Revisiting

(everything seems to be up in the air at this time)

It was t-shirt warm at night this weekend. I'm sure in no time it'll be uncomfortable warm and humid, and the air will turn a fraction shy of sweat like it was when I got here.

Friday Ben and Bora came over and we played Wii. Playing imaginary sports while drinking is definitely a conversation starter, at the very least. Plus boxing, I mean, who doesn't wanna kick the shit out of their friends when they're get a few drinks in, right?

Then the hungry bunch went and got some galbi (amazing Korean barbeque marinated meat stuff) and started kicking the shit out of ourselves with copious amounts of imbibery. We drank car bombs, which involves dropping a shotglass full of the infamous soju into a small glass of beer. It also involves getting hit by a freight train, as far as I can recollect. I took some series shots of the shots, and they work so well as an animation that I made them into a very short video, which you can check out here, of course.

From there, we went to the Woodstock bar. That place was a bit of trip. The assimilation of 'popular' 'alternative' North American culture into a room of drunk Koreans is the kind of strangeness you've got to see to fully comprehend.

I really tried to get a video of the guys headbanging to Rage's Killing in the Name, but the batteries on my other camera were dead. Just look at the blurry picture and picture them (clearly unable to speak English) screaming "and they do what they told ya" and having it come out like "an' 'ney tu ruat tey tocha!"

Drinks were more varied here. We drank North Korean beer (dictatorship is delicious!) and then we got a few mixed drinks. They had quite a few advertised, many of which they'd long forgotten how to make. After a few failed requests, I settled on a Cannabis (yes, it was green), and Ben got a Fucking Metallica. They were both wicked strong, but Ben's drink was so unspeakably awful it should have been called a Fucking U2.

The music requests were far more successful. They just downloaded anything we wrote on a piece of paper. More on music and success and Iggy Pop and all that in a moment, though.

Cahill came by on Saturday and we went to Hongdae and met up with some of his workmates from out in butt-fuck nowhere (aka Suji) and went to the ever-awful foreigner bar Tinpan. This place has handlebars bolted to the ceiling to assist drunk girls in dancing on the tables. That's entertaining in the same way as watching a snake swallow a live mouse; it's one of those horrific things that you watch out of morbid curiousity, but don't ever actually want to see.

Mike came by and really, I can never go to Tinpan without running into a few people I know anyway. But enough was enough, so me, Cahill, and his coworkers Simon and Helen went in search of a better venue. We eventually made our way to the underground reggae bar that a few of us went to on my birthday last year.

It's really an amazing place that's located under a bridge, in a basement behind an unmarked door. Somewhere among the many wall scrawlings there are birthday wishes from our last visit, but I never looked hard enough to find them.

I'm not one who minds retracing his steps, especially if there's good music involved. That's why I'm planning on going back to Japan at the end of my Asian travels in July. The Fuji Rock Festival is being held from the 27th to the 29th and the bookends quite nicely with the tail of my post-contract travels. I really want to see Japan again, then there's Mount Fuji and music and good dozen birds to kill with a single plane ticket.

Then it's home. Canada in early August.

That's about it this week. Well, I did get a new lighter, and really it's easily the best damn non-pig lighter I've won to date. The damn thing is a gun, for starters. Pull the trigger and a teeny flashlight shines out of the barrel. Click it again and a lazer - a frickin' lazer - shines out of the goddamn thing. Oh, and there's the flame, which can be used to burn stuff - that's always a bonus.

Of course I had to make a video of it in action.
You can check that out right here.

Korea's got a lot of high tech shit going on lately, but what about good ol' simple function? Well, check out a bag of Jolly Pong (it's actually Sugar Crisp cereal sold in bags as a snack food. Curiously, it's not marketed here as a cereal). See, the prize in this stuff is a simple card. But follow the perforations and pictures on the back and that card is a kickass food shovel!


I love origami and all, but if you can find a better use for folding then to literally shovel food into your mouth... you're clearly thinking too hard, and need to fold less fucking paper.

