(in)Famous at Last!

Well,

Sort of. Korea.net ("The Official Website of the Republic of Korea") is featuring my blog on their front page. As that will be transient, I've taken a screen shot..

Down in Silla Town

Last Friday the family bundled up and off to Gyeongju. We took the train down and on the way I was amused to see the sister campus to where I work looming off on the horizon.



when we got to the yeogwan, Baxter assumed his customary position:


Outside in Gyeongju the evening was frightening:


But it was still autumn when the sun came up:



Squirels were standing on their heads



And the lovely Seokguram Grotto loomed ahead:


As did tumuli
And the harsh streets of Gyeongju (Picture courtesy of Danny):


We wandered through the "open air museum" that is Gyeongju, and ate alarming amounts of sam gyap sal...

You could say it was a good day...

LOL...

Two names my charmingly stumbly Graduate Education student call me..

1) Mona Angry
Which should amuse anyone in the family.

and

2) Mr. Mongo Marry
Which I feel is even better!

Who Wrote the Book of...

Two More Steps Outta Hell....

1) Got a crudload of papers graded.... Academic Writing? Great to teach, a pain to mark.

2) Finished my 250 page textbook edit. Semi-hysterical work and semi-hysterical me. I had to vet, above and beyond the language, if the pages with definitions were correct, and if the fill-in and essay questions were appropriate. Let's just say there was some "thesaurus-using" by whoever created the testing component.

But I R dun....

Prepped for tomorrow's classes and ready to sleeeeeep!

Work Updates.. from hell... where work comes from.. ;-)

Finally.. finally finished the review of The Red Room I've been working on...

It is

available here

for my one reader who wants to read 2000 words about Korean Pain-Porn-Lit (and that's me!) .

Got about 1K words done on "Who Ate Up All The Shinga." This is one of the two reviews I'm doing for the online Korean Review...

But Shinga is a killer book that is fun to read if you like mother/daughter fiction or to read about the development of an author as a child... actually, it's just a pretty good book!

Tomorrow is pain... three sets of essays to grade and about 200 pages to edit...

If I should die tonight, grieve if you want, but my spirit will be light. ;-)

Building Expat Community in Seoul

NOTE: This is cross-posted at MorningCalm

Saturday was the first 2S2 (Second Saturday, 2:00PM) meetup near Anguk Station. For those who don't know, this is an attempt to build to build some community and camaraderie between expats and, we hope, to create a stronger support system for incoming English teachers and professors. For more information you can contact Rob at his blog, Roboseyo. Here's what it looked like at one point:

left to right: Shannon Heit, Roboseyo, Chris Backe, Jo, Joy Iris-Wilbanks, Hayley who came in from Jeollanamdo, Yvonne from Daejon (Not pictured: Joe McPherson, Dan Gray)

This is also associated with a website, the Chatjip expat site which I urge all expats to check out and join. This site has information about 2S2 and is working to create the best online events calendar in Korea for English speakers. It also aggregates headlines and blog posts.

We were extremely lucky to have Shannon Heit, from the Seoul Global Center, attend the meeting and talk to us about what the Global Center offers expats and what she hopes to do in the future. In the past, the Center has focused on business initiatives, but now it is branching out in an effort to support all expatriates. In addition, Shannon hopes to expand the Center's support impact on the web. Shannon can be reached by email at shannon.sgc@gmail.com.

Everyone had a great time, and we will do it all again in a month.

Stay tuned...

Last Weekend

Since it is already this weekend, I suppose I should post about last weekend?


Which was off the Morning Calm Gardens in Cheongpyeong, which is kind of north-east of Seoul. We had gone on this train line before, but discovered that if you took the train from Oksu you ended up in the Cheongyeongri train station and we were able to catch a train, standing room only, within about 15 minutes. We were in the front car with about 10 college students who were heading up to Gapyeong or Chuncheon. They quickly pulled out the beer, then quickly spilled some of the beer, but everyone was in good spirits.



Once we got to the train station it was a short walk to the bus station, where we discovered we had just missed the bus.


So it was a quick taxi ride to the Morning Calm 아짐 고요 Garden. Alas, we had arrived just about at week to late and most of the beautiful leaves were on the ground, though they were made up for, in volume, by gnats. This will certainly be a cool place to visit in Spring. You can see how beautiful it was BEFORE our visit by checking Roboseyo’s site out. By the time we got there, most leaves were on the ground.

We did get to see one of the world's smallest churches (Photo on right has tiny Injun for scale):


Then it was a walk back through town and a samgyapsal lunch/dinner at a fairly backwoods place – it was where the bus drivers went to eat and we were quite the center of attention with the ajumma hovering and cooking our meat for us. Any random little bit of Korean I could pull out was appreciated and we left, full and happy.

On the mugungwha, again standing tickets, and back to Seoul, drinking a coke and a beer on the floor and sitting with slightly fewer students.

This and or that...

With week 10 of classes done the finish line is starting to come clear.. which is a darn good thing as they continue to pile the editing on.. not a bad thing, just a bunch of work at just the time I'm trying to get three book reviews, two newspaper articles, and a paper out of the way so that I can concentrate on the photo-essay that is due in early December. ;-o

Oh yeah, I still have to grade the big essay my Academic Writing students gave me as well as the midterm for the Graduate English Teachers Convo Class.

Consequently, after work today, I bailed on anything productive and instead headed over to Gyeongbokgung Palace to take pictures with my boy Adam from Daejeon. At Gyeongbokgung Station I stopped to take a snapshot of this arch. The arch isn't anything particularly grand, but right next to the arch is the punchline - the metal 'stone' with the inscription:

This gate was made of monolith in imitation of PULLOMUN in CH'ANGDOKKUNG.
It has a legend that once one passes through the gate, he would not be old forever.

That always cracks me up, since I'm pretty sure the Grim Reaper is also out there to make sure I don't stay old forever.

Anyway, Adam and I and a guy from Australia cruised around, took pictures and drank coffee. Later Adam and I headed into Itaewon to eat some kind of Middle Eastern food and Adam sucked on a Shisha like a half a dozen hookers looking for a big paycheck.

After we ate at this restaurant we headed around the corner from Noksapyeong Station where Adam stopped at Instanbul and had "Second Dinner" (I think he might be a Hobbit?).

Now home, waiting for Yvonne to get here. No celebration yet, but her hiring at BPU2 moved one step closer yesterday. BPU2 may find a better English teacher than me, but I think they're decided they are unlikely to find a better editor. Part of the deal is that I will stay at least one more year after the next one and they will lobby for a year after that if our grant goes through.

I've left the possibility open, but we'll see about that. At least if Yvonne gets hired we will have shared winter and summer vacations and will be able to come home a lot more.

For the few of you who do not know, we'll also be getting married (anyone know a good pre-nup lawyer??????!!!) when we get back to the States in February. As you know, the Korean tradition is to put money in envelopes and give it to the couple.

WE NOW DUB YOU ALL "HONORARY KOREANS!"

;-)

Oh yeah, that last picture is of the smaller pagoda in the smaller lake at Gyeongbokgung. It's a pretty place and I hadn't been there since my first trip to Korea with the BKF.

Had to scope it out in prep for the fambly landing later this month...

Tomorrow it's off the the prettiest garden in Korea..... more pics..

Noted with minimal comment

If Kimchi "prevent" swine-flu, why all the panic around here?

More RETARDED overseas marketing.. this time Korean food

Ok..

sounds good (link here)..

various events have also been organized to raise awareness of and popularize Korean cuisine among L.A. residents. Locals will have the opportunity to enjoy food-tasting events, such as with "gimbap," or seaweed-covered rice rolls, and fried squid and other seafood.

But they are doing it at Hannam Farking Market IN KOREATOWN! Because God knows, Koreans know nothing.. NOTHING I tell you! about Korean food.... This "gimbap" as you call it? How will Koreans react to its strangeness?

Jesus... take this money and roll it into some kind promotion with the Kogi Truck which has, in less than a year, converted more whitey's to the advantages of Korean food than 20 years of M*A*S*H, Sandra Oh in movies, or multiple translations of books about the pain and woe of Korean history..

Crap.. what is wrong with these people?

The Web is My Friend!

After the computer (and ribs) trauma of the last weekend, I'm back up and running. The MacBook Pro is a cool machine and I've 'found' the latest Office and Dreamweaver online. A few more translation softwares to find and all I will need is Photoshop and a couple of other "big" apps that can't really be 'borrowed.'

In the meantime, I've been contacted by my author's (Kim Yong-ik) son! He saw some comments I made about his father online and he still lives in the family house, with papers and manuscripts intact. He also gave me contact info on several people who knew Kim, so that book I wanted to write might be back on.

I think I also mentioned here that Acta Koreana contacted me about a review, so I have three in the hopper. Add to that the paper I'm working on with Kim Soonyoung, and I'm a busy lad.

Still, it was an added bonus that I was also contacted by the son of Lee In-soo (about who, more later) who is interested in meeting. I think I need to email him soon.. now that I am fully technologized again!

Stupid is as stupid does..

Had a great weekend. Some confusion on Friday night about an editing job that never came in, but on Saturday I went to my new Korean language class at the ungodly hour of 10 am. Yvonne got up and headed up Namsan to chill, sort of, in the sun. Later in the day, James showed up and Yvonne went off, again, to Namsan, but this time with our friend Margaret. James and I bachelored about until.. oh... 8:45 or so and then returned home old and defeated!

So sad. There was a day when I could drink until nearly 10!

Sunday was all about bookshopping, and I picked up a Pak Wan-seo short novel that it will be convenient to read as it will give me background on her style for the review I'm doing for Korean Journal on her autobiography/novel. James had to head back down to Busan, so Yvonne and I had lunch and then headed back onto the town.

Finally, time to return, and at Geongdeok station, transferring to line 6, the train pulled into the station as we came around the corner.

Preparing myself for the sprint to the train, I carefully placed my left foot upon the instep of my right shoe and ... and... began to tumble to the ground.

Three good sprinter's steps and my struggle to stay aloft was over.

I went in headfirst, but kind of on top of my backpack, which was loose on my right shoulder.

I got up with some pain.. mainly in my left chest (no doubt a heart-attack).. but mainly embarassed and, got the train!

Get home to check out the damage to my gear (laptop and camera and lenses were in the backpack) and fire up the computer, which works... but the screen looks like some kind of bad modernist painting.

OOOPs!

camera and the rest of the gear is OK, but I will be buying that new laptop a couple of months before I thought I would. There goes my fantasy that some mysterious benefactor would buy me some top o the line shite for my b-day!

Thank god BKF brought an old laptop to Korea on his last visit... at least I have something to type on!

I will send this in the morning, if my broken rib does not puncture my heart....
.

In the past four days I have had a couple of experiences that reminded me why I am so fond of Korea, and one of the things that moving to Korea has meant to me personally.

Last weekend, as my fiancee and I sat in Yongsan Family Park (By the Korean National Museum, Ichon Station, lines 1 and 4) I was amused to watch a young Korean girl in the middle of the playground. She ignored her surroundings and concentrated on waggling her left arm in the air. She found this intensely interesting, and so did I although I don’t think I would have been interested in doing it myself! In fact, as I watched her work her way around the playground, I noted that she found everything extremely interesting.

This started me watching all the kids in the park, and I noticed they all had remarkable ability to find things new and interesting. The boy who watched a bug intently for 10 minutes, then sprang up to chase a dog, could go back to the very same bug with the very same intensity as he had the first time he observed it (ok, the first time he poked it with a stick, he was a young boy after all).

I forgot about this until yesterday, when two things happened. First, as I was running through my daily blog list, I came across a blog that quoted the movie, Knocked Up (which I have never seen) in which two characters watch children playing in a park.

PETE
What's so great about bubbles?
BEN
They float. You can pop them. I mean, I get it. I get it.
PETE
I wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles.
BEN
That's sad.
PETE
It's totally sad. Their smiling faces just point out your inability to enjoy anything.

Second, as I walked home and enjoyed the coolish autumn air and the spectacular foliage in and around Namsan Park, I settled in behind an older man, probably in his 60s. He walked along, but it was clear he wasn’t going anywhere, at least not in a hurry. He kicked at pebbles, he “high-fived” low hanging leaves, every once in a while he stopped to examine some small thing on the ground. When the sidewalk leveled off, before ascending to the Hyatt Hotel, he pulled a very thin, dead branch out of the bushes, yanked off the smaller end so that the switch was approximately cane-lengthened, and then swept up the hill like D’artagnan, poking and prodding at things in the bushes, waving the switch in front of himself, and pushing things (very small things) around on the sidewalk. I thought to myself, “what a great day, and what a great model for enjoying it.”

These three happenings, and the excellent mood I was in, crystallized something I like about children, about Korean society, and about what moving to Korea has done for me. Almost all children and much of Korea, is able to find pleasure in the smallest things, and they are able to find that pleasure again and again. I’m not sure I’ve met a jaded Korean.

Coming to Korea has restored this semi-childlike wonder in me. I had spent the last few years in the US weaving together banded bits of thread into something that throttled my ability to have spontaneous fun; there was always some important thing to do, or some way I had to act, and, at least where I was, there was no culture of spontaneous fun. In Korea, I was able to turn much of this around.

Part of it, of course, is that all of Korea was new to me when I arrived. So it was easy to be enthralled by the differences. This is one reason that people travel, you are a passport and a ticket away from a quick and easy return to a state of wonder. But another part of it is the spontaneous (a word expats often don’t associate with Korea) public culture that breeds the opportunities to have fun and new experiences. I think back to my hike up Bukhansan and the family that shared food with us (and others) and the climber who insisted I toast my summitting with Makkeoli. This kind of experience may happen disproportionately to foreigners, because we are so obvious, but I see it everywhere I go. Finally, there is also what I interpret to be (although it might be something else entirely) the Korea solipsism (I mean that in the good sense of the word) that allows Koreans in public, to ignore others and do their own things.

All of this has combined, for me, into an opportunity to reconnect with the little kid inside of me. Who knew he had emigrated to Korea?

At the Chuseok-hop

So… Chuseok, of course, was not over after 1.8 days. Instead Yvonne and I repaired to the couch to watch movies. The first lovely photo is Yvonne setting up the jury-rigged system we have to show movies on the walls. It actually works wonderfully, and we had noodles and beer and watched Iron Man. I had been given the movie some long time ago by Yvonne’s brother, but had put it in the bookcase where it languished, as a book, until Yvonne found it last week.


Good movie!

The next day, which was actual Chuseok, it was off to Yongsan family park to loll about. Koreans are very public, and Yvonne loves that hang out in public thing, so I bought a pad and we pack up some water-crackers, tuna, and various beverages and go into the park and hang out. Yvonne reads, I read and take notes (somewhere around here is a picture of my “park office” which is similar to my “Train office” which picture I now cannot find on the blog?), and at various times we wander around, watch Korean kids play, watch the dogs run free, or as in one of these pictures, watch the super-solipsistic Korean women find a way to hang mirrors outdoors and make sure their makeup is just so!



And, you know, take pictures of bugs




We stayed out until the sun started hiding from us, and then it was back home to sit around (more reading!) until it was dinner and movie time.



Next day was similar…. A late start and then off for a walk on Mt. Namsan, from where most of these pictures come. When the sun came down that day we went to “Dear Friends” a cute little café up the street and had lemon tea and gin and tonics (I think most people can guess who had what). Then it was time for Yvonne to take off for the train.

It’s a drag – she doesn’t have to start teaching til late on Monday, but the Hagwon insists she be there in case of emergency.

Lo and behold, when I caught her on FB on Monday morning, the imaginary emergency had finally come: Her Canadian (they are largely swine and every last one untrustworthy) co-teacher had pulled a runner, leaving only a filthy apartment and filthier memories.

Heh.. this will be the example the director will use to defend his Monday morning policy for the rest of his life.

Chuseok Comes Early!

As Thursday is the traditional "early getaway" day for Koreans leaving for their hometowns, to celebrate Chuseok, we are allowed to cancel our Thursday classes. Which I did with a speed that would considered indecent in rabbit sex.

So tonight is Friday night, and so is tomorrow night, and the night after that.

Sweet!

Not so sweet - last night I decided to walk home and thought I might take a stroll through Namsan tunnel. This is just about a mile through Namsan Mountain. The tunnel was hot, polluted, and the walkway a bit uneven. Worse, what I didn't think about was that everything in the tunnel would be, of course, coated in auto exhaust. This meant that when I grabbed hold of the railing, I got a fistful of soot. Also, when I brushed the wall, or touched anything. You'd be suprised at how much af a tar-baby you can make of yourself in such circumstances.


