Mar. 6 (another fun filled trip to Daegu)

Friday, March 6, 2009 at 8:45am
Today, as the title suggests, we went to Daegu! It was really a great trip, one of those that leaves you slightly exhausted and struggling to recap exactly everything that happened during the trip. My best attempts follow:

First we wanted to check out some lunchable activity, so after exiting the bus in Daegu, me, Kayla, and our newly found english-teacher-turned-korean-student-and-all-around-good-guy Wayne started looking around for places to scrounge on the way to the art show. It wasn't long before we found a little place, and it offered korean barbeque beef. It was on. We went in there and told the lady to get the barbeque fired up.

After talking amongst ourselves for a while, the old lady who ran the shop by herself brought out our barbeque, which looked great. She put it on the oven in the middle of our table to cook, and brought out our side dishes.
I just want to go ahead and say once and for all that I wish American restaurants would put out side dishes the way they do in Korea. It wouldn't even cost them much more, because instead of the side dishes being with the dinner, they would be out in the middle for everyone to share. Quite economical really. Who wouldn't want to go into Cracker Barrel and along with those biscuits and jelly, they brought out little servings of things like hashbrowns, grits, you know, easy side stuff.
Anyways, it turned out the lady charged us for individual meals when we shared the one big tray, which was shady I thought, but we were full, and she gave us some hypersweet drink that came in like 1.5 oz. bottles (thank goodness it wasn't any more).

We had a chance to casually stroll through downtown Daegu and make our way to the Design Center, which was apparently BRAND new (they hadn't even finished putting the books on the shelf in the bookstore). The design center was really nice, and the layout was top notch. The art show (which only costed about $5) was really good. It was centered around modern art and had masters like Warhol, Picasso, Dali, Matisse, Boar, Ratta, and many others. Their work was stunning. The prints they had in the museums were absolutely mesmerizing, especially if you were familiar with the difficulty of making perfect and consistent prints. I even got an illegal picture next to some Warhol paintings. We casually got our fill of the best modern art to behold and meandered our way out of there.

On the way out, we met a very young toddler who was incredibly cute and who I was able to play with just like a baby in the states. It's so neat to see that all babies really are clean slates and react in virtually the same way no matter where they are from.

When we left the art show, we decided to head out to the traditional korean market to see some neat stuff. Wayne described it as a "sprawling jungle of covered markets with all the riches of a world you've never seen." needless to say, I had to go, which brings me to my next little interlude.
Korean taxis might just be the scariest thing ever invented. Imagine that you're in an amusement park. You're about to ride a semi popular ride that you got good reviews about. So you strap into the ride, and get ready as it gears up. Little known to you and better known to everyone else on the ride, the ride you're on is known for its seemingly near death experiences. In a matter of seconds you're tricked from thinking that you're about to be imploded forcefully by two buses at once to wondering why Korea even has crosswalks at all if people are almost struck every time they cross. count in the fact that the ride's operator sits in the front, and he makes angry gestures at people going too slow or trying to stay in their own lane or just driving defensively. The best part about my little taxi ride was getting out of the car ha ha.

Before we got in the taxi, though, we saw a really curious building with trees all over the terraces of its multi floored premises. Wayne explained to us that it was a wedding hall and that it probably does 25 weddings a day on the weekend. When all he got was puzzled looks, he also explained that Korean weddings take, at most, half an hour, and often the ceremony and reception are done in 35 minutes. I don't think I have been to many weddings where the ceremony was under an hour, or at least what felt like an hour.

Anyways, we got out of the taxi and decided that before we went marketeering, we needed to get some coffee. When we stepped out of the cab, there was a Starbucks waiting for us. Creepy I know. However, the coffee was on par with what Starbucks serves, and I even got to try some Walnut Pie. Imagine Pecan pie with less taste and a more gelatinous filling and you have yourself a walnut pie.

We had some more fun conversation over the coffee, talked about the culture in Korea, getting a job, being happy here, being happy in Canada, all kinds of fun stuff. Afterwards we packed up and headed to the market to try and find some deals.

