20 Minutes

When I first lived in Korea I barely really lived in it at all. I stayed in my apartment trading the international financial markets, and when I ventured out – largely at the weekend on chaperoned trips – I felt more like a visiting alien, although to be fair that was the official classification the Korean government gave me; I still have the Alien Registration Card to prove it.

Recognising that living in Korea conventionally meant actually trying to live in it, I took the opportunity to do some writing for the local English-language radio station and appear on their shows, and later I got a part-time programming job so I started spending a lot of my life really out there, on the move.

One day I was on the move back from the radio station when the subway train stopped in a station and stayed there. Announcements were made by the driver in Korean so I had no idea what was happening. Ten minutes passed, and during one announcement, I held my phone up to the speaker in the carriage for my wife to listen to the explanation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’d been a suicide at the next station ahead of us.

Right now, screen doors are being installed at most – if not eventually all – of Busan’s subway stations ‘for your comfort and convenience’, by which I’m pretty sure they actually mean “to stop you throwing yourself off the platform into the path of an oncoming train”, which I understand happens quite a lot.

I don’t know if these suicides are planned, because it’s occurred to me in recent years that climbing up to the top of a building requires effort, but throwing yourself out in front of a train can be one of those spur of the moment decisions that mark a final act of rebellion amid Korea’s claustrophobic social conformity, although evidently placing doors on the platform to enforce a further level of social conformity is going to solve this problem.

After twenty minutes most people had left the train, but I didn’t want to venture up to the surface and try and deal with a Korean taxi-driver, so I took my chances and waited with the five other people who remained, pondering the unanswerable question of who this person was, why they’d chosen to end their life by being hit by a subway train at 8.25pm on a Wednesday evening, and whether inconveniencing the many thousands of people who had found themselves stuck in the subway system was what they wanted from their final act in this world.

I also wondered how long it took to clear a badly mangled body from the subway tracks. I imagined it would be quite a long time. Apart from the mess, surely the police would want to ensure there was no foul play? Twenty minutes is all it takes as it turns out. Because all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. The procedures for scraping humans off the subway tracks in Korea is well practised, and the local authorities are the Formula 1 pit crews of suicide clean-ups, which is a rather depressing realisation.

As someone who has struggled on and off with depression for a long time but is determined to see life through to its bitter end, I’m not sure I would be the best person to try and talk a suicidal Korean out of their intended course of action. But when I walked down the subway steps to the platform of one of the many trains I was catching one Thursday recently, I momentarily checked myself on discovering a youth around the age of 18 sat at the bottom sobbing uncontrollably. The new screen doors are not yet functional and his proximity three meters away from the fast end of the platform instantly concerned me.

Of course, because of the language barrier there was almost certainly nothing meaningful I could say to him, and even if I could, it might have only made him feel worse about himself that he’d embarrassed himself in front of a foreigner.

Part of me just wanted to tell him to stop using an umbrella in the rain, which is what all Koreans do but I generally don’t. This marks me out as quite possibly mentally ill in the eyes of most Koreans who fail to see their own collected psychoses which are simply called ‘society’ here, but to live life is to endure a lifetime of emotional pain far greater than the minor discomfort of getting a little wet. If you can’t feel the rain on your head and stare up in the sky and see the wonder in it falling towards you, reminding you that you are alive against the odds and for the briefest of moments in this Universe, then how can you cope with anything else? Umbrellas are a great evil foisted upon society, quite possibly as part of a secret plot by the psychiatric industry.

Becoming a father turned out to be a strange experience for me. I often look at my son wondering about his future and consider that as he is now, I once was, and as I am now, he may become. The circle of life goes on with many of the same scenes but different players. How will my story end? How will my son’s if he doesn’t live to see the Singularity? That mangled body on the tracks was someone’s baby once, and after all the joy and difficulties their parents must have experienced this is what it came down to.

That day, our twenty minutes came to an end, the blood of someone’s child was cleaned off the Busan subway tracks, and the rest of us inevitably resumed our journeys to our own eventual destinations.

August Rush: A New Home and a Financial Setback

Since I last wrote I feel as though I’ve lived another lifetime and I’ll forever call it August 2011. It’s hard for me to explain recent events in my life in a short narrative so over the next few days I’ll post a series of entries under the theme of my ‘August Rush’.

My wife and I decided to buy an apartment. Since we returned to Korea we’ve lived with her mother, and that had both its emotional and logical reasons, but it changed the nature of our relationship and not for the better. Summer tends to be the slow season for apartment hunting in Korea, for the very good reason that people don’t want to hike around in the unbearable heat as I have just spent the last month doing, and with prices of apartments in Busan rising at a bubble-like pace, we were watching our relocation options dwindle by the month. We had to take advantage of any lull there was.

I became a full-time financial trader in December 2004, and I was quite successful for a few years, but since my wife stopped working alongside me last year - providing an all-important extra set of eyes and second opinion - my profitability just ebbed away and my heart wasn’t quite in it any more. I sat alone in my office trading London hours into the early hours of the Korean mornings, I wasn’t getting out of the apartment much at all, so I was failing to learn the Korean language. And the relentlessly negative financial macroeconomic environment of the last few years began to take its toll on me, because in the end I found it doesn’t matter whether you’re winning in the market if the constantly depressing news environment just wears you down. I started doing a weekly radio segment on Busan e-FM during trading hours just to get away from things, an unthinkable move during more motivated times.

But the end of my career as a trader in August came quickly. I have a rule that if the running annual total of my profits falls sufficiently below the level I could earn from a normal salaried position, then I have to accept that I’m in the wrong job. When you’re ‘in the zone’ in trading, as we call it, you feel untouchable, but when you’re not it’s easy to see extended runs of losses, because this is an activity where studies have suggest 90% of participants consistently lose money. When you find yourself in that 90%, when general market conditions seem no longer aligned with your trading style, you have to find something else to do with your life. And while it would make for a great narrative if could say I’d suffered a major financial blow-up, really it’s been more of a setback, albeit a significant one.

