On the first Sunday in October, Barbara and I visited the National Museum of Korea, and spent a beautiful afternoon indoors as it poured outside. The edifice, and there is no other apt word for it in English, so I fall back on my formally native tongue to delineate it, is simply monumental, an emphatic statement of Korean determination to express the uniqueness of the country.
The area has a rather long and involved architectural history, interwoven with the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, and far too complex for a peregrinator of my limited knowledge to do justice, so I won’t.  The building is monumental and serene, and the color of the stone beige in various tints but all certainly conveying the complexions of the country. The exhibits, permanent and special, were not confined to Korean art, but covered Asia in general, from the Paleolithic to the present; statues of Buddha abound, and influences on Korean art, from as far away as what is modern Turkey,
reverentially noted, and there is a gallery housing an exhibit of a Japanese ship, bound for Korea in the 15th century, carrying  twenty-two tons of copper coin amidst a cargo of ceramics, food, and mercantile stuffs, which was recovered in 1971 through undersea archeology by brave divers, of course Korean. There are also three restaurants, including a spacious tearoom to allow one to reconsider what one had just seen. Certainly this museum rivals anything in Paris with its sense of permanency and an inner space environment making a person feel the same honor of experience as if one were allowed to walk through the interior sanctum structure of a pyramid unhurriedly and with full rights and privileges of observation, and …like…it’s all for you and you alone, baby, as I remember feeling listening to Stephane Grappelli from a center box at Carnegie Hall
nearly four decades ago.

Part of the trip was occasioned by Barbara wanting to get a sense of the place before she brought two of her drawing classes out to the museum, but what really caught us were photographs from Gyeongju of huge tomb mounds of kings from the Silla (pronounced “shilla”) kingdom, the place on the southeast of the peninsula responsible for the unification of Korea. I had seen these in a book, but this photographic exhibit just reached out and beckoned us.  Gotta’ go, gotta’ see, gotta’ do!

And so after finishing teaching for the week, we took a 7:43am train on Thursday to Gyeongju, the center of the Silla Dynasty 57-935CE. The area is an archeological and anthropological treasure. We returned late on Saturday. The train trip was five hours each way, but the ride was the best, except maybe going through the Alps in April 1966, in my life, and the country here is only 23% arable, so the mountains are never far away; there are rice paddies all through the valleys, and it’s pure nature except for the ubiquitous high rise apartments which house a high percentage of the population.  This is a huge shift in traditional Korean culture; the extended family within one home has been fragmented – part of another general upheaval in the way younger persons think, particularly the women who have slaved forever and now of the opinion that happiness cannot buy money but rather the antithetical philosophical outlook, and the hell with the Beatles’  “Money Can’t Buy Me Love.”

What was remarkable about the train was that it didn’t leave us with the feeling of total frazzle that even a trip to New Haven can; there were conductors on the train female and male, but no one checked anyone’s tickets. This has got to be what is known as the honors system. I could just imagine what would happen in the States if this were the case: Total bankruptcy for the railroads, if there’re not already.  Gyeongju, the area, has a population of about 250,000, and it is a major touring spot for Koreans, so we were fortunate to have booked a pension, Bellus Rose — I have no idea about this name except that it is allegedly a type of rose, and the rose adorned the establishment’s card – and we were picked up at the train station, by Ms. Pak holding a sign with our names on it (a first VIP reception in our sweet young lives), who drove us into the rice fields where this newly founded pension had sprung up in what was in the process of becoming a packet of pensions. Lots of roses on the wallpaper, the bedspread, and those growing outside made for any MBA’s example of determined branding of a new business.

Ms. Pak drove us back to a bus stop from which we could go to the Bulguksa temple, a very ancient Buddhist temple which was inside a huge national park which incorporated a good many archeological sites as well as resort establishments, but we stopped to eat at a seafood restaurant where we had haemulgoki (sea-water-meat; literal translations are so romantic), and then made it to the bus stop which was next to one of many stoneyards (my term) a sculpture reproduction emporium, that seem to be frequent in Korea. As we were taking a few photographs, a slender slight man approached asking us if he could take some pictures of us.  This became our afternoon with Mr. U, a chef from one of the resort hotels who, as the afternoon unfolded,  we discovered was on temporary sick leave from his job after having been assaulted by a younger employee.  He was thrilled to meet us since we were jungu (my transliteration: short “u”s) speakers and he had one passion in life: to learn to speak colloquial English. He turned out to have been studying English since before the Norman Conquest, loving it, frustrated by it, ineluctably pinned down by it, in fact obsessed with it from the time he began to study it at hotel management
school a generation ago (we estimated his age as 47 from other information). Later on after the temple visit, over a couple of bottles of diet water, he regaled us with a dramatic performance of how English was taught to him in college or how he was taught English ( this instruction I can only characterize as being administered in the non-existent passive/aggressive voice) through grammar and learning of a massive series of set conversations through memorization. He had several dozen dialogues which he had burned into his brain:

“Good Evening Mr. Brown. It’s a pleasure to have you joining us here at the hotel for the next three days.”

