As I'm sure many of you know, Valentine's Day took place on Monday this week. While it's true that the observance of Valentine's Day (밸런타인데이) is different in Korea than it is in most of North American and Western Europe it's not really a subject that I considered writing about. I did, however, receive chocolate from a few of my female students ( Read more... )

Last weekend I went to see an exhibit on pre-contact Andean civilizations at the National Museum of Korea. This special exhibition contains 351 artifacts from 20 different civilizations - including the Moche, Chimu, and Incas among others - on loan from nine different museums in Peru* and will be open to visitors through 28 March. While taking ( Read more... )

One of the bigger news stories from last month was the announcement that an Indonesian tribe, the Cia-Cia from the area around Bau-Bau on Buton Island, will adopt the Korean alphabet (Hangeul) as its official writing system. This decision, undertaken after consultation with the Hunminjeongeum Research Institute, made it into several media outlets ( Read more... )

Korea's traditional calender has its origins from the Chinese lunisolar calender (夏曆), which is used to build sexagenary cycles using a combination of ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Stems. Without getting into too much detail the former system is based on a belief during the Shang Dynasty that there were ten suns that cycled through the sky ( Read more... )

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One of the remarkable things about Korea is the degree of syncretism that takes place between religions. While there are several 'universal truths' to be found within the world's belief systems it's not often that they borrow from one another to the extant that they do here. Take, for example, the following sign that I encountered a couple of ( Read more... )

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When I mentioned sebae (세배) - the tradition of bowing to one's elders for the lunar new year - in an earlier entry I hardly thought that I would have further reason to write about the subject until next year. Guess that was a premature conclusion ( Read more... )

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Next week is the start of my winter vacation - a rather limited five days - and since I never got around to planning any international trips my current plan is to spend the time exploring a new part of Korea, in particular the province of 경상남도 (Gyeongsangnam-do) in the southeast of the country ( Read more... )