Korean Flight Attendants

In the US back in the mid-20th century, and up into the 90's, flight attendants possessed a certain mystique. Airlines flaunted their stewardesses like bikini models, bringing sex appeal into the air in a way that would change airline travel forever. Well, until the 2000's, anyway, when some airlines (*cough* Delta *cough*) started hiring average-looking people (and men) to vend microwave meals along their aisles. American flight attendants have lost the allure they once possessed.

In Korea,  however, where discrimination based on appearance is smiled upon, the attraction is still alive and well. Young Korean girls dream of growing tall enough and pretty enough to fly the skies with Korean Air. Their beauty, grace, and impeccable grooming is internationally renowned, as it is for many Asian carriers. 

Several universities in Korea actually offer a "flight attendant" major, where (girl only!) students can practice their manners, dress and geography skills to perfection.

At Uiduk university, the freshmen are required to stand by the front entrance at times, in their standard student uniforms, to greet every car and/or pedestrian that enters the campus.

Mud Festival: Keep your Shirt On

I went out to Boryeong over the weekend with a couple of friends to make arrangements for the Boryeong Mud Festival trip in July. 

Along the beach the city council had posted entries in a photo contest from last year's mud festival. There were probably three dozen photos in total, and all of them were quite good. Most focused on foreigners enjoying themselves in the mud.

One of the pictures, though, was a bit surprising.

The actual photo isn't blurred

My friend Justin and I, discussing opinions on the presence of the photo along the beach, felt shock and a bit of mild outrage, but couldn't decide who was causing it - the girl who posed so carelessly for a professional photographer, or the photographer who entered it into a contest.

Justin brought up the issue of privacy, which is always heavily guarded in Korean society. If this were a picture of a Korean girl it would NEVER get posted. This is true. Koreans tend to think of foreigners as a funny sideshow, without rights or feelings of our own.

But then again, Korean girls don't flash strangers.

It's not surprising that girls do this at mudfest. Some girls get drunk and like to flash people. Big deal. If you want to take a picture of some poor drunk girl's breasts and keep it for your own personal records, that's fine by me (and apparently her). 

I don't know if the photographer had the girl's permission to share the photo. But to post it along the beachfront in a photo contest is in extremely poor taste.

The Eight-Legged Playboy

바람둥이[Param dung-i] - literally "wind person" - is a popular expression in Korea that means "playboy", likening a man's mind to the capricious nature of wind. It's probably one of the first non-critical phrases that many foreigners remember, because, hey! it's always fun to share a laugh with a Korean when you call someone out on their infidelity.


Last week I learned a couple of new expressions that are also useful for talking about an uncommitted Korean's love life.

양다리 [Yang dari], meaning "both legs", refers to someone (a man or a woman) who is getting a little sum'n sum'n on the side, i.e. someone is sitting on both of their knees.

Santa wants to fill BOTH of their wishes!

God gave him 8 legs for a reason!

문어다리 [Mun-eo dari], a derivation of 양다리, means "octopus legs". As you can probably deduce, a 문어다리 doesn't limit him or herself to just one extra lover. Just because you have two hands doesn't mean you should only juggle two balls, am I right?!

Incidentally, if you're actually talking about octopus tentacles, the word is 문어발 [Mun-eo bal], or "octopus feet".

Testicle Friends

When I was a kid, I attended a small private Christian school. (Maybe that's not the best sentence to open with considering this post's title, but hey....) It was so small that, in my first grade class of 9 students, there were no girls.

We were all very close at the time. Sure, there were a few dorks (Peter, Evan) in the group that we all picked on. And a couple of us (Danny, Joseph, me) mighta sorta been bullies and I might have once - maybe - hit a kid in the face with a flat dodgeball and made him cry. But we were always invited to each other's birthday parties, we had a clubhouse in Joseph's parents' toolshed, and we would slink around at church potlucks like a gang of little James Deans, dressed in our Sunday best. We were inseparable, but let's be honest - mostly it was because we didn't have a choice.

