Man, I didn't realize just how badly I needed a day out of Seoul. My friend Tom, who is escaping soon to Taiwan, invited me down to Changwon - South Korea's alternative capital in case Seoul gets bombed to bits by Kim Jong-Il - where he lives and works for some fun and a cherry blossom festival. The weather reports forecasted rain for this weekend (no surprise there), but I wanted to get out and see my buddy before he left, as well as see a bit of Korea, so on Saturday (would've gone Friday night but he works Saturdays) I took the "express" bus (five hours) to Changwon from the express terminal, which is an hour's subway ride away from where I live. It was a long trip, but no matter.
After a minor debacle with a cab driver taking as long as he could get away with to bring me to Tom's apartment, I saw my friend outside the Family Mart, drinking, like ya do, with two other foreigners - an Irish lass, and, I believe, a South African. This sort of thing is standard foreigner procedure in Korea, you see.
From there, we proceeded to a party with his coworkers and friends on the roof of their apartment building - but first, of course, we needed booze. Which brought us to our first adventure:
Creepy Construction Worker Guy
We wandered on down to a small grocery store in a basement. On our way down we passed a tall, strange ajosshi in coveralls and a yellow construction worker's helmet, who started rambling in Korean upon seeing Tom. We believe he thought Tom was Russian.
Anyway, we proceeded on to the beer aisle, while we looked at our (very sadly limited) options. But the creepy fellow had followed us and began gesturing at the dried fish foodstuffs on the racks while making what I believe had to be suggestive comments. We did our best to talk with him, but we didn't know a scrap of his language, and nor did he ours.
When we picked up our beer (maekju), he perked up, as if genuinely impressed that we were buying (so much?) beer. He started rambling on about alcohol, and the various benefits that could be derived from it, in the most physical manner possible: he snatched at Tom's crotch, and pulled his hand back up to his face with a vigorous sniffing. He then did the same to me, making, much to my dismay, contact with the bits he was apparently talking about. As far as I could tell, he was trying to tell us that a) beer makes you manly, or b) it makes your urine stink.
After the crotch-grabbing incident, we hurried away from the crazy fellow, who was happily distracted by one of the store employees as he elaborated on the benefits of maekju.
We went on to the roof, where I met some of his quite fun and lovely coworkers and friends, chatted a while, till it got cold and we retired to someone's apartment for more drinking and chatting and suchlike with more people showing up.
At that point we (or somebody, anyway) decided it was time to go to a nightclub, which was apparently all you can drink for 15,000 won, a pretty nice deal when they throw in platters of fruit for free. I tore up the dancefloor all night with Mina, one of the Korean girls who work at their school... good times.
It was about 4:30 AM when, in a slow, random trickle, we somewhat disorientatedly left the club - and we unfortunately missed the creepy short fellow stalking one of the girls. Probably (hopefully) harmless, but would've been fun to see.
I need more nights like that. Tales (and maybe pictures, if you're not on Facebook) of the next day to follow.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Clueless
So now I've got to suddenly rearrange everything I thought I knew and figure out some kind of new plan. It's a daunting task.
At least it's sunny out again...
On a more positive note, tomorrow I'm taking a five-hour bus to Changwon to see a friend and the cherry blossom festival. Finally absorbing a little Korean culture, perhaps. Cherry blossoms are supposed to be beautiful... and Changwon should be a bit more natural than Seoul... so let's hope for a positive iteration of Spring here.
I'll bring my camera.
At least it's sunny out again...
On a more positive note, tomorrow I'm taking a five-hour bus to Changwon to see a friend and the cherry blossom festival. Finally absorbing a little Korean culture, perhaps. Cherry blossoms are supposed to be beautiful... and Changwon should be a bit more natural than Seoul... so let's hope for a positive iteration of Spring here.
I'll bring my camera.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Ye gods.
I had something to post about Easter last weekend, but it just kind of fell off... I'll put it up later. Today I'm just shocked and appalled and dismayed at the unreasonableness of nature in this country.
