Korea 2013

Seoul/Last Impressions

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:11:35 -0300

I am standing once again in my mind on the top floor of the National Museum of Korea, the sixth largest museum in the world and a new beautifully designed building that opened in 2005. I am the only person walking its halls filled with breathtaking Buddhist sculptures as it is right after opening hours on a Sunday. Just the sound of my footfalls and an occasional guard. Three floors of exquisite sculpture, paintings and ceramics. The museum is free, reflecting the pride and value the Korean government and its people put on its traditional arts and culture. Before I leave, many families with children arrive for a visit.

But this is just one of several world-class museums in Seoul and I take a taxi over to the Leeum Samsung Museum, two co-joined buildings designed by very disparate architects, one displaying traditional arts and a second with modern art. The highlight for me is a special exhibit of video and photography based art -- reflecting the new technologies which have made Korea a phoenix of economic growth, arising from the ashes of destruction after the Korean War. Suitable for a Samsung museum.

My last excursion in Korea is a visit to the old Bukchon area of Seoul, where there are still rows of traditional hanok homes, gated and proud, beautiful wood and tile. I follow a crowd of locals into a restaurant and sit on the floor and have my last meal in Seoul, dolsot bimbimbap, vegetables cooked in a hot iron stone pot, and one of the best of this trip, before heading for the airport. The evening before was a many course vegan dinner with Malaysian and Indian friends at an upscale restaurant:

My conference is a blur of pleasant experiences: a dinner for the Council members in a world-class private golf resort 45 minutes outside the city where no expense was spared on the architecture or interior design: ultra-modern, sleek, bronze statues by an infinity pool, hand carved wood, and full scale Japanese heated multi-purpose toilets in the many stalls. Korea must have the cleanest bathrooms in the world, everywhere, even small restaurants, even public bathrooms in bus stations have cleaning attendants. A night at a film shooting set (it seems that Korean historical TV soap operas are wildly popular in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong from my friends’ responses), a gala dinner with K-Pop entertainment, Las-Vegas style, a dinner with close friends at a small local restaurant (below):

At this golf club dinner event, I was presented with a large birthday cake and everyone sang happy birthday to me, a few days before my actual event. On my actual birthday, at 12:01 am I was with a close group of friends at a bar lounge on the top floor of the Sheraton hotel who toasted my birthday -- and then at 11:59 the same day I was with another group of friends in the same location who also sang and congratulated me. This is what I love so much about this organization, the friends I have made. I organized a small tour and lunch in a traditional Korean temple food restaurant for the women lawyers and looking around at my friends, I smiled with joy: we were each from different countries and represented a large slice of the world, all highly successful lawyers (except me, now the facilitator), most of whom have children, who conduct major arbitrations and cross-border negotiations, with no distance among us: we all said, if only we could rule the world and set the policies! Here we are, left to right: Australia, Hong Kong, U.S., China, India, Taiwan, Canada, France, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia.

And here is our lunch together:

And the younger attorneys who were chosen by me and my committee and whom I got to know: this year from Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Samoa, Philippines, Nepal, New Zealand, China, Israel and Russia, all with multi-cultural backgrounds - the Phillippina works in Japan, the Russian has studied Chinese language and policies, the New Zealand attorney is Korean by ethnicity and has worked in Seoul for several years, the Samoan is receiving a doctorate in Australia, the Chinese attorney received an LLM in New York, the Vietnam attorney has a PhD from France, the Myanmar woman has studied law in England . . . such cross connections create hope for greater understanding around the world.

My last night I had moved to a small hotel in the center of town and the difference from our sheltered Sheraton world was remarkable: bright lit small streets and avid shoppers at 10 pm at night in the Myeung-dong area, neon signs, street hawkers selling local foods, and an air of great energy and enthusiasm for material consumption. Both local and international name brands were there and numerous shops selling skin-care products (including the trendy snail juice). Earlier in this visit, my friend Priti and I had walked through the central part of town, past new buildings with interesting architecture, through well-maintained parks with flowering spring trees, to an old temple, the mothership of the Haeinsa temple I had previously stayed at, where teams of women had volunteered to construct paper lanterns for the upcoming Buddha’s birthday celebration and where shops along the road sold grey clothing for monks and nuns and religious accessories.

