The Boseong Road Trip And My First Brush With Culture Shock

In the first weekend of September, David, having recently been awarded a Korean driver’s license, drove us all the way down to the southern coast of Korea on what I hope will be the first of a few road trips. We left on a Saturday evening. We had to teach on Monday at 4 PM. Some might think that traveling within such a short timeframe is a raw deal, but I’ve come to enjoy it; everyone on a two day “vacation” is usually a lot more adventurous when they realize their vacation will end soon. You’re also more willing to push yourself to do crazy things. Case in point: David ended up driving for something like 15 out of the 36 hours we had for our trip. Definitely something normal people wouldn’t want to do after a six day work week.

I got to be navigator for the vast majority of the driving hours. Armed with a detailed road map of Korea and a compass, I charted our course and asked David to confirm it whenever we took a break at a rest stop. Navigating through Korea couldn’t be easier; all the major highways are clearly marked—in English as well as Korean, thanks in large part due to South Korea’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which fought in the early 2000s to require all road signs to be translated into a revised Romanization of Korean. Go globalization!

Our destination was Boseong, a county famous for its green tea plantations. On the way down, however, we thought we’d stop halfway in the city of Jeonju to sample the nightlife there and find a place to crash on Saturday night. We also wanted to try Jeonju’s bibimbap; in Korea, different regions are popular for different foods, and it just so happens that Jeonju is known for its bibimbap, one of Korea’s most popular dishes among foreigners.

Jeonju’s urban layout is not unlike other Korean cities. Businesses of all kinds are nested together in 5-7 story buildings. Central hallways wind through the buildings in a seemingly impossible effort to connect a disparate mess of bars, restaurants, hofs (Korean bar-restaurants), dentist offices, hagwons, optometrists, whorehouses, cell phone providers, and PC bangs.

After consuming a delicious variety of street foods, we twist and turn through these hallways looking for something to do. Dodging drunken businessmen and college students, I find myself running all the way up the stairs of a building to the top floor of a building in search of a bathroom while my four friends are wandering the streets. I find a club instead, and I hear the usual American top 40 pop and rap hits being blasted. Then I hear a beatmatched crossfade between two tracks; awesome, there’s a DJ present. I take the elevator back down to find my friends.

We return as a group, and a bouncer shoves a slip of paper into my hand. It has a number; “for a table,” I think to myself.

But something’s not quite right; there’s plenty of open tables around the bar area. I am confused. As I notice that we are the only foreigners in a club full of about a hundred people, I play it safe; I sit at the bar and order a drink to buy some time to survey my surroundings.

Nick and David start chatting up two Korean girls at the bar. I keep to myself; something is not right here. I wonder why we don’t have a table? I dismiss my thoughts by assuming the bouncer is simply reserving the tables for other Koreans, something I can handle—something I can understand.

But then it happens. The DJ kills the music after a song is up, says something I can’t understand into the microphone, and walks out of the DJ booth. The entire dance floor of about forty people flocks back to the tables around the club.

“Wait, what just happened?” I ask Jovan. Her guess is as good as mine. I turn to David, who is asking the Korean girls what happened to the music. One of the girls whips out her cell phone, starts using its dictionary to translate a phrase. She says two words I can recognize: “rest time.”

We are in a club with organized rest times. Like preschool’s nap times, except you’re relaxing your body after grinding on members of the opposite sex instead of resting after fighting with those members on the playground.

Every seat in the club is now taken. A girl even comes up to my bar stool and informs me I have taken her seat; this is one of the few bars in the world where “seat-back” actually works.

This is all happening during the conclusion of my second month of living in Korea. In my time here, I have been asked by soju-soggy men on the subway if I will be their English friend. I have been asked why I am so white. I have been surrounded by Korean schoolchildren who point and pluck at the hair on my legs. A middle-aged businesswoman has approached me with her sleeping baby in hand, pointing at her child’s face and repeating: “Teach English? Teach English?”

And until this moment, I have never experienced what people call “culture shock.” Great parents, a solid college education, and general open-mindedness have prepared me well in accepting cultural differences. But this catches me off guard; what transpires in front of me violates everything I’ve ever learned about nightlife culture.

David caught it on camera as it was happening:

But maybe it’s just this club, right? Surely, rest times cannot be a popular trend. After a few drinks at the bar, we head out in search of a change in scenery. We descend upon a club on a different street. Inside, we find a dance floor surrounded by chain link fences. A dance floor that is empty. Because everyone is sitting down. Because it is rest time.

Welcome to Korea, Mr. Snyder; here’s your obligatory serving of culture shock. Sorry it was late, the chef was really overworked tonight.

I’m not sure what’s funnier; my dramatic response to something as simple as seeing a crowd of people sit down and stand up simultaneously, or the fact that witnessing that event phased me more than what came immediately afterwards: bathing and sleeping in a Korean jimjil bang.

