Thursday reflections

A couple days ago I got news of a great-uncle's death back in the States. It wasn't someone I was particularly close with, but it's still sad tidings and a stark reminder of how disconnected I am from the everyday lives of family and friends back there, and how much will have changed by the time I get back. Sometimes it seems so selfish to live a world away, adventuring for the heck of it, spending money on travel and a degree I'm not even sure I'll truly use. And it is - selfish - but it also seems the right thing to do, all things considered.

Meanwhile, life marches on here, too. Tomorrow is the final day of us teaching these summer classes at the college, and it's amazing to see how much the students have progressed - the heartwarming factor of teaching really shows up quickly. Course I still have plenty of heartburn, too (I get ridiculous about any new job - times ten for a major career change), but overall, things are going really well and it's been a great introduction to education. Next week we do sessions more similar to what will be in the Village (basically teaching amid movie-like sets to place kids in situations like they will find in the real world, and using hardly any bookwork), and we also start doing planning of schedules, curricula and logistics for the Village.

Yesterday was a national holiday (one of what I understand to be four Korean independence days), but one without much ceremony aside from flags popping out on shops and in neighborhoods. Four of us hopped a bus to Gyeong-ju, a historic city about an hour east of here, not quite to the Eastern Sea. The place is absolutely packed with sites - we were making plans on the fly and still managed to hit about five places in a few hours - and some of the cooler ones were parks filled with tombs of ancient rulers, like in the (handout) picture below. They're not quite as colossal as Egypt's pyramids, but serve the same function. The biggest one is seven stories tall, and there's one that's been excavated and now houses a display of the tomb structure and artifacts found there.

In the same area are beautiful gardens and other landscapes, a former palace grounds and man-made lake, and a museum housing many of the artifacts found in the area. One display in particular made me smile: Apparently, in the dawn of A.D. as Buddhism spread through the Shilla Kingdom of this region, people began making increasingly artistic and personalized funeral urns to commemorate the dead. Which is all well and good, but it threw a whole new light on this article (click here), which I remember reading a few months ago at The Gazette. There really is nothing new under the sun.

And in other news of the odd, I've become quite the model since arriving in Asia - the whole group has. It seems to be quite the thing to have Americans in your promotional photos, so we get stopped everywhere to get photographed checking out a business or area. In fact, the manager at the local Costco said he'd hold a party for us if we just took a picture at the store. The latest episode was being flagged down at the palace "ruins" at Gyeong-ju for "City Hall propaganda!" as a bespectacled gent put it, emphasizing his point with wild gesticulations at an oversized camera. It's so bizarre that looking like a tourist - an AMERICAN tourist in particular - is actually a good thing. Of course I can't read all this stuff they print with our pictures ... maybe it's more along the lines of "Come see our latest attraction! Buffoons straight from America! You never know what ludicrous stunt they'll pull next!"