The integration of the old and new seems well done here with some concern about preservation without sacrificing the desire to soar upward with economic prosperity.

I leave Korea with a sense of a resourceful people, who have been thrown around by a harsh history but have kept a strong sense of identity and forceful perseverance. I only hope that the stubborn trait not to bow to adversity that has kept the nation going does not translate into a military fistfight between the North and the South. In which nobody in the world would be a winner.

Haeinsa Dharma Bells

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 12:00:00 -0300

At 3:18 am we were standing in a brisk cold in front of the pagoda in the Haeinsa temple courtyard as the first roll of the Dharma drum began, the deep sound amplified by the darkness and stillness surrounding us. Three monks took turns on the large drum, the predecessor of the Japanese taiko, using full body to produce the rich rolling thunder. This ceremony, followed by the ringing of the very large cast metal temple dharma bell (wake up! wake up!), had also been part of our training the previous evening when the 12 of us temple-stay guests were introduced to the customs and etiquette of the temple, dressed in our brown plain temple grab. There are 4 Danish women who had never been in a Buddhist temple before, a young German woman, who was half-Korean and could understand the language, and her German boyfriend, a young Vietnamese woman from London with her new very British husband, a Korean woman math teacher, a Korean artist there for inspiration, a retired Korean man interested in spending more time practicing Buddhism - and me.

This is the largest and most important active temple of the Seon (Zen) school in Korea, built in 800 ad, with a 4 year study academy for monks. It has two serious retreat periods of several months a year, including a 7 day non-sleeping period and it is all male. At its high point during the year there are 200 monks here; at other times many of the monks are in outside hermitages. The nuns are off someplace less, undoubtedly with less resources. There is a continual stream of devout local Koreans coming to pray and worship.

The evening before, a monk gave us detailed instructions in etiquette, including sitting in meditation and in doing prostrations, and later we had tea together, apricot blossoms picked by the monks from a local tree, as the monk answered questions we had previously written down. He spoke little English so there was minimal translation which was very unfortunate as this monk had a deep presence about him and what was communicated seemed true and right. His information and message was very similar to that I have experienced through the San Francisco Zen Center - his main practice is watching his mind, whether sitting, walking, or working, and he continually asks himself “the big question”, who is this that is sitting, walking working, and feeling pain and happiness. He talked about this practice not as a “koan”, as it is sometimes presented, but as a way to get under the layers of preconceptions that make us what we think and feel about ourselves and the world and to find within us, at the bottom, a core that is without distractions, a core that is emptiness.

And so, after the morning drum service, there was the service with the chanting monks in the great hall and then, in a room by ourselves with our monk-leader, our 108 prostrations, followed by about 60 minutes of meditation. And then by breakfast in silence. Did I do all 108 prostration? No, I knew I might run into trouble and did about half, doing 18 and then resting for about 18 - which was a wise decision as that has left me with extraordinarily sore muscles.

Our morning tour of the temple grounds included a walking meditation through a labyrinth of colored lanterns which is a signature image for this temple and a view into the amazing set of 4 buildings housing the famous Tripitaka Koreana, a set of important Buddhist scriptures, in Chinese characters, carved into 81,000 wood blocks and one of the earliest known extensive printing undertakings in the world. A new modern hi-tech building was built in the last 10 years to protect this world heritage -- and then it was discovered that the ancient buildings, from about 1300, were perfectly designed to keep the wood blocks at the right humidity all through the year, with sand and charcoal base to absurd moisture in the wet season and add humidity back in the dry season and with the perfect wind flow through specially angled windows to keep the library perfectly ventilated.

The temple prayer halls themselves are a blend of Japanese Buddhist aesthetics and Tibetan color and design programming --- beautifully carved wood, painted in bright colors with large paintings and gold Buddha images at the altars. The monk color is grey, with an ochre-brown trim to the top robes. And then the over-layment of colored lanterns strung for holidays and for events, creating an environment that is both subtle and strikingly bold at the same time.