Sweet, though, a student gave me two bottles of wine for Chuseok, so at least I had something to look forward to when I got home.

Now I'm sitting in Gecko's, with a beer and a quesadilla down, preparing to take the shortish walk home.

Just Another Friday.. er.. Graphic Monday..

Random graphics inserted...

Yeah.. two classes .. then started to walk home, but ended up watching some Korean Little League..

For some reason it seemed classically Korean to me.. Each inning the defensive team worked themselves into enormous trouble (two innings with the bases loaded before there was an out!) and then in a fit of "coaching" and pitcher changes (and probably the bottom of the lineup!) they worked themselves out without much damage.

As far as I could tell (I eventually buggered off to catch a taxi) the game must have ended in a 3-3 tie. The story of Korean history, perhaps...

then back home to a flurry, nay, a hurricane of edits. There is some kind of conference this weekend, and the papers are due by 9am tomorrow. This makes me a popular dude...

other than that... Fall in Korea... and Al Green rocking "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" on the Digitizer..

Cain't beat that shit!

Tardy Updates, Lynyrd Skynrd style - "Gimme Back my Bullets"

Many things have happened and I have been an uncertain poster her. So I resort to bullets

• BPU2 is considering upgrading my position to include work as a liason between the school and English-speaking Unis. More pay, of course. My teaching would be reduced to official load (9 hours) and I would be working on some cool projects. Not to get any hearts in a flutter, but this might include some work in Texas - "might."
  
  
• We are also working on a totally cool project to create a rubric by which to pre-screen fiction that is being considered for translation into English. More about this will pop up on MorningCalm very soon, but for now it's a fun project
  
  
• I still need (even more if my load is reduced) to find BPU2 a second English instructor. Someone has to know someone with an MA in English Lit or ESL who wants to come over and have some fun in Korea?
  
  
• The BKF tells me that KLTI will be moving us onto their lists as a translator/editor team. That is, as we vernaculate, splendiddest. And has promise of more money attached to it.
  
  
• Gecko's is the place to be in Itaewon on Sunday - Queen on the stereo, Yvonne mopping up the bits of calimari that she mysteriously spat onto the table, bookshopping complete, and the wireless working flawlessly and fast.
  
  
• Next week? Two days of instruction!!! Deal with that biaaaaaatches!
  
  

Korea Imposes its Ferocious Will

I meet with the Chair last week to demonstrate that my knee is relatively healed up and that she can stop bugging me about going to the hospital.

I get into her office and she's giving off a nervous vibe..

She says.. "You know, until last Friday you DID NOT have health insurance. Someone forgot to enroll you in it."

I say, "well, boy howdy, but it's good news that I have it now, eh?"?


She says, "well, that is good news, but there is bad news also."

"What is that?" I inquire in that cat contemplating a hot stove-lid way that I have.

"Well," she responds, "you owe six months worth of paycheck deductions for your health insurance."

That would be the health insurance I have just been told I DIDN't have.

I ponder. I am being charged for a service I didn't have. And yet, since it is Korea, there is nothing to be done about it.

Lo and Behold(en), I am docked nearly 600,000 won on my next paycheck...

Bastids!

A Few Nice Words About Korea

Every so often you hear someone complain that Koreans are a bunch of rude, neo-Confucians who would just assume run a foreigner over as look at one.

I think that is only the motorcycle delivery guys. And I don't think it has any relationship to race or country of origin. ;-)

When my knee was all asploded, walking caused me considerable pain and it must have been obvious even on my stoic and craggy features (Did I say "handsome?"). Everywhere I went, Koreans stopped to help me. The helped me get down stairs, they helped me flag down cabs, they helped me walk up and down hills, they asked if I was all right. Cabbies rushed out of their cabs to help me get out without further crippling myself. By the time I could walk half-normally I had worn out all the kamsamneeda ("thank you") and kwenchanayo ("I'm OK") muscles in my face.

On Friday I went up to the District Office to see if there was anyone there to help me at the hospital, but all the English speakers were out to a late lunch. So I grabbed a cab home and rested the thing all Saturday. This worked out well enough that on Sunday I was able to go out with the Chatjip folks and stump all around Seoul.

The outpouring of spontaneous assistance culminated in the student who came to my class Monday morning and handed me an industrial-strength knee brace.

Nice-uh!

I'm reasonably certain no student in the US would ever have even thought of such a thing.

Now the knee is better to the extent that even though I banged it, last night, into a wooden planter outside the Buy Right (or whatever) I can walk on any surface and rotate the thing torsionally (for a while there, putting on socks was about a 20 minute exercise in pain and sweat - a lot like sex, now that I think about it).

And now, finally, I DO have health insurance (as it turns out I did NOT have it prior to going to the office and complaining that I thought I didn't have it), but that came with a kind of a joker...

which is a post for tomorrow, I suppose..

Ensmallened Scope

The knee is incrementally better.. I actually slept some last night and even the cab ride to work wasn't horrible (I mean, it hurt and all, but I didn't feel like barfing!).

I have an ice-pack because Yvonne angeled her way up to Seoul two nights ago and in a suprise visit brought food and the ice-pack. It's actually a hot-cold thing, so I suppose this weekend I can do alternating compresses.

It's funny to walk so slowly. I take my legs for granted and having one NOT work is a drag for non-pain related reasons. Inverted-L-shaped little old grammas now go shooting past me on the hill to my house! Oh the embarassment. Putting shoes on is an ordeal (actually socks are worse). Even sitting down becomes an adventure, particularly in chairs that have wheels and would like to dump me on my ass if they get the chance. Walking is funny also - things I used to race by are now landmarks in my turtling my way to and from work.

Oh well, off to the Division office for advice on a doctor/hospital..

Kneebone connected to the?

Bummer..

Woke up this morning crippled. Walked to work and back yesterday with nothing out of the ordinary. Got home and right knee began to ache. A drag, but not so intolerable I couldn't do my normal evening stretching routine.

Wake up this morning (at about 3 am) after a painful night and it won't support any weight (and baby, I got that!) or straighten out, and is incredibly painful.

Trying to figure out how I'm getting out of my third-story apartment. :-(

If there are no updates I am crumpled in the stairwell.

Wedding Daze..

Down to Busan for a wedding…

I purchased the tickets entirely in Korean .. probably quite ungrammatical, but I was able to communicate that I needed two tickets on Saturday, one from Seoul to Busan and one from Daejeon to Busan and they needed to be together.

Small victories.

The Korean class is helping… the tutoring helped a bit, but the class is quite intensive (although only six hours a week, the instructor piles on the homework and hammers the two of us in class). I finished the first class, 1.1, with the tutor and now I am working on 1.2. There are three classes per level and I hope to go through all of them. It will depend on how long I am willing to drag my ass to a class that is MWF from 7 to 9 at night.

That is particularly galling on Friday, when I should be out hootin and hollerin in Itaewon.

Still, got the tickets and headed down. As I love trains immoderately, this is always a good thing, and Korea is still a beautiful green color as you 300 km/hr your way through it. Yvonne hopped on at Daejeon, and we were fully away.
s
At the Busan Depot we ran into two other couples who were going to the wedding and headed out to Gwang alli together. Grabbed a nice cheap (about 38 bucks US) hotel room with a view of the beach and headed over to the wedding.

It was mercifully brief, as Korean weddings can be, and then it was down to the cafeteria for a meal. The pic just above is the lovely couple working the room at the reception in a pub and the one down below is Yvonne smiling because this wedding gave her some new, expensive, ideas to try to pile onto our wedding. The post-wedding cafeteria served some really good food, and I had time to enjoy it with my friends.

At BKF’s wedding I was part of the photo-shoot after, and so by the time I got to the cafeteria everyone from that wedding had eaten and departed. I was the lone Waegukin in the vast hall, and so I ate quickly and skeedaddled. This time we all stayed at the tables until the beer and soju was gone. Then it was off to the deck of a pub which overlooked the beach. More idle chit-chat and general tomfoolery.

Many of the party headed off to a bar, but I headed back to the hotel while Yvonne went downtown to meet her friend Katie and her boyfriend du jour. I did absolutely nothing productive besides watching two episodes of The Simpsons.

In the morning we had coffee on the beach and boggled that, on a weekend as beautiful as it had been, essentially no Koreans had headed to Busan for the beach (that picture from the hotel window will give an idea). Korean vacationing runs on a rather rigid “season” basis and this is not the season to go to the beach.

Consequently, Koreans don’t.

I type this on the way back up to Seoul, Yvonne already dropped off (sob!) at Daejeon. Got a longish piece edited for BKF and finally finished my review of Yi Chongjun’s The Wounded. That pic at the bottom is of my little office on the KTX

If I do a little Korean homework tonight, this trip back up will have brought this weekend back from completely non-productive, to pretty good. And with a trip to the beach and a motel as well.

Can’t beat that.

In Which Yvonne is Pictured Eating...

We took the Mugugnwha to Chuncheon. I always prefer the train to the bus, because Korean intercity buses do not have bathrooms and that can be a bit inconvenient. The trip is two hours and quickly moves out of Seoul and into much more beautiful territory. We arrived at Namchuncheon Station at about 1:00 and set about to buy a return ticket.

All seats for Sunday were already taken! So we purchased two standing tickets and headed downtown to find a yeogwan. This was easily accomplished and the next task was to find food, which was surprisingly difficult and Yvonne even contemplated eating something from a street vendor. Instead we kept walking back towards the train station which I knew was closer to our first tourist destination.

Eventually we found a small restaurant with pictures on the walls and Yvonne pointed to one and ordered it. This turned out to be, when I looked at it more closely, Galbijim which is a delicious soup of beef ribs. The nice ajummah made it not so spicy for Yvonne, and we scarfed it down with rice and beverages.

Then it was off to the Kim Yu-jeong memorial museum. Here I managed to NOT take a bunch of film clips to use on my other site. Instead I filmed the walk up TO the museum and the beer afterwards. I R-tarded!

Then it was off to the bus stop and we miraculously caught a bus that was heading somewhat in the direction of the Chuncheon Museum, which Yvonne wanted to see. At a certain point we saw a traffic sign saying that the Museum was 2 kilometers to the right. The bus kept going straight, so we got off and walked towards the museum. Yvonne got all confused about where we were going and started badgering random-passersby, I just kept walking because, well, those convenient signs that Chuncheon had put up kept telling me which direction to go. ;-)


Eventually we got there, and Yvonne took a quick spin around the museum (it was just before closing). Then it was off to the hotel and I had to do a quick editing job for Ewha University while Yvonne went off on an epic, and unsuccessful journey to find the bookstore in Chuncheon.

Next morning we headed out at about 11 and immediately set off in the wrong direction. ;-) We wanted to go to find a ferry (story of my life) to an island that supposedly featured camping. We wanted to check it out, plus taking a ferry is always cool, and it supposedly had good hiking and biking trails. Our hotelier said that the island (and surrounding Chuncheon) was “like Vancouver.” I consider all Canadians to be transplanted Frenchmen, I don’t care about them or their silly surrender-cities, and I have no idea what our host meant by his comparison.

But we set out, and once again on a path with absolutely no places to eat. I should note that a remarkable number of places in Chuncheon were closed or out of business. Yvonne was demented with hunger and as we passed the “Medizone” a store that sells medical appliances, she looked inside and said, ‘there’s a good-looking restaurant.” Not wanting a delicious lunch of catheters and replacement limbs, I insisted we keep walking

We wandered down to the river, the Ethiopian Korean War Shrine (yah, really), and then beyond.

Yvonne was boinking out again about where we were, but this boinkology was assuaged by some Galbi-Tang that included the biggest freaking ribs in the history of mankind.

We ate, then headed back towards the river. Yvonne gave in and asked directions. They were pretty much the same as what the map had told me, but she felt better, and we walked along to lake up to the ferry. Along this path I took some of the bug pictures you see here, including that one to the left which shows some kind of unfortunate food-chain-type-thing happening to a bee.

We took the ferry and then started to walk toward the resort. A truck driver who had been on the ferry offered us a ride, but in my best fractured Korean I told him we were happy to walk. He accepted this and then rode off.

Only to stop about 100 meters later.

Excellent dude got out of the truck and, mainly in pantomime, indicated to us we should not walk on the dirt road and that if we went about 20 meters to the left we would find a bike/walk path. You hear a lot of shit, and some of it deserved, about Korean neo-confucian lack of concern for others, but it seems that the further you get from industrial hubs, the more this attitude fades away.

The island is beautiful and we have a place to camp, come fall. We wandered around a bit, sat in front of the market and had a drink, and then slowly walked back to the ferry.

As I was taking pictures of bugs, we missed one ferry. As we sat there waiting for the next one, we took a short stroll and found this unfortunate poodle in a cage. The pic isn’t close enough, but the cage bottom is clotted with dog-crap and fur. Underneath the cage it is a bit worse. Koreans routinely treat dogs in ways that wouldn’t fly in the US, but I should say that this dog was quite healthy and only barked, in a woeful looping way, when we walked away after petting it through the mesh of its cage.

The ferry was quite unsafe by US standards – they never picked up the gate – but I felt no qualms as I watched the pilot work. It reminded me of my days in Louisiana on the boat “The Second One” (perhaps I should not have been sanguine there, as the “First One” had sunk). The pilot could “walk” the boat and pinned it against the dock without need of any rope. Nice-uh. It cost 3-chun for a round trip. Add all the shit you’d have needed in the US and we would have paid a bit more. I guess it’s all a balancing act.

Then it was back to Chuncheon for Dak-Galbi, the “dish” of Chuncheon. Yvonne and I will be going back to Chuncheon, so I will save photos of that for later. Suffice it to say it was like womy…. Er.. it was hot, plentiful and cheap.

Another night waiting for my second edit job… ho hum..

In the morning we took a cab ride to the Kim Yu-seong memorial which is about 5 kilometers (I’m guessing) from the museum. Then, as the hotelier had told us we could walk from that point, we got on a crazy long and hot walk to the waterfalls.

Yvonne had another one of her moments – that girl needs a GPS/Satellite Camera/Vibrator installed in her bad self so that she can stay calm!

But we got to falls and they were just as beautiful as advertised. They were also in a narrow canyon of damp stone walls, so it was about 20 degrees cooler. Nice-uh!

On the way out we had some food and then footed it another mile or so to the next train station. There we got to see why the train was full when we had tried to book on the previous Friday. Ganyeong is some kind of Tommy’s Holiday Camp for Koreans, or at least it leads to one. After our long death march in the sun, we got to the train station and it was already chock full of Korean kids. I was in search of a PC Bang so that I could get the files that I needed to edit, so Yvonne headed to a café, and I headed downtown, which was overrun by kids and stuffed with cars trying to escape.

It was a bit of a zoo. The PC Bang was completely full, so I couldn’t download my files to edit.

No big deal. I met Yvonne back at the Café and we had a drink, then caught the train.

Our tickets were standing, but there were empty seats, which we grabbed.

The empty seats held up for about an hour, and then the older folks who had them got
on the train and we went to the space between cars. It is hotter, but you can sit down there.

Then it was home. Yvonne had to head to Daejeon and I had to head home to edit 20 pages of (brilliantly) translated text.

Chuncheon is beautiful, the people are friendly, and nature is right up in your grill.

I’m going back. ;-)

I will not, however, take the bold step that Yvonne took when she ate the “pizza-cone” fresh out of the microwave!

Back from Chucheon..

And had two editing jobs on the "vacation."

Got one done, working on the other.

Chuncheon was farking gorgeous..

It is surrounded by mountains...

It has many lakes flowing into rivers.

'We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.' (Chapter 11 of Lao-tzu's Tao te Ching)

For now though.. I have to finish the second editing job....

Pics to follow..

The Verb, to Bee!

Why have I been such a bad blogger? Because I’ve been on Staycation here in Seoul. Been sleeping in late, studying Korean, and wandering about the City, with a strong emphasis on Namsan.

Sleeping in is, of course, an unalloyed good, which requires no explanation. It is odd, therefore, that I have the punched-looking eye-sockets of a boxer and a permananent case of the old pee-gon hayo.

Studying Korean, on the other hand, is supposed to keep my mind young, or flexible, or creative, or something, but its main take-home lesson so far has been that I am either too old, rigid, entrenched, or too stupid to learn a new language.

Wandering about has been more successful and, as I sit here waiting for some big-ass editing job to come over the mojo-wire, I am sorting some pictures from Mt. Namsan. I’ve been up it three times this week.

Yesterday I walked from my Korean lessons in Gwangwhamun, over the top, and then down into Itaewon-dong. On the way up I snapped a quick picture of a tour company that might want to change their name? I stopped at the top for a delicious bowl of bibimbap, which gave me the strength to continue.

