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.