And with your help, I'll get that chicken

Fourteen even better places to visit in Seoul (with pictures!)

2012-02-12T18:05:00.010+09:00

Roboseyo recently wrote about five places to visit in Seoul that are not the typical touristy places. As I prepare to move out of Seoul and back into suburban Gyeonggi-do, here are some of the places I've loved visiting over and over during the two years I've lived in Seoul. I will no doubt keep on returning to these places.

The list is not in any particular order, though I've grouped them by neighbourhood to give a vague sense of itinerary.

1. Visit Deoksugung, especially at night, for the lit-up Daehanmun, the quiet and the crowds. Deoksugung is the dimunitive member of Seoul's five palaces, but it is where the Joseon dynasty lived out its final years. The Western buildings inside bear testament to a Korea that tried, without avail, to modernize. Get out at City Hall station, exit 2.

Daehanmun, the entrance to Deoksugung, at night.

While you're there, consider dinner at Deoksujeong around the corner from Deoksugung. They serve typical jjigae dishes, but also fish and galbi. For a very serious neighbourhood, it's an inexpensive, boisterous and tasty meal.

Another option is coffee at the Sogong-dong Starbucks, an exceptionally wide location that's mostly quiet and empty in the evenings. This location has Korean-style architecture, historical plaques on the inside and many soft leather couches.

2. Another favourite of mine is Oori Bunsik and the Good News Cafe at the bottom of Namsan, both quiet places with good food. Oori Bunsik, which seats about 16 people, is especially nice on cold days. It serves typical Korean food (rice, jjigae) but closes at 8 and will stop serving one of rice or noodle by 7:30. Have a cafe and a waffle at the Good News Cafe next door. The location is tricky if you've never been there, but you want to take the bus to the Yongsan Library, the top of which is on the main road, and get off at its ground floor, which is on the bottom of a side road.

3. The Gwanghwamun location of Kyobo Books is another favourite of mine, considering that you can eat, shop and read there for hours. They have a large selection of English-language books, though as is the case elsewhere, it's biased in favour of new releases and classics. Gwanghwamun is also a great place to relax at night, assuming that it's not lined by riot police. Get off at Gwanghwamun station on line 5 or Jonggak station on line 1.

3. If you've already been to Bukhansan or simply don't want to go to the top, try the dullegil, which is a 70-km route that circles the mountain. It's not a very strenuous hike and you'll see many hidden-away restaurants on the way, though your challenge might be covering enough distance to get back to civilization before dark. I personally recommend the Uiryeong-gil section that bisects the route, though if you're not a Korean nor with one, you'll need to make reservations about a week in advance.

4. If you're looking for a cafe that serves good, strong coffee but isn't a chain and is in fact nicer than a chian, check out Caffe Themselves (the misspelling is Italian, I'm told) by Jongno-3-ga. They have great coffee, great desserts and baristas who wear ties with their collars in the style of the early twentieth-century. I have chose Neville Chamberlain as my example, for some reason.

Nearby is Potala, a Tibetan restaurant that also has some Indian, Nepali and Chinese dishes. It's owned by a man from Tibet and functions as a meeting place for Korean Buddhists, activists and other people who are countercultural enough to grow facial hair.

5. In the ethnic food category, we have New Delhi with locations at Gangnam, Hyehwa and Kyung Hee University, Uzbek food at Samarkand (locations at Anam and Dongdaemun), and great Chinese food with Xinjiang-style skewers at Oedae Lamb Skewers (walk out of exit one of HUFS station, its above the Olive Young).

Gobble 'n' Go in Apgujeong is not ethnic, serving great burgers, fries and chili, but it's a nice, quiet place south of the river and everything I mentioned is north of the river.

I hate losing even more than I hate winning

2012-02-07T12:28:00.003+09:00

I was wrong about this Super Bowl, but gladly so. I sank to 6-5 in this playoff season, making me slightly better than random chance, though considering that there are 11 playoff games, I don't know if 5.5 wins are possible. Many people, students included, asked me who I cheered for, but the truth, of course, is that I cheered against the Patriots. I like watching the Giants play, especially their defensive line, but I wouldn't necessarily say I always cheer for them. I am amused, however, that Eli Manning has now won two Super Bowls.

That's two wins by a total of seven points, which hardly inspires confidence, but that is what many people said (and still say) about Tom Brady's three Super Bowl wins, which were by a combined nine points. There are fewer people who challenge Brady's credentials because he has since gone on to put up the sort of irrelevant regular-season statistics that turn people like Peyton Manning and Dan Marino into such curiosities.

As untouchable as the Patriots were in those years, when they won ugly, with championship teams made up of spare parts (Tom Brady being one, initially) and receivers playing defense, they have become the sort of regular season paper tiger that the Colts have been for so long. Consider this run of playoff appearances after the last Patriots Super Bowl win seven years ago:

2005 playoffs - opened with a 28-3 win in the wild card round, lost 27-13 to the Broncos on the road
2006 playoffs - beat the Jets in the first round, squeaked by the Chargers thanks to Marty Schottenheimer's loss aversion, and then blew a 21-3 lead to the Colts in the AFC championship game
2007 playoffs - started off 18-0, then blew a 14-10 lead in the final minute of the Super Bowl
2008 playoffs - did not appear
2009 playoffs - routed 33-14 at home by the Ravens in the wild card round
2010 playoffs - got a bye, lost 28-21 at home to the loud-mouthed Jets in the second round
2011 playoffs - beat the hapless Broncos 45-10, squeaked by the Ravens on a dropped touchdown and inexplicably missed field goal, blew a 17-15 lead in the last minute of the Super Bowl

At some point, a pattern would start to emerge, as counter-intuitive as it is. Just like the Colts of the past decade, who could have won every regular season game by five touchdowns, but still lost 21-20 to the Chargers at home, the Patriots just can't seem to win when it counts. Or, more likely, someone just happens to be better. It's not the Patriots don't have talent, they have far more of it than they did when they won the Super Bowl, but it just hasn't been working out, no matter how explosive the offense gets.

Bill Belichick is acknowledged as the best coach in the league for thinking about the game in a way that makes other coaches fuzzy-headed. Not only does he play aggressive, but he's always playing, making adjustments when his competitors are content to let their teams play on using an existing strategy that's not working. He has played a significant role in normalizing the shotgun and multi-receiver sets on first and second downs, in any situation.

On the surface, just as he seems to get best at what he does, leading his teams to 16-0 and 14-2 seasons, he seems to get worst, losing both times in the Super Bowl. What's maybe more likely is that while the 16-0 team was a fantastic team, it simply met its match in the Giants that day. This time was probably not as good as it seemed, considering the way it played against teams with a winning record. Wins over the Broncos (9-8 when they met) and the Ravens were the only ones they recorded all year, but I wouldn't really count the Broncos as a winning team and the Ravens just barely lost.

How to fix the biggest problem we have in Canada and America

2012-01-29T16:54:00.003+09:00

I've felt for a long time, though I'm not sure if I've said it here, that the biggest problem facing Canada, and especially America, is the increasing inability of people without professional degrees or even any sort of post-secondary education at all, to earn a middle-class living.

While it has become quite fashionable to declare that economies in the West are moribund, or that there are no more jobs, the reality is that those with university degrees, particularly those with degrees that are essentially vocational training, are living as well as ever. Those without, however, are living worse than they have in a long time. As Don Peck wrote when looking at America's middle class in September's Atlantic:

America’s classes are separating and changing. A tiny elite continues to float up and away from everyone else. Below it, suspended, sits what might be thought of as the professional middle class—unexceptional college graduates for whom the arrow of fortune points mostly sideways, and an upper tier of college graduates and postgraduates for whom it points progressively upward, but not spectacularly so. The professional middle class has grown anxious since the crash, and not without reason. Yet these anxieties should not distract us from a second, more important, cleavage in American society—the one between college graduates and everyone else.

If you live and work in the professional communities of Boston or Seattle or Washington, D.C., it is easy to forget that nationwide, even among people ages 25 to 34, college graduates make up only about 30 percent of the population. And it is easy to forget that a family income of $113,000 in 2009 would have put you in the 80th income percentile nationally. The true center of American society has always been its nonprofessionals—high-school graduates who didn’t go on to get a bachelor’s degree make up 58 percent of the adult population. And as manufacturing jobs and semiskilled office positions disappear, much of this vast, nonprofessional middle class is drifting downward.

In Saturday's Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente asks the question, "have we become a caste society?" Wente is somewhat out-of-touch, though it often appears to be intentional. This time, for example, she wrote that being part of the richest one percent "doesn’t take all that much money. A family income of $196,000 will do it."

However, Wente is spot on with the thrust of the article, which is that:

Today, the top 20 per cent and the bottom 20 per cent seldom cross paths (except at Tim Hortons). They raise their kids in different ways, send them to different schools, eat different kinds of food, choose different forms of exercise and recreation, take different kinds of vacations. The top 20 per cent include virtually all of the people who run our governments, manage our businesses and set our social policies. But fewer and fewer of them know anybody in the bottom 20 per cent, or have much idea of how they think and live.

She is also correct in saying that: "The trouble is, solutions are hard to come by. Raising taxes on the rich might be a good thing, but it won’t narrow the gap. So what will? Some people want massive investment in early childhood education for disadvantaged kids. Some want massive job-creation programs, or a massive increase in training for the unskilled. Such solutions would need vast amounts of public money, but maybe they’d be worth it."

The likely solution, which is really not a grand solution at all, but probably the only sensible one, comes from Adam Davidson in this month's Atlantic. Davidson looked at how a factory in South Carolina could manage to stay in business against the seemingly inevitable outflow of manufacturing jobs overseas, especially to China. He found that the jobs that stay are jobs in what is, essentially, skilled manufacturing. A great number of these skilled jobs can be found in Germany, Taiwan, and, yes, here in South Korea.

Davidson concludes that there really is no solution besides education and, more importantly, fixing all the other problems that cause people to be unemployed.

"It’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances would reverse recent trends and bring large numbers of jobs for unskilled laborers back to the U.S. Our efforts might be more fruitfully focused on getting Maddie the education she needs for a better shot at a decent living in the years to come. Subsidized job-training programs tend to be fairly popular among Democrats and Republicans, and certainly benefit some people. But these programs suffer from all the ills in our education system; opportunities go, disproportionately, to those who already have initiative, intelligence, and—not least—family support

...

To solve all the problems that keep people from acquiring skills would require tackling the toughest issues our country faces: a broken educational system, teen pregnancy, drug use, racial discrimination, a fractured political culture.."

Aristotle and the agony of defeat

2012-01-24T23:05:00.004+09:00

The video below is cheesy and dramatic, of course, but I found it illuminating. The very act of letting your emotions rise and fall on the performances of a sports team is cheesy and dramatic to begin with, so let's check that part of our brain at the door.

TV only shows the winners: winning quarterback and coaches are interviewed, as are those who make plays for the winning team. After conference championships and the Super Bowl, we see the winning teams celebrating, but we never see the losing team sitting around dejected, filing into the locker room and going home. We almost never see dejected fans sitting in the stands, which makes this commercial a fresh image, to me at least.

This weekend, of course, was full of tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, though certainly not the way the term is conventionally used. Aristotle wrote that tragedy is about the reversal of fortunes, when a great person suffers a misfortune. Certainly, Billy Cundiff's field goal is one such reversal of fortune, made more acute by the fact that a 32-yard field goal has about a 90% chance of success.

Kyle Williams had a more dramatic reversal of fortune. It's one thing to miss a field goal, but it's another to fumble a punt, still another to do it twice in the same game, and it's even more crushing to do so in a playoff game. Williams, sadly, received death threats on Twitter, perplexing considering that these are people who willingly spent time watching him on TV and then, like an deranged puppy, turned on their master.

If you are a fan of the 49ers and Ravens, my high-minded appeal to Aristotle and literary philosophy might not do much to salve your wounds, but that's exactly the point. Defeat is every bit a part of sports as victory, but one that seldom gets attention, except perhaps in the cities and countries where it happens. Sports is obsessed with winning and winners, but dramatic, agonizing defeat is every bit the spectacle that is victory, in some ways moreso.

I split this week's games to move my record to 6-4. As much as I hate the Patriots, and as well as I think the Giants are wearing, I think the Patriots are simply more likely to win. I would not be surprised in any way if the Giants won, but this game is just as likely to be a three-touchdown victory for either team (okay, moreso for the Patriots) as it is a tense, close game.

Remember defense? It's back, in football form!

2012-01-18T01:33:00.004+09:00

Just two weeks after Gregg Easterbrook pointed out that the two best teams in each conference had the two worst defense in the league (Packers 32nd, Patriots 31st), defense made a comeback in big way, reminding us that while defense might not necessarily win championships, it can certainly win games.

The Ravens and the 49ers are two of the best defenses in the league and while the Giants have had a so-so year, it's hard to miss that their defense played a huge role in defeating the Packers. The Ravens won with just 228 yards of offense and three points in the last three quarters, though they have long been the perfect example of why strong offenses with mediocre defenses go farther than strong defenses with mediocre offenses. In the last 13 seasons, the Ravens have ranked outside the top 10 in fewest yards allowed just once (2002), and have ranked third or better eight times.

In that time, however, they've watched as the rival Patriots and Steelers have won a combined five Super Bowls. This probably has something to do with the fact that the Ravens haven't ranked in the top 10 for yards gained since 1997, back when their high-flying ways led one football writer to teach me the term 'oxymoron', as in "Biggest oxymoron in fooball: Baltimore Ravens defense." Of course, if you look through the rankings for most yards gained, you'd be amazed at which offenses rank highly and which don't.

Nevertheless, this just might be the Ravens year, though this week's performance makes it hard to see how they'd get past the Patriots next week. The Broncos were a cream puff to be sure, with an emphasis on puff, but a team like the Ravens is usually good enough to lose to the Patriots by a touchdown. Their drubbing of the Patriots in the playoffs two years ago will give them confidence, but the game will probably be determined by whether the Ravens have the presence of mind, and the talent, to cover the Patriots' tight ends.

The Patriots are getting healthier and better on defense, though a lot of their supposed rejuvenation was the result of playing Tim Tebow, who clearly showed that he's not anyone's long-term answer at quarterback. Quarterbacks who are likely to be elite at the professional level don't look that bad, they look shaky like Cam Newton has seemed shaky. Of course, Tebow, like so many other quarterbacks (Vince Young is 30-19 as a starter) who made careers out of someone in the front office believing in them despite a lack of talent, will be back next year and will certainly play a few more years before a consensus finally develops that he was useless.

The Giants-49ers game, too, is the result of great defense, sort of. While the Giants' defensive performance was lauded for humbling the 15-1 Packers, let's not forget that they scored 37 points. That's one more than the 49ers, who have one of the best defenses in the league, but needed (and got) 36 points to beat the Saints. The Giants pose a lot of problems for any team when playing well, due to their strong front four and cornerbacks who can play man coverage, but when they're bad, they're atrocious. The 49ers have been more consistent on offense as well as on defense, and they're also playing at home.

I pick the 49ers and the Patriots to meet in the Super Bowl. I was 2-2 last week, giving me a playoff record of 5-3. That looks good, until you consider that picking home teams alone would get you to 7-1, which admittedly is as good as home teams have had it in 20 years.

If this is failure, more of us ought to fail

2012-01-11T00:18:00.003+09:00

About a year ago, I wrote about how sources outside Japan describing a country in decline clash jarringly with the reality of life in the country. Writing about this myth is becoming more prevalent, in part because Americans are fearful of a "lost decade" of minimal economic growth of their own, and partly because people with knowledge of the situation are eager to tell the truth. I find the story interesting because it shows that it's possible for us to live well and prove it in ways that aren't growth in GDP.

The reason is very simple: what if life is just good? Expecting the good life and happiness to come from growth, and to refer to the absence of growth as decline or stagnation, is to hold that life isn't all that great right now. Naturally, we want the economy to grow since populations almost invariably grow, but if you were living well five years ago, you're probably living well right now if everything has stayed the same, and in Japan it has stayed the same at the very least.

Eamonn Fingleton moved to Tokyo a quarter century ago, but anyone who spends even an hour in central Tokyo or Osaka could figure out that Japan isn't exactly a country you need to pity. Fingleton in fact goes on to write: "In the fullness of time, it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story."

Life in Japan is not only great, but it has improved since before the stock market crash of the early '90s. However, Fingleton asks, "how do you express this in G.D.P. terms?" He gives countless examples, of which the most interesting are:

- From 1989 to 2009, despite a worsening diet, Japan's life expectancy improved by 4.2 years.

- Of the 50 cities in the world with the fastest Internet, 38 are in Japan. The fastest Internet service in the world is apparently in Daegu.

- Tokyo has 16 fancy restaurants according to the Michelin Guide compared to 10 for Paris.

- Cell phones, infrastructure, and fashion also show Japan doing as well as anywhere else in the world.

- Even the idea of Japan's stagnant growth is not entirely true. Japan's GDP per capita grew at just 1 percent annually in the last two decades, but then, America grew at about 1.4%.

All this points to the limitations of GDP as an indicator of well-being. It's a good indicator, to be sure, as any American could have told you when the economy was shrinking, but there's a lot more to living well than just money. What that actually entails can often be nebulous, but thinking about the answer is a good start in and of itself.

Japan is not without its problems. It has a horrendously inefficient political system that in many ways does not deserve to be called a democracy, but then, we could say that about America, Korea and many if not most other democracies. It is something of a odd-man out when considering technology, with a great deal of triplicate paperwork and stamping going on. None of this, of course, even mentions the favourite by-the-numbers issue of outsiders, the low birth rate.

All in all, if you were going to choose to live in a developed country, you could do far worse than Japan. It's clean, the streets are safe, the landscape is beautiful, and the cities are exciting and vibrant. Going to Japan would certainly disabuse anyone from writing the sort of depressing article I see constantly in the press, so I wonder if many of the people who write about Japan in English have ever actually been there. For those who live there, well, anybody can sound depressed about the place where they live.

Well, that was obvious

2012-01-09T13:07:00.002+09:00

All four home teams won in the playoffs this week, which makes it one of the easiest calls in sports. I picked three home teams to win, choosing the Texans, Saints and Giants, but I just couldn't see the 8-8 Broncos beating the 12-4 Steelers. In the event, of course, the Broncos played probably their best game of the season. Combined with the injuries the Steelers had not just to Ben Roethlisberger, but also Rasheed Mendenhall, Brent Kiesel and Casey Hampton, the Broncos could have turned the game into a rout.

Up 20-6, the Broncos threw an obvious lateral and recovered by the Steelers at the Bronco's 18 or so. However, an official ruled it a incompletion and blew the whistle as the ball came out, meaning that only the incompletion could be challenged. That, along with two field goals the Broncos kicked from inside the Steelers' ten-yard line, meant that the Broncos had the chance to score as many 21 points. The Steelers, meanwhile went on to close the gap to 20-13 when it could just as easily have been 27-6.

In the end, the game went to overtime, but the score could have been far more lop-sided. The Broncos did a great job on defense, particularly with their pass rush, where they earned five sacks and produced rushed, awkward throws from Ben Roethlisberger (one interception deep in the Steelers' end was undone by an unrelated offside). As for Tebow, who I belittled all year, the Steelers were the one team that couldn't do what three teams in a row had done: dare Tebow to throw the ball and reap the benefits.

This time, the Steelers stunk it up on man coverage, the Broncos receivers had sticky hands all of a sudden, which explains how Tebow completed just five passes in the first half for 185 yards, four in the second half for 51, and one in overtime for 80 yards. Altogether he was 10 of 21 for 316 yards, throwing for two touchdowns and running for another. Completions of 51, 30, 58, 40 and 80 yards shredded Pittsburgh and almost turned the game into a rout, but I don't know that relying on the deep ball is a path to success in the NFL. Granted, lots of teams throw the ball deep, but those teams also have quarterbacks who can complete more than half their passes.

Today, at least, Tebow had the league figured out than the other way around. It likely won't work in the long run considering how successful the Patriots, Bills and Chiefs were in containing Tebow, but it's working at the moment. As much as I'd like this line of attack to work against the Patriots, who had the second-worst defense in the league by about eight yards, I have my reservations. The Broncos are a problematic match-up if they can get pressure on Brady and outrun the Patriot corners, but I think more likely than not, we'll see a game similar to the regular-season match-up just a few weeks ago.

My other picks are the Packers, Saints and Ravens. I was 3-1 this week.

First-round NFL playoff predictions

2012-01-08T05:55:00.002+09:00

I had planned some sort of elaborate scheme involving which team's colours my two-month-old nephew preferred, much like the time I used a 500-yen coin to do the same, but we're out of time and he's sleeping. Instead, I'll share my crappy record at predicting playoff games in recent years while lamenting once again that, once upon a time when I was 11 years old, I predicted all but one game correctly in the NFL playoffs. The only one I got wrong? When the Giants blew a 9-point lead at home with less than 2 minutes to go.

I was 4-7 two years ago and 5-6 last year. This year, I will be better than random chance. For this week, I predict, without explanation, the Texans, Saints, Giants and Steelers.

Are independent bookstores really that important?

2012-01-07T06:02:00.002+09:00

When I read that Toronto's oldest independent bookstore was set to close, my first reaction was that it was also the world's biggest bookstore, or maybe one of those places in the Annex. I was wrong, of course, because the answer is The Bookmark on Bloor West in the Kingsway, which has been open for 47 years. My second reaction was to remember Slate's recent look at independent bookstore, where Farhad Manjoo wrote:

Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. A physical store—whether it’s your favorite indie or the humongous Barnes & Noble at the mall—offers a relatively paltry selection, no customer reviews, no reliable way to find what you’re looking for, and a dubious recommendations engine.

...

It’s not just that bookstores are difficult to use. They’re economically inefficient, too. Rent, utilities, and a brigade of book-reading workers aren’t cheap, so the only way for bookstores to stay afloat is to sell items at a huge markup...At many local stores, most titles—even new releases—usually go for list price, which means $35 for hardcovers and $9 to $15 for paperbacks. That’s not slightly more than Amazon charges—at Amazon, you can usually save a staggering 30 to 50 percent. In other words, for the price you’d pay for one book at your indie, you could buy two.

In response, Will Doig at Salon dismissed Manjoo's argument as "so paint-by-numbers counterintuitive that it almost reads as a parody of a Slate piece":

Manjoo’s argument that bookstores don’t really foster a local literary culture wildly misses the point. They foster a local culture, period. Bookstores provide a space to meet friends, cruise for a date, and hide out when you have nothing to do on a Saturday night. They provide a small slice of intellectual development in a retail landscape that’s otherwise dominated by denim, cupcakes and facial moisturizer. And they do so without asking much in return — just that we come in frequently, browse all we want, and occasionally buy a book at retail price. If people mythologize bookstores, that’s the reason. Rather than look for reasons why they shouldn’t be celebrated, you could just as easily ask why, even in the age of Amazon, they still are.

I enjoyed Majoo's takedown of independent bookstores, but I can't agree. While I'm not in love with independent bookstores, I never buy books online either. I'm aware that prices are cheaper online, but I buy books in person, either on impulse at the airport, or after thumbing through a few at a bookstore. I tend to shop at chain bookstores, which is all you get in Korea with the exception of a few tiny places that sell old, used or specialty (eg English-language, Christianity) books.

What bothers me about Doig's repsonse at Salon is that the functions he and others ascribe to bookstores likely only apply, for them, to independent bookstores. They might romanticize the third space of an independent bookstore where you can sit around doing nothing or to meet someone for coffee, but I suspect that the Starbucks or the chairs at a Chapters probably wouldn't meet with the same enthusiasm. There are other reasons, of course, but many people are uncomfortable with large businesses due to aesthetics.

Personally, I don't care. I used to go to an independent coffee shop in my neighbourhood in Seoul, but then I remembered how good Starbucks coffee is and now I go there (cue the part where someone says that Starbucks coffee isn't 'real coffee' and that real coffee can only be found in some obscure place like...). I regularly go to bookstores in Seoul, usually the Kyobo Books location at Gwanghwamun. I pass about four bookstores on the way, all of which are chains, but I prefer Kyobo because it has the largest selection and also because I like its location next to Gwanghwamun.

Kyobo Books isn't just a chain, it's owned in turn by a large insurance company of the same name. It has a selection of English-language books on philosophy that's easily bigger than the selection you'll see in any Western store. I find, though, that like any English-language bookstore in Korea, it has a heavy tilt towards books about business or economics, as well as best-selling paperback novels.

At any rate, you could easily spend an entire evening at Kyobo, as I certainly have, many times. You could start with dinner in its food court, then get a coffee and walk through the bookstore. At some point you can just get a book and start reading, or just sit down, either on the floor or on a chair, to talk. You'll probably find, like any other public space in Seoul, that it's hard to find a seat. Nevertheless, Kyobo certainly fulfills most of the functions fulfilled by any of the bookstore, except that it lacks indie cred.

Of course, indie cred is mercifully meaningless in Korea, so Kyobo also has a website, which lets you order books from the website to be picked up in the bookstore an hour later. You could technically do the same from the bookstore: find a book you like, use your phone or a computer in the electronics section to order it online, and then wait an hour to pick up your book with a discount.

I have been to many independent bookstores in Toronto and, with the exception of the used-book stores on Yonge Street, I found them uncomfortable and not very useful. Books are hard to find, they're expensive and the community aspect works best if you're very liberal and a certain kind of liberal at that. The problem ultimately is that, with the exceptions of the largest ones like Kyobo or preferably Amazon, only carry what people want to buy.

Beijing censorship update

2012-01-05T19:07:00.001+09:00

Facebook, of course, does not work, neither do Twitter or Blogger, at least not the websites. Google works, as do sensitive searches (Tiananmen Square protests, Dalai Lama), but their results won't load. Doing so appears to have caused Google search to crash entirely. The New York Times website loads.

I'm going to go before I get arrested.

Slow times at Beijing International

2012-01-05T19:00:00.001+09:00

Because I was bored, I threw away my dignity and allowed my passport to be scanned in exchange for free wireless access at the Beijing airport. Hence, I can complain, albeit with some hypocrisy for my complicity in the process, about the Kafkan process of transferring in airport that was neither designed to accept international passengers, nor does it want them. The experience, as I learned in Shanghai almost a year ago to the day, varies widely, and it varied this time as well, but it's ad hoc, bizarre and annoying.

For example, the arrival card that I needed in Shanghai but not in Beijing (naturally, I was given one on the plane in Beijing, but not Shanghai), allows "visit", "visiting friends or relatives", and "sightseeing/in leisure" as a purpose of visit. Also included are "return home", "settle down" and "others", which I hope make more sense in Chinese than they do in English. However, transferring is not an option, so it makes sense that they've waived this requirement.

The airport itself, which seems grotesquely oversized despite what anyone might tell you, since I've always breezed through when not transferring, has gotten more formal. There are still the crappy "duty free" shops selling items you might find at a chain convenience store anywhere else in the outside world (China being no exception), but the restaurants seem to be getting better. I see a Starbucks and a Pizza Hut where I didn't see one last year, and the number of extortionist cafes selling $5 instant coffee seems to have gone down.

Still, it's more or less a case of buying new furniture for the deck of the Titanic. China is increasingly becoming an attractive destination to transfer, going from invisible to relatively common, but you really do give up your dignity when you come through this airport. I still think it's preferable to going through Narita, which says something about how unpleasant that airport is, but the shopping options are limited and overpriced, the food is awful, costs between two and five times what it does elsewhere, and it's remarkably hard to find something in this airport that was designed for human consumption. China must truly be pulling out all the stops in prices to get people to come here, though to be fair, you might have to look at its competitors.

For a flight going from Seoul to Toronto or vice versa, the three most common layovers in my experience have been Beijing, Tokyo and Vancouver. I hate transferring in Canada, America or Japan it's like going through the entire paranoid security theatre process again. Yes, that's right, Canada, America and Japan are out-paranoid-ing the Chinese Communist Party. When you have a stopover in, say, Minneapolis, you have to go through US customs, collect your checked luggage, check it, and then go through security one more time so that they can dig up the empty bottle of water you bought after your previous liquid bogeyman check. Beijing, on the other hand, does have liquid bogeyman check for transferring passengers, but spares them the ordeal of collecting their luggage just to re-check it.

As for the city itself, the fog, smog, pollution or whatever you want to call is thick today. The city was invisible until a comparatively low altitude, and it didn't just become visible, but it was a blurry mess once the plane went under the clouds. When the Asiana flight landed, the trees at the other end of the runway (1-3 km?) weren't entirely visible. Data from the US embassy here puts the air quality index at 163, which is in the "unhealthy" range of 150-200 according to the EPA, and is far beyond the 0-50 range that is considered good, though it's hardly at the "crazy bad" levels that have generated so much controversy.

What I've always found remarkable for this airport, perhaps unique in any airport I've been to, is the gap between the building and the people. Granted, there are bad airports in nice places, but I think there are few airports that are as spotless as this one, with employees that are as coarse. You will seldom find anybody who speaks even broken English, and you will know this because they will say "okay, yes, okay" midway through a question like "do you have any--". Employees match a North American airport for their causal approach to their job which, in essence, amounts to being a public menace of sort, one that has probably wasted enough money and person hours to be considered a terrorist unto themselves.

I think anyone who has ever been here will know that the best people are the ones who don't speak English, whether you're in the airport or outside of it. I've been openly hostile to anybody who tries to start a conversation in English, and I know that I'm not the only one. One common point between them is that they seek to part you with your money, whether it's through a rickshaw ride or tea ceremony near Tiananmen Square or a $5 bottle of water at the airport. Naturally, there are far better opportunities for anyone who speaks conversational English than to be a cashier selling $90 t-shirts from a no-name brand at a "duty free", which is why we get the people that we do at the airport. More than other cities, then, Beijing is one that should only be experienced far, far from the airport.