On the way down I snapped the picture of what I know believe to be an actual cicada (or certainly some other kind of insect). If it’s eyes look weird, that is because it has obviously been the victim of some kind of hideous vampire-bugs who ate its brain out.

Yep, you’re looking through the empty eyeholes to the foliage beyond. Cool or gross, I can’t decide?

Monsoon season is allegedly winding down, but as it continues to rain, it continues to be green and insect-y. Today I spent some time snapping pics of honey-bees. These bees are working the Mugungwha blossoms that have just begun to appear and man do they go at it. The bees get completely coated in pollen, then head off.

After a couple snaps of that, I concentrated on getting, with mixed results, some snaps of bees landing.

Several Kinds of Insects

Korean Lesson today. My third one in a long line and I think this teacher is mean enough to make me learn. She talks almost exclusively in Korean and when she thinks I am being a retard she slowly turns the left side of her head to me, taps her ear, and says, "listen!"

On the way home I was the subject of a slow motion mugging. I walked from Gwangwhamun to Noksapyeong, a sweaty and blurry walk in the current heat and humidity. At a stop light someone grabbed my left arm with reasonable strength and sort of stupid intent.

I wheeled around, and it's a sunburnt, totally wasted beggar who really, really, wants to keep hold of me and poke at me.

His brilliant plan is somewhat limited by the fact that his pants are unbuttoned and he has no belt.

So, after about 15 seconds of poking me, his pants slide to his ankles and he has to try to gather them up again.

Repeat as is (thoroughly) unnecessary.

I practiced some of my Korean (I may have pissed him off by accidentally calling him "grandmother", but then again he was drunk, and my Korean sucks, so it could have been a non-communication moment) and tossed him away once, where he banged into another white dude in a three-piece suit who hollered in agony that contact had been made.

The light changed, and I moved along.

I met other insects along the way.. the Cicada thing is just beginning (more about that later).. and I think this is what the critters, slightly out of focus, look like:







Wait til you hear the racket!

The Reason Korea Has No Nobel Prizes for Literature

Its language is just TOO good! LOL. I have this off to the BKF to make sure the translation is correct.

Classically Fake Korean "Advertising"

Oh man.. Sookyoung De Hakyo has a reputable Korean Language Program.

But the placed article below in the The Seoul Times as allegedly written by an English speaker.

It's like... like.. they don't know how an English speaker writes, or that an English speaker wouldn't spot this as a fraud in about 3 seconds.

The first paragraph, alone, is a classic Korean version of English:

Learning the most scientific phonetic language in existence to attain the ability to communicate well in Korea does not have to be so difficult, because I aspired to express myself beyond speaking louder, slower, or continuing to mime out my expressions and requests.

I attended several Korean language programs. The type of program I desired needed to be convenient to attend, professionally taught, and provide good cultural insights of Korea and its people.

The LinguaExpress located at Sookmyung Women's University (SWU) in Seoul exceeded my expectations. Located in Yongsan-Gu, Sookmyung Women's University is accessible by public transportation. I currently attend the Regular Intensive Program beginning at ten in the morning and lasting until one in the afternoon, Monday through Friday.

Expats in Sookmyung Women's University's Korean class

I appreciate the class hours because they avoid the rush hours of cars entering the university and bypass the onslaught of noisy lunch hour crowds.

Entering the first floor lobby of the Social Education Building for the first time, I was impressed with the bright and comfortable space of LinguaExpress. The open lobby is flanked by large glass windows allowing the sun's rays to flow in.

Many table settings and sofas make this area an excellent location to relax. With a snack from the coffee corner, students exchange conversations, watch the large screen television, or practice their new language skills. Additionally, on each floor of LinguaExpress there are supplementary tables and chairs next to wide windows offering a good view of Seoul.

Expats with locals at Sookmyung Women's University

I appreciate the computer terminals located. I check my e-mails before and during my class breaks. On the second floor, the roomy and modern multimedia library has great individual workstations to practice language proficiency.

The library services are open daily at 7:30 a.m. and close at 9:00 p.m. Students utilize the audio and video materials quickly with assistance from courteous media library staff.

LinguaExpress's professional teaching staff instructs a wide variety of nationalities the Korean language by integrating listening, speaking and writing skills in relaxed and functional classrooms. Utilizing modern and updated textbooks, music, movies, and diverse dialogues to introduce a variety of everyday situations, so learning Korean is easier to understand and retain.

I appreciate my instructors approach to teaching, initially my poor vocabulary and limited ability to communicate made me shy to speak Korean. Under my teachers patient guidance, I am able to say more complex sentences. I respond more effectively to questions and engage in conversations.

Fun at Sookmyung Women's University's Korean class

My progressive ability to communicate in Korean is assisted by learning more about Korea's culture through the Special Program Workshops hosted by the LinguaExpress.

Various Korean language programs offer field trips to various sites within Korea, however, SWU's LinguaExpress promotes hands on workshops that are informative, occasionally messy, but always enjoyable.

The Kimchi 김치 Making Workshop gave all who participated a deeper appreciation of the time and effort it takes to prepare a complicated and delicious dish. Using a recipe handed down from generation to generation.

Students blend vegetables, pickled fish and spices to wrap Chinese Cabbage to produce Kimchi. Besides preparing Kimchi, my class group cooked Chap Chae 잡채, Pulgoki 불고기, Pachon 파전, Kamchachon 감자전, and Kimchichon 김치전.

The Korean Calligraphy Workshop promoted the skills of a Korean scholar. Students used brush strokes to create Korean texts with traditional ink and paper. Each stroke is praised for its own attributes. The ink for its color and the composition for its configuration's use of space and strength
of the message.

Expats learn ink painting at Sookmyung Women's University.

The Korean Paper Craft Workshop introduced an artist's skill to manipulate paper to create umbrellas, rain hats, or fans in a traditional manner. Because of our novice student status, we created paper boxes by pasting layers of paper on a prefabricated framework. Being slightly prejudice, my creation was the most artistic.

The quality of my studies and special workshops at SWU's LinguaExpress are excellent. The facilities used and the professionalism of the instructors make learning Korean enjoyable.

Everyone from the friendly housekeeping staff, to the cheerful and beautiful clerical staff with whom I chatted and practice my new skills, continue to encourage and ease my frustrations.

Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, once stated, "The only way the magic works is by hard work. But hard work can be fun." The LinguaExpress's Korean Language programs consisting of it's professional staff and special workshops makes the work of learning the Korean language easy and fun. It is magic!

KNTO gets it right.

Both regular readers know how I felt about the "Sparkling" widget (NOTE: That post now features the new and improved widget!) when it first came out. But the KTO has revamped the thing, and now it presents Korea, and the idea of a trip to Korea, in a much better light.

Props to the KTO for listening to the original responses to this thing.

Bad News!

For all of you who have been waiting to send me last year's Xmas gifts.

You must now rule out the Sigma APO DG 70-300 lens as a potential gift. I bought this bad-girl from a, well bad-girl I suppose for about $133.00, which is a real bargain in Korea.

It's a nice lens too, although I'm still figuring it out. The first thing I did, of course, was take it out to take picture of bugs, stinking bugs.

The first bug was a fly on a wall (a bit cliche, even for a walking, talking cliche such as myself!) as I walked across Namsan Mountain and took a bit of refuge from the sun in a redwood-ish pagoda on the side of the hill.

The fly was obliging and hung out til I could figure out how to engage the macro. So I got two or three shots of which the one on the right is best by far.

Also, I learned that a picture of a fly on a wall is not only pretty uncompelling, but it also doesn't seem to reflect much about Korea.

Lesson learned, lesson learned

Then, when Yvonne and I went to see the Egyptian Exhibit, we also hung out at the little pond in front of the Museum and, lo and behold, a dragonfly came by and alit on the one sad leaf of pond-grass that stuck up out of the algae-ridden pond.

So I got me another pic.

Now, of course, we come to tragedy. We arrived home and there was a cockroach in the bathtub. Yvonne went in to shower - which she does Korean style, standing on the bathroom floor with the drain open. This means she didn't have to actually get in there with George, as we had named him. But it did mean she splashed enough water on little George that he expired soggily.

I didn't want to pick him up in his waterlogged state, so waited until the tub had dried out and..

It must have been CockaRoach Easter, cause George was back to life!

Or, those cockroaches are as tough as they say.

So, with George dry and alive, I got an empty yogurt cup, some cardboard, and trapped George and let him go outside.

Here is a picture of George, valiantly trundling away.

With that it was bed time and so I went to bed.

When I looked out my window.. Woe betide! Alas!

Poor George had not got very far.

This truly sh*tty pic is of George, on his back, six little legs to the sky, communing with the Great Insect What Lives in the Heavens.

And Yvonne can chalk up another kill!

Muse, National, Eum, and all that..

Today was a trip to the Seoul National Museum. Yvonne and I had been here once before, with BKF on our first trip to Seoul several years ago. This time, however, we were in search of Egyptian culture. The museum is hosting an exhibition, and since it is beginning to heat up in Seoul (I think it hit 28-29) we are trying to do more indoor things. We walked to the tube-station and had one of the excellent street-pastries they sell in Korea. Something like donuts in the US, but the “dough” part is a bit closer to bread, and there are no sticky glazes. The sweetness comes from the dusting of sugar, most of which I try to brush off. Then it was to Noksapyeong Station for coffee and down to the museum.

It is farking vast, as that picture above is intended to demonstrate (Which you are going to have to click on, since Blogger won't size it right). Someone had also tarted it out a bit.. the columns were covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs and art, and the bank of stairs at the middle of the museum had been painted with the Sphinx. It was a cool combination of the existing architecture and an application of Egyptian motifs. As usual it left me wondering how it is that when Koreans get near getting something right they so often hit it head on, but if they get too far away from getting something right it slides all the way to dead wrong.

My guess?

Every culture is like this, it just so happens that crabby old me is here. ;-)

The exhibit was grand, one of the few themed museum exhibits I’ve been on in which the exhibit gave out before my interest did. There were several cool things, including a semi-panoramic movie, a Terry Gilliam-esque thing in which someone at the British museum had taken old Egyptian frescoes and art, and animated them. It sounds totally cheesy, but it was quite grand. There were also some cool holographs. But really, the main thing was the exhibit, which was well thought out and presented. There was also the typical lack of queuing and too many kids running around unwatched, but as we got there early, it wasn’t too bad. Sunday afternoon would have been an entirely different story!

On the way out I took a picture in the gift shop, of the pyramid of chocolate you see to the right and was immediately stopped by an ajumma who told me “no pictures, no pictures!” I was a bit surprised, because behind me was a flock of couples and families snapping pictures. I pointed over my shoulder to where at least 10 of were taking pictures with flashes flaring (I observe a polite “no flash” when in public indoor spaces approach) and said, “no pictures?” Ajumma said, “no pictures.”

Seeing me put my camera down she walked away content, the barbarian insurrection quelled!

The flashing behind me continued unabated.

Oh well. Next time I’ll wear my Korean makeup. ;-)

I tried to sneak back to the tube-station before any more culture could be inflicted upon me. Unfortunately, Yvonne remembered that the Korean National General exhibits were free and thus we had to go check them out. This time, however, we got the little 3k won tour-guide PDA and that was completely worth it even though the information was set up as a woman lecturing and a retarded man answering randomly (sample quote when faced with the complexities of the Paleolithic Era: “Are you kidding me? There was a technique for chipping stones?”).

After all this we were a bit peckish and stopped in at the Korean Restaurant and Yvonne had some kind of sogogi dish and I had hae-mul pajeon. Then it was out into the heat for me to take some pictures and for Yvonne to wander far, then near, and then fall asleep. So when I was done with my pictures I wandered far to find her while, near, she could not find me and got on the subway home. ;-)

We finally met up there and headed up the hill to have a delicious noodle dinner and watch the first episode of Michael Palin’s Sahara (on the wall, from the computer through my projector).

As the B-man says, “another average day in paradise.”

Oh yeah...

that picture over there on the right?

Like any visit to a Korean museum could be complete without some kind of pictorial representation of the Korean museum's bizarre fixation with roof tiles.

Yep, that's a roof tile.

Excellent!

Normally I don't take much note of English Errors

And not that much glee in Konglish.. but shouldn't the National Theater of Korea know better?

Marking final assignments and the actual final... Siiiigh..

Now the lamb lies with the lion
He's just a little savage



I can't wait for next week, when I will only have a convo class to deal with.. and that all planned out.

Really.. of course it's sticky-hot, but I'm not compaining

My convo students ambushed me in the hall and gave me a coffee cake.

Well, a Korean version.. so it was coated in saccharined-spackle and close approximations of graveyard scenery.

Still, I took it home.. scraped off all the gunk and had two slices of pretty good spice-cake underneath.

Then I cut it up and put it in the eum shik mul bag as I haven't been in the gym in months, and this is not healthy food. ;-)

Been grading ever since.

It is really the only "chore" to instruction and it is a chore pretty much proportional to the skills of students... as my kids are skilled, I have to sort through their arguments and splay them on the return table. Taxing.



I should say, for my friend Pucay, that retards might also be as taxing, since you'd have no idea where to begin ("Er, excuse me dear student in the United States, did you hit your head on the pier when you landed?"), but Pucay's hatred of the simple.. well.. it bothers me while it pays her.


hopefully that bit of true evil will get her off of Charles' yacht and back to posting. ;-)

Anyway.. so infra dig.... but grading continues... and will be done by Friday, I hope!

That Hot Chick from Bulgogi Blog Found These Pics of Daejeon

Wow


Yvonne, the rare blogger at bulgogi (and, of course, my fiancee) found a slide-show of pictures of Daejeon in 1951, after the Civil War had left town. They are farking amazing pictures if you have ever been to modern Daejeon.



Boggling..



I'm not sure war left Dresden this flat?

Summer Plans..

Are beginning to shape up...

I will teach from next Monday til July 17th. This is morning work, and in the afternoon I will write and try to shake off the rust I've grown since I came back Korea from the US.

From then until my Korean class on August 5th is a bit unclear. In an ideal world I'll make enough money to get to the Philippines and the US, but I don't know. That's a lot of world traveling and money for a poor kid from South-Central Seoul. ;-)

Then back for my Korean class, and more writing in the afternoon, and then a quick 5-day trip to China. Since flying to China is about like flying from SFO to Denver, this should be a breeze.

Then, back to the teaching thing, but this time armed with knowledge and skillzzzzzz!

Lost Weekend?

Nah...

Headed down to the Mike McStay benefit, which raised about 1.5 million won. Yvonne and I crashed at the usual yeogwan and shopped for books in the morning.

Normally I'm lukewarm about the bookshopping thing, but I'm working on an article. So I used Yvonne's 2-chun purchases as an excuse to snap photos like crazy. That pic on the right is the "upstairs" storage area of a bookstore in the Jung-A market. The books hide two doors which lead to even more..

well

books...

Then up to Seoul where I napped as Yvonne went (more) book shopping.

Later, we went into Itaewon and actually had fun (well, 2 beers worth for me, two cokes worth for Y) at a bar that was splendid.. except for Young Soldier X whose drug intake, crazy Cartmann reflective shades, and habit of busting into weird air-guitar poses did not add up, at all, to how annoying he was when he spilled someone else's beer and then did some kind of spastic dance in the puddles.

Morons.

As it turns out?

They are everywhere. (I just saw one in the mirror while I was shaving)

Sunday we went hunting for bookstores in Dongdaemun and after a bit of palaver, found the goldmine.

Yvonne went mad.. and I snapped pictures for the article.

Then lunch at a place we never would have stopped in, but as Yvonne pointed at the picture of Sam Gye Tang on the window, the ajumma came running out and started yapping at us in Korean. But all restaurant Korean, so I got it. She pulled us in, basically, by force of will. A good marketing approach as we had been desultorily wandering down the street apparently doomed to end up at Lotteria or Mickey D's.

As we had our Galbi Tang we watched her work the street.

Ajumma had skills... her best catch was three Ajeoshi who were wandering the street looking for food.

First time they passed she just got a bit of a word in.

Second time she flat stopped them with her flow. They sort of hovered in front of the joint for 5 minutes and then slowly walked off, with one of the three in vocal dissent.

finally, they came back down the street (the original direction they had come) and the guy who had been hectoring them, as shepherd, and the ajumma as chorus....

they found food Jesus.

Yvonne and I laughed our asses off at the positive personality this ajumma projected.

We'll be back.

The food was plentiful, not great, but the ajumma made the place rock.

We Enjoy What?

