Pat and the protest

Here we are in Seoul and, true to form, Pat found a protest.

Before we’d gotten here, we’d heard that there were college students planning to meet in Seoul and protest. What’s the issue? Well, these were—get this!—special education students who were upset that Korea’s new laws about special education permit people from other disciplines (e.g., occupational therapy) to have the same level of licensure as special education teachers. So, we understood, students were going to protest the lessening of teachers’ status. Well, that was enough for Pat.

As we returned from lunch, we saw police forces getting off busses and donning flack jackets and preparing shields. They were coming off busses in droves. There were scores of busses. Pat watched from our hotel window, which overlooked some of the streets where the police busses were arrayed nose to tail with another row of busses overlapping the crack between the nose-and-tail position of the others, in brick-like fashion. Pat couldn’t resist. “I’m going out,” she said.

She got a couple of photos and came back to report a couple of times. She convinced the two young police officers in the top shot to pose for her. And she found that the police had cordoned off an entire main street in the Gwanywhamun area (as shown here; looking east from near the Gwanywhamun Gate, notice the Chongro Tower Building in the background).

As it turned out, it wasn’t the special education students. These were farmers who descended on Seoul to protest the US-RoK free-trade agreement. They had erected a stage and assembled people to demonstrate their concerns. She said the crowd went much farther along the street than this photo shows; it’s from just to the right of the stage. This is a wide street, so there were lots of people. Pat reported that a group of them (not shown here) were carrying petitions and, she surmised, hoping to deliver them to the US Embassy (this neighborhood is thick with Embassies).

So what if it wasn’t about special education? Pat was out there.