The Doors

I love the casually displayed
art/entrance

First a disclaimer: this is not a post about Jim Morrison's group. Those boys were very talented, and the idea  of teaching "Riders on the Storm" to a class is still very amusing to me.¹

Nope. The title of this post is based on the photos in it, many of which are doors. I arrived forty minutes early for a lesson last week, and decided to take a walk. I was not very familiar with the neighborhood, and the rain was off bothering someone else, so I got off the main road and took a look around.

I was inspired by my friend Aaron Klenke, of Detroit MI. I believe he just wanders around during his lunch break taking pictures of things he finds interesting. And one set of his photos was doors. I found them fascinating, and it occurred to me that you, dear reader, might find some of the doors here in Busan fascinating as well.

Not a fun walk, but scenic.

The doors I'm showing you today are all from this walk. To me, they are mostly familiar, though not unremarkable. They share another thing in common which I failed to capture with the lens:

They all open up directly onto the street, unless you can clearly see otherwise. In taking these photos, I did not trespass, or walk up anyone's driveway.

Isn't this the same as the
other door, but painted white?

I did, however, walk up a serious hill. The photo doesn't do it justice. In Busan I don't think you can move more than a mile in a straight line without either going up a hill or into the sea.

Definitely not Kansas.

Which is the one thing that I bounce back and forth between loving and hating about Korea. It's not familiar, and that is frustrating at times. But it's also fascinating, and exciting, and fun.

I'm a bit amazed to find that I still feel that way after more than fifteen years. The frustration is still real, but it is mostly a background noise level of annoyance. It's like having a temperamental car for a long time, the kind where you have to jiggle the key just right to get it out of the ignition, and pump the gas just right to start it, and you can't unlock the driver's side door. But it is predictably difficult, and it gets you where you are going. And you have a history with it, driving your friends around, shopping, road trips.

The big difference is that a car wears out; the problems get worse, not better. But many of Korea's problems are improving: Busan is way more foreigner-friendly than when I first arrived, part of which includes many people being able to speak English. There are bike lanes in some places and a public bicycle program that has cute yellow bikes all over the place (though not in any of my pictures). The food situation is unbelievably better, including restaurants and groceries.

The same hill from further up. I walked up that road and didn't die!

Busan has become objectively more comfortable for foreigners, and I have adapted to it as well. I am comfortable enough to stay, but uncomfortable enough to be a bit challenging.

A very common,
short, cheap, door.

I still find neighborhoods like this interesting. I have heard people say that walking around these neighborhoods is boring, that they are all the same. True, they are often composed of the same elements, but isn't all of life?

I love seeing how people have adapted to the space that is available. It's fun to see homes that are so very clearly made by human hands. I know, it's all made by people, but in the photo of the hill above you can see some big apartment blocks. How much fun is it to walk around in one of those? And those are not the really big ones. Our current home is across from LG Metro City. (That's a Google Map link.) It is a complex of about a hundred big apartment buildings, in the 30 story range, I think.

It's a good use of space. I understand that the environmental impact is less than when people are spread out all over the place. But when you walk around LG Metro City it feels like a maze of twisty concrete passages, all the same. With minor landscaping differences.

Former house, now garden. Someday likely an apartment.
I suspect that lots like this are bought up by developers.

Step right out onto asphalt. Be sure
to look both ways!

But these homes are different. There is some variation in style, building material and color, their shapes fit the landscape, and they don't all stare out at the road with identical concrete and glass faces.

They clearly date from a time when cars were for rich people: there are few parking spaces, and you often have to walk past a few houses to get to the street. I've lived in a house like this here in Busan. In the summer, your windows are all open because air conditioning is also for rich people. You can smell what the people in nearby houses are cooking, and hear their rice cooker hiss. If your Korean is better than that of a toddler, you can probably understand what they are saying (I couldn't). When you go in and out you bump into them, and you can hear their kids playing, complaining, crying, living.

In neighborhoods like this people often leave their doors open, for ventilation, or because they are going in and out. There is always a mudroom, usually with a shoe closet. They don't deal with very much mud, but the concept is the same: dirty shoes don't come all the way inside. House slippers, socks or feet only on the floor.

My family will be moving to a different home in less than two weeks. On moving our current home will feel violated because from the time the first objects get removed until the last object is placed, the door will be propped open and people will be wearing shoes inside. I will be wearing shoes inside, and I know from experience that it feels wrong, like swearing in front of your mom.² It's odd how much of a difference it makes seeing your home without feeling it in the soles of your feet. And even though my shoes don't add more than an inch of height, I feel like I need to be careful going through the doorways, as though I am a giant invading my own home.

A hilltop neighborhood. To the right, homes, to the left, the roofs of homes.

Doors are fascinating. We feel such a strong need to divide spaces, especially private from public. When I lived in Nepal, I found that the culture there was much less divided. The family found it somewhat strange that sometimes I would go into my room and lock the door. They kind of sort of accepted that I slept in a room by myself, but I think I was still considered eccentric for not sleeping in the room with the other boys.³ 

Looking over the roof tops from the road. You can see some of the same
buildings on the hill in the background as in the previous picture. 

Monster cat door? Coal delivery?
Who knows?

During the day, most people in the villages left their homes open. They would often be nearby, working in the fields, collecting wood for the fire, carrying water, or doing other necessary chores. The women were almost always nearby. When I walked places, it was very common to find houses with the door open, and no one in sight. At first I always locked my door when I went to work, but it started to feel weird, far too paranoid. So I stopped.