LOLcatzzzz..

even when attempting to use the US as an example of something to emulate, it seems we can't quite be.. known... (this from the joongong daily)

“Korean teenagers compete for higher scores during three years of high school, but students in other countries such as the United States read, write, do volunteer activities and enjoy sports such as taekwondo and tennis.”

Man.. I think we can all agree that those years on the taekwando squad were bitching!

Curses, Gargoyled Again!

We woke up early-ish and headed off to Hongdae, which is the cool and artsy section of Seoul that surrounds Hongik University. This was both to check the place out and so I could pick up my new toy an ultra-wide Tamron 11-18 lens for my camera. Some guy was selling it for only 300,000 won, and a quick look online suggested that deal was too good to pass up. He included a UV polarizer and a nice bag. That’s a picture of the critter up there on the right.

The guy who sold it to me was very friendly and he also told me that there was an Apple shop just down the street – which makes sense for such a trendy and artsy neighborhood – as well as a Canon dealership just down at the next subway station. We headed over to the Apple Store, where I drooled over the new mac-book. Then, walking over to the Canon dealership we found a cool bookstore with English books, and magazines of many different languages. All this made us hungry, so we stopped in at a really nice restaurant for some Tuegi Galbi. At the Canon store I dropped about 50,000 won on a new 2-gig card for my camera to replace the faulty one I’d had to throw away, as well as a new card reader to replace the one I’d lost. The Compact Flash Card is “professional” so, you know, I feel pretty good (like a trendy tool) about that.

Then, of course, off to a bookstore – the smaller Pookyoung store by Cheongyecheon – which was good for Yvonne, but disappointing for me as it did not have the one book I was looking for.

Finally, we half walked and half subwayed down to the Hangnag to meet Jong Kyu. As I type this I am sitting in an outdoor café, with the potatoes eaten and the beer still on the table..

LATER

Jon Kyu took us to his friend Chong suk’s restaurant, where all the food was great in Jeollnamdo style, until they brought out the 홍아 (ammoniated fish). I had eaten this before, but Yvonne had not. There was no way to refuse it as the hostess came to our table and prepared us individual servings, with hot kimchi, garlic, pork, and sauce. Then she sat there and watched us. It was interesting to watch Yvonne try to choke it down. That's a picture of it below, one which, suprisingly, is not giving off sulfur or wearing horns.

She chewed ferociously, sweated prodigiously, and her nose ran, but eventually she swallowed it, washed down with torrents of coke. Mission accomplished, or so we thought.

Then it was off to the Han River, where we lolled, talked, drank beer, and set off fireworks. This was a lot of fun. At the last minute, Chong Suk decided we should play basketball, so it as off to a very dusty court to shoot around and play to games to 10. Yvonne messed around and got a triple double, and I didn’t die. So we count that as a success. At the end of the second game, however, Yvonne’s stomach began to get troublesome, and we had to quickly find a public toilet, then walk back to the restaurant. On the walk, Yvonne grew progressively grayer and more quiet. When we got to the restaurant Jong Kyu decided we needed to use a substitute driver. This is a cool way to avoid drunken driving charges in Korea; you call a service which drives your car home. The driver had difficulty finding us, and by the time we set off, Yvonne was holding the seatbelt off her stomach so that she wouldn’t puke.

The car rattled over a series of very small streets in an attempt to make a clockwise circle to the main road. We got there only to discover that a tour-bus had parked across the top of it. The driver was nowhere to be found, though the flashers of the bus were on, and wouldn’t initially answer the phone. Our driver got more and more angry, while Yvonne continued to grey up.

We tried to back out, but a car came up behind us.. it pulled parallel and our driver dropped to window to talk to the other guy who informed us that it was all a one-way street, and the it went the direction that ended up at the bus. So our driver pulled forward again, made several calls to the bus company, and finally got the driver. Our driver hopped out of our car so we wouldn’t hear him swearing. Still, 10 minutes later, the bus loomed over our hood, and our driver finally gave up backed out till a turn-around space, and drove us out, the wrong way down the one-way street.

Just as we got turned around, of course, the bus driver showed up, and as we sped the wrong way down the alley, in the rear-view mirrors you could see the way behind us come clear.

Oh well.

Then a long ride home, the driver did not know the Itaewon area and ended up in the left-turn lane into the US Yongsan military base. We ran a red light to get out of that one. Finally we got near home and the problem of parking arose. Finally we decided to risk parking in front of a villa right by my house.

Yvonne took my keys, ran up the pad, and performed the Famous Flying Gargoyle Act. Jong Kyu ran back down to the store to get two beers, while I nervously listened to the sounds emanating from the bathroom. They suggested that, simultaneously, the Pequod was being pulled to the bottom of the ocean by the world’s biggest whirlpool and Old Faithful was spitting out an unfriendly card game of incontinent devils.

The smells weren't good either.

After a moment, Yvonne opened the door and asked “is anyone planning to use the bathroom?” I peered inside and decided not.

She continued, “cause I have to clean this up. I puked.”

Thank god for Korean style bathrooms, in which you can pretty much sluice the entire bathroom clean, although Yvonne didn’t quite completely achieve that.

Still, better than what would have happened in a Western bathroom.

I pissed into an empty beer can, and need to remember that when I get home, so I don’t try to drink the stuff and start the evil Cycle of Gargoyle all over again.

Working it...

Two bits of good news on the work front..

First, I will have a class at the beginning of the summer session. So that should add about 1k won to the kitty for the trips to the US and Philippines.

Second, the BKF informs me we will have major translation/editing job later in the summer. That should land a few more ducats on me as well.

If I can pick up some scrap-work in the interim, that would also be grand. Tomorrow I will find out if I have actually been having my overtime money deposited in my bank. I don't think I've seen it, but today I will get my ending balance and tomorrow will tell that particular tale.

LOL.. that's right!

That would be three book reviews by me, published in 10 Magazine Asia. Not yet a literary juggernaut, but a convenient thing to do until that time comes..

Burgled!

After being down (for I am nothing if not down) in Daejeon with the lovely Yvonne I came back to find my flat had been burgled..

well, about Daejeon first.

I needed a break from Seoul, so directly after work on Friday I caught the KTX down to Daejeon where Yvonne and I pigged out on Sam Gyap Sal and got a cheap Yeogwan in Eunhaengdong. Next day we got up, had some coffee and stuff, ran into Scott at the Starbucks, and then spent a few hours jamming around the market. At 4 we walked over to Woosong Staff Housing unit A (the "A" in the name is about the order of construction of housing, not the quality of the housing).

There we chilled with many old Woosongers and Woosongettes as the charred flesh and soju slid past bloody gums, down ulcerated esophagi and into contented bellies. Those two pictures here are from Mr. Michael Peacock's collection. The picture up above shows Yvonne about to rock out with her cock out. Or whatever chicks do. It also shows my bald spot. The one below shows my enormous head, which can be spotted on Google Earth. It also shows an Australian known as "Rodney" apparently about to ask for the photographers phone number, or ask her when she "came down to Earth." If he moves that inverted fanny-pack down just a bit? Impressive codpiece my Australian friend, impressive codpiece!

At evening's end we walked back to the Yeogwan - probably about a 30 minute walk in my partially inebriated state and arose the next morning to more Starbucks cofffe, bookshopping for Yvonne, and a cafe for me, to prep for my Auditory class on Monday morning.

Back to her hood for some delicious Galbi Tang (I also had soju).

Just as I was trying to make my escape (and with a suitcase full of stuff that had been stuck at Yvonne's pad since my move three months ago) Yvonne thought I should meet her coworker Donnie (sp?). Which was grand, but he did pull out some remainder of a bottle of vodka that now, well, does not remain. ;-)

We sat around his apartment and talked shit until it was time for me to catch a cab to the KTX and then a train on up to Seoul.

Once in Seoul, I actually caught a cab to my place.. a thing I never do, but I didn't want to have to drag the books with me.

I got home.. opened my door..

and the place had been burgled!

Everything dirty had been taken.

The pillows were back on the sofa.

The floor was clean... DEWD! They took my FILTH!!!!!!!

Apparently the ajumma did her quarterly apartment check and had a go at the messy bits of mine.

I silently thanked god that the Wednesday before I had totally cleaned the bathrooom and my office. If she had come in on Tuesday I might have been evicted.

It's funny, if a landlord in the US pulled a stunt like this I'd be angrified. Here? Par for the course and in fact she did me a favor.

heh..

Unexpected Responses from Google

So.. I realize I have not set my goals for this year and, given my essential laziness, this will hold me back.

So I started to work on them today.

Been looking at translation sites..

Thinking about my teaching....

Looking at conferences..

And trying to plan losing the next 30 pounds. In that effort I googled something I had heard, that modern soju was made from ethanol based on a chemical mash, and sugar. I just wanted to see how bad for me this could be, as Korean men consume soju at an industrial rate, yet still seem to stay slender.

In my eternal search for wisdom, I googled "soju and sugar"

See that picture thingy there at the top, left?

It was the first(!) result.

It's a goddamned dildo!

This result didn't help me at all in my particular search, but I've ordered two for some friends who need a little release. ;-)

Oh yeah.. and one for me!

Stooopid Goooooogle!

Arbeit macht frei!

It looks like I might get some editing work from Ewha University. The last job I did for them was apparently good by their standards, and they sent me an email back asking if I would be willing to do more work.

Of course, I said yes. ;;-)

Team Building Weekend!

It started far too early – just after 6 am on a Saturday. Unless you are still grinding the surface off your teeth in a crank frenzy, this is a time to sleep. But the alarm clock comes without mercy, and so it did to me. I cleaned myself up as best I can, and grabbed a cab to the Uni. Got there a bit early, which was in fact spectacularly early, since the “departure time” had been calculated based on “Korean time” (which is something similar to “Mexican Time” if you live near the border). Everyone showed up, and we headed off just about 8:15.

I really could have used that extra hour of sleep, but made up for it the best I could by napping on the bus. Sleep was impossible after we stopped halfway through the trip and heard that ex-president Roh had killed himself, apparently on account of the corruption probe into his presidency and family.

We took a quick stop at a kind of shrine to a Korean Movie which showed North and South Korean troops living in peace in an imaginary semi-utopia.

We arrived in town and walked through the market, which was nice, but nothing really unusual for a Korean open market. Lunch was adventurous. Seundae (an intestine based sausage), So Mori kuk pap – which is Cow-head soup and rice, and some extra bits of cow head and liver (the only thing I didn’t touch, based on horrible memories from my childhood) and Makkeoli. Not a bad meal, if you forget what’s actually in the thing.

Then it was off to rafting. As we drove up the river, it looked pretty lame – flat and regular. But the rafting was quite fun – the river was very tame, tame enough so that the guides actually crashed us into things for fun. Two of the slenderer girls were on the verge of hypothermia by the end of the trip and the guide kept splashing them with water and pushing them into the river (this was part of the game), despite the fact he had given one of them a heat-blanket type thing, and had the other huddle in the bottom of the raft to get out of the wind. This didn’t make sense to me, but it must be one of those Yin versus Yang things that no occidental tourist can understand. It also began to rain on us, which added to the coldnessosity.

Then back to the bus and off to the hotel. Our lovely office planner snagged me a room with a bed – a giant room, for only 60k won, which I was happy to pay for the solitude and control of the TV!

Then a truly brilliant dinner. Fat-ass Sam Gyap Sal, real sausages, thick mushroom strips, bean soup, rice and beer and soju flowing like beer and soju. Lots of cool chatter with the students and the kind of public good feelings that Koreans are so splendid at. Some folks headed off to a casino after, but I retreated to my big fat Korean room and am watching TV and preparing to go to sleep early.

Word is we aren’t expected to leave until 10 tomorrow, so I also should get a bonus sleep-in type of thing.

The Second Wave

Namsan is changing, as it does.

The bright blossom colors from this day have gone away.

Still, the greenosity is epic.

this




compares to this (click ya genius!) in that apples and oranges way.

And the once gnarled Rose of Sharon (click here, ok?) now looks like this:



meaning the field of ochre that was this link.. is now this field of green

And the blossoms be coming baby, the blossoms be coming!




One more pretty time before the heat killlessez...

Perhaps Someday I Can Become a Super-Jenius?

The Economist is now reporting that living overseas can make you more creative (if that is the same thing as smart).

20 more years here and I'll be comfortably above average intellectually!

"Teacher's Day," Last..

Koreans have a day for everything. For instance, today was "finally old enough to be seduced day," a day on which Korea finally frees its innocent young maidens up to be preyed upon by Hagwon English Teachers.

Well, actually, it's "Coming of Age Day," but still.

Last Friday was "Teacher's Day" and that note over there on the left was the best of the three notes I got, as it was the least formal. I also got a decorative cup and saucer, a rose, a box full of bakery treats, and a cake.

The respect Korean students have for instructors (although the students are work-avoiding missiles, just as in any other country) is just another reason it is a good deal to work in a University here.

THE SEOUL INTERNATIONAL BOOKFAIR

This started out rather lamely, but ended surprisingly well. Yvonne and I got up early and headed to Noksapyeong for coffee at the new coffee-shop that has inexplicably been placed inside the fare-gates. I swear, sometimes I wonder about the marketing guys here.

But the coffee was good (as it gets) and cheap, and the Noksapyeong subway station is an amazing thing. It is three stories high with a glass geodesic dome on the surface, and could easily handle 20 times the traffic it handles on an average day. You look at it and wonder what the designers were expecting when they built it.

My only theory is that it is right next to Yongsan Army base, which will go away in a couple of years. At that point Seoul will have an enormous chunk of empty property in downtown (northern) Seoul, and they may be planning something grand.

Anyway, we eventually headed off to the COEX and got to the fair. It was in two rooms, and the first room was rather uninspiring. Basically a bunch of kids books, and nothing that could fairly earn the title “international.”

The second room was better, with reps from Saudi Arabia, The Philippines, the US, Japan, etc.. Nothing that I was personally interested in, but undeniably international. Later, talking to a man who has had a booth at this convention for many years, I heard that the global economic splash had greatly reduced the number of North American and European booths. Surely something the organizers cannot be held accountable for except, perhaps, on Dave's ESL Cafe.

I quickly canvassed the entire place and was kind of unimpressed, but when I went back and spent more time (duh!) it turned out much better than I had initially judged. The Korean Literature Translation Institute was there, with many books I have read or own, and my one attempt to communicate with the woman running the booth was so traumatizing that she basically ran to hide.

Only to return in about 10 minutes with a raft of free stuff in English, which included 3 copies a seasonal magazine on translation, an annual (this is the first one) book of “new” Korean fiction and poetry translated by the KLTI, and a book listing ALL known translations of Korean fiction from 1980 to the present. The last thing will be very useful for my kiddies who are studying the penetration of Korean literature in the West, in Europe this summer. There is also an associated website.

On a more amusing note, the folks from Urantia were at the conference. I imagine they were downplaying, somewhat, their argument that people with blue-eyes are descended from the “smarter” planet of space aliens from which we all originated.

Some Dao-ists (a kind of splinter sect of them, to be exact) were there, and I spent some time talking to a Korean guy with amazingly perfect English. Obviously, he would like to convert me, but there also seems to be some slight chance that he will have editing work for me. As I had been researching religious structures in Asia for an upcoming photo-essay, I was able to gracefully drop into the conversation the question, “oh, there’s an important Daoist temple in Manila, isn’t there?” This surprised him and I got pulled into the booth for a one-on-one chat that I hope will lead to some work, or even just an introduction to the Daoists in the Philippines. He also gave me a bilingual copy of “The Cosmic Autumn Approaches” which is some kind of distillation of their essential doctrine of Millenial Daoism.

How those two thoughts are supposed to work together is unclear to me, but if I attend their workshop, I am sure they will lay it out for me.

Not quite as ironically amusing as the Cool Urantian Dressing mentioned above, but still funny, was the 'save the world' poster that was apparently begging the polar bears to go all Terry Schavio, dye their fur, or.. well do something to the planet that ends with "ave"

rave

lave

pave (no, wait, not likely with the hippie thing going on here)

have

wave..

oh... "save!"

The idea of the confused and mismanaged (and apparently doomed) whitey-bears was amusing to me, but I was frankly terrified by the little insert on the lower left (click on it an a bigger version will magically appear by the magic of the intarweb's magical magic) in which a bird has clearly pulled the thumb-tip off of its owner, and is consuming said delicacy whilst still perched on the owners immobile wrist.

The only way this could be possibly happen is if du Maurier/Hitchcock's ugly avian fantasy had come true and the owner was already deceased, eyeballs an appetizer for the hideous ruler-seagulls of the aerial future.

