South Korea: The King’s Porn

For Friday, October 14, 2011

Seoul

I had heard good things about Jeju, an island off the southern shore, and Busan, a port city on the southern shore, so I decided to spend some time there. I had about ten days left, which would be enough time to do both, so I decided to spend part of the day planning those trips. I bought flights from Seoul to Jeju on Sunday, October 16, and Jeju to Busan on Friday, October 21. There’s a bullet train that I can take from Busan back to Seoul for my flight to Tokyo on Tuesday, October 25. Then I called my parents for the first time since I left home and caught them up on my trip so far. It had rained earlier that morning, and it was still cloudy and cool, so I decided to go to a museum and avoid the bad weather. Mia recommended the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, so I went there. Unfortunately, it was 5:45 PM when I arrived, so I only had 45 minutes to see stuff. I chose to see a special exhibit about the paintings of the ancient kings’ painters. The art varied from dull to exquisite, faded and torn to vibrant and crisp. There were also some ancient books about war craft and government. Near the end of the exhibit there was a dark room with an attendant at the entrance that seemed odd. Inside, paintings were displayed along each wall inside opaque boxes with viewing slots above them. The first one showed two women sitting on the floor of a room. It puzzled me why this art was displayed so differently from the others. I moved on to the next painting, which showed a woman lying naked on the floor on her stomach with one knee bent, and a man sitting next to her, bottomless. Each painting got progressively more erotic and explicit. It dawned on me that I could be perusing the king’s porn collection. I was puzzled why the first painting had been part of the collection. Had I missed something? I went back to it, and then spotted it: the two women were looking at porn. Ah! Subtle. I returned to the hostel and met Ian (from the U.K.) and Sean (from Taiwan/South Korea). We went to dinner at a really good restaurant nearby with a couple of friends of Sean’s, Kaie and Semi (not sure about the spelling). Keren (from Australia) and Charles (from Singapore) met us at the restaurant after we had finished eating and we stayed there for a while drinking rice wine. Then we went to a bar and had a beer (Cass, a Korean beer). Then we went to a club nearby called Papa Gorilla and danced and drank beer and shots (of what, I don’t know). Ian was as relentless as ever approaching girls and dancing with them. People had started to split off and go their own way, and Charles and Keren (who were also staying at Miso Guesthouse) had already left, so I walked by myself back to the hostel. I got in around 4 AM.