"In Korea" #1: In Korea, people carry umbrellas when it’s sunny.

I’m trying to motivate myself to write for this blog more regularly.  Since I feel like my day-to-day experiences aren’t always blog-worthy, I’ve decided to introduce a new feature to my blog that will, I hope, entertain the reader and also allow for more frequent posting on my part.  I call it my “In Korea” series.  In it, I will write short, bite-sized posts attempting to describe or explain random quirks and idiosyncrasies of Korean society and culture.  A great majority of my readers are Americans who presumably know little about this country – these posts will mostly be for their benefit.  I am aware that I also have some readers here in Korea – for those of you in this latter category, a lot of this stuff will be common knowledge for you, but I encourage you to leave comments if you think there’s something I’ve left out, or if you have some additional insight.  And now, without further ado, on to the first installment:

In Korea, people carry umbrellas when it’s sunny.

Exhibit A

By “people”, I mean mostly ajummas and halmeonis (middle-aged women and grandmothers).  And by “carry”, I don’t mean they just happen to have them handy as a precaution against a possible shower later in the day; I mean they carry them open in the full light of day when there’s not a cloud in the sky.

And if they don’t have an umbrella, ajummas will probably be sporting a comically large sun visor, sometimes accompanied by a scarf or bandana wrapped around the whole thing.  Younger women tend to wear floppy wide-brimmed hats or baseball caps instead.

Exhibit B

All you need for an ajumma Halloween costume
is a visor and a loose-fitting shirt with a floral pattern.

The purpose of all of this is to shield from the sun, and from what I gather, the reason they do it is only partly because of the possibility of sunburn.  They also do it because in Korea a tan is not considered beautiful. Quite the opposite.  The Korean ideal of beauty, among other things, includes milky white skin.  The lighter the better.  Having darker skin carries with it the connotation of being from “the country” – which is something that, in this increasingly modern, urbanized population, is considered common and unglamorous.  In Korea, it’s all about status and appearance.  Heaven forbid someone interpret your tanned skin to mean you’ve been working out in the fields. 

And here I thought superficiality was an obsession more or less confined to western cultures.  

The Cherry Blossoms Cometh.....and goeth pretty quickly

This time, I won’t make any empty apologies about the lapse in blog entries over the last couple months.  I’ve been pretty busy with work, and I’ve also grown a bit weary of chronicling my experiences one after another – especially now that these experiences are no longer new and interesting, but instead common occurrences lacking novelty and intrigue.  Still, I think it’s about time for an update.  My last four entries (posted back in February) were about my Japan trip, so I haven’t written about Korea since January.

I am exceedingly pleased to report that the very long, cold winter abruptly turned to spring a few weeks ago.  As a result, I’m coming out of hibernation and discovering new motivation to get out and see more of Korea – something I did so little of during the winter.  Spring here is really lovely.  Color has returned to the landscape, swiftly sweeping away the dull browns and greys of the cold season.  These days, the sun shines more often than not.  In a matter of two weeks, the temperature went from bitingly cold to tee-shirt-and-shorts weather – skipping right over the mild hoodie-weather stage.  The humidity and mosquitoes that plague the summer months are, at least for the moment, still conspicuously absent.  The result is a near-perfect combination of radiance, warmth, birdsong, and natural rejuvenation.  Too bad I know it can’t last too long.  Monsoon season is just around the corner.

But for now I’m content.  The much anticipated cherry blossom bloom came and went in the blink of an eye – the delicate blossoms don’t linger for more than a week or two, making their brief appearance across the country every spring a major event.  The blossoms bloom first in the south and gradually spread to the north, covering the country in white and pink.  On local news broadcasts, the weather anchors track the progress of the northward bloom on a map the way you’d expect them to cover a slow-moving thundershower.  During those few short weeks, festivals are held all over the country in a hurried attempt to squeeze as much enjoyment and appreciation out of the tiny flowers’ fleeting existence as possible.

I went to one of these festivals.  It was a smaller, lesser-known festival in an out-of-the-way but pretty amazing location on a lake near Jecheon.  I went with some friends on a sunny Sunday, and it was a great way to spend an afternoon.  The festival itself was nothing special – a few streets lined with stalls serving up food, games, souvenirs (some of them rather random) – but the preponderance of cherry blossoms hanging over everything infused the atmosphere with a giddy springy-ness, and it was really quite beautiful.  Really, the thing that made the day fun was spending it with friends, enjoying each other’s company while traveling by trains and buses to a random spot in the mountains where none of us had been before, taking in a change of scenery, enjoying the chance to be outside without shivering.  And experiencing a genuine cherry blossom bloom in east Asia – that was nice too.