The culmination of my minor financial crisis was connected with the search for an apartment. I’d done a radio segment about ‘the gravitational pull of Haeundae’, and like a lot of Koreans in Busan I felt like I had to be there, but not just out of the need to climb the property and perceived social ladder; the two prominent foreign schools - Busan Foreign School and Busan International Foreign School - are both in the area, and with the prospect that this is where my son needed to go one day, we were planning ahead. But Haeundae is expensive, and it seemed like we had a choice – buy a nice apartment in a good area, or a bad apartment in a good area. We started looking around and it only seemed to make that choice seem even more stark.

I’d seen some nice apartments in Centum City, but they were out of our price range, and yet tantalisingly close enough that if I pushed hard with my trading accounts living there might be possible. So I did something I hadn’t done in a long time – broke my risk management rules, ignored the warnings I’d built into my systems, and went for it. If I failed at least I could say that I met my undoing out there on the ragged edge which so often defines who you are as a person. In earlier and more reckless times as a trader I’d done the same thing, and I’d always come out of it on top, but not this time. My decision came just days before the market entered a particularly high period of volatility, and in trading parlance, I was long when I should have been short and short when I should have been long. By the time it was over, I’d lost quite a lot of money and Centum City was no longer tantalisingly close but instead an even remoter dream.

You live by the sword and die by the sword as a trader. I knew what I was doing, I let frustration and impatience get the better of me, and now I have to pay the price. That was my first financial disaster. My second may be buying the apartment itself, because I’m convinced that Busan is in the midst of an unsustainable property bubble that could entirely conceivably implode in on itself at any moment. But we urgently needed a place to live, and rather presciently as it turned out, while watching what was happening in the international financial markets and the Korean construction sector, I predicted that Korean banks might stop lending, as banks in the UK had a few years earlier, excluding a generation from the dream of home ownership.

In fact when we were arranging our loan, in a remarkable and frightening admission the bank manager told us that he couldn’t guarantee the bank would still be willing to honour it at the end of September when it was supposed to be released. Despite this, it wasn’t certain then that the turmoil in the financial markets would translate into real-world actions, but just days after we arranged to buy our new apartment, the Korean banks made their move as I’d believed they would, but much sooner than I expected.

Frozen

One of the things that surprised me when I moved from a self-contained and somewhat isolated one-room apartment into a large apartment block, was the speaker on the wall from which the building's janitors/security guards would issue pronouncements from their bunker far below. The disembodied voice - with its Orwellian overtones - which can suddenly cut into any conversation or private moment and can not be switched off, has continued to be one of the more disconcerting aspects of living in a Korean high-rise community. But it also has a comedic value that I fear I will never truly appreciate until I am fully conversant in Korean.

Sometimes the reason for amusement is subtle - advice is dispensed carrying a chastising undertone of things the residents have done wrong and should not do again. And sometimes the reason is more overt and quite possibly alcohol-related, although to be fair, the disembodied voice has only become so slurred on one occasion that my fellow Korean-speaking prisoners could not understand it either. By comparison the series of announcements that began on Saturday were at least comprehensible, if delivered in a rather uncertain and rambling fashion.

The speaker told us that our building's pipes were frozen, and we should not use our taps. Then later it was OK to use the taps but not the sinks. Then certain sections of the block were clear to use everything, and others weren't. And so it went on through the afternoon, as one imagined the Korean equivalent of the Mario video game character running around desperately from one crisis to the next. Later, when my wife got to the checkout of the local mart, the assistant asked noted the lack of bottled water in her cart and asked if she wasn't buying any. They were running out of water, demand had been so heavy. The apartment announcements continued into Sunday.

I had been surprised to turn on my computer screen on Saturday morning to find Ubuntu's weather applet telling me it was -8 degrees Celsius outside. Surely some mistake I thought. But in fact, temperatures had hit -12.8 in Busan overnight, the lowest here in 96 years according to the JoongAng Daily, although the problems with water pipes were clearly much worse in Seoul, causing problems for Korea's often low-profile poor. Even the higher-profile middle-classes, who are in no danger of freezing to death, are feeling the effects of the cold - with the government imploring them to cut back on their electricity usage as underfloor heating usage saps the capacity of South Korea's power stations. Evidently however, it is a call falling of deaf ears.

Even we finally succumbed and turned on our underfloor heating for the first time since moving here last week, but it didn't work. It transpired that - according to the plumber who came out to fix the problem and turned out to be very familiar with our building's problems - the construction company didn't put the right amount of anti-freeze in the heating pipes seven years ago, leading to many of the underfloor boiler pumps becoming damaged when they tried to move the semi-frozen water. While the freezing problem has long since been solved, the damage caused to the boilers apparently hasn't, leading to new residents discovering the issue the first time they tried to use their heating. Fortunately, our plumber fixed the problem.

As for the weather, unless you've had one of those diseducations (sic) which are so popular in the West these days, especially in America, you probably accept that climate change - whatever factors are causing it - is gradually leading to more extreme weather events. So Busan's coldest temperatures in 96 years are not incompatible with the claim from the National Institute of Environmental Research here that Korea's temperature could rise by 2.2 to 4.2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, although apparently this means that by 2040 the streets of Seoul could be lined with tangerine trees. It's not clear to me that there's a particularly high national demand for tangerines in Korea, and why therefore this is seen as an advantage, but that's what they said. Presumably if it's that warm in Seoul, the higher temperatures in the south will mean Haeundae Beach will stretch inland to Seomyeon. Or that's how they'll probably spin the desertification of Busan, at least.

