The Factory

Great as a sauce, too!

The only thing shorter than my time remaining here is my attention span these days. I think about leaving and traveling and my last days in Korea so often that it's hard to think of much else. There's a lot going on and more to come. I'd stop and reflect, but I've got a mirror for that.

Saturday we headed to the Andy Warhol Factory exhibit at the Leeum Art Gallery. It was great to see some of those famous works first-hand, still thick and shiny with globs of ink and silkscreeny texture. Pictures of the exhibits themselves were forbidden, with lots of meager-looking Koreans in conservative suits ready to ask nicely / kick ass if anyone dared. There were, however, a few Andy things around, as well as general little doodads of weirdness to photograph.

After than, we headed to Yongsan, where Ben picked up a camera (like mine) and I picked up a dashing new lens (a nice zoomy one to take better pictures during my travels).

Speaking of those travels, I've got my tickets for the Fuji Rock Festival. That should be a bit of a trip, since I'll be camping alone at Japan's annual version of Woodstock at Mount Fuji. A weekend of loud music should be a nice way to toast-off the end of my Asian travels.

But back to the present (or recent past, as it were). After purchasing new photo gizmogadgetrons, we ate sushi and headed to a patio-ed bar to cool-off with cool coppery drinks. The warm sweaty thick air makes the inebriating kind of heat relief the nicest.

If you stay in a bar long enough in Korea, they normally bring out some sort of food-snack menu item for free. This night it was a nice, full, half-dried squid. I've mentioned before how these ten-legged swimming nuns go hand-in-hand with drinking in Korea, and after a year, I'm still not quite sure why. I guess it's the salty-chewiness or whatever. It would take more than beer, however, for me to overlook the fact that the stuff tastes like a bicycle tire soaked in sea water.

Begrudgingly, I'll admit that salted, dried, shredded strips (or as I call it - squid jerky) in gochujang (Korean hot sauce kinda thing) are actually pretty decent. Neglecting that one exception, I refuse to understand why the stuff is served next to the popcorn at the theatre.

It's hard not to take a picture at night here without it looking interesting. There's a weird combination between the neon and the flashy and the old and new that just leaves this wonderful confusing clusterfuck of interesting. I know the texture of this place so well now, and I'm excited to see what other places 'feel' like.

Although I certainly won't have a year to absorb the atmosphere. In the run of about a month, I'm looking to visit about seven different countries; five of which I've never seen before. Despite the rushed schedule, I'm going to try to travel by land as often as possible. Crowded boats and stuffy trains and the back of pickup trucks and scooters and such are a much better way of seeing a place than the quiet, cloudy bird's-eye perspective you get by jetting above it.

Back in Seoul, though, I'm already dealing with the loss of my life here. So are my Kindergarten students. I finally explained to them today that I'm leaving in a month. They understood, and they got all little-kid sad. They cried and begged me not to go, and asked me why I had to - it was all a bit heavy. For a moment, I even asked myself why I was leaving - how could I leave this wonderful bunch of kids? But I realized they won't be there forever, and I can't keep teaching them forever, even if I stayed.

Even their drawings have progressed a lot in the last year. Another teacher showed me some of the pictures the kindie students drew of me for a project. Interpretations ran from giraffe-necked to balding to completely bald with stubble and some sort of forehead cross.

After I warned them about my departure, the kids were telling me that their moms all really liked me. "Mommy likes Peter Teacher" "Mommy says Peter Teacher very good!"

Then William says, "Mommy says Peter teacher (bunch of stuff in Korean I don't quite understand)"
"William, stop speaking Korean and do your work, please."
"No, Peter! My mom says Peter teacher... very handsome!"
"Oh, thank-you William, that's nice of her to say."
"Peter teacher..."
"Yes William?"
"My mom is crazy."

I had another funny moment when Melonie was showing me her toy cellphone. I asked her why pushing the buttons made no noise, so she told me...
"Me this..." (she pushes the buttons - a lot of them.)
"Then mommy this..." (she puts her hand on her head, giving her best Tylenol commercial frustrated headache impression.)
"And mommy this..." (she mimes opening the phone and taking out the batteries.)

"Oh..." I fully understand.

Rosa asked me for suggestions for 'inspirational' phrases to put on the wall of the classroom. I knew it had to be something really bad-slogan school-lame, and the only thing I think of was a line from the theme from School House Rock.



And speaking of power, how exactly does Korea meet the power needs of its technological, dense populous? Surely the power grid fueling Seoul must be among the most advanced on Earth. Right?

Well, check out these power lines around my neighbourhood.