In 6th grade I moved to public middle school. Some of the kids moved to different states. We were pen-pals until the weather got warm or until we forgot to write anymore. We lost touch. I don't even know how I would search for their contact information anymore.

If I had grown up in Korea, this band of 9 little Christian brothers would be my "불알친구". That means, quite literally, "testicle friends".

These boys would be testicle friends in Korea

Testicle friends are Korean men who grew up in the same town, went to elementary or middle school together, and perhaps stripped naked at night to go skinny dipping in the river that ran through their village. They might just have a baby picture together in which their ball sacks are visible. Whatever the case, they were close enough friends that they, at one point or another, saw/touched/smelled/witnessed each other's male organs. And after such an event, I suppose, there's no turning your back...err...the back of your scrotum on 'em.

Today Mr. Shin, one of my co-teachers, told me quite matter-of-factly that his group of testicle friends still meets twice a year, in or near their hometown. He described the group as one based on the purity of childhood innocence, when there are no preconditions or ulterior motives for friendship. "It's a carefree environment," he told me. "Some of my friends are very rich, powerful people now. But I don't care about that." Well, since everyone has a different job now, what do you talk about? I asked him. "We just drink," he said. "A lot."

Hopefully testicle friends make your wife this happy.

Obviously, as the term so eloquently suggests, testicle friends are men.  So, you may eagerly interject, enough about all this ball talk. Tell us about the lovely Korean ladies and their league of labia friends! 

Unfortunately, even in this age of gender parity and sexual equality, Korean women (generally) do not share in this tradition. Women have too many responsibilities to have lives of their own. As Mr. Shin conscientiously put it, "Women should follow their husbands."

They are free to join their men in the reunion and become best friends with the other women who also happened to marry into her husband's group of gonads.

Boryeong Mud Festival

If it's festivals you want, festivals you can get in Korea. There's a kimchi festival, bullfighting festival, mask festival, whale festival, fireworks festival, sunrise festival, ice fishing festival, film festival, ginseng festival, and a bodypainting festival - and that's just off the top of my head. On any given weekend there are a handful of festivals going on in various cities throughout the country.

Among the expat community in the country, however, no single festival garners nearly as much attention as the Boryeong Mud Festival. In a country as conservative as Korea - where beachgoers don't take off their shirts and shoulders are considered indecent - the Mud Festival is one place where naked flesh is not only expected, but required.

Boryeong mud is famous for its nutritive properties; it is used to make cosmetics, soaps, lotions, and other toiletries. During the Boryeong Mud Festival it is applied more, well, liberally.

The city trucks tons of mud from nearby mud flats onto the festival grounds, which abut the beach, and dumps it all onto inflated slides, obstacle courses, and mud wrestling pools. There are stations for painting your body with mud, stations for throwing mud at other festival-goers, even a "jail" station where festival staff will spray you down with mud (and for which you had to wait about an hour).

The Boryeong Mud Festival is about getting dirty, and for many people, in more ways than one. There are no (enforced) public drunkenness laws in Korea, and the prospect of getting drunk on the beach and smearing girls (or guys) in bikinis with mud is too much for a repressed population to resist. It attracts a wild crowd. Every third person is carrying a pitcher of beer in broad daylight, and perfect strangers indulge in public displays of affection without remorse.

This, not surprisingly, is the chief complaint of the abstaining portion of the foreign population, who refrain from attending because they "aren't really into spring break."

For the most part, though, the dirty, drunken foreigners carousing the streets of Boryeong are a peace-loving lot. Beyond that, Boryeong is good at confining the party atmosphere to a limited section of the town. And besides, you're not into it, the mud madness is not that hard to escape.

In fact, if getting muddy is your MO, the festival itself is not the first place you should go. As I mentioned before, Boryeong trucks all of the festival mud in from mud flats nearby. Interestingly, neither festival staff nor Boryeong city officials advertise this fact, and no one asks. Most festival-goers are content to wallow in the watered-down buckets of mud that Boryeong locals dump on them.

