Homesick Day - I Yileded to it..
Today I felt the twinges..
Montgomery's have succesfully adopted across generation, centuries, and epochs.
Labels: korea
Today I felt the twinges..
Montgomery's have succesfully adopted across generation, centuries, and epochs.
Labels: korea
Adam, who is a relentless photographer (he had already gone out into the hills behind BPU in the morning) gave me a call and politely bullied me into going out to the haunted city I had discovered. Here we crawled in and among the wreckage and took a bunch of photos.
is so predominant, is that many of the houses were once quite nice. This wasn’t a slum of squatters such as might have been condemned in Seoul in the 60’s and 70’s – these houses were multistory brick ones with substantial rooms, western toilets (in most cases – there was the odd outdoor WC), and yards. This looked like a neighborhood that should have had enough political/economic power to put up a fight, but the place was trashed. I’d love to find someone from the area who could explain what had gone down here. The electricity
was still hooked up, but no juice was running through the lines though we spotted evidence that a few people might still be surreptitiously living in some of the flats. Oddly, we didn’t see any rats or cats.
Labels: korea, photography
The neighborhood here isn't the greatest in the world. Bad, I suppose, but nothing like a ghetto. Korean society is still too cohesive to have ghettos (oh what brave new worlds globalization will bring!). BPU is in the old neighborhood and Korea being what it is, the newer neighborhoods are grander and more sterile. Bee's nests in the sky.Labels: korea
I sometimes make light-hearted fun of BPU for the way it teaches things, particularly EFL. But I can proudly say that BPU's character building mission is a profoundly serious (you can turn that around and be just as vacuous - "a seriously profound" one). For evidence I can point to it's determined, steadfast, and obstacle-overcoming commitment to.. CANCELING CLASSES THAT I TEACH!
Woot!
Just like that (the little note in my box saying that a class is cancelled for some kind of 'athletic'* festival) my character is fucking built. Built my droogs, built. And out of the same rotted planks, diseased mortar, and uncertain foundations it was ever built from: Drinking, sleeping in late, and not working until mid-afternoon.
Tomorrow morning's class is cancelled and this means I don't have a class til middle afternoon. Weather permitting it will be a day for a longer walk then yesterday and a fuller exploration of empty town (BTW - for those of you who don't look at the comments, do look at the comments from my previous ghost town post. MAF has an excellent link from a few years ago about an intrepid woman on a motorcycle who photo-journalized the dead areas around Chernobyl).
On other notes, the weather has been freaking spectacular - hottish (upper 70's and lower 80's) and clear... not even any smog to mention. Also, of interest to my mottled self, I learned today that doctors here do laser mole-removals for about 13 bucks, including totally superfluous unknown injection into the buttocks.
WTF? How cheap is that?
It's like, not socialized medicine, but also completely without any threat of a lawsuit. And, it isn't corporatized.
Do we have a model here people?
And then, the OAF got all of her paperwork done and will be arriving here in about 10 days. YAY! My presumption is that the move here will be like it was for me - a lovely way to get out of a crappy job and get that palimpsest scraped clean yet again. I hear rumours she can be allowed at dinner tables with settings! I intend to try this rumour out after I re-try a couple of other things out.
You gotsta have priorities
*This is an oxymoron. As I'm sure I've covered elsewhere, BPU students are shockingly un-athletic. I set me this yearly physical goal that I should surpass in the first 4 months here. Then, then, I will buy me a basketball and unleash my ghetto skills on these foos'.
No, really. For this place I would have ghetto skills. And I'd be a decent soccer player as well. I don't get this part of things here. It probably awaits my closer analysis of BPU, college status, and students?
Labels: korea
Took a 1.5 hour ramble along the fetid creek and came across some Urban Redevelopment sort of near my neighborhood. Whenever you see this kind of fencing you know that something old is being torn down and something new put up. This area is gigantic, probably 6-8 of the gigantic Korean 'blocks' run through with alleyways. I have no idea if the folks who lived here were adequately repaid for their land and homes, but given recent Korean history, I kind of doubt it.




