Subject: Weekend Update 13 Mar 94

Date: 13-Mar-94 at 21:37

From: Roger White

Another busy weekend this week. The weekend started Friday, I went

mountain hiking for four hours with my government officers class.

Koreans are avid mountain hikers, and many mountains here have Buddhist temples located near the top. These temples have pleasant path ways leading up. This particular mountain is midway between Seoul and Suwon.

I came with camera in hand, and it was a good thing I had shooting

pictures for an excuse. These Koreans don't waste time heading up, and I was getting winded after about twenty minutes of climbing. After that I stopped every ten minutes or so to shoot, and rest. I met the "iron men" coming down as I passed the quarter way up point. I got about three quarters of the way up before I turned back. The trail was pretty and there was just a touch of snow in the air.

I had a good time shooting and my appetite was really whetted. At the bottom of the slope were some snack shops and most of class was resting in the shops when I got down. I found myself eating Kimchee and enjoying it, ugh!

Saturday I saw Schindler's List. It was a good movie, but what made it particularly interesting for me was that one of my students did the Hangul (Korean) subtitles for it.

This student knows English well, but she's not American so she has questions about cultural things. For Schinder's List she had some questions about guns. Few Korean civilians own guns, so they have little practical experience with them. In one scene a German is about to blow the head off a Jewish worker when his pistol misfires a couple times. The Germans are muttering about which part has gone faulty... the firing pin or the lever arm. I helped her understand what these different parts where.

Sunday I got to go to a 70th Birthday Party. Koreans celebrate 60th, 70th and 80th Birthdays much as we celebrate decade wedding anniversaries. This was a big bash at a banquet hall in Osan, a small city (90,000) just south of Suwon. The banquet hall entrance was a crush of people, there were perhaps a dozen celebrations going on in it--birthdays and weddings--each in a different room in the hall.

(Osan's greatest claim to fame, by the way, is that the first Americans to fight in the Korean War--Task Force Smith--had their first engagement in the hills north of Osan. There's a big statue there now, and an annual memorial celebration.)

There were about 200 people at this birthday affair: relatives, friends and neighbors. There was a spread of buffet food surrounding the tables, and a video camera set up facing a central dance floor. This particular affair had two honored foreign guests: a member of the Chinese Embassy, and myself.

The party was informal and lively in structure: lots of singing and

dancing on the dance floor. The dress was a mix of western and Korean. There was a kisaeng--this is the Korean equivalent of a geisha. During the Choson dynasty--which ended about 1900--kisaeng sang and served wine to Korean nobility. This modern kisaeng functioned as a mixer. She helped people get started with their songs, and danced with men and women.

It's now clear why the Noriban--sing along rooms--are so popular in Korea. These people sing a lot at their social functions. The dance floor had a circle of singers who took their turns singing solo using a Noriban microphone. Inside the circle were dancers doing simple moves that looked like mellow versions of a sixties high school fast dancing.

I was asked to sing. I like singing, but I don't know any Korean songs. Fortunately John Denver songs are very popular, so I belted out two and a half verses of "Take me home, country roads" accompanied by a guitarist and sequencer, then I switched to dancing.

It's been what... thirty years since dancing school, and twenty years since college. But it's sort of like riding a bike. I was out there cutting the rug and having a great old time. I watched the 80 year old woman who's birthday we were celebrating. This woman was healthy indeed, she was on the floor dancing away for most of an hour!

So, last weekend my first public bath and this weekend my first birthday party. Friday I make my first public speach. Still lots of firsts to experince here in Korea.

More later,

Roger