The mud flats (갯벌체험장) are actually less than 5km from Daecheon Beach (where the 2010 Boryeong Mud Festival was held), at the river delta near Daecheon Station. During low tide, the field of mud extends for hundreds of meters on either side of the river.

When my friends and I arrived on Sunday morning it was high tide, but the mud was only covered in ankle-deep water. I quickly stripped and covered my body in the dark, sticky muck beneath my feet. Aside from two Korean tourists and a handful of festival staff, the only sign of life around the mud flats were the seagulls, hunting for crabs. One member of the staff even helped to bury me in mud - he seemed so amused that I wondered if he had ever seen any foreign tourists out there.

Shortly before we left, the staff began setting up futsal goals for a tournament which would start in the early afternoon. Unfortunately we couldn't stay and watch - our group bus was scheduled to leave soon after it began. I cleaned off in a row of showers above the rocks and we caught a taxi back to our hotel.

The mud flats were the highlight of the festival for me, and I realized that I didn't even need to be at the festival to enjoy them - they're there all the time! (Although the showers may not be up year-round, and I doubt taxis would pick me up after frollicking in the muck.)

Dirty travels!

(Photos courtesy of Darin Novak (Boryeong Mud Fest 2009) and Nadia Hugo, one of the only other sober people awake at 8:30 on a Sunday)

If you're looking for more non-mud-related things to do during the Boryeong Mud Festival, here's a tourist map of the Boryeong environs:

Sex with a Korean Minor - Not a crime

A headline on the second page of the Korea Times today reads: "Sex With Minor Not Crime if Not Forced".

A local high court found a 46-year-old man not guilty of having sex with a runaway teenage girl, saying their liaison was neither forced nor in exchange for money.

The man had invited the 16 year-old girl, who had been homeless for two years, into his home to "offer his house as a shelter to her request." He fed her and gave her pocket money, but "there is no evidence that the offering was in exchange for sex."

In Korea, a person is not guilty of any crime for having sex with a minor aged 13 and over unless it is paid for or forced. Sex with those under the age of 13 is punishable even if it is carried out under mutual consent.

Let's be straight: if sex is forced, it's rape; paid for, it's prostitution - both of which are illegal. So minors between the ages of 13 and 18 are basically adults, with all of the sexual rights and responsibilities afforded them.

Personally I have mixed feelings on this issue.

On one hand

• People develop at different rates - who is to say that this particular 16 year-old girl (after two years on the streets, mind you) isn't more mature than your average 22 year-old (sheltered) college senior? Is it really fair to criminalize the sex of one and let the other share her "love" with whomever she pleases?
• Most human beings hit puberty around 13 - which wasn't an unusual age for a woman to get married about 100 years ago.
• If teenagers are scarred from sexual experiences as youth - with peers or adults - it is not from any shame or guilt inherent in the sexual act. It's foisted upon them from a culture that teaches them to feel shame and guilt. Teenagers can - and should! - be taught to appreciate their sexuality. The more they understand themselves the less likely they are to be taken advantage of.
• Are we really going to say that we trust 16 year-olds in the US to wield one-ton weapons at 65mph but not to make decisions about their own bodies?
  

The other hand:

• "Consent" is not very court-friendly. Rape cases, especially in the event of acquaintance rape, are notoriously difficult to prove. Every country has its own problems with low rape conviction rates. This is particularly pertinent in consideration of point number 2:
  
• Teenagers need to be protected from adults with devious intentions. They are impressionable, and, more often that not, incredibly naive. Be honest, when you were 14 did you really know where your genitals were and what they could do? Yes, you say? Damn. Well alright then, Mrs. "I didn't get pulled out of family life education in middle school!" Rub it in.
  
• Does anyone really NEED to be having sex? OK, for purposes of procreation and perpetuation of our species, YES, of course. But a 14 year-old 7th grader has better things to be doing, like homework, and masturbating.

I guess my opinion falls in between. I'd like to see the legal age of a minor set at 16.

Any thoughts? I'd love to get some feedback.