In the Love Motel in Gwanju...
Funny scene when we got to the one room that was available and popped the key in the "rememberer." The porn movie hopped onto the TV as the other lights came up. Ed, Jae, POSSLQ, Jong-kun and his Dad - we all stared in shock, laughed, and turned it off. Unfortunately Korean porn is soft core... alas...
computer in the room.. no white lights.. all red lights.. a variety of oils and cleaning liquids, ... porno on the TV?
If the girlfriend wasn't here I might even try to get laid. ;-)
New Year's Eve in Korea.. we're off to it...
I'll fill in the last two days in a bit but my laptop is elsewhere for the moment.....
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Thursday, December 29, 2005
DAY 10: MORE IN THE TOURISM LINE
MORNING COMES EARLY - WHICH SUCKS
POSSLQ woke up before 7 am, completely cured of her disease and decided to share the good news with a cavalcade of grunts, bangs, and door-slams. A gentle request that she shut up or be killed, and I was back to sleep til about 9.
A quick morning trip to the PC Bang and the rest of the crew went out for porridge. I crawled back to the pad for a shower. We gathered up our laundry and dropped it off at a local laundromat and then headed into Seoul for a meal with Ed's father. These social events are multiplying at an alarming rate.
Ed has developed another evil power, the "circle of silence" in which things are decided and not communicated. One thing that came out of the circle of silence is that we are on the hook for another meal with Mr. Park on our last night in town. My liver is still in jeopardy.
We met Ed's dad for some bulgogi which was a delicious as it always is, and then we headed off to the Korean national museum at Yongnam. A funny scene at the ticket booth where Ed kept pushing money at the woman and she kept pushing it back. Finally the guy next to Ed told us it was free and we slunk away feeling silly for holding up line for free tickets. Turns out that since it just moved to its new location across the river, the museum is free until next year.
Well, that's a few days away, but we made it.
THE BIG MUSEUM OF KOREA
The place is vast and covers a lot of Asian history, all Korean history, adds a few things that are obviously made up, and according to Ed, who was at constant war with what the plaques on the wall were telling us, contains 'controversial' material.
While I personally was there at least 1,000 Koreans walked through all of this without the slightest hint of disagreement with the wall plaques. Eddie, however, too the time to deny that the Chinese had ever contributed even the slightest scrap of cultural content to Korea.
I fear Ed is developing a new evil power, the "cone of controversiality!" Fortunately the cone seems only to be active when anyone invokes the power of Chinese culture and that doesn't happen that much in daily existence.
Here is the "Temple of Inummerable Stories: From Top to Bottom":
top
bottom
After the museum we caught a cab up to the Geongye River and this allowed me to take some pretty cool pictures. If I come back to Seoul, and I hope to, I will bring my tripod and some time so I can really set up for pictures. Here is a day/night contrast of the Geongye River as well as some pictures of the excellent water and light show.
Geongye Day
And night
Water and Light Show
After the river we walked past an alleyway we had been down before. Again this provided me with a good opportunity to take a shot showing the contrast between night and day. Not the clearest contrast, which is really to be found in the northeast section of Seoul which is pretty grubby and dirty during the day, but still indicative.
Alley in Day (With bonus banner!)
Alley at Night (With bonus beauty!)
Finally, two photos.
One for the POSSLQ of a picture that might interest her brother:
for me it's unbearable
and one more of my obsessive shots of night vendors ;-):
Please note the woman who is, in expectation, choking herself even before she eats the food.
Tomorrow: pix from hicks in the sticks!
POSSLQ woke up before 7 am, completely cured of her disease and decided to share the good news with a cavalcade of grunts, bangs, and door-slams. A gentle request that she shut up or be killed, and I was back to sleep til about 9.
A quick morning trip to the PC Bang and the rest of the crew went out for porridge. I crawled back to the pad for a shower. We gathered up our laundry and dropped it off at a local laundromat and then headed into Seoul for a meal with Ed's father. These social events are multiplying at an alarming rate.
Ed has developed another evil power, the "circle of silence" in which things are decided and not communicated. One thing that came out of the circle of silence is that we are on the hook for another meal with Mr. Park on our last night in town. My liver is still in jeopardy.
We met Ed's dad for some bulgogi which was a delicious as it always is, and then we headed off to the Korean national museum at Yongnam. A funny scene at the ticket booth where Ed kept pushing money at the woman and she kept pushing it back. Finally the guy next to Ed told us it was free and we slunk away feeling silly for holding up line for free tickets. Turns out that since it just moved to its new location across the river, the museum is free until next year.
Well, that's a few days away, but we made it.
THE BIG MUSEUM OF KOREA
The place is vast and covers a lot of Asian history, all Korean history, adds a few things that are obviously made up, and according to Ed, who was at constant war with what the plaques on the wall were telling us, contains 'controversial' material.
While I personally was there at least 1,000 Koreans walked through all of this without the slightest hint of disagreement with the wall plaques. Eddie, however, too the time to deny that the Chinese had ever contributed even the slightest scrap of cultural content to Korea.
I fear Ed is developing a new evil power, the "cone of controversiality!" Fortunately the cone seems only to be active when anyone invokes the power of Chinese culture and that doesn't happen that much in daily existence.
Here is the "Temple of Inummerable Stories: From Top to Bottom":
top
bottom
After the museum we caught a cab up to the Geongye River and this allowed me to take some pretty cool pictures. If I come back to Seoul, and I hope to, I will bring my tripod and some time so I can really set up for pictures. Here is a day/night contrast of the Geongye River as well as some pictures of the excellent water and light show.
Geongye Day
And night
Water and Light Show
After the river we walked past an alleyway we had been down before. Again this provided me with a good opportunity to take a shot showing the contrast between night and day. Not the clearest contrast, which is really to be found in the northeast section of Seoul which is pretty grubby and dirty during the day, but still indicative.
Alley in Day (With bonus banner!)
Alley at Night (With bonus beauty!)
Finally, two photos.
One for the POSSLQ of a picture that might interest her brother:
for me it's unbearable
and one more of my obsessive shots of night vendors ;-):
Please note the woman who is, in expectation, choking herself even before she eats the food.
Tomorrow: pix from hicks in the sticks!
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
DAY NINE: "WELCOME TO KOREA, PLEASE TO EVACUATE YOUR BOWEL. AND ENJOY YOUR STAY!"
Most guidebooks don't cover it, but one 'event' you will likely come across in Seoul is the forced extrusion of your own intestines.
The illness that struck me (from the waist down) and struck Ed (from the waist up) decided that the POSSLQ was small enough to hit from both sides. At about 6 this morning she lept out of bed (an unlikelihood at most times, given her extreme laziness) and shot into the bathroom where, semi-beknownst to me, she sat on our excellently technological toilet for about 45 minutes. It occurs to me that Koreans have excellent toilets because the food they routinely eat means they require them.
POSSLQ then took a soothing bath and had a refreshing bout of vomiting. This was followed by some of Ed's symptoms, chills and lightheadedness, though strangely, no more lying than normal. A brief effort at having some water ended in tragedy, and we are now sitting around monitoring symptoms to determine if we can safely move across town or not. She seems slightly improved, so it may be a go.
And it was. Yvonne removed her change from the safe - she re-opened the safe last evening to put all her US currency change in it. I think she underestimates the cunning of the local criminal classes who would probably steal wet towels and dust bunnies before they would take her $1.23 in assorted coins.
Ed and Jae had social commitments so Yvonne and I spent the day at the flat. She rolled about in pain and vomited randomly. I read.
Recent (1850 on) Korean history is pretty much a story of betrayals and oppressions and the whole country is, in one way of looking at it, in a permanent state of "1.5" status, always stuck between its 'natural' culture and some monolithic and invasive culture on the other side (Japan, US, Russia).
Interesting because it has some literary implications that I will have to discuss with Ed when we are safely back in the bosom of democracy. But for now it is time for more beer as the final Monday Night Football has just come on the Armed Forces Network and I would be some kind of commie if I didn't give props!
The illness that struck me (from the waist down) and struck Ed (from the waist up) decided that the POSSLQ was small enough to hit from both sides. At about 6 this morning she lept out of bed (an unlikelihood at most times, given her extreme laziness) and shot into the bathroom where, semi-beknownst to me, she sat on our excellently technological toilet for about 45 minutes. It occurs to me that Koreans have excellent toilets because the food they routinely eat means they require them.
POSSLQ then took a soothing bath and had a refreshing bout of vomiting. This was followed by some of Ed's symptoms, chills and lightheadedness, though strangely, no more lying than normal. A brief effort at having some water ended in tragedy, and we are now sitting around monitoring symptoms to determine if we can safely move across town or not. She seems slightly improved, so it may be a go.
And it was. Yvonne removed her change from the safe - she re-opened the safe last evening to put all her US currency change in it. I think she underestimates the cunning of the local criminal classes who would probably steal wet towels and dust bunnies before they would take her $1.23 in assorted coins.
Ed and Jae had social commitments so Yvonne and I spent the day at the flat. She rolled about in pain and vomited randomly. I read.
Recent (1850 on) Korean history is pretty much a story of betrayals and oppressions and the whole country is, in one way of looking at it, in a permanent state of "1.5" status, always stuck between its 'natural' culture and some monolithic and invasive culture on the other side (Japan, US, Russia).
Interesting because it has some literary implications that I will have to discuss with Ed when we are safely back in the bosom of democracy. But for now it is time for more beer as the final Monday Night Football has just come on the Armed Forces Network and I would be some kind of commie if I didn't give props!
DAY EIGHT: ME AND MY SHADOW
DAY EIGHT: WE DO THE TOURIST "THING"
Day eight was all about being a tourist and it was my best day here. Ed was off to Gimpo again - to see various relatives - and Jae had gone with him. I think I must have mentioned, somewhere in here, that we are in Korea because they have become engaged and now they must indulge in some kind of of weird Korean family dance. Anyway, Ed was going to stay out in Gimpo overnight and Jae would return later to our apartment on the wrong side of town.
In their absence POSSLQ and I went to Naemdun Market and to the up-scale one. She totally dug the old market and the following pictures are of various things in the market. With POSSLQ there was more time to take pictures, as she was as interested in the market at I was.
Here are various photos from the market
and a shameful admission of inadequacy from a papier-mache bear:
We then headed to the bookstore (POSSLQ's Korean xmas gift was a gift certificate) where we purchased books about Korea and then up to Gyeongbkukgong which was thoroughly cool. So cool we will go back tomorrow (maybe, for a reason which will be explained later).
Here are some quick photos from the palace:
Great Kings Ooga and Booga
Their "associate" Mr. Wooga
A lovely diorama of the Great Han Army marching relentlessly on the Cabbage Fields of Cholla-Do
Some bird..
We came back to our hotel and, because we are complete idiots, had 30,000 Won worth of one drink each (I swear, the best Gin and Tonic I've Ever Had!)
That night the Prince of Lies called us with his latest whopper.
He had left Gimpo after telling his relatives that we were in trouble in Seoul and he needed to save us. I haven't heard the specifics yet, but it is good to know that if I come back for his wedding his family will consider me not only a stinking foreigner, but an incompetent stinking foreigner.
We hung out, read our books, watched a bit of TV and slept.
Day eight was all about being a tourist and it was my best day here. Ed was off to Gimpo again - to see various relatives - and Jae had gone with him. I think I must have mentioned, somewhere in here, that we are in Korea because they have become engaged and now they must indulge in some kind of of weird Korean family dance. Anyway, Ed was going to stay out in Gimpo overnight and Jae would return later to our apartment on the wrong side of town.
In their absence POSSLQ and I went to Naemdun Market and to the up-scale one. She totally dug the old market and the following pictures are of various things in the market. With POSSLQ there was more time to take pictures, as she was as interested in the market at I was.
Here are various photos from the market
and a shameful admission of inadequacy from a papier-mache bear:
We then headed to the bookstore (POSSLQ's Korean xmas gift was a gift certificate) where we purchased books about Korea and then up to Gyeongbkukgong which was thoroughly cool. So cool we will go back tomorrow (maybe, for a reason which will be explained later).
Here are some quick photos from the palace:
Great Kings Ooga and Booga
Their "associate" Mr. Wooga
A lovely diorama of the Great Han Army marching relentlessly on the Cabbage Fields of Cholla-Do
Some bird..
We came back to our hotel and, because we are complete idiots, had 30,000 Won worth of one drink each (I swear, the best Gin and Tonic I've Ever Had!)
That night the Prince of Lies called us with his latest whopper.
He had left Gimpo after telling his relatives that we were in trouble in Seoul and he needed to save us. I haven't heard the specifics yet, but it is good to know that if I come back for his wedding his family will consider me not only a stinking foreigner, but an incompetent stinking foreigner.
We hung out, read our books, watched a bit of TV and slept.
DAY SEVEN: RECOVERY AND THE PRINCE OF LIES
HOTEL LIVING
The day was spent more or less recovering from the illnesses of the previous day. We went to Seoul and had Udo noodles which are always a good thing. Then we headed across the Han river to find the Imperial Palace Hotel. Which, oddly, the cabbie could not identify. Several phone-calls (cellular of course) later we discovered that the hotel used to be called the "Amiga" and the change in names had not yet taken in the brains of the cabbies. Nice hotel though, and we got a room upgrade because our rooms were not ready and it was already mid-afternoon. I hied myself hence to my room and first boggled at all the booze available at the minibar and on the shelves above it. Booze, of course, I was still to sick to even try.
The bathroom was a thing of beauty and the toilet was as complicated as the space shuttle. Here are two pictures of the control panel attached to the thing. It even had a built in clock in case you are evacuating yourself on some kind of timetable.
The side view
The top view
I played around with the various controls and got several cheap thrills and very clean. Cleaner, perhaps, than I should have been.
I lolled around the room and watched Van Helsing. A truly horrible but entertaining movie. At about 4 Jae called me on the room phone and asked if I wanted to go out to eat. I was still illing, so I said no. Jae said she would call me back at about 6 and some group of us would head out on the airport bus to Incheon to pick up the POSSLQ. I actually drank a beer and got away with it and then started dressing. Got a panicked call from Ed on the room phone. He said he had called me 6 times. Well, on the cell phone which I had turned off. I had already missed the 6:05 and so I raced to the lobby.
ED - THE PRINCE OF LIES
Here Ed's proclivity for lies kicked into action. I get down to the lobby and he says, "there is just one problem, you needed a reservation made yesterday. The bus is probably full." I started thinking frantically about how we were going to deal with this. We talked about who would go if there was just one ticket (me) and who would go if there were two (Jae's brother). We talked about how we would contact the POSSLQ if we couldn't get on the bus. We talked about all kinds of plans and schemes to get around the full-bus problem. In fact we talked about all these problems until THE COMPLETELY EMPTY BUS PULLED UP AT THE HOTEL!!!
I turned to punch Ed, but unnacountably he was sitting in a lotus position on the floor humming. I didn't have time to figure this out and lept onto the bus. We headed into Incheon and other than waiting for Yvonne at the wrong gate everything was good.
On the way over I talked with Jae's brother about Korean architecture and after we both became exhausted with the language barrier, we slumped into our seats and silently watch the Han and all the pretty lights spin by. If I came back to Seoul alone I would certainly spend more time out with the camera. This is an amazing city by night.
We got back to the Hotel at about 9:30 and stepped into the bar. I ordered a Gin and Tonic and Yvonne ordered a green tea. The Gin and Tonic was perhaps the best one I have ever had and I assume the green tea was equally good. It better have been because the Green Tea cost 15,000 Won and the G&T cost 13,000 Won. The first outrageous thing about this is the price. The second outrageous thing about it was the fact that the Tea cost more than the Gin & Tonic.
What kind of country is this?
We rolled a taxi-cab into downtown and found a Mexican restaurant that also served clam-chowder and hamburgers. Everyone chowed down and the day was over.
PREVIOUS FOOD FIGHTS
A couple of days before this I was out with Ed, Jae and brother eating lunch. We ordered a variety of things including some kind of soup straight out of the first scene of Macbeth. It was called Kimcheegogeegee, or something like that. Anyway, in traditional Korean fashion it went into the personal bowls and then food and chopstix flew like Bruce Lee kicks. Ed would take nasty little morsels from the small bowls, dip them in his soup and eat them with relish (the attitude, not the delicious condiment from the United States). I watched for a while while I chewed on a bean-pancake. Pretty good, the bean-pancake. So I took a piece of it with my chopstix and dipped it in the Kimcheegoogle (name still approximated).
It was like that moment in a Western Movie when the gunfighter rolls into town. The entire restaurant went quiet and stared at me. People with their backs to me stared, people in the bathroom stared at me, people who streamed in from North Korea and people who rose from their graves all stared at me. In that one second I was the complete center of attention of all Korea.
Ed stared. Hissed, "don't do that!"
I have learned better than to ask, so I just pulled my chopstix out of the Kimbochi-chi (I'm no longer even trying) and quickly swallowed the bean-pancake.
Air slowly came back into the room, flows of urine resumed in the bathrooms, the universe spun once again.
I was puzzled and finally asked why I shouldn't have dipped the bean-pancake into the soup. Ed dipped into his bag of Confucian "reasoning" and said, "they don't go together."
Oh, that explains it again.
A day later I asked why they didn't go together and Ed responded that they just don't. I tried again, "why is it against the rules to do that?"
Ed responded, "It isn't against the rules. There is no rule against it because no one would ever do it."
I would have explored this further, but Ed was lighting incense and preparing to sacrifice a white ox.
The day was spent more or less recovering from the illnesses of the previous day. We went to Seoul and had Udo noodles which are always a good thing. Then we headed across the Han river to find the Imperial Palace Hotel. Which, oddly, the cabbie could not identify. Several phone-calls (cellular of course) later we discovered that the hotel used to be called the "Amiga" and the change in names had not yet taken in the brains of the cabbies. Nice hotel though, and we got a room upgrade because our rooms were not ready and it was already mid-afternoon. I hied myself hence to my room and first boggled at all the booze available at the minibar and on the shelves above it. Booze, of course, I was still to sick to even try.
The bathroom was a thing of beauty and the toilet was as complicated as the space shuttle. Here are two pictures of the control panel attached to the thing. It even had a built in clock in case you are evacuating yourself on some kind of timetable.
The side view
The top view
I played around with the various controls and got several cheap thrills and very clean. Cleaner, perhaps, than I should have been.
I lolled around the room and watched Van Helsing. A truly horrible but entertaining movie. At about 4 Jae called me on the room phone and asked if I wanted to go out to eat. I was still illing, so I said no. Jae said she would call me back at about 6 and some group of us would head out on the airport bus to Incheon to pick up the POSSLQ. I actually drank a beer and got away with it and then started dressing. Got a panicked call from Ed on the room phone. He said he had called me 6 times. Well, on the cell phone which I had turned off. I had already missed the 6:05 and so I raced to the lobby.
ED - THE PRINCE OF LIES
Here Ed's proclivity for lies kicked into action. I get down to the lobby and he says, "there is just one problem, you needed a reservation made yesterday. The bus is probably full." I started thinking frantically about how we were going to deal with this. We talked about who would go if there was just one ticket (me) and who would go if there were two (Jae's brother). We talked about how we would contact the POSSLQ if we couldn't get on the bus. We talked about all kinds of plans and schemes to get around the full-bus problem. In fact we talked about all these problems until THE COMPLETELY EMPTY BUS PULLED UP AT THE HOTEL!!!
I turned to punch Ed, but unnacountably he was sitting in a lotus position on the floor humming. I didn't have time to figure this out and lept onto the bus. We headed into Incheon and other than waiting for Yvonne at the wrong gate everything was good.
On the way over I talked with Jae's brother about Korean architecture and after we both became exhausted with the language barrier, we slumped into our seats and silently watch the Han and all the pretty lights spin by. If I came back to Seoul alone I would certainly spend more time out with the camera. This is an amazing city by night.
We got back to the Hotel at about 9:30 and stepped into the bar. I ordered a Gin and Tonic and Yvonne ordered a green tea. The Gin and Tonic was perhaps the best one I have ever had and I assume the green tea was equally good. It better have been because the Green Tea cost 15,000 Won and the G&T cost 13,000 Won. The first outrageous thing about this is the price. The second outrageous thing about it was the fact that the Tea cost more than the Gin & Tonic.
What kind of country is this?
We rolled a taxi-cab into downtown and found a Mexican restaurant that also served clam-chowder and hamburgers. Everyone chowed down and the day was over.
PREVIOUS FOOD FIGHTS
A couple of days before this I was out with Ed, Jae and brother eating lunch. We ordered a variety of things including some kind of soup straight out of the first scene of Macbeth. It was called Kimcheegogeegee, or something like that. Anyway, in traditional Korean fashion it went into the personal bowls and then food and chopstix flew like Bruce Lee kicks. Ed would take nasty little morsels from the small bowls, dip them in his soup and eat them with relish (the attitude, not the delicious condiment from the United States). I watched for a while while I chewed on a bean-pancake. Pretty good, the bean-pancake. So I took a piece of it with my chopstix and dipped it in the Kimcheegoogle (name still approximated).
It was like that moment in a Western Movie when the gunfighter rolls into town. The entire restaurant went quiet and stared at me. People with their backs to me stared, people in the bathroom stared at me, people who streamed in from North Korea and people who rose from their graves all stared at me. In that one second I was the complete center of attention of all Korea.
Ed stared. Hissed, "don't do that!"
I have learned better than to ask, so I just pulled my chopstix out of the Kimbochi-chi (I'm no longer even trying) and quickly swallowed the bean-pancake.
Air slowly came back into the room, flows of urine resumed in the bathrooms, the universe spun once again.
I was puzzled and finally asked why I shouldn't have dipped the bean-pancake into the soup. Ed dipped into his bag of Confucian "reasoning" and said, "they don't go together."
Oh, that explains it again.
A day later I asked why they didn't go together and Ed responded that they just don't. I tried again, "why is it against the rules to do that?"
Ed responded, "It isn't against the rules. There is no rule against it because no one would ever do it."
I would have explored this further, but Ed was lighting incense and preparing to sacrifice a white ox.
Sunday, December 25, 2005
KOREA BY THE NUMBERS & THE ROADS TO NOWHERE
Day five already? It's flying by. Funny how accomplishing the simplest things in a foreign country can be so satisfying. Just navigating my way through purchasing a cup of coffee, a Korean Herald, and a porridge breakfast brings me vast satisfaction. That and I can almost pronounce "thank you" in Korean.
Headed out alone and was surprised at how empty the streets are on Saturday morning. I guess it makes sense, but the streets are usually so frenetic that this just seemed completely wrong. Also, nothing opens until 9 or so (with the lovely exception of the 24-hour PC Bang). So I diddled on the intarwebs for a while and went back to the street later. Rustling through the Herald I found a discussion of real-estate in Seoul. A boom-market which the government has attempted to reign in on the grounds that it is too speculative. So the government is proposing higher taxes on multiple home-owners (on the assumption they might be speculators) and increasing the housing supply by making public land available for construction and creating new towns on the South (desirable) side of Seoul. This is in response to an increase in house prices in Seoul that, in some areas, rose 20% at the start of the year.
The passage of the bills seems to be in question and apartment prices in Seoul are reaching historical highs. How high? Apartment prices in Seoul are 12.11 million won per pyeong (a pyeong is 3.3 meters square - or twelve hexadecimals short of a long ton. I can never keep that stuff straight).
So that would be $12,497.520 per pyeong (at a selling rate of 1,302.75 won to the dollar - I think. There is math involved here so I could be far astray and have no idea.)
This is reasonably puny compared to prices in the United States (although US prices are for stand alone houses). San Jose homes typically sell for $300 to $400 a square foot which compares (is "favorably" the word? Or is it "unfavorably?") with a nationwide median cost of around $150 a square foot. As far as condos go, perhaps a closer comparison, in Manhattan they are almost $660/foot.
All this makes me doubt my math! ;-)
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
One of the reasons Koreans must be the most telephonically wired people in the world is that while a fine public transportation system makes it easy to get anywhere, it is often impossible to know where "anywhere" is. See this picture:
Looks pretty normal to western eyes - it's two street signs (in front of the coolest building in Seoul). And that is why it is rare. Most of Seoul has no street signs and thus figuring locations out by address is impossible. There are no street addresses. Actually, as in the picture, there are some street signs, but they are mainly in the alley sections of Seoul. Seoul is very alley-cultured and you don't have to walk very far (in North Seoul, at least) to find an alleyway which leads directly into a rat's warren of other alleys that twist unpredictably around each other, sometimes just petering out, sometimes leading to even smaller alleys, and sometimes abruptly depositing you back on a main street of some sort. Each of the alleys is equipped with a colorful old woman pouring an enormous bucket of something toxic into a sewer grate as well as various little restaurants, butchers, and other businesses. Only the largest of these alleys have street signs, so you wander from thoroughfare's without name, through a level of alleys with names to a smaller level of alleys that go nameless.
Eddie has still not told me how mail is delivered. When I asked he mumbled something I didn't understand. The short version of what this means is that navigation is by landmark. With no street signs and complicated mazes of alleys, everyone in Seoul is completely lost at all times. When we went out to meet a friend for lunch it took 6 phone calls to the friend and 4 stops for directions from other people on the street. Without the cell phone there would have been absolutely no chance we ever would have found our friend at the restaurant. It is a small amelioration of this problem that Seoul abounds with very distinct buildings, temples, and subway stops by which locations can be recognized and described.
MARKET DAY
I was partially recovered from the octopus meal and Ed and I headed off to see the famous market districts of Seoul. There are two by Seoul tower, one a bit older (Namdaemun market) and more traditional, the other a bit upscale (Dongdaemun Market) . We went to Namdaemun market first and saw at least two things you aren't going to see in the US.
This here is a sign advertising the availability of dog-meat for human consumption.
This is not supposed to be a "feature" of Korean culture anymore and the owner of the store started yelling his head off when I took the picture.
and this is a legless beggar, lower body clad in innertubes from industrial sized wheels. He pushes a wheeled crate supporting an alms bowl with his forehead and kind of pushups his way through the crowd. I saw a couple of beggars with the inner-tube lower-leg protection. An ingenious solution to an effed up problem. I will say that I never saw anyone give one of these guys money, and if you look at the picture you'll see that Koreans (like city-dwellers in the US) look right past the guy as if he doesn't exist.
REVENGE OF THE KOREAN FOOD
This post is a bit short because as soon as we returned to the apartment my grippe returned with a vengeance. Eddie wanted to go out (it was xmas eve over here) but I was cramping up and feeling like sh*t. I ended up going to sleep at about 9 and sleeping fitfully until about 8 this morning. Somewhere in the night I heard Ed get up and vomit for about 20 minutes, so whatever caused the thing was something we both ate or drank. Eddie says it was the beer (I drank some before we went out to the market, but by the time we got back I was too ill to drink anything but water. Eddie drank some just to celebrate xmas eve (while I was lying, fighting for my young life, in the room next door. Thanks Ed!).
I refuse to believe this because beer is good! I think it might have been the "noodle on a stick" (in the foreground) we got from the street vendor
I still feel a bit rocky this morning and it is almost 10 and Ed is still sleeping. Tonight the POSSLQ arrives and we are in the Imperial Hotel in South Seoul. It will be a good night to sleep on a bed again and use western sized towels. As I lay writhing in pain last night it snowed in Seoul. Daytime Seoul is pretty.
LAST PICS
Every place in Seoul seems to have a bizarrely happy animated representative/logo. This is on the side of the police station by the University:
And a picture of Chonggye Stream (below) which is only important because during the occupation the Japanese completely covered it over for some inscrutable reason. It has now been re-opened and is a beautiful walk through some of downtown Seoul. There are supposedly light and water shows some nights, but I haven't gotten there yet.
Merry Xmas from the land of the Morning Calm!
Day five already? It's flying by. Funny how accomplishing the simplest things in a foreign country can be so satisfying. Just navigating my way through purchasing a cup of coffee, a Korean Herald, and a porridge breakfast brings me vast satisfaction. That and I can almost pronounce "thank you" in Korean.
Headed out alone and was surprised at how empty the streets are on Saturday morning. I guess it makes sense, but the streets are usually so frenetic that this just seemed completely wrong. Also, nothing opens until 9 or so (with the lovely exception of the 24-hour PC Bang). So I diddled on the intarwebs for a while and went back to the street later. Rustling through the Herald I found a discussion of real-estate in Seoul. A boom-market which the government has attempted to reign in on the grounds that it is too speculative. So the government is proposing higher taxes on multiple home-owners (on the assumption they might be speculators) and increasing the housing supply by making public land available for construction and creating new towns on the South (desirable) side of Seoul. This is in response to an increase in house prices in Seoul that, in some areas, rose 20% at the start of the year.
The passage of the bills seems to be in question and apartment prices in Seoul are reaching historical highs. How high? Apartment prices in Seoul are 12.11 million won per pyeong (a pyeong is 3.3 meters square - or twelve hexadecimals short of a long ton. I can never keep that stuff straight).
So that would be $12,497.520 per pyeong (at a selling rate of 1,302.75 won to the dollar - I think. There is math involved here so I could be far astray and have no idea.)
so that would be $106.61694 per square foot.2.54 centimers per inch -->
100 centimeters per meter..
so 330 centimeters per side of a pyeong --->
Therefore -->
129.92126 inches per side of a pyeong
so... doing more effing math....
16,879.534 square inches per pyeong (divide by 144)
117.21899 square feet per pyong -->
13.024332 square yards per pyeong
This is reasonably puny compared to prices in the United States (although US prices are for stand alone houses). San Jose homes typically sell for $300 to $400 a square foot which compares (is "favorably" the word? Or is it "unfavorably?") with a nationwide median cost of around $150 a square foot. As far as condos go, perhaps a closer comparison, in Manhattan they are almost $660/foot.
All this makes me doubt my math! ;-)
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
One of the reasons Koreans must be the most telephonically wired people in the world is that while a fine public transportation system makes it easy to get anywhere, it is often impossible to know where "anywhere" is. See this picture:
Looks pretty normal to western eyes - it's two street signs (in front of the coolest building in Seoul). And that is why it is rare. Most of Seoul has no street signs and thus figuring locations out by address is impossible. There are no street addresses. Actually, as in the picture, there are some street signs, but they are mainly in the alley sections of Seoul. Seoul is very alley-cultured and you don't have to walk very far (in North Seoul, at least) to find an alleyway which leads directly into a rat's warren of other alleys that twist unpredictably around each other, sometimes just petering out, sometimes leading to even smaller alleys, and sometimes abruptly depositing you back on a main street of some sort. Each of the alleys is equipped with a colorful old woman pouring an enormous bucket of something toxic into a sewer grate as well as various little restaurants, butchers, and other businesses. Only the largest of these alleys have street signs, so you wander from thoroughfare's without name, through a level of alleys with names to a smaller level of alleys that go nameless.
Eddie has still not told me how mail is delivered. When I asked he mumbled something I didn't understand. The short version of what this means is that navigation is by landmark. With no street signs and complicated mazes of alleys, everyone in Seoul is completely lost at all times. When we went out to meet a friend for lunch it took 6 phone calls to the friend and 4 stops for directions from other people on the street. Without the cell phone there would have been absolutely no chance we ever would have found our friend at the restaurant. It is a small amelioration of this problem that Seoul abounds with very distinct buildings, temples, and subway stops by which locations can be recognized and described.
MARKET DAY
I was partially recovered from the octopus meal and Ed and I headed off to see the famous market districts of Seoul. There are two by Seoul tower, one a bit older (Namdaemun market) and more traditional, the other a bit upscale (Dongdaemun Market) . We went to Namdaemun market first and saw at least two things you aren't going to see in the US.
This here is a sign advertising the availability of dog-meat for human consumption.
This is not supposed to be a "feature" of Korean culture anymore and the owner of the store started yelling his head off when I took the picture.
and this is a legless beggar, lower body clad in innertubes from industrial sized wheels. He pushes a wheeled crate supporting an alms bowl with his forehead and kind of pushups his way through the crowd. I saw a couple of beggars with the inner-tube lower-leg protection. An ingenious solution to an effed up problem. I will say that I never saw anyone give one of these guys money, and if you look at the picture you'll see that Koreans (like city-dwellers in the US) look right past the guy as if he doesn't exist.
REVENGE OF THE KOREAN FOOD
This post is a bit short because as soon as we returned to the apartment my grippe returned with a vengeance. Eddie wanted to go out (it was xmas eve over here) but I was cramping up and feeling like sh*t. I ended up going to sleep at about 9 and sleeping fitfully until about 8 this morning. Somewhere in the night I heard Ed get up and vomit for about 20 minutes, so whatever caused the thing was something we both ate or drank. Eddie says it was the beer (I drank some before we went out to the market, but by the time we got back I was too ill to drink anything but water. Eddie drank some just to celebrate xmas eve (while I was lying, fighting for my young life, in the room next door. Thanks Ed!).
I refuse to believe this because beer is good! I think it might have been the "noodle on a stick" (in the foreground) we got from the street vendor
I still feel a bit rocky this morning and it is almost 10 and Ed is still sleeping. Tonight the POSSLQ arrives and we are in the Imperial Hotel in South Seoul. It will be a good night to sleep on a bed again and use western sized towels. As I lay writhing in pain last night it snowed in Seoul. Daytime Seoul is pretty.
LAST PICS
Every place in Seoul seems to have a bizarrely happy animated representative/logo. This is on the side of the police station by the University:
And a picture of Chonggye Stream (below) which is only important because during the occupation the Japanese completely covered it over for some inscrutable reason. It has now been re-opened and is a beautiful walk through some of downtown Seoul. There are supposedly light and water shows some nights, but I haven't gotten there yet.
Merry Xmas from the land of the Morning Calm!
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Fine Whine With My Meal(s): Korea Day Four
Day Four: Lunch of the Living Dead/The Science of Bathroom-ology
Thank God for the iPod.
SIR JOHN CRAPPER WOULD ROTATE
Today was really all about eating, but let's begin with a loose end (gak!) from yesterday's discussion of the Korean home - Korean Bathrooms.
They are different. Here is a nifty picture:
Notice that in this one there is a shower curtain rod (unusual) and no shower curtain (completely standard). There is a drain on the bathroom floor and water is expected to splash out of the shower and exit from the drain. I presume this is some echo of the public bath-house but I'm much to modest to check that out. ;-) This means the bathroom floor is wet much of the time and right inside every Korean bathroom there is a pair of plastic slippers so you can go to the bathroom or use the sink and mirror without soaking your feet. In a nice bathroom such as the one pictured, there is a platform of some sort at the base of the toilet as well as one by the tub. These allow you to stand, magisterial, above the muck. The bathroom floor, needless to say, is depressed from the rest of the household floor and there is a sturdy doorjamb to ensure that no water escapes into the rest of the house. On the outside of the bathroom door is a mat with a towel so you can dry your feet on the way out if you showered or if your feet got wet.
Which brings us to towels. That thing you see (if you squint) hanging by the sink is a shower towel. Korean towels are slightly larger than washcloths and particularly prized for their skimpy weave and near complete inability to absorb water. Thus they require vigorous use, some contortion, and time, to be useful. When they are useful, it is primarily as exercise and by the time you have dried the shower water you will be soaked in sweat and the showering process must begin again.
Well, that's the Yang way and probably explains why most Korean stores don't sell deodorant. They don't have to. Koreans don't smell bad when they sweat. The ones who did ended up dying of exhaustion in their bathrooms.
Darwin rules.
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
Had my third traditional Korean breakfast today, this one at Ed's parent's house. I took a picture because even the table looks like nothing western. It's about 10 inches high, since you eat sitting on the floor. And it is covered in food. This one featured a rib-sticking rice dish, a fried(?) fish and a variety of vegetable matter (prominently featuring Kim-chee, of course).
Ed's dad sat down, looked over the whole array then looked at me and asked if I wanted Soju. I sat, shocked ....... shocked I tell you, that my reputation as an international drunkard had crossed the line from the Occidental to the Oriental nations. I demurred.
Later I asked Ed if that was a normal breakfast question. He predictably replied that it "was a Korean tradition" and then began randomly pointing out objects around the room and claiming that they warded off bad luck and evil spirits. But Ed says stuff like that and when he tripped on a Korean throw rug on his way to the bathroom, he stopped that chatter for a bit.
It was a good breakfast but it still doesn't stack up to the mushroom and beef porridge of two days ago.
And as good as all the breafasts have been, when I get to breakfast that first morning at the Imperial Palace hotel and the obsequious (and with the money I'm paying they damned well better be obsequious!) staff asks me what I want for breakfast?
Omelette, pancakes, mimosa.
Rinse with a coffee and repeat.
LUNCH WITH THE KLINGONS
Having survived a soup that featured the exploded entrails of a lamb liberally larded with the congealed blood of a pig, I was feeling pretty confident about my ability to navigate my way around the Korean table. Hell, the breakfasts had been a bit odd by my standards as well, but I'd had no trouble. Liked most of it in fact.
So, when it was finally time for lunch with Mr. Park I was feeling pretty good. And when he said he was driving us down to the coastal town of Anmunjon I felt even better. Nothing like a meal in the bracing sea air. And it was actually quite a scenic spot, sort of like Moss Landing in California.
We walked into a nice clean place that had a view of part of the bay and sat on the floor. Mr. Park ordered the "sushi special" and some Soju. The waitress quickly rolled over a two-trayed cart of dishes and started unloading.
Started unloading piles of things that would be used, in a country that possessed taste-buds, to attract sharks. Ah, but there it all was dolled up on the cute little plates they use in these parts. I dug in and ate all kinds of things I really hate. As it happens I have become quite a partisan of the red sauce Koreans use.
it covers up the taste of most everything, if not the texture.
We had put most of it away when a 5th diner arrived and new plates had to come to our table.
As I looked over the new array I worried I was becoming nauseous. At the edge of my vision I could see a plate that seemed to be crawling with something.
I took a shot of Soju.
Just to steady my vision.
And looked again.
The plate was still crawling.
20 disembodied tentacles crawled around on a plate.
More Soju.
Mr. Park took his chopstix (the difficult all-metal Korean type) and grabbed at one of the moving pieces. Well, it was moving, but it didn't want to go. It clung to the plate with all the sucker-plates it had. A war of wills ensued. But it would be a rare amputated bit of of sea-creature that could beat a South Korean in a contest of this type and after 15 seconds or so Mr. Park ate the damned thing.
I took another shot of Soju.
For once, it didn't help.
I flashed back to something I had read about people who ate octopus tentacles. Apparently ..... well not even apparently.. as I had seen.... the tentacles are still functional. And the tentacles can kill people by attaching to their throats and choking them to death.
By the time I came back to reality over half of the critters were gone and the remainder were clumped up on one corner of the plate apparently trying to reassemble themselves into something that could escape. Well, that one at the upper left of the photo tried to go over the wall solo, but the others huddled together in some futile gesture of support or defense.
And four Koreans were looking at me expectantly.
I snapped a photo in a lame attempt to stall:
This resistance was, as heroines in bodice-rippers often aver, to no avail.
Four Koreans were looking at me expectantly.
Faced with this adversity I steeled my nerve. I knew what I had to do.
I curled up in a ball and played dead.
When the waitress came across the floor at me with a filleting knife I gave up that charade.
I looked beseachingly at Ed.
Ed looked back sympathetically and snarled, "chew it to make sure it's really dead."
I ate one of the goddamned things. Perhaps the chewiest thing I have ever eaten it long outlasted whatever cover the red hot-sauce could give it.
I'll just note that tonight is the first night on this trip I've suffered any intestinal complaint. And while I believe that my little tentacular (ex)friend is currently beyond any attempt to escape?
It sure seems like he is.
Tomorrow promises fresh Hells. Market time.. perhaps some bookshopping. Even tea?
Who knows……
As the tears drop sideways down her face/.
I end up talking in the tongue of a different race/
And as the flight touches down, my watch says 8:02/
but that's midnight to you
Well, Graham was really singing about Japan, and conflating Japan and Korea is a very bad thing in these parts. But until someone writes the definitive song on jet lag, "Discovering Japan" is as close as you're going to get.
I dreamed headlong collisions in jetlag panavision/
I shouted 'sayanara', it didn't mean goodbye/
But lovers turn to posers, show up in film exposures/
Just like in travel brochures discovering Japan
Thank God for the iPod.
SIR JOHN CRAPPER WOULD ROTATE
Today was really all about eating, but let's begin with a loose end (gak!) from yesterday's discussion of the Korean home - Korean Bathrooms.
They are different. Here is a nifty picture:
Notice that in this one there is a shower curtain rod (unusual) and no shower curtain (completely standard). There is a drain on the bathroom floor and water is expected to splash out of the shower and exit from the drain. I presume this is some echo of the public bath-house but I'm much to modest to check that out. ;-) This means the bathroom floor is wet much of the time and right inside every Korean bathroom there is a pair of plastic slippers so you can go to the bathroom or use the sink and mirror without soaking your feet. In a nice bathroom such as the one pictured, there is a platform of some sort at the base of the toilet as well as one by the tub. These allow you to stand, magisterial, above the muck. The bathroom floor, needless to say, is depressed from the rest of the household floor and there is a sturdy doorjamb to ensure that no water escapes into the rest of the house. On the outside of the bathroom door is a mat with a towel so you can dry your feet on the way out if you showered or if your feet got wet.
Which brings us to towels. That thing you see (if you squint) hanging by the sink is a shower towel. Korean towels are slightly larger than washcloths and particularly prized for their skimpy weave and near complete inability to absorb water. Thus they require vigorous use, some contortion, and time, to be useful. When they are useful, it is primarily as exercise and by the time you have dried the shower water you will be soaked in sweat and the showering process must begin again.
Well, that's the Yang way and probably explains why most Korean stores don't sell deodorant. They don't have to. Koreans don't smell bad when they sweat. The ones who did ended up dying of exhaustion in their bathrooms.
Darwin rules.
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
Had my third traditional Korean breakfast today, this one at Ed's parent's house. I took a picture because even the table looks like nothing western. It's about 10 inches high, since you eat sitting on the floor. And it is covered in food. This one featured a rib-sticking rice dish, a fried(?) fish and a variety of vegetable matter (prominently featuring Kim-chee, of course).
Ed's dad sat down, looked over the whole array then looked at me and asked if I wanted Soju. I sat, shocked ....... shocked I tell you, that my reputation as an international drunkard had crossed the line from the Occidental to the Oriental nations. I demurred.
Later I asked Ed if that was a normal breakfast question. He predictably replied that it "was a Korean tradition" and then began randomly pointing out objects around the room and claiming that they warded off bad luck and evil spirits. But Ed says stuff like that and when he tripped on a Korean throw rug on his way to the bathroom, he stopped that chatter for a bit.
It was a good breakfast but it still doesn't stack up to the mushroom and beef porridge of two days ago.
And as good as all the breafasts have been, when I get to breakfast that first morning at the Imperial Palace hotel and the obsequious (and with the money I'm paying they damned well better be obsequious!) staff asks me what I want for breakfast?
Omelette, pancakes, mimosa.
Rinse with a coffee and repeat.
LUNCH WITH THE KLINGONS
Having survived a soup that featured the exploded entrails of a lamb liberally larded with the congealed blood of a pig, I was feeling pretty confident about my ability to navigate my way around the Korean table. