Hiking, Korea Style

Some days here, I have my mind blown.  Today was one of those days.

This panorama was shot from one of the gates in Bukhansan National Park.  Difficult to capture on film how breathtaking a view this was.

I woke up early on a mild October morning today to go hiking with one of my colleagues in this park just north of Seoul.  One of the great things about living in Korea is that you're surrounded by mountains, and a pastime of Korean life is to go climb them.  One of the best parts of going to Darden and living in Charlottesville for me was the proximity to the outdoors, and quite surprisingly it's not hard to get into nature in Seoul either.  Seoul has excellent public transit, and we were able to get from the Hannam-dong neighborhood (where we both live) to the foot of the mountain in about an hour by subway and bus.

Summer's heat was thankfully swept away several weeks ago and autumn's chill has slowly started to creep in here, though the temps are still comfortable.  The days are mostly dry now and it's a wonderful time to visit Korea.  We saw more than a few glimpses of the fall foliage in full display today.

The Bukhansan park is massive and there are hundreds of trails meandering every which way through it.  The park has lots of Buddhist temples — Buddhists fled to the mountains when they were persecuted during the Joseon dynasty — so you can get your spiritual fix in more ways than one.  There are also a series of old defense gates and you can make a good hike out of walking from one gate to the next.

But be warned — the mountains here are not for amateur hikers!  The trail started simply enough, and I was mocking the Koreans for getting all geared up.  Most were carrying hiking sticks and were decked out in everything that REI offers.  But once we climbed towards the peaks, my nonchalance quickly turned to anxiety.  There were some serious rock scrambles up there!  Sadly, I was unprepared.  I own proper hiking boots but I had never needed them on the relatively tame peaks around Charlottesville, so of course I thought my low traction running shoes would suit me just fine.

My buddy De and I were getting tired but we were loving the hike, and we thought we had plotted a good way to get down and out of the park.  But we reached a peak we couldn't ascend, so we thought we could find a path around.  Big mistake.  We started following a group of middle-aged Koreans who were bouncing down but they clearly weren't on a path, and they were far more prepared for offroading than we were.  After a couple slips the Koreans saw our plight and adopted us into their group, scolding us repeatedly for not wearing the right boots (they didn't like my t-shirt and shorts, either).  This was possibly the most intense, macho group of 50-year-old hikers I have ever encountered.  I saw one guy in the group literally climb a boulder with no hands, just to show off.  I don't even know if they sell boots in the US with the grippy material on his soles, but I need to find some!

De did not come prepared for these rock scrambles

Though these macho Korean hikers spoke only about as much English as I speak of Korean (not much!), they were helpful in guiding us down.  We even stopped with them for snack time, and they graciously offered us their scallion pancakes, pickled anchovies, and soju.  That's right, soju...Korean vodka!  I never thought drinking and hiking mixed, but I wasn't able to let down a group of Koreans who already thought we were pathetic foreigners with our shabby footwear.  So I downed about four shots!

Despite the alcohol making our already slippery balance even worse, De and I managed to make it down the rest of the mountain and back to the bus stop for the return journey to Seoul.  Though exhausted from a day of intense hiking, we came away with a unique cultural experience and memories we will never forget.  And we had quite the appetite for dinner — Korean barbeque was especially delicious this evening!

What Price Beauty?

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good,
A shining gloss, that fadeth suddenly;
A flower that dies, when first it 'gins to bud;
A brittle glass, that's broken presently:
     A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower,
     Lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.
William Shakespeare, "The Passionate Pilgrim"

One cannot travel anywhere on public transport around Seoul without being confronted with the latest fad: young Koreans obsession with plastic surgery. You wouldn't believe it until you see it — advertisements everywhere, on the subway and on buses, showing before and after photos of enhanced faces and altered bodies. Walk around Gangnam and you see signs plastered on building exteriors for plastic surgery clinics. I haven't yet figured out where I would need to go if I had the flu and needed to see a doctor, but I would have no problem finding a place for a face lift. It's shocking!

