Noraebang

While it is always a bit dangerous to make broad generalizations about a people or culture, I think it is safe to say that there are three things that nearly all Koreans love to do: sing, hike, and eat kimchi.

Koreans do a lot of their singing at noraebang 노래방, which literally means "song room". In any part of Seoul where there is night life -- restaurants, theaters, bars -- there will be a high density of noraebang. The Shinchon area near where we live is full of them. Many young Koreans will make an evening of dinner, drinks, and an hour or two of singing.

A noraebang is a small, sound-proofed room with a karaoke machine in it. It is rented by the hour. There are thousands of songs available, all instrumental versions with the vocal parts missing. As the songs play, the lyrics appear on a video screen, often super-imposed over a montage of visual images that has nothing to do with the song. You can order soft drinks and snacks. So far I have yet to see alcoholic beverages at a noraebang. You'd think that would be a natural combination, so I wonder if it is illegal to serve alcohol at noraebang.

In China and Taiwan, the equivalent to noraebang is called "KTV" (which I believe derives from Karaoke TV).

At all the norebang I've been to so far, the volume has been set at an ear-splitting level and is not adjustable.

My first trip to a noraebang was on November 6, when my class was trying to pick a song to perform at the KLI singing contest. Fortunately Erma came along with us, because most of us were not familiar with how it worked. We were able to rent an extra-large room to accommodate all of us.

In this picture we are looking through the lists of songs to find ones to sing. The songs have unique numbers which are entered using a gigantic remote control. The songs then queue up and play in order. There is a pretty large selection of Japanese, Chinese, and Western songs along with the Korean songs, from different eras in a variety of styles.


Here's Erma singing a song she learned years ago on an earlier trip to Korea. The background video consisted of scenes of European landmarks.


After you sing, the computer will score your performance out of 100 points. As far as I can tell the scores are essentially random, but perhaps there is some sort of highly sophisticated pitch-matching algorithm in there.

Some noraebang will also let you make a CD or tape of your performance to keep. When we had narrowed our song choices down, Erma and I made a CD by renting a noraebang and playing the songs without singing along. The idea was that we could use the CD to practice and also on the day of the performance.

One of the songs we recorded was "Summer Dance" (you can see a video of it here), which actually has an animated video specifically designed for the song. I took a few pictures while it was recording.


This song, like many modern Korean pop songs, has some English in it.


One of the other songs we were considering is the most popular song in Korea right now, called "Tell Me" by the Wondeo Geolseu 원더 걸스 (that is, "Wonder Girls"). Not only is it played everywhere, it's become a touchstone cultural reference, and you can hardly turn on the TV without seeing someone doing the dance moves from the video or humming the chorus. If you're curious about what kind of Korean pop is prevalent nowadays, take a look/listen here.

Juso

One of the odd things about Seoul (and perhaps Korea in general) is that street addresses don't really exist. Every street has a name -- I've seen the street signs on which they are written, and I've seen them on maps. But aside from a few major boulevards downtown (like Sejong-no, named after King Sejong, the inventor of hangeul) nobody seems to know or make reference to those street names.

Official postal addresses do not contain street names or numbers. An address in Seoul consists of the city name, a postal code, the gu (district), the dong (neighborhood), and a dong-postal code. It appears that the dong-postal code, just like our 9-digit zip codes, might specify addresses down to the individual building, but this is not helpful to the average person trying to find a home or business.

(Those of you who have seen the address of our apartment here might have noticed that there is no street name or number on it.)

So how do people find their way around? They use landmarks: subway stations, buildings, palaces. "Get off the bus at the police station, walk to the next intersection, turn right, go past the palace, and you'll see it." We tell taxi drivers that we are across from the back gate of Ehwa University. We haven't ordered take-out yet, but if we do, we'll have to give complicated instructions to the delivery guy so that he can find the building.

As you might imagine, this is a source of considerable difficulty for the language learner trying to give or get directions.

It is also a challenge for businesses. Just putting their gu and dong on a business card won't help customers find them. So almost every business card has a sketch map on it. The streets are never labeled, but major landmarks are. Many of those landmarks are themselves businesses, and if they go out of business the maps quickly go out of date.

Here's a sample of restaurant business cards, most from around our neighborhood. You can click on the image to see a larger version. It's actually kind of interesting for us to look at them and see which things in our area are considered to be salient references to the average Seoul resident.


