View from the Top

(To the rooftops - to the ground now)

Beware the Ides of March as Spring tries to spring a little and worlds collide and new friends meet old. Life's a lot more alive when the weather thaws a little bit. There's a lot more happening - a lot more incentive to go out when it's a little warmer out.

Friday night, me and Cahill and Ben headed around Sillim a bit. Comfortably, almost predictably, we headed eventually headed to Led Zeppelin. We grabbed drinks and were given cheese and vegetable sticks and other strange free Korean things. There was a teeny dog wandering around the place, willing to hang around with anyone willing to give it attention - even me.

Ben headed his way and me and Cahill stuck around there and requested good music on rich, lively vinyl. Then we headed over to Box 86, where Cahill picked-up the untunable, mostly decorative guitar and strummed-out whatever mumbly tunes a drunk guitarist strums at four in the morning. We mumbled whatever mumbly accompaniment accompanies that brand of music and then headed back to the apartment.

But then mischief caught our eye (as it is apt to do at such an hour) and we decided to explore the building being constructed across the road from mine. Illegal and dangerous be damned, it was a worthwhile excursion. We got up on the rooftop and the view was excellent, and we hollered at pedestrians and I took pictures aplenty.

I'm so comfortable with the city now that it's easy to forget how cool it looks. It's a good practice to think like a cat sometimes - get up to a high point and get a good view of your surroundings. Perspective and and all that.

Besides, a place never really feels like home until you've played a bit of Urban Indiana Jones by exploring an empty, incomplete building.

Saturday, we went shopping around Myeongdong and Namdaemun. Or rather, we went exploring around the shopping areas (great place to find cheap knockoffs, by the way - check out that Mike sweater) trying to reach the underground mall I found back in August. It's filled with used record shops. After an hour or so of looking, it turned-out to be the third underground mall we checked.

Cahill got some nice records and I got what may or may not be an original Butcher Cover copy of Yesterday and Today. I'd rather live in mystery forever than try to peel it and ruin it.

So, a month after Valentine's Day, Korea's got White Day. That's the day where guys buy chocolate and candy and flowers and anything else for girls in acts of romantic consumerist desperation. Technically, Valentine's is strictly for girls to give gifts to boys here. As such, White day is actually probably a bigger deal here. Regardless of the gender stipulation, any holiday is an opportunity for small children to give their teacher chocolate and candy and freaky toy snakes that pop out of boxes with Kindergarten love hearts around their tongues.

And now I'm halfway through March. This weekend is St. Pat's day, and as decidedly un-Irish as Korea inherently is, I'm bound to do something relatively shamrockian.

To close this week, here's a subway ad for a toilet seat bidet. There things are actually quite common in Korea (in Japan they were actually in quite a few public bathrooms.) The things work basically the same as a bidet, but you don't have to... leave your seat, so to speak. And as strange as that all seems, it's not even the reason this ad really entertains me.



It's that woman. Or rather, what seems to be coming out of her. Apparently, this is the bidet so effective that it makes roses grow from your ass. Now, ignoring the fact that roses actually need dirt to grow, I really question the comfort and practicality of having any plant - let alone a thorny-stemmed flower - growing out of your ass.