Greetings and Farewells

There are times when I hate how life is such a series of “hellos” and “goodbyes.” It's strange to think about all the faces and names I've known and forgotten...and will know and forget. And it is also strange to realize that I pondered these exact thoughts one year ago. Life must be a series of cycles, as well.

I have a friend who used to say goodbye to people like this--he would give a crooked smile with half his mouth and say, “See you on the other side! Heaven will be better when we both get there.”

I guess I'm holding onto a similar faith. I'll meet up with people again in this world or the next, and either way I am convinced it will be a good thing.

Time 'til departure: 4 weeks and counting...

The Barefoot Path

Korea is a place with lots of interesting ideas. (However, perhaps that's an understatement. Hehe...) Anyway, I've noticed that several interesting ideas have to do with health. Health is of utmost concern, and I possess the theory that if you want to market a new product or idea, all you have to do is tell people that it's good for their health. Simplicity in advertising, you know...

Sometimes I am of the opinion that Koreans think about health too much. And Americans think about it too little. Perhaps if you combined an American and a Korean, you would have a balanced (and maybe even healthy!) person. Perhaps...

Health does bring about some fun inventions, though--like the barefoot path, for instance. The barefoot path is a path full of differently sized stones and gravel. The stones are meant to trigger the various nerve points in your feet--which I can testify that they actually do!--and improve blood circulation, etc.

So you slide off your shoes at the park and walk across this path on a sunny afternoon. Socks are optional. (Screaming is also optional.) It's really quite the experience. :)

Black Day

A couple days ago it was Black Day. I had even forgotten it was Black Day until the day was almost half over. Too bad.

Black Day is the opposite of White Day. And White Day is the opposite of Valentine's Day...perhaps...hmmm....maybe I can explain. Maybe...

Valentine's Day is Valentine's Day, except that in Korea girls have to give chocolate to their boyfriends (or prospective boyfriends). Boys give girls nothing.

White Day is March 14, one month after Valentine's Day. White Day is when the girls get paid back for all their effort on Valentine's Day. Boys give their girlfriends (or prospective girlfriends) chocolate on this day. Or giant teddy bears. Or cheesy-looking gift baskets. The streets are littered with outdoor stands to sell these items, and salespeople prance around frequently wearing life-size animal costumes. Needless to say, one must use extreme caution when going outside on White Day. The commercialization even rivals that of Pepero Day!

Black Day occurs on April 14, one month after White Day and two months after Valentine's Day. Black Day is for single people. The commercialization of this day is more subtle. The holiday's primary purpose is to allow single people to sit around and mope—or celebrate, as the case may be—over a bowl of jajamyun (Chinese noodles with black bean sauce) and a bottle of soju (popular Korean alcohol). It is quite unique, and as far as I know, nothing else exists quite like it in the world.

Cherry Blossoms!

I visited Yeouido (an area of Seoul) yesterday morning to see the Cherry Blossom Festival. It was beautiful. Check it out:

Character Sketches

A few months ago I bought a small spiral-bound notebook that fits into my pocket. I sometimes carry it around and have started to write character sketches onto the pages. The notebook has a picture of Mickey and Minnie on the front. They are gazing into each others' eyes the ways only mice can, and on the first page of the notebook the following words are printed: “hello, life is a journey! don't forget it.” (Unfortunately, there is no correct capitalization in this message, but I suppose everything has a time and place.) Anyway, here are a few excerpts:

Paris Baguette – November 25, 2008

There is a baker who works at the Paris Baguette on the corner of my street. He sells soft blueberry bagels and croissants—mostly the chocolate-filled kind (which are sometimes sold out when I stop by at 9:30am on my way to work). He is tall and academic-looking with streaks of silver slicing through his dark hair like it might as well be a flaky pastry with icing.

This man works late at night. Sometimes he steps outside the front of the building, bends his knees, and methodically swings his arms in great circles around his head. Somehow he seems too calm to belong in this metropolitan hub. He has people-watching eyes behind those thick-framed glasses. And he's the only stranger in Seoul to ever have smiled at me.


Grocery Store – November 26, 2008

I saw a man outside the grocery store steal a mandarin orange this evening. He went inside, bought some beer, then walked out through the produce stands, casually turned his back to the light, and lit a cigarette. Its red tip smoldered in the semi-darkness. The man then picked up a small orange from its outdoor stand and rolled it around between his palms. It seemed a curious sort of love affair. When I looked back again, there he was: cigarette dangling from his mouth and both hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his black felt coat. And the orange was nowhere to be seen.

오빠 --Opa

Blessings come in strange packages sometimes. That is a globally accepted truth. I can attest that I have experienced many unusual blessings. However, I have the gumption to believe that there's an extra special (and perhaps extra strange) kind of blessing for me in Korea. That blessing is the blessing of “opas.”

The word “opa” confused me when I first came to Korea for one simple reason: “opa” means “grandfather” in German. So for several weeks I couldn't hear the word without a mental picture of an old man in my head. However, in Korean, “opa” means “older brother.” And as my favorite opa reminds me on a semi-regular basis, he is not yet an old man! (However, he does prefer that I think of him in terms of his American age, which is a couple years younger than his Korean age!)

Anyway, “opa” is the term that Korean girls use to refer to guy friends who are older than they are. Under the Korean social hierarchical system, opas have one self-imposed duty: they must watch out for the well-being of these girls (their “younger sisters”). One guy explained it to me like this: “When a girl calls you 'opa,' it's like she's putting her life in your hands. If she calls me by my name, I can ignore her requests, but if she calls me 'opa,' it convicts me somewhere inside, and I have to do what she wants.”