In-Action

(at the right place at the right time, it'll be worth it)

It's a few degrees warmer in Seoul these days - approaching teeshirt warm. The petals have dropped off virtually all of the cherry blossom trees, leaving boring leafy green instead of Asian whites and pinks. It's a wonderful, colourful phenomenon - made all the more special by lasting just a little over a week.

But enough about fucking dead flowers. Friday Ben and Mike came over, and together with me and Claire, we finally managed to have the Wii party I've been meaning to have (in order to justify the purchase as a social one, as opposed to another excuse to sit around the house).

I also got to play with my camera, taking 'burst' series photos of people as they played imaginary sports. I liked the way it captured the event - somewhere between photos and video. A chunk of time, but a silent one where you get to put the words and details into what went on. Mike's great at illustrating moment in either defeat (lower right corner) or insanity (left centre, et al.)

Of course, this is a simple story that's been played out all too many times: Play Wii, loose, look like an ass. Win, still look like an ass. Either way, you're having fun doing it.

Saturday we went out to see some more of Seoul. During daylight, we saw Gangnam and bought stuff and ate sushi and bought more stuff. I actually bought my first shirt with Konglish nonsense on it. It's some garbled nonsense about Transformer robots and '3D glasses inside'. Inside of where? Me? Like, metaphorically? Spiritually? Literally, as the result of some surgery gone horribly wrong?

Regardless, it's got Optimus Prime on it, so it's cool in my books. The store also had a great comic-book graffiti-shower motif in the changeroom.

We were also surrounded by various people dressed as various things. All of them strange. The oddest actually wasn't the Master Shake lookalike - the kinder-aged kid from Jangu (awful Japanese cartoon) toting a bottle of soju was really more creepy. And more eager to make friends, but that tends to happen to folk who carry around soju in the middle of the day.

Later in the day, we headed to Dongdaemun, the largest market district in Seoul. I've never been around there at night, and man is it ever colourful there.

What they did in the area is actually kind of neat. They had this big elevated highway going though, but there was this old river underneath it all. So they kinda said "Fuck it, a river would look pretty badass here, right?" and they tore-up the road. Now it's this nice walk past fountains and lights and hopping across big stones to cross from one side to the other.

It matches pretty well with the feel of Dongdaemun. This isn't the kind of high tech futuredistrict like Yongsan, but nor is it strictly traditional. It's got all manner of smatterings of everything. Live chickens and used car parts. And clothes clothes clothes.

We also stumbled across this strange store that basically just sold statues. Most of them were Korean traditional and various religious stuff, but they also had jade guitars and big stone penises and such. I'm not sure how Buddha would take to being placed next to a big ol' Phallus, but he strikes me as a pretty laid-back guy, so I'm sure he wouldn't mind too much.

And in other matters of Korean culture colliding with consumerism, I got a great Golden Pig accessory tonight. This amazing stretchy, bouncy, sticky magical splatter pig.

But that's not all. My battle with Korea's crooked claw contraptions continues. I'm actually getting better at this supposed game of skill, and I hardly pass one of them without taking a stab at getting a tacky lighter. And tacky lighters are what I've got. I've even compiled a video showcasing the strangest of my lighter collection in action.

So another week comes to close in a fiery blaze. But to ensure that you don't meet a similar demise, the kindly people at the Hyundai mall have prepared an informative sticker on the potentially horrible ways you can be maimed by misuse of their escalators.


While not as useful as advice that could save you from becoming a real-life Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, a thoughtful shop in Gangnam saw fit to provide some dietary advice on their sign.

How about a sandwich once a week, eh? Well, I'm sure that couldn't harm me that badly. I do have reservations, however, about buying any sort of food from a place called "Sand House". Not that I don't like the beach, I just don't want to ingest it.

Spring Blossoms

(our robot masters will know how to clean this mess up)

Hot on the tail of the infamous Yellow Dust from China, the latest annual phenomena to hit Korea is the annual blooming of the cherry blossoms. Maybe I haven't seen the last of the Dust yet, but so far it seems more like a menace to car windshields than human lungs.

