Yeongeuk

On Monday we had a play contest at school. Unlike preparations for our singing contest at Yonsei, which seemed to take months (and come to think of it, it probably was technically more than one month), we only really learned what was going to happen last Friday.

Our lesson text was in the form of a play script. The play is set back "before people knew what mirrors were", and tells the story of a man from the provinces who purchases the wonderful device in Seoul and brings it back home. His wife discovers it, and looking in the mirror, assumes that the woman she sees there is a concubine that her husband has secretly brought back with him from the capital. Wacky hijinks ensue, with the inevitable result that the mirror is smashed to pieces.

We actually read a different version of this story in our textbook at Yonsei last fall, so I assume it is a well-known folk tale in Korea.

After we read the script on Friday, we were each assigned parts and told to memorize lines. On Monday, five classmates would be chosen to represent our class in competition against the three other third-level classes.

I ended up being selected to play the shop owner who sells the protagonist the mirror at the beginning of the play.

In our classroom we practiced for a while, and then put on hanbok 한복, traditional Korean dress.


Here I am holding the mirror during the practice session.


The competition itself was held on the fourth floor, in the same large classroom where I had taken my placement exam back in February.


I decided to play the character like a sinister peddler of the mysterious and strange -- not unlike in the Monkey's Paw or, to choose a more topical reference, Gremlins.


With me out of the way, the rest of the cast gets down to the wacky hijinks. The wife, second from the right, is bemoaning her situation, while her mother-in-law looks in the mirror and finds that the woman in there isn't her son's concubine, but her husband's!


After the performances we watched pictures taken by students back on taekwondo day, and had a pizza lunch. Take-out from Domino's. This pizza was topped with potato wedges, bacon, and hot sauce.

And this one with pineapples, mushrooms, green onions, and various meats.


These pizzas came with garlic dipping sauce and pickles, just like the ones we ate last year from Mr. Pizza.

After lunch the judges had finally finished their deliberations. Our class won for best overall performance (hooray!). I won an individual award for best performance as the shopkeeper, and my classmate won for best performance as the mother-in-law.


It was actually a good day for prizes for me. One of the pictures I took of taekwondo won a prize too, although the prize was not awarded to me but to my classmate who was the subject of the photo.

You are probably wondering what I got inside that "Happy Mind" bag. It was a Peter Rabbit travel toiletry kit.

Demo

Today walked home from campus after lunch. At about 2:45 pm I was on the main street that runs from the SNU main gate to the subway station, when I came upon this scene occurring in front of the gu 구 (district) government offices:

It was a demo 데모 (that's the Korean word for a political demonstration). They must have just blocked the road a few seconds earlier, since traffic was only just beginning to back up. (You can see in the photo the #5412 and #5528 buses, which are the two that run from my building to campus.) Korean protests are generally carried out sitting down.

Traffic immediately began to snarl up pretty fiercely. Traffic cops were present and started moving traffic onto side streets. One motorist, stopped right in front of the demonstrators, lost his temper and started screaming at them. (You can see him gesturing angrily beside his silver car, on the left side of the third picture in the sequence below.)

Then, a few seconds later, the demonstrators all stood up and, in orderly fashion, walked off the street, gathering in the plaza in front of the government office building.





The whole thing lasted about 4 minutes; then traffic started flowing again.


With the demonstrators out of the way, I could see that there was a sizeable group of riot police on hand:

So what was the protest about? I'll see if I can figure it out.

On the back of the red vests was written 전노련. A web search reveals that these three syllables, Jeon No Ryeon, are an abbreviation for Jeonguk Nojeomsang Chong Yeonhap Hoe 전국노점상총연합회 "National Federation of Street Vendors". (You may be wondering why Yeon in the full name ends up as Ryeon in the abbreviation. That's one of the things that makes Korean interesting! I'm also pretty sure that Chong Yeonhap will get pronounced as Cheong Nyeonhap. That's another thing that makes Korean interesting! I will explain it all in another post if anyone cares to request an explanation.)

On the back of the black vests was written "주거권쟁취 (Fight for residency rights)" and at the bottom "빈 / 철 / 연". Another web search reveals that those last three syllables, Bin Cheol Yeon, stand for Binmin Haebang Cheolgeo Min Yeonhap 빈민 해방 철거민 연합. This organization seems to be dedicated to preventing the housing of poor people from being dismantled (though I can't quite parse the name).

So I'm guessing that this is a joint protest by advocates for poor city residents and street vendors, most likely in opposition to some planned public construction project that will result in the elimination of housing and street-vending space. (I have heard that there were lots of protests of this type when now-president and then-Seoul mayor Lee Myung-Bak was trying to daylight Cheonggyecheon.)

Wapeul

If I asked you to guess what the most popular snack foods in Korea are, I'm betting you wouldn't come up with:

waffles!

Yep, the wapeul 와플 is, for some reason, extremely popular. It's sold out of street carts and in student dining halls, usually topped with ice cream.

This little cafe on campus sells coffee and soft serve ice cream, such as these two fellows are enjoying:


But most of the students waiting in line are there for just one thing: a waffle.