Imagine going down a subway escalator and seeing this ad

In general, the fixation with looks goes beyond anywhere else I have traveled in the world. Walk around anywhere in public on a typical day, and you'll see a Korean woman in an idle moment with her hand mirror out, examining her face. In this week's news, I read that South Korea is the world's biggest market for male cosmetics — a country of 50 million people makes up 21% of global skincare sales! That's a lot of fancy moisturizer being used by a metrosexual bunch. My newsfeed also pulled up an announcement of 15% off tour packages to Korea this month for cosmetic procedures. And recently one of my colleagues suggested I watch the Korean film "Cinderella", a horror flick showing poor teenage girls scraping each other's faces.

Having done a little reading on Korean culture before arriving in August, I knew that plastic surgery was becoming a thing here. I had read the New York Times piece last November documenting the dramatic rise in cosmetic procedures. The article quoted a 2009 survey, which found that one in five Seoul women between 19 and 49 admitted to having undergone plastic surgery. It said that the double eyelid fold procedure, designed to make the eyes look larger and rounder, was "so common here that most women on Seoul streets seem to have a double fold, though only one in five Koreans is born with one."

This woman looks happier "After".  Shocking...

What's the look that Korean women are going for? You'd be surprised. Says a plastic surgeon quoted by NYT: “Koreans agree on what constitutes a pretty face...The consensus, now, is a smaller, more sharply defined youthful face — a more or less Westernized look."

So this explains the obsession with the bigger eyes. And bigger busts. Rhinoplasty to create a more defined nose bridge. Contouring the chin and cheeks. Even (I kid you not) calf reduction surgery!

But why the obsession with the Western look? And why throw tens of thousands of dollars into getting it? Partly it could be due to the popularity of Western media, American movies and the like. Koreans do very much like things they perceive as European or American, which connote a sense of wealth and prestige. Hence the love of Starbucks Coffee. And golf. And BMW cars. But the tentacles of Western media creep far and wide in this world. And in most other countries, women don't feel compelled to take scalpels to their faces to show their love of Hollywood.

I think the reason for the surgery boom is the hyper-competitiveness of the Korean culture. I recently finished the book "Korea Unmasked" by Won-Bok Rhie, a cartoonist who tries to explain the idiosyncrasies of being Korean, especially what makes it different than being from China or Japan. One of the themes which came out of the book for me was the predominant group culture here. Koreans feel very drawn to groups with which they share things in common, and therefore feel a desire to keep pace with the group. In America, we have an idiom for social benchmarking called "Keeping up with the Joneses" — in Korea you could translate this into "Keeping up with the Kims". In Korean society, this trend manifests itself in the education system, where students work morning to night to study to keep pace with their classmates. It manifests itself in Korea's recklessness with credit card debt — the average household debt burden exceeds that of the US before the global financial crisis! And now, I think, you see this trend with plastic surgery. If your neighbor gets her cheeks tweaked and her nose fixed, then finds a husband or gets hired for a good job, you'll probably do the same.

The label for this beverage says (in English) "I'm on a Diet. Look at me!"

As a foreigner from a country where beauty is certainly important but an obsession with which is seen as undesirable vanity, the whole surgery trend strikes me somewhat as a country gone mad. Don't get me wrong — I certainly appreciate a women who is well-put-together, eats right, exercises. And I understand that the genetic lottery has given some people more fortunate appearances than others. But in all this cutting and scraping for the ideal look, there must be something lost in Korea. As a trained economist, certainly I see an economic loss from throwing all this money into the rather unproductive plastic surgery industry. As a human*, I wonder why the elements of uniqueness and diversity, which are also beautiful, are so undervalued here. In a region of the world already mocked for having everyone looking the same, these elements are badly needed, but Koreans seem to be going down the path towards external conformity, sadly.



* (which, perhaps, is the opposite of being an economist!)

Gyeongju

My two weeks of Samsung orientation wrapped up on Friday; now the real work begins! Clearly, the highlight of the week was an overnight trip to Gyeongju in southeastern Korea, the capital of the ancient Shilla dynasty. Though little of the ancient city remains, the area is home to a couple large Buddhist temples up high on lush green mountains. The whole area was beautiful. On our way there we visited the Samsung factory where the Samsung Galaxy S3 phone is assembled (all-female workforce!) and had a fancy welcoming party at a lovely resort in Gyeongju. We cut loose with our Korean staff over drinks, dancing, and karaoke (what the Koreans call "noraebang") – the Koreans can really sing!

Pond at the Bulguksa Temple

The new Samsung GSG class at Bulguksa Temple

New Job, New Home

Whew! What a week! Not only did I have my first week on the Samsung payroll, I also moved into a new residence. While I catch my breath I'll recount how things went.