It seems that Spiderman is not only skilled at busting bad villains and box office records, but he's also a skilled electrician. The biggest issue is not really about the potential for electrical fires in these tangles, but rather the risk of small animals nesting in the wires.

Luckily, the air quality in Seoul has rendered the few surviving birds practically flightless. Once again, pollution saves the world.

Ferris Buddha's Day Off

(it moves the clouds over by the building)

Today is Buddha's birthday. My research tells me he'd be over 2500 years old now, if he wasn't reclining (or sitting cross-legged, or whatever he's into these days) peacefully off in Nirvana. But Nevermind the specifics (and the terrible pun), all I know for sure is that I get the day off from work. I wonder if Buddha realized that he'd share birthday celebrations with Queen Victoria?

Of course, not unlike May 24 weekends back in Canada, my mid-week day-long vacation was a rainy one. That's not an altogether terrible thing though, as I'm practically bedridden with a cold again anyway. It was a fine excuse not to leave the cool comfort of my dry, air-conditioned room. But I did buy an umbrella to brave the rainfall. I think it's actually the 400th umbrella I've had since I got here. They're so cumbersome, cheap, and easily lost that they're practically disposable.

The one I got today was a plain clear one. These things are really popular in Japan, and after walking around with one today, I see why. It's nice to be able to see through to the beading rain that you're happy isn't drenching your clothes. It's the walking equivalent of a sunroof. A cheap plastic sunroof that you only use when it's rainy, that is.

I actually really like the look of a wet city; particularly at night, when you get to see the bright lights all upside down and blurry confused in the pavement. A city lined with bright neon puddles of every colour must be a terrible distraction while driving, but as a damp pedestrian on the Seoul streets, they're a wonderful diversion.

I also used my day off for something a little useful, and I finally compiled the little bit of video footage I had from my trips to Thailand and Japan. My still cameras have certainly gotten more use than my video in the last year, but I still take it along on trips around Asia.

You can check out the video here, as usual.

The weather was considerably nicer this weekend, and I took advantage of it with an aimless, lengthy bike ride around Seoul. I made a long loop and rode to the area where I work, then back home, snapping a few pictures along the way.

I even saw the first case of true punch-the-other-driver road rage I've ever seen in Seoul. People here are quite liberal with the horn, and there are generally quite a few insane drivers all-round, but that's apparently part of the culture; not to mention part of the fundamentally rushed atmosphere of Korea. I guess one of the inevitable parts of being in such a big city is that you're bound to see a bit of everything. Whatever the altercation was about, they seemed to settle it with a bit of manhandling, shouting, and obstructing traffic.

That evening I fought what was my approaching illness enough to go out with Mike, whose brother is in Seoul for a couple of weeks. It was a short evening for all, but a decent opportunity to meet Mini-Mike.

Sunday night I did a bit of photographing, just to capture some of the places and things I see every day. The practically mundane things that'll help remind me of this place in a month or so when I leave. I'm not even sure if I remember what it's like to not see people everywhere. Even at night, even on quiet streets, it's never completely empty here.

Speaking of common, quiet things that I rarely get to experience here, I actually saw stars a few nights ago. Well, maybe one star and the moon. In fact, the star could very well have been a planet. But the point is, the lights are so bright here, and the air so thick that the night sky is rarely filled with anything but a dim moon and perpetual city glow. It's nice to see anything celestial clearly.

Last week I forgot to mention that a Jill (a friend from home) is here to visit Cahill for a few weeks. They met me in Seoul and I showed them a bit of the city. We went to Youngsan to get her a camera, then off to Dongdaemun to see the market and river and all that - all some of the cool Seoul things that I've seen a few times now.

What I hadn't seen before was this wildly fun-looking bungee-cord trampoline contraption that enabled scared kids to jump like fucking Mario Brothers. The looks on their faces was hilarious - a constant look of pure fright and excitement as adults stretched giant rubber bands to fling them weightlessly into the air.

I really think it's short-sighted of them not to have one of these calibrated for adults, too. I wanna be frightened and excited and twenty feet in the air, too, dammit!

To close out the week, I'm sharing a bit of Koreana that I've patronized a few times now. Lotteria is Korea's take on McDonald's. For the most part, it's pretty standard fare - a fast food joint with burgers and drinks and shakes and the lot. And of course, the menu offers such standards as shrimp burgers and squid burgers. When you combine Korean food with food from another country, they normally call it 'fusion food'. In this case, I just call it fucked up.

A little scared of any sort of formerly-swimming patty, I opted for the European Frico burger, which basically has a large, flat mozza stick instead of a cheese slice. Yeah, it tastes even more deliciously unhealthy than you imagine.



