Korea trip 2022-3, the day before

This trip has been a long time coming. In September 2019 I got a full-time casual job which looked to be more stable than my previous part-time and/or casual and/or short-term work. I talked to my manager about the possibility of taking casual time off in September 2020 for an overseas holiday, and she agreed. By March 2020 my wife and I had generally agreed on two weeks in South Korea and two weeks in Europe. Then COVID travel restrictions happened.

Once restrictions were eased, we started planning again. In between, my causal job was reclassified as permanent ‘cos I’m awesome, which entitles me annual leave with full pay (4 weeks, for Australians). We decided to skip Europe and spend a month in Korea. We chose January because my work is a bit slower in January, plus there are several public holidays as well as my annual leave. My wife and her colleagues decided to shut their restaurant for the duration, to the disappointment of some customers, but they need a break after working very, very hard for a long, long time (with no annual leave allowance). My wife grumbled a bit about visiting in deep winter, but we’ll go at different times on future trips. I love the cold weather. I originally assumed that Lunar New Year/Seollal would fall after we left (because of the lunar calendar), but was pleased to find that it falls very early next year, and will be a few days before we leave. 

We investigated hotels in the Jongno/Eulji/Dongdaemun area but a brother and a friend of my wife offered accommodation in two different middle-range suburbs of greater Seoul, which means I will have to spend varying amounts of time on trains rather than actually doing things. But some things will be more convenient; her friend lives one station from a major historical site which is high on my list of things to do. My list is actually longer than the number of days we’ll be there. And that’s not counting the social engagements at short notice that will no doubt happen once my wife is there and contacting people. And that’s only in and around Seoul, with a few day and overnight trips. Several suggestions for a 3-4 day trip further afield have been left by the wayside.

Once I get there, I will give all monetary amounts in KRW. For reference, the exchange rate for major currencies today is KRW10,000 = GBP6.53 = EUR7.39 = USD7.86 = CAD10.63 = AUD11.68. (If you can’t remember that, the first approximation is KRW10,000 = more or less 10 of those.)

This blog is mostly anonymous (at least to people who don’t otherwise know who I am), which means that I can’t directly identify anyone else. I will refer to my wife as ‘J’, which is the initial of English name she sometimes uses. Everyone else will be some family or friend of hers or friend of mine, and/or initials. The first three are her brother DS and sister-in-law MH and friend HK. I will update when I can, but it may not be every day. There will be photos.

The last few days have been a combination of getting things done and not becoming too overwhelmed (with greater or lesser success). 

I have already set the alarm for 5 am tomorrow. The temperature in Sydney will be approaching 30 degrees by the time we leave, and will be below zero by the time we arrive at Incheon. Among other things, I need to pack suitable clothes in my carry-on.

Meanwhile, photos of my previous stays in 2006-09 and 2015-16 can be found here and here.

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Sing it!

While I was eating dinner in a pub, the big screen was showing the preliminaries to a repeat of the USA v Wales football/soccer world cup game, with the sound turned down. The teams came out and lined up and the two national anthems were played and sung. Looking very carefully, I could just see the USA team members’ mouths moving, but they clearly weren’t putting much effort into it. The Welsh team members, on the other hand, were actually singing. I even mouth-read the word Gwlad (country).  It wasn’t lip-reading, it was mouth-reading, like, their whole mouth. Sing (or don’t (see the Iranian team before their match)). Just don’t be wishy-washy about it.

was killed v died

Last week two of my relatives were travelling in a group which was involved in a road accident. One was unharmed and the other was slightly injured, but several members of the group were more seriously injured and one was killed. I told my wife this, emphasising that my relatives were safe before concluding “One of their friends was killed”. She asked “Someone killed him?”

Passive voice he was killed (by someone or something) has the active voice equivalent (someone or something) killed him. But we can’t say The accident killed him or even He was killed by the accident (or we can, but they sound really strange), but might say He was killed in the accident and certainly later say He was killed in an accident.

I might have avoided the confusion by saying One of their friends died.

“God save the king”

For 70 years, people in the Commonwealth realms and beyond sang God save the queen. Recently, some of us have sung God save the king. I haven’t had to yet. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I sang God save the queen, as it was replaced by Advance Australia fair in 1974. Being a moderate republican (note that a lowercase-r republican in Australia is very different from an uppercase-R Republican in the USA) I would probably decline to sing God save the king unless I really had to (frexample if I was in a featured choir). In fact, in fact, I struggle to remember singing Advance Australia fair since the opening ceremony of the 2000 olympic games.