Erma and I have heard that the situation in Tokyo is or was similar. (Can anyone confirm this?) Further, we heard that in the 1980s it was common when ordering take-out food to fax a sketch map over to the restaurant so that they would know where to go to make the delivery.

It's somewhat baffling to me why Koreans don't make use of street addresses. As I've said, the streets have names. Not only that, but as far as I can tell, every single building has a placard on it listing the street name AND the street address.

Here, for example, is a building on the way from our apartment to the Language Institute. Gotta love the name of this cafe.


Right there by the entrance is the address.


It says 38-1 Yeon-Dae Dongmun-Gil "38-1 Yonsei University East Gate Road".

I suppose that for most people, the system as it is works fine. It does seem harder for people unfamiliar with local landmarks (like me) trying to make their way around using street maps.

Incidentally, the Lord Sandwich building is architecturally somewhat interesting. Here's another view of it.

Norae Jarang

One of the big events of the quarter here at the Language Institute is the Singing Competition (노래 자랑 대회 Norae Jarang Daehoe), which pits each of the 15 second-level classes against each other performing Korean songs karaoke-style.

We've been preparing for weeks. I was, against my wishes and better judgment, named banjang (반장 班長), or class leader, which meant it was my responsibility to make sure that we chose a song and organized practice sessions. (I did have help -- one of my classmates was named vice-banjang.) Many of the classes chose to do Korean pop songs, but we opted for a cute children's song called Kokkiri Ajeosshi 코끼리 아저씨 "Uncle Elephant", about an elephant who falls in love with a whale; they get married in an underwater ceremony attended by a bevy of sea creatures.

Most classes were able to get their music at a noraebang 노래방, or singing room. I'll write more about those in a future post.

The big contest was held this past Thursday in the main auditorium at the Language Institute. This is the first group, performing under the large banner bearing the name of the event.


Here we are getting ready for our turn on the stage:


Highly coordinated dance moves:


I'm carrying a picture of an octopus, the officiant at the wedding:


Marriage proposals:


The big finish, a rather chaotic chorus line:


Each group was briefly interviewed after their performance. I was asked if everyone had practiced diligently. I responded in halting Korean that everyone had studied hard. Oh well.

You can hear one version of the song here.

I and the other second-level banjang were rewarded for our efforts with gifts. This is what I got.


Sigh.

Cheonnun

Temperatures dipped below freezing for the first time a few days ago, and it feels like fall is giving way to winter.

It seems that Koreans have a sentimental attachment to the first snow (첫눈 cheonnun) of the season.

I got my first inkling of this yesterday, when I met with my Korean language exchange partner. There had been talk about the possibility of snow flurries in the next few days, and my partner asked me if I had any plans for the first snow. I was a bit confused. What kind of plans?

Well, he said, many Koreans often make plans with their friends: when the first snow falls, let's meet at some particular place. I told him that my plan for the first snow was to wear a hat. I don't think he got the joke.

Last night around 9:00pm we were sitting in a Japanese-style bar/restaurant in Shinchon. It was on the third floor, with big picture windows. Suddenly big fat flakes of snow started falling outside, and a collective gasp went around the room.

It didn't snow much, but this morning there was a thin coating of frost and snow in some places, and a few of the cars were limned with a light layer. (By afternoon, when I took this picture, some pockets of snow remained in areas that had not received any direct sunlight.)


Our reading teacher came into class and said, "Did it really snow last night? The news this morning said it snowed." We confirmed that it had. "Oh, I didn't see it! I was reading in my room. I'm so sad." She went on a bit about how sad it was to have missed the snow. "There'll be more snow soon enough," I said. "Yes, but it's not the FIRST SNOW," she responded, despondent.

I just checked the dictionary, and cheonnun is in there as an entry.

Why does the first snow of the season have significance for Koreans? I don't know.

Shikdang 2

Erma and I continue to eat at the dining hall frequently. And we continue to take pictures, especially to illustrate the Conservation of Ubiquitous Rice and Soup Edibles (CoURSE) law.

In the dining hall that has "The Pizza's Pasta" in it, one of the counters serves dishes in these great plastic trays that have compartments in them. I'm not sure why I find these trays so appealing, but I do. They remind me of the stiff cardboard disposable plates we sometimes used for picnics or barbecues, which also were divided into little sections so that your macaroni salad wouldn't cohabit with your corn on the cob.


