Seoul Purpose

Cambodia - Japan - Korea Trip Journal

2007-08-02T20:02:00.000+09:00

This is my last day night in Korea. The trip's over. The year's over. What a time. This weekend, I'll be in Canada for the first time in over a year. My sketchbook is now full but for a single blank page. Here's what filled it.

And that's it, that's all, that's all there is.

Hong Kong - Vietnam - Laos Trip Journal

2007-07-20T13:40:00.000+09:00

I'm in Laos now, and will be for the next 2 days or so, at which point I fly to Cambodia, the last stop before Japan. I've run short on time, and (as I sort of expected) I'm cutting out a re-visit to Thailand to give me more time everywhere else. Six countries (and one Special Adminitrative Reigon) is probably enough for a little over a month of travel.

Here are my journal pages from the last week or two. My sketchbook is actually getting pretty full.

It's really hard to upload pictures from computers in third-world contries.

China Trip Journal

2007-07-07T17:04:00.000+09:00

I'm in Hong Kong now. My week in China was amazing. Big walls and small dice and new people and all that.
I've done the setchbook thing, and the pages follow. I couldn't post from China because those Commie bastards block blogger.

This is only the first country of... many. Still got Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Japan left.

Over and Over

2007-06-29T02:44:00.000+09:00

I am an engine and I'm rolling on...

It's hot and wet tonight. It's been raining all day. It's been uncomfortably hot all day. Thunder and lightning and monsoon season. It feels heavy - like something's happening. So goes the most pathetically transparent pathetic fallacy. How appropriate that I'd prepare my escape from Korea on a dark and stormy night.

But there was more than a storm brewing on my last weekend in Korea. I got together with the people I know best in Korea, and had a great night of Koreana and finality. Meeting in Sillim, we ate Galbi at a my favourite Galbi place. And after much drink and dead pig, we headed off to Led Zepplin for one last visit with the bartender whom me and Ben have dubbed 'Gary'.

Saturday is show night at Led, and we communicated by pen and paper while a generally shitty classic rock cover band slide-guitared their way through our faltering eardrums. Dishes of cheese an peanuts were (as always) par for the course (for some reason). Teeny dried fishes, too. Curiousity finally helped me confirm the obvious: they taste fucking terrible.

Never content to armwrestle in just one place, we headed towards another nostalgically typical destination - Hongdae.

That was goodly too; the warm comfort of doing things I know with people I know is what I wanted of the night. We even ran into some people I haven't seen for approximately forever. As nights are apt to do in Hongdae (or Korea in general) the whole ordeal turned into a drink-until-morning subway-home affair.

So my Korean conclusion was not unlike the last episode of a TV show. Safe, familliar environs, and everyone coming out to take a little goodbye bow.

And so went my last few days of work, or course. The kids were sad to see me go, particularly the Kindergarteners. They cried and asked why I had to go, and when I'd come back, and other such saddening questions. Gripping legs to stop me from walking out of the classroom. Lots wrote letters. Older kids asked for my email address.

Part of us loves that. We want people to cry and wail and feel practically useless without us. We want to know that we're that important, that the world turns a little rustier without us.

But in the end, I know they're fine, and I think they understand. I mean, no one keeps one teacher their whole life. That shit's called parenthood, and it's not really what I planned when I came here.

Simple, fitting good times on my last week. Just a week of enjoying the hominess of a place that's been home for so long. A year is good timing. A year is just right for me right now.

People ask me why I'm not doing another year, and honestly it's nothing to do with disliking Korea. In fact, I can think of few more satisfying places to piss-away another twelve months. But the reason I came here in the first place was for a change. If I come back again, it's not a change anymore. It's not different. It's more comfortable, it slowly gets better and feels more like home.

And perhaps that's the crux of it right there. Right now I'm not looking for a new home. If anything, I'm looking not to have one. Perhaps that's why I'm going wandering around Asia for a month. Maybe it's why I'm traveling so quickly, only a few days in each country. Never time to get comfortable anywhere. Hell, hardly time to realize I've arrived before it's time to go again. A whirlwind of wander and wonder, which is more than fine by me.

The shit thing is that I'm losing the people I've met here. Or at least, I'm losing the means to enjoy their company very easily. But fuck, no one's a tree planted in Korean soil. We all move. Out and on. Over and over. The ones that really matter will cross my path again. It's a cruel system, this finite one-year-contract shit, but hey, I had to leave some great people to meet these folks in the first place.

So it's done here. Hours left in this country. Then it's off on a 26-hour boat to China. And a million other places between now and August. I'll keep up to date here with sketchbook pages sent from the road.

Exciting, sad, wonderful, scary shit this travel thing. Just me and a backpack full of crap.

But hey, what does Korea think of this travel stuff? Or rather, how do Koreans envision us foreigners when we're visiting the rest of the world?

Like that, evidently.

I'm not quite sure what sort of Singapore-ian treats are making this guy basically spasm with culinary joy and orgasmic tastebud overload, but someone should really warn him that drug offenses are punishable by death in Singapore.

And that's it for my year in Korea. Over fifty Thursday nights spent talking to a laptop and letting the interwebs listen-in on the conversation.

Porky Pig used to have some sort of saying that's really far too obvious to specifically mention here. But too appropriate not to reference.

Goodbye, Korea.

Penultimate

2007-06-21T23:33:00.001+09:00

Just that something so good just can't function no more

How often does a night start with eating live seafood, then end with playing impromptu Jenga drinking games? I guess the answer to that question depends pretty highly on whether or not you're in Korea. I've only got a week left in this country though, so soon the answer to that question will be a disappointing 'not often enough'.

I managed to check another fishy item off my 'I'll probably only get the chance to do this while I'm here' list this weekend. Ben and Bora took me out for dinner, and along with a plate of fine fresh sushifishies came a creepy crawly surprise plate. It turns out that the secret purpose of the meal was to eat live octopus.

I'll say that again so it sinks-in a little better: We ate live fucking octopus.

I did so without hesitation. It's actually really difficult to eat. Literally, the tentacles cling desprately to the plate, and it takes quite a tug to pull them off with the chopsticks. Plus they're all squirming madly. Some of the legs actually managed to crawl off the plate and tried to escape across the table.

See, it's actually chopped-up, and you just eat the tentacles, but they continue to move for a good half an hour. Taste-wise, it's pretty much like raw octopus (which I've eaten more times than I've wanted to), just a little more tender and, you know, moving.

Just in case all this graphic talk about eating live octopi isn't disgusting enough, I've got a looping animation of them squirming wildly on the plate. It's mesmerizing, but so quease-inducing that I'll only put the link here.

Click it if you've got a strong stomach. Or if you've got a weak one and you're just in the mood to puke.

So, what can you do after eating live food but get drunk? Well, I guess for most it'd probably be more important to get drunk prior to and during it. For us, darts (magnetic) and booze (non-magnetic, I hope) were the perfect chasers.

The bar actually had this nifty device, which was basically a big tube with a freezer at the top. It created snow and sprinkled it gently down the tube. It actually snowed inside, right onto the beer in the middle of the table.

Somehow, a beer-branded mini Jenga set came with some of our drinks, so that turned into a messily competitive drinking game. Not since Tetris has stacking blocks been so exciting and tense. That and more drinking games followed when the bar closed and we headed to Ben's place.

Of course, being that it was my second-last on the peninsula, I had to get some things done this weekend. I got some flight booking and slow-boat-to-China booking done. Some paperwork so the Republic Peoples don't go all Mao on me at the border.

After the boring important shit was all done, I walked around and looked at flea markets, fountains and other useless junk downtown. Picked up some camera stuff at one stand, while the stands to either side were selling replica machine guns and various pieces of pigs.

But right next to the randomness and shamelessly misspelled counterfeit goods (GaoLanger is supposed to be Go Rangers, which still isn't the right name, of course) there's this nice fountain that I never seem to get sick of photographing. The lucky timing of getting random Korean strangers to unwittingly recreate the cover for Abbey Road is well worth being redundant, though.

I found something in Dongdaemun other than people looking for bargains and shelter from the sweltering sun, though. I noticed a long string of 'medical' shops. Now, these aren't really drug stores, as such; they sell, ahem, medical supplies. The kinds of things that pass as having medical purpose in this country range from hilarious to confusing and probably somewhere near dangerous and every other ineffective level in between.

First, there's these infra-red lamps ("Human Doctor Q" - the Q is for quack). Now, these things are taken so seriously that I can't visit an ENT (an actual legitimate doctor) here without him making me bake my ears for 2 minutes each under a fucking hand-held McDonald's burger heat lamp.

Then there are the foot massage slippers, which are so accurately precise and effective that they've mapped out exactly what part of your foot stimulates what part of your body. If only Western doctors were aware that most bowel diseases can be cured with a footrub...

The Compressible Limb Therapy System looks kinda fun, if not potentially crippling to the poor soul who thinks crushing their legs with awkward balloons is medically sound. The woman on the box is smiling a kind of smile that whispers 'Hurry up and take the picture so I can take these painful fucking things off of my legs.'

To be fair, people go for the magnetic bullshit all over the world, so the "Magnetic Health Hoop" is actually the least hilarious bit of sham medicine here. The wild thing about these fridge magnet laden overpriced hoola hoops is that they're probably more popular than Tylenol here. Why is everyone convinced that magnetic fields from anything useful (cellphone, TV, microwave, alien death ray, etc.) are cesspools of cancer, while the ones from bullshit health products can evidently cure anything but mass stupidity?

To switch gears (considerably) I'll admit that thoughts and emotions and all those other human things are in no shortage on my last few days of Koreana. While I'm sure my finale next week will be full of introspective weepy-ness, I'm trying to get my good-natured digs in at Korean culture while the soil's still soft.

So, that in mind, I've got something to mock that is so steeped in Korean culture that it comes with a 10-second language lesson. See, Korean singing rooms (Kareoke) are known as Noraebang. However, there's something called a Noraeba (no 'ng'). This is also a singing room, but a sketchy one in which women are apparently paid to come 'escort' men to the rooms and 'encourage them' while they sing.

Now this is the symbol for 'bang' (pronounced like 'bong'). That little circle on the bottom is what makes the 'ng' part.

This character lacks, the circle, and therefore lacks the 'ng', so this just says 'ba'.

Looking at this sign, it's obvious that this was once, a Noraebang. However, it seems like the owners weren't satisfied, so they literally just tore the circle off their sign and turned it into a sketchy-ass Noraeba. It's no accident either, every sign outside the door had the same hasty hole from removing both the circle and their scruples. Newer spinning signs were designed without the 'ng' and feature pictures of girls that people are supposed to believe work there, I guess.

The funny thing here isn't that this is a sketchy singing room (judging by the signs, there's no shortage of those), it's that they changed it so lazily and transparently. And really, if you were inclined to visit such an establishment, would you really trust the quality of service provided by a red-light business that can't be bothered to buy a new sign?

And that's the end of my song this week. Next week is my last track. Then a bit of unofficial live records from the road. Maybe even a reunion album I finish my world tour.

Unfinished Business

2007-06-14T23:43:00.000+09:00

(Hey, remember that time...)

Things are clueing up here. I'm down to about a dozen days now- my last weeks are filled with what feels like a closing ceremony. Packing and cleaning and booking and planning. Luckily, I'm a flagrant procrastinator, so I've hardly done any of it.

No, I'm far too busy tending to more important matters. Months ago, back in November, I tried to destroy Ben's phone with a bunch of fireworks. Since that didn't work (or rather, since the charred phone still did) I simply had to finish the job before leaving Korea.

Armed with the combined innards of several gutted roman candles, I set the scene and marinated everything copiously with lighter fluid. Ever cautious of safety, I used other fireworks as projectile fuse ignition doodads, to keep a 'safe' distance away.

The whole ordeal was a success. While the destruction was more of an extended fireball than the single, eyebrow-searing boom I feared, it sure burned the fuck out of the phone. I've highlighted the photo of the charred remains to show the screen (left) and the keypad (right).

Of course, I captured the whole thing on video (from multiple angles). Like most of my self-destructive exploits, it's been put to rock music and put online here.

After the phone met its maker (mister LG?) we were thirsty for more booze and potential destruction, so we met Mike and Adrian in Gangnam. That went like other Saturday nights often have here in Korea.

Start with eating charred pig and gulping beer and soju at a Korean restaurant. Then off to wander streets, drinking and probably annoying the shit out of Koreans. Actually, I think this night set itself apart in that we kind of went out of our way to do the latter. The specifics aren't real clear right now, but pictures of Adrian wielding traffic cones and megaphones can't be a good sign.

The cutesy heart pillow is a complete mystery.

Not content to keep our irritation at street level, we pulled ourselves into a Noraebang and screamed into microphones for a bit. I've actually got video from this, but I'd never release it to the Internet public, as doing so might incite riots. Or just make us look really retarded. Probably both.

I think the expressions on everyone's faces should suffice to communicate the sort of singing skills that were brought to the table that night. If that doesn't do the trick, the bottles of cheap booze on the table should augment the picture a bit.

After the Noraebombing, we wandered a bit and cabbed off to Mike's apartment, where we shot the shit (as well as Mike's pellet gun) until blinding sunlight reminded us to catch the train home.

This is the kind of note on which I want to leave. This kind of meandering Korean-ness. With only two weekends left here, I couldn't ask for better than more of the same, really.

I finally got my Holga film developed. Unfortunately, a little loss in translation mean that I got them developed into negatives. I scanned and reversed the negatives, and while the images are messier and blurrier than they'll be when I get them developed, they give me a good idea of the blurry images the infamously, wonderfully flawed camera will give me. They look fucking haunted. I'll look back at this and think I visited Korea sometime in the 1920s.

A lot of the pictures are spoiled (spring-powered film cameras don't have a delete button) but the ones that came out are worth it. I actually really like they way they look on film strips like this, too. Makes the ghostly glow all the more creepy. Makes this cool-digital Korea a little more warm-analog. I swear I can almost hear gears ticking inside my cellphone.

But I'll miss cool, digital Korea. It's given me just what I wanted from it. If I was in the mood to make bold, pretentious, uninteresting statements, I'd say it gave me one of the defining years of my adult life. I think saying that it gave me a hell of a year will suffice, though.

I'll miss a lot of things. I'll miss the food, for example, and everything that surrounds it.

Cooking your own galbi with friends. A collection of sixty-some-odd magnetic take-out ads that have been left on the other side of my door. Mascots who are not only willing, but honoured - excited, even - to have you eat them. A tank overfilled with about a hundred giant scary-ass battle crabs. A country that's so goddamn silly that it thinks potato is a good pizza topping. Not to mention corn and pickles.

Ice cream on salad. Cutting food with scissors. Whatever works, it's an interesting approach to culinary delights.

So many of the things that seem so funny about the food here is the Western food that's been warped by the fun house mirror of Korean culture. But as I mentioned, that's not the only part of Western culture that gets a bit blurry through the Korean lens.

Once again, I'm ignoring the myriad spectrum of thoughts and opinions Koreans actually have about foreigners, and I'm trying to define our image in Korean popular culture. And there are few things more popular in Korean than advertising.

In contrast to the singing, gambling cowboy image of a few weeks ago, some of the only ads in Korea that use white people portray them as creepy, plasticy repressed caricatures straight out of the '50s. There are more ads than these, and they all have even-creepier television versions.

Living in a place where you look so different from everyone is interesting. You're loved, hated, ignored, stared-at, fled from and fled to all at once. I think that's the crux of Korean attitude towards foreigners there. There is no one attitude, surely, other than the definite, universal realization that we "ain't from 'round these parts".

So regardless of whether we're liked or loved, we're inescapably alien.

War Cry

2007-06-07T23:47:00.000+09:00

(If that's all they see, I wouldn't blame 'em...)

The other day, as my subway car ran parallel to the highway bridges that cross the Han River, I saw a procession of army trucks speeding alongside, the only traffic moving at more than a traffic-jam crawl.

But no, the North hadn't attacked. It was, in fact, Korea's version of Remembrance Day, one of the few holidays on the Korean calendar that doesn't involve specially-packaged chocolate purchased from the convenience store. I knew what day it was, of course, since I had the day off work.

I sought to make the most of my last, and somehow along my travels, I managed to accidentally walk past the Korean War Memorial. Given the timeliness, I decided to take a look around.

There's a lot there. A lot of tanks and jeeps and planes and guns and bombs and other pre-robotic means of world domination. There's something a little unseemly about kids playing on a tank. It was a pretty interesting looks at Korea at war, though. Kind of like MASH, except I didn't change the channel as soon as I saw it come on.

The memorial's supposed to honour all of Korea's historical battles, but the Korean war of the 1950s really the main attraction. Interestingly, much like the Vietnamese call their infamous was the American war, as do many Koreans call their latest the American war. I mean, why name a war after yourself?

The thing that surprised me was how overwhelmingly American the Korean war memorial was. The first thing I saw approaching the place was a sign warning that it was US Army property, and I may or not be shot on site for visiting. It's like the Army set up this big monument on Korean soil, thanking themselves for saving the world.

The tourist-y 'I haven't seen enough things in this city' day off didn't end there. I headed to Namsangol, a rebuilt traditional Korean village in the middle of Seoul. I like to call the place Jumong-ville, because it looks like the setting of the inexplicably popular (read: awful) Korean drama of the same name.

The place was a nice spot where Koreans talked and slept and sat and watched Koi swim upstream. The unfortunate thing about Korean historical sites is that so many of them (this one included) are replicas. The problem is basically Japan burned down the whole goddamn country a few centuries ago or so. Ashes don't make good museums, it seems.

Stepping back the history of my week, on Saturday I check an item off my 'things to do before I die in Korea' list. Namely, I ate blowfish. Or swellfish, as it had been hilariously re-mis-translated by the restaurant. Maybe that's a marketing choice, though. I'd much rather be told that my meal was swell than hear that it blows.

The food didn't blow (although it was a bit bland). Nor did eating the deadly fugu fish kill me. In fact, we were dso very alive after eating that we went about the area doing what we do best in Korea - imbibe.

We wandered about the area, in and out of whichever place had the most alluring collection of gaudy lighting.

Lack of attention and a cloudy memory means that I never quite knew where we were. Not that I didn't know where I was, just that I never paid attention to what part of the city I was in. It was a very nice, wildly-lit area, though. Fountains and rivers and people and lights, all hours of the evening. A man sleeping on a pile of glow-sticks. Balcony bars above drunken streets, watching little drunken ant people navigate from bar to bar.

Wandering around like an ant is about what I do now. The last-minute urge to try to see as much of the place before I leave it. Snap pictures of what I can. Quiet scenes of trees and trails. My last glances of neon home.

Now it's time to make fun of Korea, quickly, before things get too serious here.

Now if there's anything Korea takes more seriously than its shitty melodramas, it's technology. In particular, this place is pretty much the cellphone capital of the world. With an estimated 90% of the country using them, they claim that cellphones actually outnumber people in this country. With numbers like that, I just hope that the phones don't turn against us and plan a genocidal uprising.

A student of about six showed me his new phone the other day. It's a crippled phone, in that it can only dial a few pre-programmed numbers (ideally home, for emergencies I guess). I while the intention is pure, I'm sure, it's a bit creepy to see kids who can't ride a bike owning their own cell.

I saw this art piece at a subway station. Only in Korea (or in my head) would people think to combine cellphones and Tetris and try to pass it off as legitimate art.

The last thing here is a Korean ATM. These thing are models of modern tech. With two screens, no buttons, RF detectors, cell-phone connections, fingerprint readers, cheque scanners, and probably a big robotic arm to beat you silly if you fuck with it.

