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.