In fact, last summer had the highest number of 'tropical nights' in ten years, and perhaps mindful of that Lotte Department Store is already doing a brisk - and apparently rationed - trade in selling aircon units for the summer.

When I first arrived in Korea I marvelled at the fact I could wear a t-shirt in October, and I was willing to accept the constant Korean assertion that this country has four seasons. Five, if you count the Yellow Dust season. But perhaps it's a sign that I'm becoming acclimatised because I'm increasingly feeling that recently Korea has just gravitated between very hot and very cold.

Personally, having grown up in a Northern English gulag, snow reminds me of home and I'm rather partial to it. Plus I'm sure it would look wonderful on the nearby mountain which dominates the view from my office. Unfortunately for me this is yet another year of no snow in Busan, although it has tried a couple of times at least, which is more than I can say for previous years. But it's best to hope for warmer weather, because the cold isn't doing anyone - not least the poor - any favours.

The Hornet's Nest

Apparently Namhae has killer bees. Or something like that.

Korean Father was out very early in the morning on top of an isolated mountain mowing the grass around his mother's grave, during the last days of the summer's heat. It has to be done otherwise it would become unkempt and that would be disrespectful, and since graveyards in Korea are generally small and don't employ anyone to maintain them, it's a family responsibility. The graves of those with no nearby or surviving relatives can often easily be spotted as isolated patches of chaos in an otherwise ordered scene.

This particular morning Korean Father was stung three times by large hornets. It seems that this is OK as long as they don't get you in the head. Then you die. Really. In fact I understand that earlier this year a forty-two year old farmer died in Namhae after this happened to him, and there have been other deaths and incidents. The fourth sting caught Korean Father right between the eyes. His right eye began to lose focus, his lips numbed, he started to lose movement in his jaw, and his arms and legs weakened. He called a friend who's the head of a health clinic, and he phoned for an ambulance, which had to negotiate its way to the top of the mountain Korean Father had walked up. Fortunately there is a road, of sorts, although it's one of those Korean ones you really don't want to look down over the side of.

Fortunately with rapid treatment Korean Father quickly recovered, unlike some other unfortunate victims, although his face was still swollen days later.

Before city dwellers lull themselves into a false sense of security, according to the JoongAng Daily the Busan Fire Department had to administer first aid to 145 people this year, so clearly it's not an issue just confined to the countryside. And while we have a lot of bees and wasps (hornets) where I'm from, they pale in comparison to the Asian Giant Hornet, which grows up to two inches (50mm) in length, and injects a venom so strong it can dissolve human tissue.

So it seems like this is an important safety tip, beware of Korea's killer hornets...

When the Smoke Clears

I really don't like mosquitoes, the dreaded Korean 'mogi'. Recently I related some of my mogi-chasing stories to someone here and she seemed to think it was more amusing than I did. When I got home, I asked my wife, "what's so funny about that?" She told me that Korean people don't usually bother enough about mosquitoes to spend an hour out of bed in the middle of the night chasing one with a newspaper. OK, that's fair enough, I may be a little crazy. But look at it this way - I'm a completer-finisher*. (*I wish - I'm actually a dangerously high scoring 'shaper').

But am I crazy enough to want to run trucks around crowded streets spraying insecticide at everyone? No - so who are the crazy ones now?

I didn't see this the first time I was here, but this summer one day I noticed a cloud of smoke in the distance. My first thought - that some old Hyundai Accent had finally reached its expiry point - proved incorrect.

It was, I was told, mosquito spraying. I'd heard about this, but thought it was a practice largely consigned to the past. Apparently not, it seemed, as the scene was repeated every couple of weeks thereafter.

It didn't look very healthy either, as the truck in our area dashed around the narrow streets spewing a chemical cloud behind it leaving people nowhere to hide.

Obviously, the insecticide is designed to kill mosquitoes rather than people, but I can't help thinking that it can't be particularly healthy, even if it won't kill you. And will this chemical concoction still be seen as safe in future? There was a time when people thought DDT was fine too.

But what I didn't expect, was to see one of these chemical spraying trucks do a circuit of the local school ground every two weeks, enveloping the children practising football in thick clouds of insecticide.



But perhaps this means if the Korean national team ever have to play a game in fog, they're bound to win.

Maybe it doesn't cause any lasting damage though. My wife used to run through the smoke chasing the trucks down the street because she said it was fun. That was when she was a child by the way, not recently - which would be more disturbing.

Now I'm a parent though, I watch that mosquito truck making its regular rounds of the local school, and think one day that could be my child enveloped in a chemical soup. I'm not really thrilled at the idea.

But does it work? Well, this summer was amazing for three months - I didn't see a single mosquito. But just as I was contemplating the notion that actually, it really does work, I read that the unusual weather this year meant that mosquito numbers were down significantly. However, as the autumn arrived they emerged with a vengeance. The mogi-trucks are still doing their rounds, I suppose they would argue that it would be worse if they didn't. But how can we know?

Aquatic House Party

"Our department store is turning into an amusement park."

When Lotte opened a large department store in the Gwangbokdong area of Busan it didn't seem quite finished. They were still building a new section but it finally opened last week to reveal even more designer stores, and to try and balance the cultural vacuum they create, a large bookstore and 430-seat concert hall on the higher floors. The centrepiece of the new space features fountains and a waterfall. A Lotte Mart and Lotte Cinema are next to be built. Construction will be completed in 2016 with a large Lotte apartment skyscraper which will provide - possibly in breach of the Geneva Convention - a captive audience for all things Lotte. It's a cunning business strategy but you certainly won't catch me living there. Well, not until 2016 anyway.