But the thin blanket of yellow filth covering the city is paled by the thick coat of white petals around now. Every year for just around a week, the previously innocuously-bare trees bud out into these wildly white cherry blossom flowers. It looks like a fresh snowfall in the city, with the trees all covered in white fluff. As the week closes, the petals are starting to snow to the ground, and the whole thing looks quite like a samurai movie.

I've been wielding my own photographic katana this week, taking pictures with my new camera. I've even been taking a few shots of things I've seen before, but now from new angles with new lighting and things I simply couldn't do well before.

The fact that I'm stumbling around brandishing a camera bag and staring through a lens probably makes me look a bit too Spiderman for my own good, but I don't care. For some reason, having a serious camera makes me a little less shy of taking pictures of things. I look more like a hobbyist and less of a tourist. Or maybe now I just look like a stalker. Regardless, it's still better than looking like a tourist.

Incidentally, I never thought I'd be lucky enough to catch an image of a cougarwolf (completely made up term, don't bother Google-ing it) caged right below the Easter Bunny. Then again, I guess I never expected to see used car parts sold street-side next to jewelry, live chickens, and pornography, but Korea can change such expectations.

Claire came in on Saturday, and me, her and Mike went out around Hongdae that night. The majority of that was just walking around outdoors, drinking, taking pictures and swearing at those fucking crooked claw machines. My delightfully tacky claw machine lighter collection is now up to seven.

I like showing someone around this place. It's like I can take my year here and turn it into a week long presentation of the best of what I've found. Food, drink, shopping, and I guess a few sights (if you're the boring old type who likes to take pictures and such). It's a delicious place Korea, and I think I'll miss the sticky taste of smog and rice in my mouth when I finally leave it.

Showing someone else how cool the place can be just reminds me of it. I've gotta overload on as much of this place while I still can. Mike clearly missed it, as you can see from the image of him staring in painful awe of the plastic food advertising a castle-themed restaurant. You can practically see him mouthing the words "I can't wait to get paid..." as he basks in the florescent glow of the display shelf.

In my photo-happy travels I always come across a few hilariously strange images. Not the least of which is this potentially innocuous (but who knows) subway ad for a donkey show. Well, not just any donkey show, but The Donkey Show, nonetheless. Then there's a moderately clever sign for Floppy Disko, which is really neither here nor there.

I wish I could take credit for the picture of fish flopping helplessly on the road, but that was actually from a Korea Press Association exhibit at City Hall. Even if they probably were the result of massive flooding, roadfish are funny enough for me.

Speaking of plagues, I hear that it was Easter this week. So what better way to celebrate than for me to crucify some poor kid for his honest attempts as learning English?


I mean, overall, the diary isn't that bad for a kid of about nine or so. But really, the line "The Jeus is rising again" makes me laugh too hard. It sounds an awful lot like the tag for a bad horror movie sequel to me.

Jeus 2: The Revenge?

Picture-Perfect

I see the school, and the places where the kids are

It's April, and now May is the only month this fool has never seen in Korea. The two points are closing on my little yearlong Korea circle. The weather's getting legitimately warm now, and the air thick. That means Korea is slowly returning to the state in which I found it.

This weekend's key was - once again - pretty low. Ben came over Friday and we kicked the shit out of each other in various Wii events and competitions. Saturday I was going to have a Wii party, but most people had plans that didn't involve manipulating imaginary things with white remotes, so it really became just me and Mike drinking and Wii-battling. Wattliing? No, that sounds like some perverted way for a duck to feed its children.

As the weekend left me with a dearth of entertaining pictures (while images of two drunks playing pretend sports can be hilarious, the idea never occurred to me at the time) I set out during the week to capture some nice images of Korea... being Korean. I'm starting to get apathetic to the fact that an old lady buying fruit might kind of lose it and start screaming when a foreigner takes her picture. That kind of apathy makes for some more candid photos, which is really the only way to get life in its element.

Fear of Koreans' fear of me still stops me from getting some pictures of some good scenes, though. The other day, I came across a group of about half a dozen 40-50 year old men cooking Sam Gyup Sal (tasty baconesque fatty BBQ pig thing) on top of a mountain. Drinking Soju. In the middle of the day, like shortly after noon. I'm not sure if I've seen a more definitive image of Korea in my life. But I knew if I snapped a photo of drunk, jobless men trying to enjoy barbecued pork, I'd be grilled alive. And it didn't help that they all froze and crane-neck-stared at the white guy stupid enough to trespass into their turf.