When you live in a different culture, you have to have some sort of separation. Everyone does. The two main questions are: "Where do you draw your lines?" and "How militantly do you defend them?"

I suppose a third question could be "How flexible are your lines?" but it seems to be a blend of the first two questions to me. I consider my younger self to have been very flexible, though far from extremely so. The extremely flexible volunteers stayed, got married, took Nepali nicknames, wore Nepali traditional clothes. I shut my door to those things.

Matching door and window. I can
guarantee there is a bathroom
behind the window.

I came directly to Korea from Nepal, and stayed for a couple of weeks to visit with my friend, Andy. I then spent three months in America⁴ before returning to Korea to get a job. In Nepal, I spent much of my first year isolated, surrounded by Nepalis (or Nepalese, as non-Nepali like to say). In Ranitar, there were no other foreigners. It was a village, so there weren't really that many other people. During my second year I stayed in a few different places, worked with other volunteers, and met a lot of Nepali people. And my limits, my doors, shifted back and forth, opening and closing, sometimes easily, sometimes with difficulty.

So when I came to Korea, it barely felt foreign to me. Compared to Nepal, it felt no more foreign than any big American city. Except that the writing was all gobbledygook and the people made jibber-jabber sounds instead of talking normal. 

Once during my first year in Korea, I was out walking with Andy and his future wife, Sarah. It was her last week in Korea before heading home, and she was letting us know all the things she was looking forward to.

More creative gardening, and lovely doors. 

One thing she said that she was looking forward to was not being stared at all the time, and I was kind of surprised. I asked if she was really being stared at, and she told me to look around.

I did look around, and was surprised to find that she was right! People were staring at us! But I immediately noticed two big differences from the way it worked in Nepal. First, in Korea people stopped staring as soon as they saw that I noticed them, and second, it was not really everyone. In Nepal, if you look around at any given time, you would clearly see the eyes of everyone nearby. And it took a long stare back to make them look away. Way too much work for me, though I probably did so at the beginning. In Nepal I would read a book while waiting for a bus, and people would literally watch me read the book! As though they had nothing more entertaining to look at!

Parking lot with two marked spaces. Be sure to set your brake!

I had gotten used to constant knocking on my personal space door in Nepal, and so Korea's light brushing of it was well below my threshold of perception.

That was the end of the 20th century, well before cell phones and easy internet access. Nowadays it is much more rare for me to get attention just for being a huge, hairy foreigner. I am still a bit prone to behavior that calls attention to myself: laughing loudly, singing, speaking English in my loud, foreign-person voice. And small children still notice me. As my hair grows closer to gray, they are more and more likely to ask if I am Santa Claus, based on reactions to my father. That is some fun attention to receive.

What do you mean there's no space for a garden with
this home? I don't need a parking space!

Everyone still has to decide for themselves what is acceptable in terms of being looked at or talked to in public. I've heard from people who get upset very quickly, and some who enjoy it. And like so many things in life, you can't just not make a decision on it, because no decision is a decision.

 

The view from my destination, looking back at the hill I had just walked.
It's to the right of the electric spiderweb pole.

Of course, doors do more than just separate us from the outside. The door you choose says something about you as well. Granted, all the doors I've lived behind in Korea have clearly stated, "I am a renter, and do not decorate," but people who own their houses have more leeway. I love the way some people have literally brought life to their neighborhood with plants. The unexpected garden on a city street brings a smile to my face every time, even though I see it a couple of times each week. And the wall-top flowers I discovered on this walk almost seemed to sing, "Welcome to our home! Don't mind the broken glass embedded in the top of the wall!"⁵

I'm talking about doors on different levels, here.

My last observation on doors is that I love seeing adaption to the landscape in Busan. A house with entrances on different floors, like the the one pictured above, would be such a fun place to grow up. The little cat or coal door is fun to wonder about. I've seen doors of odd sizes here, and gone to bathrooms which I had to duck to enter. It's similar to houses built to fit odd-shaped lots, and the tiny parking lot and garden built on lots that probably used to have small houses. Fitting buildings into odd lots is quite common in a city this old,⁶ and I find myself forgetting that almost every building with double doors I've ever entered has has one of them locked. Sometimes labeled, sometimes not. Often in places where there is a lot of foot traffic, and you have to wait for someone coming the other direction before you can go through. Standing next to a locked door.

Yes, doors can be frustrating, but it's worth going through into someplace new.

---

1 During the long instrumental I imagine the students getting restless, and me shushing them and telling them to let the music wash over them, like driving your convertible with the top down in a thunderstorm, driving to nowhere just driving to feel the wind and the rain and the power of the car.
2 Of course I mean my own mom. It does not bother me to swear in front of your mom. Unless you are my brother. Or cousin. Or aunt or uncle. That's even worse, because I certainly don't want to swear in front of my grandmother. Or any of the other little old ladies at church, for that matter.
3 To this day, I still do not like sleeping in rooms with strangers. I can barely tolerate sharing a room with my children, my own flesh and blood. Though this may trace back to times when each of them shared a bed with me and kicked mercilessly in their sleep.
4  The time length was an arbitrary decision, but a good one, I think. If I had stayed longer, I would have found a job, and a job leads to stuff, and stuff is an anchor. Though my parents will tell you it is not a very effective anchor, based on how much of my stuff is in their basement and how far I am from it.
5 I do not know whether or not there was broken glass embedded in the top of this particular wall, but sometimes a writer has to set aside truth in favor of humor.
6 You could say it happens... a lot.