I went to Gwangbokdong the day after the 'Aqua Mall' opened to take a look, not honestly expecting to see very much, but Lotte were holding an 'Aquatique Show' which you can tell was meant to be something special because they used a French word. Some foreign gymnasts - probably not French - were performing a floor show and there may have been clowns buried deep within the crowd to add to that slightly uncomfortable circus feeling.

It appeared that someone from head office in Seoul was visiting, but perhaps he was not a fan of the entertainment - "Our department store is turning into an amusement park. Is this so fascinating?", adding words to the effect of 'people in Busan are easily pleased'. No, let's be honest, what he actually said was "What a bunch of countryside people". His Busan colleagues then nudged him to be quiet. You never know who's listening, but I think he got away with it. Anyway, I shouldn't be too hard on him, he's only saying what most people from Seoul think.

If he thinks people in Busan are easily pleased, he doesn't know the people here I do. In fact, 74.4 percent of workers in Korea said they thought their jobs had driven them to depression in a recent survey. People need their distractions. Plus, it's not easy deciding which of forty designer stores to buy yet another $1,000 handbag from. Very stressful.

It's also easy to be blasé about the importance of what you have when you spend your day working in a regulation 26°C air conditioned 50% humidity environment. Many shoppers in the crowd had just escaped from the 34 degree 80% humidity outside and after that, the sight of fountains and cascading torrents of water falling from the ceiling is practically pornographic.

Quarantine

When I spend time with our Korean friends, we share experiences, but not often thoughts or conversation; they can't speak much English and I can't speak much Korean. When they laugh, I don't get the joke, when they suddenly decide to do something, I usually don't vote, only follow. The language barrier separates us and it's easy to fall into an isolation of my own thoughts and my own world. It's a frustrating reminder that the time I've spent studying has not yielded adequate results, and while I try to follow what those around me are saying, it requires a sustained level of concentration which my mind seems ill-equipped for after all the hundreds of ups and downs of fifty-five hour trading week. It was with some trepidation then, that I opted to extend the experience from a few hours to an entire weekend spent at the summer house of one of our group, two hours north of Busan in Hapcheon County ('합천군'), West of Daegu.

Recently Korea has suffered from an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, and once we left the highway one of the realities of this became evident as our stuffed minivan was quickly subjected to decontaminating spray at a checkpoint. It wasn't the last; shortly before we reached the isolated valley in the mountains that was our destination, we had to repeat the experience. It may only be a matter of time before movement is prevented entirely as it had to be in the UK in 2001.

When we drove down the final mountain the valley that emerged before us comprised of six or seven small dwellings clustered amongst the fields. It was the type of place which was so small and dispersed you had to wonder whether it could even be called a village. I'd expected our weekend home to be a rather ramshackle building in keeping with the vast majority of Korean rural architecture and my experiences in Namhae, but the rather smart metal gates we pulled up at suggested otherwise, and these were opened to reveal an entirely modern single-story house beyond, which in turn opened up to reveal a modest but functional three room dwelling comprising of a bedroom, kitchen/living area, and a bathroom.

Our friend, the owner, has a full-time job in Busan. I'd been told he grew vegetables here, but the variety of crops visible, along with the size of the plot of land - which even included a pond - made it evident that this was no mere side operation but a serious commitment. It seemed he was leading a double life as a farmer at the weekends.

Namhae hadn't prepared me for this. The nearest road was a thin strip visible in the far distance, and even then it wasn't well traversed. In-between the bird song it wasn't just quiet, there was an actual absence of noise. I couldn't remember the last time I'd experienced anything like it. It was breathtaking - and perhaps because Meniere's Disease has left me with mild Hyperacusis, enormously relieving. People always seem surprised when they read of traders who give up their lives in the city to become farmers - moving from the frenetic pace of the city to the perceived tranquillity of a job which seems right at the other end of the career spectrum as far as one's environment is concerned. While I'd always sympathised with the sentiment, at that moment I understand it perfectly.

After a barbecue, to which every fly in Hapcheon County had been invited, the plan was for the group to go 'night fishing'. It had been warm in the sun but as we'd eaten and dusk had fallen, the temperature had become surprisingly cold, promising to turn the experience not so much into a battle against the fish, as a battle against the elements. But once again language and cultural barriers highlighted the difference between my English understanding of the act of going out 'fishing' and the Korean definition. We drove out to a river near an isolated love hotel, getting sprayed for foot-and-mouth disease again on our way in and out, where nets were prepared on a low concrete bridge in very little light. Once prepared, the nets were tied to the bridge supports. And that was it - no rods, no braving the near freezing conditions, no waiting around in vain for hours - just drop your nets in and leave. Two hours later the nets were collected - two fish had been caught.

We were all up the next morning at 7am because we'd come here with a purpose of sorts - to help dig foundations for a new outbuilding and harvest some of the vegetables. An early mist hung in the valley but it wasn't long before a surprisingly strong sun burnt it off. I also got burnt - I'd spent an hour clearing stones from the fields to be used around the pond, and while I put on sun-cream when I went in for breakfast, the damage had already been done.

At 9am my image of the idyllic rural scene was somewhat shattered by the sound of a disembodied voice echoing around the valley. I realised later there were speakers on some of the telegraph poles, and the authorities weren't afraid to use them. A foot-and-mouth warning was read out. It repeated every couple of hours, and at one point a car broadcasting a similar message even made its way down the valley. Now that I've worked out in the fields while loudspeakers broadcast government warnings I feel I've had a little taste of the North Korean experience. On the whole, it seems strange that such a potential invasion of privacy would be put up with, no matter what the 'public good' arguments are, but given that our apartment back in Busan has a similar loudspeaker which 'important' messages are broadcast through - with no way of turning it off - perhaps people here are conditioned to be used to disembodied voices of authority speaking to them in their private moments.



