While I was looking up stuff I looked at the Suncheon Bay website, but it doesn't make any sense. Right off the bat it has some weird bullshit on the page:
Swampy? It's perhaps the most significant place in the city and you go with "The five coastal Swampy land of the world" to lead off? The only time you see something called Swampy is when a porn star has a bad manager. Even I have no idea what that means. Actually, okay, I think it refers to the bay being the fifth-largest in the world, which I've seen reported by the Suncheon city website (click entry 22). I haven't, however, seen that confirmed elsewhere, and Suncheon Bay never turned up in any books on the significant wetlands of the world. For instance, neither Suncheon nor Korea are even mentioned in this book The World's Largest Wetlands. Matter of fact it's only the second-largest wetlands in Korea. You can take a look at the list compiled by the Ramsar Convention and see that tons in just the first couple countries are larger than Suncheon Bay. That's not a knock against Suncheon, because it is extraordinarily beautiful there, but you can't just say whatever the hell you want because I'm fixin to call you on it.
I sent off an email a while ago to Suncheon to offer my help as a copy editor. It's nice that they do make the effort to include some news on their websites, but Christ, the English portions are either unreadable or factually wrong. I haven't heard back, just as I hadn't heard back from Gangjin, but it occurred to me that there are, like, a few dozen native English speakers working through City Hall plus scores more working in Suncheon public schools. If getting it right were a priority they wouldn't have to rely on unsolicited emails.
Actually, I came across something else interesting while spending Tuesday afternoon writing up the story. From the piece:
The festival's namesake the hooded crane is especially beloved, and practically every exhibit of the Eco-Museum is devoted to it. Classified as a vulnerable species there are roughly 10,000 left in the world, and its numbers are being further reduced by the constant reclamation and development of wetlands in South Korea and China.
However, very few of these birds actually spend time Suncheon, as an estimated 80 percent in 2005-2006 wintered in southern Japan, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
The IUCN Red List page looks to be down now, but I do recall some of the figures on the site, including one which said only about 110 of the 11,000 hooded cranes in the world make their home in Suncheon at some point of the year, compared with the over 10,000 in southern Japan.
1 comment:
I haven't heard back, just as I hadn't heard back from Gangjin, but it occurred to me that there are, like, a few dozen native English speakers working through City Hall plus scores more working in Suncheon public schools. If getting it right were a priority they wouldn't have to rely on unsolicited emails.
It's not a priority, or, more accurately, no one wants to put up the cash required to get it done right. There's also probably a sprinkle of just not giving a shit.
I don't think you'd find anything like that on a Seoul city affiliated site. I don't think you'd find it in Busan or Daegu either.
I'd even suggest it's reflective of that part of the country's attitude about non Koreans, government, economy and history.
If that's the image they want to portray...more power to them. The hub of South Jeolla.
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