The main dish, in this case, is the fried breaded cutlet thing with the white sauce on it. Since it is inherently neither rice nor soup, both rice and soup are served with it.

In the picture below, I've got a fried rice dish, which comes with soup, while Erma has a hot stew dish, which comes with rice.


Erma's dish, incidentally, came from this counter:


A closer look at the sign


shows that the name is Ppogeul Ppogeul 뽀글뽀글, which is just an onomatopoetic "burble burble" reminiscent of the boiling-hot stews that are served up there. It reminded us of the similarly-named Korean restaurant on Telegraph in Berkeley called Beogeul Beogeul 버글버글, which was cleverly Romanized as Berkel Berkel.

Just to beat the point into the ground, here's Erma yet again with a spicy hot stew.


It's important to note, however, that there are some important corollaries to CoURSE. One is that if a soup is primarily a noodle soup, then the noodles count as the equivalent of rice. That's the case with these two noodle soup dishes:



Oh, and we saw this guy in the dining hall. Your guess is as good as mine.

Chujeok

This is a general follow-up to some earlier posts.

First, I've already described the ferris-wheel-like parking structure near where we live, and the cowboy-hatted parking attendants at Severance Hospital.

Turns out there's a parking lot in Shinchon with two even larger ferris-wheel like parking structures.


I got a better picture of cowboy-hatted parking attendants at Severance:


And discovered that they have a female counterpart at the main entrance gate:


Isn't she cute, all in pink?

At the Hyundai Department Store in Shinchon, there are also be-hatted uniformed parking attendants. But they look like this:


Guy looks like he just wandered off the sound stage after auditioning for the Wizard of Oz.

I've also written about apostrophes on Korean signs. Erma discovered a place in Shinchon called "Comma,,". (The name of the café whose sign is above the one for Comma,, will have special significance for some of my family members.)


A lot of restaurant signs have anthropomorphic animals on them. Most of them are giving a big thumbs-up, as if to say "I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of you eating my delicious self." We sent some pictures of to our friend Pangea, who collects such things and posts them on her blog accompanied by witty commentary. Take a look here.

In the same vein, here's another sign in Shinchon. The name of the restaurant, Gui Baksa 구이박사, translates roughly as "Dr. Grill" -- that's Dr. as in Ph.D. The clever and happy fish and octopus are not only wearing mortarboards as they celebrate their doctoral graduation, but also licking their lips in eager anticipation of devouring each other.

Inwangsan

A lot of interesting things happened today.

Seoul is a city lacking parks. There is barely any green space to be found. But surrounding the city are lovely mountains--it was established as the capital because the hills make it defensible--providing good opportunities for hiking.

We woke up too late to make a major expedition, so we decided to visit an area not far from where we live, called Inwangsan 인왕산 (Mt. Inwang), a spiritually rich area where Korean shamanistic rituals are carried out.

We took a bus over to Gyeongbokgung, where we planned to get on the subway. As soon as we got out onto the street, we realized that something odd was going on. These are police riot buses, dozens of them, parked on the street.


Large groups of riot police were stationed at the intersections.


They were ignored by the pedestrians, who went about their business.


Erma called her mother, and found out that a major protest was scheduled to take place later that day, led by disgruntled farmers unhappy with Korea's free trade agreements. I think these kind of protests are fairly common in Korea. Partly they are due to genuine economic grievances, and partly I think to anti-American sentiment, although the two are sufficiently tangled together (both geopolitically and psychologically) that it can be hard to separate them.

We took a fancy elevator down to the subway station.


This subway line -- Line 3 -- stops at a lot of historical and cultural sites, so there are many related art installations in the stations. Here's Erma posing with a life-size replica of one of the famous Shilla Dynasty sculptures (really just a few inches high) that we saw two weeks ago in the Gyeongju museum.


Way to go with the typical Asian V-pose there, Erma!

We got off at Dongnimmun 독립문, Independence Gate. Installed on the wall of the subway station is a copy of Korea's Declaration of Independence, made in 1919 in protest of Japanese imperial rule.