And since I'm on the topic of confusingly un-enticing food combinations, here's a pack of tiny dried fish that came as a promotional item with a bottle of Cass Red - the newest and most potent beer to hit Korea. If the prospect of higher alcohol content didn't incite me to buy the beer (which it did) I really don't think a package of slowly rotting fish would.

You know, I probably don't give Korea a fair chance here. Sure, I love it here, and I make little attempt to hide that. But I also make fun of it, and to see a country purely through the lens and mind of a foreigner trying to funny probably gives a pretty skewed perspective. In the interest of fairness, here's a look at how Koreans see us. Surely a society so heavily influenced by and interested in western culture would have a pretty clear picture of the strange lands to the west, right?

Well let's see here...



Hmm, blond hair, gambling, rock music, American flags, cowboys, skateboards, and loud boomboxes.

Shit, that's actually a pretty accurate portrayal right there.

Taught

(you are a runner, and I am my father's son)

"Twenty, thirty, forty,
twenty, thirty, forty,
twenty tired teachers teaching English."

So goes a little song they teach the Kindergarteners at my school. Well, I'm not sure if they teach it to them or not, but they all seem to know it. And the lyrics have never been truer then they are this week.

Not that there are forty, thirty, or even twenty teachers at the school - in fact, that's the problem. See, last Friday Don was late for work. He missed the first class, then the second, and by the third, they decided to check on him. His apartment was empty. No people or clothes anywhere. Herein lies the infamous midnight run.

See, the midnight run is basically where a complete douchebag decides that they don't like Korea and / or their job, and they run away, like a child after a fight with their parents. Since they're breaking their contract, and probably owe the school a bunch of money, they figure they can't warn anyone that they're going to leave, so they disappear like a loved one on Unsolved Mysteries.

Who could leave these kids? I guess the whole ordeal of living in Korea and teaching kids English can be intimidating, but these little characters are saccharine wonderful.

Of course, because we're short one teacher, the rest of us are working all the harder to pick up the slack. Incidentally, I got back one of my favourite classes - one that I'd lost to Don - and they were really glad to have me back. Then when I explained that I was leaving Korea for good in just over a month, they we're all disappointed and such. I still haven't explained that clearly to my Kindergarten kids. I'm not sure how they'll take it. I know I'll probably take it like big fucking baby, though.

Emotional digressions aside, it was teacher's day this week. I got scads of presents from the students, including a few bottles of wine, no less than eight handkerchiefs (the first eight handkerchiefs I've ever owned), and about a billion pairs of fancy, nicely-boxed socks. I also got a few other niceties, including gift certificates, and a cool homemade cellphone charm that a student made just for me.

More adorable were some of the cards I got, with cute kid writing thanking me and randomly professing love. My favourite was a card from a new Kindergarten student who thanked me for 'taking care of' her. I'm not sure why, but I found that one all touching tingly, or whatever it's supposed to feel like when people get emotions.

Speakings of feeling things, the air here is thick with heat and moisture. It's also raining a little bit lately. Reminds me of monsoon season here. So hot, but pouring, torrenting, loud, angry rain. You walk indoors, glad to sheath the umbrella, but then it's so hot and wet and people-y in the air that you just feel like running outside again and letting Seoul's cool acid rain soothe your skin.

It didn't rain Saturday night. It rained all that day, so I brought my umbrella, but ended up leaving it somewhere or another, glad that I didn't need it. It was a good night, too. Me and Ben and Bora went to a shellfish restaurant that had a dirt floor (makes for wonderful atmosphere, I promise).

After a bucketload of fresh mollusks, we got some more drinks, then headed to an odang bar. There we were met by Bora's curiously co-named sister Sora. There we ate tasty odang (a kind of fish cake type substance) dishes and imbibed bamboo soju right from the chute.

As the evening came to a close, I opted not to share a cab, and instead to stumble home and take scads of pictures along the way. Luckily (almost surprisingly) I knew and actually followed the most direct route home (only 2 subway stops away, but that's a task at four in the morning under such conditions). In fact, I'd have even made it back reasonably quickly if I didn't stop every ten footsteps to take pictures.

I'm actually pretty surprised with how well I can find my way around in Seoul now. I mean of course you can get around on subways with maps and such, but on the trillion tricky trails known as the streets of Seoul, things are much more confusing. However, I can manage to tell whether a cabbie is taking the right route home. Of course, I wouldn't really know how to argue with him about it in Korean, other than to ask "Where are you going?" and then swear a lot.

Then again, I guess that's about how I'd deal with it in English, anyway.