"This is the governor, what is your name?"

2012-01-05T07:11:00.000+09:00

Sometimes, I think that at least some politicians are paid off by comedians to act like complete morons and be recorded as doing so. The latest case of this is the governor of Gyeonggi province, Kim Mun-su, who took it upon himself to see how cancer patients were transferred in his province by directly calling 119 (Korea's equivalent of 911). The conversation, which unfortunately is not subtitled but is hilarious if you can understand even a little Korean (도지사 means governor). The call went something like this:

Operator: "Hello?"
Kim: "Yes, this is the governor, Kim Mun-su."
Kim: "Hello? Hello? Hello?"
Operator: "Yes, go ahead."
Kim: "This is is governor Kim Mun-su, who am I speaking to?"
Kim: "Hello? Hello?"
Operator: "Yes, what is the reason for your call?"
Kim: "This is the governor, what is your name?"
Operator: "Sir, what is the reason for your call?"

Finally, Kim snaps, quite rudely, I thought, "I asked you for your name, why didn't you answer?" and "I said I was the governor, didn't you hear that?" To this, the operator asks Kim for his emergency, pointing out that he hasn't exactly called the operator on his cell phone. Kim, obtuse and arrogant, says in banmal, "no, the governor called and asked you for your name, you're not going to answer?" The operator asks again for the emergency and Kim responds with another moronic grunt, asks for the operator's name once more, before the operator hangs up.

Incredibly, Kim calls back at around 2:00 in the clip and repeats the same line of inquiry: "Yeah, this is the governor, is this the same person I spoke to earlier?" The guy gives his name, but asks for Kim's emergency, to which he responds, of course, that he is the governor. The operator says, "right, I understand," and Kim finally just hangs up.

Amazingly, Kim's delusional power trip didn't end at this. After Kim complained to the fire department, both operators (actual firefighters rather than operators) were transferred. When this became public, the fury was enough to shut down the provincial government's website. Eventually the transfer was reversed and Kim made a visit to the fire station in question.

Both officers apologized to the governor both for prematurely judging the governor's call to be a prank call and for ignoring the regulation that states that they are required to give their name when answering a call. Of course, the law also states that prank calls to 119 are punishable by a fine of 2 million won (about $2,000), but we already know that the law doesn't apply to powerful people.

Netizens naturally had a field day with Kim and made countless parodies of this phone call. My favourite is this one that mixes Kim with a clip of the recently-jailed Jeong Bong-ju swearing at the person on the other end.

Catching the first sunrise of the new year in Jeongdongjin

2012-01-04T09:09:00.000+09:00

Ever since Andy first mentioned it, I've always wanted to take the train over the Taebaek mountain range in Gangwon-do, especially in the winter. As well, I often walk through the lonely lobby of the Cheongnyangni train station and notice the sparse crowds lined up to take an infrequent train to destinations you have never heard of. The problem, of course, is that as nice as the train is, there's not a whole lot to do in Gangneung after the summer. Gangwon-do, of course, is a great place to hike, but I wasn't quite in the mood for a death hike through feet of snow on deserted mountains.

Enter Jeongdongjin: isolated, beautiful, accessible. Ever since it was featured in a scene in a drama over fifteen years ago, it has acquired a cult following. The name Jeongdongjin (正东津) itself is rather interesting: it was named as the farthest point due east (正东) of Gwanghwamun, though subsequent study has shown that it's actually due east of Dobongsan. Whatever the case, Jeongdongjin makes for a stunning location.

The train station at Jeongdongjin is on the trip from Seoul, which technically runs on parts of three lines (the Jungang, Taebaek and Yeongdong lines) and follows a meandering, indirect route to Seoul. Jeongdongjin is the second-last stop, and it makes for a dramatic introduction. You could, in fact, never leave the station and still go away impressed. The train stops about 10-20 metres from the station, with a narrow beach and barbed wire being all that separate the platform and its stadium seating from the sea.

However, Jeongdongjin has evolved in the way of all tourist spots, particularly ones with cult followings that attract an impossibly large number of tourists for a single shot. Hotels in Jeongdongjin and nearby Gangneung are sold out on New Year's Eve despite charging extortionate rates, and all trains going to Gangneung on December 30 or 31 are sold out about a week in advance. There is no shortage of hotels in the area, culminating in the Suncruise resort, a hideous monument to tastelessness that sends chills down my spine every time I look at it, and doubly so at night.

I ended up staying in Gangneung on New Year's Eve and took a train to Jeongdongjin in the morning. Barring a second Korean War, you will never see this many people pack a train departing from Gangwon-do at 6 am on a Sunday. Judging from the crowds and the traffic jams I saw, such as a 30-minute wait to have breakfast at a non-descript, randomly chosen restaurant at 6:30 am, I would guess that between 10,000 and 30,000 people came to Jeongdongjin to see the sunrise.

The sunrise itself was a bit disappointing. Those expecting to see a brilliant orange disk in the sky were sorely disappointed. Most of the crowds were gone before anything resembling the sun was visible in the sky. To give you an idea of how quickly the crowd disappeared after the sunrise of 7:40 am, there was a traffic jam as far as the eye could see by 8 am. By lunchtime, there was nobody left but locals and the piles of garbage left behind by tourist.

I got to spend an extra day in Jeongdongjin, having dinner as snow blew in and leaving by walking in 4-5 inches of fresh snow. As fantastic of a place as Jeongdongjin is, I wouldn't consider it attractive or even tolerable on New Year's Eve or the morning of New Year's Day. For me, the real highlight of the trip was the time I spent on its deserted two-lane main strip by the beach, smelling the wood fires and the train ride back home.

The trip from Gangneung to Cheongyangni takes six hours, compared to three hours or less by bus. Note that while train delays are rare and never more than ten or twenty minutes, the bus can easily be delayed by an hour or more. The train costs about 20,000 against 14,000 or so for the bus, but the train is definitely worth it, especially in the winter. It slowly travels down the sea coast from Gangneung to Donghae, past furious waves, barbed wire and empty beaches. I spotted a group of women on one beach being approached by a group of soldiers, having somehow negotiated the cliffs and the barbed wire on this beach in the middle of nowhere.

After Donghae, the train runs inland and creaks through the mountains of Gangwon-do, which here were snow-covered. Gangwon-do is probably Korea's poorest area, neither a good place to farm nor fortunate enough to receive the patronage of successive dictators that has transformed places like Pohang or Gumi. However, it is likely Korea's most beautiful, though I haven't spent much time on Jeju. The current trend towards opening up eastern Gyeonggi province and western Gangwon-do, the more mountainous part of the province, will probably make life better there, though it will make it the place little worse to look at.

Book #14: Mao's Great Famine

2012-01-03T18:53:00.003+09:00

I finished this book about a week ago, but writing about it had to wait until the new year. Reading 14 books this year puts me two above last year's two, though I thought that I had done a much better job of reading this year. Clearly, I was wrong. Nevertheless, things are clearly moving in the right direction, as the 'books' tag has become one of the more popular topics on this blog.

Mao's Great Famine is writen by Frank Dikotter, a professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong and professor of modern Chinese history at the University of London's School of Oriental and African studies. On the latter point, I'll concede that I had never heard of it before 2011 and thought it to be a rather racist-sounding degree mill at the time, when in fact it is one of the finest places to study in the world.

Dikotter places the blame directly on the actions undertaken by the Chinese government, which would be utterly comical if they hadn't produced quite possibly the single worst event in history. The book begins with a description of the political background that led China to undertake the Great Leap Forward. In the late 1950s, the USSR claimed that it would surpass the economy of the United States in fifteen years. By 1975, the per capita GDP of the US was $7500 against $3000 for the USSR.

Much of the impetus for the Great Leap Forward, Dikotter explains, is that Mao was ever-conscious, if not downright obsessed to the exclusion of reality, with his status in history. Eager to jockey for leadership of the communist world, he proclaimed that while the USSR surpassed America, China would surpass Great Britain. Judging Soviet socialism to be impure, he declared that China could do better and that it would progress from socialism to communism almost instantly. For those keeping score at home, Chinese GDP per capita stood at $92 in 1960 and progressed to $175 by 1975. In that same period, the British numbers went from $1382 to $4204.

The sort of political culture that Mao was creating domestically took what was essentially a delusional claim and bolstered it to the point that Mao's claim of surpassing Great Britain in fifteen years was ceaselessly revised down. Politicians who did not want to appear as anything less than enthusiastic declared Mao's ideas to not only be possible, but as likely, followed by imminent and inevitable. China would overtake Britain in a few years, they said, then Russia, and would pass even America within 20 years.

To do this, Mao claimed it was necessary to "unleash the masses". The idea that China's greatest resource was its large population is not entirely untrue, and it has played a part in making China a wealthier country today, though there's more to it than simply having hundreds millions of people willing to do work (why do factories locate in China but not India or Nigeria?). However, Mao held in their limitless potential and was hostile to expertise and intellect.

If what had transpired so far was delusional thinking of the highest order, what would transpire was horrifying on a scale that defies imagination and description. The masses were mobilized along military lines. The country was divided into communes. Possessions, from furniture and food to even sewing needles, were confiscated for a variety of purpose. Houses were demolished so that they could be used for fuel, fertilizer or to create metal in horrendously ill-conceived backyard furnaces.

With farms turned into communes that no one and everyone owned simultaneously, and with many of the farmers sent to work in urban factories, farming suffered. Compounding matters was the fact that the state promoted supposedly innovative farming techniques which produced crop failure after crop failure. This alone might not have produced catastrophe still, if China had not exported grain in this time. The exports, too, like the delusionally cheerful projections of parity with the United Kingdom, were ceaselessly revised up as local politicians lied about how much food they had actually produced.

The last component of the famine was the authoritarian state that the Communist Party produced, which gave out food in exchange for work, and only in exchange for work. Those who were sick, hurt, could not work as much as others, or completed even the slighest infraction were given less food, creating a vicious cycle that almost invariably ended with death. About eighty percent of those who starved to death had had food withheld for one reason or another.

In the end, Dikotter and other historians are left to compile a death toll. While records from the era are hard to come by and even harder to access, par for the course when dealing with a secretive dictatorship in what was then a country as poor as any other in the world, some counties kept detailed records. Rather than compile a a list of all those who died, an impossible task, it is easier to access provincial and local archives to consider the issue of excess deaths.

Most historians had put the death toll at between ten and forty million, hardly a paltry sum, but Dikotter uses evidence from party researchers to arrive at a minimum death toll of 45 million. This ranks not just Mao, but the Communist Party that continues to rule China and continues to be fiercely protective of its past, as guilty of the worst atrocity in history. This truth is worth bearing in mind when we start making equivalencies in international politics: if America has to answer for ceaseless interference in the affairs of foreign countries, and if China can be smug in noting that it hasn't baselessly invaded countries in the way of the Iraq war, America can politely note that it didn't cold-heartedly kill one out of every ten people in its own borders.

I feel nauseous

2011-12-25T23:28:00.003+09:00

There are three reasons why I feel nauseous right now. First, I am watching football in the condensed format that NFL Game Pass offers, turning each 3.5-hour bloated monstrosity of a football game, complete with cell phone ads, half-time interviews and repeated low-resolution replays of someone's knee touching the ground into a neat 40-minute package. However, it moves faster than what I'm used to and cuts out replays and explanations that I'd like to see. Most of all, I think I just saw about a dozen swings of momentum, points and possession in the span of three minutes in the Giants-Jets game.

This is what it looks like:

1. With 11 minutes to go, down 20-7, the Jets go for it on 4th-and-1. The pass is incomplete, but the Giants are guilty of pass interference. We already have two swings, as the Giants go from having possession to giving the Jets 27 yards.

2. Two plays later, the Jets score a touchdown, but Plaxico Burress is called for pass interference, putting them at 2nd-and-17.

3. On the repeat of the second down, Mark Sanchez fumbles, but the call is overturned.

4. The Jets manage to drive down the field and get to the Giants' 1, but Sanchez inexplicably fumbles the snap, which is recovered in the endzone, but by the Giants.

5. Eli Manning throws an interception on the first play of the drive, an odd passed that is tipped.

6. The Jets take over at the Giants' 11, the third huge break they've just caught, so naturally they proceed to shoot themselves in the foot with a holding call, pushing them back to the 21. On the next play, the ball comes out of Sanchez's hand and as there's no whistle, the Jets recover it back at the 38. However, the Jets successfully challenge and it's ruled an incomplete pass.

7. On a 3rd-and-12 play, Sanchez runs for 11 yards, but the Giants are called for defensive holding, resulting in a first down. Sanchez runs for a touchdown on the next play.

This was truly as repulsive, shoddy and nauseating a segment of football as I have ever seen. Comically, it was all for nought at the end.

To update my recent posts, the Chargers were blown out, effectively ending their playoff hopes. Tim Tebow was 13 of 13 with a touchdown and 4 interceptions, further indication that even the modest statistics he has accumulated are the result of cautious passing. In a less controlled environment where risks are required and the sample size is larger than six games, he seems to be struggling mightily with little to suggest improvement as a conventional passer in the future.

Who goes to jail in Korea?

2011-12-25T00:08:00.005+09:00

The striking thing about the case of Jeong Bong-ju, a former politician and current host of the wildly popular podcast Naggomsu, is not that he was found guilty or that he was convicted of violating a nebulous law, but that he's actually going to jail. Jeong was convicted this week of spreading false rumours in connection with a scandal that erupted four years ago when current president Lee Myung-bak was a candidate, and sentenced to a year in prison. To put it in American terms, this is a bit like John Hodgman or Wyatt Cenac going to jail for what they said on the Daily Show.

You see, nobody goes to jail in South Korea. You'd have to do something really stupid, over and beyond the obvious things that land you in jail, like steal millions of dollars, rape disabled children put under your charge, order the wholesale massacre of civilians, or intentionally burn down a national landmark. You'd have to do something really, really bad like spread false rumours. Let's do a quick rundown over some of the awful things you can do here that don't earn you any time behind bars, as well as some of the awful things you can do to earn a sentence as harsh as Jeong's.

Lee Kun-hee, chairman of Samsung Electronics - convicted of tax evasion for which the prosecution requested a seven-year sentence, given a three-year suspended sentence, which in turn became a pardon by the president, all so that Lee could help promote Korea's bid for the 2018 Olympics (the reason for the pardon is not a joke)

Kim, administrator at the Inhwa School for disabled students - sentenced to a year in jail, identical to Jeong, for the crime of raping six students between the ages of 7-20

Kim, principal at the same school - convicted of the same crime, received a suspended sentence

Chun Doo-hwan, former president - while effectively ruling the country as a general, hundreds of protesters were killed, along with many others over his eight-year dictatorship; for this, Chun received a death sentence that was commuted to, you guessed it, about a year in prison

These are just some of the famous cases, but let's go through the news to find what else you can get away with in this country:

A man received three years for beating his son to death

A man received a two-year suspended sentence for running a gambling website

An actor received a four-year suspended sentence for raping a 17-year-old girl

Six bus drivers received suspended sentences for sexually abusing a disabled, underaged passenger

Two employees of a bank received suspended sentences for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the bank

As you might be starting to figure out, it takes a very determined man to go to jail, or in this case, a man who displeased the president. I don't doubt that Jeong broke the law, but aside from the politicization of this case that led to his unusually harsh sentence, there's also the fact that there are so many laws in this country that are very vaguely worded. I bet it is impossible to find one person in this country who is not guilty of something. To give one example, that is personally relevant, I display my favourite, from the Korea Immigration Service:

"Foreigners are granted rights to any activities granted by their visa, and may stay as long as their given period of stay. They are not, however, allowed to participate in any political activities except when specifically allowed by law."

The official Korean, for any sticklers out there:

"외국인은 체류자격과 체류기간의 범위 내에서 체류할 수 있으며, 법률이 정하는 경우를 제외하고는 정치활동을 할 수 없습니다."

As I wrote in a question to Ask a Korean, himself no slouch with the law:

"I find that baffling. To me, it seems that it's intended to keep out troublemakers of some sort, especially the sort of professional protesters you get at the G20. My guess, however, would be that the regulation predates the G20.

Leaving aside whether there's any law that makes note of political activities in which a non-citizen may engage, except voting in some elections, doesn't this mean I could be deported for attending a "Dokdo is ours" rally? Supporting comfort women? Tuition fee protests? Writing an op-ed piece? Blogging?"

The response, which I hope he doesn't mind my posting here, seems to confirm the opacity of the law: "I think you just identified a potential law review article. It's an interesting question, but it will take some significant research to answer."

Why is Chinese so hard? Or, do you know how to spell the word 'sneeze'?

2011-12-24T00:38:00.000+09:00

David Moser from the University of Michigan has an excellent write-up that humourously but forcefully relieved me of my notion that Chinese was at all an easy language, particularly when we're discussing high-level or written proficiency. If you have even the slighest interest in China, languages or even learning anything, I promise that you'll enjoy reading what Moser wrote.

Whenever we discuss the complexities of English or Korean in the staff room, I always bring up Chinese as an easy language to learn for what, I suppose, are superficial reasons: verbs have no tenses, words are shorter, there is no honourific speech that Korean has, none of the weird superfluous words that English has, and it's easier to build simple sentences than it is with Korean or even English. Consider that if you can say "how are you?" in Chinese (ni hao ma), you've learned three important words (you, good, question indicator).

I wouldn't even consider myself a Chinese speaker, though I can have basic conversations, and manage to shop, eat and travel with some of the basic vocabulary you might pick up from introductory Chinese lessons in a variety of media. I also have an uncanny ability to read place names and signs with rules on them. Considering that I've studied Chinese using phrasebooks, subway announcements and the odd website, I think I'm doing alright. My strongest asset might not be the fact that I can say 我是加拿大人 ("I am Canadian"), but that I've never failed to be understood when I say it (that I might say it in response to "do you want fries with that?" is another story).

I think I've considered Chinese to be easy because I've managed, through more of a desire to speak basic Chinese than I ever had for Korean, to speak a few dozen well-rehearsed sentences. It might also be true that I've been enjoying the benefits afforded by low expectations (any Chinese I learn while traveling is really a bonus) and high practicality (you will never find an English-speaking hotel clerk in, say, rural Qinghai province). As well, it seems to be easier to learn a lot of Chinese in a short period of time, whereas I can't even explain how to say "how are you?" in Korean without giving a short speech about the culture and the language.

However, Moser makes it clear that beyond this basic proficiency, the road is absurdly hard. Coincidentally, the day I found this (about a month or two ago), I was explaining to a co-worker that you only need to know about 2,000 Chinese characters to be able to read a newspaper, adding that many characters are made by combining other characters, so that while 永 (forever) and 水 (water) are different characters, as are 王 (king), 玉 (jade), and 国 (country), learning the latter three is about as hard as learning the words hysteric, hysterical, and hysterically.

To this, the response is:

This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when you look at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones.4 But what such accounts don't tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't mean you know the word "uptight".)

And:

A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".

The bottom falls out when you move on to writing Chinese, which is something I never do and likely never will, with the possible exception of writing addresses, as I did when traveling to Xining in China's Qinghai province. It hadn't struck me that I had no way of writing the address of the hostel where I was going, but I was lucky because I: 1) was sitting next to a Norwegian in a town of 50,000 people located at 12,000 feet and 800 km from the nearest city 2) found out that this Norwegian had come to China to study Chinese and had become reasonable at copying characters from a screen.

I regularly bother Korean friends to explain some ordinary Korean word that winds up written in Chinese in a newspaper, which probably has the effect of transporting them to their high school days, hardly a pleasant experience. If it's hard enough for them to remember the meaning of the character, it'd be impossible for them to write it, and they're hardly alone.

Considering that nothing about a word you know tells you how to write it, Moser says that "I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on."

Whatever you might think of English's shortcomings, the situation we have is not so bad that "a well-educated native English speaker [is] totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"". To elaborate:

I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??

Whenever the topic of learning Korean emerges on the Internet among Westerners, an opinion often expressed is that Korean is a useless language, and that if there is an East Asian language worth learning, it is Chinese, or possibly Japanese. We rate the utility of learning Chinese to be quite high due to China's increasing geopolitical and economic significance, plain evidence of which is that cell phone stores in my neighbourhood frequently employ Chinese students to sell phones to other Chinese students.

This sort of viewpoint looks at language-learning as something that can only pay off with money, preferably lots of it and in exchange for employment. With the exception of people who have formally studied a language over a number of years, typically as a major at a university, very few people will ever make money from a language they learned. Nobody who spends their time half-heartedly studying Chinese on their own while living in Korea and not studying Korean is ever going to make a dime from their Chinese ability.

Learning another language does offer immense benefits that are probably greater than those of learning just anything, partly because of its portability and its interconnectivity. You could probably do more with, say, intermediate-level Chinese language ability than you could with a knowledge of Chinese history, not to mention the fact learning the former entails a great deal of the latter, while the latter typically does not entail the former.

In my case, I've tried to pick up Chinese words and phrases wherever I could all because I thought Chinese sounded impossibly hard with a large number of harsh consonant sounds that sound almost exactly the same. I don't imagine ever getting to the point where the difficulties of Chinese that Moser describes would ever really affect me. I would still tell anyone reading this that learning basic Chinese, at least, is far, far easier than imagined and being able to do nothing but distinguish small, medium and large as a Westerner (小, 中, 大）will give you a disproportionately high degree of satisfaction.

Here come the Chargers, again

2011-12-21T06:32:00.001+09:00

As far as football teams go, the San Diego Chargers are a slacker's team. They play on the west coast after all the other teams, in a city that is essentially at room temperature year-round. They're a bit like Homer Simpson doing his taxes on the day they're due, driving to the tax office to arrive just as it closes, and launching his envelope from the doorway, watching it bounce around before finally landing in the bin, albeit the one for audits.

This is a topic I love to write about. Two years ago, I predicted that the 2-3 Chargers would win the division over the 6-0 Broncos, which they did. Last year, I made the same prediction, but the Chargers came up short against the Chiefs.

Now, the stage is set again. In an act of what may or may not constitute cheering against "my team", I'm rooting for the Chargers to overtake the Broncos for the AFC West title. Or, failing that, I'd be satisfied with a wild card spot. Just a few weeks ago, the Chargers were 4-7 while the Broncos were a heartwarming story-in-the-making at a slightly-better 6-5. Now the gap has been closed to 8-6 and 7-7, and while the 7-7 Raiders are in between the Broncos and Chargers, I have every reason to believe that one of the league's most talented teams can do this again.

Their record over the years:

2007 - 5-5 start, 11-5 finish, went to the AFC championship game
2008 - 4-8 start, 8-8 finish, went to the AFC divisional round
2009 - 2-3 start, 13-3 finish, went to the divisional round
2010 - 2-5 start, 9-7 finish, just missed the playoffs
2011 - 4-7 start, but I like their odds

This is a team that shows just how unpredictable and sometimes how meaningless the regular season can be, if you consider that an 8-8 team can go to the second round of the playoffs, or that a team that starts 5-5 can play for a chance to make the Super Bowl. In another setting, I believe that this is a team that could have won two Super Bowls in the last decade, but instead we have the peculiar phenomenon of miraculously fast finishes.

In fact, even I wrote this team off just a month ago, weepily noting that their window of opportunity has probably closed. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if a team that's made its name shooting itself in the foot managed to do so again and missed the playoffs, but right now I'm rooting for the Chargers to spare us the hagiograhpies of Tim Tebow in the playoffs.

Book #13: The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka

2011-12-16T14:38:00.002+09:00

It took about four months of reading it and sixteen months from the time I bought it, but I have finally finished the complete works of Kafka. I thought it would be a lot better than it was, but I had to admit that Kafka's writing, in greater exposure, tends to be either riveting or impenetrable. Kafka's strengths is a jarring prose with the tone of dull bureaucratic pomp, often using run-on sentences or paragraphs. However, when the premise is dull, as is the case with some of the stories, the result is excruciating.

Nevertheless, it was my first time reading the Metamorphosis, which is perhaps Kafka's most famous work, though I've been partial to The Trial, if only for my familiarity with consular pomp over my travels. Many of the short stories amount to little more than a paragraph, while others appear not quite complete, though given Kafka's style, there's not much lost in reading an unfinished story.

Broadly speaking, the stories might be divided into ones with a political theme or setting, and those in a more natural setting. I enjoyed most of the ones that had a political component, such as In the Penal Colony, The Warden of the Tomb, and A Hunger Artist. Others were set in nature or discussed the ordinary lives of ordinary people in alarming detail, though my not enjoying them is probably a matter of personal preferences.

A few of the stories that Kafka wrote are written from the perspective of an animal. I was so struck by the transformation in The Metamorphosis that I didn't realize it was all written from the perspective of an insect. It is, of course, along with A Report to an Academy and Investigations of a Dog.

When I struggled to finish some of the stories, I did consider just what it is I like about Kafka's writing. I suppose it's easy when the writing is masterful and the idea is novel, as is the case with The Metamorphosis, but I struggled to put my finger on what it is that I find so appealing about the other works. At least some of my fondness for Kafka is for his excoriation of minor officialdom, the sort of which insists on rules for the sake of rules, as well as for the power that comes from enforcing those rules.

A Kafkan story today might well be about a mundane, absurd event in our lives where minor, unimportant people exert a great deal of influence in our lives. A perfect example might be the airport, where the insignificant, unimportant nonsense of our lives is elevated to life-or-death consequences, in part, as a giant make-work program for the individuals, agencies and companies that enjoy a stake in the elevation. I'm not sure how much I'd like Kafka if I hadn't traveled and produced reams of redundant paperwork for the privilege of doing so, though I imagine that I would regardless.

Jesus Christ's superstar

2011-12-14T08:56:00.001+09:00

Finally, the Broncos are winning and I've come to begrudgingly admire Tim Tebow, but still, something doesn't feel right. Sure, they've won six in a row to climb to 8-5 from a 2-5 hole, but I'm not that impressed, at least not with Tim Tebow. It was about fifteen years ago that I remember seeing, to pick one example, an athletic quarterback win game after game. Even as a child, I intuited that he really wasn't that good, and I know it now with Tebow.

In this week's miraculous Tebow comeback, he not only kicked field goals of 59 and 51 yards at the end of regulation and in overtime respectively, but he also managed to strip the ball from the Bears and recover the fumble. On top of all that, he threw the ball forty times and managed to complete more than half of those passes.

There are three things people can say about Tebow: one is not true, one is true, and one is intellectually lazy. The first says that because he can run, regular measures of a quarterback's value don't apply to him, and that detractors are merely jealous old dinosaurs who don't understand how the game has changed. This is simply not true.

Others say that it doesn't matter what he does or doesn't do, as long as the Broncos keep winning, which is intellectually lazy. Others will recognize that Tebow has played very well in certain situations due to a combination of skill, luck and athleticism.

Overall, Tebow completes less than half his passes and has thrown more than twenty passes in a game just once during this streak. He does have 11 touchdowns against two interceptions this year, but that's a function of how conservatively he's throwing. The best quarterbacks in the league average more than eight yards per attempt, meaning that their teams will gain nine yards for every time they drop back. Good quarterbacks will still average more than seven. Tebow is at 6.9 yards per dropback, and he's not making that up by running, because he averages about 5 yards per run.

Essentially, this is also a team that's playing well above its head, riding a defense and an offense both ranked around 20th in the league to an 8-5 record. You can't simply say that the stats don't tell the true story, because they do. Tebow has gotten help from his teammates, as we saw this weekend, and the hype that preceded him into the league has covered up his deficiencies. I would be surprised if this team doesn't make it into the playoffs, but this is obviously not one of the stronger teams in the league.

Taking the Metropolitician Challenge

2011-12-10T09:51:00.001+09:00

On the recent EBS experiment which purportedly shows that Koreans are more likely to help those with white skin than those with darker-skin, Metro agrees wholeheartedly with the obvious conclusion and writes:

I propose more experiments!

How about a handsome, tall, black man and lithe, attractive Korean woman walk as a couple through the #1 subway line, from head to tail, on hidden camera? Watch the fun -- and verbal and perhaps even physical assaults -- ensue!

Or the same couple just walk through the Shinchon CGV as an obvious couple and watch all the people behind them snicker and point, as I did just a couple years ago? It was fucking ridiculous. Really? A couple at the movie theater?

Maybe we should have a black man in a suit try to get a cab next to his white buddy looking 90's-era Seattle grunge? Let's place bets! (I'm betting on Whitey, boys!)

Or sit an Indian man (or me!) on a crowded city bus and watch if the empty seat next to him is ever taken -- with a timer! First one who loses the bet that Koreans will choose to stand for an hour rather than sit to a dirty curry-eater buys lunch!

Oh, the fun we could have, EBS.

I'm game. Call me.

I can't dispute Michael's experiences, but I think that the discrimination he seems to believe (and if he doesn't believe this, I stand corrected) is dominant is more likely to be widespread, at least when we're talking about individual people in a relatively mundane everyday setting. The more you try to do, of course, the harder it gets, both as the stakes get higher or you deal with institutions over individuals.

I'd like to think that I count as something close to an Indian man (all four of my grandparents were born in British India), and I can't say I've ever had the privilege of an empty seat next to me when the bus is packed. Men, women, young and old usually have no problem sitting next to me on the bus or on the subway.

A few times, I've noticed that people sitting next to me will leap at the chance to go sit next to another stranger, which I concluded as discomfort with the way I look, where I'm from or even the fact that I'm a man. However, I remember that Metro once said something along the lines of "what do you call a nigger who went to Harvard? A nigger!"

