The New York Times has a fantastic article by Marie Myung-ok Lee. One a recent trip to North Korea with her mother and father, where her parents were born, and their experience with Korean cuisine and propaganda.

We took meals at restaurants where we were the only customers, and the food seemed to come from the same Western-facsimile kitchen: bread with swirls, bland fried flounder, mayonnaise-based salad served in a martini glass. Finally my mother, weary of the utter weirdness of the place, told our tour guide in Korean that we needed to try some real North Korean food.

The family encountered a “propaganda picnic” on the beach where they were in fact served a traditional Korean meal of Kimchi and Clam Bulgogi. Read on: Lives – Picnic in North Korea – NYTimes.com.

Tell your friends, tell your co-workers, tell your pets if you want. We moved to a brand new server this morning after deciding we were tired of free loading off of our old friends over at KGSM. Update your links, bookmarks, blacklists; double check your readers to reflect the shiny, new web home of Harms-Boone Productions! We’ll keep this site up for a while, but all new content will be posted at http://harmsboone.org

Enjoy

Lee Kyong-hee, 62, tells the story about being reunited, if briefly, with a sister she hasn’t seen since being separated at the end of the Korean War nearly 60 years ago. Lee, her mother (now 100 years old), and other siblings met with their long lost sister at Mount Kumgang in North Korea over the Chuseok holiday.

We had five reunion sessions in total, spending two hours with my sister each time, in addition to a one-hour farewell meeting.

The moment Hye-gyong entered the reunion hall I recognised her immediately even though she looks very different from what I remember about her appearance.

She was 16 years old when I last saw her; she is now 75.

The BBC has her story, and her reflections on the intra-peninsular relationship between the two Koreas and what will need to happen in order for a peaceful reunion to occur:

In helping North Korea I believe the South Korean government shouldn’t expect the situation to change overnight.

It writhed around for a bit in the small plastic bowl before finally dying, the way any animal might after having its head impaled and skin removed. Without hardly flinching the man grabbed another hagfish from the pile, removed the awl-like tool from the cutting board and drove it through the fish’s head as if to say, “hold still, this will only hurt a little.” Nearby a row of old women, ajummas, were splitting clams with a knife.

Welcome to a routine day at Busan’s famous Jagalchi Fish Market. Read the rest of this entry »

We took a trip to Busan (or is it Pusan, you decide!) this weekend for the annual International Film Festival. We’re told it is the largest in all of Asia and in the second largest city in Korea. We’ll have more on all of it soon including details and some photos from the Jagalchi Fish Market. Keep your browsers tuned here for all of it this week. As for now, we’re going to bed.

Cheers.

From time to time we shake things up and make our site a little more user-friendly or change the way we deliver you content. In the beginning we wanted to bring some fancy-looking, podcastable, and printer-friendly versions of each of our posts, and then we ran into some problems with our publishing software deciding to go out to lunch. We also added a photos page with slide shows from each of our picasa pages serving up our most recent pictures from our journey around the Korean peninsula, and recently installed a gadget to allow our mobile users better access to our page. Today we rearranged our links so that their a little more organized and it’s easier for your to find the links you are looking for and know what kind of site you are visiting when you click on one of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Cafe Pascucci is one of the few places open today. A big corporate chain, Pascucci is a cozy cafe in LaFesta catering to the Western tastes many Koreans have for coffee and cafe sandwiches. It stays open for the same reason many big corporate chains stay open during major holidays back home.
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Last month was my first with a new batch of students and classes. I am now teaching all the elementary grades we have at our hogwon. I teach a different subject to each of my classes and it is only a little frustrating.

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We left Goyang immediately after work bound to Jinwi station where we were promised a farming experience. So began our farming experience: three hours on public transportation, two backpacks, a couple of sweatshirts and some basic supplies, a guy named William and the promise of a “once in a lifetime experience” somewhere on the outskirts of Seoul; the ones exactly opposite from the outskirts in which we presently reside, to be exact. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey everyone, we added a nifty little gizmo to our webpage today that lets us make our content more accessible to all your wired readers of ours out there. Now, whenever you go to our page on your iPod touch or Iphone, Android, or blackberry browser, you should get a fancy looking mobile page. We’ve been trying for a while to find a good way of delivering our content to mobile users without compromising our site’s overall style, look, and feel, and we are glad we can do it now. Have a look around the site, and leave a comment letting us know what you think.

As always, thanks for reading.