Cozmopolitan Sunkyoung

방콕 – ‘방에 콕 처박혀 있다는’ 그 방콕이 아니라 진짜 방콕으로 6월 초에 출장을 갔었다. 타이 항공을 탄 것은 처음이었는데 착륙 전에 승무원이 바구니에 담긴 난을 나눠줬다.
Bangkok – not as a joke (in Korean, we refer Bangkok to  an acronym. ‘Bang’ mean a ‘room’ and ‘kok’ is a mimetic word for picking, poking, and in this case it describes one’s motion of placing their body tightly at the (corner of) room. So the full meaning is ‘to be stuck in the room, especially having no plan to go out’. Therefore, when a Korean says he or she is in Bangkok, they could mean either they are indeed in Bangkok or they only stay at home. But personally I think we would hardly say this term to foreigners because it requires this long explanation as I just did.) but as a real destination I went on a business trip to Bangkok. It was the first time for me to fly with Thai Airways, and before landing, flight attendants distributed passengers orchids in baskets.

로마자를 쓰는 인도네시아와 달리 태국은 타이 고유 문자를 쓰기 때문에 이들의 문자가 내 시선을 끌어당겼다. 타이 글자를 들여다보면서 드는 생각이 외국인들이 우리 나라에 왔을 때 한글을 보고 나와 같이 느꼈을까 싶은 거였다. 이건 어떻게 생겨먹은 글자가 알아먹을 건덕지가 당췌 하나도 없는 것이다. 한국어 어렵다는 외국인들한테 내가 여러 번 말하길 한글이 기본적으로 조음 기관 모양을 본떠 만든 것이라 그 원리를 알면 쉽다고 했다. 그리고 한글 자체가 쉬운 언어라고. 하핫! 물론 내 말에 동의한 외국인은 한 명도 없었다. 그리고 이제서야 그들의 심정을 이해하겠다. 외국어, 특히 완전히 다른 문자를 쓰는 언어는 종류를 막론하고 어렵기는 다 마찬가지라는 것을.
Unlike Indonesia where the Roman alphabet is used, Thailand has their own Thai characters so it caught my eyes. A thought I had looking into Thai letters was that foreigners who encountered Korean characters when they came to Korea for the first time would have felt the same way I did about Thai. It was because this wacky language gave me no single clue about how to figure out. And you know what I often said to those foreigners who complained how difficult Korean was? Korean characters are basically formed by shapes of articulators so once one understands the theory, it will be easy. Moreover, the Korean  itself is an easy language. Haha! Of course, there was no foreigner who agreed with me. Now I’ve come to truly understand how they felt. As for foreign languages, particularly the languages using entirely different characters from one’s mother tongues, are all difficult which ever they are.

택시를 타고 가면서 엘리엣이 창 밖을 가리키면서 “태국에서 눈에 띄는 것 중 하나가 전신주와 전선이야. 선진국에서는 다들 전선을 땅에 묻잖아. 싱가폴도 그렇고.”라고 말했다. 그러고 보니 그랬다. 한국에서도 볼 수 있는 전신주. 그렇다면 이전 포스트에서 했던 이야기에 이어, 선진국과 후진국을 가르는 기준이 전신주를 도로에 세우느냐 아니면 땅에 묻느냐라면 한국은 아직 개도국이네.
In a taxi, Eliette said pointing outside the window, “One of noticeable things in Thailand are telephone poles and cables. You know developed countries all bury them underground. So does Singapore.” Yes, they were indeed. You can see these poles and cables in Korea too. Then, following what I wrote in my previous post, if an indicator for developing and developed countries is whether they set up poles on the streets or bury them underground, Korea is still a developed country.

자카르타의 스타벅스에 이어 방콕에서도 익숙한 장소를 발견했다. 점심 장소로 정한 오봉빵인데 서울에 있을 때 즐겨 찾던 곳 중 하나였다. 엘리엣이 자신에게 익숙한 불어로 쓰여진 문구를 보고 먼저 찾았지만 정작 어떤 곳인지 설명을 해 준 건 나였다. 방콕에서도 오봉빵은 럭셔리 샌드위치 샵이었다. 편한 가격으로 먹을 수 있는 곳은 오봉빵의 탄생지인 미국 뿐인 걸까?
In addition to Starbucks in Jakarta, I again found a place familiar in Bangkok. It was au bon pain we decided to have lunch and this American sandwich place is one of the places I enjoyed in Seoul. It was Eliette who first found the sign written in French, a language most familiar to her, but it was me who actually explained her what kind of place it was. Like in Seoul, au bon pain in Bangkok was also a luxury sandwich shop. Is it only in the US, a hometown of au bon pain, where we can eat its sandwiches at reasonable prices?

