Hair today...

(click me)

Try clicking the image here at the top, it's a panograph; a combination of over 20 pictures into a kind of hybrid panorama. It's from a mountain near my house, gives a great view of my area and beyond.

So, two months now. This week I got a little sick of having my long curly hair. I feared the communications issues of dealing with Korean hairstylists, and I was interested in both a drastic change and being able to affect it myself, so I clippered my own hair.

I still maintain that this was not a bad idea, as such. The hair turned out pretty well at first, but then in my final trimming I forgot that the plastic guard was off the clippers and...
bzzzt!
I accidentally cut a bald spot into my own hair.

You can check out a short video documenting the whole process, and where it turned so hilariously wrong here:
Hairtastrophe

The kids love it, though. The younger they are, the funnier they find it. And not so much the dumb-looking bald patch, but just the fact that it's so short and such a drastic change from before.

Speaking of looking like a dummy, I'm got to sport the spot at a coworker's wedding this weekend. It's down in Busan, on the southeast coast of Korea, 3 hours by the superfast (300km/hr) KTX train. It's supposed to be a great city with awesome beaches, so I'm looking forward to seeing it.

On the topic of beautiful locales, I've found what is easily my favourite place in Seoul so far. It's just ten minutes from my place by bike, and it's a small mountain with a little network of trails running through it. The strange thing is that right in the middle of the path I took, there's this little outdoor workout area made from benches and iron and trees and old / makeshift workout devices. It was a really surreal thing to find in the middle of a mountain trail, even for Korea. This mountain is also the place from which I took the picture(s) on top of the page.

The nice bits of free outdoorsdom are nice considering how condensed the rest of this city is. Take for example parking. Parking is enough of an issue everywhere, but here they take to measures like parking such that the cars touch each other, and leaving cars in neutral so people can push them out of the way when you're blocking them. They also have nifty multi-level soloutions, like little lifts so you can park on top of another. Then there are car carousels, which turn the cars around on top of each other like hotdogs under a heatlamp, so you can fit many cars in a space for two.

Speaking of space concerns, I leave with this image of clothing shopping in Korea. Most of it isn't quite this bad, this is more of an extreme charicature of it at its worst - just a table outdoors with a few hundered bits of unorganized clothing. Fuck, stealing laundry is easier than this!

It's My Birthday Too

(click for a big ol' panorama)

I'm approaching two months here now, and I'm a sucker for cliches so I'll go ahead and postulate that the time has flown 'cause I've been having fun.

Exploring this weekend brought me around to the Tapgol Park area here in Seoul. The park itself is beautiful and has this beautiful pagoda (an old decorative tower - think of it as the Asian totem pole) ecased in glass, but my picutra obscura is from the park fence, and you can hardly see the pagoda for the trees.

I also found this great buddhist temple (not exactly rare here). The sharp-eyed folks out there might think they see a swastika on the temple, but that symbol is common here - it signifies a buddhist place of worship, and predates WWII by quite a damn bit. Another ubiquitious image here is the sleeping old man. People sleep everywhere here. Seeing an old man passed out on the side of the road is more common than makes sense. I've resisted the temptation to take a picture until now; he was just so perfectly placed in such a quiet area, I had to snap a quiet shot.

Back to school on Monday, which just happened to be my birthday. It also happened to be the birthday of on of my favourite Kindergarten students. When we found out the conincidence, she was very excited to have the same birthday as Petah Teacha. The whole class had icecream and I got a slice 'cause I'm their teacher, then they sang to me and I stood and soaked-in the surreality of getting my birthday song and cake from a group of 5 year olds who met me less than two months ago. When another (older, around 10 or 11) kid found out it was my birthday, he promised to bring me a present next class, and surely enough he brought me in this awesome plasticine snake that he made himself.

I got a care package from home too, which great, and packed with cool little birthday presents. There's a real mysticism to getting a box sent around the world, not to mention the thought that surely counted a whole damn bunch.

The day after my birthday was a holiday, so me and some friends went out and had a hell of a time. The bulk (and highlight) of the night was spent looking for some mysterious bar. Me, Mike, Seohee, and John ran around exploring and running and jumping and climbing and stnading on boxes and hands and heads and bridges and cars. Sadly, I have no photographic evidence thereof, but hope to in days to come.

Incidentally, we did find the bar, and it was awesome - basically a basement that played raggae and Dylan on vinyls. You could write on the walls. The 'menu' was a select few Korean words written on a framed picture. It was alive with atmosphere. I want those damn pictures.

The next night me and Mike headed to Metallica and Tool in concert at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Stadium. I got to listen to loud and aggressive music in the very place where Canadian Ben Johnson ran really damn fast 'cause he was all messed on 'roid rage. Judging by the abundance of sweaty bulky men, little has changed. Neither of the bands are exactly my favourite, but it was worth the experience to see them here in Korea, of all places.

