Sanso

We are spending our last week in Korea with Erma's parents in southeast Korea, not too far from Gyeongju. In a few days we will return to Seoul to pack up for our flight home.

As noted in a comment to an earlier post on street addresses in Korea, the government is switching over to a street-address system more like that used in the US. We saw direct evidence of this in a new sign attached to the side of the building where Erma's parents live:

"So this is Jigok Street," Erma helpfully remarked, supplying an appropriate quote for this blog entry, "Who knew?" This isn't a small street by any means. It looks like this:


In the lobby of the building there is a sign up informing residents of "your new address".

Korea is a fairly small country and that makes it easier to do certain things than in the US. The widescale changeover of the address system can probably be done more quickly and efficiently than I would imagine in the States. Another nice thing about small-sized Korea is that you can ship items by taekbae 택배, home delivery service, quickly and cheaply from any place to any other place in the country.

I'm not that familiar with the satellite navigation systems currently available in the US, since Erma and I don't have one in our car. But I suspect that certain features of the Korean system are missing in the US systems, again because of the relative sizes of the countries.

Here's Erma's dad driving with the navigation system on.


The software knows the location of every single speed-enforcement camera in the entire country, as well as the speed limits on every stretch of road. So as you approach an enforcement camera, the system measures your speed and issues a warning if you are going too fast. You can see here that we are approaching a camera (marked by the yellow triangle) in a 100-km/h zone. Erma's dad is driving at a law-abiding 97 km/h. The symbol on the lower right of the screen indicates that a tunnel is coming up in 2.2 kilometers.


The reason we were all in the car was to visit the ancestral gravesite of Erma's family, located about four hours away in southwest Korea, out in the countryside.

The graves are cared for by a distant cousin with the same surname (a seventh cousin, to be precise) who lives here:


There are a mix of buildings, some in the older Korean style, others of concrete or brick. The cousin is a farmer, so there are also some greenhouses around the property:


Here's Erma with her sister, aunt, and father, heading up past the greenhouses toward the burial area.

Korean graves are traditionally marked by mounds of earth. Of course, for ordinary people the mounds are much smaller than the massive mounds marking the graves of Shilla royalty in Gyeongju.


Most of the mounds are unmarked by gravestones. But it is not uncommon for descendants to collect money and erect gravestones, so some mounds are marked with stones that were carved within the last decade or two. Erma's father and his siblings had paid to have several gravestones erected. The "youngest" relative we visited was Erma's great-grandfather. The graves go back many generations before that.

We made the round trip in one day, which meant eight hours in the car. Some of it was on the Gyeongbu Expressway, which Erma's father informed us is part of AH1--Asian Highway 1, which runs in a nearly unbroken line from Tokyo in the east to Turkey's border with Bulgaria. It's the first I'd heard of the extensive Asian Highway network. (The Wikipedia article has a good map detailing the network.)

The rest stops along Korea's highways are far nicer than anything I've seen on American interstates, and the bathrooms in particular are impressive: clean, comfortable, and attractive. Many are decorated with polished marble. Some play classical music and other have elaborate water sculptures. There are even little baby-sized toilets for small children. We stopped at Geumgang 금강 for dinner. According to Erma's father, Geumgang has the best rest stop in the whole country. The public bathrooms have giant picture windows along the extensive back wall looking out over a scenic river. (Since we were there after dark we unfortunately didn't get to enjoy the view. It may have looked something like this.)

But there is one very odd and unsettling thing about public bathrooms in Korea. They seem to all be deliberately designed in such a way that men peeing are visible to passersby of both sexes. (I noticed something similar in Japan. But not in China.) For example, I took this photo at the Geumgang rest stop, from the doorway where both men and women enter. (Men proceed to the left, the direction I'm facing, women to the right. It was pretty nerve-wracking taking this picture, since there was a lot of traffic going in and out, and as you might imagine I didn't want to get caught photographing people using the bathroom.)

Even in small bathrooms in restaurants and bars, where the men's room might have just one urinal and one toilet, the urinal is invariably placed along the one wall where it will be visible from the hallway when the door swings open.

The bathroom in the restaurant we ate dinner at is a good example. Men and women share a doorway leading into an outer area with a sink. Straight ahead is a stall for women; next to it on the right a stall for men. If you look to the right after going into the outer area, you can clearly see the urinal.

True, there is a panel which blocks the view of the urinal from the threshold of the door. But it leaves the urinal clearly visible to anyone exiting the women's stall. Here's Erma coming out after doing her business.

No! Don't look to your left!

Oh, the humiliation.


It seems hard to square this whole urinal situation with the traditional conservatism of Korean culture. But perhaps it has roots in the relative openness of bathroom culture in the countryside. (I remember in the early '80s in China, rolling past open farmland in trains, and seeing peasants squatting out in full view to do their business. But I can't say whether Korea and China have any commonalities in this regard.) There's also a certain underlying assumption of sexlessness that perhaps ameliorates any embarrassment that might otherwise be expected from these bathroom setups. Unlike in America, public bathrooms here aren't closed for cleaning. It's quite common to walk into a public men's room and find a middle-aged woman mopping the floor. (I don't know if middle-aged men clean women's bathrooms.) In fact, once at Severance Hospital, one of these ladies vigorously but matter-of-factly mopped around my feet while I was peeing at a urinal.