원래 우리는 6월 말에 가질 첫 파트너 미팅 장소로 프로젝트 기금 증여국인 일본 동경을 생각했었다. 하지만 비슷한 시기에 열리는 아세안 유행병 대처 및 대응을 위한 실무기술단체의 2차 회의에 파트너 기관으로서 초대를 받았고 여기에 참가하는 일부 인사를 우리 미팅에도 초대를 하게 되어 방콕을 최종 장소로 결정하였다.
Initially we’d planned to hold Partners’ Meeting in the end of June in Tokyo, Japan in consideration of the funding donor of our project. But we happened to be invited as a partner organisation to the second meeting of ASEAN Technical Working Group on Pandemic Preparedness and Response, and some of participants to our own meeting also presented this ASEAN meeting. So, finally we decided Bangkok for the location of our first Partners’ Meeting.

더 많은 사진은 여기에 / More photos at Bangkok, 3-4 June 2009

웹을 돌아다니며 몇 가지 새로운 유행어(流行語)들을 발견(發見)하는데 어디서 어떻게 쓰인 말들인지 궁금하다.
친구(親舊)들아, 나 한국(韓國) 가면 유행어 강습(講習) 좀 부탁(付託)해.

(‘궁금’은 한자(漢字) 제시어(提示語)에 적합(適合)한 낱말이 없어 국어(國語) 사전(辭典)을 찾아봤더니 우리말이네.
‘친구’의 ‘구’자도 헷갈려 하고 ‘부탁’의 ‘부’도 모르고… 유행어보다 한자 공부(工夫) 해야겠다. -_-;)

- ~할 뿐이고

- ~하는 1人

- 오덕/육덕

Today I had a big lunch at Sevi’s with her flatmates and their friends, and had a lot of fun over good food. It was great to go beyond the stagiaires’ boundary and to be in a multicultural environment – well, it is true, though, going to somewhere in Brussels is almost always being surrounded by multi cultures. There were four Spanish/ Catalan, one Bulgarian, one Norwegian and one Korean. However, the best explanation about where I am from I think was the one’s from Madrid. He said, “after growing up in Madrid, but living in the US for two years, and now living in Brussels for five years, I no longer know where I really am from. I have been thinking about posting on identity some day and, in addition to a friend of mine’s case, who has mixed more various places and periods into forming his identity, this guy gave me a good insight on this subject.

Back to the title of this post, while we were talking about French language with which most of us are struggling, one of the Spaniards said as following:

English for business
French for diplomacy
Spanish for love

I think Italians will argue about the last one but I’m quite sure no one would tackle on the first two. Some might replace French with Chinese but it’s not really likely yet.

After all, the objective of (learning foreign) languages can be best achieved when it’s based on one’s own interest and amusement. When the needs come from external-forced- factors, however, it’s hard to maintain one’s motivation. Well, maybe I’m saying this as an excuse of my slow progress in French.

As you can see on my twitter on the right side bar of this blog, I watched ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Weird‘ yesterday, which has ranked #1 in box office here in Korea. The idea of seeing this film came from S whose boyfriend also wanted to watch it because he learned from a local English newspaper that Yongsan CGV offers an English subtitle exclusively for the film. (I guess this aims at promoting the film widely to a lot of foreign residents in town and the location, Yongsan, where there is a US Army Base, makes sense to be chosen for this unusual occasion.)

Since there was a long queue at the box office, we instead decided to get the tickets by ourselves by using the ticket machine. Above the machines, there were the big signs promoting ‘English Subtitle’ on the billboard as well as on the screen and this note was attched on to every machine. Finding this interesting, I took some pictures of the cinema as below. (For bigger pictures, please go to my Flickr site.)

When the movie started, however, we were stunned that it didn’t show any subtitle! As it was an action movie, it didn’t require high Korean proficiency for E who understands the language. But, still, it was very disappointing to us that Yongsan CGV didn’t do properly to inform the audience of the separate schedule for the English subtitle which I believe should have been posted near from the machines.

While S was heading to the toilet, I went back to the machines and confirmed that there was no time schedule around the machines but found the leaflets of time table at the opposite side from the machines. We could have checked the time table before approaching them, but it is also true that, given no additional information about the different screening schedule displayed very close to the machines, we simply were not provided with full information.