Past to Present: Sangdong to Kpop

The Lonely Planet guidebook describes Korea as a place of contrasts...I can’t say that its an inaccurate description.

Thursday was a holiday for us.  “Opening Day of Korea”, which a kinda Founders’ Day thing.  Anyway, a few of us decided to go hiking along Sangdong Fortress in Cheongju and then meet up with some other foreign teachers for dinner.

Sangdon Fortress is beautiful!  It’s over 1000 years old on top of a mountain just outside of Cheongju.  There’s a small touristy area around the base to the hiking trail, but once you head up the hiking trail you step back in time.  The views are absolutely breathtaking...and not just because you have scaled a mountain to get there.  I mean, I may have like to have been placed in a major city, but you just can’t get these kinds of views there.  I didn’t climb all the way to the top because I was hurting a little from my injury and will be going back once I am 100 percent.

We headed back into the city to meet up with some other teachers, some I knew from Jincheon but some were located in Cheongju.  This is really once of the best groups of people I have ever met.  Really...everyone is just wonderful and I am so, SO lucky to have them in my life!

So, after dinner, we took the world’s longest cab ride to a Kpop concert.  This was my first real exposure to Kpop.  I mean, Southerners don’t have a lot of exposure to Korean people, culture, etc...and short of Gangnam style and a few random songs, I was (and largely still am) Kpop illiterate.

Kpop is bright and bouncy.   Catchy, even.  It’s flashy and fun.  Maybe nothing I would spend a lot of money on, but it was more fun than my angst-riddled, deep and meaningful music background would have let me believe.  Yeah, a lot of it is “canned music”, but I had a really good time...except…

So, let me make this clear.  I am from MEMPHIS.  Aside from not being Kpop savvy, being from Memphis means that when a crowd of people surges forward your natural instinct is to head the other way.  You cannot...and I mean, CANNOT, do that at a Kpop concert.  The crowd periodically surges forward...I have no idea why, by the way...and when that happens you MUST go with it.  It took quite a bit of self-control to not freak out and start trying to fight my way out of the crowd.

Also, it is a little unnerving to see full-grown adults...and I am talking middle-aged and older...freak out over boy/girl bands.  Its gives a distinct air of pedophilia, but probably because most Kpop artists are altered to the point of being plastic.  But definitely surreal.  And mad props to the security guards there in their three-piece suits and earpieces...those guys kept order like a BAWSE.  One security guy would LITERALLY point, then wave his hand, and the crowd would obey.  Intense.