Osan and a Country for Old Men

Now with Pictures.

On Thursday I rose early and caught the subway out of town. Seoul's subway system is extensive, stretching for hours in every direction out of the city like an ambitious cephalopod. I caught an 'express' train to Osan, because it was one of the cheapest and quickest ways to get there. Even so, the trip took almost two hours. I was hoping to be back in central South Korea by late dinner time, so I wandered through the market for a couple of hours before returning.

Osan market has been in operation since 1792 and is one of the oldest continuously running markets in the world. Its full of food and toys and games and tools and cds and cassettes and food and fruit and vegetables and fish and rice and garlic and food. Outside the covered heart of the market, the vendors create a makeshift canopy of multicoloured umbrellas and tarps so that most of your shopping occurs in the shade. It's a throng of chattering sing-song Korean, bargaining when the price seems high and buying everything from Apples to Octopus.

Conveniently, since so much of the market vendor population is selling food, many of the actual shops that line the market are grocery stores or household goods stores. This allowed me to find some good deals on metal chopsticks that I wanted for myself.

In addition, I was hunting for a travel lunchbox set for my mother. Due to a bad misunderstanding of what my mother had described as her request from Korea, I spent most of the time in Osan hunting for a set of chopsticks that disconnected in the center to make them shorter for storage--an item which I'm almost positive doesn't exist. It made for an entertaining morning though, and after half a dozen housewares stores I had fairly mastered a combination of pantomime gestures and basic words that conveyed what I (thought) I was looking for. Once I'd gotten the point across, every shopkeeper looked at me quizzically and apologized that they didn't have what I needed.

I did get some marvellous pictures though, the market is a full of curiosities and interesting smells. I ate street food for lunch as I wandered. I can't really recommend this, as the market smells like every scent ever created, and each step will introduce you to a new one. As those of you with any anatomy training may remember, your sense of taste is highly tied to your sense of smell. This means that your maple syrup and peanut filled pancake (which is delicious, by the way) will develop additional flavours to include cherries (yum!), sesame (eh?), cuttlefish (awww man.), dried eel and garlic (ew?) and kimchi (what. the. hell.), with each step.

On the way back, I spied a vendor with a giant table of baked goods, cookies and snack cakes and rolled wafers and flat wafers and butter cookies and what looked like m&ms and even a sort of Korean Rice Krispy treat. I watched others browse (and consume his wares directly off the table as they did so) and realized that, as best I could tell, the man was selling pretty much anything you put in the basket from off the table for 2000 won per kilo, I.e.: about 75 cents a pound.

So I bought about two pounds of cookies and various interesting Korean snacks. They were really tasty, and served as train food for the next two days. When I gave him the basket, he weighed it, told me "2,000 won!" and then threw three additional handfuls of random snacks within his reach into my basket. Hurray additional snacks!

I also confirmed a suspicion I had about the Korean enthusiasm for seasonings. For most of my life, I have been under the impression that the French loved garlic. This isn't true. We like garlic, sometimes we're remarkably fond of Garlic, but we don't love it. The Koreans love garlic. The Koreans will serve it, by the whole clove, along with an dish. You're expected to eat the entire clove, fresh, as a sort of palate obliterating snack, somewhere during the meal. This is reflected in their markets, where some stations sell almost nothing except garlic of various types. They have a method of twisting it into a giant cylindrical bundle that can stand almost as tall as a man. They make for interesting photographs.

After I was done in Osan, I climbed back on the Subway to Seoul.

Major cities are floods of humanity here. eye contact is always limited, and people turn inward on public transit, like in most major cities from New York to Paris. I'm starting to believe that humanity isn't emotionally capable of creating and breaking thousands of personal connections per day indefinitely, and it's a natural defensive mechanism for us to stare at the numbers in the elevator, rather than standing in a circle and speaking to one another, or quietly thumb through a book we aren't really reading on the subway, to keep from greeting our fellow passengers. Throughout my time in Seoul, I discovered something. There were two social groups that made an exception for a young foreigner with a crew cut traveling abroad.

The first was the eternal constant: young schoolchildren. On my way to the Museum of history, I'd passed what seemed like an entire preschool on its way back from a field trip, and had been greeted with giant toothy grins, chattering hellos and "BeonSeyOhs!" and the flailing of perhaps 60 or 80 tiny arms as each group of 15 or 20 children passed me on the sidewalk. Human children are fascinated by the outsider, across all cultures and races, and the Koreans are no exception, a white giant wading through their school group (and being nice and waving and smiling back to them) was probably a greater topic of discussion when they returned home that afternoon than the dark and somber museum through which they had spent all morning wandering.

The second though, I had not expected. It was elderly gentlemen. They were generally clothed in impeccable dark suits with ties closely knotted, even in the heat of an early summer day, with the crinkled eyes that come from laughing and squinting at the morning sun, and the cool demeanour of men who have outlived two governments with as much dignity as survival would allow.

These men looked at me, with my military haircut and G.I. frame (in the boots, I'm 6" and 190lbs), and they must have seen the allies and friends of their youth. Men they served alongside in the Korean war, and trained alongside in their service to the army in the long waiting game that followed. Some were 75, barely children when the war ended and the eternal pause began, others were 90, and must have seen action throughout the conflict. All of them saw something they recognized. I could see it in their faces, a softening that comes with memories bitter and sweet. There was a certain eager light in each face at the opportunity to greet a foreigner in a language they once maintained meticulously and has long since rusted on the tongue.

These men would spy me in the train, with my backpack and baggy cargoes and combat boots, and greet me with polite questions. Where was I from? Was I in the Army? How long was I in Korea? Did I like the weather? Where was I going to visit while I was here? They never asked for my name, nor I for theirs. I think it would have been a breach, both of etiquette and memory. To them I must have been a sort of ghost--a prototype of every American boy they knew, through training and war, in days long over.

On the way back from Osan I had the most long lasting of these connections, a gentleman of 75 sat next to me all the way from Osan to my Hostel stop (by pleasant coincidence we had identical line changes). He drug up each English word with obvious pride and ponderous slowness, making every ounce of small talk available to him, weather, sites, length of stay, etc. I asked him about the game I had seen the day before, and it was he who provided me with the name Jang Gi. In the station platform while waiting for our transfer, he gave me the briefest of tutorials in Han Gul--how basic sounds were formed, and which shapes formed which sounds within some of the syllables on signs around the platform. When we boarded our second train he tried to give me his seat on the "reserved for the elderly" bench, which I refused, insisting that he sit instead.

I thanked him as warmly as I dared before I stepped off the subway, and he smiled and told me it was nice to meet me. Often it is these simple connections that make travel so interesting.

I grabbed my bag, headed back to Seoul train station, and hopped on the slow train into the heart of Korea to meet up with Mac once more.