I suppose it's not as though they are used to urge people to work harder in the fields - not that it would perhaps be needed - who needs Big Brother when you have your dead ancestors watching over you in the fields from their graves in the hills?

We completed collecting stones from the land and the 'Oriental Fire-Bellied Toads' ('Bombina orientalis') now had a more interesting environment to live in. The toads, as their name suggests, have rather spectacular orange undersides to warn of their toxicity, but they weren't easy subjects to photograph.

The foundations began to take shape, but digging was hard work as the ground was full of stones and rocks. The building was being referred to as a summer house, which appeared to make it a summer house for the summer house. There seemed to be a Russian doll thing going on here. From the haphazard nature of our work, I harboured a suspicion that in Korea, if you wake up one morning and decide to build a new building on your land you just go ahead and do it - there's little if anything in the way of planning permission to resolve. Or at least, there didn't seem to be anything other than an ad-hoc plan.

Later I helped harvest some vegetables before lunch, and in the afternoon sawed some wood - my wife wanted to make a traditional wooden object which is meant to usher in good harvests - it's basically a wooden base with a small vertical branch connected to horizontal, vertical and then horizontal branch, all progressively smaller. The alleged effect is that of a bird perched on a branch.

We'd been on a tight schedule all weekend, in fact there was an actual schedule printed out in some detail, and our time was almost at an end. We left our brief rural life and returned to the city, where the 'Meowi'/'머위' vegetables (or Meogu/머구 as they are called in the Busan dialect) were a big hit with Korean Mother. Apparently they are really hard to find or buy in Busan because not many people eat it here, even though many people like Korean Mother are ultimately immigrants from more rural places. I'm told it tasted especially delicious. When I closed my eyes, I could still see dozens of black dots flying around. I can only imagine this place is mosquito hell in summer.

During the trip I seriously began to wonder how I was perceived by my Korean friends. My wife, who normally acts as my translator, was elsewhere most of the time, and unlike at social gatherings I found myself in situations where I needed to coordinate with others or follow instructions, but it was hard to do. I felt that if I were a Korean, I'd probably be regarded as having a rather low IQ, but then this is the reality of my Korean existence so perhaps for the purposes of defining my Korean life, I am thus mentally challenged. At one point I was asked if I knew how to use a spade. I don't know how it is that the deeper I get into Korean life the more isolated I feel, and can only hope this is an inverse Bell-Curve of which I will one day find myself on the opposite, ascending side. I never expected my experiences to get worse as time went on, and that's the surprise and disappointment.

I tried to work very hard to compensate, but I was sorry that between this and the tight schedule I never had the chance to leave the compound and walk around the area. Life in rural Korea is radically different to life in the cities, and I thought there must be much to discover. I also really needed that elusive perfect moment of tranquillity that was hinted at, and the faintest promise of some enlightenment it might carry with it, but instead it seemed we exported our city lives into the countryside, changed one form of work for another, and kept the same urban pace that is so much a part of our existence.

Fresh Air

After our pottery class in Haeundae on Sunday, we went to Songjeong Beach. It wasn't far, which surprised me. I realise in retrospect that every time we've been there before it was by car, and since separate trips to Haeundae and Songjeong have never connected, I'd never made the geographical connection between the two. This tells me I'm still orientating myself when it comes to getting around Busan.

I found some clean air on the beach, and it was more than welcome. As one might expect, the atmospheric quality of a large city like Busan is never going to be high, but the day before Korea had been hit by the worst recorded Yellow Dust storm since records began in 2003. I'd noticed it late on Saturday afternoon, when an apparently descending fog took on a brownish hue, in-between the mountains where we live. There were warnings not to go out without a mask on the next day for fear of breathing in the potentially damaging cocktail of heavy metals and other pollutants, but by the time we awoke, it seemed to have passed.

When I think about my life in Korea, weighing up the pros and cons, the increasingly severe Yellow Dust and its potentially life-shortening properties are a significant negative, although it does have one small benefit. Koreans often ask me what I like the most about their country, but sometimes the braver souls ask what I don't like. The truth is that the extreme sensitivity here to any kind of national criticism is a fact of life that I find incredibly tiresome, and it's also why answering that question unprepared is a minefield. The Yellow Dust is as perfect an answer as one is likely to be gifted with, because it's immediately something Koreans can identify as being a problem in this country while not in any way being their fault.

So a beach with an accompanying sea breeze offers the rare pleasure of non-life-shortening deep breaths in Busan, especially during Yellow Dust season. Unfortunately, it was rather cold, though this hadn't put off a number of people who were also to be found strolling along the sands, and the even braver souls in the water with their surfboards trying to find the perfect wave. As I discovered before, Songjeong is very much a beach for surfers.

We hung around for a while breathing, watching the surfers, and at one point, being buzzed by a large flock of seagulls which were inexplicably trying to claim my section of beach as their own. I stood my ground.

Winter's Child

It snowed this week in our part of Busan. It was the first time snow had settled on the ground since I've lived here. South Korea hasn't had an easy winter, but this city's location and our location within it - in the south-west by the sea - mean that it usually rains, if anything. The snow still falls on top of the nearby mountains though, which I have an excellent view of from my office window. Annoyingly, it often doesn't stop it from being bitingly cold, but it's nothing compared to Seoul. Our dog was captivated by what he saw out of the window, and outside our building a group of children, whose school was apparently closed by the weather, bravely tried to scrape together enough of the white stuff to build a snowman. I imagine this was their first and last chance of the season, and it was clearly hard work.