The place was crowded and sweaty and holy shit loud and it crawled in my head and stayed pounding for at least a day to come (read: headache). Of course, the intesity of a headache is basically like the richtor scale for measuring the quality of such a concert.

The production was nice and complete with complicated lights and video screens and backdrops. Tool only played for a little more than an hour, as they were opening for those other old bastards (weird, since they're all popular with the new album and such, and Metallica's not exactly in the spotlight these days). They also made great use of all the visual doogadgetry by playing either parts of the videos along with the live songs, or just playing disturbing shit onscreen in lieu of a real video.

Metallica played for almost 3 hours, but they were really focusing on the 'classics', thankfully ignoring most everything they've made in the last decade or so (just like everyone else did).

I've even got some (short, awful, poorly lit) videos of both bands playing. Check them out here:

Tool One
Tool Two
Metallica One
Metallica Two
Metallica Three

It's hard to see much on some of these, they were done with my digital still camera, not my DV cam. Not to mention that it's hard to film things at a concert.

That about brings a close to another week. In the interest of once again going out on a laugh, here's yet another messed-up poster. There was a series of these parody posters here based on iconical images, all for the same event. The other two were of the Mona Lisa and Michaelangelo's Creation of Adam. What those two have to do with a Nivanna CD I'll never know.

Drop me in the Water

click for a bigger panorama

Seoul continues to be great and I continue to leave it whenever possible. This weekend I went outside of the city for some white water rafting (where outside I never even bothered to check, I just hopped on the Adventure Korea bus and went to wherever).

Well, it might be a bit of a stretch to call the water white, as such. It wasn't really The River Wild or anything, but between the paddling and the occasional little rocky bumpride, it was certainly a fun little rafting excursion, particularly for a relative raft virgin like myself. I don't have any pictures from rafting itself 'cause the camera is not water's biggest fan.
Afterwards we headed out for swimming and (for the few souls with brave hearts and empty stomachs) bungie jumping. I was neither brave nor empty enough to take a plunge, but it's something I'd like to do before I leave Korea. The area was gorgeous though, as was swimming while watching people rubber-band their way off that big red bridge (see the panorama at the top of the post).

Back in Seoul, I did a bit more exploring, and found myself at Dongdaemeun Market, the largest and most random outdoor market in the whole damn city. It's also the most random market ever created my people. You can find fridges, powertools, antique cameras, counterfeit watches, sex toys, jewelry and live pets literally within feet of each other. And speaking of the live pets, they were selling chickens and roosters! Like, everywhere, in cages right next to the hamsters, ferrets and budgies. I'm not sure if they're intended as housepets or what, but it's creepy regardless.

What's not creepy is the gorgeous stream that runs through this area. Apparently this was a huge elevated highway just a few years ago, and in the interest of de-industrializing and un-uglifying the city a little, they tore the road up and exposed the natural stream hidden below. Kids wade in it, fountains run, you can cross it by hopping strategically-placed stones. It's a pretty nice break in the hustle-bustle of the mid-city market madness of the area.

Speaking of pleasant changes, my most frustrating kindergarten student has taken a definite turn-for-the-better. On his last report card, I let his (evidently very concerned) mother know that he's improving a fair bit. Then I got a present from the kid (presumably ultimately from his mother, since five-year olds have little disposable income). It was a real nice sentiment, with a really adorable heart-shaped card that says "I love you Peter". Korean kids throw around the word 'love' pretty easily by the way, it pretty much means 'like' in practice. Still, I really really appreciate my little VW Bugclock.

Last night the Canadian Hogwon Trifecta (consisting of me and the other two Canadians from my school - Ben and Mike) had a few drinks outside of the GS, as we're apt to do. Towards the end of the night, we overheard a Korean at a table behind us on his phone, and between screaming angry things in Korean, he started throwing in some random english profanities. It just catches your attention when you hear a Korean shouting "Fuck you bitch!" It's kind of precocious, really. Anyway, the guy eventually came over to us and we talked and drank and he called his wife, who came by with the whole damn family, for some reason. We almost had to go all coyote and chew our own arms off to get away to go home and get some sleep. Koreans can get pretty friendly when they've got a few drinks in.

I've also decided that I'm going to try to keep my distance from odinga jerky. It's basically kind of like beef jerky, but it's a made of squid. It's not quite as awful as you'd picture, I'm just real turned from it at the moment. Somehow squid just seems to seek me out when I've had too much to drink here.

That's all for this week. It's my birthday next Monday, and the day after is a national holiday here. Sounds like it might be a squid night.

