The Land of the Rising Robots

My trip started off great. As I’m clearing security, the girl with the metal detector wand hit me in the funny bone and laughed.

As I’m sitting by the gate waiting to board, I saw this old Korean Buddhist monk sitting across from me with his eyes closed in meditation. He looked so peaceful and happy compared to the other people sitting around dreading the process of travelling. I wondered how old he was, with his long white beard and long greyed hair. He was wearing a two-piece bright orange jumpsuit that could have been mistaken for a prisoner’s outfit.

I fell asleep and when I woke up, I noticed that everyone else was in line at the gate except for me and this monk. He came up to me as if he knew that I was analyzing his serenity 20 minutes prior. He said, “This world is filled with distractions, do you want to learn about meditation and better understand the world?”

Then I realized that he was the happiest and most peaceful person in the room, and maybe the most peaceful person I have ever met. We chatted about Korea and China, spirituality, alchemy and vegetarianism. He frequently travels to China and India to meet his Buddhist homeboys.
He lives at an ashram deep in the Korean mountains and invited me to join him. I told him that I would on another trip and we exchanged contact information.

This trip was to be my first experience with couch-surfing. It’s a website that promotes travelling and meeting people around the world by staying at a complete stranger’s couch. The first two nights, I stayed with a young English teacher from Wisconsin. I was to meet him at 6:30, so I wandered the city until then. I saw a couple of temples, some really interesting art galleries and museums until it was time to meet him.

I went into the Seoul Museum of Art, which was hosting an international exhibition on New Media Art, something similar to what my company does in Beijing. One exhibit was a two-video sequence, a logo and a poster. The Logo was all red. The top was the top half of a Magen David and the bottom half was clearly from the Polish Crest, the White Eagle in red. I went in to see a poster with versions in English and Korean. It was called ‘A Manifesto of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland’, which outlined reasons why Jews should return to Poland. Then the two video clips. The first was a young polish man standing in an empty stadium that was old and shoddy, preaching to a bunch of young polish students, in adorable little uniforms, about why Jews and Poles should reunite in Poland. The second video was the same Polish guy, this time speaking to a bunch of Israelis and then the construction of a facility in the middle of Warsaw to signify the return of the Jews. It was built like a concentration camp, but built with pride and as a testament to history. I sat there tearing as flocks of Koreasn walked by, only partially understanding its value. As I sat there, I wrote this letter to the creator of this exhibit.

To Yael Bartana,

Wandering the streets of Seoul, not even for four hours after landing, I came across your exhibit on Jews returning to their Homeland of Poland. My family were Polish Jews. My grandfather was from Łódź and was lucky enough to suffer through the Great Depression in Canada, rather than to have remained in Poland. My other grandfather was from Kraków and my grandmother from Radom. These two had the pleasure of taking the tour of ghettos and concentration camps across Poland and Germany; Warsaw, Auschwitz, Matthausen and Bergen-Belsen to name a few.

I live in Beijing now after having lived in Toronto, Montreal and Tel Aviv. Maybe I’m adventurous or maybe I’m lost. I don’t know, but by sitting through your films, surrounded by Koreans, I cried for my family, for the Jews of Poland and for all of those, who have disappeared as a result of such atrocities. I am very conscience of my family’s history in Poland, but have never considered an affiliation with Poland itself. Well, until I saw your work.

My family is planning a trip to Poland in May with my grandmother, who after having been physically removed from her home and taken to a strange country, that has never returned to the country that turned its back on her. Only recently, she agreed to return and show us where she came from and what she went through for us and for her legacy.
When I go, I will look for my place in that world, or at least try to imagine the difference in my life had our family remained there. You provide an interesting perspective on this issue.

Thank you for hitting me so close to home in such a foreign country.

Josh.


At 6:30, I met up with a group of 15 couch-surfing hosts living in Seoul and we went out for dinner and drinks. I carried copies of the poster with me, but they never made it home.

Korea is strange. The people here rarely look up from their feet, but clearly know what’s going on around them. They do little to see what others are doing and I feel that people watching is offensive here. People do not even notice others walk by them. They see a sea of people, but no faces. Yet, the women here spend more time on makeup and outfits than anywhere else I’ve been. Seoul has the highest concentration of plastic surgeons in the world and getting eye-surgery, or otherwise, is a common gift from a parent for a daughter’s sweet sixteen. It seems that everyone is so focused on themselves, that they don’t notice everyone else’s need for attention.

In China, locals take notice of Westerners as they pass by, and in Korea, we go totally unnoticed, yet so much of the West is embodied in their style and cuisine.

In the first 3 days in Seoul, I found the only friendly people to be Chinese/Taiwanese tourists.

On the weekend, Zac and I stay with a really nice Korean couple that spoke bits of Chinese, Spanish and English. They taught us how to say 3 phrases in Korean: Hello, Thank you and ‘We have old lady perms’.

The food in Seoul was delicious, but much more expensive than Beijing. There is a Korean dish called Tsanakji, which is when the chef takes a live octopus, cuts it up and serves it as is. When it gets to the table, the whole plate is squirming. When you put the pieces in your mouth, the tentacles crawl around and grab onto your teeth, tongue and lips. It was really cool, not to mention delicious.

Other great Korean food to try:
Bulgogi – grilled slices of beef and onions
Paejon – seafood/kimchi pancake
Kalbi – sorta like Miami ribs
I don’t know what it’s called – a big plate of baked beans, spam, weird hot dogs and veggies are thrown together into a big pan with Korean spices and noodles. It comes from the US army influence and has become a staple in cheap food culture. Spam is everywhere.


The military museum was really cool. Outside it has a lineup of tanks, planes missiles from the last 50 years and the museum itself has a lot of information about Korean history. Worth checking out.

I waited until the last day to hike up Bukhansan, the big mountain north of Seoul. Zac and I arrived there at 5 pm. The hike we took said 3.3 km to the top. We decide to go for it. People kept telling us that we better have flashlights or camping equipment, because it was getting dark. We kept going. After a while, we lost the sign of the trail we were on and realized that we were on a different trail that was bout 2 km longer than our initial route. We kept going. We scale the mountain in a little over an hour. The view was of a dark sky, other than a bright, full moon guiding our way, and a city of lights below that stretched forever. The air was clean and everything was silent. What a change from regular life in Asia.

On the way down, we found a route that was less than 2 km and it took us as much time to get down, because it was so dark, we couldn’t see 2 feet in front of us. It was a nice way to end the trip.

It was nice going to Korea, but I was really happy when I got home.