Yeah well, who cares about other people?

The point here is that the books and magazines I snatched up for free (beyond what I scored by obviously being white, both Yvonne and I looted the free magazines at the US Embassy exhibit) will go into filling that bookcase in my school office, so the kiddies think I am a legit instructor.

Back home to a chill night with Yvonne and a trip to see Star Trek this morning...

The End of Hi-Seoul

Being pretty busy, I contrived to miss most of Hi-Seoul, the annual festival of culture, but last weekend ADAM and I did take a spin around town to catch what events we could. I had Friday off, and he left Daejeon in the morning, so we headed towards Cheonggyecheon to see what we could see. It was "street performance day" at the stream, and so we were treated to a pretty amusing clown doing the kinds of things amusing clowns do.

As a teacher of English in Korea, I identified!

As an added bonus, ADAM is Mr. Photography and he knew of the fabled Canon dealership in Seoul. For a measly 10K chun they took the camera apart and cleaned both the sensor and the see-through apparatus. I had known the sensor was smudged - in close up pictures you could actually see the smudges on the digital output, but I had no idea how bad the eye-piece had become.

It was like looking through an entirely different camera, and a better one at that!

As you can see however, it did not succeed in making my photographs any better. ;-)

As we wandered down from Cheonggye and I took some snapshots of about the 100th "Changing of the Guard" ceremonies that I have snapped in my life, we also went by this kind of cool installation art in the sky. Later that night Adam looked it up on the wikipedia and it was revealed that the fabric was supposed to represent rivers.

We were just impressed by how it looked, and even more impressed at seeing such a grand expanse of green grass anywhere in Korea. Most fields are of spit-permeated dust, or covered in concrete or stone. What little grass is around, is usually pretty beaten and abused, but this was in good enough shape to lie directly on (after conciously excluding the whole "coated with spit" thought from your mind!).

Then it was home for dinner, Yvonne joining us, and some time spent over in Itaewon. Never my favorite place to go, but it was pretty fun.

The next day was back to Seoul and some cultural performances. I was still carrying the effed up card from Tokyo, so I really only had 256 safe MB to work with and was thus quite parsimonious about my snapping. Still, this pictured little girl was both intense and cute, and the medley of Beatles songs(!) played on traditional Korean stringed instruments (help me here BKF?) was soothing and kind of ridiculous sounding.

Finally, as we backed out of the shrine/temple park, we were amused to see the following piece of (I think) conceptual artwork. Someone has erected a scaffold around a brick building and is enclosing it in a facade of doors. Surprisingly, to me at least, it looked attractive and thoughtful.

Book Reviewer....

Looks like I just got some page space in 10 Magazine as their hip new book reviewer. Three reviews a month, one of a translation, one of a book on Korea, and one of a best seller.

K3wL!

My Students WIN!

Woot!

Just got news that the grant application for overseas scholarship (Germany and England) that I worked on, was funded!

This means that three of my students will travel to Europe this summer to do research on the penetration of Korean literature translation in Germany and England, and what the implications of that level of penetration are (i.e. associated impact). This will, of course, be a comparative study, with the Wae-Pirates as the rubric to judge by. Once it is completed, we will turn it into an academic paper and parade it around the Koreasphere for a year or so.

The only bad news is that I won't be funded to go to Europe, since I'm not a student. ;-)

Still, this is the kind of nifty thing that comes from moving to an academic university and I suppose it won't look bad on a resume or sound bad in an interview.

Now I need to get all packed for Tokyo.

Scraps..

Some awesome things on the writing horizon at BPU2. The Mentor and I have a scheme for analysis that is both a mile wide and, so far as we can tell, previously untapped.

But, really, doesn't all that fade in the face of Rosemary Chicken with scallions and cherry tomatoes? With a Heineken on the side?

Clearly, that question was rhetorical!

Re-unification

Had an interesting talk with the Chinese and Korean students in my conversation class. These are pretty articulate and pretty smart kids, and a couple of things they said quite suprised me.

First, ALL the Chinese students thought that not only should Korea unify, but that it would. Second, the Korean students were split. Half thought there would be re-unification and the other half thought there shouldn't be.

The short explanation of this is that the Chinese kids believe in re-unification as a general notion, and are clever enough to generalize it. When I said something like "WTF you OWN North Korea, why would you give it up?" they responded with "countries should be unified." And then made an exactly parallel argument about China and Taiwan.

The Korean students, on the other hand, were split between fuzzy racialists (we are all one) and people who were afraid that the economic failure of NK would mean a re-unification would economically destroy SK.

The Chinese students found this interesting, as they identified a similar problem as the main reason that Taiwan had steered away from re-unification with China. That is, they thought Taiwan's historical aversion to China had been economic, and now that China was a tiger, this problem had gone away. Some of the Korean students were politely sceptical that this was the ONLY fear Taiwan had about Chinese rule, but I was amazed at both the depth of thought (I heard some things I hadn't considered) and their willingness to try to express it in English.

AT LONG LAST: PLANT-BLOGGING AND THE RETURN OF THE GARBAGE GODS

As I am sensitive to the requests of both of my regular readers ("Anonymous" and that other "Anonymous"), today I return to the mighty house-plant blogging endeavor. In fact, I have been so remiss in my plant blogging that I have failed to mention two new plants. The first is a Rosemary plant, one of two that the BLF and I picked up in Gwangju two weekends ago (the other is suffering a slow death in her dark apartment). This bad boy has already been trimmed for at least two chicken dinners. The second plant is some other kind of thing, which I picked up just down the street.

But that was then and this is now.

The first thing to note is that I did track down some potting soil. I memorized the word for soil and went into a little shop just up the street. It looked grim upon entry – the typical collection of lovely plants that were clearly rootbound in the little containers in which they sat. But using my piss-poor Korean and pointing, I got across to the woman what I was looking for. She moved a little screen aside, and lo and behold there were three bags of potting soil. I purchased one for 10 chun won and lugged it up to my apartment. I also asked the woman if she had any pots, but the ones she had were quite expensive clay ones.

Buoyed by my victory, I went back out onto the street to try to find some kind of ceramics store which might have something I could use for pots. No luck there, but the garbage gods did bless me with one medium-sized plastic bowl that had previously served to hold something greasy, with green flecks. I tried not to think about that as I tucked it into my backpack. I made it back to the apartment with this treasure in tow, and decided it was time for the heavy-drinking section of my day.

I stepped outside my door, took about 23 (it could have been 22) steps down the hill and, lo and behold(!), there next to some brand new garbage, was a big old black pot.

I beelined over to the thing and was ecstatic to see that it contained several more largish pots that would suit me just fine. This put off the heavy-drinking section of my day by several score minutes. I scooted back up to the pad and started dishing dirt (as I do) and pulling plants out of pots and re-potting them.

When I was done, my repotted collection was fantabulous. Also, I was coated in mud and dirt was scattered all over the floor.

Now I need to figure out where to place these plants, as well as get a few new ones. I want full-tropical up in this fugger. Full Tropical!!

When I get all that figured out, I'll be back with the most potted plant shots since Chris Hitchens went after Al Sharpton about atheism!

Artopia! Klimt in Seoul!

As we headed off to the Gustav Klimt exhibit at the Seoul Art Center, we made a terrible miscalculation. We ate at the waffle house near Noksapyeong station. After stuffing ourselves ill, neither of us wanted to head across the Han for the exhibit.

Still, Sunday in Korea does not bring tempting couch-potato fare such as the National Football League, and with little better to do, we headed off on the 6 and 3 lines, and were dumped off in some non-descript area of Seoul. The BLF (just now upgraded from OAF) immediately began freaking out that the “neighborhood map” that is a feature of each subway station, did not have the Hwarangan Museum on it. Being a bit taller than the nearly-subterranean BLF I could see the rather prominent street signs that pointed towards it. To be fair to the BLF, these were printed in rather large English, and that probably put her off track.

We walked (BLF suspiciously muttering all the time about how lost we were and how the “Koreans would slaughter us and eat our brains for anju") and as we did saw a cool overpass-slash-water-sculpture that, when we returned to, was alas off.

But we found the Klimt exhibit and bought our tickets. About 12 bucks each, US, for adults. The exhibit was a bit crowded, and had an unusually high percentage of people who didn’t really know how to queue and instead bumped around randomly and cut in front of things. In fact, in just about 1.3 years (cumulatively) in Korea, this was the first time I ever felt that expat complaint that Koreans paid no attention to who got some place first.

Oh well, it lightened up, and so did I. The exhibit was grand, particularly in the cases in which it had the planning sketches from pieces the Klimt painted. The first chamber, of course, was an obligatory attempt to tie Klimt’s art to Asian/Korean influences. It had some Asian paintings he had owned, as well as some Asian clothing. This was, I thought, good marketing, because it brought him home to the local issue.

Anyway, after that we wandered through the chambers and goggled. It was a bit dark in some places, in consideration of the age of the art I’m certain. But it was grand.

There were some great sketches leading to development of posters – in some ways Klimt prefigured computer typography and the Adobe Ilustrator program. Of course he also blew by those limited things in every conceivable way – his skill was that he could toss in those approaches, photo-realism, negative space, negative space defined by detritus, toss out brush strokes, and still end up with something mesmerizing. The room of pencil sketches of naked women was funny for more that one reason. Klimt drew some pretty graphic sketches of naked women, at least as graphic as you could get before the razor blade and Brazilian Wax. But no matter how obscene the picture (and at least two were graphic depictions of masturbating women), he gave them those great antisceptic “painterly” titles: “Reclining Nude #1 With Legs Parted.” Then there were the ajumma and ajeoshi, who had brought their kids to the exhibit to introduce the kids to culture. That was all good in the more tasteful rooms, but the haste with which kids where whisked through this room was epic.

And it had a totally cool “electronic poster/panel” section that showed various works that were not present, but gave context or meaning to pieces that were there. Another excellent panel combination compared works of Klimt to fashion that had trod the runaways in 2006/7. A really brilliant thing to see. This also contained digitized pictures of his friends and family, including a very spooky (we think) death mask of Klimt himself.

Then it was off to the “total artwork” section. Klimt and some of his fellow “secessionists” wanted art to extend beyond gilt frames and embrace entire environments. So they designed rooms and buildings that were entirely coordinated: A kind of proto-quieer-eye-for-the-straight-guy thing. The accompanying text related a (probably apocryphal) story of one of the “total art’ dudes opening a fashion line because people were walking into his “art” space in clothing that clashed.

A few final paintings, and we were out for the day, after I took a photo for the BLF’s brother (the bear one, obviously!). That was pretty funny in itself. Korean couples were running all over these rooms taking pictures, but they were using the art as a background. I took a shot of the bear shitting in the woods(?) and security was on me in a trice. Either you have to be taking a picture of a girl flashing two peace signs (in front of anything you want), or you need to be Korean. Outside of that. “No pictures please, sir!” LOLcatz..

BLF wanted to walk more, so we headed up the hill behind the museum and found a nice little Buddhist enclave which was gearing up for this weekend’s celebration of the man/god/extinguished. Thus there were lanterns hung everywhere. Here, we saw something amusing, this display which indicated what, if you took a particular trail, you could eat afterwards without fear of caloric impact.

Then it was down the hill backwards, to the plaza outside the Opera House. There was an Opera that night, so the sharply dressed intelligentsia were queuing up like sheeples from their glossy cars. In the plaza, there was a water-display timed to various snippets of opera. It was cool.

We wandered about for a bit, found a place that served semi-German beer, and chilled for the time it took to have two beers (me) and two cokes (BLF). Then it was off to the subway and our divergent trips home.

I think you should ALL fly over to Seoul and see this exhibit. I have a spare room with a bed, and the round trip is less than 1,000 US. You Americans lose at least that much each day on your plummeting stock market!

Heck, you get a view of Namsan Tower each night and at least one sam gyap sal dinner for free.

You parochial bastids won't come!

Unecessarily Graphic?

It isn't Just Fan Death that can kill you around these parts, mister!

I have to hat-tip the BKF for giving me a clue of this. We were walking to dinner during his visit (a time I already refer to, with just a hint of woe on my otherwise noble countenance, as "the good old days") and he started laughing. I asked why and he gestured back over his shoulder, "There's a sign back there that threatens to kill litterers."

In the interim I have learned the word for garbage, and so today as I walked past the store I could read some of that white sign scratched in the concrete. It says, "If you litter around here, I'll kill you!" (that is kind of translated from the literal)

New Words are -
걸리면 = When caught
버리다 = throw away
죽는다 = dies

and I think(?) that the verbs are all in the root form to make it simple for foreigners to understand? The BKF can clue me in on that, I'm sure.

UPDATE - The only other thing I can easily read there is the advert for cigarettes, not only because it is ubiquitous here, but always looks the same - white circle, red letters, blue background. Now THAT is marketing!

The Hills Are Alive....

Walking up the hill behind BPU2 to get to Namsan Park I first come across this little shrine, tucked between two horizontal trails across the hill. Around it you can see the kind of springing that is going on.


Those once ochre and dull-green hills have asploded with color - in fact much of the cherry-blossom color has already fallen off of the trees. As you walk through, the wind brings down gusts of blossoms, like velvet flakes of snow.



Finally, a close-up of the 무궁화 bushes reveals that they are finally starting to come back from their savage pruning. Good, since I think it will mean a second efflorescence on the hill.

I'm all for it.

Taking an assignment and "running" with it

The cute kids in my communications class do an advertisement. Just for BAX, I think they are calling the drink "Super Eight!"

Enough Said

The Klimt exhibit in Korea (which OAF and I shall see next weekend) occasioned this quote from Teit Ritzau the Austrian art organizer in charge of the exhibition.

Private lenders from countries including America and Germany made the exhibition complete but it was difficult to convince them to contribute their collections,” he said.

“Korea had not much to offer them back.

But of course Korea does (eg Celadon and painting, often decorative ) have much to offer back.

Which no one knows the first thing about, due to Korea's failure to spread knowledge about Korean culture.

It's the same old problem.
Korea might never be China in the international imagination, but could it please step up and be Korea?

Two Bathrooms and a Heating Pad

The last two weekends have been spent out of Seoul. Last weekend in Gwangju, and this expiring weekend in Busan. These trips from Cosmopolitown have not been without incident. In Gwangju we met the L family, and the father is a traditional older Korean. This means, to my unrestrained joy, I get to drink a lot when we visit him.

While down in Gwangju, we stayed at a Love Motel/Yeogwan and these things are always kind of interesting. In this case the interest came late at night as our drinking session required me to use the bathroom. Yeogwan’s tend to have similar layouts (as illustrated in my MS-Paint quality graphic below), you walk into a very small entrance vestibule where you can take of your shoes. It normally has a door directly in front of you, which goes to the sleeping area, and a door to the left of you (sometimes right) that goes to the bathroom. Typically the light in the vestibule is movement activated, so when you pass through it, it snaps on.

This Yeogwan was no different, so when I walked through the vestibule, the light snapped on and illuminated the bathroom. I stepped in and peed, the light going off as I did so.

No big deal, I’ve learned to pee in the dark.

Upon conclusion, I dropped the toilet-seat back down, and pulled the handle to flush the toilet.

The handle, that is, to the bidet function.

So, instead of flushing the toilet, I got sprayed in the lower torso with a stream of warm bidet-water.

In my drunken state, I thought the toilet was taking its revenge by peeing back at me.

I dried myself off with a towel, identified the actual flushing mechanism, and staggered back to bed.

This weekend, it was the OAF’s turn to lose the war(s) with technology. Our ‘normal’ yeogwan in Busan was full, so we went to one around the corner. It was very nice, but I don’t think we will be allowed back.

The bed had an electric blanket and of course the OAF turned it on. The blanket is underneath the mattress pad (a sort of simulation of Ondol heating on a bed) and whatever lays upon it, gets very warm (again like Ondol heating). At about 2 am this morning, the OAF rolled over onto a spot that had been covered by a pillow or something. Like a frog, the slow heating of her body had not bothered her, but this was apparently different. I awoke (as I imagine our neighbors did), at about 3 in the morning , to the sound of the OAF hysterically screaming, “Hot! Hot! Hot! Hot!”

I hope anyone listening thought I was driving her mad with my skills in the Marital Arts, but I imagine that they thought more about criminal activity.

I pulled the plug on the blanket, and all was well until morning.

In the morning, I visited to my old nemesis, the yeogwan bathroom.

I suppose there is no delicate way to say this, but the OAF has a lower bowel in which it is still possible to believe Jimmy Hoffa’s corpse could be found. This has been a problem at several places we have lived, and apparently one of Jimmy’s arms had come loose in the night.

