The Mount

Korean Culture: Not What an American Might Expect

As I flew out of Eppley Airport, I watched out my window as the sparsely populated Nebraskan landscape passed underneath me. Hours later, flying into Incheon, I saw row upon row of high rise apartments squeezed between mountains and the ocean.

Upon our arrival, my Korean host Seeon Lee, a Mount Michael senior, and I took a bus from Incheon, near the coast, into Bundang, a suburb of Seoul where Seeon lives with his family. Throughout the two-hour drive to Bundang, I was caught up in the incredible landscape and buildings of the area. One moment I would see a new train station that looked like something from NASA, and the next I would see a corrugated iron shack in a rice paddy. This was my first glance into this dynamic world of contrasting old and new cultures, both completely foreign to me.

I spent the next month running all around South Korean, visiting everything from the palaces, to Buddhist temples, to PC rooms, which are internet cafes that are similar to Mount Michael’s computer lab but with blue lights and a heavy smell of cup-of-soup. I even had a chance to visit senior Ricky Cheng in his hometown of Hong Kong. The cities of Seoul and Hong Kong are both huge, bustling metropolises crowded by mountains. Seoul’s buildings mostly look about thirty years old and are usually not more than 60 stories tall.

In Hong Kong however, most of the buildings are enormous and impressive. Hong Kong is much denser than Seoul and is right on the ocean, surrounded by high, misty mountains. Because of this, the city has grown up instead of out. The city of Hong Kong is divided up into different regions which include Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, Lantau, and the New Territories.

The heat in Hong Kong is incredible and is accompanied by stifling humidity. It was the closest thing to a jungle that I have ever experienced. At one point in my stay there, the temperature reached 44 degrees Celsius which is around 111 degrees Farenheit.
Seoul, however has a much more moderate climate, similar to that of Omaha’s. It doesn’t get too hot but definitely experiences the four seasons.

The Seoul metro area is inhabited by 23 million people, making it the second largest metropolis in the world just behind Tokyo, Japan. The density of Seoul is twice that of Omaha. Seoul has thousands of apartment buildings, each at least ten stories high. These are offset by parks, lakes, streams, and pathways bustling with residents riding bikes, running, walking their dogs or playing basketball. Because of the population density, the large parks are used much more frequently than in Omaha and are popular places for all sorts of activities.

Nearly every day spent in Seoul, I took either the bus or the subway or both. Lee’s home is about half an hour from the center of Seoul by subway and thus the subway was very useful for us. Seoul’s subway system is one of the largest in the world and has nine lines transporting over eight million people a day. I got so accustomed to using public transport that when I returned to Omaha it felt strange to get back in my car and drive instead of just hopping on the subway.

I traveled with junior JeaWoo Park and his father across the Korean peninsula to the Seoraksan mountain range near the eastern coast. The trip from Seoul was only about four hours long and was mountainous the entire way. When we reached the Seoraksan mountains I was shocked at how different they are from any I had seen in America. They are much rockier and more jagged than even the “Rocky” mountains of Colorado. We climbed for a while and reached a Buddhist temple. It was so much different from the cathedrals of the western world. It consisted of about eight or nine buildings each with different shrines and elaborate roofs, ornate golden statues and beautiful paintings. Not far from the temple is a giant statue of Buddha.

As I flew out of Seoul, I got one last look at the massive concrete jungle that I had called home for nearly a month. I headed home to my own city of Omaha which is over 40 times smaller. Approaching Omaha from the west, I saw its entirety, spread out on an endless plain. The contrast of these two worlds was an incredible shock to me and will never leave my mind. - Chris Antonelli