That line never goes away. Around lunch time it is 30 or 40 deep.

Here is the object of their desires:


I wish I could tell you that I walked up to a co-ed and said "May I photograph your waffle?", but this in truth this is a classmate of mine.

The plain waffle was, frankly, nothing special. Kind of bready. Most of the waffles sold here aren't plain, though. They are topped with vanilla soft-serve ice cream and chocolate sauce.

I took these pictures from far away with a 15x zoom. Still, I think the guy in the second photo noticed me.



Speaking of Korean foods, this is a chamoe 참외 melon. Etymologically, the name means "true/fine cucumber".



According to this web site, it is a type of chate melon with a flavor halfway between a honeydew and a cucumber.

The skin is very thin, like an apple. I found it hard to decide how best to peel it.

It might be too early in the season, or I might just have gotten a bad melon. It wasn't very sweet.

Nakseongdae

I was trapped inside for most of the weekend working, so Sunday evening I determined to go out for a walk while it was still light outside. I've mentioned before that my building is halfway between two subway stations. They are the Seoul National University (서울대 입구) Station and the Nakseongdae (낙성대 落星垈) Station. Nakseongdae has an intriguing meaning -- "Falling Star Site" -- that I've been curious about since I first saw the Chinese characters at the station entrance. It turns out that the station is named for a nearby area, which is now a small park. That was my destination on Sunday evening.

Inside the park there is a lovely, secluded space with a handful of small buildings and monuments set in well-tended grounds.


On the left is a small stone pagoda. It was moved here from a location nearby, where it marked the site of the birth of the famous Korean general Gang Gamchan (강감창 姜邯贊) (948-1031). Legend has it that on the night of his birth a shooting star was seen descending from heaven above his house.


I'm not sure how old the pagoda is, but it dates from the Goryeo Dynasty so is probably about 1000 years old. It was repaired by the city and moved here when the park was established in the early 1970s.

In fact the whole park is dedicated to the memory of General Gang. The main building is a small shrine where incense burns in front of his image.

Opposite the pagoda is a commemorative stele, which looks no older than the park.


One more view:

Just outside the entrance is an informational sign written in Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese. As you can see from the English portion at the top of the picture below, the pagoda is designated Seoul Tangible Cultural Property No. 4.


If you click to expand the picture and look at the Chinese section, you'll notice that parts of it have been taped over. There's an interesting story here.

The city of Seoul has been known by many names in the course of its history, including Hanyang 한양 and Hanseong 한성. The current name, Seoul, is unusual because it is a pure Korean word. So far as I know, it is the only geographical name in all of Korea that is not (seemingly) derived from Chinese elements, and so cannot be written with Chinese characters. (That "seemingly" is there as a hedge on purpose -- some of the place names written with Chinese characters are of Korean origin, but that origin is now disguised to most observers.) Seoul means 'capital city', but the precise Korean etymology remains a subject of debate.

Perhaps because the name Seoul has no corresponding Chinese characters, the Chinese continued to refer to the city by its old name of Hanseong (Chinese Hànchéng 漢城) until quite recently. Some years ago the Korean government decided that it wanted to create a new official Chinese name related to the name Seoul. (This may have been motivated in part because one interpretation of the meaning of the characters writing Hanseong is 'Chinese city'!*)

A Korean professor of Chinese linguistics -- whom I know -- is the one who came up with the new Chinese name for Seoul. He chose the Chinese characters 首爾. In Chinese they are pronounced Shǒu'ěr, which sounds similar to Seoul. (Does that pronunciation look familiar to you? It should.) And the first character has the meaning 'head', and is part of the Chinese word for 'capital city', so the meaning of the characters is also appropriate.

On the sign, occurrences of Hànchéng 漢城 have been pasted over with Shǒu'ěr 首爾. For some reason, though, they left Hànchéng 漢城 intact on the top line. (If you're actually looking at the picture and trying to identify the characters in question, there's a complication. The sign is written in the form of Chinese used on the mainland, the so-called "simplified characters". So the two names in question appear as Hànchéng 汉城 and Shǒu'ěr 首尔.)

Out front, near the road, is this impressive statue of the general. He's probably getting ready to ward off the attacks of the Khitans, who had already seized the entire northern half of China from the Song dynasty when General Gang turned them back for good from the Korean peninsula in 1018.



Next door to the park is a Science Park. It's a weird-looking place.

If you were to head up that sidewalk on the right side, you would come to the back gate of SNU and then to the faculty and student dormitories.

Between Nakseongdae Park and the Science Park I saw a bunch of (presumably) South Asian guys playing cricket.


They were drawing a lot of attention, including from me. They looked like devout Muslims, most of them with large bushy beards.


The guy in white was scampering after balls just fine despite the un-sporting outfit he was sporting.


Finally, on my way home I was very amused by this sign.


* In fact, the name Hanseong means 'City on the Han (River)'. The Han River (Hangang 한강 漢江) is one of those toponyms that is written with Chinese characters and looks like it's composed of purely Chinese elements. Gang is indeed the Chinese word for 'river'. But han is in origin the noun-modifying form of an obsolete Korean verb meaning 'large, great'. (That verb, hada 하다, is related to the modern Korean word for 'big', keuda 크다.) It happens to be homophonous with the Chinese word for 'Chinese', so it ended up being written that Chinese character, thus disguising its natively Korean origin.

