{"id":5191,"date":"2020-11-22T22:59:56","date_gmt":"2020-11-23T06:59:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5191"},"modified":"2020-11-22T23:02:44","modified_gmt":"2020-11-23T07:02:44","slug":"korea-blog-michael-gibbs-island-hopping-travelogue-a-korean-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5191","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: Michael Gibb’s Island-Hopping Travelogue “A Korean Odyssey”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Modern South Korea made its orchestrated debut on the world stage with the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Since that time, the most memorable English-language travel narratives about this country have been written by Englishmen. Simon Winchester\u2019s\u00a0Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles<\/em><\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0which came out the year of the Games, seems to remain the best-known, though as supplementary reading I always recommend Clive Leatherdale\u2019s lesser-known\u00a0To Dream of Pigs<\/em>, the chronicle of a journey around the country taken in the same time and published in the early 1990s. Over the past decade, during which Korea has made a fuller return to the global zeitgeist, a few more such books have appeared: Graham Holiday\u2019s culinary travelogue\u00a0Eating Korea<\/em><\/a>, for instance, or Michael Booth\u2019s\u00a0Three Tigers, One Mountain<\/em><\/a>, an exploration of northeast Asia given over in large part to Korea. What keeps bringing these Brits?<\/p>

For the London-born Michael Gibb, author of the new book\u00a0A Korean Odyssey: Island-Hopping in Choppy Waters<\/em>, the attraction feels atavistic. \u201cJust as a hiker salivates at the prospect of scrambling over a mountain range or an equestrian glows at the prospect of galloping across a far-flung grassland,\u201d he writes, \u201cI get giddy thinking about ferry trips to remote outlying islands,\u201d especially \u201cthe storm-ravaged, history-rich, guano-splattered archipelagos of South Korea.\u201d Even when transplanted to the other side of the world, it seems, a man from an island not known for its pleasant weather will seek out more of the same. Gibb currently lives with his Korean wife and young daughter on Hong Kong\u2019s Lamma Island, where he relishes each summer, which begins \u201cdark and thundery, oppressive enough to transform the jolliest of friends into miserable wretches,\u201d then turns into \u201cclear blue skies and enough heat to melt your brains.\u201d<\/p>

In the 1990s, Gibb lived here in Seoul \u2014 or rather, in the altogether different Seoul that existed in the 1990s. \u201cIt was far from easy dealing with a complex language, a feisty cuisine, and complex social etiquette,\u201d he recalls. \u201cThe shove in the back while boarding a bus was not welcomed. Testy nationalism and insular world views alienated me. Motorbikes roaring down sidewalks instead of on the street boiled my blood.\u201d By all accounts, the still freshly developed nation was indeed more reckless and slipshod all around in those days. \u201cPlanes fell out of the sky, bridges collapsed, gas pipes exploded, the top of a bus was shorn off by a low bridge, and one of my former students and my wife\u2019s cousin were both crushed when a shopping mall collapsed.\u201d The collapse was presumably that of the\u00a0Sampoong Department Store<\/a>\u00a0in 1995, which killed more than 500 people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Modern South Korea made its orchestrated debut on the world stage with the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Since that time, the most memorable English-language travel narratives about this country have been written by Englishmen. Simon Winchester\u2019s\u00a0Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles,\u00a0which came out the year of the Games, seems to remain the best-known, though […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-korea-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5191"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5196,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5191\/revisions\/5196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}