The 'mountain' in question was a hill overlooking Gwangmyoeng, the area in which I work. Funny how the typical Korean neighbourhood of tightly-knit houses with anachronistic roofs looks all the more interesting clung to the side of a steep hill with a relatively modern city in the smoggy distance. Then, of course, there's a traditional temple in the middle of it all.

Arcade games here aren't limited to noisy coin-changing flashy-light mall locales. In fact, their most popular iteration seems to be the run-down looking mini machines outside of tiny grocerias. I guess it makes sense, given the main clientèle, that these change-stealing monsters be 3-feet tall and located outside the place where moms buy cereal.

Another great photo op I missed-out on in this area was just outside of a small hair shop. A small truck selling fruits and vegetables had stopped outside the salon, and a bunch of women, still in rollers and plastic haircaps were out bargaining for cheap food. That's another essential bit of Korea right there - the ability to shop anywhere at any time. Kittens, puppies and bunnies for sale on the stairs of the subway station. Who comes home from work and decides to pick up a sickly rabbit from the old lady who lives on the stairs of the local subway station, anyway? Then again, this is coming from the guy who bought a ceramic golden pig while waiting for a crosswalk light to change.

Speaking of my purchasing aptitude, I visited Yongsan again tonight. In a move that probably should have come before now, I bought a new camera. My (mostly) pocketable point-and-shoot Fuji has served (and will continue to serve) me well, but now I've got a slick new DSLR - a Nikon D40. After only a few hours, I can already appreciate that it takes far better pictures than I've been taking for the last nine months (see left). Of course, it's too new, and I don't know how to get the most out of it yet - these are just quick snaps.

This should serve me well in the weeks following Korea, too. I'm planning to travel around Asia for a bit after my contract finished in late June. Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand (again), and who knows where else. Then it's back to Canada before too terribly long. From there I'll play it by ear.

Speaking of travel, I've got my first visitor coming next week. Claire's coming Saturday and staying for a week. It'll be fun to show someone Seoul, and see them be a tourist here. I've helped people around the place before, but those are more like survival tips - help how to live here for the next year.

Before closing-out the week though, I've got a few things to show. The first is a strange ad I saw at a subway station. I couldn't help but make up a Gary Larson sort of caption in my head to explain the strange picture:

"Despite their best efforts, the crack team of inanimate stuffed animal doctors was unable to save the patient's life.

The tragedy seemed rather predictable to the child's parents, who vehemently protested the hospital's unorthodox choice of physicians.

Hardly the first incident of its kind, the Board of Directors finally thought this might be the time to re-examine the wisdom behind their always-controversial Teddy Bear Infant Emergency Care Ward."

And oh, from the mouths of babes. Of course, children are far funnier than me (probably more clever, too). A Kindergarten student said "So, we meet again..." to me the other day. I kind of expected us to fly into a samurai battle from there. Probably for the best that it didn't happen, though - these kids all take TaeKwonDo classes, too.

Then, the other day my student Thomas said "Peter, you are Chinese!"

Never one to let a 5-year-old outwit me, I quipped, "Thomas, you are Japanese!"

Then he really caught me off guard when he responded, "You are a Gypsy!"

At that point, I was honestly stuck for a response other than "What!? Did you just call me a Gypsy? How do you know that word!?"

So, to close the week, I leave a a few examples of limited English leading to strange results. On the left, I've got a few strange test answers, some from a student who seems to have some strange idea of what goes on in Hollywood. Then on the right, I've got what is easily the strangest and most inappropriate shirt I've ever seen a 5-year old wear.


In case you can't make it all out, it says:

"If you had a rich boyfriend he'd buy you diamonds and rubies. Well, maybe next year you will when you're got bigger boobies!"

Poor Kevin. I wish I could explain to his mother what his shirt says without embarrassing everyone involved.