Coup de Grace

I'm quickly approaching the three month mark here in Seoul. Speaking of being in Seoul, I almost feel like I've spent too many consecutive weekends here without going to explore the peninsula (aka country). That (lack of non-Seoul exploration) will all change in time, but more on that in a moment.

I've certainly had no lack of exploring within the city, though. Last Friday we had the day off work, so I biked to Yeouido to start off a daylong biking adventure. Incidentally, I tried to bike my way to this place for a few hours back in July, to no avail. It took me less than half an hour this time, so I guess I'm learning to guess my way around this maze of a city. Mike met me there and rented a bike and we spun around for 3 hours of fun and frolic and traffic dodging. We stopped for a while on an island in the middle of the Han River called Seonyudo park.

The place used to be a sewage treament plant, but has been turned into a nature park. They actually left some of the structures and rusty mechanisms, and the place is considred this real bastion of contrasting mechanical and organic images. Accordingly, it's a real popular spot for photographers. Accordingly, I took a bunch of pictures - mostly playing with macro shots of pretty flowery things.

After Mike returned his bike and subbed home, I left to explore a little more and got shafted on taking an ill-advised scenic route. Or someone should have ill-advised it for me, since it got me stuck on a highway, wading through leg-slicing plants, and having to pull a leap of faith across a five-foot stream into a pile of soft mud. Frustrating as it was, it was an adventure in and of itself, and I've yet to develop any fatal disease from the uncharted foliage.

All in all, my bicycle odyssey lasted six time-flying hours, and I was a muddy lump of blood. Sunday I went on my own little skateboard adventure, checking out what parks I've found so far in my travels in the city.

I've been keeping the hedonism levels down the last few weekends in order to save my spirit and resources for that oft-mentioned Chuseok vacation. Speaking of which, there's been half a dozen or so developments in that story, some of which you might have even caught wind of on a little thing called 'the news'.

Tuesday I got the excited exciting news from Mike that not all hope was lost for my trip to Thailand. Seohee's magical travel agent actually managed to score me an 11th hour flight to and fro. It does, however, put me back in Seoul just shortly before I have to teach Monday morning (possibly too short to make it to class on time). I slept on the idea Tuesday night.

I wake up and there's a message from Mike about a 'coup' in Thailand. I figured he meant figuratively, like a major blow had been stuck for (or against) our cause. Hours later, I realize that he meant the literal kinda coup, where the military overthrows the government and there's martial law and tanks in the street and that kinda shit.

Much to the shagrin of some friends and relations back home, this is not the coup de grâce for this trip. The news is calling it 'The Bloodless Coup' and it is, after all, their 17th since WWII. By all accounts it's really not that big of a deal, as far as political upheaval goes. Still, a city where there are tanks in the streets sounds a little less than vactaion-y. The chance to party with Mike et al on the beaches of Koh Sumai would certainly be worth it, though, so the inner debate continues.

But even if Thailand doesn't happen, Japan will. There's also a tiny chance that China might happen. My vacation choices were never this varied before. It's hardly a thing about anyone which anyone could complain.

For the first two months here, I was in a movie-buying flurry. You can pick up pirated DVDs from a virutally endless number of street vendors. While they're actually rarer here than their hollywood counterparts, I always tried to purchase Korean movies. Sadly, my purchasing habits have fallen by the wayside lately, but I'd imagine that as time passes, this collection of Korean curiousities will grow into a fever pile of subtitled cinema.

Speaking of curious things from Korea, I egress with this little present from one of my students. Cute interpretations of 'dong' (conveniently, this Korean word for shit is pronounced more like 'dung') are not at all publically unacceptable (although I don't know where the culture stands on afwul double negatives like 'not publically unacceptable'). Now the real question is: is this some sort of coy comment on my teaching abilities?