Weekday life is fairly uninteresting. Aside from work and the classes I teach, I attend Korean classes that are offered for free to all foreigners at the university every day. Progress has been made in areas of speaking and listening, but my writing (my handwriting is absolutely atrocious) and reading (it takes me a long time to read a sentence and understand it) still need a lot of work. As for grammar, I seem to have developed a strong handle on that, but vocabulary is what is really lacking. My limited vocabulary limits how much I can speak as well as how much I can understand. For instance, advanced or technical vocabulary is definitely out of my league. When I try watching the Korean news or reading a Korean newspaper, I understand approximately 10% of what is said or written, the other 90% being completely mysterious, garbled, and alien to me.
Weekdays are a little more interesting. Nearly every weekend (so far), I have managed to travel to other areas of Korea or do some hiking. The list isn't spectacularly impressive, but it's still quite a few places (Namwon, Gokseong, Cheongsando, Seoul, hiked up Mudeungsan and Jirisan). This weekend being a 3-day weekend, I'd wanted to go to Jeju or Busan, but there was a little incident. I fell down the stairs of my apartment and had to go to the hospital. Luckily I didn't break or fracture my tibia, but I did do a significant amount of damage to my muscle. Strictly ordered by the doctor not to move around or do any exercise, I'm confined to my room and bed for the time being. Thus, I'm a little bored and then this blog came into my memory.
Today is Liberation Day in Korea, the reason why I am not working on a Monday. Koreans celebrate their liberation from Japanese occupation, which happened at the end of WWII in 1945. That's quite interesting, actually, the Korean-Japanese relationship. Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and occupied the country for 35 years until the Allies shooed them away. Older Koreans generally have anti-Japanese sentiments. This I can personally vouch for since my paternal grandfather was Korean, thus my Korean last name despite my 1/4 Korean background. He was actually captured and "sold" by the Japanese to a sugar cane plantation in Hawaii in the late 1920s. My paternal grandmother, who was an ethnic Mongolian (her history is actually astounding as far as I know - my mother says I'm most like her in that I love traveling and learning languages) was also shipped off to Hawaii during this time. So, I suppose it's not a huge surprise that my paternal grandparents did not have a favorable view of the Japanese until their deaths.
Personally, I never had anything against a group of people since, it was history and the present-day Japanese don't have anything to do with WWII and the atrocities committed during their occupation of Korea. Likewise in Korea, the younger generation (my age contemporaries and those younger) are not as anti-Japanese as the prior generations. Japanese media and culture have infiltrated the Korean media and culture and vice versa. While all popular culture is being exported and imported between the two countries, of course, as with every nation, there are some bigots and xenophobes. There are still some people with anti-Japanese sentiments even among the youth and likewise there are anti-Korean sentiments in Japan. I personally remember when I was staying with a Japanese host family for a month as a 17-year-old, there were protests by the Japanese Yakuza every weekend, announcing their hatred of Koreans living in Japan and telling them to go back to Korea. Such protests don't seem to exist in Korea, probably because there isn't a significant enough Japanese community in the major Korean cities, but some people seem to hold some hostile feelings toward their neighbors to the east.
Still it's not all terrible. There are many Japanese and Koreans alike who appreciate each other's culture and strive for peaceful cooperation. Fortunately, those with a more positive attitude seem to be the majority. While the Japanese-Korean relationship may not be as peachy as that of the Anglo-American one (Americans can still celebrate independence from the UK on July 4th and still get along quite well with the Britons), hopefully, it will be close to that eventually. So, I wish a "Happy Liberation Day" to all Koreans out there and remember, it's better not to hate. Forgive, but don't forget, and everyone would get along better.
Today's Random Picture:
