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| Day 4: Nat'l Museum and Miso |
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We started off our day with two lectures at Korea University. The first was about the demography of Korea. The country has urbanized quickly. 80% of Korea’s population was once living in the countryside, in a matter of decades, 80% of Korea’s population now lives in the cities. Thus, apartments are a sign of success and wealth as opposed to a rural house. There are some interesting trends in Korea, such as the dip in the fertility rate in Korea. As of 2005, the fertility rate dropped to 1.08, the lowest rate in the world (except for HongKong and Taiwan). There was a decrease from 6.2 to 1.08 from 1960 to 2005. Why? Because the emphasis on education and attending university has heightened and been applied to women as well, so women are waiting longer to have children and are having less children. There’s less space for children in apartments and the amount of money Korean families pour into education and extra classes for their students is astronomical, so less is more.
There is also a traditional preference for boys that has not left society yet. The preference of boys was further enabled and caused further gender imbalance by the ability to determine gender with ultrasound. This causes a surplus of men who want wives, but girls want to marry city boys, where life is easier, not marry farmers. To find enough females to marry the men, Korea is going to have to open to international marriages; nearly 50% in the countryside are international marriages; in the urban environment around 11%; 25% of marriages in the country are international marriages. For the farmers, many are using agencies to find girls in Thailand or the Philippines to bring to Korea and marry.
We also had a lecture on Modern Korea that was given by a very dynamic professor who had a lot of inside stories. After that was ate a quick lunch and were headed to the National Museum of Korea where we were briefed by the museum director himself. We learned about the history of the museum and how the artifacts were collected. Then we were provided with a tour of the museum and were able to see the famous Silla crown, several beautiful Buddha statues, and many other beautiful statues, pots, etc.
We ate a delicious dinner in the museum. It was a very traditional Korean dish in which you have several different vegetables in a large bowl, you add in rice, the other dishes on your tray, and red chili paste. You mix them all together and yummy!
We spent an hour wandering around a little section of Seoul before the show started and ran into a fish restaurant alley. One shop after the other offered different types of fish. Almost all the shops had fish aquariums in the window to advertise. Puffer fishes, eels, you name it.
The theatre production, Miso, was very good! A young girl falls in love with a boy who is called up to the military. While he’s away a local magistrate is infatuated with the young girl and asks her to be with him. She turns him down and he locks her in prison. Her true love comes and breaks her out of jail and they have a beautiful wedding. There wasn’t any talking, but lots of music, a singing narrator, and lots of dancing. My favorite scenes? There is an awesome drum song where a very involved rhythm created with 10 or 15 people drumming at different tempos to create a really cool song. My other favorite scene would be the man tassels – there were four guys who wore hats with tassels that had a six foot white ribbon attached that by gently nodding their head would swirl around like the ribbons in rhythmic gymnastics. …They even did them in a coordinated way all in time together. It was pretty cool. The costumes were all traditional Korean clothes that were very bright and colorful. At the end of the show, the actors and actresses all climbed up the stairs of the theatre and led everyone out to the courtyard where they did another dance and then posed with us to give us a chance to take pictures with the performers.
We are all in the midst of packing because we head on our field trip tomorrow! Everything is awesome so far! :)
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