Elections in Korea

June 2 was election day in Korea (a long time ago, I know). I want to share a few photos, but they need context, so here we go:

A few weeks before the election was the beginning of the official Campaign Season (it's Korea, everything's scheduled). What this meant for us was that we woke up one morning to the sound of angry shouting into a PA system coming from town. Whenever anyone speaks to an audience in Korean they sound angry, and they almost always shout. So, we're hearing shouty angry urgent public announcements happening in town and our thoughts immediately turn to evacuation orders being given to the citizens of Yeoju in the aftermath of the shelling of Seoul. No such calamity-it's just campaign season.

I'm sure that campaigning manifests itself in other ways invisible to the untrained eyes and ears of a foreigner. But as far as I can tell, it consists of little more than dressing up ajummas in coordinated, numbered t-shirts and sashes, directing them to dance, bow and sing at busy intersections, and setting up mobile stages with large PA systems on the backs of trucks. The presence of the candidate should not preclude the speakers from blasting beligerrent sounding speeches or grandma techno. These trucks may be anchored to a specific intersection or may be found careening across town, audio blasting all the while. Often, the ajumma dancing teams will square off across the road from each other, accompanied by their aforementioned campaign trucks.

A coordinated bow to every car that passes.

Standardization is the fabric that binds Korean society and the Korean economy together, and so too is it the rule of elections in Korea--particularly when it comes to graphic design. Every candidate has a campaign poster that looks identical or similar to his or her opponents': terrifying over-sized head-shot on a crappy photoshopped background with a huge graphic of their designated number (we never figured out if the message was "vote for number 3" or "vote for me under category 3"). T-shirt design must have also been standardized and regulated, along with all particulars pertaining to the ajumma sashes, which seemed to be required by law.

A final, overwhelming element of Korean campaigns are the candidates' building-sized banners (they literally just hang them up on the sides of buildings). These are typically just oversized versions of the campaign posters, but many are much more fun. One, for example, shows Our Candidate wearing a shirt and tie (they all do--corporate middle-manager is the ideal) whilst carrying a broadly smiling and very old grandmother on his back. He too is smiling and photoshopped to perfection/oblivion.

For two weeks we couldn't escape the screeching noise and the aggressive visuals of the campaign. It was bad in Yeoju, even worse in Gyeongju and I can't even begin to imagine how terrible it must have been in Seoul. I'm glad it's over but I'm glad to have seen it. It was nuts.

The election results (an afterthought, as far as I'm concerned) delivered a blow to the ruling conservative GNP  party. It was a nationwide election for local seats and the opposition picked up more than expected. This is most relevant to the progress of the Four Rivers Project (terrible, massive river re-engineering without the use of environmental impact studies) and the possible re-location of government ministries from Seoul to a new city currently under construction in the heart of the country. Without going into these issues further, it should be mentioned that the President, Lee Myung Bak, is the former CEO of Hyundai Heavy Industries, which probably owns about 75% of all construction contracts in the country. Surprise!

If there is any sort of moral to this story: Democracy is ridiculous and funny no matter where you are.

June happened

...despite our best efforts to slow it down. We haven't had much unstructured time in the past month. We've either been at work, working on graduate school stuff at work, or working on graduate school stuff at home. It was kind of a relentless month and I'm not exactly sad to see it go. Still, we had some (structured and scheduled) fun in between the long periods of relentless productivity. 

Our greatest achievement (and subsequent disappointment) was our little garden on the porch. Eight or so tomatoes, about nine peppers, a couple of cucumbers, and some gourdy climbers whose identity we're still working on. Just a couple of weeks ago, the porch was a riot of green leaves, yellow blossoms and the smell of tomato.

Unfortunately, our tomatoes got blight and our viney plants seem to be suffering from nutrient deficiency, lack of root space or both. Our peppers, however, are performing valiantly, and we've harvested a couple of cucumbers. There are a few ripening tomatoes on the vine, but the tomato plants are, generally, big wait-and-see. Kate did some re-potting last night and we've begun a fertilizer-bombing regimen in a last-ditch hail mary attempt to salvage our plants and our dignities. 

In the meantime, I've been working to fight back the swarming hoards of spiders and little bugs that find their way through our screen windows. The spiders in our neck of the woods here in Yeoju are phenomenally huge and phenomenally numerous. I saw one about a block from our house whose body must have been two inches long, not including legs. They're not so monstrously huge at our house, but they're everywhere--mostly nesting in the cracks between our vinyl siding and under our roof overhang. Our livable spaces outside on the porch are mostly spider-free (it takes some maintenance) but the narrow balcony around back of the house is pretty solidly an arachnid habitat preserve. Every night and every morning I dispatch one or a handful of spiders with a wad of paper towel and a pounce, and I've also been known to go on holocaust-scale buggie killing sprees with a rag swatter. These only really happen when someone accidentally leaves a window open at night when the fluorescent lights are on, but they are a sight to behold when they do (I'm sure that Kate could provide a hyperbolic and humiliating account). While Kate worked to salvage our garden last night I used clear packing tape to seal the open seams between the screens and the windows and window frames. Now we're comfortable with leaving the windows open at night, which means more breeze and less AC, which isn't very effective anyway. We are slowly but surely bringing back the order of civilization to our home. 

Otherwise, we've been spending a lot of our time on the porch, especially in the evenings. It's quite nice. The monsoon season just settled in (it's raining pretty hard at the moment) which means that sunny days may be few and far between for the next four to six weeks, and the humidity is pretty bad. All of the Wisconsinites complain about the humidity and the heat, but it's frankly not much worse than the Chesapeake. It's the damned bugs that drive me nuts.

A few more photos of life at home, with a handful more on the photo blog:

http://nandkinkorea.shutterfly.com/1414