At first it seemed like unfortunate coincidence, but it's happened far too often - there must be some kind of malevolent force or at least a decent scientific explanation of the phenomenon. It is as follows:
No matter how beautiful and sunny and lovely the weekdays in Seoul are, the weekends will be utter crap.
This has been my experience over the past four months here... I believe I've seen two nice weekends, and those were both a while ago now. At this point I can say with complete confidence that something causes weekends to become grey and cold and wet and dark and altogether unpleasant, even though on Friday and the following Monday the sun will shine and the sky will radiate blueness.
So what causes this? Is it the fact that traffic picks up on weekends as everyone frantically drives out of Seoul to escape the certainty of terrible weekend weather, pollutants from all the cars spewing into the air and becoming both the cause and the effect of this bizarre and depressing phenomenon?
What a country. I need a vacation.
At first it seemed like unfortunate coincidence, but it's happened far too often - there must be some kind of malevolent force or at least a decent scientific explanation of the phenomenon. It is as follows:
No matter how beautiful and sunny and lovely the weekdays in Seoul are, the weekends will be utter crap.
This has been my experience over the past four months here... I believe I've seen two nice weekends, and those were both a while ago now. At this point I can say with complete confidence that something causes weekends to become grey and cold and wet and dark and altogether unpleasant, even though on Friday and the following Monday the sun will shine and the sky will radiate blueness.
So what causes this? Is it the fact that traffic picks up on weekends as everyone frantically drives out of Seoul to escape the certainty of terrible weekend weather, pollutants from all the cars spewing into the air and becoming both the cause and the effect of this bizarre and depressing phenomenon?
What a country. I need a vacation.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Dongdaemun Stadium
Ack, I'm kind of bad about updating, aren't I?
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.
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.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Cliche #604: Emotional Roller-Coaster
It's trite, but there's a reason cliches are cliche. What better image is there to describe extreme emotional highs and lows in a short period?
Two Fridays ago, I was happy and excited about my life here in Korea. Hapkido was going well, I had received an e-mail saying my book (Manga Studio for Dummies) would arrive within two days, and a new term was coming with a new schedule showing fewer hours and new classes, all of them late elementary to early middle school, the group of kids I seem, based on the past term, to get on with best. A friend told me she'd be arriving in Korea to teach not too far away by subway. I was thinking about my comic. Things looked good.
Then on Monday, we had a meeting, in which we were given yet another revision of the schedule, with my awesome classes going to a new teacher and me getting two classes of the second-lowest level and age they have at this school, as well as one each of the next two levels. Young children. Yikes. I've never really understood young children, and the youngest groups in my previous term were the ones I'd had the most trouble with. Surely my head instructor had noticed this when going over our CCTVs? Surely there was some mistake? But after some questioning and nagging and a promise he'd look into changes, I was told that it was too late and there was no way to revise the schedule.
Happiness and anticipation move out of the way. Dread settles in comfortably.
I had gotten into an absolute funk. No energy, except in hapkido class. My favourite classes felt like they were dragging. Even the new material I was teaching, which was actually exciting compared to the stuff we'd had, felt like suck. I was half-convinced I would hate it and not be able to get through the coming three months. It's amazing what one little twist can do. Ah, and also, Manga Studio for Dummies, though the e-mail had said it shipped, was not in my hands. All week.
A little over three hours ago I was still filled with dread. My first class was to be my youngest group. Couple that with the usual dread of having to make the first impression on a new pile of people, and things weren't feeling nice. But I tried to make the best of it, tried to convince myself that I'd have a good crop of students, and went in with as much energy as I could muster and as much smiliness and excitement as I could inject.
Damn, was I surprised.
Not only did the material not completely suck (a major problem I'd had with the level above this one last term), but the kids were (mostly) respectful and paid attention. They listened, they interacted, they laughed at my silly drawings, and it was actually, dare I say it... fun.
So to those who had to deal with my dread, my apologies.