The declaration is written in a very formal style that is a hybrid of Classical Chinese and Korean.*

We had some trouble following the directions in our (quite up-to-date) Lonely Planet guide from the subway station to Inwangsan. We soon figured out the reason -- a huge complex of new apartment buildings was going up, blocking the road.


We met up with several other foreigners looking for the mountain, and together worked our way around the construction. This new retaining wall by the new road wrapping around the construction site seemed pretty unusual-looking.


At the top of the road we had to walk over these mounds of dirt and freshly poured concrete, just as the woman with the visor is doing, all the while avoiding being crushed by a blow to the head from the giant swinging backhoe.


At last we safely reached the gate to the shrine area of the mountain.


Here's Lance above Guksadang, a famous shamanistic shrine. When we passed it, a female shaman was performing a rite in the doorway, singing, dancing, and waving a fan. The purpose seemed to be to bring good luck to a student taking college entrance exams in a few days.


There was an interesting article on the revival of Korean shamanism in the New York Times a few months ago. (May require that you have a subscription to read it.)

As we climbed up, we began to get nice views of the city. Unfortunately the weather was pretty hazy. That's Seoul Tower in the background atop the distant hill.


This is Erma standing in front of Seonbawi 선바위, a pair of eroded rocks said to look like robed Zen Buddhist figures. When we went up, several people were burning incense, lighting votive candles, and making food offerings to the statues.


Here's a view of the same statues, from above.


As we climbed higher, the views got more spectacular, except that the Seoul skyline is actually pretty ugly. Yonsei University is just behind the ridge on the right side of the frame.


This pleasant-looking Buddha was carved into the mountainside.


There was a flock of pigeons clinging tenaciously to a nearly-vertical rockface.


Just east of Inwangsan runs the old city wall of Seoul, which has been recently rebuilt along this stretch.


After we came down the mountain, we followed the city wall down farther until we reached city streets. We saw more riot buses, these parked right in front of a shrine.


Turns out the shrine is dedicated to Dangun 단군, the legendary founder of Korea 4340 years ago.


There's a rather cheesy-looking statue of Dangun inside the shrine.


One of the things Koreans enjoy most when hiking in the autumn is looking at the spectacular autumn leaves (danpung 단풍). Unfortunately, as you could see from some of the earlier pictures, it's rather too late in the season. But outside the Dangun shrine was a small stand of trees that were sufficiently sheltered to have been spared the brunt of the wind and rain that brought down most of the leaves around Seoul yesterday. The colors were pretty spectacular.


We wended our way through a small park below the shrine, and then came out onto Sajingno 사직로, the huge main thoroughfare that runs by Gyeongbokgung. Dusk was approaching. The riot police were still out. In fact, they had barricaded off the street with their buses.


Erma and I walked on top of a pedestrian flyover to get a good view. This group of riot police was sitting on the right side of the road. They've got truncheons across their backs, and are sitting on their riot shields.


On the left side of the street, groups of police wearing somewhat different uniforms were camped out on the sidewalk.


After a while, some of the police began climbing up on top of one of the buses, walking across to a neighboring bus, and climbing down again. It seemed to be a practice exercise.


Looking the other way, you can see how odd the street looks with all ten lanes completely devoid of traffic.


We waited about 30 minutes to see what would happen--the police were acting as if some kind of activity was imminent--but no rioters or protesters appeared, so we eventually decided to go home. We saw later on the evening news that there had indeed been some confrontations with police earlier in the day, but they must have happened in a different part of town.

Before we left, we took this picture from the flyover. You don't see too many of these clusters of old buildings left in Seoul anymore.


We got off at the Ewha Women's Univeristy subway stop, which is about the same distance from our home as Shinchon Station. There's a rather unusual hybrid elevator-escalator in the station. In this picture Erma and I are reflected in the glass as we wait for the car to arrive. The slowly descending car is visible at the top of the frame.


Erma got on while I snapped pictures. See ya at the top, Erma!


There she goes. This is an unusually deep station, so the escalators are quite long.


The elevator moved slowly enough that it wasn't hard for me to dash up the escalator ahead of Erma and catch her emerging at the top.


And that's our exciting day in Seoul! Now I have to prepare for tomorrow's class.

*As far as I could tell, all the noun and verb stems were Classical Chinese (with Sino-Korean pronunciation), with native Korean used for inflectional endings, adverbs and grammatical function words.