KKot-nori

Yesterday it suddenly got significantly warmer here. In these last two days temperatures have gotten close to 80 degree (26 Celsius). Of course, hardly anybody is in short sleeves (except the foreigners) because by the calendar short-sleeve season hasn't started yet. Koreans seem to be very particular about that. I suppose at some point global warming will have to affect the fashion calendar.

Flowers have been blooming like crazy all over campus. I've already posted a lot of pictures of cherry blossoms (벚꽃 beotkkot), so I'll just show one more here.

I took the picture from the balcony of A Twosome Place, on the western edge of the SNU campus. There's a little park that runs along the stream that borders campus, with trails that go up into the hills. A lot of the blossoms have fallen, coloring the walkways a dusky pink.

[Thanks to comments from Erma, Pangea, and an anonymous poster I assume is Museum Lady, I've updated (April 24, 2008) the flower descriptions below in square brackets.]

Around campus the most common flowers in bloom now are jindallae 진달래, a kind of azalea. They range in color from pink to purple.

[These pink/purple flowers are probably cheoljuk 철죽, royal azalea, as seen here.]




Also present in large numbers are gaenari 개나리, the forsythia or golden bell.



They've peaked already, and are on their way out.

I'll need help with the other flowers. If you know the English or Korean names, please let me know, so I can caption the pictures appropriately.

These little red flowers for the most part haven't bloomed yet, but they look eager to do so.

[The red flowers are yeongsanhong 영산홍, another variety of azalea. I gather that there are many varieties of azaleas with different Korean names; based on the usage I've heard, jindallae seems to me the closest to a generic term for these varieties.]



I like these white flowers a lot, the way they cluster in long cylinders:

[They are jopap namu blossoms 조팝나무꽃, bridal wreath, as described here.]


This is the only tree of this kind I've seen on campus.

[It appears to be a pear or apple tree.]



Finally, these pink flowers look like carnations to me -- but what do I know? Is the carnation a tree?


[Turns out that these are cherry blossoms too -- called gyeop beotkkot 겹벚꽃 (literally 'layered cherry blossom').]

I sure am a plant ignoramus!

Susukkekki

We had a Korean lesson text about riddles, so the teacher told us a lot of Korean riddles. These are riddles of the Dixie-cup type:

Q: "When is a door not a door?"

A: "When it's a jar (ajar)."

Most of them work fine in any language, such as:

Q: "What can you only see with your eyes are closed?"

A: "A dream."

Two of the riddles we learned involve multilingual puns. Of course these were the most interesting to me. Here's the first one:

Q: "세계에서 제일 큰 코는?" "What's the biggest nose (ko) in the world?"

A: "멕시코" "Mexico" (Korean mekshiko, which sounds like "maxi"-ko)

[Updated May 1, 2008 by Lance: I have it on authority from at least one native Korean speaker that "maxi" is not actually part of this pun. Mexico, being a country, is already a big ko. But for me as an English speaker, the pun has an added dimension!]

And the second one:

Q: "풀중에서 제일 좋은 플은?" "What's the best of all the plants (pul)?"

A: "원더풀" "Wondeo-pul" (Korean pronunciation of English "wonderful")

Possibly you had to be there.

Sae-KKot-Namu

Last autumn Erma and I learned about the Seodaemun-gu bird, flower, and tree from posters at a building construction site in Shinchon. I was in Shinchon last week and that building is completed, no longer under construction. The signs with the gu (구 區, district) bird, flower, and tree are gone. They are still looking for tenants to fill the building:


Putting district information on construction site walls must be a common practice. Here in my current district, Gwanak-gu, I walked past this building (also visible in this earlier post):


Sure enough, look what's on the wall surrounding the construction site:


I still can't listen or express myself very well, but my Korean is getting good enough that with the aid of a dictionary I can translate these passages with some confidence.

Gu bird:

the magpie that has been viewed as a lucky omen said to deliver good tidings

It is said that this magpie in olden days greeted the learned scholars who crossed the southern divide and entered Hanyang [an old name for Seoul] in order to take the state civil service examination.

Gu flower:

When spring arrives the beauty of the fragrant(?) royal azaleas, the pink flowers that blanket Gwanak Mountain, adorn the season.

In Gwanak District, whose "Gwanak Mountain Royal Azalea Festival" is widely known, you can encounter the royal azaleas everywhere once spring has arrived.

Gu tree: the pine tree that symbolizes resolve and righteous integrity

All the year round growing green, stately and dignified, it has since ancient times come to symbolize the resolve and integrity of gentlemen and ladies.

(I welcome any corrections if I've made mistakes.)

There's some overlap with Seodaemun-gu; both districts have the magpie as their bird. I wouldn't be surprised if every district in the city has the magpie as its bird. They seem to be everywhere. Right near my house is a street named "Magpie Park" (까치공원). Here's a magpie I photographed on the SNU campus.