Several days ago I watched a video about music in which someone talked about the use of repetition in music. He contrasted God save the king (which has no repetition) and Twinkle, twinkle, little star (which has multiple repeated phrases). But he didn’t use standard words (either God save the king or My country,  ’tis of thee, but a parody version I hadn’t heard before. I thought that was semi-interesting but wouldn’t have written a post about it. But yesterday a colleague mentioned that when he was young, he thought that one phrase was 

Santa victorious

1000th post – a few stats

As with my 500th post, I am taking the milestone of my 1000th post to consider a few statistics. I started this blog on 1 November 2014, so 1000 posts in just under eight years is about one every three days (2.89 days, to be precise), slightly less often than the two and half days I calculated then, because my posts have been fewer and further between recently. 

According to WordPress, I have had readers from 203 countries and territories around the world. The top 10 are the USA, Australia, England, India, Canada, Philippines, Germany, South Korea, Indonesia and Brazil. On the other hand, I have had one reader from each of 24 countries and territories: Andorra, the British Virgin Islands, Burkina Faso, the Cayman Islands, Chad, Congo – Brazzaville, Djibouti, the Faroe Islands, French Polynesia, Fiji, Gibraltar, Greenland, Grenada, Guadaloupe, Guinea, Kosovo, Monaco, Samoa, the Seychelles, South Sudan, St Lucia, Swaziland and Timor-Leste. I would love to know what brought each of those here. 

999th post – A tale of two cities

I have occasionally pondered the similarities and differences between these two cities (shown above as close as I can to the same scale). I think there are more differences than similarities. Both are the biggest city in their country, but Seoul comprehensively so and Sydney only just (and is projected to be overtaken by Melbourne sooner rather than later). Seoul is the capital of South Korea, but Sydney isn’t the capital of Australia, even though many people around the world think or assume it is. As a result, Sydney (and/or Melbourne) dominate economically and culturally, but not politically (at least at the national level; they dominate their respective states). 

Geographically, both sit between the ocean and mountains. Even though South Korea is overall more mountainous, Wentworth Falls (at the far left of the Sydney map) is higher in elevation than Bukhansan. It’s just that Bukhansan is located comparatively much closer to its city. (Also, Mount Kosciuszko (the highest mountain on mainland Australia) is higher than Hallasan, and Mawson Peak (the highest on an outlying territory) is (just) higher than Mount Baekdu.) Both are at similar latitudes (Seoul 37ºN and Sydney 33ºS), but Seoul’s weather is dominated by the Siberian high and East Asian monsoon, meaning very cold winters (with snow) and very wet summers (with occasional typhoons) while Sydney’s is more equable, very rarely getting super-cold or super-hot (at least towards the coast; my inland suburb is more variable, and one day a few years ago a suburb near here was the hottest place on the planet). 

Sciencing

I previously mentioned the Youtube channel It’s okay to be smart by Joe Hanson, which presents bite-sized chunks of general science, specifically his catch-phrase “Stay curious”. Another catch-phrase is “[Name/pronoun] did a science”.

In the movie The Martian (but not the novel, which I recently bought, partly to research this), astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) is stranded on Mars after his crewmates think that was killed during an emergency evacuation. He survives (obviously), then records a video outlining what he must do to survive, partly to clarify his own thoughts and partly for any future mission which might find him (dead). He concludes: “In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m faced with only one option: I’m going to have to science the shit out of this”.

Singing in languages part 2

Several months ago, one of my wonderful nieces attended a Celtic festival. She posted on social media: “Unpopular and controversial opinion: people shouldn’t sing solo on stage in languages they do not speak”. I commented: “Almost every opera and lieder singer?”

Strictly speaking, lieder singers (possibly lied singers, compare song singers) only ever sing in German, but let’s expand the repertoire to at least Italian, French and German, and maybe Spanish. Opera singers can easily add Czech and Russian, and modern operas have incorporated Sanskrit (Glass, Satyagraha), Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew (Glass, Akhnaten), probably Palestinian Arabic and Modern Hebrew (Adams, The death of Klinghoffer) and maybe Mandarin Chinese (Adams, Nixon in China).

Choral singers also clock up languages, probably even more so, because there are larger or smaller choral works in languages in which there are no operas. In my last post, I talked about a recent concert in which we sang in English, liturgical Greek, liturgical Latin, Church Slavonic and Latvian. I forgot to mention that the women also sang in French. 

Another choir I sing in (a perfectly ordinary suburban community choir) is preparing a concert with pieces in English, mediaeval Galician-Portuguese, Italian, Latin, modern Hebrew, Māori and Quechua. And our conductor wonders why we are looking so worried as we sing. 

