its own security code that is entered on a numeric keypad. The thing beeps at you when it opens and beeps some other kind of beeps when it closes. If the door is opened, the closed partway, then opened again, an alarm sounds. It's not clear to us if we can get out should there be an electrical outage.


Notice also the camera set into the wall to the left of the door. If someone buzzes, we can use the closed-circuit TV screen inside the apartment to see who it is.


Oh, it's Erma. I guess she can come in.

As I said, it's a pretty simple studio apartment. Here's the bed-al area. The bottom row of windows opens, although only the left-most one has a screen on it. (That's important, as mosquitos are plentiful.) Against the windows you can see our clothes-drying rack.


We're lucky to have a corner apartment. In addition to the south-facing windows by the bed, we've also got these west-facing windows by the desk. (That door leads to a closet in which is housed the monstrous air-conditioning unit and the gas water-heating furnace.)

In the foreground is the little table separating the living space from the kitchen. It appears that breakfast (toast toasted in a dry frying pan and mandarin oranges) is served.


The kitchen is small but serviceable.


Under the range in the kitchen there is a clothes washer/dryer. We haven't had good luck with the drying function, so we expect to hang-dry our clothes.


The bathroom is pretty nice too. The shower is roomy and works very well.



As you can see, the place is really quite fancy. Take a look at the air-conditioning vent in the ceiling. It cools the whole place down in about 3 minutes.


There's an underground parking garage. That's where the recycling and trash bins are. From left to right: paper, trash, cans, plastic, glass. Food waste is in the little blue can.


We had our first home-cooked meal in the apartment on Monday night. There's frozen potstickers (aka gyoza 餃子, aka jiǎozi 饺子, aka mandu 만두, aka Peking ravioli) with a garlic-soy dipping sauce; two kinds of kimchi; a tofu-green pepper stir-fry, and seasoned crisp seaweed (aka kim 김, aka laver).


It's not clear how much cooking we'll be doing. We have limited ingredients and a limited number of kitchen tools. On top of that, it looks like eating out may be cheaper than buying groceries.

Chuseok

Today, September 25, is Chuseok (추석 秋夕). Chuseok (pronounced CHOO-suck) is the autumn harvest festival (equivalent to the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival), and one of the biggest holidays in Korea. Most people have three days off of work, and because this year Chuseok falls on a Tuesday, that makes a five-day weekend for many people. Most shops and restaurants are closed, and large numbers of Seoul residents head out of the city to spend the holiday with their families in the outer cities and villages. Chuseok is sometimes referred to as the Korean Thanksgiving.

It's an odd time to arrive in Seoul and try to get settled. We moved into our apartment Thursday night. So we've spent the last few days not just getting settled, but also provisioning as the city has emptied out, so that we can survive a day or two without access to grocery stores or restaurants. Our apartment building has seemed completely deserted apart from the security guard. It's not clear if this is because (a) no one but us is living here; (b) everyone has gone away for Chuseok; (c) the residents keep very strange hours.

Of course, not everyone has left Seoul for the holiday, and the ex-pats living here don't have family homes in the countryside to return to. There are a few things going on around town for those with nothing else to do. At Erma's mother's suggestion, the two of us took a bus from our neighborhood to the Gyeongbok Palace, one of the major historical sites in the city. It seemed that half the population had the same idea we did.

As we arrived at the main gate of the palace compound, it turned out we were just in time for the ceremonial changing of the guard, a reenactment of the traditional royal ceremony from the days of the Choseon Dynasty. I really like the bright red and blue outfits of the palace guard.





The palace is pretty spectacular. Since 1990, the government has been working to restore it. (Much of it was destroyed by the Japanese during the occupation of the first half of the 20th century. What they were destroying was itself a rebuilding of the original palace that the Japanese had originally destroyed in the 16th century.) Here's a picture that shows the main palace hall against the backdrop of one of the hills north of the city.

For Chuseok, there was a special set-up on the palace grounds illustrating five traditional Korean games. All were interactive. The most exciting to watch was top-spinning. The traditional Korean top, a paeng-i, is made of wood. It has a cylindrical top part that gently tapers to a point at the bottom. The top is spun with a stick to which a length of ribbon is affixed. The ribbon is wound around the top, then pulled free with a rapid yank on the stick, setting the top spinning. The top can be kept spinning by skillful whipping -- the right kind of wrist flick will lash the ribbon against the spinning top, providing additional force.

The red signboard explains the history of the game and how it is played. Kids are playing with the tops on the blue tarp. For the most part the kids were terrible at it. It's clear that this traditional game is not widely practiced in the era of Xboxes.

There was one middle-aged man, however, who was quite impressive. He was able to whip his spinning top to a formidable speed. Probably he'd been quite adept at it as a child. In the photo, his stick is moving so fast that it's not even visible.


Quite a few children were dressed up in traditional Korean garb for the holiday. The general result of this was intense cuteness. Here's a little girl in a pink hanbok, and a small boy in a blue hanbok.


The little boy seemed to be all on his own. When I took the picture he was wandering happily through the grounds, hugging the large pillars along one of the covered walkways. We figured his parents were nearby. A few minutes later we stepped through a gate, and saw a young woman in a yellow and red hanbok running around frantically, tears streaming down her cheeks, crying out a child's name over and over again. Erma and I both had the same thought -- maybe the boy we'd seen, and photographed, was hers. We walked back through the gate, but the little boy had disappeared. After a few moments we saw a teenage boy carrying the little boy back toward us. The teenager had apparently realized that this little kid had lost his parents, and was helping him look for them. Just at this moment the frantic mother reappeared, running and wailing. Erma and I looked at the boys and pointed the mother out to them; moments later the family was happily reunited.

Welcome to Seoul

Erma and I are spending the autumn in Seoul, studying Korean at Yonsei University. We'll be posting to this blog with updates on our experiences, pictures, and (there's no escaping it!) the occasional linguistic insight.