Haeinsa was a gem set on the Gaya Mountain. A place that is now being well supported by its admirers and knows how to run a business to stay alive, modernizing where appropriate but retaining its essential nature. I can understand the many people who come here for retreats for a week or two, staying in the modern pilgrim accommodations we stayed in, with heated floors, modern bathrooms and showers, and ample food. And the opportunity for quiet in a chaotic world.

The trip back to Seoul is an adventure: bus to Daegu, subway to the train station, express train to Seoul, taxi back to the place I stayed in central Seoul to pick up my suitcase --- a wait for the guest house owners to return and then another taxi over to my 5-star hotel. Back to the luxury world of Sheraton, a raised bed with real pillows, lovely shower and, best of all, my wonderful group of IPBA friends.

The local people along the way were kind, helpful and sometimes very rude and pushy at the same time. There was no deference for an older woman with a number of bags getting on and off buses or sitting down, no offers for help going up and down stairs. But the people I did make contact with were all sincerely interesting in aiding me and making sure I found my way. A very worthwhile experience.

Gyeongju, Temples and Beyond

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 02:39:06 -0300

I am sitting in an unexpected place -- a beautiful artfully built traditional wooden tea house at the foot of the great Haeinsa Temple in the mountains of south central Korea, having Omijacha tea. I am told this tea is made from the fruit of the Maximowiczia Typica which is reknowned as a health tea containing five different tastes at the same time, sweet, salty, sour, spicy and bitter and absolutely delicious. I have not yet entered the temple but the journey to get here was a journey indeed: bus from Gyeongju to West Daegu and then another bus to Haeinsa, about a 4 hour journey in total. And sometimes a Starbucks is ever such a wonderful place, as was the one opposite the bus station in Daegu where I went to relax between buses. I thought the bus would take me to the temple but it actually dropped me off at the bottom of a 1km uneven path, uphill all the way, so that, dragging my luggage behind me, I was ready for some healthy tea by the time I arrived at this elbow in a beautiful canyon with a vista of hills. It was sunny and warm.

Driving through the countryside on the way, I was struck by my sketchy understanding of the past history of an area like this: an agricultural society trying to find isolated valleys to create for itself some protection from the inevitable violence of the political lords and invading hoards for century after century. The bus went from large city to smaller and smaller towns and then villages as we passed into a canyon between small mountains containing minimal flat fields around the waterways that carved through the hillside. Every available space in the valley appears to be or has been in use for a long time. The appeal of Buddhism and a monastic way of life become clear to me in this context: going higher into the mountains and finding a simple but more peaceful way of life, away from the potential strife and violence down below, apart from the difficult roles placed on both men and women and a daily life with little relief from the stress of trying to sustain life.

I am glad I am here. Yesterday was a blur of a tourist bus trip, with site after site explained in a running stream of Korean. I was the only non-Asian but there were other non-Korean speakers who struggled as I did and relied on a few tourist information displays providing information in English. The Bulguksa Temple, a world heritage site, was large and beautiful and filled with what appeared to be every primary school student in the area visiting for the last day of their annual field trip.

What struck me most strongly during the day was the Anapji Pond, the location of a group of very old palace pavilions with an intricately designed and landscaped lake, wonderfully restored. The lake filled up over the millennia and when it was dredged in the early 1970’s a vast treasure of over 3000 perfectly preserved objects were found, gold statues, jewelry, tools and even writing on wooden tablets, all preserved in the mud down below for some many hundreds and hundreds of years. Also memorable is the Gyeongju National Museum with incredibly beautiful Buddhist stone sculptures from the area, artifacts collected from the many burial tombs in the city from about 750 (some not found until 1990) and from the Anapji Pond. What a location for an archeologist!

At the museum I noticed this statue and thought, even Bodhisattvas sometimes have bad posture. The children were all so well behaved and beautiful.

Although lunch was a buffet blur with many foods which were unknown to me but dinner was indeed memorable: I had heard of a vegan Temple Food restaurant but it would not serve a single person. So at my guesthouse, the manager helped me round up two other single guests, a young Israeli wandering the world after his military service and a young Korean engineer and we indulged in a 2 hour many-course meal, pictured below, with great enjoyment. This is probably the most sybaritic experience so far of pure taste enjoyment. We shall see what the real temple food bring me at Haeinsa tonight.