“Yes, we have all sorts of amenities and a western menu as well. “

“We will ring you at exactly seven-thirty. Do you require anything else?”

His performance was delivered with a wit and humor seasoned with winks from him at the absurdist twists
of these inane dialogues which would never leave him and clearly had a half-life beyond the resurrection: immortally inane, almost cruel,  useless bits of language instruction driving a lingual stake through my heart since I was suffering the same torment in my Korean class:

“Is that your laptop computer or is it an umbrella?”

What can one say in response except:

“Y tu madre tambien!”

And so as we exchanged his in situ expertise for our mellifluous New York syllabification and idioms we walked and talked all afternoon in the temple grounds, stopping more than every so often so Mr. U could pencil our colloquial phrases on to the back of an envelope he happened to have from his paycheck. Did I sympathize? Do I draw breath?

He volunteered his services for the next day, but we left that up in the air. There are not enough sweet adjectives in anyone’s phrase book to capture this man’s sincerity and charm: delicate, emphatically passionate, insistently generous, plaintive about what he felt he had missed out on in life; his mother had died before he could remember her, his father a local policeman (on a subsistence salary) sent him to live with an uncle, no higher education than graduating from the “first hotel college in Korea,” and an elegant spirit.

After farewells to Mr. U, we returned, wending through the rice fields to our pension where we were the only guests.
We had signed on for  “traditional Korean barbecue,” and had pledged our appearance for 7:30, and here one’s word is one’s word. We were treated to an extensive and elaborate spread of various pork cuts (twaejigoki), vegetables and sauces worthy of all the more than 500  Sillan kings who had ever reigned. This was served in the pension’s garden, and it was just for us.  Memorable, memorable, memorable.

The next day we were driven 30 minutes away to Yangdong Village, now a UNESCO historical world treasure site (that’s not UNESCO’s terminology exactly).
This is a village essentially intact for more than 700 years, and we explored it under the guidance of a professional whose acronymic surname was BYK, Mr. Byk. His services were ours for free; Ms. Pak had arranged this on the spot once we arrived. Mr. Byk was likewise as was Mr. U the day before hell bent on debriefing native English speakers, and coming from Manhattan bestowed an epic Brahman mantle of power upon us and we were walked through gratis. It is wonderful to have such a divine power, but this is what St. John meant when he said, “In the beginning there was the word….” Mr. Byk was studied, scholarly, and comprehensively versed in Korean history and culture, had a rich sense of humor, and told us that our coming to him was simply “destiny,” and he preceded to prove it to us by outlining the course of his decision to come to work on a day when he could have been elsewhere. Mr. U had, too, declared our meeting a move destined by some cosmic force. I don’t care if this is what they say to all their dates: It’s great to be special 14,000 miles away from your E-Z Pass. Talk about entrée.  The village’s history was a mirror of Korean Confucianism, a tradition which one feels embedded in every single quotidian act of the current modus vivendi despite the ever deepening stratum of Christianity over a Buddhism that predated both.  Mr. Byk, who was interested in marriage, himself a Buddhist and a bachelor, gave us a solid supply of his professional cards bearing his “most famous  Korean movie star” cameo on it to pass out to our Sungshin (all-female all star) students in the hopes of a nibble. We were gracious and remain professional.

Walking to the public bus in the rain, we spent the afternoon in Gyeongju visiting the burial mounds in their parks; one of them has been rendered enterable.
They were so designed that tomb robbers would be crushed to death under a huge weight of stones should anyone be that ambitious and stupid. Huit clos for criminals! Requiescantur in pace omnes. No book will do these tumuli justice; they have to be seen and approached as they form the upper arc of sine curves and baseline at their circumferences. Reverence for the architectural earthwork marvel descends on one; it’s impossible to resist or deny it. Some of these go back 1800 years. 211 of them out of over 500 have been discovered.

Dinner was in the Sun Du Bu Restaurant, named for a local soupine delicacy: an uncurdled tofu soup, mild with a raw egg cracked into it, very mild but rivaling any “comfort” food we’ve ever had. This was part of Mr. U’s legacy. His previous boss at the fancy hotel he cooked for had opened it a couple of years ago with some partners, and he had recommended it.

Before training back to Seoul on Saturday afternoon, we spent hours in the Gyeongju National Museum, a super
treasure house devoted to the area’s finds and history. The Silla civilization and culture are awesome, and the displays perfectly designed for maximum effect. The only shortcoming of the museums we’ve visited is the lack of information in English and the translations were in need of native-level competency, but who needs us anyway?

We left on the 3:30 train back to Seoul and watched the shadows lengthen, the mountains shade, and the rice fields disappear into a vespertine cloak.

Gary