First, I returned to full-time workforce after a 28-month hiatus on Monday, ironically celebrated as "Labor Day" in my home country. I slapped the alarm clock, suited up, wolfed down breakfast, and arrived at 7:50AM at the office. It was like a return to first year of business school, albeit dressier. Our first two weeks at Samsung are an orientation period, so we're not "working" per se, though keeping similar hours. Thankfully we had been up early the week before to attend Korean language classes, so it wasn't a complete jolt to the system to be up that early, though certainly the realization that I no longer live in B-school la-la land has set in.

A light photo moment on workday #1

On Monday morning, the 42 new hires boarded a bus in Seoul and traveled to the Samsung HR Development Center (HRDC) in the exurbs of the Seoul metro area.  The HRDC was quite nice and immense...even had dormitories for overnight stays. Felt like "Camp Samsung" to me. Our group stayed for two days, spending the night sleeping on the "Wassily Kandinsky" floor (meant to inspire our creativity we were told). At the HRDC we listened to lectures on the Korean culture and succeeding at Samsung.

Wednesday felt less like work as we completed a "challenge course" designed to promote teamwork. No trust falls at Samsung, though we did climb ladders built from logs and learned how to communicate with one another while blindfolded. On Thursday, we toured Samsung Electronics facilities in the nearby city of Suwon, listening to more introductory lectures and viewing the assembly of semiconductors. On Friday, we stayed in the new office in Seoul and learned about some of Samsung's lesser-known business divisions: construction, green energy, and insurance.

One of several group photos taken last week of the entering Samsung GSG class

The weekend left no time for rest as my moving day was Saturday. It felt disorienting to be leaving my hotel in Gangnam – after a month there that neighborhood had become the center of my Korean universe. My new apartment is in Hannam-dong, a neighborhood just north of the Han River that has many of Seoul's foreign embassies. I seem to be in the ASEAN area – the embassies of Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand all stand within two blocks of me. The neighborhood feels far more residential than Gangnam and is popular with colleagues in my group due to its proximity to the bustling Itaewon nightlife as well as the office (a 25-minute commute by bus).

The moving company arrived promptly Saturday morning at 9AM and got to work very quickly. So much more manpower on the Korean side of the move – I had three Americans packing my stuff in Charlottesville, and eight Koreans packed into my apartment to unload! Not surprisingly, the Koreans worked very quickly and I frantically tried to direct them. After living out of suitcases for almost three months, I started to wonder why I owned so much stuff! Thankfully almost everything arrived intact.

New Seoul residence: Rosemary Villa in Hannam-dong

The new apartment has a lot of space and a lot of windows. I also have a guest bedroom, so any visitors to Seoul have a place to stay!

After living like a vagabond since school graduation, it feels great to finally have a place to finally settle into. There's a lot more to be done to make Seoul feel more like home, but having a full-time residence is a milestone.

Getting the new guest bedroom set up. Open for visitors!

Getting My Sport On

I experienced several more firsts in the week that just flew by. Visited my first Korean palace (Gyeongbokgung). Hailed my first taxi in Seoul and unsuccessfully tried to navigate the driver to my destination (though I was able to at least get him to take me to the correct neighborhood). Saw my first film in a Korean cinema (R2B: Return To Base), a Top Gun-like thriller, with English subtitles. Watched live television from my new Samsung Galaxy S3 phone...on the subway!! Took my first Korean language classes. And visited my new office at Samsung, on the 26th floor of the Samsung Electronics building in Gangnam, for the first time.

On Wednesday I went with several of my new colleagues to our first Korean baseball game. Baseball is very popular in Korea...along with golf and soccer it's one of the favorite sports here. Every night this time of year is baseball night in Korea -- you flip channels on TV and you can see three games being broadcast simultaneously. The Korean professional league has 8 teams and we bought tickets to see two of the Seoul teams go head-to-head...the LG Twins vs. the Doosan Bears (all of the teams are named after their corporate sponsors).

