Asian Travel Inside

This one hour DVD is not a real touristic guide. It is rather the trip of a typical English man in South Korea and his philandering with the country is interesting because he shows a lot, or at least some, and I guess some may say a few or even few, but then, they will be unfair, things about the country, from the DMZ to Cheju Island. This trip is interesting too because this country is holding and detaining, let’s hope we can liberate that detainee soon, the key to one of the sorriest problems and heritages of the Cold War. They only detain one entrance, one rope to it, true. At least five other countries detain one rope to it too, North Korea, China, Russia, Japan, and the USA. Let’s hope the next president of the US will be able and willing to solve that sorry carbuncle boiling at the surface and in the face of the earth. The very British humor of the “guide”, Ian Wright, is often forgetting that his name has a “w” and has “work” as its root and meaning, and he too often righteously in his mind un-righteously in our opinion, forget to work his curiosity and mind and complain about things that are the very charm of this country, the fact that their signs are written in the local language and not English, for one. Has our Ian thought that South Koreans would be entitled to require all signs to be written in their language in England if they yielded to his demand to have all signs written in English in South Korea. But I have seen worse: some American tourists requiring English signs in the middle of the jungle of Sri Lanka, I guess because English is the only language wild elephants understand. “Beware American tourists approaching! DANGER!!”. But the video gives a lot of interesting information and pictures about some aspects of South Korean life, South Korean nature and cities, mountains and harbors, and among other things some short sequences on the tradition the Buddhists keep alive of some martial arts that can be defensive for sure but are first of al a living art, an art of life, a way to turn our deep psyche and meditation alive in out physical body and social life. Martial art as a way to share and communicate. Go there and enjoy that country and concentrate on the old heritage and what the South Korean are making of it, particularly Buddhism, martial arts and Ginseng, the miracle plant that has to be the center of a ritual if you want to enjoy its beneficial and auspicious qualities.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Rating: 5 / 5