To Dream of Pigs Quotes

Nearing Pusan the railway joined the coast. A rusting coaster sat impaled on the rocks, its holded bow rearing out of the water like a frozen fish gaping for air. In a cove beyond the ever-present security fence white-vested soldiers went through their knee-jerks. The train swung round a headland, exposing mile upon mile of white, rectangular, apartment blocks, like cigarette packets standing end to end. It was my first glimpse of Pusan.

Pusan is South Korea's largest port and second largest city, with a population of four million. It lies at the south-east corner of the Republic, diagonally opposite of Seoul, and is the stepping-off point for the Japanese port of Shimonoseki. Unlike Seoul, which bore the brunt of the changing fortunes of the Korean War, Pusan was never occupied by communist forces and bears none of the visible scars of war. It did, however, in the darkest days of 1950, accomodate four million refugees fleeing from Kim Il Sung, many of whom stayed on. Pusan's cosmopolitanism and refugee legacy saddles the city with the reputation of criminal hotspot.

...Pusan is long and twisted. Its major thoroughfares choke with traffic at all hours. On the map the city resembles a misappen tree, stunted branches spilling outwards.


Any charms Pusan posessed did not reveal themselves lightly. Before the Olympic Games yachtsmen complained about the polluted waters of Suyong Bay, close to a favorite tourist area. Floating garbage threatened to rip off the rudders, and crews refused to enter the water to clean their hulls. This prompted an unprecidented change to Olympic rules, permission being given for the boats to be rasied from the water and cleaned on land.

Nor does Pusan earn brownie points for its official bumph, wish is full of Doland Duck English - excusable, comical and even lovable elsewhere, but not in a city of Pusan's resources. 'The beloved trade mark of Pusan is among Koreans,' declaired one tourist pamphlet, nonsensically.

Pusan seemed even more compressed than Seoul, its hills close and more claustrophobic, its traffic still slower.

Waiting at a bus-stop one blustery evening I was treated to the force of Pusan's stink. Korean drains are covered by paving stones with cut-away hand-holes at either end. The hand-holes permit a free view of the passing sewage and ample opportunity to inhale its stench.

He was aggrivated at Korea's obsession with filching tourists as a means of demonstrating her modernity. He examined my entrance ticket and remarked upon its expense. Not the expense of buying it, but of making it - glossy paper with colour pictures. They were always like this in Korea. Bus tickets would have sufficed, at a fraction of the cost, except that in Korea appearances are everything.

It was, perhaps, disadvantageous to visit Korea after having known Japan, for Japan presents most Western visitors with a shattering dose of culture shock. Korea is subtler, more restrained, offering little to compete with Japan's sheer spectacle - for example, Japan's Sumo wrestlers, her tea economy, lava baths, awesome Mt. Fuji, love hotels, bullet trains, pachinko parlours, street bunting, dragon dances, A-bomb museums in Hiroshima and Nakasaki, the dawn calls of her sweet potato sellers.

Korea's culture has absorbed so much from China, Japan and America, and lost so much through erosion, banishment, and subjugation, that, to her detractors, little remains that can be called truly Korean, other than her ondol underfoot heating, her hangul language, and her kimchi. Korea, I felt, is enjoyed not by seeing but by being. The name 'Chosun' (Land of Morning Calm) hints at the softness of her real charm. A night out in provincial Korea is to wander the market-place or stroll the waterside in some fishing port.