I leave you with some more of that beloved Korean randomness. This is the poster they put in the subway with instructions on how to use the little plastic bag gas masks they supply in case of a chemical attack. Not that that's real likely or anything, but the whole thing kind of reminds me of that Fight Club quotation about the illusion of safety. Plus, it shows a guy tying a plastic bag around his head - what the hell is safe about that?

Buildings and Food

(click the banner for a bigger panorama of the city)

It's vacation week, and while others have taken the opportunity to visit far-away locales, I've had neither the time nor resources to comfortably plan such a trip. Instead, I've welcomed the opportunity to explore Seoul a little more.

There's certainly no shortage of things to see and do here. Just taking the subway to a random stop to just get out and wander around for hours can be entertaining for hours. This weekend I started at Myeongdong. If you take a closer look at this fountain you'll see not one but two huge video billboards on the buildings in the backdrop. Again, I'm impressed by the weird combination of modern and not-so modern here; Koreans have a real flair for anachronism. Not that the fountain is that old, just that it clashes with the various electronica behind it, on an ideological basis at the very least.

This area has an underground mall. In fact, a lot of areas around here have underground malls. Not underground as in they're secretive, just that they're underneath the road. This one had a few nice finds, including an amazing hand-crosstiched wall hanging of Morgan Freeman (that probably costs more than I'd want to imagine) as well as quite an impressive lot of vinyl. Unfourtunately, there's no organization of the records by artist, genre, decade, condition, or anything. So, essentially you've got 5 or 6 stores each with thousands of vinyls and you'd have to search through every single one to know you hadn't missed anything. this type of insane lack of order is pretty common of Korean shopping. It makes it exciting, albeit potentially frustrating.

I may have insinuated before that this place is pretty damn crowded. With forty million people in the country, and almost half of them in Seoul and its surrounding areas, there are people eeeverywhere. Of course it's easier to show that than to say it. Or more effective, at least.

One funny thing about the culture here is the accepted manner to deal get through the crowds - you just push and shove and elbow and make no apologies to anyone. I'm not criticizing it, I figure it formed out of neccesity. I've still got this inborn natural reaction to turn and say 'sorry' everytime I bump into someone. That's doubly pointless, of course, since most people understand neither the word nor the sentiment.

Speaking of understanding words, I'm starting a learn a tiny bit of progress in my funtional Korean. I've managed to order a couple of meals in broken Korean. The meals here, by the way are delicious and cheap. I'm still in the process of trying out a lot of different things, but so far, I've liked pretty much everything. I don't quite get how people come here and just get North American foods most of the time. Sure they're familliar and availible, but doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of travelling to another country?

So for a lot of the rest of my free vacation time, I've checked out a few of the parks here. They've got nice grass and streams and the little duckies in the pond. There's some real prettiness here, and for a moment you can kind of pretend that you're not in the middle of urban sprawl.

Until you take a breath, or look around and see the skyscrapers or the scads of Koreans trying to live-out the same fantasy of Seoulessness. But I'm not ripping on the urbanality of this place - hell, it's why I chose to move to Seoul.

In fact, I'm still so taken with the iron building giants that I've taken way too many pictures of them. On Tuesday I went to Yeouido (an island in the middle of Seoul) and walked around for hours. There is some impressive modern architecture and sculpture around the place, and I went all touristy and snapped an assload of pictures.

There's also the National Assembly which, judging by the abundance of police officers guarding it, must be the centre of all that is governmental here in Korea. These Police, by the way are armed with what is essentially a bo staff - a long beating stick. I wonder how the feds back home would react to being outfitted like Donatello the Ninja Turtle.

See that crossy-thing in the upper-right corner? That's the Yeouido Full Gospel, a church that claims to have the largest congregation of any Christian church in the world.

Jesus! Are you telling me that those heathens have a bigger church than us!?
Goddamn right they do.

Or course, no collection of photos on Yeouido would be complete without the 63 Building. This is the tallest building in Korea, home to Korea Life Insurance. (Actually, it's not techinally the tallest anymore, I've read that's Tower Palace Three, Tower G, but that one's not as purrty, and the name is dumb.) All shiny and tapered and gold-coloured, it's quite the blinged-out megaphallus. I guess you can get inside of it and take pictures of the city, but it was getting late and I'd already filled my daily panorama quota, anyway.

And that brings me up to date. Back to classes tomorrow. The Korean summer break lasts a couple of weeks, tops, and for the poor kids at my private hogwon, they get half a week off of classes, same as me. I asked some of them where they're going on summer vacation, expecting to hear of intersting and far-off locales. They said things like 'Swimming!' I guess half a week doesn't afford much time to travel.