I had to go to the maternity hospital with my wife the day of the snowfall, because she had an ultrasound scan scheduled. There was no more than two centimetres of snow beneath our feet, but somehow the main road had become treacherous. When a taxi driver saw us, he apparently knowingly applied the brakes about ten feet away in order to slide to a stop beside us. It was clear that most of the road was ice - there had been no attempt to grit it.

As we skidded our way terrifyingly towards the hospital, it was clear that few drivers were prepared to compromise their driving style to accommodate the dangerous conditions, so regularly changing lane and cutting up people who couldn't necessarily brake effectively was commonplace. The saving grace was that the roads were so jammed with traffic, so nobody was able to go very fast, meaning the hundreds of accidents which doubtless occurred should have been minor.

Our doctor had not made it to the hospital - he was stuck in traffic - but we were able to see another, who at the end of a long conversation I barely understood asked if I had been bored. I'd tried to look attentive while fighting the constant tendency I have in Korea to zone out, but my lack of comprehension had somehow been detected or correctly assumed. It's unfortunate that my Korean ability has not progressed sufficiently, because this is a time when I want to understand every word and subtle nuance of the ongoing diagnoses, but instead all I can do is read the body language for any sudden negative revelation. It's incredibly frustrating.

The hospital gave us a DVD after the ultrasound. We hadn't had one after previous scans but this was a big one which incorporated a '4D' imaging technique which is supposed to be more comprehensive. The DVD contains a software application - Windows only of course - from which it's possible to view the ten minute ultrasound video, still photos and a general yoga video for pregnant women alongside some hospital advertising. We'll take the DVD back with us as the pregnancy progresses and they will continue adding to it until the baby is born. It's all part of the package but it's still a very nice touch. A friend of ours who's also pregnant has chosen a much bigger general hospital - as opposed to a specialised maternity hospital - where they don't do this, which seems a pity. Having the video has enabled us to share it with family back home to make the pregnancy more real to them than it would otherwise be, given the geographical difference.

Everything is fine and we continue along the road of the Korean pregnancy experience.

Fire and Ice

I first came here in October 2006, I changed my climate from an already cold England to a pleasantly warm Korea, and greatly enjoyed being able to walk the streets in a t-shirt at a time I might otherwise be bracing myself against a cold Autumn wind. But as October 2009 wore on in Korea this time, there was no respite from the clinging warmth and humidity of a summer that threatened to never let go of its grip.

There was one cooler day just over a week ago, and on that day the Koreans decided to start wearing long sleeves and coats. It was as though some subliminal command that only Koreans could understand had been broadcast via the television that morning, and they all dressed differently. The temperature was still about 19°C, and I stuck to a t-shirt.

When the weather got warmer the next day, back to the incessantly irritating 24°C-or-so which it has been for most of the time since my return, I expected the Koreans to give up and go back to something more comfortable - but they didn't, which was oddly disconcerting. During the week I sat on in a subway carriage where everyone was dressed for autumn, while far above us a heat-mist clung heavily around the mountains. At the weekend I was up in the PNU district with Korean friends. The biggest wardrobe question on my mind before I set off was whether to wear a thin t-shirt or a thicker one - I went with the former and was glad of the decision. One of our friends, evidently still under the influence of that subliminal broadcast, turned up in a t-shirt, under a shirt, under a thin sports jacket, and they remained on throughout the day in spite of any logic to the contrary. And he was not alone.

This morning I awoke to the news that snow may occur in parts of Korea, which sure enough it did, and when I went outside it was bitterly cold. So two days after wearing a light t-shirt in Busan, I was now wearing a long-sleeve top and a coat, which I quickly had to zip up against the biting wind. I gathered it was about 10°C, but more like five with the wind-chill factor. By the time I reached my destination, my ears were ringing with the cold. So to my mind we've gone straight from summer to winter - a big shock in the land of the four seasons.

Beijing also had snow today, because the sudden cold snap over this part of Asia coincided with Chinese scientists seeding the clouds with silver iodide to make it rain. Which led me to idly wonder to what extent China's climate engineering might impact Korea. Seoul is 594 miles from Beijing and Busan is 770. Is that too far to effect us or not? It's certainly the case that we're getting their 'yellow dust' - are we getting their silver iodide as well, and does it matter? If we are - perhaps it does.

Event Horizon

"Chuseok is one of Korea’s most largely celebrated holidays. It is a time when families and friends gather to share food and enjoy their time together, giving thanks to their ancestors for the year's bountiful harvests." - Korea Tourism Organization

But there was no bountiful harvest for me on Saturday - except of misfortune; Chuseok will now also be known as the day I caused the Great Internet Blackout in our apartment, after the setting up of our intranet-based trading webserver went horribly wrong and stopped our self-sabotaging router talking to the outside world. So while I spent the the holiday trying to get us back online, Korean Mother, Brother and Wife whiled away the hours playing our other British import - the Nintendo Wii. I wondered if I should care; it didn't feel like a holiday to me - I've spent much of the thirteen days since my return working to set up our new lives here and I don't particularly want to stop until everything is done.

The next day, we are in a taxi taking a Chuseok gift of several bunches of very large and heavy grapes to Korean Best Friend. "Is he American?" asked the driver. Our eyes meet through the rear-view mirror. "No - British" replies my wife. This is usually the point at which the tension in the air dissipates and we have a good-humoured conversation or I listen to criticisms aimed at my cousins from across the pond - instead this time there was something of a complaint heading in my direction. "I had three British people in the back of my taxi not so long ago, and they ate!" - "Burgers!" he added with some disgust. I'm guessing this isn't the done thing in Korea. "Do people eat in taxis in the UK?" Well, not as far as I know - but then maybe that's just because I don't know the kind of people who do.