On the other end of Korean technological innovations, there's a curious new product at the local convenience stores. Basically, it's iced coffee in kit form. You buy a pouch of coffee, then get a tiny bag of ice, a cup, cover and straw. You mix it all together yourself.

It's a caffeine fix for the Lego generation.

The Factory

2007-05-31T23:00:00.000+09:00

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

2007-05-24T23:27:00.000+09:00

(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

2007-05-17T23:53:00.000+09:00

(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

2007-05-10T23:48:00.000+09:00

(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

2007-05-04T00:34:00.000+09:00

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.

Revisiting

2007-04-26T23:04:00.000+09:00

(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

2007-04-20T00:14:00.000+09:00

(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

2007-04-12T23:54:00.000+09:00

(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

2007-04-05T23:33:00.000+09:00

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.

Playing Games

2007-03-29T23:39:00.000+09:00

(your sun sets when mine starts to shine)

The Yellow Dust from China. Sounds sinister, doesn't it? Like it's some new kind of drug, or some sort of evil ninja cloud that consumes all in its path. Unfortunately, it's nothing as cool and deadly as either of those. It's this cloud of airborne dirt particles that blows over from China every year around early April. It started this week. Hasn't been bad yet, but I'm curious to see how things look when it does, since the natural consistency of the air in Seoul about that of a hot-boxed closet.

The kind of hot-box where all the inhalants are from several million cars and factories and gassy old women who stare at you on the subway, that is.

So what have I been up to in this perpetual cloud of dirt? Well, I finally broke down and bought a Nintendo Wii this weekend. Friday after work, I went to Yongsan, the biggest damn electronics district in the country - and boy, is it big. Imagine Futureshop if it exploded, and the debris covered several square kilometers. Then the debris turned Korean and carried a lot more stuff for like a quarter of the price - that's Yongsan. That's (part of) it in the banner image, by the way.

Well I started looking around there frantically for a Wii. See, they're not easy to get here, as the only ones here have been imported from Japan, and it's hard as nails to get there (signs everywhere in Akihabara said "Wii sold out!"). After getting laughed at by a number of booths for the impossibility of such a request, the dozenth or so shop I checked out said "No... oh wait a second..." and left to run to another shop. He came back and told me I could have one, it was Japanese (of course) but he could put a mod chip in it so it would play English games. Then he opened a binder of illegally copied, dirt cheap games that will also run with said chip.

Sold.

That's part of why I like Yongsan, and Korean shopping in general. There's something really unofficial about it all. This whole 'market' system, where you've got a big department-store space, but they're actually filled with dozens of little independent stores. Like a flea market.

That's Seoul in a nutshell - a city full of flea markets. this is one of those places where it's not only kosher, but even encouraged to barter with salespeople. It's a that shame I'm terrible at bargaining.

Then there's the cash. See, this place is still very big on cash. You can use credit cards and debit cards in a few places, but the preferred method is cold hard won. However, the largest bill in Korea is 10,000 won. That's about equivalent to 10 bucks, so if you're buying something that costs about a grand, you walk in with a fistfull of a hundred bills or so. While there's something very gangster-cool about having enough cash on you to do a Scrooge McDuck swan-dive into, there's something terribly inconvenient about not being able to close your wallet.

On the flip side of all that excessive cash and technology and consumerism, Yongsan is also a train station where a depressing bunch of homeless people sleep on a teeny slit of filthy dead grass next to the tracks. I felt compelled to photograph that, for some reason.

As I was stumbling around Youngsan. I saw this pedestrian tunnel. Tiled floors, walls, people, the works - clearly a walking tunnel, indoors save for the lack of doors. And at the entrance, they've got a warning that bikes aren't allowed. I figured that, only in Korea would you need to warn people not to drive their motorbikes indoors. See, the delivery guys on scooters here will take to the sidewalks, crosswalks and escalators to get where they're going.

Of course, moments after thinking how retarded someone would have to be to consider driving their bike through the tunnel, I had to hop out of the way of a delivery bike speeding through the very same tunnel.

So eventually, the Wii made it back to my home alive. Then I stayed home and played if until I developed mental bedsores and virtual injuries from sitting around and swinging around a white remote control for a couple of days. Between a few billion rounds of bizarre, remote-controlled nonsense, I'm practically enslaved by the goddamn thing.

Incidentally, the menus, and a number of my games are still in Japanese. That adds a whole new level of challenge, though. It's like an extra bonus game called "What the fuck is going on?" and you can get to play it at almost any time, whether you want to or not.

Surely my entire week can't have revolved around a video game, though. Well, I am still doing that 'teaching' thing. Or this 'speaking English around Korean kids and hoping they pick it up through osmosis' thing.

I got a few pictures of the kids this week, mostly 'cause I love little kid drawings. Particularly ones as tooth-rotteningly sweet as Dotothy's backwards-C "Oh so cute" drawing of her own clothes. And if you look closely at William's self portrait, you can see he's drawn himself as a horrific, fang-toothed monster. I've definitely taught kids like that, but he's not one of them.

But cute be damned, none of them did anything photographically hilarious this week. So, to close-out the week, I've got the (presumably unintentionally) hilarious and strange warning images that came with the Wii. Now, I understand that the North American Wii probably has about the same strange warnings, but it has been scientifically proven that anything bizarre becomes funnier when you put Japanese text next to it.

I figure if these diagrams prove anything, it's something I've personally believed for a long time - guys in pink shirts are really fucking stupid.

Answers Will Vary

2007-03-22T22:42:00.000+09:00

(I'll do it anyway, so it makes no difference)

March is going away, making way for another month. But April isn't the rainy season here, that starts in July, and carries the much more sinister-sounding title of 'Monsoon Season'. That's old news, though; shit that was happening when I got here last summer. Now Spring is back, and the air conditioners are coming on already.

But where's all the green?

Well, St. Paddy's day was this weekend, if you'll excuse the cheap colour gag. Friday me and Ben grabbed a few drinks around Guro. We saw some sights typical of Korea. Strange murals that place Courtney Love next to Gandhi. Digital signs that show the ever-high air pollution rates in Seoul. One of the bars we went to was named JSA, after a famous Korean movie about soldiers being killed along the border with North Korea. I know when I think about death on the North Korean border, I think 'par-tay!'

Incidentally, as you can see from the sign here, Koreans truly celebrate Donk(e)ys for their chicken frying abilities. Or maybe the chicken is Donkey flavoured. Regardless, this is not the first Korean chicken joint I've seen with some variation of the word 'donkey' in its name.

Me and Cahill had plans Saturday to go to this big all-you-can eat and drink Irish party. However, like many plans left up to us retards for execution, they fell by the wayside. An original group of many friends planning to go dwindled to just us, so we decided to go to Hongdae instead.

Even there, we never had anything even as Irish as a pint of Guinness. We did, however, have a good time, between watching strange Koreans dance strangely and claw machines and bats and guns and tanks full of giant crabs and the like. See, there's this place we found in Hongdae with a batting cage and BB-gun firing range. Few things appeal more to an inebriated male than shooting a gun and hitting stuff with a bat.

Of course, then there's the ongoing struggle with the claw machines. I hardly pass them now without putting in a bit of change and trying for a lighter. This weekend, Cahill managed to score a pig lighter. It fires two flames - one from each nostril of its piggy little nose.

One of the things I like about going to Hongdae to is that Hongdae (or Hongik University) is the big art university in Korea. The area around it is one of the few places around here that feels truly artistic, or counter-cultural. In a city of ten million people, there are a surprising few that seem interested in going against the grain.

But around Hongdae, you can kinda feel the art. There's (decent) graffiti around. Stencils are pretty popular (even if the most common one is the hateful 'Fuck Japs' that some dickhead spread around). Maybe it's no mistake that one of the biggest foreign communities formed around here. Maybe these forward-thinking paint-hippies can accept us scary foreigners a little more comfortably. Whatever the cause, the bars and people are plentiful, and insofar as a Saturday night goes, I guess the paint is colourful icing on the cake.

And speaking of colour, it's been a while since I shared the some images from my colourful little characters known loosely as 'students'.

My former Kindergarten class has been split into two, and I teach both of them, and I work a lot more than I used to but the kids have grown a lot, and even when they're bad, they're more mature, and respect me a lot more. Their command of English is also impressive, considering they knew practically none when I met them in June. They speak full sentences now. It's kind of rewarding, since I realize that they learned a lot of that from me.

Even Kevin, who's in the 'less smart' class said of the awful gruel they were fed as a snack, "Peter, the taste is bad." I took his word for it. From the texture and smell, I judged that what they were eating consisted of the innards of an egg salad sandwich blended with sour milk.

Of course, I can't bring up my students so proudly without having a little fun at the expense of their limited English knowledge. Up first, I've got an older kid, whom I think was trying to tell me that there were too many people on the sidewalk to ride his bike quickly. However, that came out as "humanity is narrow". Or maybe he's just a 10 year-old philosopher-in-training.

Then I've got the infamous Kindergartener Gaby. The other day, the kids were doing this thing where they have to write a sentence. It was beyond their ability, so I was helping them on the board. Then Gaby screams "Teacher, I'm done!" I look at his book, and instead of the intended "The cat sat on the mat" he has...

"Answers will vary."

I break down laughing. Apparently, there's an answer key in the back of the book, and it took my clever-but-lazy student all but a few minutes to figure that out. He copied this, and having no idea what it meant, figured it was the right answer. In the end, we lost about five minutes of class time 'cause I really couldn't speak. The kids asked "Teacher is crying?" and between gasps, I said "No... laughing... that's the... funniest... ohmygod..."

It's a good thing these kids are so funny, it helps a lot with the frustrating moments.

View from the Top

2007-03-15T22:33:00.000+09:00

(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.

The Boys are Back

2007-03-08T22:40:00.000+09:00

(run to the hills - run for your life)

It's March now, my ninth month in Korea. I finish work the last week of June, leaving me with shorter than 4 months left here. Where I am right now is about where Ben and Mike were first when I met them (but more on those kids in a minute). I haven't officially started counting the days or anything, but I'm certainly aware of my imminent departure, and aware that I'll miss this place a bunch.

While I'm on the topic of departures, I went out Friday night to celebrate Scott's last day of work. He's a New Zealander at my school who's been in Korea for two years now. It's interesting how that seems to be the magic number when visiting Korea. While so many seem to sign on for the second year, comparatively fewer seem to stick around for the third.

After drinks and Japanese food with some work people, I went out around Seoul National University and met Ben for a few more. That was all great, save for the Korean guy at the next table whose idea of a date was shouting at the girl for three hours and leaving her with the bill. Minus the rather progressively unchivalristic approach to payment, that sort of paternalistic exchange is really not uncommon in Korea.

Saturday I did the time warp (again?) as me, Ben and Mike spent a night that felt eerily similar to my first few months in Korea - we even grabbed a few drinks outside of a Sillim convenience store.

Then we made our way out to meet a few of Ben's friends, and drinking at a Soju bar turned into singing at a Noraebang. Every time I go to one of those, I question why I don't do it more often. Singing drunk with friends is such a natural thing, and it's all the better when you're amplified and given the lyrics.

While this weekend, and the weeks preceding it, were quite nice and temperate enough to drink outside and adventure in underprotective sweaters, this week served to remind me that it's still March and Korea's still kinda close to fucking Siberia.

It even snowed this week - enough for that giant melting dandruff to accumulate on the ground, even. Koreans get so excited when it snows. They take out their cameraphones (they've ALL got one - I think it's actually required for Korean citizenship) and take pictures of themselves with the snow. Like it's a landmark or drunk friend or something. I'm almost sure I saw one guy try to put his arm around a snowflake to pose for a self-taken picture.

I guess I can't say much better myself. Snow is so rare here that I felt inclined to photograph the seemingly contrasting images of Korea under a whole centimeter of fresh snow. And of course, the kids were excited too. In fact, I'm not so sure excited covers it. Excited is running to gym class, or seeing their teacher for the first time after a holiday. With snow, they get completely run-around-and-climb-the-walls shitbaked.

Oh, those kids. I teach a lot more kindergarten classes now. Save for the lack of a nap-sized break in my morning schedule, it's all pretty good. The kids are in smaller classes and better-behaved now, too. The school's a little redecorated with strange papers from children who have since left - such as an illustrated document of what the earth would be like sans-gravity.

I've also redecorated my desk with little trinkets I've gotten from kids, or those that I've made in class. Not to mention some nice but photographically boring stock photos of me with the students. My two personal desk-bound highlights are clearly the adorable framed picture Dorothy's mom gave me, and the pigdevil puppet I made in class one day. The idea was to make adorable little animals, but I was a little bored, and of course kids love to follow the teacher's example...

Once again, it's quite clear that I'm having a good time corrupting these poor children.

But perhaps they're already gone beyond repair as it is. As the closer this week, I leave a relatively innocuous subway ad, featuring a geographically-inaccurate portrayal of Korea, in which it spans a significant portion of the earth's surface.

Sometimes I wonder whether this might be the version of geography kids are taught here. Whenever I draw a map (I do this often, I'm not sure why) the kids are appalled at the size of Korea relative to other places. I've had them argue that Korea is similar in size to Canada (it's about the size of Newfoundland). I dare not mention that Japan is bigger, lest I be castrated and eaten alive by an army of cute, over-patriotic 11-year-olds.

The Graduates

2007-03-01T23:46:00.000+09:00

(a lovely bunch of coconuts, here they are all standing in a row)

The school year runs a little differently in Korea. Instead of changing grade levels over a long summer vacation, Koreans graduate in February, and start their new classes in March. More than a moot curiousity, that actually means that my Kindergarteners are swimming up. Incidentally, they're swimming up to their second year of Kindergarten, which will also be taught by me, but that doesn't make occasion any less auspicious.

The graduation ceremony was this week, and it was a strange but adorable event. Take all the awkwardness of six and seven-year-olds having to speak in front of their parents, then multiply it by whatever the stress level speaking in a language other than your own. Mind you, these kids are quite good at it, but still nowhere near as comfortable as they are with Korean.

Then there's the wonderfully adorable and delightfully strange performances themselves. They had a few typical (and atypical) songs and dances that make you go "damn those kids're cute".

A video of a couple of those can be seen here.
(the first two performances here are from my students, the Coconut class).

But then there were the plays. First, the older kids (some of whom I taught) put off a musical version of Snow White. The real entertainment value there came from the songs and performances. Strange singing, weird pronunciation, curious actions and completely fucking odd songs made the whole show quite watchable in a curious way.

There's a short montage of some of the funniest parts here.

But then there was the copyright-infringing surrealist take on the Peter Pan play. This one was performed by the younger classes, so a fair number of them were from my Coconut class. This was a pretty standard Peter Pan story. Oh, with Batman, Spiderman, the themes from Rocky and Mission Impossible, and a scene where hunters brandish machine guns.

Check out the insanity here.

It was all quite adorable, though. Next month, my class is split into two and I'm teaching fewer kids at once more often. Plus I've got a couple of new ones transferring from another school. I hope they've got as much personality as the nutcases I teach now.

Speaking of nutcases, I had a decent weekend. Me and Ben met up around his new place in Guro. We drank mircobrewed beer from strange jugs, listened to an awful Korean singer named 'Sweet Chocolate' (she was neither sweet nor very chocolaty), then headed to Hongdae to meet Trevor and some people.

Trevor's cohorts were an alright gang. Several were even from Newfoundland. Like always when you meet people from 'home', it only took us a few moments to figure out someone we knew in common. We sat in Brixx and had some hookah and some Korean girl was scooping fish from an on-the-floor aquarium tank and then we left the strangeness.

Well, I guess there's never a complete shortage of strangeness wandering around Korea. Nor is there ever any shortage of strangeness when drinking with a group of people. At some point it seemed a good idea for Trevor and a couple of other guys to try and stack on top of each other in vaguely homoerotic poses.

After we lost the group to whatever it is that separates groups of drunks, Ben and I went to Route 66 and played made-up-on-the-spot dart games for 10,000won per game. I lost virtually every one (except for distance darts and the first round of backwards darts) and Ben went home with a bunch of my money.

But Ben's not the only one calling Korea home for a second time. Mike came back this week, too. He was too jetlagged to hang out much this weekend, but the former Sillim Musketeers are now all back in Seoul (not that we ever titled ourselves, I'm just trying to impart the fact that we were three friends living in the same area). Even if I'm the only one still in the Sillim area. I guess that makes us the Subway Line Number Two Crew instead.

Changes have been underway in Sillim too, though. The sofa I got back in October was actually procured from outside a building being renovated. Those renovations are finally complete, and what was once a nondescript Korean building with an unwanted sofa is now a Seven Eleven. And so, to close this week I present a quick tour of the average Korean convenience store.

First, notice that outside there lies patio furniture. Practically all stores have these so you can go in, grab a beer, and get drunk outside the store. Repeat ad nausium. Also notice the flowery wreaths outside the store. That's what every new Korean business does. I think it's some charm or omen to wish good fortune on the new establishment.

Next, see the noodle section and notice that it's actually about one quarter of the whole store. Koreans love noodles, and I love Korean noodles. So nothing to really make fun of there without being a hypocrite.

Then see the dried squid section and notice that... notice that there's a whole fucking section dedicated to dried squid.

Finally take a peek at the seemingly innocuous chip aisle and think 'hmmm, which of the many varieties and flavours of shrimp-flavoured corn chip snacks should I get today?'

I'm not sure if I could follow-up a comment about shrimp-flavoured snacks even if I wanted to.

Super Tokyo Adventure Mega Japan Fun Time

2007-02-23T00:47:00.000+09:00

(night majestic)

My vacation in Japan was amazing. I've wanted to go there pretty much since the moment I figured out that all my favourite Nintendo games originated there. It's exactly as strange as I always imagined it, and pictures and words can only do so much to capture that. But fuck are they ever gonna try.

That banner panorama is taken from the bar at the Tokyo Park Hyatt, 42nd floor. That's the place from Lost in Translation.

The place is a real electronic dream. Or nightmare. I've described Korea and a colourblind neon insanity fest a good dozen times, but Japan puts this place to shame. I had to take care not to go all Exorcist and pull a few neck-twisting head turns looking around at all the wonderful distractions. Likewise, I had to take special care that not every picture I took was a panorama. There are video games and video screens and people and colours and lights everywhere.

In a sense, it's kind of like Korea two-point-oh. Or like Blade Runner meets Anime. Or like the 80s' version of the future, with copious quantities of pornography tossed-in for good measure.

Ah yes, the pornographic nature of Japan. Note that the pictures in my collage here were not taken in sex shops. The signs were taken from the street, and the products were all from relatively 'normal' shops. Alright, granted, one of these shops was some sort of all-purpose grocery mart that we stumbled into at 2 in the morning, but nonetheless, it was an otherwise normal store with this one section dedicated to some strange and depraved shit. Not that separate, though. I promise, the magic kits were on the same shelf as the vibrators.

Also take note that I've added some black blocks to make this collage safe for work and moms. However, if you click on the picture to see the full version, it is not safe for work whatsoever. Unless you work in a Japanese sex shop.

But speaking of toys, Japan's full of the sort that actually are safe to display proudly in public. Not that proudly displaying scads of nerdy Japanese toys will exactly win you many friends, but at least it won't alienate all but the most depraved of visitors.

Practically everything I bought fell into the 'useless kitsch' category (see the middle of the collage for some of the toys I bought). My favourite buys were my pixel kits, though, as they allow pixel-perfect recreations of all the games that came out when I was still young enough to get in trouble for saying 'fuck'.