In addition to the above, I have also sung in concerts in Welsh, Spanish, biblical Hebrew and Korean that I can easily think of, and as read-throughs of at least one South African language. I sure there’s more. I speak exactly none of those. If I only sang the language(s) I speak, I’d be limited to English. 

Singing in languages

Last weekend one of the choirs I sing in presented a concert which had been delayed and disrupted by COVID and reduced in numbers by choristers travelling. Alongside works in English, liturgical Greek and Latin, we sang works in Church Slavonic (a movement from Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy of St John Chrysostom) and Latvian (a new work by a local composer of Latvian birth or heritage). 

Church Slavonic and Latvian are both Indo-European languages, so I was on the lookout for any words which are obviously related to other IE languages I know about. But the only words I could discern are loan words into those languages just as into English: kheruvímy (cherubim) in the former and fenikss (phoenix) and oranži (orange) in the latter (all heavily influenced by the pronunciation and spelling of those languages). There is also trisvętúju in the former, which is guessable as trinity. 

Even though all these languages are Indo-European, they are obviously very different. Even though Church Slavonic and Latvian are both Balto-Slavic, they are obviously very different. Among other things, Church Slavonic is Slavic and Latvian is Baltic. Also, the texts we sang are liturgical dating to perhaps the 9th century and a 19th century secular poem. 

Linguists started by comparing closely related languages, such as Church Slavonic, Bulgarian and Macedonian, and Latvian and Lithuanian, then work their way back from there, eventually linking Polish, Czech and Slovak, the Balkan languages, the Russian-related languages and others into Slavic and thence with Latvian and Lithuanian into Balto-Slavic and then Indo-European. (Some people have attempted to reconstruct further back than than that, but their efforts are speculative and inconclusive at best.)

PS The Latvian poem is Putns ar uguns spārniem (which I can’t find anywhere online) by Aspazija. The title translates as Bird with wings of fire. I wondered if putns is related to a certain Russian surname, but no, the certain Russian surname apparently comes from put (path or way) + in (belonging to) and probably means something like ‘one who travels on a path’. (I couldn’t find any authoritative source and am relying on several user-submitted websites.)

Duffins, cronuts and olive jars

A trip to a local shopping centre yielded two linguistic snippets. One shop was selling duffins, which it helpfully explained as “not a donut, not a muffin”. Cronuts (doughnuts made from croissant dough) have been a thing for a while now (Wikipedia says 2013). Duffins appear to be new. Wikipedia does not have a page for them and several news stories online from earlier this month talk about the product’s launch, but the company’s own website says that “The duffin is back”. Pages for Mac auto-changes duffin to muffin and red-underlines it when I change it back. 

Hang on, though. If a doughnut made from croissant dough is a cronut, then shouldn’t one made from muffin dough be a muffnut? Maybe not …

(spelling: Google Ngrams shows that doughnut is used more in BrEng, and about equally with donut in AmEng. I don’t often write about them, so I don’t know what my natural usage is. (PS My diary for my first stay in Korea 2006-9 has three instances of donut(s) and none of doughnuts, but that’s hardly convincing.)) 

(pronunciation: I had always pronounced croissant with kw-. Various dictionaries give kr-, krw- and kw-, so there’s obviously no unanimity (Wiktionary gives the most options). The other issue is -ant, which can be -ant, -ont, -ənt or ɒ̃. A lot depends on how French you try to be.)   

My wife bought a jar of olives. Around the top is a message/are messages in four languages. 

CAPSULA DI SICUREZZA / PREMENDO AL CENTRO, L’ASSENZA DI “CLIC CLAC” GARANTSICE L’INTEGRITA DELLA CHIUSRA
CAPSULE DE SECURITE • SE SOULEVE A L’OUVERTURE / LE “CLIC CLAC” A L’OUVERTURE EST VOTRE GARANTIE
SAFETY BUTTON / SAFETY BUTTON POPS WHEN SEAL IS BROKEN
VAKUUM • SICHERHEITSVERSCHLUSS / KNACKT BEIM ERSTEN ÖFFNEN

I won’t discuss these at length, but clearly, different languages say equivalent things in different ways, and use a different number of words to do so.

PS 25 Jul: at a work meeting today my manager digressed and spontaneously mentioned lamingscones (which I have now discovered is styled as Laming-Scones). Non-Australians may need to look up lamingtons and scones.  

PPS 1 Aug: today I watching a Youtube video by someone walking around Seoul. I saw a bakery advertising croiffles. 1 Sep: Another video shows croffles.

PPPS 2Aug: I mentioned this on Facebook and a friend said her local supermarket sells muffnuts.