I considered making an effort to apologise on my compatriots' behalves, but if I'm not on the their side, and I'm certainly not on the Koreans', where does this leave me? "Whose side are you on here?" I asked myself as I exited the taxi. "Mine". Or at least, I think I am.

So here's my plan: Best Friend's house, gift, leave, lunch at Gimbab Nara, home, watch the Japanese Grand Prix while continuing to work on setting up our computer network and attempting to fix the monitor which failed earlier in the week. I never watched Formula 1 in Korea despite it being on Korean ESPN, but started again when I was in the UK and I just haven't kicked the bad habit again yet. The plan advances as far as the Friend's house, where Friend's Mother is very happy to see us again. "You look well". So I try to reply in Korean "Listen, if I don't get some proper sleep soon in this noisy country of yours, I'm going to have a psychotic episode" but it comes out slightly differently as "It's the weather". "Ah well, yes, Korea has four seasons you know" - I attempt a swift riposte "Oh come on, we are not going through this bovine excrement again are we? We get four seasons in a day in my former homeland", which I mistranslate as "Ah yes, the FOUR seasons" - and nodding my head for effect. And then the food starts coming out. And I know what this means - there comes a moment when you cross the event horizon of a Korean social black hole, and you don't necessarily see it happen but after that your fate is sealed - there's no way out until you're put through the process and can possibly emerge as Hawking radiation.

So here's their plan. At 1pm 4th Daughter will arrive with her boyfriend - who hasn't yet been formally introduced to her parents. This is, therefore, a major occasion in Korean culture; parental approval can make or break a potential marriage, and it's clear from the anecdotal evidence I've already been witness to that this is no mere rubber stamping exercise, but a real opportunity to make superficial, prejudicial and ultimately condemning judgements on the potential match for any unfathomable reason whatsoever. At 2pm Korean Best Friend and 3rd Daughter's soon-to-be husband will arrive and while that match is a foregone conclusion it's still suit-and-tie affair for the groom-to-be. At 3pm 2nd Daughter will arrive with her new boyfriend, who will also be formally introduced for the first time. So if we don't get out by 1pm we're going to get sucked into this.

At 1pm 4th Daughter's new boyfriend arrives in his suit looking jumpy. "I'm so nervous, I'm sweating!" And he really was - if you could bottle agitation he could have cornered the market. The pictures of the potential father-in-law hanging on the wall, showing him so proudly in his uniform with acres of medal ribbons across his chest, would no doubt have done little to calm his fears. And I thought I had it bad marrying the police inspector's daughter. Maybe not so much. After he settles down at the table Best Friend's Mother complains that 4th Daughter hasn't said much about him beforehand. "Then ask me anything about myself" he says. The first question is "What do your parents do?"

At 2pm Best Friend's future husband turns up. "I actually got here 15 minutes ago - so I had to wait at the end of the street." he jokes - or does he? Best Friend's father is very particular about punctuality, which between that, and his background, may account for the afternoon's precision planning. I eat some rice cake but pass on the abalone which I'm not a fan of - despite some insistence from the groom-to-be; I've played this game before and my go-to-hell smile is well practised. Except last time I played I was here as a prolonged visitor, this time I'm here with the intention of staying, so the game has changed, and not to my advantage. I turn to my wife and ask if I should eat it just to shock him. She thinks not, but I know the day is coming when I'm going to have to dive into this kind of Korean cuisine with gusto rather than picking at a dish here and there. In fact, while I may always be afforded some latitude, I know I have to become more Korean, and the terrible thing is that sitting there on the floor at that table, wondering if my aching out-of-condition Korean sitting muscles will ever let me stand up again, I knew that I'd already crossed the event horizon when I got on that plane and came out here two weeks ago. It was always going to be this way, but this is when I really felt the full horror of it - surrounded by seafood with my dead legs, rusty language skills and a fading smile.

Best Friend's Mother is friendly and familiar and she's really making an effort, which only serves to emphasise that I am the problem here. Or maybe she's getting too familiar - "Hands in my space! And... now... you have your arm around me." Did I mention I was British and in my culture... oh never mind. There is much laughter as my body language is unconsciously signalling my intention to escape. We're sitting on a bench by the table at this point, and Korean Wife seizes the opportunity of a distracted moment to grab hold of the top of my jeans pockets and belt and use them to discreetly slide me away across the bench from the ajumma's immediate sphere of influence.

More food is on the table now - because it's coming in never-ending waves from the women in the kitchen - and this time Best Friend's Mother insists I try some decorated Korean sweet rice cakes before her. It's a trap, and not one I fall for - you should eat first - I tell her. She claps her hands in delight at this indicator of my growing assimilation.

Despite my protestations the Japanese Grand Prix had been put on the TV. I couldn't watch it without appearing rude and I couldn't not watch it without also appearing rude at the gesture. Shortly after 2nd Daughter's new boyfriend appeared at 3pm and he had been introduced and settled down at the table he asked those assembled "Why are you watching this when there's no Korean playing?" So there you go Bernie Ecclestone, you can hold your Korean Grand Prix next year, but until a Korean driver gets put in one of those cockpits, don't count on anyone here really giving a damn.

My wife confided in me that she was sorry she didn't come from a large family to have this kind of gathering, and as though Best Friend's Mother read her mind as she counted off her daughters and their partners, she went on to indicate my spouse as her 'honorary' 5th daughter and therefore myself as her 'honorary' 5th son-in-law, offering the justification that "even though he's a foreigner, he seems nice." Everyone laughs at the joke.

There were threats that a round of 'Go Stop' was going to break out, which as well as being the Korean driving style, is also a popular card game. This was finally our chance to escape; Korean Wife was tired and while she may have harboured wishes of being part of a bigger family, her stamina for it was about as strong as my Korean sitting muscles.