Even back in Toronto, high school and the comments sections of online newspaper articles have taught me that the city with the motto "Diversity our Strength" nevertheless managed to have an immigrant-despising id. I've been told in Canada that I was the "good kind" of brown guy because I spoke better English than the angry white guy who hated Sikh immigrants, but when I take the 37A going to Islington, you don't necessarily know that. Here, too, I'd be considered the "good immigrant" for learning to speak Korean, but the drunkards on line 1 don't know whether I speak Korean and make twice what they do, or whether I came here last week from Nepal and live in a one-room with six others.

I would never consider my experiences here to prove anything, but in three years, I wouldn't say that I've had any significant or memorable instances of being treated negatively because of my skin colour. There have been cases here and there. Sure, if a Korean is going to approach a visibly foreign person to chat, they'll probably choose the white person before me. If you're going to choose the visible face of your institution for promotional purposes, you're probably not going to choose mine if you can help it.

Have I been called "monkey teacher"? Yes. Have kids told me I smell bad? Yes. Have I heard kids being Indian or Filipino as an insult in my classroom? Hundreds of times. I once polled a class of grade 6 students and while almost none wanted a Filipino or an Indian classmate, almost all would have loved an American classmate. They quantified it on the basis of language and wealth, which I suppose is true to an extent, but I think the wealthiest Indian would probably still be ranked below the poorest white American in their books.

As for what the video or what my experiences prove is debatable. I do regularly roll my eyes when I see the trope repeated that somebody with dark skin wouldn't get the time of day here. That I've been here for three years without a memorable incident and Michael is closing in on twenty years in Korea is evidence that it's not true.

If nothing else, I can tell you that much of what's said online about race in Korea is simply not true. Claims along the lines of "Koreans will choose to stand for an hour rather than sit to a dirty curry-eater" express indignation with many cringe-inducing practices relating to race and appearance, and we might even believe them, but I can tell you that thousands of people have sat next to me on Seoul's buses and subways, and I've seen hundreds of dark-skinned people on public transportation with honest-to-god Koreans sitting right next to them.

Has running hit the wall or is it going strong?

2011-11-29T13:24:00.003+09:00

Recently, I have seen a pair of contrasting posts about the state of the sport. Broadcaster Toni Reavis argues that, ironically, even though it is "going faster than ever, the sport of distance racing has hit its own wall". To wit, he points out the dwindling competitive fields at B-level road races in America, which are starting to move towards paying just a single headlining elite athlete to run, the slow death of World Cross, and the fact that many white runners are dropping out of the sport at its highest levels. Lukas Verzbicas' much-publicized move from triathlon to running is an example he notes of an athlete leaving the sport for another one.

Reavis might appear to be complaining about the fact that the dominance by a bunch of nameless Africans is killing the sport, but he's not. In a star-studded comment thread, Reavis writes that he does not want to "eliminate the East Africans. Instead let’s incorporate them into a larger competitive model. The question is, how and what?" While locals who could give interviews and didn't have ephemeral careers would be better for the sport, running is more than capable of doing this with things like the man-versus-woman competition at the Los Angeles Marathon. Anything is better than the current system of big city marathons with a dozen East African runners wearing the exact same clothing.

Peter Vigneron responds to Reavis by saying that the only way in which the sport is in trouble is financially:

But Reavis sees competitive running as a commodity. Or he must, because that is the only metric by which it is not wildly successful. Otherwise, things are humming along nicely: international competitive running has never been more competitive, American competitive distance running has never been more competitive, and more people are running and entering races in the United States than ever before.

I agree that running, in many ways, is doing really well, but the sport is slowly dying. It may well be that the sport is in the midst of a long, drawn-out downsizing from the popularity it enjoyed in the early-to-mid twentieth-century, and that eventually it will stabilize. However, it's clear that the sport could be doing a lot more to market itself because the results would be better: more money would mean more TV coverage, more and better competitions, and an elite circuit in places like Canada, America or the UK that's not necessarily tied to the performances of the absolute best in the world. Consider Japan, where it pays to be a 2:10 marathoner because of the value that talent has on domestic corporate teams.

I doubt there's much interest in this, though, because a great deal of the people who care about running are involved in it. It would be like asking high school and college football players to help save the NFL. Fans who watch the NFL might be inclined, but if everyone who watched the NFL was also a football player themselves, they might not be as fascinated by simply watching someone else play football. Running is not only participatory, but it fulfills a public health function, and the existence or absence of elite, professional distance running is irrelevant.

What is likely is that running will remain a niche sport to be enjoyed by those who competed seriously and those amateurs who have an interest in it. We will watch it on TV when the Olympics happen, and the rest of the time we'll settle for online feeds. Whether this starts to constrict the sport in ways beyond the elimination of 10,000-metre races remains to be seen, but running's participatory base and attractive financial incentives for East Africans will likely see it through the next generation.

Sohn Kee-chung and the Sohn Kee-chung Marathon

2011-11-20T18:14:00.005+09:00

I can't say that I've ever run a race and seen Hitler on a big screen the size of my apartment, but there's a first time for everything, I suppose. Today I ran a 10k at the Sohn Kee-chung Marathon, named after the Korean runner who won the 1936 Olympic Marathon. Much as Jesse Owens is celebrated in part for his accomplishments at the Berlin Olympics, Sohn became a national hero after bowing his head at the medal ceremony to protest Japan's colonization of Korea. Sohn competed as a Japanese national under a Japanese name (Sohn Kitei).

The Dong-a Ilbo continued the protest by airbrushing the Japanese flag from Sohn's shirt at the medal ceremony, quite possibly the last independent thought from that venerable journalistic institution. This earned them a nine-month publication ban and caused eight people to be arrested. Sohn himself had a long career in sport as a coach and administrator, so the story does have a happy ending.

I love Sohn's story for a few reasons. The first is the obvious political significance, but Sohn is also a personification of one of my favourite things about running, namely that someone can go from obscurity and an even more obscure place to victory in a matter of minutes, or perhaps hours in this case. Sohn was able to do it coming from a poor, backwards corner of the world while running 2:29, but that it can happen today for people running 2:05 is a lesson in both sport and running.

Second, Sohn's enduring popularity speaks to the immense popularity that the marathon enjoys in Japan and Korea. We know that Japan cares about the marathon more than any country in the world, to the point that 284,000 largely domestic runners applied for 35,500 spots in the Tokyo Marathon. Compare that with about 140,000 applicants for the 47,000 spots in the New York Marathon, and similar numbers for the London Marathon. Korea is able to put together three world-class races in three weekends, with large fields trailing behind.

As for the race and Hitler, today's race started and finished at the Olympic Stadium in Seoul. The 10k ran out of the river and went west along the river, which meant it ran into the wind for 5k and then with it for the second half. After a stinker of a race last week at a race where I normally do very well, I thought I was still tired from the Chuncheon Marathon. While I ran everyday this week, I ran no more than 20 minutes at one time. I was fresher, and the crisp weather (just above zero?) helped.

I had a much better rhythm this time than last time, which is what I use to pace instead of what my watch tells me. My best this year is 40:54 and I was hoping to just beat that instead of getting a sub-40. I was slow at 5k in 20:46, but I had lots of energy and knew I'd get to run with the wind. I ran the next two kilometres relaxed (4:05, 4:05) before pushing hard at 7k (3:55, 4:00, 3:54). The second 5k was exactly 20:00 and the final time was 40:46. That was probably the best I've felt in a race all year. I'll take one last shot at a sub-40 this year in four weeks, but I'm really looking towards the spring now.

As for Hitler, a documentary on Sohn's life was playing on the screen in the stadium as runners finished. When I finished, I looked up and there was a scene of Hitler waving to the crowd at the Berlin Olympics. Much of the footage was quite interesting as the nexus of Korean nationalism, Japanese imperialism and Nazi Germany at the 1936 Olympics is not a topic that's been given a thorough treatment, at least in English.

What does the Korean government really think of the KORUS FTA?

2011-11-17T22:03:00.007+09:00

Although a majority of Koreans support the KORUS FTA, the minority in opposition is very fierce in its opposition. Going by what I see on Twitter, I was actually surprised to learn that a clear majority is in favour of it, as I'd imagined it to be precisely the opposite. Nevertheless, to help bolster its image and to help reduce the opposition, the government has gone on an online charm offensive using Twitter and comics like the one below to make its case.

I was disgusted by this comic, which is crude and demagogic. It's the card that the government, which is being accused of selling out the country to foreign interests, has to play, however. Accused of being traitors, the government is assuring opponents of the FTA that rather than selling out Korea to American corporations, it is paving the way for a victory over America.

It's titled "Stop the FTA?". For some reason, when I save it and upload it to Blogger, it comes out in a lower resolution, so I had to link to the image from the government's website, which might eventually disappear. For posterity's sake, the illegible but stand-alone version is here.

The comic, set in the future after the ratification of the FTA, starts at the secret headquarters of a anti-Korean organization that not only hates Korea, but also Hallyu.

One villain asks the other how his spy mission went. He gushes that "Korea is like heaven!" He says that "the people were happy and full of life", before lamely launching into the government's talking points.

"These days, Korea's large and small businesses are selling more and cooperating well. Through the elimination of tariffs, exports have surpassed $140 million. Businesses are doing well and there are plenty of jobs. About 350,000 jobs have been created."

As the boss' face grows angrier and angrier, the henchman continues:

"The economy is growing at a rate of 5.66% and the people can't stop smiling. Foreign investment is up and the economic system is more advanced."

"Social spending is up to $32 billion and the standard of social welfare has improved."

The boss pounds his fists on the desk and shouts, "the KORUS FTA was that big of an opportunity for development?" The henchman stammers, "I guess so."

The boss grabs him and shouts, "were there any side-effects?"

"Farmers and fishermen were hit hard, but the government was prepared for it with subsidies, so there were almost no problems."

"My stomach hurts!" the boss groans. "I can't take it that Korea is doing so well. Let's go to Plan B."

The two get in the "Anti-Korean Time Machine" to go back in time and disrupt the KORUS FTA negotiations.

However, they end up back in the Joseon dynasty, where soldiers stare at the befuddled villains.

In the meantime, the comic concludes that "Koreans continued to live happily amidst abundance."

The villains, meanwhile, end up in some sort of space-time warp. "I'm jealous," sniffs the boss. "Can't we just move to Korea?" asks the henchman.

On the government website, there's only one comment on this comic. It says, "looks like the work of an elementary school student."

The comic is shockingly childish in its adversarial point-of-view and its claim that some vast anti-Korean conspiracy of foreign devils wants to see this country fail, starting first with the FTA.

I can't imagine the White House releasing anything near this slimy and it not being front-page news here. For comparison, when the New York Times wrote about plastic surgery in Korea a couple of weeks ago, it was front-page news on Daum.

Is this the first victory for Occupy Wall Street?

2011-11-15T12:27:00.003+09:00

Last week, labour activist Kim Jin-suk's 309-day sit-in on top of a crane at a Hanjin Heavy Industries near Busan came to an end (sappy Hankyoreh article, another piece by the Los Angeles Times). For almost a year, Kim had been the darling of the South Korean political left, turning the dismissal of workers at the factory into a hot topic on the Internet, thanks in part to heavy promotion by the actress Kim Yeo-jin.

Finally, an agreement was reached between the company and its workers that called for the dismissed workers to be rehired within a year. In a hardly surprising move, police have issued a warrant for her arrest. One of the ironies about this country is that although it is not exactly famous as a place where laws are obeyed to the letter, there are too many of them to obey.

The victory at Hanjin's plant in Gimhae is the culmination of an occupation that began this January and ended successfully. Its demands might have been overreaching and flat out unreasonable, I don't know whether they were or not, but it was a case of citizens triumphing over corporations. Rather than merely raising awareness, the post hoc justification for just about anything that people want to do in North America, I feel as though even the most baseless protests in Korea tend to have a demand.

The Occupy Wall Street protests might have achieved something somewhere, I'm sure, and the Hanjin sit-in was hardly the result of Occupy Wall Street, as Korean labour protests are ongoing and just as dramatic as this one. It's unclear, though, that Occupy Wall Street will do much more than bring the issues of economic inequality to the table, to be debated with varying degrees of honesty. I don't also know that Korean-style demands are necessary or beneficial for either the movement or society as a whole, but Kim's protest would have gone nowhere without a clear and firm demand.

That, along with the support of frustrated 20-somethings on Twitter who can't find a job and feel entitled to one, provided support for this occupation in a way that wouldn't be possible in other societies. Their sentiments, much like the Wall Street-inspired protests, are not without their merits, though both can give the impression of having a kernel of truth surrounded by the tasty white fluff we call popcorn.

South Korea would never be confused as a workers' paradise, but its highly-unionized, protectionist economy is not as backwards as it might seem at first. The looming FTA with America would open up some sectors of the economy to American products, which will undoubtedly mean lost jobs in some sectors although jobs will be gained in others.

I don't claim to know much about the FTA, which has naturally been protested as though it would bring about the apocalypse. While it's plain as day that doing business in Korea for foreign companies can be absurd, no matter what the latest "ease of doing business" rankings might spit out, it's not necessarily a bad thing.

A part of me thinks that the tariffs Korea puts on imports helps Koreans live better by protecting domestic companies. It is, essentially, a form of welfare that helps prop up inefficient companies and industries, but I don't see why it's a crime for a government to, in a limited capacity, support these businesses through arriers. I'm more than welcome to being proven wrong, but I don't think Korean protectionism is without its merits.

Watching the Patriots lose is still the best play in all of sport

2011-11-08T14:18:00.005+09:00

For almost a decade now, I've been watching the Chargers lose and hoping that the Patriots lose. For a long time, the Chargers lost and the Patriots won. Now, the Patriots are losing, but so are the Chargers. It used to be that the Chargers were a phenomenally talented team that just couldn't get over the hump in the playoffs. Now they're a phenomenally talented team that can't get over the hump in any single game. That's how you have the best defense and the best offense in the league, as they did last year, but finish 8-8 and out of the playoffs.

This year, it's the 6th-best offense in the league and the 7th-best defense (both based on yards), and a middling 4-4 record to show for it, not to mention three straight losses. Last week, of course, was the snap debacle, the first time I've seen anything like it. This week, the Chargers made a game of it against the Packers after being down 45-24 in the fourth quarter, actually getting two chances to tie the game and getting as close as midfield.

Still, it's as frustrating as it ever was to watch the Chargers, who probably should have won a Super Bowl by now. After letting Marty Schottenheimer go all those years ago, Norv Turner's teams have had some amazing feats, which mostly centre around taking a supremely talented team, giving it a 1-4 record, and then seeing what it can do. Ladainian Tomlinson may have missed his chance for a ring, certainly his chance to do it as a star rather than a role player, but the Chargers' window probably isn't quite closed yet. But it will close, and I have a bad feeling that it will likely not include a Super Bowl.

On the other side of the United States, there were the Patriots playing the Giants in what was one of the worst-played games I've seen. Really, it belonged with last week's clinic on how to screw up a football game, because it featured so many dropped or bobbled snaps, dropped kicks and general incompetence, that I often thought I was watching replays.

As the Patriots dynasty fades, it's important for those of us who despise this team to remember that Super Bowl championships don't come from your record in a 16-game season, but how and who you play in three or four playoff games. Still, at 5-3, with consecutive years of home playoff losses that really weren't all that close, I'm starting to breathe easier and easier. The hurricane of fawning adulation, which I feel is controlled by Peter King, is already starting to centre on Aaron Rodgers, though I feel like it could change.

Both the Patriots-Giants and Packers-Chargers games were exciting, as was the Ravens-Steelers game, where I thought the Ravens were going to cruise to an easy win with a 16-6 lead, but had to overcome a Steelers comeback to win 23-20. That last drive led by Joe Flacco might have been the strongest moment for the Ravens offense in 11 years, and it could make them a more legitimate playoff threat.

As amazing of a game as it was, what was mystifying was this comment that Peter King featured in his weekly column from somebody he calls a friend, and what he unflinchingly called his Text Message of the Week:

"I want to die. This feeling feels like death. Nothing else can describe this. The pain is that bad.''
-- Pittsburgh Phil, Phil Gennaro, a friend of mine and a 41-year-old claims adjuster from Monroeville, east of Pittsburgh, leaving Heinz Field early this morning. He went on to text that today "will be miserable. I will have to deal with angry people, all because of this game.''

It's disturbing that a gainfully employed adult could feel this way about a football game. It's one thing to take sports seriously, even too seriously, and another to say this. For a city to have its mood change so drastically after a loss, as Gennaro claims, is almost equally disturbing. It's enough to make me think about no longer watching sports.

Left, right and Naggomsu in South Korea

2011-11-05T17:30:00.009+09:00

Sonia wrote here that, "If I were to vote in South Korea, I’d vote conservative. Liberals here scare me." I'm personally not a big fan of voting, which is not something you should admit often because the prevailing orthodoxy is for everyone to vote regardless of their opinions or beliefs. At any rate, I share Sonia's distaste for the South Korean left, though I don't know that Na Gyungwon is better than Park Wonsoon (it's like comparing Cheez Whiz to Snuggies).

In my mind, the merits of Korea's right and left can be distilled to the faceoff you might see at a protest. On the one hand, riot police make Seoul feel like central Beijing, deem protests illegal on whims and have often been accused of brutality. On the other hand, the people you see at protests believe(d?) that American beef, the beef that hundreds of millions of Americans eat every day, could kill them at any second. They attack police and generally spare no excess or hyperbole.

These same people, if you were to vote for them in the next election, are currently holding up the KORUS FTA with threats of violence. If the GNP, which has a majority in the Assembly, tries to use that majority to pass a bill that opposition parties initiated, the opposition parties will retaliate with violence in the Assembly. It's not the case that the GNP hasn't been involved in violence, or that the GNP hasn't tried to investigate a novelist who dared to bring the plight of sexually abused children to the mainstream. Clearly, both parties are not without fault.

So, enter the darling of Korean politics these days, its very own equivalent of the Daily Show, 나는꼼수다 (I am a Weasel). It got coverage in the New York Times, finally, bringing attention to something that would have never otherwise gotten attention in the English-language press.

That 나꼼수 is a podcast rather than a TV show tells you something. If the Daily Show was a podcast because it was too controversial to make fun of politicians on TV, you would have a sense of where things stand in politics here. Not too long ago, a Twitter account with a username that translated to "fuck Lee Myung-bak" (@2mb18noma) was banned by the Korea Communications Commission, though the ban was eventually overturned.

It's very easy to feel hatred for the paternalistic, condescending conservative establishment, which brings you the crappy news you see here, here and here. The quality of news in English is so atrocious, two parts PR for one part news, that I don't think it can be considered legitimate journalism, and I cringe whenever I see anyone citing news from an English-language news source in Korea. However, the Korean-language news is not much better.

From an editorial written in the Joongang Ilbo about 나꼼수, Kim Jin-gook wrote that the podcast "blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction, commentary and comedy", and argued that the traditional media iss fairer. This leads me to wonder if Kim has ever actually read his own paper.

Some of the high-quality journalism you can find on the front page of the Joongang Ilbo:

The top story is some guy's online petition for the release of Park Chu-young
Two women explain how to get a Korean boyfriend
Woman takes pictures of herself everyday for 5 years
Baseball player Lee Seung-yeob's wife "as pretty as ever"
Indian students have a Korean speech contest in New Delhi

Now for the English edition:

Shinee to hold concert in London
K-pop to land in South America
Star chefs get a taste of Korea in Jeonju
An unpaid advertisement from Amore Pacific

Yes, Mr. Kim, it's awful to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction, commentary and comedy.

To be honest, neither Naggomsu nor the politcal left are a silver bullet for the problems of a conservative establishment, as this quote from the New York Times article shows:

For their latest recording, the team invited Kim Yong-ok, a philosopher who called Mr. Lee “a tragedy for our nation” and South Korea “an effective colony of the United States.” The show replayed an audio clip in which the philosopher said he was “not convinced even 0.0001 percent” when the government announced last year that the sinking of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors was caused by a North Korean torpedo attack.

On the Internet, no paranoid fantasy is spared by anti-FTA activists. I can't say that I have a particularly strong opinion about the FTA, but I don't like to see someone lie at the top of their lungs. These banners at Daehanmun in front of Deoksugung are an example:

The banner on the top, from the Democratic Labor Party, says that they oppose the Grand National Party forcing through the FTA, rich words considering that: 1) the GNP has a majority 2) about 58% of people support the FTA 3) the DLP will use violence to stop the bill.

The one on the bottom claims that the FTA will lead people to their deaths.

What's in a poppy?

2011-11-03T08:33:00.003+09:00

At the Canadian embassy yesterday, I paid 500 Korean won and picked up a poppy. The first thing I noticed was that I'm still abysmal at putting one on and keeping it there, though the poppy I have seems to have made it almost twenty-four hours now without incident. Wearing a poppy is the sort of serious cultural tradition, a convention or orthodoxy in the sense of being what everyone else does, that made me slightly uncomfortable as a child, no matter what the situation was.

In elementary school, there was an assembly every November 11 for Remembrance Day and teachers handed out the red poppies for us to wear. There was a time, I felt, when schools had veterans attend ceremonies, though that seemed to have stopped by the time I got to high school for reasons I don't understand. Wearing a poppy on Remembrance Day was the one day a year in elementary school, and even to an extent in middle school, that I felt I was in someone else's house.

It might be Canada's greatest asset that somebody who has lived there for even a few years can feel as though they belong, not necessarily because there's nothing to which to belong, but that Canadians make others feel welcome and accepted, almost to a fault. With 300,000 people moving to Canada every year (the equivalent of 3 milion new Americans each year), it might be a reflex that's necessary for helping society function.

The Korean experience, if due to nothing but appearance, is very different. That said, it took the presence of thousands and millions before me to make my presence seem ordinary. Korea may well get to that point one day, but it's certainly not there yet. I'm not sure what the Korean equivalent of the poppy would be, but it might be that an immigrant to Korea could sing the national anthem and feel as though it meant something, though I don't know how anyone, Korean or otherwise, feels about the national anthem.

What gave the poppy almost an exclusionary air to me, hardly a negative one, was that it was a reminder of Canada's British heritage. I could have seen myself as Canadian, but bringing in a history that I didn't really share (my great-grandfather did serve in World War I) made things different from the usual fare in the classroom. That British heritage is something I think we should be proud of, but it is also not entirely ours. My grandparents and great-grandparents never wore jeans, but I do. Similarly, the current retrograde movement by the federal government towards a monarchist stance is baffling: why express pride in your country by obsessing over the queen of another country?

On and around Remembrance Day, there is no shortage of people serving up tributes to soldiers, some of them thoughtful and deserved, others verging on melodramatic and the product of emotional insecurities. The lesson today from the deaths of 67,000 Canadians in World War I, representing almost one out of every 100 Canadians, ought not just to be the usual lines about remembering their sacrifices, but also that of a country punching well above its weight.

Bad football really isn't that bad

2011-10-31T14:16:00.002+09:00

David Fleming of EPSN's Page 2, perhaps the most irreverent and therefore the best way to approach sports, took it upon himself after last week's 6-3 Seahawks-Browns game to find the ten worst football games of the last ten years. Fleming didn't count routs in his analysis because those are technically games where somebody plays well, and in a sense I suppose he's right, but from my perspective as a more-or-less dispassionate fan without a particular favourite team, I'd rather watch two crappy teams play a close game. A rout like the Saints' 62-7 win over the Colts last week is simply awful to watch.

I watched most of five football games today by skipping through commercials, kicks of any sort and other undesirable fluff. In the Colts-Titans game, were up 20-0 in the first half, which is when I switched to another game, and went on to win 27-10. I remembered the Bills were playing in Toronto. As I watched the game, the Bills kept making plays, it was great, but when I skipped ahead to the third quarter, the early 13-0 lead had become 20-0, so I stopped watching. The Bills won 23-0.

Then I tried the Jaguars and Texans, hoping that this otherwise unassuming game might have been interesting, but when I tried to watch just the fourth quarter, it was 21-7. I turned it off immediately. The Jaguars did get as close as 21-14, but the Texans put it out of reach with a field goal. I gave about a half hour to the Cowboys-Eagles game, but as dazzling as the Eagles looked, it was a double-digit lead before long and when I skipped to make sure it stayed that way, I saw the score that made it 34-0. That final held up as a 34-7 rout.

As I write this, my fifth game of the day, the Lions-Broncos game, has just become 17-3 for the Lions. Skipping ahead a bit, I saw that it became 38-3 midway through the third quarter on a deep pass to Calvin Johnson. With two minutes left, it's 45-10. I give up. I'll have to wait to watch the Patriots-Steelers game in its entirety, which the Internet has given rumblings (Facebook comments about the game I didn't read, pictures on websites that I immediately closed) of having been interesting.

By contrast, I saw three football games last week: the Jets-Chargers, the Broncos-Dolphins and the Jaguars-Ravens. These Jets and Chargers game was presumably well-played for the first half, but I saw the last twenty minutes (game time) and I was appalled by what I saw, particularly at the end of the game. Still, it was reasonably entertaining to watch as the Jets came back from a 21-10 deficit thanks to the Chargers' miscues. Rivers threw two interceptions that resulted in ten Jets points. This was entertaining.

What was not entertaining was something that I feel like I see far too much, as losing teams stand around doing nothing as the clock runs inside two minutes. The mismanagement of the clock inside two minutes was so egregious that even normally reserved commentators, the sort of vexing people who remind you of an indifferent parent as your brother pummels you, noted the incompetence.

Then we switched over to the Broncos-Dolphins game, where the Dolphins had extended their lead to 15-0 with seven minutes to go. The Broncos didn't score a touchdown until 2:44 to go, then recovered an onside kick before scoring on another goofy-looking Tebow pass. In overtime, it took three possessions that looked as though they might lead to an unsightly 15-15 draw before finally there was a Dolphins turnover that the Broncos used for an 18-15 win.

Even the 12-7 Jaguars game, where the Ravens didn't score until late in the fourth quarter, was more watchable than today's games. They scored with 2:02 left, then recovered a tantalizing onside kick that went about 9.5 yards and bounced backwards, before holding the Jaguars to a 19-second possession. The Ravens had a chance to drive for the winning touchdown from their 20 with 1:43 left, but threw an interception on the second play of the drive. It was ugly, but it was far more watchable than the crap that aired today.

What does Yueyue's death tell us about China?

2011-10-26T05:23:00.000+09:00

Two weeks ago in China's Guangdong province, two-year-old Wang Yue (nicknamed Yueyue) was run over by a car, ignored by passersby and later died in hospital. Thanks to the presence of security cameras pointed at the street, the hit-and-run and the subsequent indifference of eighteen people to the plight of a bleeding two-year-old was captured and seen by the world.

This isn't quite a case of China-bashing, because reaction within China has been as critical as the reaction outside of China, but both Chinese and non-Chinese seem to be treating this as proving, among other things, that China or the Chinese have no soul because they sold it to get rich. For years, people have felt that China's meteoric rise economically was coming at the expense of its people's well-being (as though hundreds of people being lifted out of poverty isn't well-being). Now, they seemingly have their proof.

But, as is so often the case, an event in China tells us what we think of China instead of telling us something about China. We would never think of India as the world's ninth-largest economy, but China is the world's second-largest economy, its second superpower and future ruler. All sorts of expectations are levied on China, when talking about daily life rather than its military or diplomatic capabilities, that would never be expected in other countries with per-capita incomes of 7,000.

It's likely that in other countries, this wouldn't have happened, but even if this had been an anomaly by Chinese standards, this would have confirmed our gut feeling that the Chinese can't be trusted. All it takes, of course, is one example, and if the example had come from CCTV in Thailand, Syria, Ecuador or Slovakia, it probably would not have had the same impact.

Much was made of the absence of Good Samaritan Laws in China, which meant that passersby would have opened themselves up to legal risk had they touched Yueyue, but the reason no one stopped to help her was more likely indifference rather than fear of a lawsuit. We have all seen instances of people in need that get no help from those around them. It happens in Canada, it happens in America, it happens here in Korea and it happens around the world for a number of reasons.

The social issues in China are immense, particularly in Guangdong province where much of your worldly possessions, especially the sort you value, are made. There are 150 million migrant workers in China, representing about one out of every eight Chinese people, who travel from villages to southern cities like Foshan, where Yueyue lived. The issues raised by this movement of people are complicated and difficult, both for the towns they leave and the cities where they congregate.

It's entirely possible, yes, that a city made up of a floating population of people who work too much don't care too much about each other, but what if the same thing happened in Los Angeles or Tokyo or London? When the Chinese state media spun some nonsense about the perils of democracy and declining economies, would it not be equally nonsensical?

The death of Yueyue clearly doesn't prove anything about China, nor does it give us any justifiable reason to look into China's soul beyond the question of whether the poor and vulnerable are treated well, which is a question each country should ask itself. Far too often in China, the answer is no, moreso than it is in the wealthy country where you are reading this, but that doesn't make Yueyue's death any more or less a single, horrific instance of human indifference.

2011 Chuncheon Marathon

2011-10-24T12:24:00.004+09:00

I ended up with seven predictions for my marathon, five on this blog, one from Twitter and one emailed by my loyal friend and sometimes editor The Seadog. Most people were optimistic and thought I'd run between 3:29 and 3:38, but The Seadog knew better. Getting into the race, I thought that about a 3:25 would have been a perfect day, and 3:30 a very good day.

I started conservatively and let the pace fall where it did, which was 26:30 at 5k. I found my legs at that point and picked up the pace to 51:11 (24:41 5k), which was right where I wanted to be. I was 90 seconds behind on a 3:30 goal (25-minute 5ks) and I thought taking 10-12 seconds off every 5k was the way to do it. I hit 15k in 75:35, so I was doing really well.

