What’s the best thing someone can hand you, when you’ve cycled, feeling way too hot? Iced water! Again! The visit to the Bicycle Museum started with a highlight and should end with a double-highlight.
As I enter – after I’ve cycled and feeling way too hot – I get handed a bottle of iced water. The staff is extremely nice, agrees to charge my phone and since the young guy selling the tickets speaks well English so discuss my trip, the Korea(s) and the museum.
He is the first person who asked me, if I am not afraid of a nuclear attack on South Korea. I am to baffled that I doesn’t cross my mind to ask him his opinion. I feel extremely safe in Korea and well – if a nuclear attack should hit while I am here – I will have to deal with it then. Sounds naive but in a case like this – it would be to overwhelming to always have this option in mind.
The museum itself is filled with a number of curiosities that evolve around bicycles – a tandem where you sit next to each other up to bikes where you sit ten meters above ground and different ways to push and a history of the bicycle. The explanations are mainly in Korean, but the exhibits entertain me nonetheless.
There is even a 4-D-theatre. I am expectiong a bicycle-related-theme for the movie so I am at first disappointed when it shows a little-kids-movie. It comes as a fairly common, predictive story – one is the clumsiest, get’s lost but mom finds it and everyone is happy. I get ready to go as any German movie aiming at this audience would be finished now and everyone would go home happy.
Not so a Korean movie – it continues with a sudden story twist. A forest fire! The birds flee, of course the clumsy ones has some difficulties and I loose my confidence for a happy end. I remember the Cameroonian myth Marthe from the Cameroonian Ministry of Education told at a primary school in my home town. This one didn’t have a Happy End either – everyone died. Not all places in the world have the same longing to present kids with an easy ending, where everyone lives happily ever after.
So, the birds where trapped. The fire was everywhere. In front of them. Behind them. To their left and right. Mother bird looks up into the sky – she could fly off and be safe. But to no avail – all her kids would die. So she gathers them under her wings and hovers down.
The next morning, the fire has died down, everything lies in ashes and mother bird is dead. BUT – all her kids have survived under her wings!
Still – I am a bit disturbed by this movie when my new friend asked me how I liked it. From a Korean point of view it’s a very good and logical ending. Parents give everything for their kids, to help them, provide for them and support them. Whereas in German – mind me, parents support their kids and love them – we see things a bit differently and independence, “standing on your own feet” is am important part in supporting children, rather them giving them everything they need directly. And this – giving everything for your kids – is symbolized by the mother bird who just died for her kids.
Wit this food for thought, I get my bike ready to go as I hear a voice call out my name – and get handed two more bottles of iced water!
But… but… who will care for the baby birds then? :O
Nicole agrees that this is a bad ending of a story for children! 🙁
Oh I left out some details of the story. They are being found by a dog and ita owner who they became friends with the day before and they take them in and everybody is taken care of.
Better?