The toilet was clogged.

For those of you who haven’t lived in Korea, Koreans have a mystical belief (akin to their belief in fan death) that toilet paper is a very bad thing, and thus should be tossed out, once removed from the buttockal region, into a waste-basket. This is one of the reasons that some Korean toilets smell so… unusual.

The OAF has certainly re-inforced this belief in at least the one ajumma who runs this yeogwan in Busan (although the fact that the toilet paper was in fact still floating around was the initial evidence that the thing was clogged, and should expunge any rumor of guilt from attaching to it's papery name).

We snuck out early, partly to avoid the shame, and partly so that I could go to the bathroom.

This eventually led us to a bookstore in Busan that was far better than any I have found in Seoul…

But the train is approaching Seoul as I type, and maybe that needs to be a post for later.

"In the Depths"

A little something over at Morning Calm.

Boo-Hooery!

BKF and JAE just got in the car to go to Incheon Aiport and it makes me a saaaaaad panda!

Their stopover was grand (the OAF even grabbed a KTX on Wednesday after work and came up just for one night) but it just wasn't long enough and life will go back to boring with them and the Great Re-unifier (who ran around with all the happy rage that only a two-year old can have) gone.

waaaaaaaaaaaaah!

OLDLOL catz...

My students are fucking brilliant....

so brilliant that I'm dragging myself off to sleep at 9:46 or so on a Friday..

This weekend is off to Gwangju with the OAF and BKF and JAE (and the great re-unifier!)

But I do plan to get back to posting about my students. They betray a common (and often realistic) notion about Korean students being test driven..... and that is all.

My kids... they raWkZ!

Are Geraniums Weapons of Mass Construction?

Since I still believe my expiring plant is a geranium, I post this picture for the two horticulturalists, in the hope it will lead them to some kind of thought....

I hope clickology will result in a picture more suited for scientific analysis.



Also, the OAF and I wandered Seoul in random and seldomly related local concentric circles that, had they been tracked, would have resembled the death march of someone 8 cans of sterno into it, or a naked man expiring on the harsh deserts of the ironically named "Livermore."

In fact, what we really did was walk along the river (I purchased a tripod and the OAF, after saving me about 30 bucks on the deal, rewarded herself by buying a couple of books) and have this remarkably odd lunch.



It was advertised as a "Bagel with Salmon and Cream Cheese." It was actually a BLUEBERRY bagel with salmon, one slice of American Cheese, some kind of cream (it's doing that bukkake thing on the front of the bagel), bacon, lettuce, tomato and cucumber.

Oh, yeah, and a toothpick embedded in each half, except the toothpick was too short to go through the entire sandwich, so they apparently compressed the sandwich, stuck the toothpick in, then uncompressed the thing.

Result.. 4 cleverly hidden toothpicks between the two of our sandwiches.

Fortunately I figured that out when I picked mine up and despite it's odd stack of gooey ingredients discovered that it was remarkably structurally sound. I took a look and discovered the interior toothpick.

Despite the bizarre contents of the thing, and the wooden death concealed therein, it tasted pretty damned good.

Even the OAF, who is a talented deconstructor of Korean food, just pulled out one or two leaves of limp lettuce, and ate the whole thing.

Weird, I'd have never thought of such a combination. And beyond that I'd never have imagined it might taste good. It was like a BLT with American Cheese and Blueberry Bagel. American as Candy-Apple-Grey Pie.

Then I got home and to avoid grading, set up a mattress for the BKF and JAE when they arrive. I also worked more (in my role as 'Improviso Man!') on the sound/light-proofing.

The previous tenant had left some packing tape, I had a bunch of old newspapers (pink) and so I sealed the edges of some of the cut styrofoam (so that little bits would stop flaking off) and taped a matte of newspaper to the bigger pieces of styrofoam in the window by my bed..

Theoretically this will make it darker and cleaner in the bedroom.

Tommorow morning will tell about the first bit, and time will tell about the other.

And then forget it entirely as it kill us in succession, and then turns to those who have succeeded us.

Etcetera...

Home Improvement

With a handle (I think - I'll blog about it soon) on the teaching chores, and with Management Training (The dreaded MT!) looming tomorrow, I decided to come home, do dishes, and work on the Bohemian Love Pad just a little bit.

First thing I did was put this cool map of China, Korea, and Japan on the wall. It's all in Chinese and it was given to me by a Chinese student at Solbridge International Business School. I said I'd put it up once I had a decent place, so here it is.

That raggedy-ass geranium is the only of the four plants I purchase that is struggling and I wonder if that is because it is the only one I haven't replanted. Strangely, the flash on my camera renders the hideous flourescent lighting here (yeah, yeah, I know it's more environmentally sensitive, but get me some incandescent bulbs and I promise to stop killing small animals for fun, ok?) as something approaching homey.

Trust me. It isn't.

The other picture lacks a certain aesthetic, but it is the three hearty plants from my initial snagology. I want plenty of plants up here in the hizzy, since the air in Seoul is about to take a turn for the worse.

The OAF turned up a pretty good presentation at TED (a really useful website) about what you can do to clean oxygen with plants. But until I can find those badboys, I'm just going to fill my house with what is locally available. Big plants, like dirt, apparently require heading to the outskirts of Seoul, and a car to bring back.

I'm sure I'll do a bit more googling on this, perhaps even (pace MAF) visit the wikipedia.

Anyway, it's a small step toward personalizing the pad.

The Path Taken More Times Than Jenna Jameson

ME AND IMMIGRATION

Today is my weekly day off and it started well, lolling about in bed and IMing The Reprobate, the OAF, and MAF at the same time. I felt such a 21st century boy! If only some of you other "friends" and "family" were more certain IMsters. After all, I now have a personal best to beat.

Then it was off to get the last bit of my difficulties with immigration ironed out. Simple things are often good things (explaining why I dated Kim Vickery) and I had a breakfast of Kimbap and Coffee which is both simple and good.

As a bonus, I got to Immigration, got my ticket out of the machine and was called within three minutes. So now, at the cost of 700 dollars, I'm clean with Korea. Looking at the passport I'm not sure that I have the paperwork I need for multiple entry (which reminds me of an experience I once had in a men's room at the bus station in New York, but perhaps that is for another post?) status, but when BKF lands I'll have him look at it.

This has been, as my first lovely picture of Namsan over there indicates, an uphill struggle.

Still, I'm quite happy it is over and despite initially getting on the subway in the direction of outer nowhere (Somewhere between Alameda, California and anywhere in the semi-autonomous English posession of Scotland) I was home by 1:30 or so.


UP THE HILL BACKWARDS (IT'LL BE ALRIGHT)

Since I had purchased some new headphones last week on my trip to Yansang, and wanted to use the mighty Ipod, I thought a trip up towards Seoul Tower would be a darned good thing. I grabbed the camera and headed up.

Spring is very slowly beginning to sprung. I could see some color - those yellow bushes along the road have bloomed in the last week, and when I looked closely at the bushes and trees I could see buds everywhere. The buds were pretty obvious on some of the flowers - the only exception were the Mugungwha (Rose of Sharon) which have been so tightly pruned that they seem to be in a state of shock. That might not be all bad, since although some plants have been fooled by last week's Spring-like weather, it went back to about freezing the last few days and last night, as I went to dinner at a Nepali restaurant, it snowed a bit.

But spring is coming, as even the trees are starting to bud. Most of the hill is still pretty ochre, but some spots have dashes of color and, after Spring last year in Daejeon, I'm looking forward to see what's going to happen on the mountain.

I didn't include pictures here of the lilly pond on the Itaewon side of the mountain, but by change of the season, or by the hands of man, it is starting to get substantially less cloudly and it also looks ready to start blooming into something cool.


BE VEWWY VEWWY QWIET... I'M HUNTING AJUMMA!

The hiking behavior of older Koreans is unlike anything I ran into in The Empire, so I also took a few emblematic snaps of them. The first thing I noticed in Korea (on the trails that is) is that older Koreans have a very characteristic walking style. They either carry a walking stick, in which case their hands are free, or they clasp their hands behind their backs and walk slightly leaned forward. Spookily, this walking style is exactly that of the OAF (this might explain her love for kimchee - shared genetics) and it has always reminded me of old WWII pictures I saw of Hitler reviewing the troops. At any rate, it is very typical.

The second thing, that I think I've mentioned before, is that for people going out "into nature" Koreans do everything they can to cover themselves from it, and many Ajumma look only a plane ticket to Nepal and three Sherpa short of an attempt on Everest.

It was a bit chilly today.. 45 degrees in that savage measurement system that many of you use back in The Empire ... but not that chilly, and this style of dress is as strictly adhered to when it is 90 degrees and 90 percent relative humidity as it is when ice-storms are blowing through. Anyway, I include a snap of each style. That picture of the couple, particularly spooks me out, because .... because... THEY HAVE NO FACES!!!

Ahem, I'm better now.


USE YOUR. TALENT TO DIG ME UNDER

Last week I also went on search of pots for plants, potting soil, and fertilizer. Only one of these things exist in Seoul (pots - a culture so good with ceramics is likely to have a lot of pots about). Some quick confabs with my lovely students returned a uniform response, "you have to go outside Seoul." But all the classes were also uniform in suspecting I was some kind of dangerous retard for wanting to pay for dirt.

I took great pains to explain that while I was some kind of dangerous retard, it was for not this reason. Also, after my explanation of what I needed, a student in each class finally said some version of, "Professor, why pay for dirt? Our school is next to a mountain."

And so it was that today, on my trip to Namsan Mountain, I took a little tupperware container and stole some dirt from beneath a newly planted tree.

This went against everything the Sierra Club ever taught me, but when in Rome, I suppose, I must do as the Romans propose.

Then, maybe 100 meters past the site of my dirt theft, The Universe either taunted me, offered me an answer, or is trying to get me arrested. Maybe all three.

As a dangerous retard I have no way of judging.

But there, to the left of the trail, was a tarped stack of of 20 kilo bags of dirt that the park gardeners apparently use for planting things.

I'm not sure what to do about this, but If I call any of you for bail money, I damned well expect you cough up. Got it?

Ah.. a good day in the land of always tomorrow...

This weekend may be MT, which should be a raft, if not an actual cruise-ship (since who knows where we are going), of entertaining stories.

For now, it may be time to toddle down to the regular and have a delicious Gin and Tonic.

After all, days off only come around three times a week.

Fame but no fortune..

A letter from semi-prestigious magazine:

Dear Charles,

Congratulations on your new position. Even though I work on Japan, I have a special interest in Korea and am happy that you are in Seoul. I am also attracted to your idea of a photo spread for the fall 2010 Asian Religions special section. The deadline for that issue is May 10, 2010. Please plan on a photo essay of about the same length as your first one.

I am also keenly interested in you doing a second photo essay that, if accepted, will be published in the spring 2010 issue with a deadline of December 10, 2009.

....A bunch of detail excised....

Charles, thank you so much for your interest in working with us again. I look forward to hearing from you about both of these potential topics.

Cordially,
name redacted

sweet! Of course planning so far ahead means that I will be hit by a bus or catch the cancer. ;-)

Addenda --

Korea beats the Japs 4-1

there is also far less (still way to much) spitting in Seoul...

Scraps

1) Taxi drivers in Seoul seem much less garrulous than the ones in Daejeon.

2) It is much more likely that they will have working seatbelts in their cabs.

3) The students here primp and preen at about 33% the rate that they did at BPU, where every shiny wall in an elevater was an excuse to fidget with hair, adjust collar and do makeup.

4) This stinking cold I picked up in the US just keeps hanging on. I'm not sure the Yellow Dust yesterday did it any good at all.

5) Korea currently leads Japan 3-0 (first inning) in the WBC semis

That will be all. ;-)

Stalling...

Just because I'm working on various instruction related things (and the fact that BPU2 has STILL not got me the documents I need to be clean with immigration) I will only note that..

"the cowboy meets the company"

and

"A tragedy in five comic acts" ("three" either, but then I got bored checking)

are things not yet found on Google.

Until this post is spidered.

I live to serve. ;-)

After an evening of unsteady sleep (perhaps getting home and finishing the bottle of soju on the kitchen counter was a bad idea?) I was unaccountably awoken at 7:30 by the OAF. I spent two fruitless hours trying to get back to sleep but finally had to give it up as a bad go.

I was cranky and out of sorts. A shower helped a bit, but what really helped was a trip to the Waffle House.

It was a freezing morning; that face-peeling cold that keeps my skin young. The Waffle House opened about 10 minutes late, so we got to stand in the cold for a bit just to appreciate how cold it freaking was. Still, the place was really good. The eggs weren’t great (mixed with water for beating, I think?) and the slice of ham had some unusual spice (Bay leaf?) on it, but the syrup was grand, with little berries of some sort in it, the potatoes were cooked not greased and fried, and the two pancakes were grand. And who in their right mind ever complains about bacon?

Vegans, that’s who.

Vegans and communists.

And child abusers.

But no one else.

Add a cup of coffee, and all of a sudden I was feeling ready to head downtown to see the second to last day of the Rubens exhibition down at the Sejong Cultural Center.

We hopped the subway and headed up (down? over? through? Pi divided by negative infinity? I’m still getting the geography right (left? straight? asymptotic? I can never tell)) to the Gwangwhamun station which dropped us off at the back of the Sejong Cultural Center. So we took a quick moment to check out the Art Garden, which had some stainless steel sculptures and benches. Not a ton of stuff, but nice enough. There, I snapped that picture of the OAF with the reading statue. Shortly thereafter, the OAF whispered something to the statue and sprained a finger trying to go in under its brass sweater.

After about 15 minutes of this, we headed around to the front to see the exhibit, and I was thrilled to see that there weren’t horribly long lines.

Oddly, the ticket booth was shuttered.

But, on the positive tip, there were no lines - Since lines require two points (See! I didn’t sleep through all of calculus!), and there wasn’t even one person in line. There are normally Koreans everywhere in Seoul, and here you couldn’t find two to rub together.

Confused, we walked over to the big stairs, but they didn’t lead to the exhibit. Stumped, we looked at the site map and realized the ticket booth was right in front of the exhibition.

Which, it turns out, ended yesterday! Thus the picture of the OAF in front of the shuttered box office.

We had FAIL! And tons of it!

Instead of implementing our (failed) brilliant plan, we ambled. We walked down past Admiral Yi Sun-sin to another museum that the OAF had spotted on a previous trip. It had some kind of incomprehensible exhibition called “The Scene of Criticism.” Part of it was incomprehensible because there was no English translation of some of the text-heavy work (which I think is quite sensible – I’m not sure why the Korean have always been so obsessed with English – still I miss the ease that English translations give). But part of it was just incomprehensible due to, well.. incomprehensibility. A lot of the work was crap, but a couple of things were quite good. Amongst the crap was this aquarium presented as art (after all, it has Roman ruins AND a pirate. Perhaps it is the lack of actual fish that makes it art?). I thought I’d include a photo of it for SIS, who once at SFMOMA nearly expired of laughter (and had to be hauled out of the place down the stairs) after realizing some “artist’ had created a circle of white-painted gravel as art, whereas in Tuscon it would have been the front-yard equivalent of a lawn.

To be fair to SIS, she had just seen Art Arneson’s sculpture of Michael Jackson with a monkey, so was already on edge.

And Art is funny, I guess.

But some was good, including a display of pop culture artifacts that could only be seen through a cut in a wall (the picture at the start of all this gibberish) – no entry was possible. There was also another piece of which I include several photos. It is nearly indescribable as you enter past a scene of a white bird which has beheaded itself flying into a window, and then you enter an office which has a reassuring conservative look (reinforced by technology on the desk, in a useful configuration, from an old Bell phone, through a typewriter and up to a Dell computer – so still a few years behind Apple). When you turn around you see the other side of the avicidal window, and over that a projected video plays.

Like I said, difficult to put to bits and bytes. But it was good. Someone had put together an arresting (particularly for the poor bird) external image, but then gone on to figure out what lay on the other side of it.

Then it was on to Cheonggye stream where there was a three tent “festival” celebrating strawberries, if the half limp inflata-berry yawing in the wind was any indication. Ennui washed over us as we approached the sagging tents, and the dispirited folks inside them didn’t even get out of their chairs to try to sell us their wares. We turned around and headed back to the main street.

As we walked further, we came across a little palace that we had never visited. Deoksugung is also the home of an art museum, so we wandered in to find an exhibit on art and modernism in Korea. Pretty good, although the first gallery was incredibly poorly lit. I think this was to protect the older works it held, but it made the art pretty difficult to take in. One highlight was near the end; a room that showed the necessity for the ‘restoration’ of modern works. During the Japanese interregnum, and probably during the post civil war period, artists had no money and materials. Of course they didn’t stop working, but they worked with flawed media and thus, today, even recent works need the kind of restorative effort that the West associates with resuscitation of works in the Vatican. It was kind of cool to see.

