Gwanju

I'm in the Gwanju Bus Terminal right now, at one of the pay-by-the minute computers they have here. I should be meeting Bonnie, an ETA friend, in about an hour. She's coming into town for the Gwanju Biennial, a large modern art exhibit that I just saw today with my host mother and her aunt. Some of my students were also there, as today is a 'picnic day' for the high school, so the students are doing activities as a class but not studying. And I have the day off.

The Biennial was cool. It was a sort of layered experience; there's viewing the art itself, and then there's viewing the way the art is viewed and experienced in Korea. Today was a popular day for students to visit the museum, I guess the Thursday after Chuseok is probably a common day off at schools in Korea. So my experience was a bit influenced by what seemed to be an entire middle school filing through the galleries and of course yelling "Hi" at me and then giggling and running away. Sometimes I found it hard to concentrate on the art, what with the students and the museum guides narrating to the students through large bullhorns, but I still enjoyed it. I found myself lingering after the kids had lost interest and experiencing the exhibits that way. There was a young Korean man, maybe a few years older than me, that seemed to have the same idea. A few times we found ourselves standing quietly in the same exhibit, after the girls had passed on, so I felt a certain kind of kinship with him.

After the main hall exhibits we checked out a small exhibition of items from North Korea. It was mostly common household items, some paintings and some North Korean products. But I think when it comes to North Korea, the mundane, or the fact that it is just mundane, can be enlightening. I for one had pictured North Korea as being like South Korea with less American influence--less English used, and no Konglish. So I was a little surprised to see products made in North Korea with English words on them (and also to see some products notedly imported from South Korea).

There were a few different galleries outside the hall, and there was also a large international bazarre. There were different stands for different countries, like India, Pakistan, Brazil, Ecuador, Kenya and collectively, Europe. I was impressed when an Indian man spoke to me fluently in English and then also in Korean. There was an Ecuadorean woman at the Ecuador stand, and I finally got up the courage to try to speak to her in Spanish. It's surprising how rusty my Spanish has gotten I think just from being in Korea and trying to learn Korean. When I was first trying to speak Korean, I kept lapsing into Spanish, and now when I try to think of simple Spanish words, like "where" and "teacher" the Korean ones appear in their place. It was sort of embarassing, since I used to consider myself pretty good at at least conversational Spanish, and here I could understand her fine but was having difficulty answering the question of what I do for work. She was pleasant but seemed a little bored anyway. I imagine she gets a lot of Americans trying to use their high school or college Spanish on her, and she probably felt sort of like how I do when strangers start speaking to me in broken English just to try it out.

As I was lingering around the bazarre, waiting for my host mother and her aunt to finish perusing, the young man I recognized from many of the exhibits tapped me on the shoulder and informed me, with a warm smile and in pretty flawless English, that he thought I should look at the gallery out the back, called Korea Express. He said he thought I would enjoy it and that I shouldn't miss the chance. It was a striking interaction for me. I guess maybe he'd felt some of the same familiarity that I'd felt when we'd crossed paths often in the main exhibition hall. I did go see the exhibit, which consisted of contemporary Korean art, and I liked it a lot. There were some interesting paintings, as well as some of the more sort of experimental stuff. At one point I stood in a dark, glass-walled room decorated with fiber-optic flowers, some with petals made from sanitary napkins, and a large fiber-optic heart, with an old Korean woman and a man in gray monks clothes and a shaved head.

So I should be meeting up with Bonnie in a bit. We're probably going to get dinner and then I'll take the bus back to Suncheon. My host mother seemed a little nervous to let me off on my own, but I've been through the Gwanju bus terminal a few times now, and it is admittedly nice to get away on my own. I was starting to get a little unwarrantedly irritated, being surrounded by middle aged Korean women who would talk about me and laugh a lot, when I couldn't understand what they were saying. I feel like a child often, and I know it makes sense, since I basically have the lingual abilities of an infant in this country, but it's still a sort of frustrating way to feel. I think maybe more independence is a good thing at this point.