I'm excited once again. Tomorrow I have another class of the same level of kids... hopefully, if I do things the same as today, the rest of the term will be good. The key, I've learned, is to start out strict, establish your rules, call them on it when they break 'em, and force the timid ones to interact... and at the same time, relate yourself to the kids. I opened the class with an attendance check in which I called the kids' names - then asked each one to talk about him or herself for a bit. I occasionally interjected some - like when a girl said she liked to draw dragons, I mentioned my own monster-drawing.
It was good.
Let's hope things go well tomorrow.
Ah, yes. My book had apparently delivered, but the ajosshi who "guards" the building had mistaken my room number on the package (1413). I looked into his office and saw a book-shaped box with 413 on it, and took some initiative and walked in. He was confused, but I pointed to my name on the box, pointed to myself a few times, and he seemed to get it. At least, I thought so, but then I got a buzz on my intercom saying, "Box - four-one-three, you one-four-one-three! Wrong box! Four-one-three! Four-one-three!" Happily, it was remedied easily enough once I had him put on his glasses.
Time to plan out some comic-drawing practice!
Two Fridays ago, I was happy and excited about my life here in Korea. Hapkido was going well, I had received an e-mail saying my book (Manga Studio for Dummies) would arrive within two days, and a new term was coming with a new schedule showing fewer hours and new classes, all of them late elementary to early middle school, the group of kids I seem, based on the past term, to get on with best. A friend told me she'd be arriving in Korea to teach not too far away by subway. I was thinking about my comic. Things looked good.
Then on Monday, we had a meeting, in which we were given yet another revision of the schedule, with my awesome classes going to a new teacher and me getting two classes of the second-lowest level and age they have at this school, as well as one each of the next two levels. Young children. Yikes. I've never really understood young children, and the youngest groups in my previous term were the ones I'd had the most trouble with. Surely my head instructor had noticed this when going over our CCTVs? Surely there was some mistake? But after some questioning and nagging and a promise he'd look into changes, I was told that it was too late and there was no way to revise the schedule.
Happiness and anticipation move out of the way. Dread settles in comfortably.
I had gotten into an absolute funk. No energy, except in hapkido class. My favourite classes felt like they were dragging. Even the new material I was teaching, which was actually exciting compared to the stuff we'd had, felt like suck. I was half-convinced I would hate it and not be able to get through the coming three months. It's amazing what one little twist can do. Ah, and also, Manga Studio for Dummies, though the e-mail had said it shipped, was not in my hands. All week.
A little over three hours ago I was still filled with dread. My first class was to be my youngest group. Couple that with the usual dread of having to make the first impression on a new pile of people, and things weren't feeling nice. But I tried to make the best of it, tried to convince myself that I'd have a good crop of students, and went in with as much energy as I could muster and as much smiliness and excitement as I could inject.
Damn, was I surprised.
Not only did the material not completely suck (a major problem I'd had with the level above this one last term), but the kids were (mostly) respectful and paid attention. They listened, they interacted, they laughed at my silly drawings, and it was actually, dare I say it... fun.
So to those who had to deal with my dread, my apologies.
I'm excited once again. Tomorrow I have another class of the same level of kids... hopefully, if I do things the same as today, the rest of the term will be good. The key, I've learned, is to start out strict, establish your rules, call them on it when they break 'em, and force the timid ones to interact... and at the same time, relate yourself to the kids. I opened the class with an attendance check in which I called the kids' names - then asked each one to talk about him or herself for a bit. I occasionally interjected some - like when a girl said she liked to draw dragons, I mentioned my own monster-drawing.
It was good.
Let's hope things go well tomorrow.
Ah, yes. My book had apparently delivered, but the ajosshi who "guards" the building had mistaken my room number on the package (1413). I looked into his office and saw a book-shaped box with 413 on it, and took some initiative and walked in. He was confused, but I pointed to my name on the box, pointed to myself a few times, and he seemed to get it. At least, I thought so, but then I got a buzz on my intercom saying, "Box - four-one-three, you one-four-one-three! Wrong box! Four-one-three! Four-one-three!" Happily, it was remedied easily enough once I had him put on his glasses.
Time to plan out some comic-drawing practice!
Friday, February 8, 2008
Bonus post!