We were a couple hours into the random walking, so we decided to catch the subway back to home turf (As I often make fun of the OAF’s stunning ability to get lost, I have to mention that I resolutely ignored her correct argument that we needed to board a train headed in the.. oh… right direction … and I got us going the wrong way). We stopped at an Italian restaurant (pic over there somewhere) that we had tried to hit a couple of times. This time it was open, and worth the stop. The proprietess is a quiet, meticulous and fastidious woman who makes excellent thin-crust pizza from her own dough. While we ate, we watched her make dough for the next day. The pizza was great, but the wine was, while from the West, Korean in nature – sweet as syrup. I’ll go back, but it will be for the traditional pizza and beer.

It being White Day here in the land of tomorrowness, when we got home we exchanged gifts, I got 80% done on the sound and light proofification of the bedroom, and the OAF slumbers away as I type this. While I was doing the insulation, I had the windows open and the OAF responded in the way you see in the picture below.

We are currently baking some chicken and potatoes.

Just another day that stinking San Jose would never have offered. ;-)

A Short Review of A Short Story - Twofold Song, by Yi Mun-yol

is available over at Morning Calm

Predictably

all the time spent at immigration did not add up to a Visa as BPU2's theory that a letter saying I was hired would be considered to be equivalent to a contract was, well, a flawed theory.

Still, this news back to BPU2 got them on the stick and I should have contract tomorrow, so I'll know the real terms of my deal. I went shopping this afternoon, to drown the sorrow, and purchased a lovely stainless steel pot to replace the aluminum-coated Alzenheimer-inducing piece of crap I left behind in South Central. I also started to buy the pieces for sound and light-proofing the bedroom and discovered a big patch of mold in the window roof that I'll need to nuke out.

Still, starting to settle in is nice and I'm still completely in love with the stove and washing machine.

oh, I also joined the gym which, I suppose, means I should grab out my goals from last year, see how I did on them, and set the next set.

Sittin' Here in Immigration, Waitin for My Reservation

After getting my documents, late, from BPU2, I had gone to the immigration center in the middle of the enormous rush at the end of the contract year. This nice guy there said I had a 30 day grace-period and I should go home and make an internet appointment. Today was that appointment (is that appointment, actually)

Being stupid I forgot to print out my immigration appointment which was on my computer at work. Being smart, I went up to work to print it out. Good thing I did that rather than trying a PC bang, since the “check your appointment” feature of the website was down for administration – most likely as the result of trauma or information resulting from the big rush around the end of last month. Being stupid, I left my passport at home. A quick set of cab trips and I was down in immigration early, hoping that my paperwork is ok. I have the paperwork filled out as best I can, but I’m sure it will have to be binned and redone, since there is sometimes no telling what a bureaucracy will want.

The online appointment, however, is the way to go, as even today there seems to be a substantial wait.

LATER…

So I get up there and they can only go so far before telling me I’m at the wrong office for my new address and apparently there was no grace period, alas. At least I bought my stamp and got the first steps done. The nice woman, of course, kept referring to the “large” fine I’d have to pay for being late. But, of course, she could’t tell me how much it is. So I have tubed over here with the fear of the necessity of a midnight run to Incheon, and the re-creation of my career in the United States.

Now, with only 29 customers between me and service, I sit and wait.

Getting the Reins

Walked home from work last night and had a brief, but convincing, bout of the Bubonic Plague. The walk home was pretty boring, I was briefly surprised that the route that goes over the top had been walled off with big sheets of metal. Several Ajummas were ignoring that wall (which was pretty easy as you could walk right around it), but I wasn't taking chances with my limited Korean on any kind of kerfuffle.

So I walked a different path and other than a torturous roundabout (the Castle Wall Walk) that lifted my high, high in the sky and then deposited me back about 200 meters above where I had originally been, it was a breeze. About 45-50 minutes, including my partial ascension to heaven.

Got home, started working on some classes, and my bones started to melt. This melting was a direct result of my joints achieving temperatures found in steel mills, burning tungsten, and journeys to the center of the sun.

I drank as much water as I could, gobbled half a pain pill, and turned the Ondol up to a zillion. I rolled sadly on the floor for about an hour, then headed into the bedroom and crawled into bed with the window open. I had a series of weird dreams about attempting, in various ways, to smuggle packets of heat.

But sometime in the early AM, I woke up and felt a lot better - even as if the cough that has been dogging me since the US would go away. Well enough, in fact, that I walked to work. With the advantage of not getting lost this only took 40 minutes and I'm still confused why my landlady-ajumma and Mrs. Kim were so astonished when I told them I planned to walk to or from work at least once a day. I suspect their fear is on account of my Western corpulence.

But got to work early and worked more on the classes. I've found the cafe, so now it's coffee powered as well. Got to a point I think I'm ok in all the classes and also think I've connected with the students. There were a few days there, where that did not seem to be happening, but now I've more or less figured out the room, and adopted a couple of strategies for the less English-savvy student. Primary among these is that I'm letting students take their questions home, and I'm posting all the sound files and videos to my website. That way the slower students can play and replay them as often as they want.

As a bonus, in my convo class a worried student came up to me to discuss how he would do in the class. I gave him my usual rah-rah and reminded him that a Conversation Class includes the possibility that he ask for clarification, repeats, slower speed, etc.

Somehow this mini-conference turned into a conversation (nearly unheard of in a conversation class but, to be fair, this did happen afterwards) and I discovered that he is a big fan of filming and photography. He showed me the world's most awesome video camera and we talked a bit about lenses. We walked to the subway together and discussed possible plans for film projects.

Plans, it is certain, that will fall through!

But he also mentioned he has a bottle of bourbon, so there's a plan that might well work out.

MeanMail Re-instated

Anyone interested in a meanmail update, can contact me by email...

It comes with an echo...

This is looking from in front of my desk towards my office door (Note sink and mirror - all I need is a cot and I've got an Officetel!)



And this here other one is looking from the other side of the table..

Week One, down..

A pretty crazy week, all things considered.

With one class still hanging around over 60 students, it was a busy time. The students are a bit more frantic here, as well. They have to make all their schedule changes by Saturday, so they were all running around, like whirling dervishes, shopping classes.

Still, the classes seemed to have sorted out, and despite my disorganized beginning, my course numbers seem to have held (that could also be a bad thing!). I'm still working on content and a website - BPU2 has an excellent and completely integrated website for students, professor, and classes, but it is all in Hangul, and there's no way I'm ready for that yet.

I took pictures of my office today.. just to demonstrate that it is at least a furlong.. if not several furs long.. but posting must wait until tomorrow..

Tonight is relaxio.. I'm at The Library (a lovely name for the nearest bar) having a drink, waiting for the OAF, and watching the Korean baseball team beat the living shit our of the team from Taiwan.

Now that's entertainment!

Officially Put to Bed, or Officially Put Down

It all feels the same at this moment, 1:20 am in the land of the morning nightmare.
The editing has gone away, at last.

Gone away to my poor colleague/boss, who know has to make some sense of the hashed commentary I've given her. And who had to do all the final translation of the new text as it came in. She not only has mad skills as a translator, but she's wicked fast. Which is why I could still go out and get a drink.

If I wasn't too tired.

So, like.. from 8:30 am one day to 1:20 am the next day... does that count as work?

Can't tell, I'm too tired to count. ;-)

Dear Korea, Yes, "plan" is a four letter word. But so are "work," "soju," and "smog"

and you don't seem to have any problem with them.

So why is the "plan" so antithetical to your nature..

I ask, because I have been working for a solid day now, on a translation for grant.

A grant that needs to be turned in by 9 am tomorrow (an awfully weird deadline - I suspect someone has made this up). And not just any grant, a big old nano-technology grant that will spend oodles of money (it is going to pay for foreign and Korean scholars to do big important things).

But, really, this deadline couldn't have been a surprise, could it? And even if it was, why would you have us translate a version of a document that was already being tossed out in favor of the next rev (which we would receive 12 hours later)? And to give it to us with 1.5 days to go and to hand the translation bit to a professor who is teaching three classes the day before the thing is due.

How did we end up here? With a dart and a printout of employees glued to the opposing wall?

It is weird, and every foreigner in Korea has a score of these kind of stories (Nota bene: This is probably partly related to the fact that so many foreigners in Korea are involved in education, and even back in the States, things tended to get done on a last minute and ad hoc basis. But still, Korea, in this area, truly is sparkling).

• In the slightly over a year since I've been here, I've not once seen a timestable for any endeavor (yet the buses and trains meet their timestables with a vengeance, so go figure)
• When it snows, all of Korea acts like they have never seen it before and have no idea how to deal with it
• Required paperwork is routinely handed to you the day before you are to turn it in, if not on the day itself (like my uni finally getting me some proof they have hired me on the day before my Visa expired)
• Random closures/cancellations are announced on the day that they happen (to be fair, this falls disproportionately on foreigners because many of these closures are tied to traditional activities - like class cancellations for MT)
• Korean drivers (it always ends up with that, doesn't it?) and walkers seem to be making their navigational decisions based on some local Magic-8 ball for which I have provided the translations (that is, how Koreans interpret the answers of the magic ball):
  
  

• As I see it, yes - Yes, additional speed is required
• It is certain - That if I honk the old lady in the wheelchair will get out of my way
• It is decidedly so - so veer, VEER, VEEEEEEEER!!
• Most likely - I will randomly stop, and with great abruptness
• Outlook good - so look out!
• Signs point to yes - but since I don't read any signs, particularly traffic ones..
• Without a doubt - it is perfectly legal to drive a motorcycle on the sidewalk
• Yes - the crosswalk does confer double points for a kill
• You may rely on it - that the car stopped in the right lane at the stoplight will sloooowly run it eventually
• Reply hazy, try again - I am unable to see the lane stripes
• Ask again later - right now I'm busy trying to drive while texting, smoking and watching a video
  
• Better not tell you now - which direction I plan to turn
• Cannot predict now - which way I will turn
• Concentrate and ask again - while toss a lit cigarette out my window
• Don't count on it - that there actually will be a sidewalk on many streets
• My reply is no - I will not stop for the red-light
• My sources say no - you may not park where I have put out three five-gallon water cans
• Outlook not so good - I'd use the underground walkway, not the crosswalk
• Very doubtful - you will live through this taxi ride

whoops.. just got the rest of the last minute file....

gotta run.... erratically!

Bohemian Love Pad

It was a long and cool weekend (If a bit smoggy. Welcome to Seoul to me!). The OAF and I crawled up Namsan to Seoul Tower, and then descended on the other side to BPU2. This was a handy thing for me to do, as it is part of my upcoming health scheme - to walk home from work - and now I have the route sussed out. I will be fit or expire, as there are countless steps (until I go all OCD and count them) on the BPU2 side. Itaewon (as the climb out of the subway station might have suggested, had I been paying more attention) is at a pretty high elevation for Seoul, and BPU2 is not. Seoul Tower was also a really nice joint, and we didn't even go up in the tower to get in the spinning restaurant. I'll be going back to film a truly awesome cultural display they did of "traditional" martial arts. It was flash, with the requisite slaughter of bamboo poles before the onslaught of Korean swords and also featured some really good staged Taekwondo/Hapkido. But the highlight was a dance/sword performance by a guy who probably could have been in the ballet or the Light Brigade had he gone a different way. Both the OAF and I were kind of shut up by how pretty the thing was.

Today, it was off to the Seoul National War Memorial Museum, about which I hope I will have much more to say, soon. The short version is that any foreigner in Korea who whines about cultural "deformities" needs to go and see what that culture has been through to get where it is today. I'm as prone as anyone else to go off on things about Korea that seem willfully stupid, but, hey, it's not like I come from a country that *didn't* invade Iran and *didn't* watch happily as national debt increased geometrically, while national income increased linearly. Just saying that a quick graphic (in both senses) reprise of Korean history is a tonic that the expatriate troops should remember to take, now and then. And the museum has that in spades.

Which is only to say we all have our problems and that Korea, at least, has some defensible reasons.

The museum has some amusing things (including the annoying Konglish on the "English" bits of things. Really, can't they give me a fucking phone call? Honestly, I 'm a decent editor, and as everyone knows, I'll work for Soju) and some of the lovely dioramas are, well, actually, quite lovely.

But that, my little kitties, is not why we are here today. Oh no. Today we are here to see pictures of the Bohemian Love Pad and, later, discuss a bit its neighborhood's amusing international flavor (for instance - the percentage of douchebag near-beards being earnestly grown by scrawny little white dudes around here. It is at least triple the rate I saw in the US, and I was in the SF Bay Area, where this kind of faux-hipster facial hair was de riguer).

The pad is cool. It has a bedroom, an office that will soon have a bed (so ya'll better come and visit!), and a separated kitchen and living room. The pictures, like love in a Mary Tyler Moore episode, are all around. The kitchen may be the best thing ever. The refrigerator is vast (you will note from the picture that I could kill several OAFs and stuff them in the refrigerator without even having to dismember them!), the stove/oven is grand and gas-based, and the kitchen comes with a hot-cold water dispenser. This may seem a nugatory thing to all you people in the land of healthy tapwater and economic collapse, but here in the land of economic malaise and iffy tap-water, this thing is a boon. It saves me from having to purchase (it costs me about 8 bucks for two big water-cooler bottles per month) individual bottles of water and then hump them up the pretty substantial hill I live on.

Also as I am on the top floor of a villa, the office and bedroom have that cool slightly-gabled interior. The lovely MAF will note that the green fan, having not yet killed me, has followed me to Seoul with, no doubt, homicidal intent.

The only crappy thing is the shower... this place was redone to be western (the "office" even has western electrical plugs) and this went all wrong in the bathroom. The shower has a tub, but it is the puniest thing in the history of mankind. If I stand facing the long way, my feet are trapped by the sides of the tub and each drop of water threatens to toss me astern. If I face the short way, my toes are jammed against the side, and the slightest breeze will toss me to the floor. That floor with is about a foot lower than the tub level, solely to ensure that should I fall, my skull will not remain intact. My scheme is to pull the shower head out into the bathroom proper and take a shower the way any sensible person in Korea would.

I can use the bathtub to make Gin, or something.

The Ondol is splendid, having a washer is splendid, and as always when I move, I feel splendid.

also, classes begin tomorrow and I could either prepare for them or write an lengthy and non-sensical blog post.

As a far greater man than me once posited our role in the universe, "a man's got to know his limitations."

Words to live by.

My limit is three bottles of Soju, and I'm off to accomplish it..

Straight outta Daejeon

I hear a thousand drums
A million miles away…
… I get so excited
call me a fan that’s just what I am…

It is my last night as a resident of Daejon and I don’t feel a bit of regret at leaving. Not that it hasn’t been splendid, in fact it has.

There is some kind of saying that is, I think, associated with the quitters at AA. It speaks to the typical futility of the geographical move as an effort to make a change. It features rotating cities, but it goes something like, “If an asshole gets on a plane in Tucson, an asshole gets off in Beijing” (I internationalize it only because most of the AA folks I know are pretty solidly regionally oriented).

Of course I was an asshole when I got on the plane in SFO. I was an asshole when I landed in Incheon. I would be the last to argue that I’m not an asshole as I sit here typing this in the Pirate Bar.

Now though I am a slightly different (I hope improved) asshole. I still despair of humanity, hate that life is without meaning, and love the only kind of football that God cares for (That would be US football you pathetic third-world losers – I’m talking to you, Canada and the UK!). But I’ve had some fun, accomplished a few things, even got healthier (which will make my syncopial/infracted exit even more ironic). And, somehow, it had to do with, if not the move to Korea, the decision to get the heck out of Dodge.

So I’ll take that.

And Daejeon, with it’s quiet (somnolent) lifestyle and easily walkable distances had a lot to do with that. BPU was perfect as well – a non-challenging place filled with waegukin. As a newbie instructor, this was a perfect place to develop some instructional chops. It was also a good landing place for the OAF (despite her various traumas) and that was a bonus. Culture shock was fairly minor.