The market proved truly ginormous. That's the only word to describe it. People were everywhere, and shops seemed to be overflowing out into the walkways. There would be stalls of vendors, shops in buildings, floors of buildings with shops on all of them, incredibly inexpensive clothes, hunks and slabs and oodles and oodles of dead fish waiting for purchase. It seemed like it could have been a Korean person and dead fish enthusiast's heaven. Not to mention all the neat little makeshift restaurants. We got there a little late, so everyone was packing up their stalls for the day.
On a strange note, we did get to visit the "exotic meats" section where they have things like pheasant, live chickens, roosters, rabbit, dog (yes, there were puppies in cages). We didn't get to see any slabs of dog or anything, but it brings up an interesting point about the whole bit.

Back in olden days, when men were men and women were property, It was very common to chow down on whatever meat you had available to you, and to the average feudal person, dogs were like, uh, for lack of a better term, livestock. Traditional and country dwelling koreans still treat them as such.
Coming to Korea, in a way, is like taking a serious step back from the American way of treating animals. In the states, we're all used to the unwritten rule that animals deserve their own pedestal in the household. No harm should come to them, and they should basically be treated as a person who has yet to learn to speak, or write, or in younger cases, use the potty correctly. The care of dogs here in no way mirrors the popular game Nintendogs. Cats are basically treated as urchins and vagabonds who are only tolerated because they keep the mice population down. Koreans think of them as wild animals. Dogs are a kind of livestock, and would be openly eaten by all Koreans, if it wasn't regarded as taboo to westerners. These animals aren't friendly, the culture doesn't put any value into raising friendly animals. The animals will bite you if they get the chance and truly act as if they had no domestication at all.
While I do love dogs, I also know that they are just another animal as well, and being an animal, are infused with a delicious substance us laymen term "meat." While this is nothing close to A Modest Proposal, I venture to say that the vast majority of the population would find a way to get at this meat if no other food were available. I could also venture to say that in the case of scarcity, those people would probably even think the meat was tasty and would even wish they had more. Such is the tie that binds all humans. Maybe treating dogs like less-than-humans isn't a very modern American value, but it's certainly some kind of innate notion us citizens of the world were born with.

We left the market as it was getting around dark and caught a bus home after taking another incredibly fun (not) ride in a taxi to the bus stop (sounds weird, but you couldn't get to it form where we were on foot very easily or quickly).
On the bus, we met this guy named Ismael. Ismael was from Morocco. Right off the bat, it seemed like he had led a pretty interesting life. While he had some nice stories, something didn't feel right about him. He said he came to Korea from Morocco when he was 14 in order to go to school. He didn't know much Korean though (guessing he went to an english school) and said that out of high school he became a professional soccer player. He played for the Pohang Steelers, which is a team sponsored by the Posco steel making corporation (in fact, the stadium is within the confines of the factory complex). He said he had to quit playing soccer though, because of some cerebral problems, which makes sense because I remember reading a study that said soccer was harder on the brain in terms of trauma than any other sport, including boxing. He tried to go to school in Pusan, but decided to forego finishing university in order to teach english to kindergartners. He said he really likes it, and that he makes 50 dollars an hour doing it. He did admit that he had gotten kicked out of one school though, and is working at another place in Hayang. He said to fill his free time he directs movies (type in "the story of wine trailer" to youtube?), and is doing a tv show. Not sure how true any of it was, but he was definitely an interesting guy. He invited us to a party tomorrow night, but I don't know if I trust that situation very much. The spidey senses are tingling, as they say.

So we ended up back on campus, retreating to our rooms for the night. On the agenda for tomorrow: Either Itaewon or a buudhist convent temple place. Either way, it will be great.

Until next time
Aron Huckaba International Vagabond

Edit: turns out ismael really was in that movie trailer, and it looks good, in a Korean way. Ismael had short hair and a short duration in the trailer.