Jimjil bang is Korean for freezeyourentirebodyandthenboilituntil-
yourwholebodyistellingyouyou’reabouttobeburnedalivebefore-
doingitalloveragaintwentyfourhourspa. In short, it is awesome. You pay seven to ten bucks to be able to rest in pools of varying temperature. You can move back and forth among numerous different saunas. Then, you take a shower and get dressed in cultish looking clothes that are provided at the entrance. You are then permitted to enter a communal room where anyone can sleep on mats on the floor. At the particular jimjil bang we crashed at, there were cold rooms chilled to four degrees Celsius directly adjacent to the communal room. I spent a lot of time in that one.

Unfortunately, the sun was already rising by the time our party made it to the communal room, so we were only able to sleep for three or four hours before waking up to continue the road trip. Ultimately, though, it didn’t matter–mainly because this is what we got to walk through on the second (and final) day of our road trip:

Boseong couldn’t be much more beautiful; its famed green tea plantations are incredibly calming, and I really don’t think my words could do any justice to the tremendous sense of peace imparted by that place. Throughout the day, we tried green tea gelatin, pigs that had been fed with green tea leaves, green tea soaps…we even hit up another jimjil bang, one that had a whole pool of bubbling, heated green tea for a nice twist on the usual spa experience.

Most people don’t get this much excitement out of their vacations. For me, this is the weekend. How did I get this lucky?

Times mistaken for Harry Potter on this trip: 1
Number of different green tea products consumed: 6
Approximate “rest periods” in clubs witnessed: 8

Escalation

If you had asked me a year ago what I saw myself doing in a year, I’m pretty sure “lying on a mat in the basement of a dojo in South Korea while a man pummels me in the stomach with a log” would probably be pretty low on the list. As it turns out, that’s just about precisely what I’m doing now. You know, in between the teaching and the adjustment to a new culture.

Ok, it’s not really a log; it’s a four-inch diameter, three-foot long cylindrical cut of smoothly sanded wood, but as I haven’t learned it’s technical name, “log” will have to suffice.

In one of my first weekends here, I had the good fortune of being introduced to Kristian, a friend of many of the teachers at my hagwon. Kristian is a Swedish-born engineer who hails from Spain, a world traveler whose current occupation has him working at a prominent firm in Seoul. He is a black belt in Kyokushin kaikan, a form of full-contact karate.

Kristian didn’t have too much trouble in convincing me to visit the local dojo a few times to see if I liked Kyokushin. It happened in the span of a five minute conversation. The setting: a big group of the teachers at my school was celebrating the departure of a teacher by taking a trip to sample the Seoul nightlife. In the early hours of the morning, we settle at a geology-inspired hookah bar in a tucked-away alley; we sit cross-legged in small artificial caves illuminated by neon green lights. The pitch: Kristian asked if I ever considered training in a martial art. I told him I was interested, that I figured Taekwondo or Hapkido seemed logical choices because they are both Korean martial arts. Kristian convinced me to try out Kyokushin, claiming it would be easier to pursue in Korea as a foreigner than either of the aforementioned Korean martial arts. And on top of that, there was actually another teacher at my school who was actually training at the Kyokushin dojo at the time. I am sold.

Having had no previous formal training in any martial art whatsoever, there’s a lot of basic things I have to learn during my first several weeks at the dojo. There’s the usual things like learning how to fold a dogi, the uniform of the Kyokushin practitioner; the rules of etiquette in a dojo; the basics of how to throw and take a punch.

And all of that learning is happening—gradually. But on the first day, Kristian let me spar with him, throwing punches and kicks at his body for a good twenty minutes. It was invigorating. It was also incredibly refreshing; swayed by a popular sentiment that currently deems any form of fighting that is not Brazilian Jiu-itsu or Muay Thai or another similarly “practical” martial art is inferior, I assumed that Kyokushin might be rooted in a lot of swinging at air, might not challenge me as strenuously as I had hoped.

I knew I had assumed wrong when I heard Kristian utter a word I recognized: kumite.

Kumite is sparring. It is where your training is put into practice. And for Kyokushin, that training mostly revolves around the study of how best to strike a standing opponent and bring that opponent to the ground.

What does that mean? Watching a fight is really the best way to illustrate the intensity of the martial art:

As you can see, there’s lots of pretty intense stuff to keep anyone’s interest. Kyokushin is a strike- and endurance-based martial art; the goal is to beat your opponent until he (or she; there’s a yellow belt at my dojo who has some wicked backspin kicks) falls to the mat. You’ll notice that many of the fights in the video don’t last too long; this is primarily due to one detail I haven’t mentioned yet: kicks to the head are legal.

Kicks to the head. Are legal.

Awesome.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a really interesting mental and philosophical side to martial arts I’m discovering as well, but for now, I’m still overcome by one thing: kicks to the head. Well, two things, really: kicks to the head, and the pain of being struck repeatedly in the stomach and chest with a log by the master of the dojo last Friday, a pain that made me think I had suffered internal organ damage when I walked into my classroom on Saturday and realized I was short of breath and dizzy.

Lesson learned: don’t get pummeled for the first time in your life on a Friday and then have a night out on the town until 6 in the morning. The combination of dehydration, exhaustion, and gold ole’ fashioned pain is a bit overwhelming.