Recently, news came out that MSG is a significant contributor to stomach cancer. Coincidentally, I saw in the subway today this advert:
If the resolution is too low to read the print at the bottom, it says: "Wellthy Food... Well-being+Healthy"
So what we have here is an advertisement promoting MSG as health food.
...
If the resolution is too low to read the print at the bottom, it says: "Wellthy Food... Well-being+Healthy"
So what we have here is an advertisement promoting MSG as health food.
...
How I Spent my Lunar New Year
Not having the scheduling-ahead abilities of some of my family (eg. aunt Karen), I'm stuck in Korea for the holiday. For the Lunar New Year, Seoul empties itself of a huge section of its population, so plane ticket prices skyrocket, ferries become overbooked, and basically, if you don't plan ahead, you can't go anywhere. On Wednesday the roads were completely congested. Thursday morning (the actual New Year Day), the eight-lane road that goes by my apartment had about twelve cars go by in twenty minutes.
Seoul is known for its crowded subways. So here's a station on New Year day:
Another station shot:
And waiting for the #2 train, the busiest line in the city in the middle of the afternoon, when normally you can't move for the crowds:
The reason I was on the subway, if you're curious, is that I was on my way out of Seoul to Namyangju, the home base of Matthew, a fellow former CDI trainee from the American South. I figured since I couldn't go away for the holiday, I might as well do something fun - and he lives a four thousand won cab ride away from a ski resort.
The last time I went skiing I believe I was still in elementary school, but it's amazing how quickly things come back to you. And it's a surprising happy feeling to rediscover that you enjoy doing things you used to enjoy doing. After two spills, I was weaving down the hills like I never took a twelve-year break from skiing.
It was a tremendously fun experience, but was marred slightly by the bloody idiots flooding the slopes that night. I guess during the holiday is when people decide to try skiing for the first time, or maybe it's just a coincidence that the majority of people who came to the resort that night were jerks, but all down the hills, scattered randomly, were people sitting and taking a break or standing around even smoking, while people going down had to veer and fly off jumps and into fences trying to avoid them. Amazing.
Still, it was fun. And today, although we didn't get to see Sweeney Todd as we'd planned (sold out), I got myself an mp3/video player at a steep discount and bootleg DVDs of my favourite television shows. I'm pleased with myself.
Of course, I'm completely exhausted now, having only just gotten home at about 8:00 pm. Tonight I think I'll just watch a couple of episodes of Doctor Who, sleep, and try to do something interesting tomorrow.
Happy Year of the Rat, all.
Seoul is known for its crowded subways. So here's a station on New Year day:
Another station shot:
And waiting for the #2 train, the busiest line in the city in the middle of the afternoon, when normally you can't move for the crowds:
The reason I was on the subway, if you're curious, is that I was on my way out of Seoul to Namyangju, the home base of Matthew, a fellow former CDI trainee from the American South. I figured since I couldn't go away for the holiday, I might as well do something fun - and he lives a four thousand won cab ride away from a ski resort.
The last time I went skiing I believe I was still in elementary school, but it's amazing how quickly things come back to you. And it's a surprising happy feeling to rediscover that you enjoy doing things you used to enjoy doing. After two spills, I was weaving down the hills like I never took a twelve-year break from skiing.
It was a tremendously fun experience, but was marred slightly by the bloody idiots flooding the slopes that night. I guess during the holiday is when people decide to try skiing for the first time, or maybe it's just a coincidence that the majority of people who came to the resort that night were jerks, but all down the hills, scattered randomly, were people sitting and taking a break or standing around even smoking, while people going down had to veer and fly off jumps and into fences trying to avoid them. Amazing.
Still, it was fun. And today, although we didn't get to see Sweeney Todd as we'd planned (sold out), I got myself an mp3/video player at a steep discount and bootleg DVDs of my favourite television shows. I'm pleased with myself.
Of course, I'm completely exhausted now, having only just gotten home at about 8:00 pm. Tonight I think I'll just watch a couple of episodes of Doctor Who, sleep, and try to do something interesting tomorrow.
Happy Year of the Rat, all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)