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!