Of course, as familiar and my surroundings get, they'll never stop being strange. Just a quick stroll around my neighbourhood gives a few head-scratchers, for instance. Just up from my apartment are a few strangely-named establishments.

First, we've got Underwear Story. I'm not sure what sort of tale underwear has to tell, but I'm guessing that, much like the people who wear them, once undergarments get so old no one really cares about their shitty stories, and they just want to put them away and forget about them and let them smell like mothballs.



Then right across from each other, there's a clothes shop called Giraffe girl and bar called White Chicks. Neglecting the obvious height jokes, I'll suffice it to say that given that it's a new bar in a slightly obscure location, it's very possible that White Chicks has never actually had its namesake step through the door. The real question, though, is where the hell did they pick these names?

Or, for that matter, how do you manage to put something as ridiculous as "Love Virus" on a shirt? While I'm sure the honesty is appreciated, I don't really think burning pee and the need for antibiotics are the sorts of benefit a potential mate would choose to advertise on their chest.

Smiling Canvases

(I see the shapes I remember from maps)

Sunny, hot and humid in Seoul. The smell in the air brings me back to last June. Sure, it smells like a huge city with a slightly less huge sewer system, but it's a reminder of the confused wonder I had stepping off the plane.

Kind of like the confused wonder in the kids' eyes last Friday. It was Children's Day here in Korea (and Mother's and Father's Day are combined into Parents Day - why didn't I grow up here?) and at the school, I did some face painting for the kids.

It's funny how much you learn about children when asking them what they want painted on their cheeks. For instance, Gaby (the strange and infinitely likable boy with the unfourtunate name) asked for a skull on one cheek and the Korean flag on the other. Wait, I didn't learn anything about the kids, just that they want weird shit painted on their faces.

But I digress. After so many students asked for the Korean flag, Edward asked for France's flag. Lots of hearts and flowers for the girls. Some kid I don't teach asked for a dragon, and I painted a shitty red Trogdor on him. Another couldn't make up his mind, so I just painted a random monster. All in all, it was really goddamn fun, and a great opportunity to get a few cute pictures of my students before I leave.

Humbly celebrating and congratulating itself, Seoul was hosting HiSeoul festivities for the last couple of weeks. On Satuday, they held this big outdoor concert DJ festival contraption near the Han River. It was a good time, and I've really missed big crowded outdoor concerts. Regardless of the acts showing, it was great to just get out there and be surrounded by strangers and be wandering and talking and drinking until obscene hours.

I should book my tickets soon for the Fuji Rock Festival, which has the added advantage of being and outdoor concert whose acts I'm actually quite interested in seeing. Once I get the tickets paid for, that'll finally set part of my trip in stone.

But back to the present... or recent past, as it were. The HiSeoul spectacular went through the night. The people danced and climbed on shit and passed out in the middle of everything. Me and Mike eventually camped-out in big concrete playground tubes for a bit, and then got the early morning subway back to our respective homes.

Train rides at around 6 AM on a Saturday are real strange. There's an alarming number of people passed-out or looking really sick on the train. Then again, when I get on the subway after work, it's difficult not to wince at the reek of Soju oozing from the breath from the mouth practically everyone in a business suit. Drinking is such an integral part of Korean culture that the Korean word for 'employment' is actually a synonym for 'alcoholism'.

Just so we're clear, I obviously made that last part up.

I went about this week taking pretty pictures. I went back to Seonyudo - a small island in the middle of the Han River, filled with flowers and trees and other stuff to take pictures that look suspiciously like default Windows wallpapers.

I also took a few pictures with another new camera. Dabbling in film, I got a Holga camera this week. I'm interested to see how pictures that are supposed to look bad turn out.

Speaking of looking bad, I clippered my own hair again this week. I didn't want long, scraggly hair while traveling around this summer, so I figured this was the easiest route. The results weren't quite as disastrous as last time, though. It's probably shorter than I'd like, but given a few weeks of growth, it'll be ideal.

A couple of images at which to chuckle this week. The first isn't actually funny for how it looks, but for what it is. It's a place near my house that's a shellfish restaurant / trendy nightclub. It's really weird. At night, a lineup of carefully dressed people trails down the sidewalk. Bouncers dressed in rubber boots take turns between scooping fish out of the aquarium and picking the hippest, trendiest people out of the line. Inside, loud, basy music plays as people sit in blacklight at neon coloured acetate tables with shellfish grills in the middle. I'm not even sure strange covers it, really.