Unfortunately, time spent looking for and going to a bathroom knocked me off that rhythm, and I didn't hit 20k until 1:47, halfway in 1:52. I was back on pace to hit 25k in 2:12, but the pace wasn't nearly as relaxed as it should have been. With a margin of error at around zero, all it took were the hills at 27k to finish me off. I reached 30k in 2:42 and that was that. I wasn't too concerned with a second-rate time becoming a third-rate time, and the course was still beautiful (the last 8-10k are not breathtaking like the first 30-32)

It was really tough from 32k to 36k because the pain in my quads kept me from jogging, even. I was able to get back on a relaxed albeit slow pace, which meant passing about a thousand of the thousands of people who had been passing me for an hour now. I finished in 4:04, which means that the Seadog wins the prediction contest with the 3:42 (slowest of all predictions) for never believing in me, and rightfully so.

The Seadog wrote, quite prophetically:

"I think you'll have a strong first half, but halfway through you'll start regretting not filling your pockets with Gu and Sport Beans. You'll try to power through, but ultimately, your electrolyte balance will be thrown off just enough to cause you to waver (at 31K)."

Chuncheon has usually gotten better reviews than the Seoul International Marathon as the best race in Korea. I can agree with that, having run it. The course is very beautiful. The race is one loop around the North Han River, with half of it along a narrow country road, the river on one side and high colourful cliffs on the other. The big hill leading to the dam at 27-28k is tough, but the view of the river and the hills around Chuncheon is breathtaking. It is, of course, very well-organized and doesn't quite give off the impression of being a race for 20,000 people in a small city.

I'm in half-decent shape again, so...

2011-10-20T09:02:00.002+09:00

...let's play another game of "predict my marathon time".

I can't remember if anybody has ever won something from this on account of my DNF a few years ago at Boston, but I was apparently offering an autographed 8.5 x 10, so perhaps it's best that you didn't. This time around, I'll offer something far more desirable, a package of dried, buttered squid (seriously, it's good). If you don't live in Korea, you should know that dried squid is a common addition to movie theatre combos, as the image search shows.

Anyway, I'm running the Chuncheon Marathon this Sunday. It's not something that I've planned my fall around, actually, it was just a race I wanted to run. My real goal for the fall is to run a 39-minute 10k in November, this is just a way to run some extra miles that didn't really work out so well.

At any rate, I've run four races this summer and fall, none of them spectacular:

August 18 - 24:52 6k
September 3 - 44:xx 10k (a very hot, sunny day where I tried to stay upright)
September 25 - 29:22 7k
October 15 - 40:54 10k

I've been running about 50-60 km a week, which obviously isn't a lot, and yet it's the most I've run for a period of more than a month in a few years. Of course, I've said that before and then spent a month or two not running at all, but here we are. The longest runs I've had in the last two months have been about 4-5 runs of 18-20k, which took about 1:45.

I do feel like my fitness is on the upswing, but predicting how a marathon will go is like predicting a football will bounce: it's hard to say, but you probably won't like the outcome.

I think 3:30 would be a good run and anything under 3:20 would be fantastic. The course is somewhat hilly, though still fast. I wouldn't be surprised if my time ballooned to 3:40 because though I run a lot of hills, I haven't done a hilly run of more than two hours since December. Based on tempos of up to 11k, I figure I'd run about 1:32 for a half marathon.

Anyway, comment below with a prediction for a chance to win some dried squid.

Korean gets turned away at sauna by another Korean

2011-10-17T12:29:00.002+09:00

By now, you have likely heard the story of Gu Su-jin, a Korean of Uzbek origin who was refused service at a sauna in Busan. If you haven't, a Korean-language link is here with an English translation here.

Note, however, that this woman is not a foreign resident, but rather a Korean citizen. The headline in the Korean-language article is a quote from the owner of the sauna who perceived her as not being Korean, but she is a citizen. This is not a case of a foreign resident being treated badly, this is a case of one Korean treating another Korean badly.

The lazy conclusion to reach from this would be that Koreans are all a bunch of racist bastards who are so stupid as to think that you can get HIV from being in the water with somebody who has it. As an aside, before you catch aspersions on the intelligence of an entire country of people, make sure that you don't live in a country whose people have trouble finding it on a map or where a substantial minority doesn't subscribe to some other ludicrous belief.

This is one single incident pointing to an issue which is more significant than the discussions I've seen so far on English-language blogs. In ten years, about twenty to thirty percent of all children born in this country will be of a mixed-race background. As it stands, about fifteen percent of all marriages in this country are between a Korean and a non-Korean. It's very much possible that the Korea of 2040 or 2050, when the children of 2020 come to age, will be one where a substantial minority of the population is mixed-race.

This is an issue which I have discussed here and here previously. How this issue will be resolved, one way or the other, is of the utmost importance. You might say that the government has been caught flat-footed on this issue, though I don't know if it's the case.

Right now, it seems that multicultural families (다문화 가정) and "marriage immigrants" (결혼 이민자) are all the rage right now as the target of charitable endeavours. Along with this, many have used other well-publicized incidents of racism in Korea to call for a law against racism in this country as none exists. Put another way, you're well within your rights to refuse service to someone because of the colour of their skin and to even tell them that. Note that this goes both ways, so a business can be set up for non-Koreans exclusively, to the extent that it's a viable market.

However, as my friend Rob has noted, what this country needs are not so much laws as much as it needs people to start following existing laws. All the laws in the world, it's worth noting, are no substitute for widespread racial tolerance. A law against racism would go a long way, but that would do all the good of making it legal for women to smoke: just because it's legal doesn't mean that it doesn't carry a social stigma which negates the legality.

In the grand scheme of things, saunas are not that important. Gu, the woman refused entrance to the sauna, decided to make a stand here because she has a 7-year-old son. How will that boy do when he goes to school? Is he going to graduate from high school? Will he go to university? Will he be able to find work? The educational and employment outcomes of mixed-race Koreans are utterly, shockingly dismal. If twenty percent of Korean adults in 2045 are going to be mixed-race, they better be educated and able to find employment. If not, the consequences will be devastating.

A Legend of the Fall: Seoraksan

2011-10-04T12:47:00.006+09:00

I've loved fall for a long time, as I wrote in 2008 and even in 2003. I've had football, playoff baseball (albeit not in the last few years) and running to enjoy this season, but living in Korea adds one more dimension. Coming from Canada, at least, I feel like fall is long, mild and very pleasant here. Of course, I enjoy (this is not sarcasm) the harsher weather we get in Canada, such as impromptu flurries or weather below-freezing in October, which isn't to be found here.

I went hiking twice this weekend, to Seoraksan on the east coast and to Bukhansan in northern Seoul. Seoraksan (~1700m) is about a 20km hike that takes 10-12 hours, which I did last year from midnight to noon and really wasn't eager to repeat. Instead, we settled for a short and simple hike to Ulsan Bawi, a massive wall of rocks near the base of Seoraksan. Seoraksan is a great place to go in the fall for the colourful leaves and its intricate, jagged peaks, and I'd only ever been in the summer or the late fall.

The top of Ulsan Bawi is only 800m high and it's about a 4-hour roundtrip from the city of Sokcho. We lucked out and picked a hotel suited to the Ulsan Bawi course than a course that goes to the top. Alternatively, if you want to go to the top, don't stay in Sokcho. If you do go this month, you'll be in time for spectacular views of colourful leaves all over Seoraksan from Ulsan Bawi.

From the park entrance, it's about an hour to the bottom of Ulsan Bawi. From here, you can see much of the higher peaks of Seoraksan as well as the East Sea. From here, you climb a nerve-wracking stairway suspended in the air half the way, before negotiating a rocky, winding course to the top of Ulsan Bawi. Looking north from there, you should be able to see the sea as well as Geumgangsan in North Korea, though on this day it was cloudy (and very crowded) to the north.

To the south, the peak of Seoraksan is visible above the clouds.

Ulsan Bawi is a good course if you want to see the beauty of Seoraksan but don't want to do all the work getting to the top. The views of the top are better than the views from the top in my opinion, though I don't think I've ever been at the top in something resembling clear weather, so this opinion doesn't count for much. It's not a very hard hike, but there's enough thrill climbing the staircase, at least for those scared of heights like me, that you'll see both adults and small children (some under 5) at the top.

Patriots lose to the Bills, Colts lose again; is this the end of an era?

2011-09-27T12:24:00.004+09:00

During the Bills-Patriots game on Sunday, Marv Albert mentioned that the Bills hadn't beaten the Patriots since the first game of the 2003 season. The Patriots had a string of 15 straight wins over the Bills, which is partly why the Bills never win more than 7 or 8 in a season and the Patriots never win less than 10 or so, and why the game felt like such a tough one for the Bills without me knowing why.

I remember that Bills game in 2003, they won big after Lawyer Milloy had been cut by the Patriots, went to the Bills and gave a scandalous interview alleging that none of the Patriots believed in their coach. For some reason, everyone picked up on this and it was all anyone talked about.

New England had won a Super Bowl in 2001, but they had missed the playoffs in 2002, and now this. Of course, they went something like 14-1 the rest of the year, won the Super Bowl and won it again the next year. For the Bills, it was a speck of significance on the way to an ignominious decade stretching back to when the team benched Doug Flutie for Rob Johnson, which I probably attach immense significance to as a short man myself (Johnson is 6'4, Flutie about 5'9).

Fifteen straight wins over the Bills later, the Patriots have two Super Bowls, a 16-0 season and eight years of being a perennially feared team in the NFL. Of course, they haven't won a Super Bowl since I was in high school, and the playoff disappointments for Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are now numerous enough to be routine whereas once they seemed stunning.

This loss to the Bills is, in some ways, probably more significant than the playoff loss to the Colts in 2006 after a 21-3 lead, the loss to the Giants in the Super Bowl or recent losses to the Ravens and Jets in the playoffs. It was a 21-0 blown lead over a team that had been a sure thing for the Patriots, with four interceptions from Tom Brady to boot.

Seven hours after the Patriots lost, the Colts lost 23-20 to the Steelers to go to 0-3, a stunning yet not stunning turn of events for a team that has had 11 10-win seasons and 11 playoff appearances out of the last 12 years, the last 9 being consecutive.

It's safe to say that the Colts will be making the playoffs or threatening for a Super Bowl any time soon, though the Patriots could possible make a run this year, next year or the year after. It's likely, though, that neither Tom Brady or Peyton Manning will ever win a Super Bowl again, and that we're likely to see a new generation of teams and players dominate after a decade dominated by these two teams and quarterbacks.

This is about the only reason that Korean unification might be possible

2011-09-22T22:59:00.007+09:00

People often ask me where I learned Korean and I mumble something about overhearing students and storefront signs. That is a big part of it, but the subway is another big part of it. There are lots of signs on trains and in stations, you see them repeatedly, and there's often nothing else to do but to translate them using the dictionary in your cell phone.

Of course, a normal person ignores all the gibberish, but I'm someone who thrives on marketing Korean. Most people who have learned to speak Korean well come from either an academic background or a social background. I, unfortunately, have neither. I can neither read a textbook, nor can I watch a drama or understand slang. I can, however, quote marketing campaigns from a few years ago.

Anyway, I once translated this sign and almost vomited.

About two years ago, the Korean government began a campaign to get people to walk on the right. This ad from the subway reads: "Walking on the right! Walking on the right side is beautiful." Translated more literally, it reads "you who walk on the right are beautiful". I used to think about that every time I saw it for about a year: why does walking on the right make you beautiful?

Today I saw two North Korean propaganda posters. One similarity between the two Koreas is the over-the-top government advertising, what you'd call propaganda in the North. While it's not propaganda in the South (anymore), government advertising is often over-the-top syrupy to the point of absurdity, as we saw above.

This North Korean propaganda poster, charitably translated, says "Let's turn Pyongyang, the capital of revolution, into a global city".

What's that? A Korean capital city wants to be known globally? Well, let's go back to last year, when these two ads were all over Seoul.

This ad was seen around last November's G20 summit in Seoul. It boasts, or maybe promises, that "the world is taking notice of South Korea".

This one, which I actually liked for its depictions of historical Seoul, says "Welcome to Seoul, the city the world wants to go and see".

The smaller text reads: "The city that captivates the world with its endless enjoyment.

The city that the world wants to invest and live in.

The city where dynamic tourism is producing economic vigour and employment.

The world comes to our Seoul to learn about it.

Now welcome the guests with your smile."

Here's another North Korean propaganda poster of late:

The site that reported on these posters translates this one as “Let us all go for harvesting!”, but that's not entirely accurate because it leaves out the last word in the slogan. It's probably better translated as "Let's all go to the battle of the fall harvest".

This one promotes the highly controversial Four Rivers Project. It says, "Smile big, rivers of Korea!" There was one with a stronger message, one as upbeat as the criticisms of the project are dire and depressing, that I saw on a bus yesterday but I can't find it.

It's true, of course, that languages don't translate well, but I don't think I've ever been in a city that promotes itself so much as Seoul. Nor is it the case that floral, dramatic language is going to get anyone to take you seriously. All it does, I feel, erode trust and prevent people from taking the government seriously when they should do so, as we saw after the sinking of the Cheonan last year.

Those wagons are circled again

2011-09-20T18:08:00.003+09:00

I just had the chance to finish watching the Bills' 38-35 win over the Raiders thanks to the NFL Game Pass, which lets me watch NFL games live or whenever I want, for $270 for an entire season. Split three-ways, it's a fantastic deal. I'm able to watch a football game whenever I want, up to four at a time on the same screen, and since a game that's not live is shown without commercials, most games take about two hours.

I'm not a Bills fan per se, though they're the closest NFL team to Toronto. I like seeing them do well, but then, I don't really have a favourite team. I used to be a Broncos fan but then they started to suck after John Elway retired, and after that I've really enjoyed watching Peyton Manning play. There are lots of teams I enjoy doing well, but none I like enough to not root for their opponent when the game is about to become a rout.

At any rate, two things are impressive already about the Bills. First, they have scored 79 points this season, which is nine more than they scored in their last 6 games last season. This is a team that, for almost a decade now, has had one of the worst offenses in the league. The last time that the Bills ranked better than 25th in the NFL in yards gained was 2002, and they've ranked 30th four times in the last eight years.

This leads to the second key difference, which is that it was excruciating to watch Bills games, and the team under Dick Jauron never seemed like it tried very hard. It's one thing to watch a team lose if the games are close in some way, but the Bills lost five games last year by 24 points or more. It's hard to imagine a Dick Jauron team (yes, I know Chan Gailey was the coach last year) coming back from a 21-3 deficit.

This game simply was fantastic. The Bills had the ball five times in the second half and scored a touchdown every single time. The first three were unanswered scores which erased a 21-3 halftime lead for the Raiders with 14 minutes left in the game. The Raiders made it 28-24 with 9 minutes to left, the Bills retook the lead themselves 31-28 with 5 minutes to go, then the Raiders took just one minute to make it 35-31 with 3 minutes to go.

The ensuing Bills drive was dramatic, with a fourth-down conversion before ending up at the Raiders' 7 with 18 seconds left. It was 4th-and-1 and the Bills had no timeouts. A running back coming out of the backfield drew the linebacker out of the middle, and other receivers crossed to the left side of the field. This led David Nelson wide open in the centre of the field, on the goal line of all places, on the biggest play of the game.

With just 14 seconds left, the Raiders were actually able to get three plays off. The first, a 24-yard completion to the 44. If the receiver had gone down immediately instead of running a few more yards, the clock might have stopped with eight seconds instead of six. The Raiders tried to squeeze in one more play, but it was rushed and the pass was incomplete. With eight seconds and a timeout, even a quick strike over the middle might have worked. A 20-yard pass would have taken the ball to the 36, setting up a 54-yard field goal for a man who kicked a 63-yard field goal last week.

Even so, Campbell got off a hail mary pass that made it to the end zone and could have been a touchdown if it had been a foot to the right or a foot to the left. It was intercepted by a Bills defender sandwiched between two Raiders receivers. That's the kind of absurdly exciting game this was.

With the Patriots and Jets in their division, it's acceptable if the Bills don't make it to the playoffs, but if the games can be exciting, it's certainly a good halfway point between the doldrums of the past decade and the glory years of the early '90s.

Book #12: Gorgias

2011-09-19T22:55:00.001+09:00

This post should really be about two books, Les Miserables and Gorgias, but as much as I enjoyed reading Les Miserables, I have to admit that I don't really have much to say about it. I would probably end up gushing with praise for Victor Hugo's writing style, which appeals to me due to its focus on history and architecture, as I already did in this post.

Instead, let me talk about the Gorgias, which is a Platonic dialogue. This was an assigned reading in my second-year course on ancient Greek philosophy way back in 2005. My textbook included maybe a third of this dialogue, and as interesting as I thought it was, I didn't even get around to finishing that third.

In recent weeks, however, in the spirit of getting around to doing things, I started and finished this dialogue. This is probably the first time I have read any philosophy since the spring of 2008, which is disappointing in itself and also relevant to the lessons of the dialogue.

At first, I hated philosophy. The one course in philosophy I took in high school was an annoying mishmash of general knowledge with no real focus but lots of cliquish references to movies I had never seen and never would. I took a class in philosophy to round out my schedule in my first year of university and expected to hate it, but it was provocative and plain-spoken enough to instantly become preferable to political science, where I was learning gobbledygook terms like "operationalizing democracy".

To be fair, of course, over four years philosophy would teach me terms and ideas like pros hen equivocity, Tarski's truth quorum, the science of being qua being, the two meanings of the word 'is', how many stones make up a pile of stones and so on. Nevertheless, in retrospect, much of the appeal of philosophy for myself, as for others, lay in its counter-cultural appeal, in an obsession with meaning as our better-earning peers learned how to come up with weasel words.

Then I graduated and decided I was either going to become a teacher or a journalist. Either career path, it seemed, would make good use of philosophy: you surely can't write the truth without knowing what it was for something to be true and, similarly, you can't help someone learn without knowing what it was to know something.

Reality, of course, is very different. I didn't even realize how much my major differed from my ordinary, daily life until someone, with that "oh, wouldn't it be nice to learn some philosophy?" mindset, asked me to summarize the study of ethics in about fifteen minutes. As I laid it out, about a year and a half ago, I thought to myself that, as they say, you really don't need to know any of this after you graduate.

That thought went nowhere until a few months ago when I sat next to a man on the subway who was reading Plato's Cratylus. I went out to buy the Cratylus but ended up settling for the Gorgias.

At any rate, the Gorgias is very entertaining if you're an English teacher in Korea, no matter where you're from. Much of the early portion of the text discusses the role and the importance of rhetoricians, highly-paid instructors who taught others how to speak well. Socrates questions the value of rhetoricians as well as the knowledge they supposedly impart.

Classical Athens, then, is not all that different from modern Seoul in this respect. There might not be rhetoricians in the Athenian sense here, but there's a lot of money to be made by teachers and students in learning the sort of useless skills that Socrates dismissed as knacks. A knack, he says, is to knowledge what a pastry chef is to medicine: pleasing and flattering, sure, but ultimately useless.

Consider how this statement from almost three millennia ago reflect the present-day hagwon business in Seoul:

"Well, in my opinion, Gorgias, it doesn't involve expertise; all you need is a mind which is good at guessing, some courage and a natural talent for interacting with people. The general term I use to refer to it is 'flattery'..."

What makes the Gorgias so interesting to me is Socrates' claim that a tyrant is invariably powerless and unhappy. After he had said that rhetoric was a useless knack, Polus pointed to the immense political power enjoyed by those who excel at rhetoric. Socrates responds by saying that "orators and tyrants have the very least power of any in our cities".

His reasoning here might appear convuluted, but it is simple:

1) Everyone wants what's good
2) A tyrant might kill someone or confiscate their property, but this is not the good
3) Therefore, a tyrant can't get what he want and is both powerless and unhappy

This is another example of the ancient Greek view of happiness differing from our view of happiness. We view happiness as an emotional state, often in the short-term, but happiness to Plato was long-term well-being, perhaps better expressed by living well than by enjoying immediate emotional satisfaction. A person could be said by the Greeks to be happy while sleeping or performing some mundane task in a way that we wouldn't.

Reading this and subsequent discussions on whether it is better to be wronged than to wrong someone, I questioned, as Plato often did, the usefulness of philosophy in everyday life. Plato turned philosophy into almost a religious conviction, turning his nose at the possibility of rhetoric to one day save his life, declaring:

"No, my friend, you'd better consider the possiblity that excellence and goodness do not consists merely in the preservation of life. Perhaps the mark of a real man is that he isn't worried about how long he lives and isn't attached to life."

In the years since I graduated from university, I can say that while I use the skills I learned from philosophy, I seldom think about the material, and I suspect that I'm not alone. If there is one conclusion that I've reached in the last three years, it's that hectoring unsuspecting people in the agora in the way of Socrates is unproductive to modern life.

It's commonly said, as a cliche, that "you can't legislate morality". This, of course, is a very modern view of morality that, as my favourite professor joked, assumes ethics is about money and morality is about sex. We can and do legislate morality, such as when we punish murder and theft.

At the same time, many political controversies could be avoided if people recognized the difference between morality and the law. While, say, it would be ideal if everyone studied philosophy or excercised, it would be foolhardy to mandate this by law.

As for morality, the word itself has taken on a bad name and largely seems to come up when one group of people would like to restrict the lives of another group of people. Taken as a Latin equivalent of the Greek ethics, which today unfortunately applies in the negative to someone who embezzles money, it has a broader sense of how to live.

This sort of true ethics or morality is useful, indispensable really, even as job markets get tougher for those who do something in university besides outright vocational training. It seems foolish to spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars on learning how to get a job, but not even thinking about how to live, unless you value your job more than you value your life.

Hiking the Baekdudaegan: Jirisan

2011-09-18T22:42:00.009+09:00

I returned to Jirisan this week to hike the last, southernmost portion of the Baekdudaegan. Having covered the portion around Taebaeksan in June, clearly I'm not going in any kind of order, but that's a privilege I afford myself because: 1) I'm awful at hiking 2) I don't belong in any sort of nature except for the kind with the widest, most well-worn trail 3) I'm doing this alone.

There's an excellent English-language book about the Baekdudaegan by Andrew Douch and Roger Shepherd that details portions of the trail, such as how to get there, where to stay, and what makes that area special. It's an interesting enough book that it's worth a read if you have a strong interest in Korea and/or traveling in Korea, even if you've never set foot on a mountain here and never plan to do so.

For my part, I used the same, slightly less user-friendly website as last time to guide me. As unwieldy as a page it might be, it's very useful and covers the entire trail in excellent detail, complete with pictures, elevation charts and personal experiences.

I left Seoul on Sunday armed with not one, but two books (a Platonic dialogue and a collection of the works of Franz Kafka) in my backpack, but no map of Jirisan. Instead, I had this elevation guide of my planned route to guide me. This is, of course, a picture of a GPS readout from the site I mentioned earlier that I had on my cell phone.

Unlike the section of the trail just south of Taebaeksan, which is sparingly marked and even more sparingly used, the section on Jirisan is part of the well-traveled Jirisan ridge that runs east-west for 25 km. Add in few kilometres on either side to get up and down, and you've got a distance of about 32-34 km depending on who you believe. As I found out on this trip, you'll cover 2 km per hour when hiking including breaks (a hike on Bukhansan or Dobongsan in Seoul is 8 km both ways, which is why it takes you about 4 hours), which means that I was looking at about 16 hours of walking, maybe 12 if I packed light and tried to run a lot of it.

I got lucky, however, in that I was traveling on Chuseok and one of the less-popular shelters (Byeoksoryeong) on Jirisan was available on the all-important second day of Chuseok. This meant I could sleep on the mountain and hike leisurely with liberal breaks to read Plato in the sunshine.

The west end of the trail is the Nogodan altar, best accessed from Gurye in Jeollanam-do, while the east end is Jungsan-ri in Gyeongsangnam-do, not far from Jinju. I started in Gurye, traveling at night to avoid the Chuseok traffic, and arriving Sunday night. I slept in Monday and didn't leave Gurye until 10 am, which meant I got to Seongsamjae, a pavilion of sorts complete with its own cafe, at 11 am.

I've always felt that I could live in rural Korea if not for its jarring lack of good coffee, and I wasn't thrilled at having to settle for canned coffee down in Gurye. As an aside, the bus ride to Nogodan from Gurye is an hour through beautiful scenery and awe-inspiring mountain roads, well worth it if you're ever there. It wasn't easy for me to walk past this cafe in the sky, about the only time that an overpriced Americano at Angel-in-us might ever be worth it.

It's 5.6 km from this cafe by the bus stop to the Nogodan altar proper. You'll be surrounded by children, couples in casual wear and so on, though it's an easy but steep hike. From here, you'll get on the ridge going towards Cheonwangbong, the peak of Jirisan, with a sign informing you that you're 25 km away. There are signs probably every kilometre from here on out.

It had rained in the days before I got there, but mercifully not while I was there. There were plenty of clouds and, starting at about 2 pm, an ominous fog that made me wish I had picked an easier way to spend my vacation. I took lots of breaks but didn't eat much, reaching the Byeoksoryeong shelter after 18 km and 7 hours of walking.

Jirisan has recently reintroduced black bears into its vast wilderness. They go to pains to counter the impression given in the media that the bears are cute.

The walk from Nogodan to Byeoksoryeong is more or less flat, but the last few kilometres before Byeoksoryeong were quite challenging and made harder still by how tired my legs were.

As this sign shows, Byeoksoryeong is about the halfway point on the ridge. Many people left the shelter at around midnight to walk to the top before sunrise.

If you've never stayed in a shelter on a mountain, it's actually quite nice. They sell food and other supplies. The shelter itself is very clean considering the fact that it's on a mountain and full of mud-caked hikers. There's wifi if you have an account with Olleh and if you don't, there are still cell phone chargers.

I slept at 9 pm and I was one of the last people to wake up at 6:30. Pretty much everyone else was gone, never mind awake. I left at 7:30 with 11 km until the top and 17 until the bottom, figuring I could be done with the whole thing by 1 or 2.

It was a beautiful day and I really had no need to rush, so I kept taking long, leisurely breaks.

I made it to the top, finally, at around 2 pm. By this point the beauty of the day was long gone, and it was cloudy.

True, there wasn't much to see from the top, but while there are some amazing views from the top, Jirisan is also special for just how vast of an area it is. It certainly wasn't easy for me to make it to the top after 29 km of walking over about 14 hours.

I relied on three of each of these, along with some high-calorie packages of instant noodles, during the hike. It was good to have some vegetables after the fact, though I'm proud to say that I didn't have to buy any food or water on the top as I have in the past.

The way down was cloudy, dull, boring and uneventful except for the point at which I almost fell down a set of stairs and wrenched my left shoulder very badly, cursing at the top of my lungs in front of a very nice elderly couple that couldn't understand what my hurry was.

At the bottom, I knew I'd done something right by how weird it felt to be walking on pavement. I walked another 2 km to a bus stop at Jungsanri that takes you to Jinju, where I took a late-night bus back to Seoul, free from any traffic jams and making the trip in just over 3 hours.

In addition to the wrenched shoulder, I also walked away with a bleeding toe and a bloody heel from where my abrasive $30 hiking shoes had rubbed it the wrong way for about 48 hours. I did manage to run about 20 minutes (about 2k thanks to the terrain and a 20-lb backpack) both days, but even if I hadn't, my legs would have hurt just as much. The fatigue and soreness I had were similar, though not identical, to running a marathon. Completing the last climb of about 250 m (equal to an 80-floor building) was like running the last 5-7 km of a marathon.

I think this hyperbole is as hyperbolic as anything else you're going to see out there today, Jim

2011-09-15T02:12:00.003+09:00

I missed the NFL's opening weekend out running and hiking, respectively, but thanks to the NFL's Gamepass service, which makes watching games possible online if you're not in America, I'm catching up to the only game that seemed to be a close match-up between two good teams. Thanks to having dinner in between, I can't remember who won this game even though I read the boxscore, so it's as good as new.

Not as good as new is the tendency of reporters and commentators to forget that there have been games and players before the current one, and that there will be ones after the one in front of us. That's how we get the sort of nonsense I picked up in the span of a minute during the Jets-Cowboys game.

First, the sideline reporter (I missed her name) reported on the Cowboys' offensive line, which is made up of young, inexperienced players. She quoted a coach (excuse me, I was doing the dishes so I don't remember the exact wording) who said something to the effect of doubting whether the linemen were ready for the big moment, but that he was being proven wrong. Yes, this is a primetime game in New York, but these players are also not fresh out of high school and this is actually the first game of the season, not the last.

Second, more baffling, was Cris Collinsworth's claim that Bart Scott, once he makes a decision, reacts faster than any other linebacker that he has seen on film. Bart Scott is a great player, to be sure, but Collinsworth, at the age of 52, has been around professional football for three decades. Unless he just started watching film this past week, surely he has seen a linebacker that is better?

Now, it might be pedantic to tear apart every single word that comes out of someone's mouth, but it can be astonishingly painful to watch a football game if you actually pay attention to what the broadcasters might be saying. For people who are highly paid to talk about something to make sense while doing is not too much to ask.

All that aside, this does look to be a good game through the first half, even if the Jets are done by ten points. Even so, both teams are showing why they're trendy Super Bowl picks every preseason. Of course, as I wrote that, the Jets got a nice catch and run by LaDainian Tomlinson to set up a touchdown. Like Tomlinson and his former Chargers, the Cowboys and Jets both have Super Bowl windows that might not be as lengthy as they might seem.

