I Got Korean Love

Korea does Project Runway

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National Tragedy Becomes Personal in Director Kim’s ‘Crossing’

Hunt for Hidden Gems

Applicants for the open audition for ‘‘Dream Girls” practice in a rehearsal room. According to the OD Musical Company, about 1,200 people applied for roles in the Korean production of “Dream Girls,” which will be staged in March next year. / Courtesy of OD Musical Company

Open Auditions Pave Way for New Musical Talent
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Enjoy Savory Dumplings at Jonny Dumpling

Jonny Dumpling is located in Itaewon and is famous for its scrumptious Chinese dumplings. Pay a visit to the restaurant and you will be offered soft and delicate crispy-coated dumplings at a reasonable price. / Korea Times Photo by Han Sang-hee

The rainy season has come, complete with wetness and a summery chill, prompting people tend to search for comfort food. With their chubby shape and delicate texture, dumplings have always been a favorite among Korean during windy days.
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“If North Koreans Could See the Beef Protests…”

That’s what Chosun Ilbo blogger has been wondering about. The author has been to North Korea and reports that anyone there would leap at the chance to eat the US beef which South Koreans are rejecting, and includes several photos of cows in farming villages there.

The day that North Korean citizens eat beef is the day that a cow has died from overwork or disease.

Even though they can buy other meats, because they have to kill the cow themselves and it provides them with food, they do not normally think of it as a food animal. The beef I ate in North Korea was totally dry and had not a drop of grease, like eating a tire. This is because the only cows they can eat have been worked to the bone for 10 to 15 years.

Cows less than 30 months old are for the wealthy, of course — high-ranking politicians and army commanders.

In some areas there are special farms for raising calves for those elites, and ordinary people may not enter them.

In North Korea, lacking adequate fuel supplies, all work is done with cows instead. There is heavy reliance on wagons and carts pulled by cows. In the event of war these carts would be unable to manuever through the mountainous Korean peninsula, but their use continues to expand.

If a farming village has no cows it cannot farm. So it is rare to see a fattened cow in a world where even humans cannot eat. Before these hungry times the villages used to take great pride in setting their prize bulls to fight one another.

In the mid-1990s, when many people were starving to death, anyone who was caught eating cow would be publicly executed. Failure to properly take care of a farm cow leading to its death meant long imprisonment.

Prison sentences for eating a cow are from 5 to 10 years.

The cows sent by former CEO Jeong Ju-yeong were actually put to work on farms, and it is said that they had a hard time adjusting to North Korean farm work after having perviously had an easy life and eaten only good food in North Chosun. According to defectors, almost none of the cows delivered by Jeong Ju-yeong were fit for heavy loads.

It is believed that later they were sent to the army, which did have enough provisions.

Now the Rodong Shinmun is propagandizing that South Chosun people are in an anti-government struggle, with headlines like “South Chosun Citizens Will Not Eat US Beef Over 30 Months Old” and “American Cows Are Crazy Cows”. But the people of North Korea find this very difficult to understand. North Koreans think that the South Korean government, the US-created puppet state, is forcing the people of South Chosun to eat beef that even Americans won’t eat because it has mad cow disease.

People who listen to the government or the radio think that the population of South Chosun is in the grip of hunger.

At the end of the 1990s, tons of chilled beef from Germany was brought to North Korea. North Korea asked for it because otherwise it was to be destroyed for potentially containing mad cow disease. It is said the army and the citizens of Pyeongyang battled for the right to eat this beef.

Criticism of the beef eaten by Americans and two million gyopos as “crazy cows” strikes me as a little excessive. In the view of hungry North Koreans, the beef protests are nothing but an outrage.

Source

US Beef Inspections Begin at Gyeonggi Warehouses

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US Begins Preparations for NK’s Delisting

The United States is preparing to remove North Korea from a terrorism blacklist now that the North has submitted its nuclear declaration.

U.S. President George W. Bush notified Congress on Thursday of his administration’s decision to take the North off its list of state terrorism sponsors.

In making the notification, Bush said the North had not engaged in any terrorist activities in the past six months and thus had met basic requirements for delisting.

The North will be taken off the list on August eleventh unless the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives formally express opposition. The North’s envisioned removal comes 20 years after it was blacklisted for the 1987 bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed all 155 people aboard.

Meanwhile, Bush also announced he was ending trade sanctions imposed on North Korea under the Trading With the Enemy Act from one-oh-one p.m., Korean time.

Source

GNP Examines Follow Up to Beef Import Resumption

The ruling Grand National Party (GNP) has begun examining follow-up measures to new rules for U.S. beef imports that went into effect Thursday.

GNP Floor Leader Hong Joon-pyo and other senior lawmakers said the government achieved its goal of restricting beef imports to meat from cattle less than 30 months old. They urged a stop to political wrangling over the issue, saying that beef market reopening has gone according to procedure.

The ruling camp said it would work with the government and seek to enhance quarantine inspections and place-of-origin labeling of imported beef to ensure public safety.

Meanwhile, the GNP said it would positively consider opposition parties’ demand to revise a law on livestock epidemic prevention and to vote freely on the revision in the National Assembly. In addition, the ruling camp said it could discuss with the opposition a parliamentary review of the beef talks.

Source

S. Korea Saw 4th Largest Growth in No. of Millionaires

North Korean Refugee Students Increasing, Still Face High Drop-Out Rates