Afternoon with a friend
September 24
I’m seeing quite a bit more of a friend that I met last year. JM is one of our little group of 4 who went on a cruise on the Han River. This year our friendship has blossomed, and three of us are going to Jeju Island on a four-day holiday together in November. And yes, it will still be very warm!
JM is learning to play this instrument and I understand it’s not easy. The bow is made up of many, many strands of horsehair — I don’t know how many. I didn’t expect to like the sound, but on this day I was entranced.
JM had invited me to lunch at her house, which in itself indicates a stronger friendship, and she was playing this for me after lunch. The history of this instrument goes waaaayyy back, so not many people play it now.
For the musicians reading this, this is what it sounds like. You can hear the similarity to Chinese music in this piece, but there are some videos in which musicians play modern music. I love the sounds. It grows on you.
After lunch we went to the enormous green space called Olympic Park. It would take days to go around it as the perimeter is 10 km, but we did just a fraction of it, but what a lovely day.
This is the site of the original fortifications from over 1500 years ago, give or take. The park is full of mounds that signify graves of ancient royalty. There is a building in the background, seen better in this enlarged version —
The brown building in the background with the two sort of rectangular shapes on the front is the museum. We didn’t go in it today as we had just walked around the Winnie the Pooh exhibit! That’s right, as well as loving The Little Prince, Koreans also are big fans of Winnie the Pooh and have many of the original drawings and writings of A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard. I would have thought they’d be in a museum somewhere in England, but Korea outbid them, I guess.
This whole park is full of interesting things, including these wild rabbits who look like the escaped from someone’s house. They look just like the rabbits kept as pets in Canada.
They look just like pets, don’t they? And they’re very tame, as you can see from the picture. The actually came up to the little boy to be fed. They knew what to do when they saw a dog, though! They moved so fast that I didn’t even have a chance to get off a picture before they were out of sight.
JM lives in an apartment complex that are seen all over Seoul and other big Korean cities, and from afar they look like sort of ugly cement high rises. But down at street level, they are organized like little villages, with streets play areas for children, benches, and lanes. The who are lit by attractive lamps and surrounded by neighbourhood markets.
I saw many grandmas out pushing their charges after nap time. Both parents work, of course, and so there are lots of grandmas in the play areas with the kids.
After the school buses come in at 2:45 p.m., the kids are all then assigned to their various after school activities:-music lessons, Tae Kwon Do, art classes, and so on. Korean kids are kept very busy. My friend takes a friend dim view of it indeed and wishes that kids were allowed to just play. Since Korean kids do very well on global scores of achievement, I don’t know what the right answer is. Changes are coming, but slowly. There are still lots of after school academies doing a brisk business. I could easily earn good money here teaching English privately. It would be illegal though, so not worth the risk for me. Lots of other do it. It’s one of those rules that everyone knows about but everyone breaks, like the rule about stopping at a red light. Sometimes that seems to be optional.
After a great day in the park, we went back to JM’s place for a short soju and then time to head home — and that took nearly 90 minutes! The transportation system is great, but Seoul is BIG.
