Cham Jinju

The Korean government recently flew some former Peace Corps volunteers that served in the country during the 1960s. I've come across a few stories in the last week regarding this, so I'll bite and give it time here on my blog (audience of two, including myself).

This particular story is by a columnist based in Everett, Washington, writing about a guy who served in Jinju, a city I visited for the first time only recently. You'll find all the latest news on Jinju linked at the bottom of this page. I'm sure the man, William McCloy, was blown away at the changes. He met a Korean woman while here and ended up marrying her and taking her back to the states.

The 64-year-old Edmonds area man served as an English teacher in South Korea. He met wonderful friends and students, but also saw great need. He remembers struggling to stay warm, and teaching Korean health workers about basic hygiene.

Jinju is another one of those scary cities I mentioned a few posts ago, and I did meet a guy at the bus station who was mentally ill and told me he was in town to pick up his meds. Probably a case of a small sample size. It's just a backwater town, very industrial, with several clusters of smokestacks that have got to be pouring something very evil into the air at a high rate. I know a guy who was born in Jinju, but was adopted by an American family shortly after birth. He moved to Jinju to teach English for a few months, I'm sure in part, to reconnect with his hometown if not find his parents outright. He lasted about two weeks before moving up to Seoul for the duration.

Like Cheonan, Jinju gets the "historical city" tag due to the fact that there's not much there there's a castle there. I took a quick look at the Jinju Wikipedia page. Sounds like someone who works for the city of Jinju has been doing a little work on it:

The Nongae Festival, held in May each year commemorates and celebrates the sacrifice of the beautiful and patriotic gisaeng (professional Korean entertainer) Nongae's suicide-assassination of a Japanese general together with the 70,000 Koreans who lost their lives in the battle of Jinju Castle during the Imjin War.

Actually, there's a link in the above quote that goes to this page, which is a very nice photo essay (possibly written by the same person that wrote the wiki) on a blog detailing the Nongae Festival. I'm even half tempted to go back and check it out.

Slight tangent here: while doing a search for the Peace Corps folks revisiting Korea I came up with this goofy story about a local-boy-makes-good from Rhode Island who teaches English in Korea and does photography as a hobby. Basically, the story is an interview with him about Korea. Nothing wrong with that. Everyone gets 15 minutes and all that. He's thinking of joining the Peace Corps by the way. Hopefully he'll have a blog. The world needs a few more. A-hem.

And in case you're wondering, Cham Jinju, or really Charm Jinju is the tourist slogan, which gets a few points, in the great contest of dorky Korean city slogans, because it works in both English and Korean -- 참 (pronounced "cham") means true or genuine. Close enough to charm.