I actually spent a lot of my Japan trip doing exactly what I would have if I'd visited there at the age of 12 or so. Toys and games and the attention-span of a gnat are all necessary parts of life in Tokyo, I think. Akihabara was easily one of my favourite parts of Tokyo. As home of all things electronic and overtly weirdly Japanese, this place represented that fucked-up bit of culture that attracted me to this place. Toys and games and grown-up toys and little things that go whizz-beep-bang-boop everywhere. I was in heaven, and after four hours was still disappointed that I had to go meet Cahill and the Cohorts at the airport. However, after a day and a half of exploring confusing Japan alone, I could use stand to see some people whom I'd met more than a day prior.

Hanging with Cahill, Eric and Roberto was cool. Numbers like that give you the safety to do funny walks down the street for no reason. They give you someone to drink with in the lobby of the capsule hotel. Or in random bars you pass. Or on the streets.

The four of us spent most our time in Shinjuku and Shibuya, two popular districts in Tokyo. Their trip was only for about two days, which is really a torturous short bit of time to spend in Tokyo. When the guys left to catch their plane on Sunday night, I decided to on and interesting place to sleep.

Well, I actually slept somewhere pretty interesting every night. My first 2 nights in Shinjuku, I slept at a capsule hotel. That's the kind of infamous place where "Japanese people sleep in drawers". It's basically a place where they have matrix-like shelves along the wall, each about the size of a comfortably-large coffin. Inside these little beige boxes, you've got a thin mattress, an alarm, and a TV about twice the size of my fist. The whole thing is surprisingly comfortable, and I think it's really an efficient use of limited space.

On my third night I booked my own room in a PC cafe and slept in the comfortable leather chair while watching streaming movies on the internet. This is actually a popular choice for sleeping arrangements. They even have special overnight pricing for just this purpose.

On the last night, I went to Asakusa and checked out a Ryokan. That's a traditional Japanese guest house - kind of like the B & B of the far east. My rest on the bamboo floor that night was easily my deepest and most comfortable of the journey. Not that a plastic coffin and a chair are really the stiffest comfort competition, but still.

I spent a day in Odaiba on Monday. After a night of sleeping in a chair, a famous spa sounded just right. The whole thing was amazingly relaxing, even if it did look like E. Honda's level from Street Fighter 2. Mid-February sitting in boiling water outdoors in a Japanese rock-built hot tub has quite a bit of world-experience appeal.

But speaking of mister Honda, fuck if the cars aren't cooler here, too. Even when they aren't cool by any stretch of the imagination, they're so ridiculous and tiny that they've got an appeal all their own. Korea actually has these crazy import laws that basically double the price of any non-Korean vehicle, so all you ever see are Hyundais, Kias, and Daewoos. The only reason these sell well outside of Korea is that they're really, really cheap. Maybe that's necessary when so many Koreans drive like their cars are either disposable or invincible.

Hell, cars in Japan are Right Hand Drive. Even if I didn't already love JDM vehicles, any country where they drive on the wrong side of the road is automatically a little cooler.

But I'm sure very few people are interested in cars and toys and games and all that shit. Admittedly, I'm sure a bunch are interested in the black-bar stuff, but that's your own fucking business. We all know why everyone really likes Japan: crazy signs and labels. So, in closing this week, here's a collection of potential head scratchers.

My comments, clockwise from the upper-right corner.

Jack Black: You love his off-the-wall comedy stylings, now try his out-of-the-bottle coffee freshness!

Yeah, 'cause I really need directions to the Giant Panda. It's not the kind of thing I'd notice on my own. (Confidentially, even with the signs, I couldn't find the fucking thing. I think there's a slight chance it might be a metaphorical Giant Panda. Like, there's a little Giant Panda in each of us us. Either that, or I'm retarded.)

Depresso coffee. Now with extra anti-caffeine! AKA booze.

Don't smoke while walking. No joke here, it's a rule in Tokyo. It's so you don't burn others with your cigarette. While you're at it, don't smoke cigarettes that are longer than your own legs.

Sunnyside Cafe. You've gotta be from Newfoundland to find this funny.

Real black music. For all of you sick of dark gray and navy blue music. Fakers!

And that's it for Tokyo. Well, just for shits and giggles, here's an obscenely wide, almost 360-degree panorama of Tokyo, as taken from the top of one of the world's largest ferris wheels in Odaiba.

Also, you can find more pictures that didn't even make the blog on my flickr album. And you can read a more cogent and chronological account of my adventures in the Trip Journal below.

Tokyo Trip Journal (Complete)

2007-02-21T14:45:00.000+09:00

My trip to Japan was a complete success. Much like Thailand, I kept a journal in my sketchbook during the trip. Here are those journal pages, wrestled from the disproportionately tiny arms of Godzilla himself.

Balentine's Day

2007-02-15T22:42:00.000+09:00

(holding you a while and then I'm going to Japan)

My last week before my big-but-not-so-long Lunar New Year holiday was an eventful one. Weekends and punk shows and familiar holidays celebrated in half-familiar ways and conflict against machines and bureaucracy with ultimate success marked the week of hearts and airfare.

On Saturday me, Cahill, and his various coworkers convened around Hongdae nice and early to check out a place I've been meaning to see for a while here. It's called Skunk Hell, and it's just about the centre of Punk counterculture in Korea. All of the few dozen or so people in Korea who'd call themselves part of that subculture were there, and it was a helluvan interesting show.

Of the countless (if you can't count to nine, that is) bands that performed, there was a band from Japan called The Hat Trickers. What was most interesting about them was their shtick. See, they dress like Alex and his droogies from A Clockwork Orange.

While they weren't actually the best band of the bunch, (that honour goes to the name-forgotten predecessors who played a wild cover of MC5's Kick Out the Jams) they drew most of the crowd, and thus made said crowd peak in wildness during their performance. After their set, I picked up a shirt (click for picture), which is (obviously enough) a parody of the iconic image of Alex holding aloft a blade.

The punk show was an all-ages affair (albeit one that curiously allowed copious quantities of booze to be brought-in without question) so once it ended, we headed to Brixx for some nice calm-contrast as a bunch of hookah-smoking caterpillars.

After that cool-down, Robert and Co. headed the way of all-night DeeJays and me and Cahill went the way of wandering around Hongdae. However, shortly after we left Brixx, we realized we'd lost the braceleted key to our locker full of stored goods. After searching for the key, trying to pull the locker open with drunken brute force, and stealing a knife to try and jimmy the lock, we finally got the great idea to tell the guy guarding the lockers that we lost the key. Ten minutes and ten bucks later they opened the lock.

That would have been the dumbest we felt all night, if the key hadn't fallen out of Cahill's hood several hours later (I apparently placed it there as a joke).

Luckily, the horrible humiliation of was karmatically retributed when I bested all odds to finally win at one of those crooked claw machines. Mind you, I only won an ugly lighter that ran out of fluid several moments later. Also mind you that it took about 30 tries at about five different machines, and that each failed attempt was accompanied with an ever-escalating string of obscenities. All minding aside, I did finally win something from one of them.

Speaking of impossibly intimidating odds, I visited the immigration office this week to get a replacement Alien Registration Card. Then I found out that would take a week, which means I'd get the potentially necessary-for-travel card just about a week too late. Luckily, Ben suggested that night that perhaps the sofa we 'liberated' around the same time that I lost the card might be contain a clue. Much to my relief (and Sherlockian jealousy) the card was sitting safely under my sofa. All is well and good for my Japan trip.

Of course, that reminds me that Ben is back. Mike's going to be here in a few weeks. Adrian's coming around the same time. That's a strange and pleasant little time warp in my little Korean social network. March to June will be my swan song, and it'll be interesting and will fly the fuck by.

But this is Valentine's week, so surely I've got more Korean-heart-shaped things to discuss than what foreigners are coming when, right? This place is predictably chocolaty and hearty on that chocolate heart occasion.

However, there is a twist. See, Valentine's Day in Korea is basically a day on which girls give boys chocolate and gifts and the like. Then, a month later they've got White Day. On March 14th, boys return the favour, giving sweets and whatnots to their sweethearts and whonots. Hell, I've even been told that there's a corresponding Black Day (April 14th) on which it's taboo for anyone to give chocolate as a gift.

A number of my students gave me chocolate and presents. Some of the presents, however, might have been intended for Lunar New Year (the brief holiday I'm currently enjoying). In particular (particularly nice, that is to say) I got a nice wine kit from the mother of a Kindergarten student. The school also gave us these Hickory Farms-esque box of canned meats and oils and such. For some reason, Spam is an exceeding popular - almost luxurious - gift item in Korea.

But canned meat is hardly the best part of my holiday. In less than 10 hours, I'm leaving for Japan for four days. I arrive in Tokyo alone and with no plans. I'm meeting Cahill and Co. a week later, and that's as solid as any of my intentions go. Much like my trip to Thailand, I plan to keep a sketchbook journal, to be updated while I'm on the trip. I've even bought a new sketchbook for that very purpose. So, stay tuned for updates in the next week.

In the meantime, I should probably start packing. For a closer this week, enjoy a random assortment of sight and signs from Korea.

From right to left, I start with a sign post ripe with... kitsch, if nothing else. The clearly obvious sign in that lot is for the Cafe Hyper Maniac. Me and Cahill looked for the place, and it's not there anymore. Or at least not open in the middle of the night, which really seems like a pre-requisite for all hyper maniac cafes.

Foodwise, I've got a bag of garlic baguettes. These are packaged like potato chips, in a small-serving mylar snack bag. I also hear that they're heavily sweetened; you know, like all good garlic breads. Then I've got just some sign with some curious phrasing. Granted, the English is only slightly broken, but the wording is so awkward that drunk 2:00AM me obviously found it a little funny.

Finally, there's what may be a public service announcement, and may otherwise be a fun-loving ad on how socially-acceptable it is for Korean males to get really uncontrollably fucked up on soju after work. Regardless, they're acknowledging the prevalent phenomenon, which is funny enough for me.

By the way, the Korean language has no 'V'. That's the explanation behind my relatively unclever title this week.

The Subterraneans

2007-02-09T00:24:00.000+09:00

(had a good run anyway)

The weather's getting warmer now. First week of February and Ajosshi (Korean for 'old man') Winter is already crawling under the subway gate and sneaking out of Seoul. I've heard that the last week or so has just been unseasonably warm, and that the bitter chill of those occasional Siberian winds won't have me switching-on the air conditioner this month yet. Still, to see signs of this much warmth this early, clearly this isn't the kind of place where the season's last snowfall comes during a late-May holiday weekend.

Incidentally, though, as soon as the weather gets warm enough so that you can't see your breath, you start to see the smog again. There's something about that crisp winter air that looks and tastes so much cleaner. When I'm not used to it, it looks so much like a foggy day here. But it's not fog; it's yellower, and decidedly more urban and poisonous.

This weekend was good, albeit somewhat sedate. Pleasantly sedate, though. Friday I popped out for a coffee and some non-inebriating drinks with coteachers Bora and Sue. At the (quite nicely adorned) coffee shop in Cheolsan I noticed a number of Koreans had written their names on small white rocks surrounding an ambient light, so I figured I'd follow suit, writing my own name in Hanguel. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for petty vandalism.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but Korea loves coffee - it's everywhere here. Actually, I should say that Korea loves coppee. There's no equivalent of 'f' in the Korean alphabet, so the closest approximation is P (there's no v, f, or z either, by the way). It's quite natural once you get used to it, but it's still impossible to say that I'm leaving the classroom to 'copy' something, 'cause the kids all laugh and say "coppee jussaiyo!" (I want coffee!). I often groan sleepily and mumble "Yeah, I could use one too..."

Back to the weekend, I grabbed a bite to eat with Bora and met one of her well English-endowed friends. Kate was a nice girl who works as a designer for an art magazine in Korea. She gave Bora the world's best Andy Warhol calendar and I envied her job and she gave me travel tips for Japan and offered free admission to an art exhibit here in Korea. We had some drinks at some Elvis-statue-adorned bar in Hongdae.

Past the weekend, the week was relatively standard fare. I was approached by an awkward woman on the subway the other day. After saying 'Hello' in questionable English, she told me she had 'Good News' for me!

I briefly pondered whether she might have been the Korean Ed McMahon, and whether or not I might already be a winner. I hardly had time to remember that I hadn't subscribed to any Korean magazines to qualify for their non-existent version of the Publisher's Clearing House before she whipped out the old 'Awake' magazine. She was a Jehovah's Witness. And she could hardly pronounce "Jehovah's Witness"! (remember, no 'v' makes it Jehobah.)

The magazine wasn't even a Korean translation, it was the same publication that creepy people in suits would leave on my doorstep back in Canada when I looked out the window and refused to answer the doorbell because it was them. The girl pointed to some article about calypso music and I apologized to her that I had that get off at the next stop. That wasn't even a white lie, just a convenient truth.

I've probably driven this point home pretty completely already, but the subway is really Seoul at its Seouliest sometimes. (In fact, I've driven that point well past home, around the block a few times, then straight into the ground.) Still, though, a means of transport that will take you across a very congested city for a little over a dollar and in less time than a taxi or your own car is sure to attract all sorts.

My images here aren't anything spectacular, just generically definitive images of the subway. Identically uniformed people going to school (formative adolescent years spent wearing the same thing as everyone else - no wonder so many want to dress with conspicuously noticeable style when they mature.) Old ladies (ajummas) selling rubber gloves and ginseng and lighters and dead fish and a random assortment of virtually anything that is available for sale anywhere.

And people just standing / sitting there, waiting for their stop, as photographed through the window's reflection. I don't take many pictures inside the train, as it looks quite conspicuous, and I get enough curious looks and approaches by random strangers as it is.

Speaking of curiousness and pictures, I'm depending on my students for comic relief once again this week. First up, I've got a short assignment written on the dangers of drinking. It's reasonably well-written considering it was done by a 12-year-old. What's curious, however, is that the assignment called for him to write about his favourite pop music, or whether he likes to sing at Noraebang (Kareoke rooms, they're popular with young and old here). While I realize that singing and 'dranking' booze go hand in hand, I really don't see quite how I ended up with this. I hope it's not his idea of a subtle hint...

Oh the other side of the subtlety scale (or rather, further to the side on the completely not subtle at all scale) I've got a few pictures from my Kindergarten students. On the left, Edward drew me rocking-out (possibly smoking?) with an alien. Next to that, Thomas drew me drop-kicking a snake. Even if the 'tweens think I have a problem, at least the 5 and 6-year-olds still think I'm pretty cool.

Closer to be Far Away

2007-02-01T23:41:00.000+09:00

(this is not how we planned it, but we got ahead of ourselves)

This week I started off with a decent night of post-work drinking with Sue and Bora. It's real curious how the only foreigner with whom I spend any amount of time these days is Cahill; someone whom I knew for years before I came here. Coming to Korea to isolate yourself with weigookin (foreigners) kind of defeats the purpose anyway, so I'm quite glad with this.

Ben and Mike are both on their way back to Korea in the coming month, though, so the former ECC Canadian Trifecta will have a reunion soon enough.

Speaking of ECC (my school) the start of another new month meant a few changes once again. I lost a couple of classes that I've been teaching since the day I got here, so I bought them all pizza, whether I liked them or not. I also lost Julia, one of the nicest co-teachers I've ever had.

I've got some cute new classes, though; one of which speaks practically no English. They're little, and a little afraid of me or any grownup, but the fact that I share their child-like mentality and sense of humour puts us on frighteningly even ground. It also gives me a chance to use the few dozen Korean words I know with people who won't question my caveman-esque lack of grammar.

But speaking of my childish sense of humour and a limited ability to use language, I really need to stop exploiting the journal of one of my nicest, most likable students like this. But not when an eleven-year-old is trying to tell me politely that it looked like shit outside.

Oh, I also have an older student who's quite impressive at drawing, and often sketches disturbing things on the back of her paper. Like homicidal tortoise-hare what-ifs. Kids are awesome.

And hell, I'm kind of on an unfair make-Korea-look insane streak here, so I collected a few signs of Korea's insanity. Or 'slightly different from what I'm used-to-ity'.

Some of these aren't even funny or insane in the strictest sense. They're all funny in the sense that they're a little incongruous. But Korea's a little incongruous anyway, so that hardly counts. I do personally love that little picture of the octopus relaxing, reclining, and wearing sunglasses, though. Not only does he not mind the fact that he'll be devoured soon, but the fucker's so relaxed he looks like he's on vacation! I only hope I look as calm moments before being served alive, my tentacles still squirming after my brain's been impaled by a chopstick. Yeah, that's a popular way to eat them here, no joke. Hell, haven't you seen Old Boy?

And now that I've mentioned vacations and tentacles, I've got to reiterate that Lunar New Year is coming this month. Not that the Year of the Golden Pig has anything to do with flailing tentacles, but Japan sure as hell does.

It's official now, I booked my tickets today - I'm Going to Japan in February. I leave the morning of the 16th and return the evening of the 20th, spending little more than a really long weekend there. But I'm going largely alone (meeting Cahill in Tokyo for a night or two), with a complete lack of plans and proper preparation, so it's sure to be a bit of an interesting few days. I'm keeping up my Thailand tradition, and keeping a sketchbook journal of my travels, to be uploaded to the blog.

But that's all weeks away, and I'm not much of a long term planner. In the meantime, I'm still in Korea. I took a few pictures this week with the theme "What's for sale in Korea?" in mind. I got a few interesting answers. An all-too-common gatcha machine (like the bubble machines that promise robot watches and give you teeny, useless slinkies for your loonie) that sells tiny replica weapons. There's also a little food cart selling blurry, poorly-photographed tentacles. Then there are the little bowls of live-but-slowly-dying parasite-sized fish that old ladies sell outside the subway.

Then there's sex. That's apparently for sale far more prevalently than I realized before. When some of us accidentally went to a Noraebah instead of a Noraebang last month, we were told that since we had girls with us, it probably wasn't the kind of place we were looking for. Apparently, Noraebahs are 'men's only' kareoke rooms where you pay a heavy premium to have scantily-clad women come to your private room to (ahem) 'hear you sing' I guess. It's good that hey warned us before that night got really expensive and really awkward.

Even though I've already rubbed it in like salt in a long-distance wound, I close this week with an image that reminds me that there are a few strange little differences between this and the frigid block of granite on which I was born.

This is a stand at the food court of my local mall. The stand itself sells grilled dried squid carcasses. For a beverage, you can get a beer there. Seven months in Korea or not, the idea of sitting in a mall food court, eating dried squid and drinking a can of beer still seems a little foreign to me.

Finding the Rhythm

2007-01-25T23:24:00.000+09:00

(citizens of tomorrow, be forewarned)

Seven days have been crossed off the calendar since last we met, and I'm a deeper into the rabbit hole of Korea. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary happened this week, but that's a relative concept when you live in a country where selling smoked tentacles and cooked silkworm larvae as a street-side snack counts as ordinary.

Cahill came to Seoul again this weekend, after a post-new-year hiatus. Instead of heading to Hongdae, we stayed in Sillim once again, and headed for the Zeppelin bar. By the time we got there, things were quite subdued, but we enjoyed the stiff drinks and free oranges and the best classic vinyl this little corner of Seoul has to offer.