Lots of LG Twins fans with "thunder sticks"

All we could say was...WOW!! Though the game on the field was identical to that found in the USA, almost everything else about the viewing experience was completely different. You walk off the subway at the Sports Complex station (very convenient to reach from the Samsung office) and are surrounded by tables set up by food vendors. You can buy super-cheap servings of kimbap (seaweed-rice rolls typically wrapped with vegetables and crabmeat), dried squid, kimchi pancakes, delicious fried chicken. You can also purchase inexpensive Korean beers and soju to wash it all down. Thankfully, Korean baseball stadiums let you bring food and drink into the seats, unlike American stadiums which then extort you into buying from outrageously priced concession stands. Korean baseball games are delightfully cheap to attend – 10,000 won (about $9) for a lower grandstand ticket – and the aforementioned cheap food. Definitely a sport for the common man...we didn't see any luxury boxes in the stadium.

Once inside the stadium with our food and beer, we saw the stadium neatly segregated into two cheering sections...LG fans along the third base side, Doosan fans on the first base side. Most fans carried "thunder sticks", cylindrical plastic balloons that make a loud clapping noise when struck together. A lot of female fans at the game, too...a higher proportion than you would see at an American baseball game.

Korean baseball cheerleaders

And CHEERLEADERS!!! Oh my gosh. Amazing. Built into each side was a concrete platform where the female cheerleaders would trot out in their skirts and pump up the fans with their dance moves. Then a man, who I would call an "M.C.", would walk on the platform, microphone in hand, and lead the team's fans (along with a drum master) in a long series of rhythmic chants and songs. Simply unlike anything you see at an American baseball game. More like a college football atmosphere. Fans going nuts from the first pitch. Batter hits a single, fans go berserk! The Korean baseball players that make the MLB must find American fans to be so passive. The rhythms are very catchy – by about the 4th inning I found myself loving the LG Twins...and I'm about to start working for Samsung. And there was a beer-chugging contest between innings, I kid you not!

But the strange thing about the cheering was when it stopped. There was simply...silence.  The fans would go nuts when the M.C. would tell them to beat their thunder sticks together, then would just sit there. In American baseball games, the fans sit for most of the game, then rise for the big moments. You expect a crescendo of cheers before a big pitch late in the game. But at the Korean baseball game, fans who had been going nuts for three hours were silent in the 9th inning, two outs, two strikes in a close game. Very strange. As my colleague next to me put it, "Koreans really enjoy playing Follow The Leader". I didn't expect cultural realizations at a baseball game, and had just found one.

I also got back into the soccer groove this week, playing my first game in 4 months! Samsung GSG has a team which plays about one a month against other Samsung companies, and on Saturday morning had a game scheduled with Samsung Fire and Marine Insurance. Crazy start time – 6AM!! In 25 years of playing I had never been on a field so early. We played on a turf field surrounded by a cage next to a freeway in the 'burbs. Felt like something straight out of Germany. Seemed like several members of my team (myself included) were feeling the after effects of a late night out, but other than that I found myself quite in my element on a soccer pitch again. The game was right at my level – decent technical skills, mediocre fitness, and players not taking the game too seriously. Despite the hit to my sleep schedule, I look forward to continuing playing.

My new job at Samsung starts tomorrow morning. I will be wearing a suit for the first time in awhile!

Gyeongbokgung Palace was pretty nice, too

Typhoon, Screen Golf, and 30th Birthday...

I have experienced several firsts in Korea thus far. I walked into a two-story, 120-seat Dunkin Donuts. I watched Starcraft played on television, with announcers. I used an electronic bidet. And now I can add living through a typhoon, what they call a hurricane in the Western Pacific, to my list.

Looked as if it might be fierce, but wasn't

Once a category 4 hurricane, Typhoon Bolaven lashed Okinawa with 150 km/h winds and buckets of rain, then looked poised to take near direct aim on Seoul today. Flights were cancelled, schools were closed, and the U.S. Embassy shut down. My Korean language classes were cancelled for the day as well, so I set up a view of the storm from my 18th floor room at the hotel in which I am staying.

And...a whole lot of nothing, really. Not a ton of rain so far, it seems. Definitely windy but besides a stray plastic bag I haven't seen anything flying around. I won't taunt Mother Nature as I'm sure this storm could have been much worse, but I was disappointed with the intensity of this storm given all the buildup. Well, I won't have much time to bask in the glory of surviving my first typhoon experience as typhoon #2 (Tembin) is already approaching later this week!