I've never had an older brother before. I've never known what it's like to have someone take care of me in that way. But I'm learning here. And even though I'm an independent, self-actualized American woman, I kind of like it. Opas are a special brand of people, and I am immensely grateful to have a couple on my side. :)

Orchids

There's an fuchsia orchid growing outside my apartment building. In fact, that's the only thing growing. Well, sort of... A few days ago someone actually tied the orchid stem to a dead plant with green ribbon. It's the only bit of color in the patch of dirt by the front steps and quite possibly the only living green thing within a 1/2 mile radius. But I like it. It seems like hope to me.

Spring will be here soon. The Yellow Dust has started to blow in off the Gobi Desert in China. (They say it's the earliest that it's made its way into Korea.) Kim Jong-il has threatened to fire a missile somewhere this week. A psychopathic killer was recently arrested. The Korean won hit another low: 1507 to the U.S. dollar. And I'm hanging up my long underwear.

The world is a strange place, isn't it? The passing of seasons is strange also. I feel as if I'm holding my breath. I'm waiting for spring and the next few months. And I'm waiting for a gap of time which will move inevitably much more quickly than it ought. The speed of life is unending. The groans of the earth are audible. And so I am holding my breath and waiting in anticipation.

Raw Fish!

After eating live raw octopus, a little fish is nothing!

North Korea and South Korea

I had a strange dream this morning during the first hour of daylight when I was still lying in bed, trying to melt back into the covers and forget that it was Monday. (For better or worse, that time of day seems to be when odd dreams happen to me.) In my dream, I sneaked across the border into North Korea. It wasn't very hard. All I had to do was speak perfect Korean and wear a ski mask so that people in Pyongyang (the North Korean capital city) wouldn't notice that I was white. I saw Kim Jong Il in the center of the city and even bumped up against him a bit. He seemed skinnier in person than his photographs showed, but I attributed that to the fact that he'd been suffering from health problems. I looked around at all the people in the square. It was sunny, and things didn't look too bad in the sun. In fact, the architecture was pretty impressive. I wondered where all the starving people were. And then I woke up.

I think North Korea has been on my mind because I visited the DMZ (de-militarized zone) with Melissa recently. And in reality, the border isn't really that easy to cross: it's the most heavily armored border in the world. There are minefields and guards and wire all over the place.

I toured the Joint Security Area, which is the only area of the DMZ where North Korean and South Korean soldiers stand face-to-face. There's a cement strip going through the Joint Security Area that divides area where the North Korean and South Korean soldiers are permitted to stand. It just looks a little bit like a small curb along the road, but it marks the territory. There is a row of small buildings that are used for military negotiations and talks between the two sides. These buildings stand on top of the line, and they are marked by color to denote which building belongs to which country.

We went inside one of the buildings as part of the tour. There is a line down the center of a polished table in the middle of the room. One side is South Korea; the other side is North Korea. I stood on the north side. So geographically at least, I guess I can say that I really was in North Korea.

The whole experience seemed rather surreal. North Korean soldiers came up to the building and peered in the windows at us. And from the opposite side, we could see a group of soldiers with a man on the balcony of the main North Korean building. He had a camera and was taking pictures of us. So while the people in our group stared and photographed the communists, they stared and photographed the capitalists. I wonder which family's photo album I'll show up in someday.

Until recently, there were a few special travel spots that were open to tourists in North Korea. Visitors were monitored the entire time, and they were only allowed in certain areas, but a few months after I arrived in Korea, the tours shut down because North Korean soldiers shot a South Korean tourist in the back. She died.

The Gaesong Industrial Complex (a joint venture project between the Koreas, located in North Korea) was also shut down due to tensions between the two governments. With the current South Korean administration, the relationship between North and South Korea is at the lowest point it's been in the past few years.

It seems strange for me to think sometimes that I am living in a divided country. I am just 30 kilometers away from the most isolated and secretive nation on the globe, yet it seems so far removed from daily life. But there are people who are in concentration camps. There are people who are starving and dying. And they are starving and dying without being allowed to talk about or worship God.

I know a North Korean refugee who lives in Seoul. He doesn't talk about his story. He came through China; one of his parents died when he was younger, but the remainder of his family still lives in the north. I don't know much beyond that. But we hang out with friends and eat kimchi jigae together every once in awhile. And I think that's okay.

I thought of this friend when I visited the DMZ and saw the North Korean soldiers. I only felt pity for them. I wasn't scared. I wasn't repulsed. And if there is anything remarkable about these men, I'm convinced that it's their humanness.

A few months ago, I joined a prayer movement in Seoul. There is a group of people from various English-speaking congregations across the city who come together to pray for the people of Korea—both North and South. And they look forward to the day when the prayer meeting will be held in Pyongyang.

People are praying for a revival on this peninsula that will spread above the 38th parallel. Reunification may or may not happen, and it may or may not happen in the way that people expect, but I have a strong feeling that God is preparing this place for something special. He is preparing the hearts of people here and in North Korea. And Koreans have hungry hearts.

And so I'm praying. This country must be ready so that when God opens the border, the gospel can move north. I want to watch that happen during my life. And I want to visit Pyongyang for real...not just in a dream.

Out and About....around Korea with Melissa!

Melissa came to visit me during her winter break. She stayed for two and a half weeks in Korea. We did some traveling together and a bit of sight-seeing in Seoul, as well. Here are some pictures from our adventures...


Namsan Tower


Jejudo


Jejudo


Jejudo


Jejudo


Nakgi - live octopus!


Dr. Fish!


DMZ


Olympic Park


Changdeokgung


Namsan Tower


Namsan Tower