Labels: korea, photography
Got up and luck was with me. Even though Changdeokgung Palace is supposed to be closed on Mondays the fact that it is Children's Day means that it will be open. I noticed folks queuing up as turned the corner towards the subway station and quickly altered my quick escape from Seoul plan. Grabbed a cup of coffee from the cafeteria (which mysteriously serves no food - just a small selection of appallin
g looking candies). I have toured this before, but it was on a Korean tour and in the middle of a freezing winter. In addition, many buildings were closed and I'm hoping that is not the case today. The only bummer so far is that they are out of brochures in English, but my scheme is to get enough pictures to create my own brochure and so this should not be a problem. There are several specific pictures I want (based on memories of the last trip) so I should keep the tour nice and slow ;-)
the "status" of BPU (which is more or less negative) and she said, "well, you know, I’ve never even heard of that school." I laughed and did my best to explain what BPU was up to (as far as I can tell). Her thought is that after this first year, with the kind of other things I am involved in, that I should try to work as a "visiting lecturer" which is in some way better than the position I have now. I'm not sure how, but Ms. Shin was certainly convinced.
(boiled first for extra-delicious softnosity!), but the tour was outstanding. The guide-woman checked to make sure that no one was Japanese in our tour and then talked trash about them for 80 solid minutes. Highly entertaining.
made up for this by comping me three postcards, but that only kind of made up for the lameness. I suppose I should be happy there was anything in a Buddhist museum – it could have been eternal nothingness and I wouldn’t have had grounds to complain. Then there was the fact that I was the only person in the whole place and so until I
noticed, when almost done, that there were no-camera signs in the place, I did take pictures. The most interesting of which were the Golden Buddha and the rowboat mysteriously constructed out of pencils. What in the world this has to do with Buddhism was entirely opaque to me, but then I am far too much of this world.
should have departed a minute ago, but according to my rough physics, is not moving (relative to the earth). I didn't realize that seats were assigned - duh!- but thankfully the confused person whose seat I had taken spoke excellent English and it all got sorted before I had to come to blows with all of Seoul. I'd have taken them. No doubt!Labels: korea, photography
Did not expect to see this - Checked into the Beewon Guest House in Seoul, snapped on the TV and the "teach English" channel was using Rick Barry (with an amusingly non-Rick Barry graphic) to teach language having to do with arcs and angles..Labels: korea





Labels: korea
Korea.. not "sparkling" - and, that evil looking Ralph-Steadmanesque thing on the left is the new fucking OFFICIAL "mascot" (if by mascot you mean that thing that, after getting up from its position as recently sodomized beast is probably going to kill you) of Seoul - but pretty darned cool..Labels: korea
I have no idea why a coffee-machine in Korea would have football on it at all, much less Pac-10 football. My guess is that is one of the only leagues in the country in which you could snap a picture of a college football game and actually get three white faces in the thing.
Then there is the "Bucky Katt" wallpaper which features a vine growing completely through Bucky's skull. It gives me something to wake up to every morning, I'm telling you. I can't tell if the top bit of the bottom half is the part of Bucky's skull that was buried in the dirt, or if the evil (Korean no doubt!) vine has destroyed half of his noble orb.


THE CLASSIC TALE OF THE ANGRY FRIEND LEAVING ON A CLOUD

Labels: korea
Fire it Up and Enjoy the Garrulosity!
Today was the day I went with Bike‐on John (Who looks like HYS in a spooky way - he's from Brownsville as well!) to the reservoir. He had a spare bicycle and I had a delusion that I was still 40 (which might be the most depressing thing I have ever typed!). So where would the reservoir be? Up above town, and for two good reasons.
First, if it wasn’t no one would be worried about what would happen if the dam breaks.
Second, this makes it much harder to get to.
So it was “up the road.” But Korea, so proud of its “Four Distinct Seasons” is much more shut‐mouthed about its “Four Distinct Ups.” It is unlike Koreans to be shy about the wonders of Korea and so I wonder if this is their secret shame? In any case, for anyone contemplating coming to Korea to get ‘up’ to something, I have included this convenient directional graphic indicating the four kinds of Korea up.
provided a nifty visual aid.Labels: korea
Branding
Image Propagation
In-Country
Today the whys and wherefore’s of the current classes’ plot to keep my Academic Writing Class small bubbled up. My two favorite students are attempting the near impossible.
Labels: korea
My close anthropological analysis of this country and its heathen occupants begins to produce fruit.
a) What they eat (Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you…. Kimchi!)
b) The importance of the “homogenous race” concept
c) Ajummas
d) Museums dedicated to roof-tiles (some of you think I jest here. I do not)
e) Did I mention Kimchi?
I expect, now that I have discovered their plot, they will come for me as I sleep (In Catholic school-girl uniforms, if they really want to ‘convert’ me). By tomorrow I will be speaking Korean, running kids down in intersections, and spitting promiscuously. I will have been “joined” into the hive. I don’t have time to purchase enough tinfoil to protect myself!
Buy American
Drink your coffee black
Refrain from spitting and ignoring traffic rules....
And somehow, someway, resist these monsters from outer space!
;-)
Aah.. I might drop an email off to the BKF as well….
Labels: korea
<----- a long exposure shot from last night..
world-class chili-con-carne, provided good conversation, and left the bottle of mandarin-infused soju in front of me.
anything, but that bottle of wine sat, forlornly on the table, unfinished. In fact, not a second glass was poured. It tasted like children's medicine, sweet, sickly, and chemical.
It gets hot and humid ... it freezes solid.. it has brief periods of temperance... how in the world did anyone think a wine grape could be grown in this climate?
was pouring out the bottom of the thing. In the picture below that thing on the left that looks like a clear pipe is actually water pouring out.
I like other people's tragedies to be dramatic.Labels: korea
Today I was a global friend. I participated in the “Green City Daejeon Project with Global Friends.” Which is just a way to say we went to a community tree-planting event. Adam, who lives below me, had a call from Mr. 째 (“Che” as closely as I can translate it from the local patois) that they needed waegukin for the opening of a new park on the ever-expanding edge of Daejeon.Labels: korea