Then there's the venerable claw machine. The funny thing about this one, though, is that there's hardly a prize inside that weighs less than a small car. These things struggle to hold up a single novelty lighter, and yet this machine is filled with fucking sanders and drills. I've got better odds of successfully bungee jumping with dental floss than of grabbing a drill with the world's weakest robotic arm.

In the off chance that you you're a Jedi, and you can actually levitate these prizes without the use of coins or glass smashing, then you're still shit out of luck. These prizes are too large to physically fit through the prize door, so you're simply not getting your drill without a pretty serious act of vending vandalism.

Six to Eight Weeks

Let's celebrate now while there's flesh on our bones

It's May now - Children's Day is tomorrow, and I get to paint kids' faces. I'm starting to get a bit of that last-minute 'holy shit I never did this-and-this-and-this' thing, but it's not a regretful feeling. I know I've spent my time here just as I wanted. Plus I'm not gone yet, so there's still lots of time to load up on Soju and rice and random bits of pig.

So of course, in a tradition suited to both the country and ourselves, me and Ben started to drink as soon as I left work on Friday. Likewise, we went and got Galbi and Cahill met us and we escaped to the apartment for some Wii. Instead of filling a collage with tediously similar pictures, I made a short series-shot video of Cahill and Ben playing imaginary bowling.

Interest piqued by not-overly-fun Wii darts, we went to Indiana - a bar that has recently removed its electronic dartboard, unfortunately. Then off to Led Zeppelin, stopping at every claw machine along the way.

The owner invited us up to the bar itself to drink, and we got our first close-up look of the wonderful wall of vinyl. I tussled with the drunk, clueless, new bartender because she didn't know how to handle or play a record. I really can't see someone who'd put a drink on a record lasting long in a place where the owner carefully brushes cleaning oil onto a playing record with a paintbrush.

Then over at Box 86, me and Cahill caught the ear of a Liverpool lad with our unintelligible cover of Psycho Killer. He said that people who would pick up a dusty, out of tune guitar in the middle of Korea and start singing Talking Heads were fine by him.

Ben left and after we shat all manner of shit until practically daylight, me and Cahill thought ourselves out of the Box 86. Of course, then we ended up sneaking into a construction site.

We spelunked around a rebuilt apartment near my own, and eventually ended up on the roof. Sitting on the roof on a silent Saturday morning watching the sun rise was quite the spectacle. You could see all of the Sillim, with just the dull sound of delivery bikes below to blunt the mental silence of staring at the city. If that's the view I get every time I go poking about in construction sites, I'm gonna start bringing a crowbar around with me.

When we got to the ground, we made the silly choice of putting ten bucks into one of the worst claw machines in Korea. Normally, you'd expect about a lighter for every dollar you spend in one of those. We blew sixty tries on that piece of shit, and all we got was some retarded foot lighter that's not even silly enough to be cool.

Monday came around and I finally did something that didn't have anything to do with Wii, lighters, or drinking. I went around Seoul for a bit and snapped some pictures. My favourite images are from little back alleys I just found really quiet, quaint bits of Koreana.

At Namdaemun Gate they actually had traditionally-costumed, eerily stoic guards. I began to question whether they might been mannequins, but then their eyeballs pivoted about in their still heads as they noticed the big white-guy sore thumb in the sea of Koreans. I (sarcastically) wondered whether the British Royal Guards stare when they see a Korean.

Walking down my street tonight, I had one of those moments where I realized how much I'll miss this strange little place. While I don't think I'll ever live here again, I can't imagine that I'll never visit. Korea's a strange place for a vacation, but if I'm nearby, I'll have to stop by the curious country with which I shacked up for a year.

That's if I make it through the year, that is. I mean, with all the animated warnings of potential danger, you'd think Korea was a Road Runner cartoon or something.

The elevator at work has new stickers. Apparently, leaning casually, and explosive-head break-dancing are strictly prohibited. If you can't lean or break dance, how exactly are you supposed to look cool in an elevator?

Meanwhile, the Wii isn't the only Nintendo system with odd warnings for the Asian market. Caveats for this one are just a little obvious: don't drive and game, don't get it wet (or feed it after midnight?), don't set it on fire, don't eat the pen, umm... don't microwave for 3 minutes and 15 seconds, and if your eyes develop into Xs, please consult a physician immediately.

Since I'm showing images whose pictures are more effective than their words, check out this ad for a mask festival - or something or another - that was placed in the subway.


Anyone look a little out of place in this picture? Look at the expression of pure fear and confusion on those guys' faces. I have no idea how the poor bastards got there in the seventh layer of Mask Hell, but I know that they're thinking something along the lines of "What the shit is going on here?!"

But hey, if they've been in Korea for a bit, they're used to that feeling.