Scott is "stuck" in a bunker

Had another first this week – screen golf! Golf is super popular in South Korea – there are two golf channels on TV here (one for men and one for women) – but given the constraints on land in this country (50 million people living in a place about the size of the US state of Indiana), playing golf on an actual course is expensive. On average, it costs $295 to play a round of golf here! Hence, the booming popularity of screen golf, which cost us about 1/10th of that. The game is sort of like Wii Golf, except you play with actual clubs and real balls. You can play a wide variety of famous courses...we tried Pebble Beach...and as you slam a ball from a driving range mat into a screen a computer measures the speed and direction of your club face to determine where the ball should fly in the game. It's not wholly realistic – you can't really simulate a bunker shot well – but my typical late-round slice off the tee kicked in, and also just like real golf I became quite frustrated by about the 16th hole! Plus with no heat stroke or sunburn to worry about, no lost golf balls, and an attendant who continually brought us drinks and snacks, I think my screen golf experience was a big win!

Getting after it in our own private karaoke lounge

Finally, I celebrated my 30th birthday on Saturday. Celebrating a birthday in a new place can be hard as you aren't able to ring in the special day with many of your old friends. That said, I had a delightful evening with many of my new Samsung colleagues. We went "Gangnam Style", partying in the now-famous Gangnam district in Seoul. Though we ate Turkish food for dinner and strangely did not guzzle any soju, we were able to introduce some Korean flair to the festivities with a late-night visit to a karaoke room! (노래방, or norebang in Korean) With all the new experiences of the past three weeks the gravity of the end of my 20's hasn't really sunk in, but being a little older may work to my advantage in Korea, a place still heavily influenced by Confucian principles.

Finding My Way Around

It has been two weeks now since I landed in Seoul, and the wildly unfamiliar here is slowly starting to become familiar. Everyday activities like riding public transit, ordering food in a restaurant, and using my hotel gym are becoming easier. Now that (fingers-crossed) I'm done with my apartment search, I've had a little time to study the Korean character set, which I can almost fully read by now, although at about a two-year-old's pace! Still, it's nice being able to go into a restaurant without an English menu and know the difference between 불고기 (bulgogi) and 김치 (kimchi). I still don't know most of the Korean food names, though.

With my newfound free time, I've tried to take the opportunity to explore Seoul. The August weather here, unfortunately, has decided not to cooperate – rain has fallen almost every day for the last week or so. This was not totally unexpected...over half of Seoul's annual precipitation falls in July and August...but still frustrating. I have been getting a little stir-crazy on days when I'm waiting for the rain to clear, and the umbrella I brought to Korea has already broken from overuse. The umbrella survived two years in Charlottesville, but not two weeks in summertime Seoul!

Lots of old tanks and planes sit outside the War Memorial of Korea

Museums have been a good use of rainy afternoons. The War Memorial of Korea was particularly interesting...I learned about the history of the Korean War on a guided tour from an elderly man who was a refugee during that war and then later fought alongside the US forces in Vietnam. The National Museum of Korea is immense and details the entire history of people on the Korean Peninsula, all the way back to the Stone Age.

Gwanghwamun Square

I also have enjoyed walking around neighborhoods in between rain showers. My favorite areas now are in the older part of Seoul north of the Han River. The Insadong area is a lovely pedestrian mall full of small art galleries, craft shops, and tasty restaurants. Myeongdong is a packed shopping district. The Cheonggyecheon is a neat urban stream reconstructed recently through the center of the city. This leads to Gwanghwamun Square, Seoul's equivalent of DC's national mall, with a magnificent statue of King Sejong the Great leading to the Blue House (Korea's presidential residence) and the grand Gyeongbokgung Palace. And I love the Hongdae nightlife...a university area with outdoor performances from Korean indie bands and good cheap food.

South of the Han River is more modern, less touristy and more glitzy. Apgujeongdong has all the finest luxury brands I probably never will buy (Hermes, Louis Vuitton, etc.) and nice little boutiques off the main strip. The massive COEX mall is all underground and feels like a casino – no windows, no clocks, no clear way out. The Gangnam Station area, where Samsung Electronics headquarters is located, brings to life the frenetic, neon-glow image that many have of East Asia.

I've met some of my new Samsung colleagues thus far but still have many more to see. Next week, I will be taking intense afternoon Korean language classes, which should help to solve some of my difficulties with the basic language and introduce me to more of my new coworkers. I'm ready to get started.