(Note: I've been taking assloads of photos. I will post them on my flickr when I get back to the States)
So. Women don't smoke on the streets in Seoul. I've seen one woman smoking, on her lunch break. If you walk down the street with a cigarette AND breasts and you look asian, prepare for crazy stares from anyone over 40. Maybe even the younger ones as well, but I don't remember. Korea is probably one of the most patriarchal place I've ever been although I don't judge that. Not too much.
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How could I? I barely have any experience of this place at all and there are quite a few things that I adore about it. For one, I just spent half the day in a jimjilbang (finally found one in Sinchon). They're called saunas here (although they're more than just a hot room) and you can find one by locating a red sign with three vertical wavy flame lines over a horizontal line... or you could just learn to read Hangul.
Regardless, they RULE. For the equivalent of five dollars you can soak yourself in various kinds of hot tubs, then dunk yourself into a cold tub for an amazing adrenalin rush. For the equivalent for forty dollars I also had a nice woman scrub off 5 pounds of dead skin from my entire body, give me a dry towel massage, then an oil massage, a facial and finally a shampoo for my hair. That kind of thing would cost 3X as much in the States or more. These places also have several saunas, chill out rooms, snack bars, tv, video games and computer stations. There may have been more at the place I was at (Shinchon Rest) but I ended up taking a nap in one of the chillout rooms and needed to split after a while.
The scrub was the most amazing part though. At first I thought she was putting some kind of mud on me as there were little brown things stuck to my skin and all over the table, but no, that was dead skin. DISGUSTING! I'm glad all that shit is off of of me now. I've never felt so clean in my adult life and my skin certainly hasn't felt this soft in years.
Sigh. So. Back to the smorking. Before I realized that women JUST DON'T SMOKE whilst walking down the street, I put out a cigarette butt under my foot on a sidewalk. It's not like there weren't butts on the ground and sure I probably shouldn't do that, but I was with Brad and I wasn't paying much attention.
Suddenly three middle-aged men in cheap suits and armbands came up to me and started blabbing at me in Korean. Brad said maybe they liked my socks! Or they were trying to get with me! They kept pointing at the ground and I just didn't understand what they were saying until one of them picked up the cigarette butt.
Oops.
I apologized. Tried to take the butt back several times. Said please please please. Started feeling a bit paranoid. I told them I was from America and that I wasn't Korean so they asked to look at my passport. Of course it says that I was born in Korea and having found that one man pointed it out to me.
But no, IBYANG, I'm adopted, suckers! I pointed to myself and said "ibyang" and they instantly got bashful. God knows one of them could've been my father. They ALL could've been wondering if I was their daughter. Or maybe they were just feeling this Korean shame bidness I had heard about. They all backed off and let me go on my way. I felt like utter crap for about half an hour but now I'm just amazed. I have not gotten anything free or any hugs from strangers by telling them I'm ibyang, but I did get out of some kind of police trouble. In your faces, my ex-countrymen.
In other news it has occurred to me that by nature, at least, I am way more foreign than any of my Asian American friends. My Korean relatives (that I've never met) are so fobby they never got on the boat. I bet they eat that nasty pig's head I saw in the market that almost made me retch. I am also way more western than any of my Asian American friends because I can't speak Korean, my entire family is Caucasian and I'm not at all used to being around people of my same race. I don't even really connect much with other Korean adoptees because despite the fact that they're all very, very nice to me, they're also all very, very square. There's certainly nothing wrong with being square but that's never really been me and I've always found myself miserable when trying to force myself into that, uh, peg. I would say it's strange to feel like I'm a race of one (or maybe 10) on planet Earth. But I really don't know how it feels like to belong to a group of millions of people so it feels just fine to me.
Seoul is beautiful in various ways and also disgusting. Just like anywhere else... except with kimchee every meal. I want to grow my hair out now, though. I think it's time for some changes.
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