So, Ric’s definitely of the mountains, and I am most certainly from the coast.  Debates have raged throughout our relationship over altitude, humidity, the merits of salt air, and the beauty of the world from a mountain top.  We won’t even get started on what you call the thing you put your groceries in at the supermarket.  (For the record, it’s a CART, Westerners, not a “buggy”.)  Something we love about Busan is that it is a coastal city surrounded by mountains….the best of both worlds.

One of the things that has really surprised me is how similar coastal cultures are, despite being hundreds or thousands of miles apart.  Last summer, we spent at week at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, North Carolina.  There, the indomitable Karen Willis Amspacher taught us about coastal culture in Down East and showed us similarities between other working waterfronts on the Mid-Atlantic coast.  What I have been most impressed by is that the similarities aren’t confined to American waterfronts.

There exists here in Busan some of that same cultural common ground shared by any community that has made its living from the sea.  We recently visited Tae Jong Dae, an oceanside park on the edge of the city.  You can imagine how at home I felt when I saw the monument to sea captains in the photos below.

These monuments made me think of the ones along the waterfront in Morehead City and at the Core Sound museum honoring ship’s captains who worked the Atlantic coast where I grew up.

I love this common bond, this honoring of the men who make their lives from the ocean, be it the Atlantic or the Pacific.  So, imagine my further surprise when, today at the Busan Museum, we found the following plaque in the folklore section:

The exhibit talks about a type of folk plays in Busan that are based on the songs fishermen sang as they hauled fish from the sea.  If that’s not our own menhaden chantymen, I don’t know what is.

So I guess I’m writing today’s post for two reasons.  The first is for Karen Willis Amspacher, to remind her that her work is part of a collective worldwide culture that is shared by all men and women who work along the seashores.  And the second is to remind myself that the more I travel, the more I see the ways in which we, as a people, are fundamentally the same.  We work, we learn, we love our families, we try to honor our earth and those who come before us.

For those of you ex pats in Busan, Tae Jong Dae and the Busan Museum are certainly worth the trip, particularly if you want to know more about where you live.  And for those of you stateside, stop by and see Karen at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center at the end of the road on Harkers Island.  Learn a little more about the place where you live.  The fight to balance working and preserving our maritime habitats has played a role in all of human history and will continue to do so.  Fisheries and wet land management issues become more vital every year as our society advances.  This is a global issue. Learn about it.  Learn where you food comes from and what life is like for the people who make their living feeding you.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Busan, Core Sound, Korea