From there, we headed to Box 86, where the owner memorized my name after a single visit. We actually ran into her on the sidewalk on New Year's Eve, and she screamed "Hello, Peter, Happy New Year!" surprising and confusing me. She granted me the same enthusiasm on Saturday. Cahill approached the dusty, out of tune, but functional guitar hidden in the corner with the same enthusiasm. He picked it up, tuned it, and played around a bit. They even turned down the music in the bar, to better hear the guitar.

As we left the bar in the late-eve-slash-early-morning the street food carts were closed, so we headed to an all-night Kimbap place and enjoyed delicious Korean foods and soups. Really, it was a great idea, that I'm likely to repeat in future. You'd be surprised how well spicy Korean soup and tuna-seaweed-rice rolls replace greasy pizza as a post-booze meal.

It's funny how comfortable this all gets after a while. How natural it is to use the scant bit of Korean I know to communicate. How sights and sounds and smells that gave me a chronic case of crane-neck in my first few months now fade into the familiar.

That's part of why it helps so much to stop and make myself look around and take pictures to remind myself that this is neither Kansas nor the home I've known for most of my life. It just feels eerily like home now. Shibal, I even swear in Korean a lot of the time now, even when I'm alone and there's no one to hear it and be offended.

Another part of Korea with which I'm increasingly comfortable is teaching. With my Kindergarten class, I've finally got some semblance of order. For my first week of teaching that class, I'd go through most 40-minute classes without more than half of the kids opening their books.

A little over a month ago, I started letting every student draw themselves a star on the board if they finished all their work. These days, I'll get 10 minutes into class and kids start screaming "Peter Teacher, I'm done! One star!" Some of the worst-behaved students from when I started are now some of my favourites. It's all very cute and very satisfying, and if I did this again, I'd gladly teach kindergarten.

I wish I taught them art. Those snowmen they made are awesome, and whenever I've got a bit of time to kill in class, I let them draw on the whiteboard. William draws the best Monster House ever. Also, I forgot how kids have a biological predisposition to love dinosaurs at this age. Truly a universal phenomenon, it crosses cultures and half the globe to reach Korea with full force.

Coming up in February, I've got a little shy of a week's holiday for Lunar (aka Chinese) New Year. I think I may fly to Japan, but if I have any hope of making those arrangements, I should really get on that this week.

To close up this week, I've got three generally unrelated images, united in their general sense of Koreanosity. On the left, you see an elaborate Neon-tube Popeye being used to lure people into a Hof (aka bar; a pub moreso than a club). While not innately funny, it is worth noting that this particular image of Popeye was taken during his later years, after he'd switched catchphrases to the decidedly less-catchy "Fuck the spinach, let's get drunk!" While this was a controversial move for the once borderline-wholesome sailor-prone-to-violent-outbreaks, the move made sense to most who gave it a chance. I mean, he is a sailor, man! Swearing and drinking are kind of his thing.

Speaking of swearing and drinking and outbreaks of violent behaviour, those familiar with Newfoundland should look to the right and see a semi-familiar place name. While most people probably think of an island off the coast of California when they read this (cat-a-lean-ah), people from my dot on the globe are probably more apt to think of a small east-coast town of a few thousand (cat-a-line-a). It's not funny in and of itself, but I can't help but imagine the convolouted story you could tell wearing this kind of shirt on the Granite Planet (aka Newfoundland).

"Sure it says Catalina, I got it in South Korea, though."

Speaking of things that would look quite at home in Newfoundland, but quite strange in Korea, observe the large red ATV parked on the sidewalk there in the middle. If there's any way to stick out in Seoul (other than being a foreigner) it's to drive an off-road vehicle. I mean, I'm not sure there any places in Seoul that lack roads. At least they took the effort to dress it up with a superfluous dome with strange churchesque stained-glass flower stickers on it. Now it fits-in a little more...

Fun and Games

2007-01-18T23:57:00.000+09:00

(it's so unexpectedly predictable)

This week I learned an obvious lesson: that an awful way to get to know far too much about people really quickly is to play drinking games with them. By 'awful' I mean messy, not ineffective. On the contrary, it's downright messily effective.

But I use words like 'messy' and 'awful' in a completely positive way - Saturday evening was actually quite fucking fun from start to finish. I went to Hongdae with Bora, Saebom (Bora's old schoolmate), Trevor and Jason. After a tasty steak dinner (with an exceptional salad bar and a failed record attempt from Jason to create the world's tallest self-serve custard cone), we headed to a bar, bought a bottle of Tequila and introduced this naive young narrator to his first round of the Korean "Image Game".

This is a game ideally based on visual impressions, in which you sit around a table pointing and judging who is the person most likely to... (insert potentially embarrassing characteristic here). Really, it's more like the crush-one's-image game, as observations include things like who's been with the most / least people, who's most / least attractive, and so on. The person pointed to by the most people has to drink, but I guess that's a given, seeing as it's called a drinking game. After the tequila evaporated at an alarming rate, we went to a new bar, and played the more tried-and-true "I Never" game, which is a diplomatic and revealing game in and of itself, of course. Copious quantities of Megju (beer) and Soju (if you don't know by now, you don't want to - trust me) were consumed, and almost-copious good times were had by all.

Then I left the weekend behind. Or waited in bed until the the clock told me to go to work, at least. Work has been good. It certainly doesn't seem like I've been teaching for seven months now, and that's not just because I'm really about a week shy of the seven-month mark. The kids are still wonderful, and my schedule keeps changing, and I keep losing some of my favourite students but getting new ones and fuck it, as Hello Kitty says, "You can never have too many friends." Ms. Kitty never said this to me personally, but a lesson I taught the kids about her history and financial success informed me that it's her motto.

I seem to have run into an unusually fortunate barrage of hilarious Korean English misuse and general insanity this week. More accurately, I probably ran into about the status quo amount of said madness, I just happened to be carrying my camera for more of the strange photo ops.

I'm a particular fan of the tiny pink garbage can that purifies you and recycles life. In defense of the "Water passed by the manager" subway ad, I think this may be for an English school, and actually explains why this might not be a great sign to put up in a restaurant. I'll give no such defense to the Peter Fan notebook. The gibberish English on the front of this is miles worse than the English journal of an 11-year old Korean girl that's kept inside. Surely the company who made this could have at least run the grammar and spelling past a small child before sending it to presses.

Incidentally, Peter Pan is hot shit in Korea now. Makes my name a big hit with students young and old. I don't even mind the jokes, in fact, I've suggested to some kids that they can just call me Peter Pan Rabbit Teacher. Past the initial laugh they give, that's just too long, so they give up and just call me Petuh or Teachuh.

And speaking of students and English and questionable printed materials, I close this week with the following...

The page on the left is probably the result of the fact that some of our course materials are written by native English speakers who may or may not have senses of humour borrowed from adolescent children. In the same book series, there's a lesson titled "Those are My Balls!" And no, Korea is not that progressive in sexual education. Quite the opposite, I'd venture to guess. They do, however, have at least one copy of "Everyone Poops" at our school, though.

On the right I've just got a simple and completely honest grammatical error gone hilariously wrong. When correcting I crossed out the words "and hard" and I'm glad I didn't have to explain why to the student, 'cause I simply couldn't have done it with a straight face.

Jedi Nights

2007-01-11T23:16:00.000+09:00

(how many weigookins does it take to drink in public?)

For the first new weekend of oh-seven, I did something a little different and actually got out of Seoul for a night. That was great because I had a great weekend and it's been far too long since I've been out of the city middle.

Where I went however, was a little place called Suji, about an hour south of Seoul by subway. Cahill lives there, 'next to the smokestacks' which is an indicative landmark, really. Suji isn't like Seoul - it's not quite the neon splash of madness and insomnia that gives Seoul its charm. Mind you, it's still Korea, so it's still neon, and it's still mad, just not quite the same as Seoul.

The night was mad in a way I don't always get to see in Seoul, though. The dynamics of the foreign teacher subculture is different outside of Seoul. We went to a house party (at a quite nice apartment, no less) and it was quite surreal to be around 20 or so people with hardly a Korean in sight. There's even a certain discomfort being in a room where you know you're no different for being white and speaking English.

From the crowded cube we spilled out into the street and caught cabs to I-don't-quite-know-where and went to this real Irish bar called Dublin, owned by a real Irish guy called... I dunno, I'd say Paddy, if I had to guess.

It was a pretty cool place, and all the accomplices but me and Cahill left after a drink, headed for some dreadful dance joint. Me and Cahill made some fine lemonade of the situation, and introduced ourselves to a table of random foreigners from I-forget-where in the 'States. We talked about Devo and Talking Heads and the delicate science of swearing until daylight.

The bar had this nifty banner with scads of Irish family names written on a map of Ireland. In effect, this looked almost like a banner of Newfoundland names, and I'm sure if anyone from there looks they're sure to find a couple (pun cough) familiar ones, if not their own last name, hanging on some wall in Korea.

Come Sunday, me and Cahill ran face-first into a couple of odd happenings at Subway (the sandwich place, not the train place). First, a guy we met at the party the night before strolled-in and told us that his school just called him, telling him he didn't have to work on Monday. Or ever. Since the school was out of business, and he was now out of a job, and probably soon to be without an apartment. That's the kind of scare teachers sometimes get hit with in Korea. Luckily, I work at a big franchise school, so if they ever shut down, I'd probably at least get a ticket home out of the deal.

The next thing that happened was far funnier, if potentially more damning. When we left Subway, me and Cahill were approached by two Koreans, and I avoided them, smelling what was coming. While we stood waiting for the walk light to change, they came up to Cahill and asked "Do you have rerijun?"

Thinking they were asking for something like money or a cigarette, Cahill asked them to repeat themselves a few times before I signed and said "They're missionaries, Cahill, they're asking if you have religion."

Ice broken, they continued to talk to us in awful, blunt, broken english. On being asked our religious beliefs, Cahill told the ham-handed zealots that we were Jedi. The answer - possibly the best quotation I've heard from any Korean ever - was:

"Jedi? What mean is Jedi?"

Then, with timing that borders on divine intervention, the light changed, and we quickly dodged across the road, holding our too-loud-snickers until we were about three steps away. While it surely guaranteed us our own table at the VIP room in hell, this was easily worth it. For years to come, I'll remember "What mean is Jedi?" and all the world's problems will disappear.

But enough delicious blasphemy back to how Suji sucks. One of the most disappointing things about this dreary, industrial, outlet-shopping chunk of the peninsula was the lack of pojang-makjas, the little street food stands that are bastions of late night booze-snacking.

Booze or not, I've become a big fan of these here in Seoul. I eat dokboki (thick-as-your-thumb spicy rice noodles) from these stands quite often. In fact, at this one place near my house they actually got me to sign their stand this week. I put both my signature and the Hangul spelling of my name there, and now when I show up they say "Anyonghaseyo Mista Petah!" I get quite a kick out of the random stranger Koreans here who have learned my name. On New Year's eve, we were walking down the road, and a woman who owns a bar here (that I've been to about twice) shouted "Hello Petah!" It's strange to get recognized and remembered like that in a city of over 10 million people.

Speaking of that city, I've just got a pretty standard handful of signs and labels here this week. These were, in fact all taken about a minute apart from each other. I just kind of wanted to capture how badly animated Korean animals want you to eat them.

I mean, look at the eagerness on those faces. They want you to know that they're delicious. Somehow, even the squid is giving a thumbs-up to assure you that he tastes excellent. It's a lie on his part, though. The bastard deserves to be turned into a noddle topping for misrepresenting his species as palatable. As Cahill learned from our hastily-purchased convenience store noodles this weekend: squid flavoured anything tastes like shit.

Countdown

2007-01-04T23:18:00.000+09:00

(hard time gettin' past black)

If you've checked a calendar lately, you might've noticed that you need a new one. New Year's Eve and its closely-related but far more hungover cousin New Year's Day came this week. That's not quite the start of the story though - some things happened last year too.

Friday night I stayed around the Gwangmyeong area after work and after a few drinks I did something that was a long time coming: I went to a Noraebang. That's pronounced no-ray-bong, and literally translated it means 'singing room'. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but to the uninitiated, this is Korea's take on Kareoke. The main difference (read: advantage) is the bang (bong) part. You get your own private room to get drunk with friends in relative private and pick out songs and sing poorly to your favourite generically-recreated tunes.

The fact that it took me over six months in Korea before I did this is a crime against humanity. The fact that I was still recovering from an awful cold made my singing a crime against humanity too, though. I'm definitely heading to these far more often in the future. I've got to hand it to Korea on this one, it's a great idea; if there's one thing drunk people like to do it's sing. And drink more.

In honour of tried / true holiday tradition, drinking more is what happened for the second consecutive 'holiday' weekend. Ringing-in the new year was a worthy night. Me and Cahill started here with a few drinks and a plan to get to Tapgol Park by midnight.

Note that I say 'plan' and use the past tense though. See, on midnight on said eve, that place explodes with fireworks. Not in the typical state-sanctioned professional manner, though. Apparently, the street just fills with thousands of people, and everyone has bottle rockets. They fire them at the sky, at buildings, signs, people, and so on. I've seen videos, and it certainly looks like a madness to experience. However, given that we're celebratedly poor planners, by the time we left my apartment it was far too late to make it there on time. So instead, we set off a handful of Roman Candles in my neighbourhood.

It was a reasonable substitute, and given that I'm literally half a world (and 12 time zones) away from where I'm used to spending that evening, celebrating the passing of time seemed significantly less significant. After the explosive goodness, me Cahill and Bora headed off enjoy the surroundings of Sillim. We ended up at the Woodstock bar (hardly a dramatic departure from our typical Zeppelin haunt just down the road, but we know what we like).

We enjoyed our share of imported drink and music and request sheets with scattered chances of ever being played and magnetic darts that just couldn't stop being played. We stayed there until customers were no longer welcome, then we slinked over to Led Zepplin and stayed until pretty much daylight.

While the whole night sounds relatively unspectacular, and largely devoid of 'official' celebrations, I probably couldn't have asked for a nicer evening. I spent the night with two good friends and I can't imagine that a hectic trip across town to a mess of strangers firing rockets would have been more fulfilling.

But enough being sincere. Here are a couple of pictures that are Korean, if nothing else. Up first, there's an old rusty bucket whose original contents I could never care to guess. The side reads "He has lovely round face! Hello Big Boy". It was sitting outside of a tiny store that sells only cigarettes. Now you know as much as I do about the whole mystery.

Past that, I've got a banner with a picture of Soju Man. I'm sure I've mentioned this before too, but Soju is basically a cheap rice vodka sold relatively exclusively in Korea. By cheap, I mean it costs less than a dollar for a bottle. Which, of course, means that it packs the worst hangover-per-volume in all of history.

Sojuman is a bottle of the cursed cheap booze armed with a cape and a knack for extolling the virtues of Korea's official national beverage. The jury is still out on whether his ability to fly is an actual superpower or just a soju-induced hallucination.

Happy I-chun-chil.

Been Bad or Good

2006-12-28T23:16:00.000+09:00

(swag)

It was Christmas this week, and not even Korea is completely oblivious to that. Like many Western holidays, it was celebrated at the school. Also much like the last western 'holiday' (read: Halloween) I was obliged to dress up like a retard for this one, too. In fact, this time it's safe to say I was obligated to.

In order to fend off the inevitable event that the kids would recognize me from earlier that morning, we positioned the hat and beard strategically, hiding my whole damn face - albeit at the expense of my eyesight and proper breathing. A surprising number of kids didn't quite catch on, but a number of the older kids called me out on my shoes, recognizing that wears the same skate shoes as Peter Teacher. It was cute that after it was all over, some of my own students were excited telling me how Santa came while I was away.

After work, the grownup had our own party. Me, Scott, and Chris started the party a little early, grabbing a few drinks in the bland hours after work but before the party. After the small headstart we went to Outback Steakhouse and met with the rest of the faculty.

I was seated across from the nice new teacher Natalie (good) and the new manager of the school who doesn't speak any English and may or may not hate all foreigners (less good). But dinner was delish and we drew tickets for prizes and most of us won cookies and I gave mine away. After that, Chris, Scott, Bora, Natalie, Sue, and I headed out for some drinks (largely to ease Chris' pain over not winning that prized air purifier, I figure). That was a great chance to meet the two new Korean teachers at work, plus what's a Christmas party if it ends after the couple of drinks that accompany supper?

When I next heard from Chris, it turns out he'd left his apartment key at work, and when he got home, he ended up sleeping in the hallway outside his door. He had to teach at 10 the next morning. I'm just really glad my apartment has a keypad.

Saturday night me and Cahill went drinking and ended up at (you guessed it) Hongdae. We met up with Adrian and went to a red/white-themed Christmas club party. The music wasn't terrible, and you could get eggnog drinks at the bar, and there was a Santa hat floating around from head to head, so all was happy and bright.

The next day (that being Christmas eve) me and Cahill went to the CoEX mall and I had my first tinge of real Christmas spirit, fueled by the most familiar festive sight I know: a crowded mall. There was something about pushing and shoving and lights and consuming that kinda put visions of sugarplums in my wallet. It even enticed me to buy a couple of presents for myself...

Not that I needed to augment my present haul, as such. I got a fine haul sent from the homsestead. Among the swag was a plethora of Christmas-themed food items, as well as a few nice new shirts, some DVDs, magazines, and other such slices of home. The most clever gift was a collection of Star Wars Christmas ornaments; I really wish I had a tree that wasn't drawn on my cupboard on which to hang them.

The childish indulgences I purchased for included a remote-controlled helicopter (small, hard-to-control fun) and "I Am 8-Bit" - a book of art based on classic video games. They're both more than cool enough for me to have bought them for myself without the flimsy religious occasion as an excuse.

I got a few little gift from students, along with some cards - some of which are quite elaborate. Some of the Christmas cards I've seen here in Korea aren't like anything I've seen before; multi-layered pop-up book cardboard festive dioramas with writing on the back. I swear some of the card envelopes for the presents 'Santa' handed the kids were thicker than the gifts themselves.

Of course, toys and books and food and clothes weren't the only presents I got for Christmas. I also got the nastiest bout of cold I've had in Korea, along with an ear infection. It all lead me to my first visit to a Korean doctor, which was relatively painless, albeit bizarre. See, when he looked into my ears, nose and throat (he was an ENT, after all) instead of using a score, he used tiny fibre-optic cameras and then displayed the images onscreen to decipher in front of me. After years of hearing about it, I finally know what the chronic scarring of my tympanic membrane looks like. This uninsured visit to a private medical specialist cost less than $4.00. Korea is cheap.

After it was all said and done, I got my prescription, which was conveniently doled into little easy dosage packages. They're convenient, but they also remind me of the random bags of kills that teenagers used to get from friends on after-school specials. Suffice it to say that whateverthefuck these are, they're downers, kids. I've been sleeping like a madman. Assuming it's some sort of really lazy madman who sleeps a lot.

In honour of the Christmas spirit this week, I'm going to give Korea a break for a change, and not make fun of it in my closing picture. Instead, here are two of my favourite images from my new art book "I Am 8-Bit". They are titled "An Old Reflection" and "Duck Hunter S. Thompson", respectively. They are also packaged together here, as their inspirations were two decades ago.

See you next year.

City of Frost-Covered Angels

2006-12-21T22:54:00.000+09:00

(been waiting to use that lyric in the title for ages)

A few days from Christmas, halfway through my time here, and it snowed this week. Snowed more than it ever normally does in Korea, I hear. The timing was about right; even if it is all melted again now, it was nice to see snow once before Christmas, for what it's worth...