Gyeongju/ Second Impressions

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:36:08 -0300

First impressions can be wrong as I was soon proved after writing my last post on the train. The junk-food guy who was sitting next to me at the time turned out to have studied in the U.S., spoke fluent English and we had a very engaging conversation for the remainder of the trip. He said, among other things, that he was afraid of North Korea’s present posturing not because of any immediate threat but because of the uncertainty this created for his country’s future. Many people in Korea are against the idea of reunification of the North and the South based on Germany’s experience and the consequent economic fallouts. West Germany was financially stronger at the time than South Korea is now and East Germany was in better shape than North Korea so that any kind of future proposal for a united country created due to North Korea’s actions might lead to severe economic hardship to South Korea and its people. On a different note, he also said that Koreans lead extremely stressful lives: there is foremost the stress of living in a too crowded environment with not enough space to grow and continued the stress of the political situation and uncertainty for the future. I added, and he concurred, as well as the stress of family values always pushing all members toward accepting only the highest marks of success.

And my earlier remarks about the more discrete advertising appeared initially flawed by rose-colored glasses. Gyeongju is an overgrown village with a large planned resort development on its outskirts containing many big hotels, well landscaped golf courses, beautiful gardens, and a number of theme parks. Its draw is its beautiful location in a ring of mountains near the sea and the large number of magnificent ancient temples and monuments found within its precincts, the remains of the thriving ancient Silla dynasty from about 600 a.d.

My small homey guest house, in which I have a tiny first floor room, opening onto a cozy living room area, with my own heated floor and sleeping mat, and access to the cold outside bathroom (which requires taking shoes/slippers on and off each time a trip is made), is in the center of the old part of town. My guest house, the HomoNomad:

The more commercial part of time features stores selling pumps and irrigation supplies, the famous local form of soft barley bread, which all the tourists take home, and a number of true recycling centers -- with old electronic and mechanical machines being taken in and fixed or used for parts. The traditional Korean-Chinese-Japanese roof design, with sloping slanted layered tile roofs, are everywhere, from homes to small shops to schools. And, on the busier streets, the the same chaotic mix of layers of clashing advertising occurs as elsewhere in the world.

But cleaner. Everything is immaculately clean. Not a piece of discard on the streets. The population must put a very high priority on landscaping as everywhere is planted great lines of cherry trees along the less urban municipal roads together with beautiful well maintained public areas. The pink blush of trees against the light green of beginning springtime is magical. I had difficulty in figuring out when I first arrived whether the cherry trees were just beginning to bud or were on their final fading out as the public gardeners must continual sweep the streets as there was no sign of falling petals -- although it turned out that the height of the blooms was about 10 days ago and the trees are indeed on their last burst of pink. The brilliant plums and purple azaleas are just awakening though and the magnolia is in full bloom. So it is understandable why this non-industrialized city pulls so many local visitors at this time of year.

In my neighborhood streets, I collected some photographs of the interesting gates which are the entry to every family compound: from old wood to modern stainless steel, probably revealing something about the family that dwells within.

The first afternoon I took a serious of buses out to the Seokguram Grotto, a world famous Buddhist site with a magnificent carved seated Sakyamuni Buddha inside a man-made arched grotto facing the sea. At the grotto (no photos were allowed of the grotto itself), taken by one of a group of Korean-Americans on tour, the only Americans I have met so far in this part of Asia.

There were thousands of school children, some in uniform, walking in disciplined lines along the 1/2 miles walk around the mountains side to reach the site. I was told this is a time of year when children are taken on 3 day outings to visit the great cultural locations in Korea to understand their history. As I walked by all of these children, I noticed how beautiful and healthy they were but also how many were overweight, more the boys then the girls, as they appear to have contracted the same disease of over-consumption and fast-food diets as their U.S. peers.

And of course the magnificent food must be mentioned. My guest house manager directed me on a long walk to a small 4-table restaurant with home-cooked food, obviously prepared by the small staff. I ate everything below except for the cold sliced vegetables in the hot red sauce. And all vegan as well. Cost: $8.00. Perhaps it will help me to sleep.