By the time I left two Korean men had past their event horizons; if approved their futures were now locked into the gravitational influence of another Korean family. And one English man had realised he was finally locked into the gravitational influence of an entire society.

Ride the Wild Surf

On our last weekend in Busan, we met up with our friends for the last time and had a large and seemingly never-ending buffet meal at one of those equally large and seemingly never-ending restaurants which specialise in this type of experience. The obvious thing to do after adding a whole new layer of fat to oneself is to psychologically offset this with a trip to the beach - which will do little to reduce the effects of the culinary pummelling you've just put yourself through. So we made our way to Songjeong Beach - by car of course - where we could breathe in the fresh air and occasionally walk from our stationary location by the sand to one of the small huts on the other side of the coastal road where yet more food and hot drinks were available. It was cold, largely overcast and fairly windy, which at the time didn't seem very pleasant, but now that Busan is oppressively hot again I'm sure a lot of people are missing it.



I've been to Songjeong before at night, but I never recall seeing it in daylight, so I was surprised to discover it's something of a gathering place for Busan's surfing community. Aside from the surfboards on the beach, the Korean equivalent of a surf shack overlooked the bay, and from the wetsuits drying off outside, it seemed to have been a busy day.



Soon I started to pick out a few figures standing in the water trying to catch that perfect wave, even if it appeared that as far as Songjeong was concerned, that meant rather small and possibly hardly worth the effort. But maybe we just arrived at a bad time - it wasn't long before most of the surfers pulled their boards out of the water and headed for the road. This was the point I had to re-evaluate my impression of what I had to assumed to be the Busan surfing scene, because as they came towards us I realised they were '외국인' - waegugin/foreigners. It's a fact that in my seventeen months in Busan I actually only met one foreigner who I talked with for around fifteen minutes, so I claim no expertise into the 'waegugin' lifestyle here - and I have to admit this was not my stereotypical image of what the ex-pat community were getting up to in their spare time. My surprise would only become greater as I watched one of the waegugin a little later, proceed to hail a taxi - with his surfboard - and much to much to my incredulity manage to fit it inside said vehicle with an apparently equally unphased taxi driver. Getting around Busan by taxi as a foreigner isn't always easy. Doing it with a surfboard deserves some respect.



I kept scanning the sea in the hope of catching a shot of a surfer riding a decent wave, but the conditions were clearly not going to allow those remaining to ride a wave dramatically into the beach, so the photo on the right above is as good as it got. But I added the experience to my list of 'things you can do in Busan that you can't do in Seoul', which I started mentally keeping for reasons which might eventually be revealed.

A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit

During my time in Busan, I've found there are areas of this city where foreigners are ubiquitous, and then there are other areas which are more exclusively Korean, and your chances of seeing another obviously foreign face are quite low. By this admittedly very rough and ready measure, Busan's Children's Grand Park would have to fall into the latter category, given that last Saturday I must have seen several thousand Koreans there during the course of the day, and the total number of obvious foreigners (i.e. non-Asian in appearance at least), not including myself, amounted to one. Since he, like me, seemed to be part of a Korean family, it's possible that the Grand Park is way off the tourist trail, especially considering it was a five-day holiday weekend (Monday was Children's Day), and in theory at least, the foreigner teaching community should have been freed from the bondage of their hagwons and were out running loose in the wild.

Recently, the temperature here has been rising into the uncomfortable range which merely forebodes the arrival of even more oppressive degrees of heat as the real summer rapidly approaches. They say Korea is famous for its four seasons, but forgive me if I blinked and missed the spring this year, because it only seems a few weeks ago that it was snowing in Busan. Under the circumstances, I was concerned about visiting a park, which being English evokes images of gardens and wide open spaces. But my fears of getting sunburned were misplaced - the Children's Grand Park is a heavily forested affair and wonderfully cool compared with exposed exterior.

After being here for almost a year-and-a-half, I would have to say Korean tourism and leisure often seems to be a case of 'almost, but not quite'. It's as though the Government recognises that it's important to provide public facilities and even try and promote them to foreigners as part of 'Korea Sparking' (the promotional branding inspired by Korea's ubiquitously questionable electrical wiring), but somehow the authorities seem to fail in a way which Koreans probably don't see but which a foreigner would probably raise their eyebrows at. In the Children's Grand Park, this means that a bridge across a river, which in a Japanese park might be a faux-period wooden construction, is a functional concrete affair with a satellite dish attached to it so a nearby food vendor can watch TV as they sell their high-mark-up drinks to their captive audience. An overhead cable strung across the lake - which used to be Busan's main reservoir and is supposed to be shaped like a map of Korea - detracts from what might otherwise be an unspoilt picturesque view.

But none of this detracts from the reality that overhead cables notwithstanding, the smell of relatively pristine forest on a warm spring day marks an excellent alternative to breathing Busan's otherwise polluted atmosphere. And for those seeking a little more excitement in their lives than a quiet walk through the woods with hundreds of Koreans, the Children's Grand Park has a small amusement park with roller-coaster and some other rides.

While the younger people catapulted themselves around the forest at high-speed, the older Koreans were to be found playing badminton and using the public equipment in a nearby public exercise area.

Meanwhile, in this Children's Park, the young children themselves were being posed for photographs beneath the statue Park Jae-hyuk - 'one of the greatest patriots in Korea' says the description (he threw a bomb at the head of Busan Police Station under the Japanese occupation).

But in the name of making love, not war, the park may also provide a home for equally clandestine activities if the graffitied claims of sex in some of the picnic areas are anything to go by.

This is probably not what the park authorities have in mind when they launch their 'Romantic Zone' area next year.