One side (immense?) benefit of watching games via Gamepass: I'm paying to avoid commercials and if watching on a 9" monitor means avoiding the same 4 commercials (Budweiser, pick-up truck, midsize sedan, American TV show that is simulcasted) that Global shows in Canada, I'm all for it.

Going to see the IAAF World Championships in Daegu

2011-09-06T18:53:00.005+09:00

I left Seoul Saturday night to go watch the men's marathon at the World Championships in Daegu. I went to Daegu last September as well, and I have to admit that I left Daegu with a much better impression this time around. Granted, it rained last time while it was reasonably sunny this time around, but I think I saw much better parts of Daegu this time around than last time.

Much of the trip highlighted the best of living, traveling and hosting major international events in Korea. I don't like to do it, but buying train tickets at the last minute made me to take the high-speed KTX half-way until Daejeon, before transferring to the lowest-class of train, the spacious if ramshackle Mugunghwa train. At any rate, you can travel about 300 km from Seoul to Daegu in two hours or so via high-speed rail.

Arriving in Daegu at 2 am, I had no problem finding a reasonably clean hotel room for $40, complete with a massive flat-screen TV, thanks to what might best be euphemized as Korea's thriving hotel industry. Elsewhere in the world, it would have been impossible to walk out of a train station and expect to find a hotel room within a few minutes' walk, much less one that wasn't at exorbitant rates, but that's the brilliance of Korea.

I was also able to walk to the finish line of the marathon from my hotel in about 10-15 minutes, adjusting for time spent lost in what is a major drawback of visiting Korea, its eternally confusing, nameless streets. While the government is pushing a system of addresses that uses street names instead of the present ward-neighbourhood addressing system along with lot number (eg 25-42 Bedford-Stuyesvant, Brooklyn, New York City), it might work best for mailing. It's hard to imagine anyone leaving the current system that relies on landmarks to focus on street names.

Daegu as a whole is plastered in advertising for the event. Standing in Dongdaegu train station after the race, I had a nice view of the city and I was stunned at just how many buildings had the championship logo plastered all over them.

The race was similarly well-attended. Sure, there were large numbers of people who had obviously been recruited in some capacity, but there was no shortage of people out to gawk at the spectacle, even people who had absolutely no knowledge of running. To those of us know who the sport, the World Championship marathon is maybe the least-competitive major marathon out there, but you can't underestimate the power of national singlets. If you had put those same athletes in Nike and Adidas singlets, ordinary people might not have cared so much over whether Morocco or Japan came sixth.

As for the race itself, this was my second time watching a world-class race, the other one was the 2007 Chicago Marathon. This was more interesting for whatever reason, maybe because of the sheer size of the field or because of how many actual fans there were. That's right, there were fans, the largest number coming from Kenya and Japan, who had signs, flags, knew their runners and cheered very loudly.

I wasn't that impressed with the speed of the pack the first time around, though I was definitely impressed with just how many people were running together. I remember being stunned at 30k with how fast the leaders were running. I didn't know at the time that Abel Kirui was in the middle of something like a 28-minute 10k.

It wasn't that the runners were moving unimaginably fast; I've run a 1500 at 2:06 pace and lots of people could run a 400 at that pace (72 seconds) if they really wanted to. For me, I was struck by how different it looks from TV. Someone whose torso makes them look like they're out for a jog looks very different when you see them go by in profile.

Ironically, while a marathon is an awful sport to watch in person because of how little you get to see, I think that the experience never seems to carry over onto TV, with rare exceptions. The sheer force with which a 2:10 marathoner moves and the awkward stiffness in their body over the later stages of the race somehow seem to get smoothed out on TV, but are so vivid in person that I was just glad to be standing on the side of the road with a coffee.

Here are some pictures:

Abel Kirui leads Feyisa Lilesa at 30k.

I was too intimidated by these fired-up Kenyan fans to get them to stop for a picture.

I misjudged how fast Abel Kirui was moving as he ran by around the 42-kilometre mark. This was my only whiff on passing runners.

This is the best picture I took. I was watching the race next to a mulleted man from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. The Russian on the left was putting on a tremendous kick to pass the struggling Mongolian runner on the right. The Siberian yelled something in Russian that caught the runner's attention, and he took the time to look at us, smile and wave.

This is the last-place runner, Sangay Wangchuk of Bhutan, running a 2:38 national record. I have no idea why his clothes (is that even a uniform?) don't identify him.

How is 안심클릭 still in business?

2011-09-05T14:20:00.006+09:00

There's security paranoia and then there's trying to buy something from a Korean website. Generally, it's not worth it to pay by credit card online because the ensuing process will bankrupt your patience if not your computer's capacity to function. Even if you speak Korean, the Korean will not be rendered by your computer, you will have to use Internet Explorer (the older, the better), download about 3-4 security programs and give out information you didn't know you had.

I negotiated all this to buy a bus ticket, when I got this screen:

After all that security software, I need to input my card's pin number, its own four-digit security code, and, of all things, my national ID number. Is that really necessary? The next screen asks for a 30-character phrase in Korean that I no longer remember, so this is where the odyssey ended for me.

What is so bad about the way that the rest of the world handles credit card transactions?

Here is my previous look at Korean banking.

Buying a bus ticket, by the way, is no piece of cake either. Like anything else in this country, I had to enter my ID number, which includes your date of birth, only to be told that you need to be at least 14 to buy a bus ticket. When I tried it again with Internet Explorer, all of a sudden I was older than my students.

I wouldn't necessarily say that life in Korea is hard, or unduly hard for foreign residents, but getting things done online is incredibly vexing no matter who you are.

The IAAF has no idea what it's talking about

2011-08-31T00:55:00.002+09:00

Whatever success the sport of track and field achieves and whatever popularity it enjoys is likely in spite of the IAAF, which is about as useful as the UN in promoting or managing the sport. Watching the utter aloofness of the IAAF, which is quite possibly one of the poorest sources of information about the sport, and does virtually nothing to promote it. This is significant for a sport that's dying in front of us who still care about it.

If you watch any of the World Championships in Daegu, you would notice that the stands are almost always empty. Even on Sunday night, with Usain Bolt scheduled to run the final of the men's 100, the stands seemed about half full. Tonight, they were mostly empty for the men's 400 and the two finals that preceded it. The website, however, will tell you that tickets are sold out.

Part of the problem is putting the championships in Daegu, one of three cities which was willing to put in a bid for the event (Moscow and Brisbane were the others). Daegu is at best the third choice for a major event in Korea. I can't think of any Korean who would go there willingly. While many people go there, it's to visit family or to work there.

I don't deny that Korea does a good job of organizing and hosting such events, but there is almost no public interest here in track and field, and what little interest there could be is extinguished by the fact that there is not a single noteworthy Korean competing at these championships.

This explains why someone would go so far as to spend money on these tickets and stay home, or why the local rights owner, KBS, feels that infomercials outdraw the world's third or fourth-biggest sporting event. To be fair, of course, track has a very low profile in just about the entire world; it gets to be one of the biggest sporting events in the world because just about anyone can do it and because of the diversity of competitions.

At any rate, what sparked this diatribe against the IAAF is this sentence from its website about the men's marathon here on Sunday:

The 35-year-old.(sic) proving age isn't a barrier even at this distance. mastered South Korea's harsh heat and humidity when winning the Seoul Marathon in March.

The runner in question is Abderrahim Goumri, who did indeed win the Seoul International Marathon here in March, running 2:09:11. That time is about four minutes slower than his personal best, but not because of the heat and humidity. I ran the same race on March 20 and, as anybody who knows anything about Korea could tell you, it is very cold here in March.

I remember the day as being cold and rainy, but don't take my word for it. Data shows that the temperature was 4 degrees in the morning. Here is an IAAF recap of Goumri winning the race even though he is oddly overdressed for the balmy weather Seoul apparently gets in March.

I don't except the IAAF's writers to know all about the Korean climate, nor do I expect them to have a photographic memory of every international marathon, but presumably they get paid for writing what they do. Even two minutes of research could have proven that Seoul is cold in March (average high of 10, low of 1) and that the race in question was also run on a cold day.

Resorting to outright fabrications, as the writer did, is indicative of laziness and is also a window into the sort of careless, amateur operation the IAAF runs as it governs what is, for better or worse, one of the world's largest sports.

Drama in Daegu

2011-08-28T22:30:00.004+09:00

For me, and I suspect for many others, tonight was the most important night of the World Championships in Daegu. For most, I suppose, it was the men's 100-metre final featuring Usain Bolt, but for me, the highlight of any major competition is the men's 10,000. I'm not alone in this view, but it certainly is a minority view to focus on a twenty-five lap event, to the point that no one wants to put a 10,000 in their track meet.

The race was hard to predict, at least on paper, because of the uncertainty around Kenenisa Bekele. It wouldn't have been a surprise if Bekele had won or if he had foundered. Bekele was never really a factor in the race, as it turned out. The pace was pushed by Tadesse, Martin Mathathi and others whose name I don't know because I missed about half the race thanks to the women's long jump.

The race started slowly, going through the first kilometre in 2:57, which wouldn't really shock me if a woman did it. Halfway was 13:58, and a couple of laps at 63 and 64 seconds were enough to drop Bekele, though anyone watching on TV would have missed this. Farah kicked at 400 and it looked like Merga and Jeilan would fight for silver as late as 250 to go, but by 200 it looked like Jeilan had a chance. At 150 it was a race again and by 100 he had more or less pulled even. Farah was able to hold him off until 10 metres to go when Jeilan went by.

As much acclaim as Bekele has gotten over the distance, this was no doubt the most dramatic and exciting championship 10k since the Gebrselassie-Tergat duel at the Sydney Olympics. Bekele was so good that he would kick at 400 and the race was over with 395 to go.

Now for the second-guessing. My first reaction, as Farah opened up a huge lead, was that he had gone too soon. If he had waited before kicking, or at least not spent himself so quickly, he might have had a chance. On the other hand, if he had held back, he wouldn't have had such a big lead. The fact is that Farah was 10 metres or so away from winning.

My second reaction is that Farah and Tadesse, especially, would have had a better chance if the race had been faster up until the end. Tadesse did a great job in leading against Bekele two years ago. He pushed the pace tonight, but a faster ninth kilometre might have dropped enough people to let him medal, if nothing else.

My third reaction is that Bekele dropping out is no surprise after almost two years of not racing. He has pulled out some fantastic performances over the past decade, and he may yet do so again, but it wasn't going to happen. This was his first time to ever run a 10k on the track and not win.

Finally, there was clear proof that LetsRun's America-first jingoism produces idiotic fans. The amount of attention given to also-ran Americans compared world-beating Africans is absurd and always will be. This is why, as soon as Jeilan won, we saw comments like these in the race thread:

"Ethiopian,,, Gelad or something"
"And unknown Ethiopian Jeilan" (sic)
"Who the hell is this Jeilan guy? I've never even heard of him before."

Except, of course, that Jeilan made waves five years ago when he ran 27:02 (still his PB) supposedly at the age of 17. Until today, he had never quite fulfilled the potential he showed in 2006, but he is hardly an unknown. If he had been American, of course, the LetsRun crowd could no doubt have proven with their six-degree game (he beat such-and-such by so many seconds and such-and-such once had dinner with the Duke of Wellington, so we know that...) that he was obviously going to win.

An hour after all this was the men's 100-metre final. I saw Dwayne Chambers get disqualified for a false start in the semi-finals and noted that the new rule seems overly punitive. When Bolt lined up, I said that he was going to win easily unless he did something stupid, and he made the most likely mistake, which was a false start.

Ironically, Bolt was the last person who needed to be jumpy and nervous, but it happened anyway. The crowd, the announcers and, if I could have heard it, the Internet was stunned. Bolt had been the reason that the stadium in Daegu was even half full. To be disqualified so suddenly and, for a casual fan, inexplicably, must have been a huge let-down.

I don't support the rule. I remember how annoying it used to be to get a 100-metre final off without a false start, but even without special consideration for Bolt and his status within the sport, it seems unfair to punish what is obviously a common mistake. The old rule, if it ever actually existed, of allowing one false start for anyone and then disqualifying whoever is responsible for the second false start, seems a bit more reasonable as it has a warning element to it.

On airports and feelings

2011-08-23T22:21:00.004+09:00

Airports, as George Clooney's character demonstrated in Up in the Air, are perhaps the least sentimental place on earth. The air, the food, the pleasantries and just about everything about the experience is completely fake. Most people, he says, hate it, but he thrives on it. I have a love-hate relationship with airports. While I love travel and I love airports, I absolutely hate flying.

Airports are a self-contained world of their own, as Jerry Seinfeld noted almost twenty years ago. When I had a layover at the Beijing airport last year, I remember paying four dollars for a piece of cake and six dollars for a cup of instant coffee. The airport in Dalian had a $13 cup of organic, fair-trade coffee, for which they may have very well never found a buyer outside of spite or novelty. To wit, Seinfeld said:

Do you think that the people at the airport that run the stores have any idea
what the prices are every place else in the world? Or do you think they just
feel they have their own little country out there and they can charge anything
they want? You're hungry? Tuna sandwich is nine dollars. You don't like it;
go back to your own country.

At any rate, one of the things I love about airports is that, at least in the developed world, they're completely cultureless. Airports in Toronto, Tokyo, Tianjin and Tampa are virtually indistinguishable from each other. There are the high-end stores, the vaguely ethnic restaurants, the booksore-cum-convenience store with $14 copies of Sports Illustrated and $8 bottles of water, and the well-intentioned but nearly universally-garbled attempts at helping people stay connected (Bangkok invented a weird flat computer with a metal keyboard that runs on credit cards).

Someone asked me recently whether I felt more comfortable around Pakistanis or Canadians (though, I suppose, technically Korean was also a possibility), to which I replied that the answer was neither. I would have to say that I'm most comfortable around people who don't use words like "normal food" or "those people", people like the Namibian guy I met in China who had evidently studied abroad for much of his life, if not his entire life, or the Dutch girl I met in Vienna who spoke no Dutch.

Airports are like that too, although to be fair, they're more like taking food from a dozen different cultures, putting it into a blender and serving it up in $14 cups a a new take on cuisine. However, there comes a time in every trans-Pacific flight, around that two-thirds mark when you can't sleep any more, you can't watch another movie and you can't open the windows, that your fried, confused brain thinks about just what it is that you're doing.

It's at that moment that, hopefully, for me, at least, I can assure myself that as much as my sense of time and space have been obliterated, that I'm okay at the present moment. Not only that, but if I can tolerate the flight, I can probably also tolerate anything in life. The emotional crises induced by the chaos of travel, I like to think, in my case at least, produce a healing catharsis along with everything that they take from me.

If you get a chance to recover in between flights, as I'm doing right now at the Hong Kong airport, you'll probably realize that the emotional insights and panic on the plane were both sheer nonsense. Having gone through it all, however, it's possible to learn something, even if it's that there's nothing at all to worry about.

While I was writing this, I also thought about just why it is that I like airports if they're the equivalent of a vast 7/11. It can't be the people, because all you really see are the richest, say, ten percent of the world, hardly an interesting idea. It's not diversity either, because seeing people with four different colours of skin was never that interesting in high school. Much like a train station, an airport gives you the chance to go anywhere in theory. Airports being far less pleasant an experience than a train station, I prefer train stations much more.

The IAAF World Championships come to Daegu

2011-08-22T08:18:00.005+09:00

This is an intersection of the generally non-intersecting themes of this blog, Korea and running. I went to Daegu for the first time last september and I was impressed by the enthusiasm of the local government if underwhelmed by the city itself. Now the time is here for the IAAF World Championships in Athletics, or track and field, if you will, to come to Daegu.

When I heard that the championships would be in Daegu a few years ago, I thought it was too bad, because there was no chance I'd be here. Now that I'm still here, albeit working, it's safe to say that I'll just be able to see all of the championships live and maybe catch a marathon. In theory, however, I could leave after work to catch a night event thanks to Korea's small size and excellent high-speed rail network mean that it's easier for me to travel the 200-300 kilometres to Daegu than it is to, say, go from one side of greater Toronto to the other.

You can catch previews of all the events here, though I prefer LetsRun if only because they're more critical, even though they're a little (okay, a lot) centred on white Americans, Americans and Europeans (and in that order).

The most interesting event, for me anyway, is the men's 10,000 where Kenenisa Bekele is expected to race for the first time in almost two years and try to win his fifth straight world title. Challenging him will be Mo Farah of Britain and then the usual list of Zersenay Tadesse of Eritrea, Sileshi Sihine and Imane Merga of Ethiopia. Merga and Farah look to be the strongest of Bekele's challengers, if only because Bekele hasn't bested them the way he has beaten Sihine and Tadesse for years now.

I probably will try to go down for the men's marathon next Sunday, September 4, if for no other reason than the fact that I want to go hiking this Sunday, when the women's marathon happens. The course is basically three loops, making it possible to catch the leaders about six times near the start and finish of the loop if you're careful.

Seeing either marathon is great because the hot weather will both make you grateful that you're not running and appreciate the ability of whoever (look, this is as much a crapshoot as it is talent and preparation) manages to come out on top. I imagined that Beijing and then Daegu would be comparable to Osaka where no man ran faster than 2:17 and few broke 2:20, but Beijing disproved it (partly due to superior talent), but Osaka is also inhumanly hot. Daegu is hot, but I think not as hot as Osaka can be. Times should be classically slow, not so slow that you think they ran 44 km or someone forgot to hit the stop button on their watch.

For North Americans, LetsRun has a schedule for Eastern time. For Canadians, I imagine that the CBC coverage is better than whichever American network has it, at least it used to be the case. In Korea, thanks to the largesse of state-owned broadcasters, we will probably be able to watch pretty much everything live.

I'm also a fan of watching heats, boring as they are, not for the reason that it's a rare chance to watch running on TV, but because I think it's instructive to watch someone run very fast and yet hold something back. So much bad running and so many depressing results come from trying to give a hundred percent all the time on every run, every workout and every race.

A rare article on running tips that gives actual running tips

2011-08-22T07:55:00.003+09:00

Maybe because this was written by Alex Hutchinson, no slouch at running himself, it's a far better resource for recreational runners than much of what you find elsewhere. On the other hand, there's no shortage of tripe written by former Olympians with credentials superior to Hutchinson, so maybe it's not a function of Hutchinson's running ability.

So much of the running advice you find on the Internet, particularly in mainstream publications, is of two sorts. The first makes it seem like you're about to undergo some obscure heart surgery in the Sahara, reminding you not to overdo it and covering legal liability by wrapping the whole thing in medical advice and disclaimers.

The second type is the sort that makes news for its sheer novelty. If Meb Keflezghi, Olympic silver medalist and New York Marathon champion, adds twenty-five minutes of blowing bubbles with his spit to the fifteen-or-so hours of running he does every week, this will make news. If it's not blowing bubbles with his spit, it'll be doing yoga, pilates, weights or running in those shoes George Costanza bought from "Jimmy" to help him run faster.

Indeed, it's better journalism for one article to posit a new idea, from a "study", of course, that maybe watching TV helps you run a faster marathon than running everyday. This is the same reason that if you're a scientist who can publish a study showing that eating chocolate helps you lose weight, beer makes you smarter, or any other counter-intuitive drivel, you're guaranteed to wind up published in newspapers around the world.

The analogous problem in history would be the cottage industry of people who make a living arguing that a prominent historical figure was gay, had an incredible affair, or did something so different from their usual public image that the publication in question can't help but print this, no matter how non-sensical or baseless the claim might be.

What, by the way, are these tips?

Many inexperienced runners make the mistake of always running at the same pace for the same distance, says Jerry Ziak, a top Canadian marathoner and Olympic hopeful who coaches about 35 runners in Vancouver.

This approach – a mix of easy and hard running, instead of doing everything at medium effort – is typical of the training elite runners do, and produces much greater gains in fitness.

Just as important as the run itself, he says, is what you do before and after: warming up with dynamic stretches, and taking the time to do strength and mobility drills for the core and hips.

Mr. Laan often finds runners place too much emphasis on a single long run – running 35 kilometres on a Sunday morning but only 15 kilometres the rest of the week, for example. It’s better to spread training out more evenly.

Especially refreshing about the article is that it doesn't make mention of useful extras like weightlifting, cross-training or various nutritional products that offer quick fixes. A great deal of any lifestyle, no matter what, is what you can buy while doing it. Roughly comparable activities like cycling, skiing or hiking offer no shortage of expensive items to buy, and the sort of person who makes a habit of reading the Globe also makes a habit of buying these things.

However, running flies in the face of the consumerist lifestyle. Cycling, skiing and mountaineering at their highest levels are dominated by wealthy countries, but the most successful countries in long-distance running are Kenya and Ethiopia, with a total of about 120 million people and a combined economy of $60 billion, about the size of Delaware, New Hampshire or Saskatchewan.

Guns, Germs and Steel

2011-08-20T16:34:00.001+09:00

I read Guns, Germs and Steel a few weeks ago when I was in China, making this post a few weeks old. I didn't realize, moreover, that the book was almost fifteen years old, published in 1997. That puts it in the sweet spot of irrelevance in a sense, because it's not so old that no one has ever heard of it, effectively making it new, nor is it so new that everyone's talking about it. It should be something of a required reading today given how fashionable scientific racism seems to be getting, at least on the Internet.

Guns, Germs and Steel seeks to answer the question of why it is that Eurasian societies advanced faster and further than societies in Australia, Africa and the Americas, ultimately becoming able to colonize them. The central answer it posits is geography.

Societies in Eurasia, generally speaking, were placed in locations where agriculture was possible. Geography, particularly, agriculture is so central to the fate of the world today that Diamond seems to be overreaching in the explanatory power he assigns to geography and agriculture. Agriculture, Diamond writes, was possible in the presence of favourable topography and climate, as well as the presence of plants and animals which were conducive to farming.

Nevertheless, it is a good explanation: societies which developed agriculture went on to evolve into densely-poplated states with large population bases. Contrast this with societies on Australia, where agriculture was prohibitive, population and population density very low and, consequently, there was no organization into societies which were large enough to conquer others.

Diamond is as much trying to answer a question that usually never gets answered seriously or gets answered with simplistic racism as he is trying to write a book against racism. That we over-extend by viewing things in terms of race is easy when you consider that one Maori tribe which conquered another, hitherto an equal, with the help of modern weapons would not be regarded as intrinsically superior, but Europeans who conquered indigenous Americans with the help of Chinese-developed weapons do get regarded as superior for doing so.

On the other hand, Diamond makes some leaps that are the sort of "reverse racism" (about as meaningful of a term as 'PIN number') practiced by well-meaning but misguided high school teachers. In particular, he argues that tribes living in Stone Age conditions on New Guinea are more intelligent than those of us in industrialized society because there are things they can do which we can't. While Diamond is able to correctly identify the fact that we can do things others can't because we have been trained to do so from childhood, he does not extend that some courtesy to explain why we can't do what the New Guineans can do.

As I read the book, I leaned more and more to the conclusion that even if Diamond is wrong and whites are smarter than blacks, what difference does it make? Modern racists on the Internet sometimes allow for the inclusion of Jews and some Asians as superior. Generally all racists, whether strict exclusionists or the more flexible, inclusive type, can agree on the inferiority of blacks and Hispanics.

If different ethnic groups are different in many ways, the argument goes, are differences in intelligence not possible? I personally would not be shocked if there were intellectual differences between ethnic groups, but one group would no more be "smarter" than one Jews are "healthier" than blacks by not having the gene for sickle cell anemia.

Moreover, the reality is that differences in the intellectual capacity of ethnic groups are only meaningful if that's how you see the world. If those of Russian descent are smarter than those of German descent, what does this information do for us? Should we let in more Russian immigrants than German immigrants? The smarter policy would be to simply let in those immigrants who can meet a certain standard, but that wouldn't work for those who see the world as consisting of various races, nations, ethnic groups or whatever allows them to feel superior.

What has been unfortunate for white racists has been their reliance on IQ tests, because those usually put scholastically-inclined East Asians and Jewish ethnic groups at the top. The options from there have been to broaden their appeal to include Jews, as Jared Taylor at American Renaissance has done, or to move away from being white supremacists to white nationalists preserving the uniqueness of the white race, as is more common nowadays.

Why the decline of message boards is unfortunate

2011-08-11T18:22:00.003+09:00

This blog post takes a look at the slow decline of message boards, pretty much all of whom are dying a slow death as people move towards blogs, Facebook, Twitter and similar sites. I'm reminded of the first message board I ever used, the BaseballBoards, which then became FanHome, which in turn was absorbed by some unholy conglomerate which may have been absorbed by ESPN.

Eventually, FanHome re-emerged independent as TheScoreBoards, but only as a shell of itself. That the most active part of it is its off-topic political discussion board tells us something about the power of the Internet, as people who on the surface can't stand each other start what might well be their second decade of discussing politics with each other. My affiliation with the site in its various incarnations goes back eleven years.

The main difference between Facebook and Twitter underlines the importance of message boards. If I have something intellectual to share, I'll put it on Twitter. If it's something more personal, I'll put it on Facebook. For a majority of people, I suppose the latter is more common, and understandably so, but the practice of talking to strangers on the Internet is vastly underrated.

I learned to write by debating strangers about baseball, politics and later football and running over the Internet. It's how I learned to evaluate the strength of an argument and someone's reasoning, a process that I would formalize years later in university, but it began with the Internet. Indeed, much of what I know, I've learned by discussing a variety of topics with strangers on the Internet.

A future talking only to people you know is in many ways a dull future because it's a closed loop. Talking to people you know about the things you know takes us back to the '80s when information was exceedingly hard to access and someone interested in Bactrian camels would simply be out of luck if he or she did not know any other enthusiasts of Bactrian camels.

Up until recently, the Internet was a fantastic way to learn in that strangers around the world could be united by their enthusiasm over a common topic and learn from each other. If this phenomenon becomes less common, we'll just read about things we agree shared by people we agree with.

More than a decade ago, I became interested in white nationalist message boards, first reading the Vanguard News Network until its profanity made it illegible, and then migrating to the paranoid, deluded and yet more-or-less comprehensible Stormfront. Some might argue that there is no edifying component here, but I would also like to add message boards like Cool Running and LetsRun, especially the former, where I learned a great deal from runners much better than myself.

If now I'm supposed to use Facebook or Twitter to connect with other runners, there simply won't be that depth of discussion you can find on LetsRun. LetsRun, the message board of choice for people who believe that you have no business running unless you are presently an Olympic gold medalist, but also that your gold medal was the result of doping, is a website that made me a much better runner.

Stranger-based communication allows for people in dissimilar situations to connect. But if it's going to be replaced by talking to runners you know in real-life, like with anything else, the discussions simply won't be as passionate. The anonymity of message boards allows for ideas to be examined and criticized with greater scrutiny than you might present in real-life.

If I sit next to someone at a wedding who believes that there are only 42 elements in the periodic table, I can either gently correct them or politely accept their world view. On the Internet, I can let them know in detail, with references, just how wrong they are. Maybe this exhibits some anti-social tendencies, but for the wider audience and maybe also the original poster, it presents a learning opportunity of how to call out someone for their nonsense.

But someone that I know in real-life who posts on Facebook that compression socks allowed them to run a half marathon forty-five minutes faster, I'll probably just click the 'like' button instead of pointing out that they'd have been lucky to get forty-five seconds of benefit from the sucks.

Admittedly, civility on many message boards is lacking, though the better message boards out there are far closer to real-life interaction than, say, the comments on newspaper articles, which by far trend to the absolute lowest of human interaction with near universality, a trend that I have never understood. But it's also true that a great deal of people have never read or never posted on a message board for the reason of manners, among others. Message boards might not have been for everyone, but for those who used them and have used them, the benefit was great.

Some of the message boards I've read over the years, which are still standing:

LetsRun, since 2003
Stormfront, since 2001 or 2002
TheScoreBoards, since 2000 in its first incarnation

Pictures from Beijing

2011-08-11T11:59:00.005+09:00

As much as I have to say about the Chinese government and Chinese politics, I had a fantastic time in Beijing and Harbin. I probably did about a half dozen identifiable things and spent the rest of my time simply roaming the city to the point that central Beijing became convenient enough to walk around without resorting to buses, taxis or the subway.

I grew to hate Beijing taxis during this trip. It was impossible to find one late at night or during rush hour, much of Beijing's core is an awkward place to catch a taxi and taxis don't venture there to begin with. If you do find a line of taxis waiting in a busy area, odds are that they'll quote $8 for a $2 trip.

For most tourists, most tourist attractions can be walked (eg it should take no more than an hour or so to walk from the Temple of Heaven to the Drum Tower) and you'll learn a great deal along the way.

You'll also find that if you're going to or from the core of the city, buses will likely go where you're going and will do so for 1 yuan (about 15 cents). Bus stops tend to be written entirely in Chinese, but it's also time to consider the fact that Chinese simply isn't that hard. Just as Chinese newcomers adapt to new countries by matching letters, you might do the same by matching characters.

Consider Tiananmen Square, which is shorter in Chinese than English (天安门), or Beijing station (北京站). If you learn even these six characters during your stay there, your trip will be a much more interesting one. The alternative mindset, of course, is that an expensive overseas trip is no time to start learning the world's most common language. That time is best spent isolating yourself with other backpackers discussing your travels to other locales prefaced by the verb 'to do', as in "yeah, I did Italy and Switzerland when I was in university, it was pretty chill".

That rant aside, here are some of the things I saw while I was in Beijing.

The crowd in the ticket hall at Beijing station. I'm convinced that this scoreboard does nothing but sow panic.

The aforementioned National Museum of China.

Officers from the People's Armed Police march at Tiananmen Square. They are technically a paramilitary force responsible for internal security. Unsurprisingly, they number 1.5 million across the country.

