Korea's been okay to me over the past couple of weeks. Winter has been very reluctantly releasing its stranglehold on Seoul... we see days around a nice, balmy eight degrees, and the very next day the ground will be covered with snow and ice... but I think it's finally let up, which can only mean one thing: Yellow Dust, that fifth season wherein poisonous dust storms streak across the sky and even the foreigners wear masks on the streets. There have, according to Army monitoring sites, been days at areas across Seoul where the danger level has been off the charts, but here in Gangseo we've not seen a speck, so far as I can tell. Hopefully that remains the case and I get an unexpected perk of living in such a less-than-interesting region.
I've not been going out much, though our celebration in greeting of the new teacher was fun. We went to Wild Vill after far too much heavy Chinese food and sweet but strong Chinese liquor and horrible-as-usual Korean beer, where there were darts and bartenders who put on shows involving the spinning of flaming liquor bottles. Good times. I helped Nick win 10,000 won in a rather abysmal darts game. A lot of my time has been spent reading or cursing the unpredictable weather - last weekend I had planned to go mountain-hiking, only to be foiled by one of those unexpected bad days. But I've gotten a fair bit of progress done on my graphic novel project, so I can't complain too much.
Hapkido has been great as ever, though two Fridays ago Nick and I walked into the class as normal a bit before 11:30, expecting a usual day, and the place was overrun with children. Only the older sonseignim was there, and his English is nonexistent, so I had to sit politely and confusedly in the office until the younger instructor came in. After a few requests for an explanation, it turned out that every month they have a testing class at this time... so we had a surprise grading. Having only been there a couple weeks, I don't think we did too spectacularly... but we've moved up on the belt chart with the terrible photographs on it, so we must have done okay. The class is back to normal now, and it's excellent. It's a great reason to get up in the mornings.
Regardless, that's not the main point of today's post.
Today's post is about Dongdaemun Stadium, formerly an important athletic building and now the site of Seoul's big flea market. The place is full of vendors selling anything from massively-cut-price clothing to weapons to sex toys and bootleg porn DVDs. They've even got cassette tapes. It was an experience walking around in there... it was like being in some of the seedier parts of Paris's antiques market. A lot of fun, and I kind of wish I'd been there with a) more money and b) competence in the language.
My favourite parts, of course, were the people selling absolutely anything they had - one vendor had constructed a wall of miscellaneous junk supported at the bottom by a tangle of assorted electronics cables and occasionally reinforced with old luggage. Upon this pile were busted-up camcorders, tools, and the occasional musical instrument. It was the flea market equivalent of a catacombs. It's a potential gold mine of weird crap - sadly, the limited space in between aisles and the constant press of people makes proper digging impossible.
But within this dizzying array of random and useless things, I found a wondrous treasure.
Yes, I have realized one of my life's ambitions. Well, closer to partially-realized, to be honest, because it could be bigger, but it's a great placeholder for now.
For many, many years I have wished for a stuffed (read: taxidermy) crocodile to hang from my ceiling, a dream influenced mainly by the wizards of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, whose bedrooms simply must, for some unexplained reason, be decorated with one of these reptiles.
Well, it's smaller than I hope for, and it's not technically a crocodile, but I present to you my new pet:
He doesn't do much, but he's fun to have around.
And that's it for now. I close wondering whether I'm going to have to tell off my inconsiderate next-door neighbour again, who has an unfortunate habit of playing the television at ridiculous volumes. The walls are concrete here, but that's not enough to stop his annoying pastime from reaching my ears. Alas...
I hope all's well back home in Canada and the States and Ireland and wherever else people may be reading from. Goodbye from Korea.
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