And it was worth a bit, really. This weekend was one of the nicest I've had in a while. The snow Saturday night was a great catalyst for a fine evening. We ran around and threw snowballs and I hit some random Korean who looked really pissed off and there were snowmen and dangerous roads and slush and cold wet feet and it was really hard to believe I was in Korea and not Canada.

The first snowfall is a bit of a significant event here. I've heard that it's traditional for couples to give gift to each other to celebrate it, and it's quite evident that people all over the city try to take blurry pictures of falling snow with their cell phone cameras. I'd ridicule them a bit more for that, but it seems a bit hypocritical since I was also pretty giddy over a few falling frosted flakes.

Saturday was good on its own merits, without the snow. Earlier in the day, when it was reasonably nice out I took my first bike ride in months, then met Adrian and dropped by a skate shop.

That night we ate Japanese and drank and snowed and walked and ate Korean and never got back to his place until 8 in the morning. I crashed on his comfy sofa and never got home until 8 Sunday night. If you measure the success of a weekend by how late you get home, it was monumental. If you don't, it was still pretty goddamn good.

Back to the 'real' world, it's Christmas in Korean. I think. The poorly dancemixed carols and scattered artificial trees seem to suggest so, at least. Tomorrow's the Christmas party at work, both for the Kiderchildren and the faculty. Later into the evening, we're got the staff party at Outback Steakhouse, but that morning, I have to dress as Santa for the whole school. I have to hope that my own students are too retarded to notice the same guy they see every morning is just wearing a red suit and fake beard. I don't want to ruin the illusion, since they were really excited today when they told me that Santa was coming to see them tomorrow. I had to awkwardly reply that I wasn't going to be there.

"What, Santa was here? And I missed him!?"

Speaking of students, I'm closing with one of the weirdest things I've ever seen a student write here. To be fair, this isn't my student, so I can't vouch for his sanity or lack thereof, but just check out what he wrote about his favourite pet:

Past the typical grammar, notice that he says dogs are "very fast and tasty". Now, this is a real contentious issue for Korea, but some Koreans do eat dog. No urban myth, dog soup is a delicacy here. Dog's not a common ingredient - you won't order something innocuous and end up with a plate full of fido. You can, however, walk into certain restaurants and order up a bowl of dog soup.

This paragraph is potentially funny to anyone, even Koreans. Eating dog isn't about cooking-up your pets. There's basically just one breed of dog eaten, and they raise them in farms just for food, like we do with chickens and all sorts of animals.

It's a cultural difference, one that just freaks us out because we've been using dogs as pets for so long. I'm not personally going to eat any, but I don't think any differently of anyone that does. It's something I'd have never brought up if not for this hilarious essay about one kid's favourite edible house pet. Even more hilarious is that before corrections, this was all written in past-tense, "dog was very fast..."

But that's a fucking awful downer on which to end my last pre-Christmas entry.
So here's a happy condom:

Merry Christmas!

I Love the Passing of Time

2006-12-14T22:40:00.000+09:00

(good tidings of great consumerism)

Christmas is just a little over a week away now, right? Surely it's less than two weeks away. That means I've got a couple of long weekends coming up in the near future. A few ambitious people are traveling for one of those three-day periods, but I've got nothing planned. I'll probably be a bit more ambitious for the significantly longer holiday that comes with Lunar New Year in February. No point in planning too much too soon, though, that ruins the surprise.

But even if Christmas isn't a deep-seeded holiday here, that doesn't necessarily stop its commercial appeal. Stores still use it as an advertising point, and an excuse to put even more gaudy lights and flashy decorations around. As cynical as that sounds, I'm real thankful for it. I'm secretly a big fan of Christmas, and being in a world that doesn't go apeshit for it is a bit easier when they at least acknowledge it.

At least one international sign of Christmas is quite alive here, albeit with a slightly Korean twist. The Salvation Army folk are around with their kettles, but here there's also a high-tech alternative, where you can simply wave your T-Money card (the same one you use to pay for the subway) in front of a little screen and it automatically donates 1,000won (around a buck, American) from your card to the bell-ringers. You can see the Santa-laden display here in my pictures.

I really wanted to send some presents home for Christmas - some awesome interesting stuff for virtually anyone I could think of; things that you might only get in Korea. Procrastination and a long work day and fear of the Korean Postal Service and probably some more excuses means that I've done nothing to that effect, and will therefore miss any sort of Christmas deadline. I'm still intent on sending things home though. Hopefully thoughtful shit - no trinkets.

Another weekend with Cahill this week. We hung around with Mike Jim, a guy he knew from back in St. John's. As is often the case with people from St. John's, me and Mike realized that we'd run into each other once or twice before. Cahill had a similar experience with a little blonde lady from Grand Falls - they'd met in Scotland.

The night itself was pretty standard Hongdae fare. Despite the fact that I had a great grip on that egg-shaped clock in the picture, the evil Korean crane machines shagged me once again, and the flimsy arm dropped the goddamn thing halfway through its trip to the drop slot. That probably counteracts my luck from earlier in the night, where I hopped-in on a 'closest to the bullseye' 10,000won contest with Mike and Cahill, and hit a dead-centre bullseye on my first shot.

We actually stayed out a tiny bit later than usual, and we got to see a pretty rare sight here in Korea: bars closing. After walking into three or four bars that were in the process of cleaning up, we went all home around 6 in the morning.

Bars here are quite accommodating, and often if you just stay and keep ordering drinks, a lot of them will stay open as long as you'd like them too. There's no law to stop them. It reminds me of the flyer I got in Thailand for the 'after hours' Full Moon Party. It started at 10 o'clock... the next morning. Yeah, that's the kinda place Thailand was. While I really want to get out and do life experience-type traveling a whole damn lot, I wanna get back to see that insanity once more, too. Plus, it'd be real nice to be on a beach just a few clicks north of the equator in these chilly winter months.

For closing this week, check out this seemingly innocuous box of butter-lemon cracker sandwiches. Now, neglecting the fact that the 'lemon' is clearly green, and therefore possibly lime, and neglecting the fact that this idea both looks and sounds pretty unpalatable, suspend disbelief for a moment to check out the packaging:

"Ongoing real love story"?

Now I'm not saying Korea is embellishing the veritable Soap Opera that is the relationship between lemon/lime and butter, I'm just questioning whether using their sordid love affair to sell crackers is really prudent.

Gigantic

2006-12-07T23:00:00.000+09:00

(stuporsize me)

It's cold here - officially fucking cold. The fall leaves are still on the ground, but now I get to see my old friend 'my breath' in the chilly morning air. At least chilly air tastes better than the heavy humid sludge that I was breathing all summer.

Breathing is still a battle of it own though, as I've got a damn cold. Still got a damn cold, that is. Teaching kids who love to cling to me in a culture where people don't necessarily cling to the concept of washing their hands after they use the washroom is getting the better of me. Not that post-restroom hygiene is necessarily the cure for the common cold, I'm just taking it as a rough indication of habits of people pressed against me in the subway.

But I'm not really all negative like that. Not about this place. Not even about the unwashed masses in the subway. And certainly not about my kids. Especially when they entertain me so consistently. I certainly take a tiny bit of advantage of the fact that the kids don't always understand what I tell them to write down. It's never anything vulgar, just things that I get a big kick out of. In turn, they're happy if their work makes me laugh.

I also love the pictures. I love how kids this age draw, there's little effort to make it look good, just to convey an idea. I've got some of my particular favourites here, including some giants with great descriptions (I helped with the english) and a picture 4-year-old Thomas drew of me living in harmony with Dinosaurs and airplanes. Like many smart kids his age, he loves dinos. Sometimes we discuss Jurassic Park.

Speaking of dinosaurs, me and Cahill went to the Led Zeppelin bar this weekend. It was good to be back there. Me and Ben used to go there a fair bit, but we got out and I'm not quite sure why. The place is a real diamond in the rough here in Korea. The music is good and it's played off vinyl into old, warm-sounding Bose speakers and the room is shrouded in eggcarton and it's all a feast for the ears. It's also the only place in Korea I've seen a live act in a bar, even if they are classic rock and blues cover bands.

The night itself was quite nice, we just sat and drank and listened and requested songs and enjoyed ourselves a lot more than we would have in the crowded, foreigner mess of Hongdae. Variety, spice of life, and all that shit.

I've had a nice few changes at work lately. Three teachers (Chris, Yoony, and Alley) left last week and I've lost almost half of my classes, replaced with new ones. It's kind of disappointing that you get to know and like this class of kids, and after a few months they switch things up and you don't teach them. Two of my favourite students whom I lost are actually in one of my new classes, though. Plus, it's a class of all the smartest kids of their age, so I'm not exactly complaining.

Even though Christmas is just a three-day weekend, a lot of people seem to be traveling somewhere to celebrate. It gets my mind-gears to grinding about the potential for last-minute travel plans. But I'll see about all that.

It's the Christmas season, alright. Even though Korea doesn't necessarily celebrate in the way I'm used to, it's acknowledged, in advertising, at least. Although the context in which it's observed is a little confusing. To close this week, I've got a picture of a pickle wearing a Santa hat, and a poster from the mall near my apartment, advertising their festive 'Happy Virus Story'.

I can't even begin to explain either one, other than to say they're at least as mysteriously bizarre as they seem.

Bottle up and Explode

2006-11-30T22:47:00.000+09:00

(click, boom)

The week's been good, and this weekend Cahill (partially) recovered from air-poisoning and escaped from the dull-gray outskirts back into the neon heart of Seoul. After a few weeks of Ben's cursed phone burning a proverbial hole in my proverbial pocket, Saturday Night seemed like perfect time to return the favour and burn a few literal holes in the phone.

Armed with the fireworks I still had leftover from mudfest, we headed down for the ravine under the tracks to blow the fuck out of the self-deactivating phone that was the thorn in Ben's side (pocket). The results were predictably explosive and were videotaped for prosperity. If you're into bright lights and destruction, check it out here:

Rocketphone

The aftermath leaves me with mixed feelings. Sure, I've still got all my limbs and such, but the goddamn charred remain of a phone still works! As well as it did before, at least. This means my work is not done - I promised to deliver the coup de grace on this burnt hunk of Korean electronics, so I've gotta.

When the sulfur-smelly smoke settled, we headed to Hongdae, as foreigners are apt to do here. On the way, a man on the subway gave us oranges. He wasn't old or crazy; just nice, and maybe eager for any excuse to say hello to foreigners. They were handpicked and fresh and tasty and not poisoned.

Saturday was John's last night out in Seoul, as he left this week. Once again the ebb and flow of Korean contracts takes away a fun person, but I guess it goes with the territory, so you kind of get used to losing friends every month. But the same tide brings some old friends back, and few people I've met have left without at least a glimmer of intention of returning for another year.

The night itself was good and relatively uneventful past that. I did run into Ryan, someone I know from Mudfest, and whom I've run into a good few times here, and for some dumb reason I completely blanked out on how I knew him. I also showed Cahill the evil crane machines here, and how they're even more impossibly crooked than those in the western hemisphere. The things are everywhere here, too, and are packed with the most random assortment of junk.

Speaking of random junk, on Sunday we found grapefruit, and grapefruit juice. This has been a mission of mine since coming to Korea, as the fruit, and particularly the juice thereof, as I'm a bitter person who likes his flavours to match his persona. The things are fucking nearly impossible to get here in Korea. We looked pretty foolish at the checkout counter; two foreigners buying a couple large bags of grapefruit, several cartons of the juice and nothing else. If only there'd been some sort of grapefruit enthusiast magazine for us to toss-in the pile at the checkout.

The closing picture for week pretty much defies explanation. It says Tuck-In! Baby Banana Club.

Remember that there is about a 99.99% chance that the people who put up this sign don't fully get what it's implying. I mean, they obviously know it's something vaguely sexual - they're not stupid, and they're not that naive. But I'm not so sure they get the full effect of 'tucking-in'.

Christmas Pills and Beer

2006-11-23T22:37:00.000+09:00

Christmas is still a month away, but I received my package(s) of presents from home this week. Basically, there are two ways to ship something to Korea from Canada. One is relatively cheap and takes as long as 3 months; the other is unreasonably expensive and takes an unnaturally short couple of days. Thankfully, I got the latter.

I dutifully unpacked my individually-wrapped gifts and posed them under a hastily-drawn Christmas tree (which I sketched on the kitchen cupboard with whiteboard markers I stole from work). Along with the surprising quantity of gifts I can't unwrap for another month, mom included some small slices of home. Cold medication was a welcome inclusion, as the medications here are strange and confusing and don't contain the same ingredients. And speaking of my favourite medication, she also tossed-in a bottle of Blue Star, a Newfoundland exclusive beer; my one indulgence in product-based patriotism. It'll sit in my fridge so I can enjoy it during the 'holidays'.

While I'm on the topic of Christmas and all that, I might as well point out that it's not celebrated much here. I get a single day off for Christmas day, and that's about it. I'm not even sure if I get New Year's day off, because the Lunar New Year in February is actually the one that people celebrate here. I'll be fine celebrating with my little bits of wrapped-up home. That'll be surreal, as I'm a fan of the whole Christmas season, but fuck it, when in Rome, do as the Koreans do.

Just as a little reminder that Korea's a bit of a weird place (to my wide blue eyes, at least) I'm once again taking my camera around most of the time. There's always potential for 'what-the-fuck?!' moments here. I've got a couple of examples here. The blurry photos are the breakdancers in subway station. They're around at least once a week though, so they don't even elicit a 'huh?', let alone an expletive-laced exclamation of confusion.

But then there's these 10-foot-tall stilts-wearing pastefaces. Last Friday, I saw these monsters just strolling around my neighbourhood aimlessly, advertising some bank or something, I believe. Or maybe they were headed to a costume party as stereotypical foreigners: tall, awkward-looking and freakishly pale pretty much sums up the perception some Koreans have of us.

Speaking of freakishly tall pale people, Cahill was supposed to come by this weekend, but he ended up dying of some sort of gypsy death flu. It's pretty typical for people to get sick first when they get to a foreign country. There are thousands of variations of cold and flu in the world, and when you travel to a new country, you're exposed to all kinds of new virus strains. Add to that the fact that you fly here in an airtight tube with a few hundred other people, and when you get here, you spend all day around messy children, and you're pretty much a science experiment turned Nyquil commercial.

And while I'm on the topic of sick children...

The other day one of my kinderchildren met me in the hallway screaming "Teacher, Melonie goopie!" I know this Korean word, it means nosebleed. Kids pick their nose, and tend to get them a lot. When I walked into class, the girl's face was red with blood, as were the table and the floor. There was some incident with pushing or punching or some such thing. While I got her a tissue, one of the other kids was so freaked out by the blood that he puked all over the floor.

The whole thing actually made me laugh it was getting so bad. I told everyone to calm down and strolled out to get a Korean teacher to help.

"Yeah, Maria, Melonie's covered in blood and Kevin's puking all over the place."

I'm not sure why, but teaching them, even at times like this, is making me like kids more.

But enough sincerity, time to call Korea crazy a little more. I like call this 'Anatomy of a Korean Street Scene'. It's just a pretty dull picture of a Korean sidewalk, but it exemplifies a lot of what life in Seoul is.

The sidewalk's littered with useless leaflets from half a dozen bars and churches around the area. There's a stand made of rickety tables, selling seeds, nuts and hideous jewelry. The man running it is asleep in a chair. The light poles are full of the same posters people ignored on the last 20 poles. Traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular zips past on both sides. It's all remarkably unspectacular, but it's all very much Seoul.

That's about it for this week. Although I might have already exceeded my weekly quota for making Korea sound nuts, I'm contractually obligated to close with some kind of weird image. I've got a couple here. One is just your average Korean shirt rack. The shirts all have lots of English words that don't make any sense. "Feel is for this good". I'm not sure if I've ever seen a shirt with Korean characters on it.

The other image is of a coin-operated Rock, Paper, Scissors machine that distributes candy to winners clever enough to outsmart a series of tiny red lights. Rock, paper, scissors may be the only thing more popular here than shirts with terrible English.

Pepero Daze

2006-11-16T21:40:00.000+09:00

This week I tricked some of my Kindergarten kids into making a banner for the website. Click the picture to see the self-portraits they drew below the words. I was kind of hoping they'd toss in a backwards 's' or something like that, but it's just about sweet enough to rot a tooth, anyway. I love it when kids don't question what they're writing down. To keep some 10-year olds quiet and distracted during a test, I had them write "I will be quiet, not loud and annoying" down on a sheet of paper. When they asked "Teacher, annoying is what?" I said "You talk - Peter headache."

For the most part, November still feels like November. There's something oddly comforting about chilly air and a heavy coat. Mornings where it's warm enough to wear my light sweater I'm seceretly a little disappointed.

Speaking of it being November, November 11th is celebrated here, just like it is in Canada. Or rather, nothing like it it in Canada. See, 11/11 here is Pepero Day, the celebration of chocolate breadsticks that are known as 'Pocky' everywhere but Korea. As seemingly pointless as the holiday is, at least the selection of the date is clever; see, the 11s represent sticks of Pepero. I tried to explain to my students why I found the choice in date a little funny, as it's such a somber war holiday where I'm from. I guess that's a little hypocritical, since in practice it's more of a day off and an excuse to wear a cheap plastic flower.

I bought lots of those little chocolatey sticks to bribe my kids with, and they actually gave me scads of garishly-wrapped gift packs as well. Now I'm stuck with a huge pile of the stuff, and I'm not even a huge fan of it. Particularly not after dealing through a few kilos of it on the day in question.

This weekend was a blast, as Cahill, my friend and former neighbour from back in St. John's spent his first weekend in Seoul. He got to Korea last week, and lives down in Suji, a long subway ride south of me. He came up to Seoul on Saturday and he got to see the city middle come alive at night. Sadly, I don't have any sort of collage of blurry-bleary pictures from the evening, as I was too blurry-bleary to remember my camera.

But speaking of blurry night photos, I took a few photos this week to prove that not everything in Seoul is a flashy neon nightmare. There's still some quiet pretty to this place. Some amber nightlight city charm.

The store in corner there is the epitome of Korean convenience stores. It has no cash register, no cash drawer, not even a counter. Just a bed where the owners sit quietly and watch a tiny TV. When you bring something up to pay for it, they just say how much your total is, and pull out a cardboard box full of cash to make change. I'll reitterate that Seoul's an anachronistic city of contrasts like that. Walk down the subway stairs, by the old woman selling hand-peeled vegetables from a cardboard box, through the gate, where your train fare is automatically deducted from a little electronic card in your wallet.

Speaking of quaint old people in the subway, I had a really awkward moment the other day where a strange-looking old man was so interested in staring at me that he literally chased me around. I got a coffee from the machine, and he stood about 3 feet away, jaw agape, bottom lip protruding noticably further than his nose. I walked over to wait for the train, and he popped in front of me again. Trying to avoid him politely, I walked another hundered feet or so down the platform. He kept pace, not more than a footstep behind the whole time, and stopped right where I did, inches away, gawking. Frustrated and a little freaked out, I quickly changed direction and walked briskly behind him, back to my first position. He 180-ed, followed, and stood right in front of me again.

By now the train was entering the station. I waited until the doors opened and jogged alongside the traincars, hopping into the nearest door just as they started to close. I lost him, and probably looked pretty rediculous in the process. But I didn't care; the way this guy was going he'd have followed me to fucking school and watched me teach for the rest of the day. Curiosity I can stand. Creepiness not so much.

Closing thought for this week is this strange subway ad for... I have no idea. It seems to feature some kind of mobile phone off on the side, but the bulk of the ad is the repition of the line "Toilet papers in the bowl."

I hear that in parts of Korea, you're not technically supposed to flush toilet paper, because the sewer systems can't handle it. However, this is gladly not the case in Seoul, and besides, I can't imagine why a cellphone ad would even bring up the admittedly awful topic to begin with.

It's Ben a Blast

2006-11-09T23:49:00.000+09:00

(there's a fancy new gallery button on the right you can click, too)

I remember bragging last week that it still felt like late summer would back home. The first week in Novermber would not arrive unnoticed, though. Somewhere between Sunday night and Monday morning late fall came and kicked the shit out of Seoul. As I left my house that morning I was wearing a thick trenchcoat and scarf, watching my breath where just a day before I'd contemplated whether my light sweater was even neccesary. I heard it snowed a little in parts of town that night (not mine). The cool syberian airstreams have calmed down now, and it's a lot warmer, but Monday was an icy reminder that it's a good thing I brought my trusty scarf. It's still warmer than home, though.

Cool air's not the only in the atmosphere, though. This week I lost another friend and co-worker to harsh nature of the one-year contract. Ben was actually the first foriegner I met in Korea, as he showed me the city on my second day here (Mike joined that night, thereby forming the Canadian trifecta). I remember walking to meet Ben that day, thinking "How am I supposed to pick him out in this crowd? Oh wait, he'll be the only white person."

Saturday night the boy had a proper sendoff, with a few folk congregating at a nice restaurant, which actually closed its doors for our private party. It was a great eve, and we sat and ate and drank and were merry around our long table. Last Supper references are obvious. We also played this funny little Korean game involing guessing how many thumbs people will stick up and ultimately getting your forearm severely bruised. Check out the close-up action shot of Trevor making a crater in some poor Korea girl's arm. Thank lucky shot timing for the high-speed-photography effect of the ripples going through her arm.

Later into the night, we spilled out into the street and it rained and we huddled under some little roof and ate greasy street foods and climbed around and maybe even sang. We even managed to get all who remained into a groupshot (note John in the obligatory Thriller pose). Overall, it was a good sendoff, at least from where I sat. Or leaned awkwardly, as per the photo.

Much like Mike, who left me a veritable assload of stuff when he left, Ben did not leave me empty-handed. I managed to score a microwave from Ben's apartment. That officially means that I've got an actual place to live now; a real grown-up apartment. Microwave, bed, sofa, small fridge - it's all here. Of course my initial reaction to the nuke box was to cook something in it as quickly as possible.

For reasons that are still at least a partial mysetery to me, I left Canada with a stockpile of Easy Mac packages. Now I can finaly use them. I wasted no time in whipping up a bowl of my favourite fake-cheese-potentially-cancer-inducing pasta. Three minutes later and was I home.

Ben also left me his cell phone. Not to use, though. It was left to me with specific instructions: destroy it and take pictures. See, it's a crappy cellphone that malfuntions and shuts itself off quite frequently, so Ben wants to see bad things done to it. I don't want to let him down. Stay tuned to see what becomes of the poor thing in coming weeks.

This week I've got the quirky sign outside of the Police Station near the school. It's pretty much self explanatory. Or rather, the confusing image explains itself at least as well as I could...
Which is to say not very well.

Curiously, little wooden beating sticks seem to be the weapon of choice for the police in Korea. Bank guards carry handguns. Security at the airport carry machine guns. Police carry sticks.

Halloweird

2006-11-02T22:10:00.000+09:00

(click to see the stranger's sofa I love so dearly)

The week's been great. The weekend was danergously close to being a do-nothing, but then at the last moment, me and Ben grabbed a few drinks and played video games and then Trevor joined us and we stole a sofa.

See, in general Koreans don't recycle furniture. They often replace it, but typically just put the relatively new old stuff on the sidewalk for the trashman. It's pretty standard fare for us shameless Weigooks (Korean for foriegner) to obscond with said perfectly-fine furniture. Knowing this, and knowing that my apartment was an underfurnished paradise of spartanism with but one actual chair, I've kept my eyes peeled for any discarded chesterfeilds. Early Saturday I happened on just such a pile of previously-loved furniture.

Later that night, the three of us (Moi, Ben, et Trevor) just happened to be walking by the very same collection, and I said 'feel like carrying a sofa for about 10 minutes?' and who in their right mind would say no, right?

Trying to slide a large sofa into a small apartment with little room to spare is a challenge under the best of conditions. At 2 in the morning with a night of drinking under your belt, it's really no easier. And certainly no quiter. But I'm pleased with the results. Intensely so. This sofa has changed my place from a mid-sized bedroom into a tiny apartment, and it makes me significatly happier to be here.

Speaking of being happy here, this week was Halloween - at the school, at least. See, the country as a whole doesn't celebrate it, but as an expensive private English school, we apparently try to immerse the kids in occidental culture. Of course, in the interest of getting everything western a little wrong, the school scheduled the 30th as Halloween and I was caught unawares.

I love dressing up for Halloween, but given 15 minutes to make a costume, I ran to the store and bought a garbage can. With some tape and scissors and stolen stationary, I added an eyehole and antannae for the world's crappiest Halloween costume. The kids liked it, but most called me garbage-can-teacher in either Korean or English. At least I learned the Korean word for garbage can.

It was adorable to see them in costume though, even if most of them were princesses, superheros or Snow White. Alex (the real bad kid whom I mind less lately) was Peter Pan. With a knife. That was probably the coolest, I must begrudgingly admit. Kevin's got a great Devil pose, though.

Outside of work, life's fine and dandy. It's funny, when I take pictures now I'm a lot more interested in capturing the humanity of this place than the scenery and such. Mind you, the art and achitecture and old and new are all still facitating, I'm just seeing ineteresting things that I didn't neccesarily notice before.

The subway, for instance, is a real bastion of most everything that is Korean. Between the stares and the homeless and the pushing and shoving and the loud and slient old and new and drunk and people selling everything imaginable everywhere imaginable; the underground is Seoul at its Seoulest. I'm becoming a lot less camera shy, too. Or camera-use shy that is. Where I once thought it rude to take out a camera and snap pictures of people just trying to live their life and mind their own business, now I realize that cameras are a way of life here. As is people not minding their own business. Speaking of which, I'm trying to start a series of cameraphone pictures that fall under the category of "Koreans who won't stop staring at me"

This week, I close with this poster full of Korean and shady photos of scantily-clad Koreans. It's of interest largely because of the only English words on it. The 'no touch' is kinda confusing. Or maybe the opposite of confusing, but shady, at the very least. The adopted Konglish word 'event' can apparently also mean some shady things in Korea as well.

The poster on its own hardly seems funny enough though, so I tossed in a truckload of pigs for the hell of it. They're actually piggy banks, and they're frighteningly prolific around here. Hence the truck filled with them.

Dead Leaves on the Dirty Ground

2006-10-26T23:33:00.000+09:00

Fall is here now, you can feel it in the air. Everything's crisper (relatively speaking, given that air that's blue with smog can only be so 'crisp') and most days require a sweater now. It's almost time for me to figure out how the mysterious contraption on my wall can be adjusted to generate heat.

The leaves are even falling off the trees here. Even though I know it sounds like whiny homesick bullshit, but it's just not the same. The leaves don't turn yellow then red then golden brown on the branch. You don't see the spattered mosaics between the trees. The trees here are too eager to get naked - the leaves just drop and rot with little warning or fanfare.

Curiously, at the same time, the once-inconspicuous tree across from my apartment now bears fruit - literally. I think they might be oranges. I might try and get up to grab one just to see.

The week has been nice. The weekend was videogames with Ben and bars and some Korean barkeep saying I 'look like Orando Broom'. Somehow on my way home I found a pair of boxing gloves on the sidewalk. I did what anyone would - stole them and took them home for no good reason.

Speaking of wandering the streets at night, I never grow tired of how the night-time looks here. The electro-luminance of signs and neon and streets and cars. It's never fully dark here - there's always the glow of artificiality. There's a charm to it, the colourblind nightmare of garish flash at night. I'm sure there will be times when I'll ache for the silence of empty streets and trees and stars, but for now the novelty is still pretty fresh.

I'm just about on the eve of losing another friend and coworker, in that Ben's contract expires in about a week, and he's leaving to do travel then go back to Canada then come back to Korea much like Mike. That's gonna change the dynamic of daily living here in Korea, but if change wasn't what I wanted I wouldn't have come to Korea.

However, in the same breath, my former neighbour Cahill is coming to teach in about a week as well. That'll likely change the dynamic - plus it'll be good to see someone from home for the first time in over four months.

Speaking of faces I haven't seen in a while, Dan, the guy I replaced at work has returned to replace Ben. Dan's been teaching at the school for about 5 years now, so he's pretty well established, both with the coworkers and the students. He was surely a tough act to follow, but I've done well in my short time there.

When Clara (from work) was making up cute little penguin nametags for my students' lockers, I jokingly requested one. She made one up, and it's all kinds of awesome. It even overshadows the makeshift one I made from tape and a strange sticker one of the kids gave me.

I managed to snap a picture today that pretty much sums up the state of young students in Korea. At the music school across the hall from work, I saw a boy of about 10, still wearing his TaeKwonDo uniform, practically passed out from exhaustion at the piano. The amount of extra curricular schooling in this country is intense. Between all the extra schools they go to after school, it's not uncommon for kids of 13 or younger to be at school from about 9 in the morning to 11 or 12 at night. It's all part of some the heaviest college entrance competition in the world. It's actually illegal to hire private home tutors here, as it's said to give an unfair advantage.

Speaking of unfair advantages, I picked which toothpaste to purchase this week based primarily on the hilarious English mistake on the label.

I'm not exactly Calculus' biggest fan or anything, but I wouldn't wage a campaign against it or anything.

Decompression Week

2006-10-20T00:37:00.000+09:00

It's fall now, it's even starting to feel like it. I've been back in Korea for well over a week now, and I've spent most of the time mentally and physically recuperating from my great trip. Which is to say that I spent a lot the last week doing nothing huge. But it's Korea and I'm always doing something and there's always always something to say and see.

In fact, this week there are a lot of things to see. Well over a hundred of them, in fact, but they're not here. I've finally managed to put up a gallery of some of my favourite pictures from here, in larger, non-collaged format. You can check out the brand-spankin'-new gallery here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/seoulpurpose/

I also cleaned up my Thailand journal posts into a single entry. It includes the last page, which wasn't online before.

As for what I did in the 'real' world this week, taught all day on Saturday for the first and last time, and anxious to counterbalance, I probably overdid things Saturday night. I told my cab to drop me off at where I thought was home, but on getting lost and catching another cab, I realized it was a good 6 or 7 kms off the mark. The camera never made it out with me that night, and it's probably for the best.

On Monday we had a Kindergarten feild trip to Seoul Land, an amusement park (that's not quite as cool as Lotte World). That was a nice time, and it was great to see the kids run wild and get scared and ride rides. Once again, I forgot my fucking camera, so I haven't got the assuredly cute pictures to prove it.

Speaking of pictures, I took a walk today, camera in hand, specifically trying to remedy the dearth of pictures I've got from this week. I never even went to anywhere interesting or pretty in the traditional sense. I just wanted to catch a glimpse of sincere daily life in Seoul. Just the kind of images that I walk by every day, and probably discount as routine. It's my attempt to try and relay the real look and feel of this place; through candid shots of people just doing their thing.

Speaking of daily life here, I'm often asked how the whole North Korea thing plays out here with the locals. I was talking about this with Rosa at work and she was saying that in the past when Kim Jong Il did crazy shit, South Koreans prepared for complete meltdown. They rushed to the supermarkets snatching up water and canned goods and other such supplies.

This time around, the big news is that no one's doing that. There have been so many cries of 'Wolf!' over this guy that people are getting jaded, I figure. The media here seems far less interested in sensationalizing the whole thing. There's no strategic advatage for the North to attack anyone, including South Korea. On top of that, they'd pretty much have no allies if they were ever apeshit enough to do such a silly thing. I'm not concerned, and this is the last you'll hear from me on it for now.

In slightly more hilarious news, rennovations are nearing completion at my school. While that's not terribly funny in and of itself, you've gotta read the writing on the wall, man. Literally. See, they've gone with this nice theme of international english education, with famous school crests on the classrooms and maps of major english countries on the walls. Wherein lies the problem. Not only did they fuck up the spelling of Canada, America, and New Zealand, but they fucked up the maps too. Canada lacks islands (ahem!), New Zealand lacks most of itself, and the U.S. is clearly a map of Australia. Most of the school crests are alright (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, etc.), but I don't think they chose an appropriate one for Cornell.

I really don't like ragging too much on Korea, but these are hilarious mistakes. Ironically, of the foreign teachers there, we've got me from NF, Ben from Vancouver Island, Scott from New Zealand, and two Chrises from the 'States. None of our homes appear on the maps of our own countries. There's also Shane from Ontario, but he doesn't count 'cause the story is funnier without him.

In closing this week, here's a sign from a store that I pass virually every day. It makes me do a double-take every time. I get the fat girl and the skinny girl, I guess it must me a weight loss thing. But the singing toilet? I think the two question marks say it all.

I like to call it 'NoraeJohn'.
Noraebang means Kareoke in Korean, but I had to explain it so now it's not funny.

Shirt and Thai Event

2006-10-13T00:07:00.000+09:00

I made it back from Thailand alive, and I'm back in the SK groove. I kept a sporradic journal during the trip that I uploaded from little Internet Cafes along the way, so if you want a little more insight and some sloppy sketches, you can check those out below. The short version of the trip is that I had a really fucking great time. The long version is too long an incoherent to share. One of the medium versions follows, as I try to tell the tale; the tale of a fateful trip.

Me and Mike took off from Seoul on Sunday and touched down in Bangkok late that night, hopping a taxi to the infamous backpacker district known as Khao San Road (if you've seen the movie or read the book The Beach, Khao San is where it begins). It was a seedy place, but not completely unpleasant. Dirty, crawling with prostitutes, street merchants, and all manner of people looking to capitalize on the travellers there.

The short time we spent seeing stores and filth and Buddhas and temples and pictures of the beloved king in Bangkok was great, but my personal highlight was probably being sped around by a Tuk-Tuk. They're these little motorcycles that have been converted to have 3 wheels and take 2 passengers, kind of like motorized rickshaws. They're unsafe open boxes that are loud as fuck and stink of exhaust, and I can't imagine a better way to see the city blur by.

Thailand is so cheap to stay in. A meal in a reastaurant can easily cost under 2 dollars. Beer in a restaurant or bar is about a dollar. I bought about 5 or 6 t-shirts and they totaled less than 20 dollars. It's sad to know that this is kind of indicative of quality of life there, but dry your guilty tears - tourism is an important and helpful source of income for the country.

On Tuesday we flew to Koh Samui and took a ferry to Koh Phangan, where we remained until Sunday. That place is like a large Gilligan's Island filled with people wanting to party with college-movie gusto. At nighttime the beach turned into a museum of loud music and sin and fire shows.

Not to be outdone, our group (consisting of me, Mike, Seohee, Sophie, and Song Il) did our own share of sioree-ing. We had a great time there as we baked and swam on the beach, and I crashed two rented motorcycles (our group as a whole crashed four, as Mike and Seohee each had mishaps, too). The whole thing came to a head at the Full Moon party Saturday night, which is hard to explain, other than that it was basically like New Years Eve on a beach with thousands of other people. Very fucked up people. They had a part of the beach roped off so you could basically drag people who'd passed out so they wouldn't get trampled. I may or may not have seen a dead body float ashore. Mike argued that he was possibly just passed out.

The next morning, me and Mike pulled ourselves together and caught the boat and plane back to Bangkok. There, me and Mike said our somber goodbyes as I headed back to Seoul and he flew to Cambodia, bound for the world and eventually back to Canada. I had to catch the bus from the airport right to work, where a day of screaming children was not the best way to wash down two days of sleep deprivation. I was kinda glad to see them regardless.

All in all, the vacation was more amazing than I can really explain here. It wasn't a touristy, sight-seeing type thing. It was a vacation in greatest sense of the word - just a simple week of enjoying myself in an exciting new place. Now I miss the place I've seen but I'm recharged and excited to see the next place and surprised with the feeling of home that Korea has now.

When I was in Thailand, I was a little bewildered by the lack of Koreans. The few times I noticed some (by looks or speech) I looked to them with this expectation that they'd glance back and recognize me as one of their own. Sometimes it's hard to remember that I'm white without scads of strangers' stares reminding me that I'm a sore thumb.

I'll leave with an image of the sunset rising over the Full Moon beach on Koh Phanagn. It's easily my favourite panorama I've ever shot.

(as usual, click for a big pretty version)

Thailand Trip Journal (Complete)

2006-10-05T04:35:00.000+09:00

During my trip to Thailand I kept up to date by posting pages from a handwritten sketch journal I kept on the road. Here's the collection. Please excuse the chicken-scratch handwriting and sketchy pictures.

(click them for a full-sized view)

Into the Blue Again

2006-09-28T23:38:00.000+09:00

Three months down and I'm already skipping the country, if only for a week. I've decided to go to Thailand after all. I'll spend most of my time on the small island of Koh Phangan, famous worldwide for its full moon parties. I leave Sunday and come back early the next Monday morning (which means I'll be there for the full moon party on Saturday - fuck yeah).

Of course, this week and the trip that'll consume it marks another first in that Mike, one of the two close friends I've met here will be leaving Korea for international travel and then back to Canada. He'll likely come back next year, though. I had a long drunk talk with Adrian this weekend about the cruel nature that we're all so transient here, and that the friends you make here will inevitably leave and you'll leave them. But that's all far too emokid to bother bringing up here.

Speaking of talking shit and being drunk this weekend, there was a party on the roof of Mike and Ben's apartment building to commemorate Mike's departure. It was a fine time, not in spite of, but moreso due to the fact that there wasn't a huge crowd there.

There was a reasonable collection of strangers and seldom seems to start with, but a lot of them petered away and left just a handful of us on the roof to drink too much. Music for the soiree was supplied by my far too loud white tube boombox, and food was supplied by a clever little portable barbecue. Got got his earful of complaints and financial doo-dickary from the party fallout, which puts a pretty bittersweet tone to the whole thing in retrospect. Basically, his landlord is trying to dick him out of three grand because he says a barbeque on the (solid concrete) roof will cause leaks.

But that's all moot, and far too negative to bring up on the eve of adventure. And not everything about Mike's departure is terrible news, as he practically left me his whole apartment. I'm now the proud owner of his Xbox, coffee maker, toaster, rice cooker, and potentially cursed portable barbecue (at least until he comes back).

By the way, Ben and Mike are English teachers here too, so of course they've got blogs, too.

http://benfraser.blogspot.com/

http://www.mickileepaul.com/blog/

Mike's (non-blog) website is worth a visit too, his pictures are generally far better than mine.

Speaking of pictures, I went apeshit with the camera the other day as my Kindergarten kids were playing in the playroom. I'm so attached to this class now. I teach another bunch of smarter, better behaved kids twice a week, and I can't see ever forming the same attachment to them. They just don't have the same character. I was talking to Ally at work, and I was telling her how when I'm actually dealing with my class, they often frustrate me to no end, that I spend half the class doing that pinch-the-bridge-of-your-nose-and-close-your-eyes thing that people do on headache commercials. But then I proceeded to tell her how I miss them terribly overnight, that I'm overjoyed to see them in the morning.

Ally answered "Hmm, sounds like motherhood to me." She's got a really fucking good point. There's something interesting to note from the pictures here. Of the two most photographed kids, one is easily my favourite, and the other is the kid who is most often the cause of my melodramatically frustrated facial expressions.

That's largely it for this week, and possibly for next week, too. Given that I'll be on a relatively remote island, I won't be able to post my typical Thursday blog. However, I'll likely have some sort of 'I'm still alive, shit is crazy' post somewhere from the road, so keep an eye out.

In this week's edition of Unintentionally Hilarious T-shirts (UHT), see this clearly Korean guy I spotted on the subway, with a that shirt I really wanted to steal.

Coup de Grace

2006-09-21T22:35:00.000+09:00

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?

Urbanality

2006-09-15T01:27:00.000+09:00

(don't worry, be clicky)

My third month rounds the midpoint corner, heading towards closing time. This weekend I took things easily, since I wasn't feeling quite 100%. Still decent - like 70% at the worst. There's this infamous bout of sickness that strikes forigners here. It's not a disease or infection, as such; more of a system shock where our bodies try to adjust to the thick hazy pollution-y air here in Seoul. I've still never been completely Seoul Flu-ed, but now and then I fight a little hint of unhealth.

Back at the Hagwon (I dunno if I've mentioned before, but that's the Korean word for the kind of school at which I teach) the kids actually are alright... generally. I actually get a huge kick out of that cute messy backwards letters horrible writing style that kids write in, so I took some photos of how my Kindergarteners labelled their own books.

Speaking of kid's names, I've actually gotten to name two girls in my classes. See, the 'english' names that the kids use are given to them at the school, basically so us poor saps don't have to learn to pronounce and remember so many unfamilliar Korean names. The kids typically continue to use the names for the rest of their lives whenever they deal with anyone in english, though (for the very same reason, I guess). Unfourtunately, the two girls I named refused to take any cool pop-culture reference names like Leia or Nico. I managed to get one take Lisa as a Simpsons reference, and another Alice as an obvious Carrol reference. I teach a boy named Gaby in Kindergarten. I don't know what the hell was wrong with the guy who named him.

I left work today and took a nice long walk around the area. Not the immediate area - I left with the intention of getting lost, basically. I caught some nice views and pretty alleys and the typical fascinated stares of Koreans young and old. There's also an abnormal abundance of large and pretty fountains, both in that area, and in Seoul as a whole. Oh and the tail-less cat? Yeah, there's a bunch of them, too. I think it's how you tell the difference between a wandering housecat and an alleycat: the alleycats have had their tail removed or mangled by some sort of unimaginable trauma.

Another thing that's curiously overabundant here: statues. These normally aren't statues to commemorate or memorialize anything. Often, they're decorations outside of some sort of business. Big artsy stone phalluses to celebrate commerce. I like it, the end effect is just that it makes the city prettier, with little extraneous decorations outside of even the most mundane of buildings with the most benign of purposes.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before either, but the food here is pretty goddamned tasty. Korean food's a little different than I expected, mostly in that it's pretty different from Chinese. I mean legit Chinese food, by the way, not chickenballs and an eggroll floating in cherry sauce (although I guess it's different from that too). Kimbap and sam gup sal are two of my favourite Korean dishs, even though the former is basically a renamed sushi roll and the latter literally translated means 'three layers of fat'. There's also a pretty full compliment of Western restaurants here for those feeling particularly xenophobic or homesick.

Speaking of xenophobia, there's a surprising lot of Japanese food here, considering that Koreans as a whole aren't big fans of that country. Some petty feud about Japan burning down like half the country a few hundred years ago or something. Quit living in the past, princess! Actually, it's interesting to see how a rivarly that's literally centuries old plays out between neighbouring nations. A lot of the kids call it (Japan) 'monkey land'.

Speaking of that Nipponic island of insanity, it looks like my plans for Chuseok have changed. The chances of me getting a flight to Thailand have gone from slim to none. Instead, I'm most likely going to take the ferry to Japan and just explore. It'll be a lot different wandering around Japan completely alone as opposed to sitting on a beach in Thailand with friends, but it'll still be fun. The tentative plan involves zipping around on trains between Fukowaka, Osaka and Kyoto for the week, but I'll play it by ear and see if I've got the time and resources to check out Tokyo too.

In closing, here's one of yet another of the many fountains from this sprawly urbanality (it's a word if I say it is) that is Seoul. As is the case with virtually any panorama on the site, you can click it for a much bigger version. The one at the top is another panograph, some complicated fusion of collage and panorama that I'm all about lately.

Lotta Lotte

2006-09-07T23:08:00.000+09:00

(click me and I'll get all big)

A week of fun and frollick in Seoul. I love doing new things every week. I love that I may never run out of new things to do during my year here.

This Friday me and Mike decided to cast off the shackles of the GS and explore the area a little. We decided to check out Boramae park. It's a large and wonderful place and all the stranger for being a mostly unspoiled park smackdab in the middle of the urban jungle. Kind of like Bowering Park: Seoul Edition, to put it in granite planet terms. A night of drinking in the park had some crazy charm, both nostalgic and on its own merit.

Saturday night a few of us had a little gathering on the roof of the apartment building where Mike and Ben live. We played roofpong and lost balls to the ground and probably risked doing the very same with ourselves. We graduated to tennis balls and the game got more random (both in concept and practice). Needless to say it was a pretty fun night, as random and impromptu as the stupid roof games played during it.

Sunday me and Mike and Seo Hee went to Lotte World. That was assloads of fun. See, Lottle World is kind of like the Korean Disneyworld. Well, maybe a bit more like Canada's Wonderland - but smaller (space comes at a pretty high premium in Seoul).

The place is a real smattering of indoor and outdoor attractions. Things that spin, things that drop, things that loop-the-loop. Typical theme park fair. The only odd difference is that most of the rollercoasters were indoors.

Actually, what the fuck am I talking about - this is Korea, of course there were other weird differences. There was an ice rink inside, basically the centrepeice of the whole inside area. You could drink anywhere and everywhere (this IS Korea, after all). The attendants were the most energetic people I've ever seen - possibly anywhere. They all waved with both hands. Some danced in synch with the rides they were attending. Not a regular dance, some sort of dancy-miming-traffic-cop kinda combo that's hard to explain.

When the lights turned low, the colours got prettier. At the end of the night, they had some strange laser lightshow and the globe in the centre of the park split open like the G.I. Joe Terrordrome and shot fireworks (indoors, no less).

There's a darker side, though. See, Lotte World's got a bit of a reputation problem here in Korea. Back a few months ago, a drunk passenger wasn't properly strapped into his seat and he kinda flew out of a coaster mid-ride. Before that,
(according to my students) a fire broke out and a bunch of people got caught on a coaster and kinda died, apperently. When I talked about going to Lotte World with my kids, all the older kids kind of gasped in awe at my bold disregard for my own life. It's all pretty blown out of proportion, though. You know what kids are like with stories and rumours of mortal danger.

Incidentally, the reputation issues haven't stopped the newer rides from having 2-hour lineups. We bypassed the two newest rides for that reason.

I'm currently getting things worked out for my trip to Thailand. Hopefully, I should be able to swing it. Looks like the most feasible route is going to be through Japan. That'll make the (simplified) itinerary look kinda like:
Train to Busan (Korea), ferry to Fukowaka (Japan), train to Osaka (Japan, duh), plane to Bangkok (Thailand), plane to Ko Sumai (also Thailand), bus to the shore, boat to the island.
Then play it backwards to get home. All the extra travel is more an adventure than an inconvenience. Even if it does mean almost as much time travelling as actually vacationing.

I was filmed for part of a Korean tourism video tonight. Three of us were interviewed about our opinions of a new tourism spot and our opinions are going to be shown to Korean government officials as evidence of how foriegners would react to the film. Admittedly, it was pretty damn well made, and at least as slick as a greased Pride Fighter.

I always try to go out on a joke, so here's a bit of Konglish (Korean bastardized english). This is everywhere, but it's kind of awkward to whip out a camera and take snaps of clothing and signs all the time, so I don't normally get a picture. Only one of these is real funny, the others are just full of bad grammar.

Oh, and just in case you can't read the shirt on the far left, it says:

"Whip it to me
Can I come?
HOLD BACK
I'm gonna come!"

You can be pretty sure that neither the girl wearing this nor most of the people around have any idea of what this shirt says. Hell, even if they can read it, they probably don't quite get what it means. Somewhere in Korea there's a collection of english silkscreeners with a sick sense of humour.

Then again, it's no better than the scads of Asian character tattoos people have everywhere in the english-speaking world. I wonder how many of those are terrible sexual refences?

The Beachcombers

2006-09-01T00:34:00.000+09:00

This weekend I went to Ally's wedding in Busan (she's one of the Korean teachers at my school). The only disappointing part of the trip was the 300km/hr train there did not feel nearly as fast as I'd imagined. From there, though, it was all Korean faerie magic.

A Korean wedding is indeed different than one back home, but not neccesarily in ways that I expected. The garb was wild in about the ways I'd imagined. Standard bride and groom stuff, but the ushers had marching-band-esque uniforms, and the mothers of each wore traditional Korean dresses (pretty sure it's called a hanbok). This looked particularly surreal for the groom's mother, as she is from the Canadian prairies, and her first taste of Korea was just a week or so earlier.

The unexpected weird came in the ceremony, though. The entrance music for the bride and groom was... well his was the entry music for a soccer team - literally. The lights dimmed and dry ice steamed fog down the aisle and projectors shot lazer lightshows around the room. When they both got to the altar, a bubble machine blew bubbles around them and throughout the room.

The ceremony was a nice though - quick and effecient one of half english half korean and ultimately it's not all that different from any I've seen (save for the coninuous stream of bubbles and creative lighting). There were some performances at the end, one from a friend and another from one of Ally's kinderkids (I teach her too). She played violin - far too beautifully for a child of her age. I help her colour and put stickers in a book, and she's probably better at violin than I'd be if I started playing when she was born. Assuming I ever had more than a month's patience with musical instruments.

After the ceremony we had sushi and then set out for the beach. Busan is on the southwest coast of Korea, so it's got some nice beaches where warm salty moisture is the only thing seperating you from Japan. Overexcitedly, hastily, and haplessly I hopped into the water as soon as we hit the beach. This was hapless because I'd forgotten to take off my glasses, which fell off and disappeared into the blue again. Somewhere in the Sea of Japan there is a nearsighted crab thanking me.

I sat on the beach until dark, bleary-eyed, combing through sand for tiny shells talking to Ben, Mike, and a few of the girls from work who came along to enjoy the thing for which Busan is known. It was nice to hang out with some of the Korean coworkers outside of work; you don't really get to meet someone when you're in the office working with them.

Back in Seoul to round out the weekend, I killed a few hours on Sunday visiting the COEX mall. I dig this place. It's a lot more like the malls back home, than a lot of the shopping centres here, with more focus on individual stores as opposed to some mazelike conglomeration of independant minimarkets. They've got these little interactive projectors showing little minigames on the floor where you do things like kick pool balls into holes and play a little mini game of soccer. I never tried kicking at things myself though, as they were mostly monopolized by children playing-out Godzilla fantasies.

The rest of my weeklife in a nutshell: My hair is practically normal again and I've got some sporty new glasses. I start teaching on Saturdays this month. I'm trying to plan some sort of fun vacation for Chuseok (long early October holiday) - come hell or high water, I'm leaving this peninsula for somewhere. Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, or even Jeju island. The only obstacle is the highly overbooked flight schedules, since that's the Korean travel equivalent of Christmas.

As a parting shot, check out these absofuckingloutely adorable pictures my kids have drawn of me. The one on the left is from one of my Kinderchildren and the other is from a handmade card that another very clever student gave me.

Hair today...

2006-08-25T01:58:00.000+09:00

(click me)

Try clicking the image here at the top, it's a panograph; a combination of over 20 pictures into a kind of hybrid panorama. It's from a mountain near my house, gives a great view of my area and beyond.

So, two months now. This week I got a little sick of having my long curly hair. I feared the communications issues of dealing with Korean hairstylists, and I was interested in both a drastic change and being able to affect it myself, so I clippered my own hair.

I still maintain that this was not a bad idea, as such. The hair turned out pretty well at first, but then in my final trimming I forgot that the plastic guard was off the clippers and...
bzzzt!
I accidentally cut a bald spot into my own hair.

You can check out a short video documenting the whole process, and where it turned so hilariously wrong here:
Hairtastrophe

The kids love it, though. The younger they are, the funnier they find it. And not so much the dumb-looking bald patch, but just the fact that it's so short and such a drastic change from before.

Speaking of looking like a dummy, I'm got to sport the spot at a coworker's wedding this weekend. It's down in Busan, on the southeast coast of Korea, 3 hours by the superfast (300km/hr) KTX train. It's supposed to be a great city with awesome beaches, so I'm looking forward to seeing it.

On the topic of beautiful locales, I've found what is easily my favourite place in Seoul so far. It's just ten minutes from my place by bike, and it's a small mountain with a little network of trails running through it. The strange thing is that right in the middle of the path I took, there's this little outdoor workout area made from benches and iron and trees and old / makeshift workout devices. It was a really surreal thing to find in the middle of a mountain trail, even for Korea. This mountain is also the place from which I took the picture(s) on top of the page.

The nice bits of free outdoorsdom are nice considering how condensed the rest of this city is. Take for example parking. Parking is enough of an issue everywhere, but here they take to measures like parking such that the cars touch each other, and leaving cars in neutral so people can push them out of the way when you're blocking them. They also have nifty multi-level soloutions, like little lifts so you can park on top of another. Then there are car carousels, which turn the cars around on top of each other like hotdogs under a heatlamp, so you can fit many cars in a space for two.

Speaking of space concerns, I leave with this image of clothing shopping in Korea. Most of it isn't quite this bad, this is more of an extreme charicature of it at its worst - just a table outdoors with a few hundered bits of unorganized clothing. Fuck, stealing laundry is easier than this!

It's My Birthday Too

2006-08-18T00:26:00.000+09:00

(click for a big ol' panorama)

I'm approaching two months here now, and I'm a sucker for cliches so I'll go ahead and postulate that the time has flown 'cause I've been having fun.

Exploring this weekend brought me around to the Tapgol Park area here in Seoul. The park itself is beautiful and has this beautiful pagoda (an old decorative tower - think of it as the Asian totem pole) ecased in glass, but my picutra obscura is from the park fence, and you can hardly see the pagoda for the trees.

I also found this great buddhist temple (not exactly rare here). The sharp-eyed folks out there might think they see a swastika on the temple, but that symbol is common here - it signifies a buddhist place of worship, and predates WWII by quite a damn bit. Another ubiquitious image here is the sleeping old man. People sleep everywhere here. Seeing an old man passed out on the side of the road is more common than makes sense. I've resisted the temptation to take a picture until now; he was just so perfectly placed in such a quiet area, I had to snap a quiet shot.

Back to school on Monday, which just happened to be my birthday. It also happened to be the birthday of on of my favourite Kindergarten students. When we found out the conincidence, she was very excited to have the same birthday as Petah Teacha. The whole class had icecream and I got a slice 'cause I'm their teacher, then they sang to me and I stood and soaked-in the surreality of getting my birthday song and cake from a group of 5 year olds who met me less than two months ago. When another (older, around 10 or 11) kid found out it was my birthday, he promised to bring me a present next class, and surely enough he brought me in this awesome plasticine snake that he made himself.

I got a care package from home too, which great, and packed with cool little birthday presents. There's a real mysticism to getting a box sent around the world, not to mention the thought that surely counted a whole damn bunch.

The day after my birthday was a holiday, so me and some friends went out and had a hell of a time. The bulk (and highlight) of the night was spent looking for some mysterious bar. Me, Mike, Seohee, and John ran around exploring and running and jumping and climbing and stnading on boxes and hands and heads and bridges and cars. Sadly, I have no photographic evidence thereof, but hope to in days to come.

Incidentally, we did find the bar, and it was awesome - basically a basement that played raggae and Dylan on vinyls. You could write on the walls. The 'menu' was a select few Korean words written on a framed picture. It was alive with atmosphere. I want those damn pictures.

The next night me and Mike headed to Metallica and Tool in concert at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Stadium. I got to listen to loud and aggressive music in the very place where Canadian Ben Johnson ran really damn fast 'cause he was all messed on 'roid rage. Judging by the abundance of sweaty bulky men, little has changed. Neither of the bands are exactly my favourite, but it was worth the experience to see them here in Korea, of all places.

The place was crowded and sweaty and holy shit loud and it crawled in my head and stayed pounding for at least a day to come (read: headache). Of course, the intesity of a headache is basically like the richtor scale for measuring the quality of such a concert.

The production was nice and complete with complicated lights and video screens and backdrops. Tool only played for a little more than an hour, as they were opening for those other old bastards (weird, since they're all popular with the new album and such, and Metallica's not exactly in the spotlight these days). They also made great use of all the visual doogadgetry by playing either parts of the videos along with the live songs, or just playing disturbing shit onscreen in lieu of a real video.

Metallica played for almost 3 hours, but they were really focusing on the 'classics', thankfully ignoring most everything they've made in the last decade or so (just like everyone else did).

I've even got some (short, awful, poorly lit) videos of both bands playing. Check them out here:

Tool One
Tool Two
Metallica One
Metallica Two
Metallica Three

It's hard to see much on some of these, they were done with my digital still camera, not my DV cam. Not to mention that it's hard to film things at a concert.

That about brings a close to another week. In the interest of once again going out on a laugh, here's yet another messed-up poster. There was a series of these parody posters here based on iconical images, all for the same event. The other two were of the Mona Lisa and Michaelangelo's Creation of Adam. What those two have to do with a Nivanna CD I'll never know.

Drop me in the Water

2006-08-11T00:48:00.000+09:00

click for a bigger panorama

Seoul continues to be great and I continue to leave it whenever possible. This weekend I went outside of the city for some white water rafting (where outside I never even bothered to check, I just hopped on the Adventure Korea bus and went to wherever).

Well, it might be a bit of a stretch to call the water white, as such. It wasn't really The River Wild or anything, but between the paddling and the occasional little rocky bumpride, it was certainly a fun little rafting excursion, particularly for a relative raft virgin like myself. I don't have any pictures from rafting itself 'cause the camera is not water's biggest fan.
Afterwards we headed out for swimming and (for the few souls with brave hearts and empty stomachs) bungie jumping. I was neither brave nor empty enough to take a plunge, but it's something I'd like to do before I leave Korea. The area was gorgeous though, as was swimming while watching people rubber-band their way off that big red bridge (see the panorama at the top of the post).

Back in Seoul, I did a bit more exploring, and found myself at Dongdaemeun Market, the largest and most random outdoor market in the whole damn city. It's also the most random market ever created my people. You can find fridges, powertools, antique cameras, counterfeit watches, sex toys, jewelry and live pets literally within feet of each other. And speaking of the live pets, they were selling chickens and roosters! Like, everywhere, in cages right next to the hamsters, ferrets and budgies. I'm not sure if they're intended as housepets or what, but it's creepy regardless.

What's not creepy is the gorgeous stream that runs through this area. Apparently this was a huge elevated highway just a few years ago, and in the interest of de-industrializing and un-uglifying the city a little, they tore the road up and exposed the natural stream hidden below. Kids wade in it, fountains run, you can cross it by hopping strategically-placed stones. It's a pretty nice break in the hustle-bustle of the mid-city market madness of the area.

Speaking of pleasant changes, my most frustrating kindergarten student has taken a definite turn-for-the-better. On his last report card, I let his (evidently very concerned) mother know that he's improving a fair bit. Then I got a present from the kid (presumably ultimately from his mother, since five-year olds have little disposable income). It was a real nice sentiment, with a really adorable heart-shaped card that says "I love you Peter". Korean kids throw around the word 'love' pretty easily by the way, it pretty much means 'like' in practice. Still, I really really appreciate my little VW Bugclock.

Last night the Canadian Hogwon Trifecta (consisting of me and the other two Canadians from my school - Ben and Mike) had a few drinks outside of the GS, as we're apt to do. Towards the end of the night, we overheard a Korean at a table behind us on his phone, and between screaming angry things in Korean, he started throwing in some random english profanities. It just catches your attention when you hear a Korean shouting "Fuck you bitch!" It's kind of precocious, really. Anyway, the guy eventually came over to us and we talked and drank and he called his wife, who came by with the whole damn family, for some reason. We almost had to go all coyote and chew our own arms off to get away to go home and get some sleep. Koreans can get pretty friendly when they've got a few drinks in.

I've also decided that I'm going to try to keep my distance from odinga jerky. It's basically kind of like beef jerky, but it's a made of squid. It's not quite as awful as you'd picture, I'm just real turned from it at the moment. Somehow squid just seems to seek me out when I've had too much to drink here.

That's all for this week. It's my birthday next Monday, and the day after is a national holiday here. Sounds like it might be a squid night.

I leave you with some more of that beloved Korean randomness. This is the poster they put in the subway with instructions on how to use the little plastic bag gas masks they supply in case of a chemical attack. Not that that's real likely or anything, but the whole thing kind of reminds me of that Fight Club quotation about the illusion of safety. Plus, it shows a guy tying a plastic bag around his head - what the hell is safe about that?

Buildings and Food

2006-08-02T22:15:00.000+09:00

(click the banner for a bigger panorama of the city)

It's vacation week, and while others have taken the opportunity to visit far-away locales, I've had neither the time nor resources to comfortably plan such a trip. Instead, I've welcomed the opportunity to explore Seoul a little more.

There's certainly no shortage of things to see and do here. Just taking the subway to a random stop to just get out and wander around for hours can be entertaining for hours. This weekend I started at Myeongdong. If you take a closer look at this fountain you'll see not one but two huge video billboards on the buildings in the backdrop. Again, I'm impressed by the weird combination of modern and not-so modern here; Koreans have a real flair for anachronism. Not that the fountain is that old, just that it clashes with the various electronica behind it, on an ideological basis at the very least.

This area has an underground mall. In fact, a lot of areas around here have underground malls. Not underground as in they're secretive, just that they're underneath the road. This one had a few nice finds, including an amazing hand-crosstiched wall hanging of Morgan Freeman (that probably costs more than I'd want to imagine) as well as quite an impressive lot of vinyl. Unfourtunately, there's no organization of the records by artist, genre, decade, condition, or anything. So, essentially you've got 5 or 6 stores each with thousands of vinyls and you'd have to search through every single one to know you hadn't missed anything. this type of insane lack of order is pretty common of Korean shopping. It makes it exciting, albeit potentially frustrating.

I may have insinuated before that this place is pretty damn crowded. With forty million people in the country, and almost half of them in Seoul and its surrounding areas, there are people eeeverywhere. Of course it's easier to show that than to say it. Or more effective, at least.

One funny thing about the culture here is the accepted manner to deal get through the crowds - you just push and shove and elbow and make no apologies to anyone. I'm not criticizing it, I figure it formed out of neccesity. I've still got this inborn natural reaction to turn and say 'sorry' everytime I bump into someone. That's doubly pointless, of course, since most people understand neither the word nor the sentiment.

Speaking of understanding words, I'm starting a learn a tiny bit of progress in my funtional Korean. I've managed to order a couple of meals in broken Korean. The meals here, by the way are delicious and cheap. I'm still in the process of trying out a lot of different things, but so far, I've liked pretty much everything. I don't quite get how people come here and just get North American foods most of the time. Sure they're familliar and availible, but doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of travelling to another country?

So for a lot of the rest of my free vacation time, I've checked out a few of the parks here. They've got nice grass and streams and the little duckies in the pond. There's some real prettiness here, and for a moment you can kind of pretend that you're not in the middle of urban sprawl.

Until you take a breath, or look around and see the skyscrapers or the scads of Koreans trying to live-out the same fantasy of Seoulessness. But I'm not ripping on the urbanality of this place - hell, it's why I chose to move to Seoul.

In fact, I'm still so taken with the iron building giants that I've taken way too many pictures of them. On Tuesday I went to Yeouido (an island in the middle of Seoul) and walked around for hours. There is some impressive modern architecture and sculpture around the place, and I went all touristy and snapped an assload of pictures.

There's also the National Assembly which, judging by the abundance of police officers guarding it, must be the centre of all that is governmental here in Korea. These Police, by the way are armed with what is essentially a bo staff - a long beating stick. I wonder how the feds back home would react to being outfitted like Donatello the Ninja Turtle.

See that crossy-thing in the upper-right corner? That's the Yeouido Full Gospel, a church that claims to have the largest congregation of any Christian church in the world.

Jesus! Are you telling me that those heathens have a bigger church than us!?
Goddamn right they do.

Or course, no collection of photos on Yeouido would be complete without the 63 Building. This is the tallest building in Korea, home to Korea Life Insurance. (Actually, it's not techinally the tallest anymore, I've read that's Tower Palace Three, Tower G, but that one's not as purrty, and the name is dumb.) All shiny and tapered and gold-coloured, it's quite the blinged-out megaphallus. I guess you can get inside of it and take pictures of the city, but it was getting late and I'd already filled my daily panorama quota, anyway.

And that brings me up to date. Back to classes tomorrow. The Korean summer break lasts a couple of weeks, tops, and for the poor kids at my private hogwon, they get half a week off of classes, same as me. I asked some of them where they're going on summer vacation, expecting to hear of intersting and far-off locales. They said things like 'Swimming!' I guess half a week doesn't afford much time to travel.

More Talk, Similar Action

2006-07-27T23:25:00.000+09:00

A month in Korea. I've been letting the days go by and the time has flown; guess I must be having fun. But the less I say about Talking Heads quotations the better, I'll just make this up as I go along.

This weekend started with a fun excursion up north (far enough north to be about 10kms from that other Korea) for some Saturday go-karting. I forgot how fun those things are. I remember when I was a kid too young and scared to ride the karts at Splash and Put and how dad loved them. When I finally got up the nerve to ride them, he gave me tips about the right way to go around turns quickly without slamming into the walls, but there's only so much skill with which a child can tackle a hairpin.

But now age and independant recklessness have come into play, and I had a damn fun day of slipping and sliding around the track. Sure I'm a big kid, but that's news to few. Of course, being too pre-occupied with driving, the only picture I took was of the questionable grammar on the starting line banner. Twost? Secost? I wonder how the firnd turned out.

On leaving the track, some random puppies lured us onto a sidwalk to play with them and take pictures and wonder why they were out in the middle of town like that with no apparent owner. I theorized that it may be kind of akin to the fish restaurants where you get to pick which live seafood you want to eat, but mostly just as a tasteless and culturally insensitive joke. Just so we're all clear though, you can get dog here, to eat. Far be it for me to judge, though - we eat animals that are sacred to some folk. Sacred and delicious. You can really taste the holy.

Mike tried hitchhiking, both as a fun picture opportunity and as a little joke about how long it was taking for us to find a cab driving by. But we caught a cab to the station and trained our way back to Seoul.

That night me and Ben hit the Zepplin bar and got to talking to some Korean guy who took us to meet a supposed memeber of the Korean mafia and we ate cold octopus (or squid, I can't remember) and drank Soju (think cheap rice vodka, for anyone who doesn't know) and the old maybe-mafioso shouted and screamed shit in Korean and was genenrally an asshole and me and Ben got too drunk and I went home and eventually tossed those tentacles out the apartment window.

The traffic image isn't the veiw from my window or anything, by the way. It's just a shot from one of the subway stops on my way home from work, and I like the way it looks, and it's one of the few pictures I've taken in the past week.

Speaking of the relative lack of pictures, I figured I'd share some more images of my happy-but-small apartment. It seems I find myself... living in a shotgun shack, so to speak. Just check out my kitchen here. Or should I say, my porch/kitchen/laundryroom. It's nice to have it in a seperate room though. Some of the other studio apartments here just have the one room with a bathroom on the side. That means sleeping where you cook things, and that's just not right.

Yeah, I said 'cook things'. It seems I'm not the culinary involate that I once was. Despite having the crappiest stovetop in Korea (some electric glorified-hotplate, while everyone else gets gas. Childish giggle.) I actually make my own food pretty often. Taking-out is still a viable option, though. So is delivery...

See, these are all little magnets that delivery places put on my door. I've been collecting them. It's kind of sad, I get a little excited smile when I come home and there's a new one to add to the collage. It's too bad they're completely useless to me, since I can't read Korean nor speak enough of it to try and order food and have it delivered to my house. It's pretty easy to go walk somewhere and get a bite to eat, anyway.

Oh, that little banner image at the top of this entry is from one of my favourite Korean TV commercials. I'm pretty sure it's for a delivery place, but the whole thing is basically just this funny-looking guy stuffing his face and looking very pleased about it.

And that's pretty much it. Funny how the week on which the least happened left me saying the most. I'll have to address that, pronto. After all, this only happens once in a lifetime, right? (I think that's the sixth Talking Heads reference. Sixnd?)

My Name is Mud

2006-07-21T01:35:00.000+09:00

Another week passes in Korea. I play in the mud and put my mind in a bottle like some toy ship.

I finally got out of Seoul for a day. That's kind of a milestone in and of itself. I took a crowded train to Boryeong City for the annual mudfest. The whole ordeal was actually a little less muddy than I'd feared, and about as messy as I'd hoped.

In short, it was a pretty damn good time. It was nice to get out of the Seoul smog; and nicer still to get out to a decent beach with nice waves. Really, it was more of a beach fest with pools of mud on the side, which was ideal, really. Party or not, mud should always be an option.

Of course we opted-in, at least for a little bit. We fought through the mudpool for a bit then washed off the filth in the warm and wavy East China Sea. Koreans call it the West Sea. They also call the Sea of Japan the East Sea. They refuse to acknowledge other East Asian countries, it seems.

Then the mostly sunny day gave way to night and light and more of that neon glow makes Korea Korea. On the beach they had one of those awful carousel swings that were banned years ago back home. They also had pretty mood lighting; nothing quite like a blue-green-orange beach at midnight.

Speaking of colourful lights, what would a party in Asia be without fireworks? They had a decent display, and I took many very blurry pictures. But what could go better with nice blurry memories than nice blurry pictures, right?

Between the big official display and us regular folk lighting off Roman Candles and god knows what other hastily-purchased explosives, the reek of sulfur was thick and sweet and smelly-awful the whole night. I was convinced that my clothes reeked of it the next day, but I'm pretty sure that was just some part my mind that overloaded and short-circuited.

We ended off the night with an impromptu game of soccer with some random Koreans. In fact, it was a soccer tournament. Korea versus the world; us foreigners even had a player from Ethiopia. Of course, being from a non-World Cup country, the enthusiasm with which people approach 'fuutbol' is alien to me. Of course, 'alien' is pretty synonymous with 'interesting as hell' these days anyway. We played for over two hours in the middle of the night barefoot in the sand, and I can honestly say that it was the highlight of the weekend, if not my trip so far. A defining moment in a had-to-be-there kinda way.

We won the first game and lost the second, by the way.

After the beach gaming, we limped back to the minibak (think 15-20 people sleeping on a floor fit for fewer than 10.)
That was fun both due to and in spite of its discomfort.

Uncomfortable again was the train, as we had to sit on the floor with three slightly insane but occasionally funny Americans who kept putting things inside the open mouth of their sleepy companion.

Back here in Seoul (and throughout South Korea) there's been a bit of flooding, but nothing too near me. Fear not, friends and relatives, it won't reach my second-floor apartment any time soon.

And that's all that ever happened.

Ever.

Exploring, Employment, Enjoyment

2006-07-14T01:31:00.000+09:00

Another week or so has passed here in Seoul, and things are all well and good and solid. I've got more pictures, a more swollen liver, and nothing but another 49 weeks or so of interesting ahead of me.

Seoul is so alive. There are people everywhere all the time. Although I do kind of wish I had a t-shirt that said 'stop fucking staring at me, I'm just white', I guess the city itself should have a t-shirt for me that says 'stop staring, I'm just Seoul'.

Oh, I didn't mention this before, but right now it's what we like to call 'monsoon season'. Which means that:

A) It is always humid as holyfuck
B) It may, at any given time, rain more that you have ever seen before

Really, though, on at least two occasions I've been woken up by the sound of rain and rain only. Rain like I cannot comprehend. And yet it will still be hot as fuck. The rain here feels nothing like it does at home. You can get soaking wet and still not feel cold. And after the rain stops, the streets dry in minutes. But hot and wet are not fun for 3 weeks in a row, I promise.

The other day as I left work, the sky looked so ready to storm that I swear it was threatening me (as seen above). This will all be over in about a month though. Or at least that's what I'm told.

Then it'll just be hot, minus the damp.

I've been doing a little more exploring, of course. One of the things that amazes me is how they integrate history into the monument to moderninty here. The contrast really helps remind you that this place has well over 20 centuries of history, as opposed to four or five.

For example, this palace gate, right next to city hall (and the Picasso exhibit that I have to see before it leaves in September), in a sea of intimidating skyscrapers.

Speaking of old things, I've found a great little bar just up the road from me...
named Led Zepplin, no less.

The place has the best vinyl collection I've ever ever seen. It's owned by a pretty cool guy who's as close to a stoner as Korea has ever seen. He plays some decent (and some not-so-much) stuff, straight off the vinyls.

There are murals everywhere in the place.

There are even some in the bathroom. The bathroom, by the way, is up a flight of stairs (marked Stairway to Heaven, honestly). Aside from murals, the bathroom has no door and no sink, and is located in the corner of a small parking lot.

I've taken to borrowing a phrase from Ben (one of my compadres and co-workers) and I'm going to call this one of those 'Welcome to Korea' moments.

Work is going well. I like working there. I've still got a few kids who are complete jerks, but I've got a few who are awesome squared.

These are some kids from my Kindergarten class, and the girl on the right is probably my favourite student, bar none. If I was home, I'd use the phrase "She's so cute you could pinch the face off of her" (albeit with a touch of irony, questioning the legitimacy of such a saying) but now that I see it written it seems violent, despite the complimentary sentiment.

And that's about it for now. This weekend I'm going to the Boryeong Mud Festival about 3 hours outside of Seoul (by slow-ass train)

That should be pretty fun.

I'll leave with another little hint of Korean strangeness. I pass this poster every day in the subway, and I keep thinking to myself, "Is this the Korean DFA 1979?!"

I have no idea what this poster says or is about, by the way.

(Note: This is another entry I posted on another site, then migrated to this one.)

Arrival

2006-07-08T13:22:00.000+09:00

Here I am in Seoul, South Korea.

I love it here and I have too much to tell and too many things to show.
I'm going to try my best to find the happy medium between saying and showing nothing and everything.

Alright, well I've been here for about two weeks now. My apartment is nice, but oh so tiny. Actually, here, have a look at it for yourself (this was last week, pre-unpacking, so excuse the suitcases and mess).

See the bathroom there? I put that there for a reason. See the shower head over the toilet? Yeah, the whole bathroom is the shower. There's a drain in the floor. It's actually not a bad arrangement. Makes it really easy to clean, at the very least.

So what happens when I leave the house? Well here are some snaps from my neighbourhood, all taken just a few steps away from my apartment, basically:

It's a pretty decent area - it's within walking distance of Seoul National, the Korean Ivy League University. It's not right on the main road, either, so I'm spared the constant sounds of traffic. This city does not sleep. Ever.

On my first Sunday here I went out at like 12 to see if I might be able to find a convenience store open, and there were freaking clothing stores still open. Not that everything's open 24/7, but you'd be surprised and confused at some of the hours they keep here.

Speaking of which, bars don't have to close here. And speaking of drinking, Korea loves it. Drugs? Well pot will basically get you thrown in jail and deported. But booze? It goes, anywhere and anytime. You can drink on the streets, in cars, on busses, in the subway. Mind you not a lot of Koreans do those last few, but there's no law against it.

That massive pile of beer is from a bar near work. You actually sit at that table and take beer from the centre. Brilliant. The lame labels are from Molson Canadian. For some reason, it comes imported with those strange labels on the back over here. Oh, and the other pictures are from just outside of a convenience store. They set up lawn furniture and you have your own little makeshift bar supplied by the store.

Speaking of stores, things are, for the most part, crazy-ass-shit-cheap here. A meal in a restaurant often costs like 3 dollars. Bottles of vodka at the convenince store for about 3 dollars, too.

I love seeing familliar products with strange and unfamilliar labels. There aren't all things I recognized, but it gives a good idea of what a store shelf looks like here. Oh, and the juice and pills are for the cold I had the other day.

I'm feeling a lot better now, thanks.

So, exploring near the house a little more, you'll find a pretty neat outdoor market...

Yeah, despite the roof, that is outdoors. It's a pretty popular way to sell things here. There's one across town that's literally about 10 or 15 times the size of this one, and also runs underground. It's quite the madness.

The food here is delish for the most part. They've got these seafood places everywhere, though (that I've yet to try) that have the product outside the store. Still alive. Swimming in tanks.

Some of these fish a fucking huge. Anyone who knows my one true phobia will know how much I love to walk by this on my way to the subway every morning. Also, every time I've seen the guy come out to try and fish a meal out of the tanks, the food makes a run for it, and flops out of the butterfly net and tries to boot it down the street. With little success, of course. I've yet to see a crab try, though.

So I guess I should mention work. The job's not hard (teaching english to kids ages 4 - 14), but some (maybe one) of my younger kids is pure evil. I'm told that in Korea, if there's something seriously like, medically chemically imbalanced about your kids, the parents are generally too ashamed (or rather, proud of their child) to admit it, so the kid is put in with all the others.

On the flipside, however, the majority of the other kids are too fucking adorable to let one jerkoff spoil it. In fact, my favourite kid is in the class with my least favourite. She's aaaadorable and she's only about 4 or 5 I wanna steal her and raise her as my own, but I don't think that would go over real well, 'specially not when I've only been there like a week. I think the contract said something about needing a few months of seniority before you could steal students.

This is around where I work, by the way. Oh, and that neon cross you see in the picture there? They're far more plentiful than you'd imagine. I've looked out on the city skyline and have been able to count 7 at once, just in a little chunk of Seoul. Apparently Christianity mixed well with some of the older eastern religions here.

And that's about it for now. I'll reiterate that I love it here. It's taken on a strange familiarity, like it feels more like home for now, instead of just aplace that I'm visiting. That's good, since I'll be here a year.

I miss you all, and I miss real home, but I'm surviving. Of course I do. Most of the time, there's just so much happening around me that I hardly get a chance to sit down and ponder home. That's good; that's the point. I wanted a year that spun my head. So far this is everything I wanted and expected.

I'll leave with a chuckle. See, knockoff brands are huge here. You can buy Abercrombie and Eitch clothes, for instance. Here's my one counterfeit purchase so far:

Sharkie?

Take care folk. I'll update again when I find enough time away from living my crazy life to write about it.

(Note: I orignially posted this on another website, but migrated it when I started this blog)