Seoul/First Impressions

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 21:30:21 -0300

A few days before my departure, I was asked by a group of people in a discussion group why I liked traveling so very much. And the answer I gave was substantiated by the incredible feeling of well being I felt as I waited for my plane in the bland non-descript like-everywhere international airport gate area at the San Francisco Airport on Tuesday. I don’t think I know of other people who say waiting in airports gives them positive feelings.

I travel because it makes me feel alive and in the moment. De-sensitived to my own culture, I spend my time in my hometown fairly sheltered from new sensations. But out in the unknown of a new environment, be it in the U.S. or anywhere abroad, I am forced to rely on my faculties for, in a matter of speaking, survival. I must look carefully at where I am, understand the geography and my physical position in space, pay attention to people’s reactions and to the new food and options available for eating by using all of my senses. The airport heightens this kind of reaction by putting me in a white washed-out no-tagline limbo, eliminating all sense of place, where the preparation and elation begins, before I am plunged into the sea of another culture.

And Korea is very much a new experience. I do not know the language and find myself illiterate in a location with little English transliteration. I am now on the high-speed train at 9 am in the morning moving fast from Seoul to Gyeongju after arriving into Korea by the Airport bus around 9 pm last night.

My first impressions include these:

I was struck as I read about Korean history on the plane how uneducated I am about Korea’s struggles as the soccer ball kicked between China and Japan since about 1200 and the tenuous nature of its rise to economic power from devastation after WWII following over 50 years of Japanese domination. The transition has been tremendous and fast.

I stayed last night in a small hanok, the traditional Korean house style, with a beautiful wood gateway into a dirt courtyard surrounded by a platform with rice-paper and carved wood doors sliding open into small sleeping rooms, each with wood radiant-heated floors. The bedding is a thin futon-like mat on the floor with a large quilt and the toilet and bathroom are across the courtyard along the raised platform with shoes to be taken off once onto the wood sideboard. The thin doors rattled in the night from the wind but the two-layers of doors with rice paper appeared to provide good insulation. This hanok was in a small narrow alleyway with a few lantern-lit restaurants and other similar homes along the way. But around this little street on all sides were large imposing new high-rise buildings.

And there are very few of these old homes left around the city. The Koreans seem, more than other places I have been, to have thrown-off of the old ways without looking back, dedicated with single purpose to move ahead into the capitalist world without restraint.

Recognizing this is completely subjective after a little more than 12 hours in this country, as I pass from city into countryside and back into small cities, the adjective that has come into my mind is “disciplined”. The people are disciplined to stand quietly in lines (at the airport and the train station), there is discipline in communication with less talk and a quieter atmosphere, and even the shopping streets I passed on my way to the train station seem more organized and controlled. The Koreans have taken to heart the commercial advantages of advertising and it is rampant but it too seems more restrained, with shop signs (in a script I can not understand) appearing more regular and more concerned about blending in with its neighbor than in other places where bigger, bolder takes precedence over any aesthetic or concern for impact on the environment.

And Korea appears also to be a fast-food heaven. The well-dressed young gentleman in the train seat next to mine just consumed about 5 fast-food items he purchased before embarking on this journey: Crackers, sweet pastries, coffee, some kind of sweet drink. And everyone seems to be on a similar binge. The hotel manager showed me to a restaurant across a main street last night where I was able to get a dolsot bimbimbap, hot stone pot of rice and vegetables, sitting cross-legged on a small mat on the floor (thank goodness I am in shape from yoga) so that I know, thank goodness, that traditional Korean food is still ubiquitous but it now contends with the Pizza Huts and McDonalds of the world -- and the Starbucks or another coffee shop on every other corner of Seoul.

I had read that most of the Korean landscape is rolling hills so that only about 20% of the country is flat for agriculture. And much of that seems to be taken up by large scale hi-rise housing developments. It is still early spring here and the trees covering the hills I am passing are bare and I assume, although I read that cherry blossom season is always the first 2 weeks in April, that this year it might be delayed. We shall see.