The Chinese Communist Party built itself a 90th birthday present at Wangfujing, one of many across the city.

Yao Ming in an ad next to, I presume, his mother, who is 6'3" herself.

Evening at Beihai Park in Beijing, a remarkable public space in Beijing.

The view from the sixth-floor cafe at the King's Joy Hotel in Qianmen. Note the dilapidated buildings in the foreground with the Forbidden City and the state apparatus in the background.

The Qianmen pedestrian street.

Between the pedestrian street and where I was staying was this unsightly relic from the past.

The ornate but far-too-small waiting room at Beijing station. The cafe in the waiting room was mostly empty. None of the people standing or sitting on their luggage wanted to pay $4 for a cup of tea and the soft booths that came with it.

Beijing station.

A taxi driver and a passenger discuss a destination on a map in front of Beijing station.

One of the preserved historical houses (I think this is actually the entrance to a collection of houses) on Beichang Street just west of the Forbidden City. This shady street with well-preserved architecture and occasional glimpses of the forbidden Zhongnanhai complex connects Tiananmen Square with Beihai Park. It makes for an excellent walk.

The north end of the Forbidden City, Beijing's imperial palace for five centuries.

Toonies or Tweeting, it doesn't matter

2011-08-10T15:35:00.003+09:00

I went to my first Jays game in three years today. I can't be sure, but I feel like my last game was a post-apocalyptic Toonie Tuesday where drunken shirtless hooligans began fighting with each other and with SkyDome security, doing their part to disabuse the city and outside observers of the notion that this is Toronto the Good. Somewhere between now and then, they did away with the idea of two-dollar tickets for the third deck.

I can't be in favour of a raise in ticket prices for a team that, no matter how you spin it, hasn't made the playoffs since Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister and lately has been in the process of ridding itself of its best players. However, if you had been to some of these games, it was clear that a two-dollar ticket made it absurdly affordable (a round trip subway fare was triple the price of the ticket!) for large numbers of drunken men to congregate in one place and be fueled by the just-not-good-enough mediocrity of the Blue Jays. I will gladly pay an extra nine dollars for third-deck tickets behind home plate if it keeps some of the douchebags away.

When I got to the stadium tonight, I saw that the new paradigm for Tuesdays was Twitter. Tuesdays are now Tweeting Tuesdays, the obvious step for a decidedly lame team is to tie itself to Twitter, following CNN into irrelevance. The reasons are different: CNN is delegating much of its journalism to random people on Twitter, acting as an excellent example of why the ancient Greeks feared democracy. The term had the connotation of mob rule, and similarly, this 24-hour news channel can't find enough journalists to come up with stories or opinions, so they turn to mob rule.

Case in point is this clip from the Daily Show, starting at 3:20. An anchor actually says, "tell me what you're doing this weekend, I wanna know." Stewart concludes that "CNN has given up, they've put the power of the news in your hands."

The Jays, meanwhile, are seemingly trying to be hip, but their minor league lameness comes out with events like 90's Night. Tweeting Thursday just takes the old system of encouraging fans to waste fifty cents texting some nonsense for a small chance at winning a prize, but it allows for more of it. Perhaps the worst way to use Twitter at a live sporting event (is there a good way? Let me know at @a_ahmad) where you're already there was when the Jays were down 4-1 in the middle of the ninth inning. They took someone's Twitter comment that read along the lines of "rally time" and put that up on the big screen.

Now, odds are that I use Twitter far, far, far more than you do. So, why do I use Twitter if I think that Twitter is a slide into irrelevance? The problem is not with Twitter, it's with the use of Twitter for marketing purposes by a baseball team that has finished third or worse in fifteen of the last sixteen seasons, save for one second-place finish. This season's Jays are on track for their fourth-straight fourth-place finish. It's a tough division, sure, but every other team in the division has managed to do more since the Jays last made it to the playoffs in 1993.

The only thing that can make it fun to go to a baseball game are the fans. Team-directed fun is about as fun as, well, the microwaved $6 hot dogs they sell (I fully stand to be corrected if the hot dogs are $4 instead of $6). Developing and maintaining a larger fan base is difficult in a hockey-crazed town with a so-so team. The Jays were twelfth last year and I'm sure that one of the EQA-equipped baseball illuminati has a complete answer to how to develop a fan base, but better, cheaper food would be a start.

In the absence of winning, a smaller ballpark with less cement and a far smaller capacity would do wonders for this team. The popularity of Jays hats from the '80s and '90s is in part indicative of the popularity of nostalgia itself but also nostalgia for what was a great team playing with powdered-blue uniforms. The current team, called the Blue Jays but wearing black and white uniforms, playing in a half-empty concrete cavern with fans busy Tweeting, is the antithesis to the team in powder blue playing in a anachronistic stadium subject to wind and snow from the lake and with awful sightlines.

Baseball can be a uniform sport in that there are 162 games a year which can blend into one, but what fans love is what's unusual about the game. Marketing the Jays isn't easy, as about a dozen failed marketing approaches over the "maybe a wild card" years have shown, but going heavy on corporatization isn't the answer. Of course, with a topic such as this one, discussing what more people are going to like, maybe corporate standardization is the answer, though someone who knows why attendance surged to as high as 29,000 per game (besides cheap tickets) from 2006-2008 could answer that.

Visiting the National Museum of China

2011-08-04T16:31:00.002+09:00

Please bear with me as I type up the posts I wrote by hand during the long stretches of offline time in China. I already won't post again about the Chinese Northeast for a while.

The New York Times wrote in April about the newly-reopened National Museum of China and its many difficulties, namely that of trying to have a world-class museum in a country where many topics are off-limits, up to and including that country's history.

Having read about it beforehand and the weather in Beijing being 35 degrees, it was natural to spend most of a day at the museum. I wasn't alone: there was no shortage of people sitting around in the lobby of the museum. Like many other public places in China, the part that was free was crowded with hundreds of people, but the part where you had to pay (a cafe with nice chairs) had only about eight people, most of them Westerners.

What had struck me about the building the previous day was its architecture. It looks like a North Korean monument: massive to the point of making anyone in front of it feel like an ant, concrete, and firmly in the socialist style. The throwback style of architecture is definitely in keeping with China's recent Communist Party revival movement.

In the searing heat, I was dismayed to see that there was a line of several hundred people and it was moving slowly. When I got to the front, I saw that the two windows I'd been seeing didn't sell tickets, they were responsible for taking baggage that was too big to take inside.

The ticket window itself was a room with the doors opened. In the doorway was a table with a single man sitting at it. He was handing out tickets to a crowd that had lined up but instantly disintegrated into a mob. The tickets were being handed out as fast as they could be printed, employees behind him were feeding them to him like ammunition for a machine gun.

Some people showed ID but he didn't even glance at them, though my ticket says that admission is only with valid ID. I didn't have my passport since, well, there's no need to take your passport to a museum, so it worked out well. Clearly, the museum was not off to a great start if this was the sort of absurd, inefficient way it handled something as simple as entry.

The museum itself is something of an embarrassment to one of the world's greatest civilizations, mostly due to the fact that it's very much an initiative guided by the highest levels of the Communist Party, but in part because many important artifacts were taken by the Guomintang to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese civil war. Nevertheless, I would guess that maybe twenty or thirty percent of the available space is empty.

The central hall is a collection of paintings depicting various scenes from China's communist revolution and the anti-Japanese resistance, with descriptions only in Chinese. The upper floors have an exhibit on Chinese pottery, described only in Chinese, and Buddhist sculptures, this time with English accompanying the Chinese.

There are three foreign exhibits at the museum which I didn't check out because of a lack of interest. It's worth noting that they're relatively innocuous, uncontroversial and dull. Enlightenment art is in fact controversial for the party, which is why it was carefully arranged to avoid references to troublesome things like human rights.

The best part of the museum, ironically, was in the basement. It was a fascinating, thorough exhibit about Chinese history from prehistoric times up until the collapse of imperial China with the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911.

Signs were bilingual and the museum did a good job of stringing together that much history with unifying themes, though it was self-serving to a great extent. There were numerous references to China's ethnics (sic) and the contribution they had made in multi-ethnic Chinese states going back centuries, no doubt part of China's attempt to harmonize its present minorities (Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongolians and others) by casting them as always having been part of a multiethnic China.

Another interesting project was that any and all maps of China, at the museum and elsewhere, now depict China with the entirety of the South China Sea as part of China. This is a hotly-disputed claim that involves many countries, but China just went ahead and glossed it right over.

According to the New York Times article, there was a section on modern Chinese history, which was euphemistically titled "Road to Rejuvenation". I had a hard time finding it, variously ending up at a bathroom or an exhibit hall that had nothing in it as of yet. Considering that the museum is organized like an M.C. Escher sketch, I don't think it's gone, but it wouldn't surprise me if it has been removed for making references to the difficulties of implementing socialism, itself a nice way of mentioning the millions who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward.

Where will we catch a glimpse of high society in 2050?

2011-08-04T15:52:00.002+09:00

Forty years ago, with China in the throes of the Cultural Revolution and the Soviet Union more or less as strong as ever, you would have never predicted that Russians born then would travel to provincial China for material goods as adults. And yet, that's exactly what's been happening in the Russian Far East for some time now, as Russians cross the Amur River into China's Heilongjiang province for business and for fun.

Slate reported two years ago on the border cities of Blagoveshchensk and Heihe, the former as ignored now as it was under the USSR, and the latter an unremarkable Chinese city no one would have ever heard of if it wasn't next to the Russian border. The relationship is lopsided enough that Blagoveschchensk has a monument to suitcase traders, Russians who have crossed the border into China to bring back goods they sold in Russia.

Harbin, similarly, also has Russian tourists with signs and facilities catering to them, a relationship that notably is not reciprocated in Russia. Admittedly, there's less to attract Chinese to Russia than vice versa, but clearly only one governement is interested in the region.

The Chinese Northeast is the country's rust belt, part of the first industrialization of China when Manchuria was under Japanese control in the early twentieth-century. Like North Korea, which was established as a communist state around the same time, China used the Japanese industrial base for its fetishized socialist heavy industry.

For China, the focus moved South towards Hong Kong and Guangdong province thirty years ago, and the Northeast never really recovered. North Korea, on the other hand, never really moved its focus. Ironically, the Chinese Northeast is in part pinning its hopes on North Korea opening up to China the way China opened up to Hong Kong.

At any rate, what struck me about the sight of Russian tourists getting a look at the good life in Harbin was how dramatic the change in status was. It's not the shift in Sino-Russian relationships, but how absurd this would have seemed forty years ago, like Chinese tourists from Dandong being drawn to Sinuiju by its bright lights.

Parenthetically, while China's rise might seem surprising going by the twentieth century, it's absurd that the country which had been the world's most advanced for centuries and was the world's largest economy as late as 200 years ago, would not be able to regain that position absent the turmoil of the Qing dynasty's collapse and Mao's catastrophic planned economy.

Nevertheless, it is surprising that it happened because it might not have. Another example would be the fall of the Soviet Union, obvious to everyone in retrospect, but a shock to everyone at the time. While China will not be a rusting, abandoned hulk like much of Central Asia is in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, but that the world is intensely unpredictable, as much to us as to those who make a living making predictions about it.

Staying within Northeast Asia, there is perhaps no better place to accept that we might simply have no idea what the future will hold than in North Korea. People have been predicting its demise for years now, partly because that makes better headlines than "North Korea to keep on keeping on into the future", but the more it becomes a Chinese protectorate, the less likely it is to go anywhere. Whatever the case, it's safe to say that we don't know what North Korea will be like in 2050.

To Harbin and back

2011-08-03T18:39:00.004+09:00

I spent the middle of this trip traveling to and from Harbin. It's a fifteen-hundred kilometre trip that I made by train.

The Z1 train going to Harbin was surprisingly comfortable. The 40-dollar soft seat ticket got me an actual soft seat, comparable to the sort of seat you might get on a train in Korea or elsewhere.

Actually, I would describe this train as more or less comparable to the Korean Mugunghwa trains, the lowest class. The ten-hour trip was overnight but my car was quieter than most Mugunghwa trains I've been on.

Harbin itself was one of those places I know well from having planned to go there about a half dozen times. It's most famous for its ice festival in the winter but a trip in the summer is well worth it.

From the moment I entered the Friendship Hotel in Harbin, I knew I'd hit the jackpot. Communist countries love the word friendship and this hotel claimed to have hosted Soviet leaders in the past.

It was a grand but worn hotel, so the four-star experience was mine for fifty dollars. The hotel, maybe by design was next to the Songhua river and Stalin Park, which runs next to it.

The air was much cooler and cleaner in Harbin owing to its location by the Russian border. Between the hotel and the weather alone the trip was worth it, considering that daytime highs in Beijing had been about 35 degrees. Harbin is also home to a collection of Russian architecture in varying states of repair and cheesy restoration.

Stalin Park meets the European-inspired Zhongyang Dajie (Central Avenue) at a very socialist and rather dramatic monument to flood control. I've never seen anything of the sort outside of a place on the outskirts of Budapest that collects old Soviet sculptures and statues and charges tourists for the right to stare at them.

Most of the Russian architecture in Harbin was the work of Jews who numbered in the tens of thousands there at one point. Its condition ranged from the good to The ostentatious to the beautiful.

Harbin is not an especially wealthy city by Chinese standards and development would likely threaten many of these buildings with either demolition or Las Vegas-style eternal life.

I would prefer it if Harbin and Heilongjang province became a sanctuary for architecture and nature respectively instead of being turned into another monstrous Chinese city, but I really have no knowledge of the forces at work in the city or the region.

I took the dingy T72 train back to Beijing, which charged the same despite taking sixteen hours and being far less clean or comfortable. Arriving at Beijing station made the trip somewhat more worth it.

I suspect that I'm the only one who loves that horribly undersized building and its peculiar shape, not to mention the fact that it has train service to Vietnam, Mongolia, North Korea and even Moscow.

I walked through the station's square at midnight on my way back after a late-night snack. There were people arriving and leaving, and there were also those hard on their luck roaming the area, but most numerous were those passengers who had camped out on the filthy, garbage-strewn ground on mats or their own luggage, waiting for their own train.

whoops!

2011-07-31T12:29:00.001+09:00

That email sent before I was finished. The last sentence was going to be that the successes and motivations of the party can't purely ad ascribed to evil or to pure luck.

At any rate, speaking of evil, I'm off to check out the newly opened National Museum of China.

Let me also testify that although the sky is blue here, the air is vile. I almost threw up while running a couple of miles in Qianmen this morning. That might be just this area since I didn't have this problem anywhere else, but then I've over had this problem anywhere else in the world.

What if the Party is right?

2011-07-31T12:23:00.002+09:00

It's more or less an accepted belief that while the Chinese communist party is an adept economic manager, it has not done much for ordinary people, nor does it do much for the people outside of helping them live comfortable lives.

However, I've noticed several cases where an authoritarian government can do a better job of serving the people than one which is democratic. China can be contrasted with its giant neighbour India, which has more poverty and more social ills despite being a democracy.

The sort of heavy-handed security apparatus the state has constructed in conjunction with the army and the Party allows it not just to keep riffraff away from party headquarters, but also to restrict harmful or dangerous behaviour.

To wit:

1. I saw a police officer wrestle with a man on a motorcycle who was trying to cross a busy street on red light. It seems that the police or security officials in a democracy don't feel as empowered as their Chinese counterparts. This would explain why buses and even police cars in South Korea will go through a red light if there's no one in their way.

2. From the standpoint of the traveler, the tours of sites around Beijing such as the Great Wall have been standardized and regulated by the state. While shady outfits no doubt exist, they have become a little harder to find.

3. It's actually very hard to cross the street in Beijing now given the way that thigh-high white fences all over the city tunnel pedestrians to crosswalks.

4. Similarly, an army of middle- aged women patrol underground passages and subway platforms for all sorts behaviour. While much of it is nonsense, it makes getting on a train that much easier.

On a far larger scale, it's conceivable that the only thing keeping this country together and functional is a very strong state. Much of the standardizations that the PRC gas undertaken in its history no doubt trample on many, but the linguistic unity in Mandarin, for example, is probably more beneficial than a Europe-sized country of people who can't understand each other.

I think it's undeniable that all of East Asia's developed states got there by some form of benign dictatorship. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and of course China all got there thanks in part to strongmen. Compare that to a democracy like Mongolia which is still struggling to develop.

Ideally, we would have a free state with development. But if you had to choose one, it's probably better to rich than to vote in poverty. None of this excuses the Chinese Communist Party's murderous excesses, its rampant narcissism (seen in massive exhibits all over Beijing commemorating its 90th anniversary), or its strong

Red China, white knuckles

2011-07-31T00:09:00.002+09:00

I was walking through a subway station tonight when I saw an ad for the Harry Potter movie (out August 4th here) next to an ad commemorating the Chinese Communist Party's 90th anniversary. The station was in an area with a lot of that crappy architecture from the '80s and '90s, the time when China opened up and everyone thought it would become a Western-style democracy in a matter of time. As the last few years have shown, certainly the time since the Olympics, China's grip has tightened rather than relaxed.

Before the Olympics, I think, all subway stations introduced x-ray scanners for all bags. This was widened to all bus and train stations in the country; I've taken buses in towns without running water or shower which had a scanner at the bus terminal. These also exist at underpasses allowing entrance to Tiananmen Square. Somewhere in the time I was gone, the Public Security Bureau decided to build a permanent structure in the square, so now you can cross the street into Tiananmen Square without having to go overseas.

Alongside all of that, Beijing has matured nicely to the point where it reminds me of Taipei, even far superior in many ways. That is, of course, because I spent the day in the Wangfujing shopping district and the ponds and willows of Beihai Park. Government and military buildings occupy much of the space, but there is no shortage of newly-minted middle class Chinese tourists taking it all in. I would say, in fact, that tourism in Beijing is now almost entirely a Chinese phenomenon than a foreign phenomenon.

This is hardly surprising, though I think it's clear that the opposite was true not too long ago. The Chinese will be the world's largest group of tourists in not too long, and it figures that they would conquer Beijing along the way. What this means, hopefully, for the rest of us is that there will be a slow but steady decline in the sort of menu scams (teahouse, art gallery, rickshaw ride even?) you can expect in this city. I'm sadly on nerve whenever someone tries to speak to me in English because I can see where it's headed.

While China ascends to being a middle-income country by global standards, I would dare to say that the poor here are as poorly off as the poor in just about any city in the world. If you wander the much-romanticized hutongs, the tiny homes in alleyways have gotten standardized bathrooms, which is a plus but still puts them as a block of ancient houses sharing a public bathroom. If you see the homeless sleeping on concrete blocks on the sidewalks or the beggars walking through subway trains, I'm reminded of Pakistani beggars or the literal heaps of homeless men and boys I saw sleeping on each other in Kathmandu.

I started to write a post on my phone about just why it is I ended up in China when so many others in Korea, Korean or not, end up in warmer, beach-based locales. The draw is not some kitschy clash of old or new, nor is it some cliche about a rising dragon. Rather, I came here maybe for some of the same reasons that pull an additional 700,000 Chinese to Beijing each year, along with a sense of gawking at how this poorly understood one-fifth of humanity lives.

Pakistan, the gift that keeps on giving

2011-07-30T11:46:00.002+09:00

If you can read this, that means I am writing from Beijing. The fine people at the Dalian airport took great interest in my well-stamped passport, which has no record of me before this year, and shows me as born in Pakistan, but traveling on a Canadian passport while living in Korea even though my (new) passport has no Korean visa.

The people at China Southern weren't much better. If you find yourself considering this airline, let me stop you: walking is cheaper and more comfortable.

Anyway, I'm in Beijing where the sky is blue and the sun is shining. I have a longer post that I wrote by hand, which will wait until I'm not standing in a hotel lobby.

Books #8 and #9: The Histories of Herodotus, Inside the Kingdom

2011-07-27T19:26:00.003+09:00

I'm mostly proud to have finished The Histories of Herodotus, which I think was more interesting for its treatment of history than the histories contained in it. Herodotus is cited as the first person to have written history and, as such, his treatment of it is unfamiliar to us because he was doing something no one had done before. For the most part, Herodotus wrote an interesting series of tales about the Greek-Persian conflict, even if that conflict can be hard to follow for modern readers thanks to the many comical sidebars in the book.

While I enjoyed reading Herodotus, chiefly for the cruelty and excesses with which politics and power were exercised in antiquity, I can't say that I have a lot to say about it, certainly not a week after I finished it.

The more interesting book was Robert Lacey's Inside the Kingdom, a retelling of the recent history of Saudi Arabia. I have to say that I've held a grudge against Saudi Arabia as one of the most vile states in the world for reasons like this. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were also Saudi, though that one was less the result of active government policy. I bought the book expecting a well-researched albeit heavily critical look at the kingdom. While the book is critical, it by no means overlooks the successes and the commendable actions of the country and its rulers.

Reading the brief history of how modern Saudi Arabia came to be, as an alliance between strict Wahabbi Muslims and the House of Saud, I was struck by the megalomaniacal tendencies of the name of the country. This might be the only country in the world named after those who rule it.

Lacey explains that Saudi Arabia has, simply put, been a partnership between mosque and state. The House of Saud has ruled with the support of Islam clerics. After the discovery of oil (the British Iraqi Petroleum Company "doubted there was much oil in Arabia"), the country became wealthy and, if not necessarily liberal, then at least modern in a way that made conservatives uncomfortable.

In Lacey's narrative, this culminated in the armed uprising where the Masjid al-Haram (also known in English as the Grand Mosque) was held hostage by extremists who thought the House of Saud had lost its way. In its aftermath, the Saudi government responded with concessions to clerics, whose violent, xenophobic rhetoric found an outlet in the Afghan-Soviet War. At its conclusion, the violence made its way home to Saudi Arabia as well as Yemen and Tanzania among other places.

These attacks, of course, culminated in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011. Not too many Saudis and Muslims in general might have been moved by this and, let's be honest, why should they be? How moved are you by the deaths of three thousand people who don't share your way of life? For the Saudis, the real moment of truth came when Al Qaeda began to act in Saudi Arabia, making it clear that the terrorists were after the Saudi state as much or more as they were after America.

This caused Saudi Arabia to change course culturally, much as it had been changing course economically under King Abdullah. One of the interesting things about the book is the way it portrays most Saudi kings in a favourable light. While they by no means have absolute power, sharing it with dozens of princes as well as the clergy, reform has been absurdly slow in Saudi Arabia by the standards of virtually any other country.

Nevertheless, reform came in Saudi Arabia under Abdullah after 9/11. Religious extremism was combated and many of the financial excesses of the endless royal family and its equally endless entourage were curtailed, as was corruption. Saudi Arabia began to rank reasonably well on some metrics as a place to do business, though these metrics are obviously questionable.

Abdullah's reforms have been in the area of:
- openness, urging journalists to write articles critiquing how the government conducts itself
- democracy, Abdullah set a goal of achieving a full adult democracy in 20 years
- education, Abdullah wants to open a world-class university in Saudi Arabia
- women's rights, Abdullah moved women's education away from religious authorities and put it under the jurisdiction of the ministry of education after the deaths of 15 female students in Mecca
- civil rights, it's promised that someday the country might move away from its current model of allowing the police to hold anyone without charges for up to six months, though I wouldn't hold my breath

While Saudi Arabia is still a place where women can't drive or attend university without a man's permission, where men or women can't voice any dissent without the risk of ending up in jail, and where being anything other than Muslim is punishable by death, the reality of life in the kingdom is more nuanced than we might imagine.

I read the book because it's about a topic that I know superficially but have not read about in detail for a number of years, and much has changed since I did so. For many Muslims who feel that Islam is the simple answer to all social problems, though I feel they say that more to proselytize than actually believing it, the reality of governing a Muslim country is extremely complex.

It's one thing to appeal to religion for having all the answers, it's another to try and run a modern, economically competitive state in the twenty-first century using Islam. A good first, step, however, would be to jettison literalism and trying to live exactly as the Prophet Muhammad did. I can still remember Muslim students at the University of Toronto who wore Arab-style robes and grew long beards, but also availed themselves of the benefits of Goretex jackets and Nike running shoes, luxuries the Prophet himself likely never had.

Shia intellectual Tawfiq Al-seif explains the challenge when interviewed by Lacey in the book: "there is a verse in the Koran that says in order to be strong in war against your enemies you have to prepare 'swords and horses'. Well, if you take that literally nowadays and go into battle with swords and horses you will find yourself hopelessly weak against your enemies. So here is a case where everyone would agree that you have to reinterpret what the Prophet said... What the pious Muslim--Sunni or Shia--should be asking himself today is not what the Prophet did then, but what he would do now if he were confronted by the realities of modern life."

Why I live here, parts two and three

2011-07-15T11:42:00.004+09:00

I wrote last year about why I live here. These pictures give some more reasons.

This is the under-construction Dongdaemun History and Culture Park. This will put the exclamation mark on the transformation of Dongdaemun from a gritty market district to a shiny Myeongdong-style shopping district, albeit all night and with a higher intensity. The grittier elements, of course, remain.

When I take the bus home at night from Jongno, I go by here sometimes. I'm struck at how blindingly bright the lights are.

This is an Uzbek restaurant at Dongdaemun, found next to a dog soup restaurant in a gritty alley. Samarkand is fast becoming one of my favourite restaurants in Seoul.

Yes, Starbucks is everywhere, but this Starbucks incorporates nineteenth-century architecture and sits directly across from Deoksugung.

A blurry shot of a seafood market next to World Cup stadium coming alive at 6 in the morning on a Sunday.

Whether you hate it or simply dislike it, the Jongno Tower certainly gives you something to look at. However, this site used to be one of the first department stores in Seoul, a much better building to look at.

The other reason I live here is the simplicity and convenience of life here, one of them being the possibility of living here without a car, not to mention the ease of walking to work and walking to a dozen restaurants or cafes. Toronto, on the other hand, just took the time to take bike lanes off of Jarvis Avenue because it increased travel times for drivers by four minutes, thereby keeping residents from eating dinner with their families. I'll keep using one of the fourteen subway lines and hundreds of bus routes here, thank you very much.

A visit to the Seoul Museum of History

2011-07-13T00:10:00.007+09:00

I visited the Seoul Museum of History a few weeks ago. It's strange that it took so long considering that it's just down the street from the Gwanghwamun intersection and it's marked by a big streetcar in front.

The site used to be the lost palace of Gyeonghuigung, demolished by the Japanese during their occupation. By the time Korea got around to restoring its palaces, decades of urban development around it had made restoration impossible, similar to the much smaller version of Deoksugung we find today.

I was actually drawn by the now-finished exhibit of portraits of Moscow over various historical periods.

The Museum of History is free to visit, as this sign says, though recent news reports have suggested it's free because it also functions as a public relations vehicle for redevelopment projects in Seoul.

This North Korean propaganda flyer from the Korean War warns South Korean soldiers of their fate: "if you fight for (President) Syngman Rhee, this will be your reward!" It depicts a well-off Rhee with his Italian wife and their dog.

This 1965 newspaper front page headlined "Heading to Seoul without a plan" helps to explain how the population of Seoul went from 2 million to 10 million from 1950 to about 1985.

These are public toilets on the Cheonggyecheon, maybe.

The underpass underneath the Gwanghwamun intersection is under construction in this picture. Note the now-demolished residence of the Japanese governor general in the background where Gwanghwamun now stands.

Bus tickets from the 1970s elicit shocks and laughter today. Sadly, they're still a reality in Toronto.

This poster explains that phone lines can get crowded just like roads. Koreans make longer phone calls on average than Americans or Japanese, it says, urging Koreans to make shorter phone calls.

The sticker(?) on the right says "a happy family is a planned family". Fifty years ago, Korea had a birth rate of 6 children per women. Thanks to family planning, that number is now 1.3 children per women, one of the lowest numbers in the world. We should be careful to make predictions about the future based on current trends.

Namsan Hot Summer Half Marathon

2011-07-12T06:32:00.000+09:00

I ran this race two years ago. I woke up late, missed the start by 20 minutes and begged the organizers to let me run. They were gracious enough to let me do so, though at the time I didn't know that the race is on a public path that's open to all. The race was in pouring rain, everything I owned was soaked afterwards, and I jogged the race in about 1:50 (probably more than that, though I don't remember).

I've run the course (a 3k stretch of road) many, many times since then, albeit never more than twice at a time. To repeat it six times and change is a very subtly tortuous course. There is no one killer hill on the course, but then, there is almost no flat ground either, and altogether there are about probably about 30-40 hills of various sizes over the course of 21 kilometres.

Running the course hard, however, was an ordeal. I thought I was in shape for about a 1:30-1:32 and so I could run the course 5 minutes slower. In reality, I haven't run for more than an hour since March and so the course chewed me up as the race wore on. Having not run a half in a long time, I made a big push at 9k and felt great, though I was struggling by about 14k.

I kept more or less the same effort the whole time, so while I didn't fall apart, I steadily got slower, finishing in 1:46. Judging by the fact that I finished 27th out of 273 men, maybe the course is more like 10 minutes slower at my pace, though obviously different courses have different effects on different people having different sorts of days, so attempts at equivalency are quite moot.

While the course is repetitive and indicative of sociopathic tendencies, it's easy to love because it doesn't seem that challenging if you only run it once, kind of like that old saltine cracker challenge. If you run and you live in Seoul, you really should try this race.

I set four goals this summer: a 5k, two 10k races and this half. While the 5k (19:00) was a win, the 10k (49:34) I ran last weekend was a loss, and this half is a tie. The rubber match is another 10k in two weeks, where a sub-40 is a must.

