Musings on Korea

I just spent a week in Korea, my second visit there. Since I knew to avoid the kimchi this time and the hotel was more conveniently located, it was a good visit. Finding a Starbucks within a few blocks of the hotel was nice, too.

It is interesting to observe a culture in which there do not seem to be any significant racial minorities. Everyone in all walks of life, at least that I encountered, seemed to be Korean. There was not a clear divide, as there is in many countries, in which immigrants make up the taxi drivers, the hotel housekeepers, the janitors and farm workers. There also seems to be a strong service commitment in the culture: the taxi drivers often wear a tie, the hotel has several people near the front door to greet, help with luggage, give directions, call a taxi or anything else, much more available than in the U.S., and tips for service are not part of the culture.

I stayed in one of the cities in the metro-Seoul area, the city of Suwon. It is an old city on the south side of Seoul with an old fortress that is a well known landmark, and it also has a large Samsung manufacturing site. All the places I went seemed to be quite safe with lots of people around and usually lots of traffic. There are a lot of churches as well, and you see a lot of crosses on the top of steeples and roofs as you walk around. There continues to be a great deal of construction going on. In one area we drove past, something like 30 or so high rise condo buildings are going up at once. These are 20-30 stories each. It is like a whole, new city being built at once.

One of the most interesting things from this trip was the discussion on the current tension with North Korea about the sinking of a navy ship in April. I was surprised to learn that quite a large number of folks, which was estimated at something like 25-30% of the South Koreans by the folks I talked with, think the sinking could have been caused by the South Korean government. Some think it may have been an accident in war games and that the government is covering it up. Others think it may have been a deliberate attempt by the government to influence the elections that took place soon after the sinking. Many of the citizens clearly do not trust their government on this sort of thing, and most especially they do not trust the military. The view of this is much less clear cut in Korea than the way it is presented in the U.S. news media.

It was also interesting to me that there are very few semi-tractor trailers on the road. You see lots of trucks, but they are smaller than semi’s. I had to think about that for a bit, but since South Korea is about the size of Indiana, you can see how smaller trucks would work fine if all the trucking you needed to do were within the confines of Indiana. The only semi’s I saw were sea-going containers headed for a seaport to be loaded on a ship. However, there are buses everywhere. I used a bus to and from the airport, which is about 1.5 hours from Seoul at Incheon. Buses are a well used means of transport and take the place of the semi’s on the road.

Overall, I continue to be impressed by the amount of construction and development going on, despite the current economic issues; and I found it interesting that in a land with much less ethnic and racial diversity, and that appears to an outsider as much more uniform in thought, there is still a strong suspicion of the motives of politicians.