But now I don’t think there is much new for me to do in Daejeon or at BPU, and so it was time to move on. That I was lucky enough to know Koreans important enough to get me an entrée to BPU2 was a bonus that I attribute to

1) Lucking out and meeting BKF
2) My (so-far) robust liver (thanks Ma!)
3) The greasy-pole climbing nature of my monkeyness

Anyway, with several days of travel on KTX with a big-ass suitcase over, I’ve got pretty much all my stuff up in Seoul. I’ve also been beavering away on my classes, the creation of which has been a total blast. I have to remember that this is really the first time I’ve had a chance to put together three brand new classes that will work entirely to my own specifications. If I don’t remember that my thrill might have to do with the new experience, I’ll just settle back into my default position on faculty in the United States – that they are mad whiners who don’t understand what special jobs (in the prosaic sense of ease, pay and vacation) they have, or the special opportunity (in creative and educational senses) they have.

I suppose my PR gig was the envy of many people, and the pay was grand. Meat, meet poison, I guess.

But who cares about other people? They merely interfere with my plans for world domination. ;-)

Next step.. Seoul, brotha!

Building the courses…

So I have two courses that are quite intertwined in my mind, mainly because I ran them similarly at BPU’s “Nearly a Bizness Skool” (BPUNBS). This was a culture class and an auditory class. At BPUNBS, the students in these classes were entirely different and so I could run the classes with considerable overlap – in fact the visual media I used were almost always the same, with the focus being different (and the level of instruction being entirely different). BPU2 gave me two auditory classes initially, so I began with the pieces I had from BPU1. Then, I started understanding the third class I got from BPU2, which they called “British English Regional Studies” which turns out to be a class on culture.
I can’t guarantee that I won’t have students overlapping in these courses, as they are both in the Translation Division, so I can’t merely run the same videos. OTOH I do want to include as much cultural content in the auditory class as I can, because translators need this content. This means I don’t want to just run random videos in the Auditory class, just because they are in English. Consequently I’m sorting back through all of my videos to see which are the richest in cultural explanation.

In order to make the sorting between the classes easier, I had to come up with an outline for the culture class. This process has been fun, though it will necessitate my writing actual lectures for each class and then piecing together the media to back them up. In order to do this, I came up with a list of cultural representations/summations that apply to each country.

The fifteen weeks looks something like this (and if anyone has suggestions, I’m wide open to them):

1) General remarks about culture and myths; Demographics and a cultural overview of the UK and US

2) Rock and Roll (and a bit of its pre-history)

3) Cowboys and Shopkeepers

4) Manifest Destiny vs The White Man’s Burden

5) Economic systems – Capitalism vs. Semi-socialism (and of course, the explanation that neither system is what it claims to be)

6) Sports

7) Violence

8) Love

9) International Relations

10) Imperialism

11) Food and Drinks

12) Literature

13) Cars (Dodge vs Jaguar)

14) Religions

15) Political systems (Wit and Wisdom)


I hope I can get all my shit together before the classes come (and I’m still figuring out what to do in my communication and presentation class.. some debate, some speech, some powerpoint, I guess..)

Leaving Daze..

It continues to snow in big, gustly flurries, here in Daejeon. But I got up early-ish and headed to my BPU office to clean it out, and get everything off the computer. This task is slowed by the fact that my PC is painfully slow copying files, and I am snagging, among other things, all 45 episodes of Monty Python (Nerd!).

Got in at about 10 and it is now going on 2, with completion just coming in sight. When I leave this particular office, I will not be returning. Tonight I bring some things to the OAFs pad for safekeeping, and on Monday I begin my move up to Seoul (as well as some consultation on the horrifice 110 page editing job I just did) by bringing a suitcase full of books and printed out articles.

This afternoon I will also clear up whatever else I need to do with immigration. I understand all but two of the documents they are requesting, and I will have my friend M give immigration a call to get clarity on the other two.

This whole crazy plan might work out - I can get into my work office on the 25th, and pick up the key to my apartment on the 26th. Do some moving on the 27th and spend the next two days making sure I have all my ducks in a row for instruction.

I are Ubiquitous!

Some other time (I'm too lazy to find the post), I noted that if waegukin go to festivals in Korea, they run the risk of being immortalized in print. Now I see it is more.

Back from the States, I'm sitting with the OAF watching Arirang, which has mysteriously finally showed up on my cable now that I'm about to leave for Seoul. I am nearly unconscious from this ague I have, but even through the haze, I see a flash of something on the TV screen..

a brief glimpse of a tremendously handsome man; chiseled features, a noble brow, eyes that seem to penetrate the universe itself, his equanimity, grace, and wisdom pour through the screen.

Yep,

It was me... Check out at about 45 seconds into this bad boy...

Back in Town.. Train trip down..

On the train to Daejeon, pushing 24 hours of wakeyness, listening to the mellow guitar/saxophone/bongo jam at the end of "Can't you hear me knocking" by the mighty Rolling Stones. It's the end of a highly entertaining and revealing (for me, that is) return to the old places.

Some guy like Santayana once said something like "memory is our own internal system of rumors" and I think I found this while reading a Stephen King novel on the way back to Korea. That might have been all of six hours ago. I picked the thickest motherfucking book at the airport bookstore and that was, of course Stephen King (nosing out the equally logghoreic Dean Koontz. In the same book, King has a character note that memory is also the playground on which we continually build and rebuild our personal myths. This may be true, but King seems to claim that this is self-panegyric in nature,

I have my doubts.

I took a lot of train trips, bus trips, public transport of all kind, and found that my Bay Area …meant that wherever I went I saw something that pulled me back into the good old days. Which largely consisted of memories of failures. Oddly, most of my unabashedly happy memories were triggered by the sight of places I had walked, either solo or with a partner (that partner being, in an overwhelming percentage of the cases, the OAF).

Caught you on TV last night, in a rerun soap You were young and beautiful, already without hope

This is, maybe, why I like Korea… not only does it hold few memories for me (and most of what it does are carefully cherry-picked successes), but it is also a country with no local nostalgia. Oh, sure, they love King Sejong for developing Hangul, and the turtle ships are revered (whatever they actually were), but anything within anyone’s lifetime?

Burn in down, tear it out, make it into highrises. Aside from a rather well-developed facility for nursing historical grudges, a fairly future-based society. And, happily, one in which I have no history.

In any case, other than the 10 lbs I’m sure I gained (turns out it was about 6), the trip home was splendid. I saw almost everyone I wanted to, attending to their rank, as Macbeth very nearly said.

Then he went mad.

Me? I'm going to sleep.

LOL.. I'm published in the Korea Times..

talking about that widget...

Amusingly, the Times never told me that I had been accepted, but I'll take it.

In celebration I am eating a chocolate chip cookie and having two fingers of Jim Beam (which will soon turn to a fist, and then probably a fisting).

One up and one down for Korean Marketing

Over at the Marmot's Hole they are reporting that the Chosun Ilbo thinks a Hyundai advertisement during the Super Bowl "hurt American Pride." (That article would be in Korean)

Pretty unlikely, I think, as the US has managed a pretty good job of hurting its own pride, at lease with respect to the reputation of our automobiles, but it makes me wonder who in the hell would design an ad that might hurt the pride of the the the intended market?

Oh, yeah, Korean marketers.

Anyway, the ad was, for whatever reason, a total flop (Hello Korean marketers!) as it came in second to last in viewer response. Results here. And here is the advert (which seems more likely to insult Japanese and Germans than US folks):



On the other hand, I think the "return your car if you lose your job" campaign is brilliant. If nothing else, Hyundai gets to hold on to your money until (if) you do lose your job (there are some other bits of fine print that also help/protect Hyundai). And, lo and behold, Hyundai auto sales were UP 14% in January, one of only two car companies to achieve upness.

Now that is brilliant..

BPU2 ranked among top 18 Unis in Physics

Go beloved employer!

here

Unfortunately, as in most Korean (English) papers, there is no link to the actual study data

Incheon Airport

Has a wonderful free computer lounge - a macbook even. This makes up for the fact that the ticket I purchased on KTX, far ahead of the holiday rush, was mysteriously for a train that no longer existed. It had to be traded for a later train and it cost an extra 2,500 won as well (so there went my profits from the 48 pounds of coins!).

It seemed that most people had done their Seollol traveling on Friday, so the train, subway, and the subway-train to Incheon were pretty empty. It's a cold day, so those heated seats were particularly welcome. 10 hours of flight, and then I'll be back down in the US of A. Strangely, I'm not as excited about that as I thought I would be. I'm dying to see all the peoples I haven't seen, but the idea of, say, San Jose, doesn't move me that much. ;-)

A nice dude on the last train noticed that I was about to get off at the wrong station (the English announcements, oddly, were one station out of sync - I've never heard of that before) and scooted over to tell me that I was about to get off at Gyeyong station and be in the middle of nowhere. The reputation Koreans have with some expatriates for not being helpful seems completely undeserved to me. Any time I've needed help, and times like this when I didn't even realize it, there always seems to be a helpful citizen about...

Off to see if they'll sell a brother a beer in this airport.

UPDATE:

As the picture suggests, they will....

What is 48 pounds of Korean coins worth?

I discovered the answer.

Since I arrived in Korea I have been saving my loose coins in plastic water bottles with the tops cut off.

Last night I poured 2.3 bottles worth of coins into some plastic bags, and put them in my backpack. The straps groaned at the weight, so I put the whole thing on the scale to see what it weighed - 48 pounds.

This morning, the backpack seemed on the verge of snapping somewhere (or was that me?), so I took a cab to the KB bank, which has a coin counting machine (a rare thing in Korea). I don't have a bank card with KB, but the 아저씨 at the bank was quite helpful, pulling out his own bank card (or a card the bank gave him for this purpose) and getting the machine running. He was a bit bemused when I pulled out the massive double-bag of coins, but was quite a good sport about it. I fed the machine for about 10 minutes and then it stopped.

I had filled it up as full as it could get! The 아저씨 had to go get someone to open the back of the machine and emtpy its contents. While this process was going on, some poor Korean kid with a baggie full of change showed up. He took one look at my bin full of coins, and the bag of coins still remaining on the top of the machine, smiled ruefully and walked on out of the bank.

The machine went back on line and I finished pouring my coins in.

The haul?

nearly 450,000.00 won.

Of course, since the won knows I am going to the United States it has been tanking ferociously against the dollar. Consequently my haul will convert to about $2.38 in US currency ;-(.

Still, now I know what 48 pounds of coins are worth.

WTF?!?!? UPDATE

UPDATE:

Click on the widget to go to the KTO page which has the widget with all its vignettes.



So, like Stafford, Robesoyo, and several other bloggers, I've been spammed by an alleged college student who wants my to display the "marketing" widget you see above. Somehow this thing is supposed to make foreigners want to visit Korea by demonstrating to them that they will land and act like complete rubes, be laughed at by Koreans, be beaten and/or killed, and eat things that will make their heads explode into flames (ok, maybe that's fair enough!).

Watching this widget reveals far more about what Korean thinks about foreigners (uncouth idiots) than it reveals any reason a foreigner would want to visit Korea.

I watched this thing for about 15 minutes and jotted down its little scenarios, which I reproduce below. Seventeen out of the twenty-four scenarios unarguably reveal David (our waegook hero) to be a dangerous idiot. What kind of brilliant marketing scheme is that?

• David lands and is amazed that his host family comes out to pick him up.
• He steps into a room without taking his shoes off.
• He plays hacky-sack and, showing off, knocks a bird unconscious, leaving the hacky-sack on the roof.
• He messes up a pot at a ceramics festival
• He eats sam gyap sal correctly
• He drinkes Sikyhe correctly
• At the Lotus lantern festival he tries to hang lanterns and instead falls on his ass, dragging the lanterns down with him.
• At a tea ceremony he actually kind of gets it right.
• He knocks heads with a Korean woman while (apparently?) trying to kiss her.
• Kimchee makes his head explode in flames.
• He puts mud on a Kid’s face and gets a face full back
• He puts on a Hanbok (this, at least, does not end foolishly, although putting “Hanbok” in quotation marks is weird.
• He, apparently, gets on a turtle boat and takes an arrow to the chest.
• He breaks out in tears watching Korean TV while two Koreans just kind of stare at him
• He doesn’t know what a Dolmen is
• The Hampyeong Butterfly festival goes ok
• He breaks into a traditional dance and gyrates like an idiot
• He is boggled that a Korean child can say “hello” (amazing, considering that it is rare you can pass ANY Korean children without getting volleys of hellos)
• He falls asleep while meditating and gets whacked with a stick by a monk
• He chases a Korean girl, causing her to fall and hurt her ankle
• He gets smacked with a stick for not “listening to his teacher”
• He fantasizes he is Moses parting the seas and gets roundly laughed at by locals
• He kicks a Korean in the balls while practicing Taekwondo
• At the observatory in Cheomseongdae he makes up an imaginary constellation. It is ridiculous and it roars at him and scares him

Calling all Translators

This is barely news to expats, but the Times is making note of the reality in an article this morning

Literary Professor Kim Joo-youn said Korea badly needs a growing pool of professional translators to have local literature better known worldwide.

He made the remark in a Korea Times interview Thursday after being named the director of the Korea Literature Translation Institute (KLTI) under the Ministry of Culture.

Maybe this dude will hire BKF and me? ;-)

Cross-posted in its entirety at morningcalm.

New Things I Think about Korea

1) Running when the temperature is 5 below zero (Celsiosity) is like being stabbed in the lungs with icicles. Oddly, starting there then makes 3 below zero seem nearly tropical.

2The four distinct seasons? Can the summer and winter ones become just a bit less distinct?

3) It’s no wonder Koreans want you to take your shoes off when you enter their homes – they know the public excretory wonderland that you have just trodden through.

4) I wish they'd stop tearing down the cool old hanok housing and replacing it with stands of grey concrete behemoths.

5) More kimchi, please. ;-)

Creatures of the Night?

LOLZ!!

As I've mentioned elswhere, Korean TV shows US series that would cause any typical Korean to be scared shitless of the US as the home of nothing but crazed killers, victims, and cops. But last night Cold Case did a show that begins at the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and uses the soundtrack for commentary. As an extra bonus the psycho-killer is played by Barry Bostwick.

They even did the ending credits in the blood font from the original movie!

This has to be the "best" (I know, it's relative) Cold Case ever, and I never would have seen it had were it not for shitty "in English" Korean TV

Up To Seoul

Woke up yesterday and it was snowing in South Central. The OAF and I met at SC Yeok and headed up to Seoul. As the KTX rolled north the flurries of big snowflakes were replaced by blue skies and colder air.
We shopped a bit for clothing then headed to Itaewon for some bookshopping. We went to "What the Book" and entirely cleaned out their translated Korean literature section. Since the entire section was comprised of five slender volumes, each containing short stories by one author, this cleaning out process was brief. I got

Chinatown by 오숭히
A Toy City by 이텅하
Human Decency by 겅지영
House of Idols by 재인훈
An Appointment with my Brother by 이문열

These works range from 1960 to the late 90s and two of the authors are women, so it should be a good set. I want to read them all and review them here - also start some kind of notation system for elements and themes in them, in case I ever want to write something bigger about them.

A good trip, even if I didn't get the apartment I really wanted (right after I saw it, someone made an offer on it).

Things you don't much see in the States

That red line is to point out the long and snaking path that the gas-line is taking to deliver gasoline into a house.

I guess this house isn't on LPG or the City gas (not "oline") and so they use gasoline. I'm reasonably certain this would be illegal in most states, but in South-Central it's a common sight.

Merry XMASS to ALL you all!

As you all, in the “behind world,” wake up to face xmas, it is already passed in the land of the future ™.

It’s funny how being in a new country, without stuff, focuses your present buying. The OAF and I each bought each other mugs (highly appropriate if you think of the two of us).

I bought the OAF a tea-mug, since I use one of my mugs for my toothbrush, and the other to temporarily hold various cooking items, mainly oils.

She bought me a toothbrush mug!

William Sydney Porter? Shut yo mouf!

Also, all waeguk surrender to Korea. Not only was today xmas, but last night was a birthday party and an xmas eve party. At both parties, socks, mittens, and scarves were highly esteemed as gifts.

Predictably, the OAF and I traded scarves this morning. ;-)

It’s true… four distinct seasons … with the good two so brief that it’s obvious Korean achievement is despite God’s punishment.

Good on the Koreans, then.

That picture there is the lame LED xmas tree that I drew on the wall of my flat, in cable and despair. The picture catches it in full-on LE(d)xplosion and thus it looks much less pacific and Christ-like than normal.

The OAF and I then careened, cold and in the wind, through Daejeon all day…. Bookstores and coffee-joints, pummeled by spitting masses as we walked through the Jung-ang market.

Ended in a tuegi joint that was stuffed to the gills, and that really laid on the meat portions.

Another freezing day in paradise… ;-)

and I did wear my scarf to the PC joint.. so Korea has made me gay.