남산 위에 저 소나무

2011-07-12T00:34:00.001+09:00

From the first time I went there, I've loved Namsan as well as the neighbourhood around it. Namsan is technically a mountain in Seoul, though it's only about 250 metres tall. There are actually a few buildings in Seoul that are taller.

The first time I went there, all I saw and heard was torrential rain and leafy green trees, which reminded me quite a bit of the path that circles Hong Kong's Victoria Peak, but quieter. Of course, in retrospect, most of Victoria Peak is far more remote than Namsan, but I didn't know that at the time.

As time went on, Namsan has become one of my favourite parts of Seoul and a place that I try and visit regularly. Most people, I think, unfortunately know Namsan as nothing but a small mountain with a tower at the top, which is just as well, because it keeps the rest of the area relatively quiet.

Namsan has a fantastic loop for running, about 7.5 km if you start at the top by the tower, run east towards the national theatre building and then follow the green path until its end. From there, follow the road left past the library and go up where you see the buses coming down. This is, of course, only a suggestion, as Namsan has a variety of paths and a variety of layers.

As interesting as Namsan itself is the neighbourhood. To the north is Myeongdong, to the south is Itaewon, to the west is Seoul station and to the east is a quiet, unassuming collection of neighbourhoods that would be a great place to live. Roads climbing up to Namsan can be absurdly steep, but steeper still are the endless staircases that can turn the climb up into a heart-stopping workout for the people I see staggering up to the top drenched in sweat.

The neighbourhood to the south of Namsan, taking up the space between Itaewon, is especially interesting. It's by no means a wealthy neighbourhood even though it occupies fantastic real estate with amazing views of the city as well as proximity to Namsan. It's just a winding, messy neighbourhood with stores that have tarps for roofs and restaurants where the backdoor hasn't been used in so long that it's rendered useless by the grass that has grown there.

Above all, Namsan gives a sense of being in the middle of nowhere in the core of the city, something that's exceptional for a city like Seoul. Yes, there are other places like this in Seoul, but none so middle-class this close to the centre. Much of the slopes of Namsan have mercifully been spared by the homogenizing touch of developers, and hopefully it continues.

For a taste of the best of Namsan, literally, go to the Yongsan library opposite the much larger and grander Namsan library. The spartan Yongsan library has its fifth floor on level with the Namsan ring road and its first floor on level with the neighbourhood below. From the first floor, walk across the street and get something to eat at this tiny restaurant, followed by coffee and/or waffles down the street at the Good News Cafe.

If it's late enough, the library and its elevator will be closed, so haul yourself up the stairs adjacent to the library to get back to the bus stop (buses run to and from Myeongdong, Itaewon and Seoul station). While you wait, admire the view of Seoul and the noticeably cooler weather on Namsan. Or, if you'd like, challenge yourself to make it out of the maze of streets, no prizes given to those who live in the area.

Banking CAN be this uncomfortable

2011-07-07T13:05:00.007+09:00

One of the worst parts of living in Korea is the banking. I won't make myself angry by getting into it, but here's a comparison of how online banking works with IBK, the Korean bank I use, and RBC, my Canadian bank. For what it's worth, all screenshots are from a transaction to pay a credit card bill.

Banking with RBC is a four-part step, though I guess I omitted the first step. From the main page, click 'sign in' and then the three steps that follow are shown below.

I won't claim to remember much about how the process works, but bills you register with your bank show up on the quick payment menu. The whole thing can be done in less than a minute.

By contrast, Korean banking is unwiedly and inconvenient. It only works with Internet Explorer, the pages are heavy and take a long time to load, and about a half-dozen Active X controls are required just to use the website, along with a third-party program used just for logging in.

Step 1 is the third-party program with its own password for logging in. Note that my Taiwanese laptop with Korean-language support can't decipher anything in the program.

After logging in, step 2 lets you chose a "quick transfer", the fantastic South Korean feature that lets you transfer money to another account in a method that we call personal checks.

Step 3 is the actual transfer screen itself. Granted, much of the space asks for banking information of the account you're paying, but it asks for my PIN, my online transfer password, all of which are different from the password I use to log into my online banking.

But wait! That's not all!

Step 4 is insane. When I signed up for online banking in-person (fun fact: I signed up for RBC online banking from an Internet cafe in Istanbul), I was given what's called a secret card. My co-workers have nicknamed it a nuclear football. As the picture in step 4 shows, I have to enter a combination of numbers from it in order to complete the transaction.

In step 5, finally, I have to review my transaction using the third-party program and re-enter the original password for logging into the website. Note that I can't read any of the information.

Finally, if you can manage all this, you still might find, as I did, that your bank card doesn't work outside of Korea and that you have to ask for special dispensation from your bank just to bank online from outside of Korea. The whole process reeks of this parody of the iPod, Microsoft's human ear edition of the product.

Much of the security in Korea is in the name of crime prevention. I had to bank using my passport instead of my ID card at my local branch because it had been targeted by some nebulous Chinese criminals. Many ATMs require you to confirm that you haven't come to complete a transaction that resembles a phishing scam. The block of Internet banking outside of Korea, too, is in the name of preventing foreign criminals from negotiating the thirty or so levels of security already in place to access your account.

Like with terrorism, it's worth it to take a step back and consider just how small of a risk is being targeted with how great of an effort. To stave off this low-probability event, we expend an absurd amount of time, energy and resources. Frequently changing passwords, for examples, costs the American economy something in the order of tens of billions of dollars each year.

SBS and the USFK curfew in Itaewon

2011-07-06T00:03:00.008+09:00

The only time I turn on my TV is in the morning before I go to work, partly because the morning show has a clock in the corner and partly so I can watch the news. I find the SBS morning show, like all morning shows around the world, to be generally sensationalist with the occasional piece of interesting journalism. Last week was an interesting feature on motels that officially do not permit minors but in practice have no way of stopping them (many are automatic).

Today's program, however, was incredibly egregious. The offender was a short story about the lifting of a curfew on American soldiers in the Itaewon neighbourhood of Seoul. I don't follow this closely, but a long-standing curfew on American soldiers in Itaewon was lifted last July.

As a result, crime committed by US soldiers (presumably in Itaewon?) is up 15% since last January when the curfew was still in effect. Of course, it's not clear how that compares to the overall crime rate, or whether that justifies telling adults what they can and can not do in a free country. I accept that asking for thoughtful analysis from the TV news is not a fruitful endeavour. Note that the curfew was instituted after 9/11 under the umbrella of general security paranoia.

This post is not, however, a commentary on the character of American soldiers, the people responsible for keeping this country safe. It is also not a commentary on the right of Koreans to discuss crime or undesirable behaviour by foreign nationals in their country. It is, however, a commentary on how that debate is conducted or, more specifically, how that debate is guided and framed by SBS.

What was offensive about the report, however, were the images that follow:

This is our heroine bravely standing in front of some tall black men, ready at a moment's notice to violate the honour of pure 조선 처녀. I'm sure it's a coincidence that SBS wound up doing a report about crime in front of a group of black men.

Then come the interviews of ordinary people. They asked this woman what she thinks: "it's scary. There are a lot of foreigners."

Then they asked her giggly friend what she thought, while the first woman took pictures of her friend being interviewed, giving us a hint of how seriously they take this issue. She says, "the soldiers can get around at night, so there are more problems with law and order. It's scarier now to come here at night."

Finally, they interview an anonymous employee of a club, who says "Itaewon also has a lot of drugs. I've seen a lot and it's spreading to Korean kids as well."

Now, does this prove that every single Korean is a racist? No. Does this prove that Koreans are a fuzzy-headed lot averse to critical thinking unlike us Westerners who, like Prometheus, gave Koreans the gift of rationality and processed sugar? Absolutely not.

What this does show is the corrosive effect of conventionalism. This is hardly a problem unique to Seoul or Korea. Itaewon's perception preceded it, and SBS just wanted to do a simple, frightening story about large, dark-skinned people. I'm sure that SBS interviewed a few people who didn't give them what they wanted, which was young, thin women saying that Itaewon is "scary". The club employee said "Itaewon also has a lot of drugs", which probably means that another place was mentioned, but it was better to edit that out.

It's also not true that the media is obsessed with foreign crime. While stories about "rising" foreign crime practically write themselves and find a welcoming audience in a rapidly changing society, news about foreign crime is comparatively rare, and news about all crime is sensationalistic. There was a longer story in the same show about purse snatchings and how to prevent them.

That said, it's important, I think, for someone to watch this and say "wow, I can't believe you just said that on TV." The next time SBS would like to film you eating kim chi with chopsticks while wearing a hanbok, remember that they're a bunch of smarmy, ratings-driven assholes to whom the truth is really just incidental.

Book #7: Where Men Win Glory

2011-07-03T22:06:00.003+09:00

Jon Krakauer is an excellent writer. Before I left for Nepal last summer, I spent a Saturday night reading various accounts of disastrous Himalayan expeditions, Krakauer's account of the 1996 Everest disaster published in Outside magazine being chief among them. Krakauer is an excellent writer, one of my favourites, as much for his writing style as his choice of topics.

Krakauer's account of the death of former NFL star Pat Tillman is well-written. I found much of it to be rather obsequious in a way that is uncharacteristic of Krakauer. It's sort of reminiscent of why small, overpriced portions at restaurants where prices are expressed in single digits without dollar signs cause rich people to go berserk in a way that stale McNuggets simply wouldn't.

If an 18-year-old soldier gets into a drunken brawl, it's because he's stupid, but when Tillman does it, it's an expression of his masculinity, commitment to a moral code and unwillingness to shrink down from a challenge.

The most important part of this story is not that Tillman died, or how he died, but that almost from the moment he enlisted, he was used by the American government as a public relations tool. About a half dozen people, retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal being one, seem obviously guilty of criminal activity in deliberately covering up the fact that Tillman was killed by friendly fire, although no one was punished in a meaningful way.

Krakauer is most famous for Into Thin Air, the story of a disastrous spring season on Mount Everest, and Into the Wild, another story about a man who thought he could do more than he was capable of doing. Where Men Win Glory is similar. Tillman's wife Marie describes how, two years into his three-year commitment to the military, Tillman was aggressively pursued by several NFL teams.

"[A]t that point in time he probably would have loved to have gone back and played football... But we never really discussed it it because it just wasn't going to happen. There was no way he was going to bail out of the Army halfway through."

Krakauer further observes that "[a]s much as Pat hated being in the military and forcing Marie to endure all that his enlistment entailed, breaking the commitment he'd made to the Rangers would have violated principles he considered inviolable."

It's only in hindsight that Tillman's insistence on completing his three-year commitment seems to have been a mistake, but throughout the book Tillman is lauded for sticking rigidly to principles and rules of his own making.

Both in running and in the combination of hiking-slash-traveling that has become one of my favourite past-times, we all know people with a bizarre obsession for sticking to self-imposed rules. Some people have to run everyday, others have to run everyday at a certain speed or feel like a failure, and others have to run a certain number of kilometres per week in order to feel like they're training. If you're not a runner, you'd be amazed at how many runners feel like a week of 51 miles is a success, but one of 47 miles is a failure.

In his analysis of why it was that so many experienced climbers died on Mount Everest, Krakauer pointed to one key cause: pointless rigidity. Many climbers sacrificed safety at the final push to the summit because, to them, it was absurd to have come this far without reaching the top. Those climbers who stuck to a pre-determined time in the afternoon for turning around, regardless of whether or not they had summited, tended to make it out alive. Those who insisted on summiting no matter what the cost, paid the price.

It is obviously not true that there is nothing to be gained from the sort of determination that Tillman displayed throughout his life. As a professional athlete and as a soldier, rigid determination gets you very far. Flexibility keeps you from working out on days when you don't feel like it, rigidity and determination takes you from being someone who was 5'5, 120 lbs, judged by your high school coach as someone not suited to football, to being a professional.

Obviously, the line between pigheadedness and determination is a fine one. I can't remember if there is something like this in Aristotle's virtues, but Aristotle presents us with an excellent method for divining this line. Virtue, as defined by Aristotle, is the mean between excess and deficiency. Someone who insists on running everyday, even on a broken leg, isn't doing themselves any favours, but neither is someone who doesn't run if it's hot, cold, rainy, windy, or snowy.

On first examination, Tillman seems to have an excess of determination, but Aristotle also judges the standard of virtue to be virtuous people. If we consider Tillman alongside other excellent people, be they soldiers or football players, he certainly compare favourably.

Nevertheless, Krakauer either portrays Tillman unfavourably or ascribes to him virtues that don't exist by lauding his stubbornness as something to emulate. Tillman is constantly portrayed as someone hemmed in by rules of his own making for no other reason than they were rules of his own making. It's one thing for me to eat a dozen donuts if I feel that it's healthy for me. It's another to force a dozen donuts down my throat just because I once said that I would do it.

The other notable aspect of the book is Krakauer's account of Tillman's death itself. What makes his death such a catastrophic mistake is that he was fired at by his unit from as close as 120 feet, "the distance from home plate to second base". Tillman died when he stood up from behind a rock to indicate that he was American, not Taliban. The soldier who shot him tesified that "I identified two sets of arms straight up. The arms did not indicate any signs of a cease-fire."

When asked to explain "why would you fire on two sets of arms if they were straight up in the air?", he replied "this was a third world country, and they don't have hand and arm signals like we do."

Of Tillman's last moments, Krakauer writes, "it's impossible to know what was going through his mind. ...Although Pat probably couldn't make out Alders's features in the twilight, he would have known who it was from Alders's compact stature and the fact that he was holding a SAW. Shortly after Alders brought the weapon to his shoulder, Pat would have seen a flash from the gun's stubby barrel. Concurrent with the muzzle flash, three .223-caliber bullets pierced the right side of his forehead, just below the rim of his helmet, killing him instantly."

Book #6: 힘말라야의 선물

2011-06-28T21:37:00.002+09:00

As a coffee drinker and a sucker for the romance of the Himalayan footballs, this Korean-language book (Gift of the Himalayas) was an easy read for me. The book is about coffee farmers in the Nepal Himalaya. A crew from the Korean TV station EBS lived in the village for 80 days to film a documentary called Himalaya Coffee Road. The book documented their experiences.

The book is as much about the lives of the farmers themselves as about their coffee farming. It follows a handful of families, describing their lives, their hardships and the reasons by which they decided to grow coffee in their remote villages. It's worth noting that growing coffee in Nepal, as you might know by having never heard of Nepali coffee, is not a big industry.

One of the most interesting sections in the book is where the author asked the farmers what coffee was used for. The responses ranged from "don't you eat it like corn?" to "I've never had it, so I don't know" to "it goes somewhere overseas, but I don't know where". I'm not sure how plausible it is that someone in the twenty-first century hasn't heard of coffee, particularly considering that all of them were literate adults who had gone to school at least until middle school, but that's what selective quoting is for.

Growing coffee was an interesting way to create opportunity in a village hours or days from a paved road, one where many men left to seek work in comparatively wealthy India or even as far as Dubai. The book points out that even in a subsistence-oriented village, some families did not have enough to eat, and few had the money to pay for education past middle school.

The money from coffee was used for buying school uniforms and supplies, paying school tuition and giving men working overseas a reason to return to their village. The coffee was bought by a Korean fair-trade co-operative, which persuaded them to produce it organically. If you're particularly interested in finding this coffee at a cafe in Seoul, click here.

Organic, fair trade coffee has become a trend in Seoul cafes. Caffe Bene, now the largest of the many chains of coffee shops in Korea, sells a cup of brewed organic coffee for 7,500 won, or about $6.75 Canadian. If you adjust for the purchasing power of the won, however, it's like paying about $10 for one cup of brewed coffee.

As much as I support anyone trying to make an honest living in a developing country, I don't know that fair trade is the method to accomplish this. The reason that coffee prices are low for farmers is that there are simply too many people producing too much coffee, in contrast with, say, gold. This isn't to say that treating developing countries more equitably will not help, nor that unfettered free trade will solve all their problems.

While people will pay high prices for coffee out of the goodness of their heart, large-scale sustainable development of any kind hasn't worked on this method. China, the best and most current example of hundreds of millions of people being pulled out of poverty, didn't get there by asking people to pay extra for iPods and Nikes because they were made by people in less-than-idyllic working conditions.

Koreans themselves know that the path to development was paved with hard work and, yes, generous helpings of well-used foreign aid. A small-scale co-operative targeting relatively wealthy, kind-hearted people willing to pay an extra dollar for coffee to help Nepali villagers send their children to high school can work, but it won't work for all of Nepal.

I remember reading in my Lonely Planet travel guide that while the well-trafficked region of the Himalayas I visited (the Annapurna massif) was reasonably well-off by the standards of the Nepali countryside, the same could not be said for the more isolated peaks in eastern Nepal. I had no problem finding someone to break 100-rupee (worth about $1.50) notes while trekking in the Annapurna region, but Lonely Planet advised that carrying 5-and-10-rupee notes in eastern Nepal and other less-visited rural areas was probably a better idea.

All of us would benefit from realizing just how astonishingly poor parts of the world can be and, consequently, just how astonishingly wealthy most of us are. That's not to say that you're necessarily happier than someone in a developing country, but that it would help us to shelve some of our more egregious complaints ("why can't my $800 iPhone do ____?").

Bearing in mind our wealth and the poverty of others would also help us retain some wonderment at the world in which we live. A great deal of adolescence and adulthood are spent steeling ourselves to the wonder in the ordinary, mundane aspects of our lives. Not only would focusing on this wonder, such as the mountains and the endless crowds of Seoul, make us happier, but it would also help us better understand what we see everyday.

Is a 3:47 1500 embarrassing?

2011-06-27T17:11:00.002+09:00

The men's 1500 (video here at the American national championships was won this weekend in a time of 3:47 by Matt Centrowitz, a time that a handful of high school students in America run every year. After watching a race that started out in 65 and 2:11, many on LetsRun expressed their disgust, noting that the women's 1500 was actually faster through the first 800.

Others responded by pointing out that a race which closed in about 1:50 for the last 800 with a half dozen runners in contention until the final 100 metres and a thrilling head-to-head sprint decided only in the final 50 metres is actually very exciting. Races are made to be fun, the argument goes, not to have fast finishing times. It's hard to argue with that if you've ever seen a rabbited race on the European circuit where the winner runs a very fast time in what is essentially a time trial.

Of course, the ideal race would have been a reasonably fast race that closed in a very fast time, such as the 1500 at the Athens Olympics, which closed in about 1:47 for the last 800 after going out in 1:47 for the first 700. Nevertheless, when watching a race, what's probably more interesting is the racing itself than the time. I don't know of anyone who would want to watch the world record race in any distance over 800 metres, but most of us would probably watch the Beijing Olympic marathon again.

Try comparing this to another sport. A 3:47 1500 at a national championship is a bit like a 1-0 baseball game in the baseball playoffs, but a 3:47 with a 1:50 for the last 800 is like a 1-0 baseball game that was unbearably dull up until the eighth inning. We would rather get a game that was thrilling from the very start, but it's not like the 3:47 was evenly-paced, with laps of 60, 62, 60 and then a 45 for the last 300 with only two runners in contention.

For people who are supposedly serious about running, it'd be useful to actually watch a race rather than just look at the results and head straight to LetsRun. A football fan who complained about a 13-10 game wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on if he found a tense back-and-forth game between two strong defenses to be boring. He would, however, be justified in yawning at a 13-10 game between two lousy teams where one team jumped off to a 13-0 lead, didn't get another first down, gave up ten points in the third quarter, and then held on in a scoreless, unevenful fourth quarter.

As an aside, the Canadian national track and field championships were also this weekend. The results were slow as they always are, but anyone who expects a championship race to be fast doesn't know anything about time. To return to football, it's like caring about the yard-per-attempt of a quarterback in the Super Bowl.

What was painful, and always is unfortunate, is how few people participated in the distance races. I know that there are reasons for this, but it is abysmal if a grand total of eight people, six men and two women, participated in the 10,000. Six women finished in the 5,000 and, most shocking of all, there were just ten women in the 1500, which (according to the results) went straight to a final without any rounds. That means a grand total of eighteen women participated in those three events.

Movie review: 풍산개

2011-06-26T16:58:00.003+09:00

(이 글의 내용에 풍산개 스포일러가 있어서 알고 싶지 않으신 분이 더 이상 읽지 마세요.)

I had a chance to watch the movie 풍산개 (Pungsankae) on Friday, timely because it was the day before the 61st anniversary of the Korean War. For the most part, it is a well-made, brutal, often cryptic description of North-South antagonism.

The story is somewhat bizarre, at least from my perspective of having missed the first five minutes and not really understanding what was happening. A man (Yoon Kye Sang), who doesn't speak once throughout the movie, is given three hours to cross the DMZ and sneak back across the border with the girlfriend (Kim Gyu Ri) of a well-off North Korean defector (Kim Jong Su).

He brings the woman across exhibiting considerable skill in averting both North and South Korean soldiers, but problems start when the woman develops feelings for the human smuggler over her sleazy, much older and domineering boyfriend. Yoon, not fully trusted by the South Korean intelligence agency NIS, is arrested and tortured, but is broken out by a spy he had rescued.

The movie up until here had decent if often annoying, but most of the really interesting scenes happened afterwards. North Korean spies in South Korea are able to kidnap Yoon and the North Korean woman for whom he has now developed feelings. Her boyfriend is moved to a safehouse by South Korean intelligence.

Yoon is brutally tortured by North Korean spies who seemed (my understanding of this scene is fuzzy) to have let him go on the condition that he retrieves Kim, a very high-value defector. He does so, and Kim is killed not long after. The next day, Kim (the woman) and Yoon are to be executed Al Qaeda-style by North Korean spies who invoke the name of the Korean People's Republic, its Kim dynasty and the crimes of Kim.

My recollection of the next scene is fuzzy, but one of the North Korean spies suggests hanging on to Kim's jewelry, to which the leader is furious, switching the gun from Kim's head to his head. The spy, a stereotypical weakling, says something to the effect of "Before I die, if I can be honest, I envy South Korea. The jewelry she has is a year's, no, two year's salary for us."

I didn't understand what happened after, but two of the underlings are shown walking in a forest with Kim, possibly with the intention of raping her. She reaches a cliff overlooking a river and, seeing the men advance towards her, chooses instead to fall backwards, dying what was depicted as a beautiful, painless death.

The movie then gets bizarre. Yoon escapes from the North Koreans, finds the dead body of Kim and flies into a rage. That night, spies from both the North and South are out celebrating in what I thought was one of the funniest scenes from the movie, though maybe not to a South Korean.

The South Korean spies were at a very expensive karaoke bar or room salon, being entertained by North Korean women who posed as either South Koreans or Chinese-Koreans. The North Koreans were at a lower-end karaoke bar, being entertained by South Korean women who found the men to be annoying hicks, at one point asking, "what are you, North Korean or something?" to which one of the spies replies in a stereotype of that dialect, "no, I'm Chinese-Korean".

Yoon kidnaps the spies from both countries one by one, locking them in a room. At first, when it's only a few of them, they have some hilarious fights. When it was one-on-one at the start, the North Korean put the South Korean into a submission hold and forced him to recite an ode to North Korea. When South Koreans outnumber the North Korean, he's forced to sing the South Korean national anthem, but changes the line that says "long live our country" to "long live the Korean People's Army", earning him some punishment.

Eventually, the odds are even for all the men and Yoon throws rifles into the room, producing a tense standoff, made tenser still when someone shoots out the lights. Some of the men are killed, but they make it out alive. Yoon is shown trying to cross the border on another mission, but is killed at what is presumably the border (in reality there's no fence, just signs every 200 metres) by a hail of unidentified fire.

Given the last third of the movie, the overall message is one of the futility of war, one that's popular but one that, I think, promotes a false moral equivalency between the two countries. While the Korean War was, to be fair, a war fought between two brutal dictatorships, viewing inter-Korean relations through the prism of naive pacifism has cost lives in both the North and the South in the last decade.

Also interesting was the depiction of the spies from both countries. South Korean spies were, somewhat accurately, depicted as well-dressed, well-trained but rather powerless. Considering the immense power that the NIS has and has had, thanks to the National Security Law, they sure are a bunch of incompetent assholes who can't do anything but harass and torture ordinary people, not to mention protect South Koreans from the supposed danger of North Korean propaganda.

North Korean spies were depicted as similar to South Korean country bumpkins, a common trope on variety shows and virtually every movie. They seemed to be a weird cross between working-class South Koreans and Chinese Korean labourers, a rather interesting cover.

Finally, if I learned one thing from the movie, it was that if the Koreas ever reunite, I won't be able to understand anyone from the North. Much of the speech was completely unintelligible to me, to the point that I couldn't really distinguish it from Japanese. None of the spies sounded North Korean at all, though the lead female did a great job (to me) of a standard Pyongyang dialect, though she seemed to have lost it by the end of the movie.

As an addendum, I had a conversation the day before with Roboseyo and others about the future of a unified Korea as a multicultural state. If a unified country was a democratic state where votes from the North counted equally, it would be interesting how politicians from a place like, say, Ryangkang-do, deep in the mountains of North Korea, an impoverished province ignored at the moment never mind a unified Korea, would react to the foreign population in the South.

Much of the romantic pacific nationalism of the South Korean left is at odds with its simultaneous commitment to multiculturalism. A great chunk of the impetus for reunification is that the two countries share a language and an ethnicity, a problematic idea at a time when there are Koreans being born everyday who are Korean despite having a mixed-race heritage. If nothing else, the idea that South Korea should reunite with a country as poor as any in the world on the basis of race and language is about as much of a positive as America absorbing Liberia.

Police over-reaction to student protests in Seoul

2011-06-18T19:26:00.006+09:00

I wrote here about the similarities between the city centres of Seoul and Beijing, both cities designed philosophically with a large gate in front of the imperial palace, and now a large public square in front of that large gate. Like Beijing's Tiananmen Square, Seoul's Gwanghwamun square is decidedly apolitical.

I'm someone who is, unfortunately, liable to fly into rages at the sight of procedure for procedure's sake only. Traveling through an airport with me is to listen to me explain, at 175 decibles and 175 words per minute, why there's no point in confiscating water bottles and toothpaste because someone could build an actual bomb out of the alcohol and other chemicals sold after the security checkpoint.

For the last two weeks or so in Seoul, university students have staged protests aiming at halving tuition fees. Protests in Korea are not quite the same as elsewhere. They're long, drawn-out, persistent, intense and with staggering numbers. Just before I came here in 2008, hundreds of thousands of people protested the import of American beef, and they were hardly the first example of massive protests which were able to paralyze a part of the city.

By contrast, the current student protests are comparatively small. I don't know what the numbers are, but the night I saw the protest, it was at most 500 people on a sidewalk in front of a cell phone store. They were banned from entering Gwanghwamun by a line of police officers ringing the square. No doubt the numbers have since grown, but this is not a protest with tens of thousands of people.

Why, then, are there so many police officers in central Seoul? When I was at Gwanghwamun last night, I passed about a half dozen police buses and another dozen or so trucks with cages in the back on the west side of Gwanghwamun. In the south end of the square itself, there is an underpass leading to a subway station. There were maybe 100 police officers standing there, as this poorly-taken picture shows.

There was not a protester within about a kilometre of these protesters. They were facing an empty underpass filled with closed stores leading to a subway station. At the south edge of the square, in front of the statue of Admiral Lee, was this group of cops, facing traffic and people out for a walk on a warm night.

Across Taepyeong-no, by the Kyobo bookstore at the southeast corner of Gwanghwamun, were these cops:

Fifty metres behind those cops, in front of the Kyobo bookstore itself, there were another 200 cops or so. Two blocks from there, on both sides of the intersection, were similar-sized groups of cops just standing there. Altogether, I probably saw about 1,000 police officers last night.

However, what I didn't see was a single protester. The protest wasn't happening at Gwanghwamun or Jongno, it was happening at Cheonggye Plaza almost a kilometre away. These cops were presumably there for backup in case things got ugly, but they were probably maintaining about a ten-to-one ratio of police officers to students.

I don't know if that's necessary, but what I do know is that crowding the centre of the city with police officers, police buses, sound-making buses(?), large vehicles that hurl tear gas and generally doing your best to intimidate civilians with numbers and vehicles is obnoxious at best. Much of the government's 1960s-like chiding of student protesters is that they are inconveniencing residents with their protests, but what exactly happens when you flood thousands of police officers and their buses into public spaces?

This sort of pre-emptive paranoid precaution is what they do in China and other places where they are terrified of public opinion. South Korea is decidedly not a country like that; the students have no issue making their voices heard. Yet, despite peaceful protests by what is a relatively small number of students, the government and the police respond with clumsy ham-handedness of the highest degree.

Case in point of the ham-handedness of the old generation which surely enrages the younger generation:

This is a request by the Seoul police asking journalists to not refer to the student protests as candlelight rallies, but to instead use the phrase "illegal night protest". Instead of mentioning the fact that these protests are about tuition fees, journalists are asked to use the name of the student group involved in this. Candlelight rallies have become very popular in the last decade, and the police apparently has a very active interest in denying students the legitimacy and populism conferred by that term.

Running a 12:59 5k and losing $300

2011-06-15T08:30:00.003+09:00

Renato Canova, coach to many of the world's best runners, explained on LetsRun how one of his runners, Kenyan Leonard Komon, recently ran a $12:59 5k and lost $300 in the process:

"Last year in Oslo (Diamond League) he ran 12'58", becoming n. 9 like in Eugene. He received a prize of 200 USD. His ticket for going Oslo from Kenya had a cost of 1200 USD, and the official reimbursement was of 700 USD. Since you are an expert mathematic, you can see that, for running 12'58", he had to pay 300 USD from his pocket."

By contrast, Komon recently "went to New York for winning a road race of 10 km. Putting together prize connected with his victory and a bonus for the race record, he won 45,000 USD."

At least from a long-distance perspective, track appears to be dying a slow death. The number of world-class races at 10,000 are dwindling, and the distance is more and more becoming a road race. It's entirely possible that someone who runs the 10,000 at the Olympics or World Championships is running it off the back of a performance from the previous year or a single qualifying performance this year, not unlike the marathon.

Marathons have become mass spectacles matched by highly competitive performances. The stunning 2:03 at Boston this year simply underlined this growing phenomenon. In contrast, other forms of long-distance running are dying. The World Cross Country Championships, likely the most competitive long-distance race anywhere in the world, are now a biennial event because nobody (read: no European nation) is interested. Europe has traditionally been where the money for track came, but European audiences are not that interested in watching African runners perform.

Even the IAAF World Championships of track have ended up in Daegu, a turn of events that, with all due respect to Daegu, is baffling. No one would call Daegu a hotbed of athletics or anything else in Korea, except, perhaps, a literal hotbed as the hottest city in Korea. What's likely is that the World Championships were one more way for Korea to prove its international stature as a host of the Olympics, the World Cup and now the IAAF World Championships. As such, it bid for the event, which other cities are not too interested in doing.

One of my favourite writers, commentators or whathaveyou on running is Steve Boyd from Kingston, Ontario. I can't find the comment now, but Boyd put the now decades-long decline in interest in athletics as a spectator sport in proper perspective. It's not that track is in decline but, rather, large-scale interest in running and even walking was a unique phenomenon of the early twentieth century which made it until the 1980s.

It's unlikely that even someone of Usain Bolt's stature will be able to rescue track because compared to other sports, it's simply bizarre to watch on TV. Competitions are too irregular and the sport is too international, in sharp contrast to team sports or predictable individual sports like tennis or golf. This is not bad in and of itself, but when runners abandon middle-distance events for long-distance events because of a lack of money in the former, we know that a lack of interest is actually hurting the sport.

Anatomy of a comeback

2011-06-13T12:16:00.003+09:00

As a runner, I peaked in March of 2008. Just about every race since the summer of 2007 had been great, either my fastest for the distance or that particular course. It was also the period when I won the only race I've ever won. Then I hurt my foot, which took me out of my rhythm, and then I came out flat and weak for the Boston Marathon.

After that, I was able to cruise the rest of 2008 off the fitness I had, but then I went about six weeks without running at the end of 2008 and the start of 2009. At the end of 2009 and again in 2010, I was able to put together enough consistent training to run a sub-40 10k or its equivalent. It was finally this year that I was interested enough in running to try training again, though I started in February with the modest goal of running an 18:56 5k and a 38:52 10k, times that I used to run in my sleep no matter how much or how little sleep I got, no matter how much or how little I trained.

I ran a 19:00 5k yesterday, so I think I did what I wanted to do. I was hoping to have run around 19:30 yesterday and didn't think I was quite in 19:00 5k shape just yet, but I'm not that surprised. What I thought made yesterday's race kind of interesting was that it was my eighth race of the year and while a few of them were decent efforts, none of them were times I'm proud of.

This is my year so far:

February 20 - 10k in 43:30
March 6 - half marathon in 1:42
March 20 - marathon in 4:12
April 9 - 10k in 42:18
May 1 - 5k in 22 minutes
May 10 - 10k in 47 minutes (ran with a coworker's son)
June 4 - 10k in 43 minutes
June 12 - 5k in 19:00

Despite having not run anything near a 19-minute 5k, I figured that I was certainly going to run under 20 minutes. The best race I've had this year was a 42-minute 10k and I figure that, right now, I get a minute faster over 10k with every month of training.

I can obviously train a lot harder. I run just about every day, but I seldom run for more than 30 minutes at a time and generally run between 40-50k a week. Lately that's become 60k per week, but running more than that right now would turn running into the repetitive, boring chore it has been for the last three years.

"저는 '된장녀'입니다"

2011-06-09T22:54:00.000+09:00

A few weeks ago, I saw the ad above on the subway. You can see it on lines 1 and 4, apparently. The ad, for those unfamiliar with the matter, is as clever as it is cute. It says "I am a dwainjangnyeo" (literally "soy bean paste girl", a meaningless translation).

The term is slang for a girl who lives an extravagant lifestyle, buying expensive lattes, cell phones, handbags and doing so on someone else's dime. It is, obviously, a pejorative term. What makes the ad so funny is that it uses the term literally, to refer to a girl who likes dwainjang, this time referring to dwainjang jjigae, a very popular and typical Korean dish.

The girl in the picture is a Vietnamese woman who married a Korean man, one of over 100,000 women from Southeast Asia who have married Korean men.

The ad says:

"I am a dwainjang girl.

She likes dwainjang jjigae and also makes it well, so her husband gave her this nickname.

At first she couldn't even handle the smell, but now she really loves it.

She loves her husband. And she loves Korea."

Underneath it gives her name and says that she's from Vietnam, but it's not leigible in the picture I have.

An explanation below says:

"Did you know that the number of foreign residents in our country now exceeds the population of Ulsan?

These 1.3 million residents have become an important part of our society.

Every year, 30,000 immigrants come to our country. Let's work with them today for a brighter tomorrow.

Korea is a place where everyone grows together, that's why it's called Dae Han Min Guk."

A couple of notes: First, Ulsan is the 7th-biggest city in Korea. Second, the hook for tying together Korea's past and future into one nifty slogan is the sentence "그래서 大한민국입니다."

The character 大 means both 'big' or 'great', when used in Korea's official name it translates to Great Han People's Republic, but by emphasizing it in the ad, it turns the name into a big Han People's Republic, one big enough for all races.

Viewed in a purely positive light, modernity in Korea has been about two things. First, it has been about relentless change in just about every facet of life. Second, it has been about proving doubters wrong.

No one thought this was a country that could be anything other than a poor basket case. No one thought that this was a country that needed a highway, or that this was a country that needed a major highway; both Posco and the Gyeongbu Expressway were considered risky white elephants in their 60s.

No one then would have predicted at the time that this country would host the Olympics in 20 years, and while foreign labourers first came to Korea around the time of the Seoul Olympics, it would have been absurd to imagine Korea becoming a multicultural society, a buzzword that's all the rage this year. Google News returns 1,450 hits for multiculturalism (다문화), compared with 2,500 for unification (통일) and 479 for Dokdo.

You can even find op-ed pieces such as this one questioning the very idea of there being a pure Korean race and suggesting that this is an idea best left behind as Korea moves into a multicultural era. (I'm sure this isn't the first time such a piece has been written, but I think it would surprise English speakers, myself included, that someone would write that.)

Korea has its work cut out for it when it comes to addressing its non-Korean population. It's one thing to treat me badly: I'm an adult, don't plan to live here the rest of my life, and I don't have kids. Women who marry Korean men, however, will live here the rest of their lives, they tend to be Korean citizens and they will have kids who will be Korean citizens and attend Korean schools. This subway ad won't change the fact that a shockingly high portion (about 20%, I think) of mixed-race children don't even attend school, never mind how they perform at school, but it's certainly welcome to see a government-sponsored ad acknowledge and welcome non-Koreans as being a part of Korean society.

What's also interesting is the way the ad portrays the woman: she is reasonably light-skinned, well-dressed, and is someone who loves Korean food. The Korean model of multiculturalism is, here at least, a non-Korean who can act Korean. This is more multiracialism than multiculturalism, though I don't think many Koreans really have an objection to racial and ethnic minorities continuing to live the way they live.

Part of that comes from the extent to which Korea itself has been Westernized and globalized, and part of it comes from the reality that much of Korean culture is really accessible only to ethnic Koreans. As long as I live here and no matter how well I speak Korean, I will probably never make food to offer to ancestors at Chuseok to take one example. Rather than demanding complete assimilation, the problem in Korea is the demand for a certain level of separateness.

North Korea's soft landing

2011-06-09T08:59:00.003+09:00

This is a reasonably well-written article summarizing North Korea's current dilemma: opening up the country brings prosperity and some stability to the Kim dynasty, but with openness also comes information. North Korea has done a stunningly thorough job of keeping outside information out of the country, far better than China. However, its own desires are to open up with what might turn out to be Chinese-style reforms learned, naturally, from China.

Learning from China offers North Korea a fantastic opportunity for a soft landing, where the Kim dynasty gets to keep on ruling in the way that the Chinese Communist Party has been able to survive the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution while looking stronger than ever.

Cell phones, for example, were touted as a way to break the information blackout, but North Korea's growing cell phone market sidesteps the issue by blocking international calls. Previously, Chinese-made phones used Chinese signals available in border areas to contact the outside world.

The Internet is another similar issue. As China has demonstrated, there is really nothing to stop the Internet from becoming a glorified Internet. North Korean computers connected to the Internet often only provide access to a handful of websites. North Korea could open it up great to, for example, allow many Chinese websites while blocking all Western websites. The North Korean system could relax t let North Koreans breathe, but it certainly would not represent a tearing down of the wall between North Korea and the outside world.

It may well be that in ten years, North Korea is like Vietnam or some of the poorer parts of China, an emerging market that has more freedoms than in the past but is still very much an authoritarian country. This would improve living conditions for ordinary North Koreans and the death of Kim Jong-il would maybe allow for a milder cult of Kim Jong-un with a subtler reverence for Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung. If the experiment goes well enough, the subtlety might even give way to obscurity in the way of China's frequent inability to acknowledge that Mao even existed.

It's possible to see a roadmap emerge for how North Korea might escape its current humanitarian crisis along with its murderous government without resorting to unification with South Korea, something that everyone assumes is likely. The sad part for South Koreans is that there is not much of a role South Korea can play in this. Some Souther Koreans, it's fair to say, would certainly breathe a sigh of relief if the North Korean humanitarian crisis, as well as prospective reunification of the Koreas, were both to be resolved through North Korea's gradual transformation into a Chinese satellite state.

Hiking the Baekdudaegan: Taebaeksan

2011-06-08T08:30:00.003+09:00

The Baekdudaegan (백두대간) is the mountain range that runs north-south from Baekdusan on the North Korean-Chinese border to Jirisan in southern South Korea. In South Korea, this forms a 735-kilometre trail that follows a winding, indrect route from Jirisan to Seoraksan. Given how many other mountains come off of the Baekdudaegan, this really makes Korea what it is.

This weekend I hiked the portion running south and west from Taebaeksan. Most people seem to do it backwards from what I could read, going south to north instead of north to south like I did, but for me it was more practical to start in Taebaek and go south.

Taebaeksan is located in the city of Taebaek. It's different from other cities in Gangwon-do like Sokcho, Gangneung or Donghae in that it is not by the sea, it's located wholly in the mountains. Taebaek is interesting in that while it initially developed because of the coal deposits in the area, it has since redeveloped as a popular location for winter tourism. I've wanted to come to Taebaek for a long time because of the snow festivals here in the winter, and also because there's a train that goes from Cheongnyangni station near my house.

The route I planned originally was from Taebaeksan (1567 m) to the pass at Doraegijae, a 24 km hike which would have taken about 12 hours according to books, but I thought I could have done in 8 or 9 hours. The only problem, however, was that I woke up late on Sunday morning and didn't get to Taebaeksan until 11 am. The problem facing me then was that the hike at Taebaeksan was too easy and I didn't want to do a hike that finished back where I started. I thought that if I ran as much of it as I could, I could have made up the time well, so off I went.

Taebaeksan, I was surprised to find out, was astonishingly easy. The route up from Yuilsa is excruciating for how short (4 km) and steep (600m elevation gain) it is, but the first half of it was on wide roads of concrete or gravel. It would have been no problem to drive up to the Yuilsa temple. From Yuilsa, the path is a slightly more challenging set of stone steps, but the 4 km walk took about an hour including a brief stop for a melon-flavoured popsicle.

Taebaeksan is a very beautiful mountain. To the north, there are views of Taebaek city nestled at the foot of several mountains. To the south, there are views of the Baekdudaegan and an air force facility I mistook for a ski hill. The number of children, casually-dressed adults and older people having picnics at the wide summit are a testament to the beauty of the mountain and the ease of the hike.

From Taebaeksan, what followed was almost comical. The route north descends into a very narrow path lined with azaleas in full bloom, the azalea festival having been the previous week, I believe. I was walking behind a group of middle-aged hikers with one person blaring trot music and then, all of a sudden, the turnoff for Baekdudaegan veered into some narrow bushes.

If you're hiking the Baekdudaegan, there is almost no English signage although there is no shortage of information available in Korean. I didn't realize that most of the signs were in Korean until I was looking at my pictures after the fact. This led me to walk down a very steep path leading to quite literally nowhere.

A man walking up the path asked where I was going. When I told him, he told me that this wasn't the trail and that I should've simply followed the ridge I left behind (it was confusingly marked for a mountain in the wrong direction). When I told him where I was going, he reiterated that it was 20 km. He had kind of a strong personality, so I didn't mention that I was going to run a lot of it and didn't mention that I figured there were places to stop between Taebaeksan and Doraegijae.

He wasn't that convinced and taught me how to hitchhike ("the bowing is the most important part"). Before he let me go, he urged me to hurry and took a picture of me. I couldn't tell if it was for the sheer novelty of seeing me on the trail by myself, or for safety reasons. As I jogged away, I composed the tweet he might send to a journalist.

"주하기자님 RT 부탁드려요. 어제 오후 1시 백두대간 태백산 근처에 외국인 등산객이 실종되었어요. 도래지개로 갔는데 시간이 좀 늦어서 제가 이 사진을 찍었어요. 이 외국인은 대머리 30대중반의 남성인데요. 노랑색 셔츠 그리고 빨간색 모자 쓰고 봤어요. 밤에 날씨가 추워서 빨리 찾으면 좋겠습니다."

"Please retweet this. I saw a foreigner hiking on the Baekdudaegan near Taebaeksan. i worried about him, so I took this picture. He's a balding male in his mid-30s wearing a yellow shirt and a red hat. It can get cold up there at night, so it's best if we find him quickly."

The others I saw on the trail were just as worried, though to be fair I counted the number of people I saw on the 16 km stretch of trail: eight, none in the last 10 km.

While I made reasonably good time without taking any breaks or even eating (I don't know why), eventually the ups and downs wore me down and I thought it was safer to get off the trail a village before Doraegijae. In retrospect, while there was a 60% chance I could've made it there, someone like me who rarely gets out of the city shouldn't be walking alone on mountains at dusk.

For a long time I've been searching for the consummate middle-of-nowhere experience in Korea. A pass before Doraegijae is Gomneomijae, or Bear Crossing Ridge. A steep 3 km descent from there on pointy rocks that cut up my feet led to a building on an empty road. I walked farther but this was the only pension (I guess like a Korean-style cottage?) or building within about a mile. The suite that normally goes for $150 or $200 to a group went to me for $50.

The man wore a wifebeater and knee-high gumboots. I could barely understand his dialect, but he asked if I had brought my own food over the mountains. I had, which was good because the only food they had was the food at their house (the food they advertised required longer notice). Clearly, they didn't get too many guests.

This was the quietest, dullest night I've spent in Korea. There was simply nothing except for the cottage, the small farm it was on and the mountains. I got the TV to work but I went to bed at around 8:30. I woke up in the morning to take a 20-minute cab ride, during which I didn't see another car, just to get to a small town I'd never heard of.

I'll try and edit this post later to add pictures.

China is not a kinder, gentler machine gun hand

2011-05-31T20:34:00.002+09:00

I've seen the claim here and there that, unlike America, which sticks its nose everywhere in the world, China will be a more hands-off superpower, asking no questions as long as it has access to the resources it needs. Moreover, unlike American expansionism, China has no such plans.

However, even a cursory knowledge of Chinese history under the PRC reveals the opposite. While it's somewhat true that China, instead of conquering weaker states, opted for a vassal system, the PRC's history over the last sixty years has been one of steady if unnoticed expansion.

China borders fourteen countries along with quasi-states in Hong Kong and Macau, as well as maritime proximity to Taiwan, which sadly is considered a quasi-state in the legal if not practical sense. If we consider these seventeen entities and add in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, we have twenty in all.

Of these twenty, China has already utilized its human wave tactics to greatly subdue any irredentism in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Protests, interestingly, are currently cropping up in Inner Mongolia.

Of the remaining seventeen, we have seen China do its best to seek reunification with Taiwan, turn Hong Kong into an extension of the mainland, and this year alone, station soldiers in the North Korean free trade zone of Rason while picking up one percent of Tajikistan on its other border. Also in North Korea, China is going to help develop a North Korean island on its border with China.

Farther from home, China also butted heads last fall with Japan over the disputed Senkaku islands while justifiably getting angry at America's encroachment in its claim to the South China Sea, to which about a half dozen countries have staked their name.

Now, what I term territorial expansionism on the part of China might simply be the counterpart of wingnuts referring to globalization as a new form of colonization. Every powerful country to some extent got to be that way by asserting claims which, controversial at the outset, were made permanent and uncontroversial by the forces of time and momentum. Whether China is more or less belligerent than the present guard of Western powers and Japan were about a hundred years ago is not the sort of debate I'm having.

I also don't believe, for example, that everything China does is a cause for concern. Just because China buys a lot of soybeans in Brazil, the subject of a recent New York Times article, develops a stealth fighter, or has an economy bigger than Japan doesn't mean that we should start brushing up on dull paeans to Deng Xiaopeng and a harmonious society. The most important area of concern with respect to China is not what it will do to us, but how well its own people are living and how freely they live.

That said, there are many things which China does that are specifically disconcerting. From my vantage point in Northeast Asia, a growing concern lost in breathless lurch-and-seize speculation about nuclear development and disarmament is the growing ability of China to project power in North Korea to the exclusion of all other states.

In simpler language, as Kushibo has been writing for a while now, what we might be seeing is the absorption of North Korea into China, informally at first but maybe on a formal basis down the road. That would certainly solve South Korea's worries about the costs of reunification, both financial and social, and also be something of a soft landing for North Koreans who can struggle to adjust to the paradoxical emptiness of a free society. There would, of course, be its drawbacks.

The fate of Taiwan is also disconcerting. If you consider that a China in the midst of what was essentially a genocide with a GDP per capita of about $100 was able to render Taiwan a non-entity just forty years ago, Taiwan's future has to be uncertain with China's rise. There is a movement within Taiwan to reunite with China and even those who disagree might find themselves in a difficult position in the future.

For decades, American military power has guaranteed the safety of Taiwan, which developed into a wealthy democracy with a GDP per capita higher than that of Japan. Naturally, this has been a thorn in the side of China, considering that America from thousands of miles away can control what China can or can not do in the narrow Taiwan Straits that separate China and Taiwan. One of the major goals of the Chinese military is to be able to neutralize American power in the Taiwan Straits. Once possible, will America really go to war with China over a country it doesn't even recognize officially?

수원, 나의 수원

2011-05-30T16:03:00.002+09:00

I try to get out to Suwon once or twice a month. Suwon is the city about 30 minutes south of Seoul where I lived from 2008 to 2009. Suwon is not, in and of itself, the most exciting place in the world. There are some interesting places in there that make it worth a daytrip from Seoul, even if you don't know anybody who lives here.

I haven't been to the two or three famous places in Suwon, particularly its still-standing city walls that make it, reputedly, the only city in the world that's still a walled city. What I enjoy about Suwon is that it's a little more human than Seoul, even if I don't live there anymore and even if I have spent more time living in Seoul than I ever did living in Seoul.

When I lived in Suwon, I lived in a narrow slice of a neigbourhood that was in many ways the end of civilization as we knew it. The vast expanse of metropolitan Seoul almost literally ends after my tiny little neighbourhood to the south of which were the rural rice paddies of Hwasung. More interesting were the rice paddies directly next to the neighbourhood, a rectangle about a mile long and half a mile wide. On the other side was a quiet highway with a synthetic path I used for running.

In the morning or at dusk, as was the case tonight, the sunset shone off the flooded rice paddies with the squat low-rise buildings of the neighbourhood in the background, with the purple-orange sunset above them. I live in a similarly obscure neighbourhood in Seoul, not far from the centre, but something of a self-enclosed mountain village where time stands still in many ways and an ATM is a big deal.

There has always been something more human about Suwon, if only for its size if not for the fact that I know it so well. It's a tenth the size of Seoul, which is, to its credit and its detriment, a superhuman hyperstimulating ball of light, cars and people. Suwon, I feel, can be understood as a whole, but Seoul sometimes resists that. If you stand on one busy street corner in Seoul such as, say, Jongno, it seems staggering to consider that there are another half-dozen places that are just as busy. Suwon, on the other hand, contends with a half-dozen places so hopelessly obscure that you might not even realize people can or do live there, but it seems less overwhelming.

While Seoul is probably greener than Suwon thanks to its many mountains and its massive waterfront, and you could never get away with saying that Suwon doesn't have traffic jams, when I come to Suwon, I can understand how the suburbs appeal to people. If you can stand outside its controlled chaos, you can see why Seoul might simply be too big for human habitation.

I have my reasons for living in Seoul, which I think is more interesting than any other place in Korea, but I could definitely live again in Suwon.

Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs (no, I don't mean Tony Siragusa)

2011-05-24T12:33:00.004+09:00

I hate the NFL off-season as much as I love the regular and post-season. The four months from early December to early April mark that hideous piece of football analysis known as draft predictions. If a college football star gets caught for drunk driving or tweaks a knee, people rush to predict the impact this will have on his draft placing: will he go fifteenth or will he slide to twenty-first?

So, naturally, it was hard for me to care when the owners locked out the players, despite the impact on actual football being played. I do vaguely remember the players responding by decertifying their union and then suing the league as individuals, though after that I assumed that things would sort themselves out. This, clearly, is not the case.

Football is not unique in its struggle over how to divide up a pie that is larger than it used to be. After all, even if everyone in society gets richer in absolute terms, we (most of us, anyway) would still have an issue with the wealth of all members of society relative to each other. That the owners want a bigger piece of the pie than they have right now hardly makes them unique.

Where the facts might get obscured, perhaps rightfully so, is in the absolute wealth of everyone involved. These are not striking factory workers, teachers or bus drivers. These are all very wealthy people, although how long they have to cash in on their wealth is limited by time, circumstance and health.

That's why no one really plays in the NFL just for fun, at least they shouldn't. At stake, in a league where the average career is four years, is a chance to make yourself and your family financially secure for the rest of your life. This is a side of the argument that appears lost on reductionist fans who, as they've shown over the past few decades with respect to violence in the game, care more about their personal entertainment than the players or their well-being.

The owners get criticized for being greedy billionaires, but how are they different from any other business owner? Generally it's accepted that a business owner will seek whatever advantage available to them, and if teachers, bus drivers and retail workers are overpaid, surely football players are overpaid as well. If the NFL owners operated in the same way as a major corporation, they would simply move the league to China and reduce salaries to a hundredth of what they are at the moment.

Naturally, everyone has interests, but this debate obscures them by being about the curious slice of popular culture that is professional sports. Ultimately, what's at risk is the popularity of football, which has never been higher and continued to grow in spite of confusing rule changes and what was then a looming labour conflict. Other sports exploited the gap left by baseball in 1994, though it's arguable that many of those changes were societal changes which would have dethroned baseball anyway.

It's conceivable that football loses the popularity it enjoys right now, as unfortunate as it would be. While both the players and the owners have legitimate grievances and legitimate interests, equally legitimate is our exasperation at how people so wealthy and so popular could squander it over comparatively small problems.

Book #5: The Dawn of Modern Korea

2011-05-18T09:04:00.001+09:00

Andrei Lankov's The Dawn of Modern Korea is a great book for two reasons. First, Lankov is one of the most knowledgeable writers about any aspect of Korea, the endless dance with North Korea being one such subject. When he says something about Korea, there's a very good chance it's true. Second, the book is different from virtually any other history of Korea written in English (and presumably most of those written in Korean) in that it doesn't give us the narrative of war and politics.

Instead, The Dawn of Modern Korea is great for its look into how ordinary life in Korea modernized. The usual stories of politics are relegated to the backdrop. Lankov went to some lengths to find information about ordinary life over a very tumultuous period in Korea: the hundred years or so that spanned the end of old Korea and the Joseon dynasty, the Japanese colonial era, the Korean War and the three decades of dictatorship that followed.

What was striking about the book were its themes of life in "traditional" Korea, so drastically different from its modern counterpart. Whereas today we know Korea as a relatively liberal, Westernized open society, Korea at the turn of the twentieth-century was astonishingly conservative. It's not just that the miniskirts of today were not found in the past, but also considered inappropriate was shopping, eating out at a restaurant and staying out late, all hallmarks of urban life in twenty-first century Korea.

A constant theme throughout the book is the absence of cars. The number of cars in Seoul can be roughly tracked to the modernity of Korea. Whereas today there is one car for every three people, as late as 1980 there was one car for every 150 people. This helps to explain why taxis are so cheap in Korea.

Eating at a 24-hour restaurant, commonplace today to the point that you haven't really gotten the full Korea experience if you haven't had a full meal between 3 and 6 am, was unheard of. There were virtually no restaurants in pre-colonial Korea, partly because no one had the money for it, partly because it was considered culturally inappropriate.

Staying out all night is also a relatively recent phenomenon. Starting in about 1400, leaving the house between 10 pm and 4 am was forbidden as a public security measure. This practice in one form or another continued up until independence, when the Americans instituted it for its obvious advantages, and subsequent Korean dictatorships utilized it very well. It was only lifted with Korea's democratization.

In a similar vein, traveling outside the country was also forbidden for some time. Men could only travel for business, education or if they were over 50, an idea Lankov attributes as being portraying men as soldiers first and foremost, but also an attempt to keep currency within the country. If men couldn't go, women certainly couldn't go alone, and as a result, nobody went. It's not clear, however, how all those Koreans managed to immigrate overseas.

The idea of Seoul as a powerful metropolis is also a relatively new one. Today, the Seoul area makes up about half of the country's population. As late as the 1890s, some areas just outside Seoul were considered risky for solo travelers because of tigers. Considering that Seoul of those days was roughly bound by Bugaksan, Inwangsan, Namsan, Naksan, an area that's today only the core of Seoul, this means much of what's today Seoul was territory for tigers not too long ago.

The growth of Seoul is simply astonishing: its population was about 200,000 around the start of the Japanese colonization, reaching 1 million by its end. It then multipled tenfold between independence and democratization in 1987. This helps to explain why the first apartment buildings in Seoul were a disaster at the start: nobody wanted to live that high up in the 1960s, it was strange disorienting.

Korea's astonishing economic rise can be viewed, interestingly, through the disbelief of outsiders. When a country with a GPD per capita of $100 decided to start producing steel, the world thought it was insane. After all, Korea neither had the facilities, nor the education, nor the raw materials. At considerable risk, Korea used reparations from Japan to build a steel mill in Pohang. The Pohang Steel Company (POSCO) is now often the world's biggest depending on the year, but at its inception, it was a project that no one would touch.

The now clogged Gyeongbu Expressway between Seoul and Busan is similar. When first built in the 1960s, the world refused to finance it: it was pointless to build a highway to connect a dirt-poor country where dirt roads weren't an issue since no one even had cars. In the event, General Park's gamble paid off in both cases, along with several others, though it obviously came at considerable cost. This is still a country where you input your national ID number (SIN for Canadians, SSN for Americans) just to buy a movie ticket.

If you live in Korea, have lived in Korea, live in Asia, have lived in Asia or simply enjoy contemporary history, I guarantee you will enjoy this book (it's much cheaper in Korea, I bought it for 13,000 at Kyobo). The writing style is simple, engaging and the book is organized in short chapters that are vignettes or anecdotes of history rather than a long, purportedly academic undertaking of the subject.

It's a small world, even smaller if you're a professional Platonist

2011-05-10T11:54:00.002+09:00

On the subway last night, I turned to the man to my right to see what he was reading. He was reading Plato's Cratylus, a dialogue that deals with the seemingly ridiculous question of whether the names we give to things have any intrinsic meaning, or whether they're just arbitrary. For example, why do we call it 'red'? Is there some special reason that we refer to the colour red as 'red'?

A good example of names that have some intrinsic meaning would be onomatopoeia, sounds which are named because of the way they sound. We don't call a thud a screech because the sound thud matches the meaning of the word. Now, this might not be a very good explanation, considering that I've never actually read the Cratylus.

I heard about it from my professor of Platonic philosophy four years ago. If I recall correctly, she either wrote her dissertation or a book on the topic (possibly both). I always wanted to read the Cratylus, but life being what it is, I ended up in Korea about eight months after the course, and it's not easy to find obscure Platonic dialogues translated into English.

But here was this man next to me, reading Cratylus in Korean peppered with the original Greek, a case of two misunderstandings somehow leading to a greater understanding. I almost interrupted him to say, "you know, I had a professor who specialized in this topic", before considering how obnoxious it would be of me to say that.

When I looked over to the next page, a handful of footnotes on the page mentioned what looked like recent scholarship in the area, one such footnote being reserved for the very professor I was going to bring up. I thought this would be a good time to interrupt the man to note that I learned a great deal from her, but for all I knew, he learned under CDC Reeve, he whose name appears on just about every translated work of ancient philosophy.

As a sidenote, while writing this, I discovered that my former professor, Rachel Barney from the University of Toronto, ran for the Green Party in the Trinity-Spadina riding in Toronto. Surprisingly for a riding populated by hipsters and yuppies, she finished a distant fourth with five percent of the vote, well behind even the Conservative candidate. As everyone who has ever been enchanted by philosophy consoles themselves, the purity of philosophy and the filth of politics simply don't mix.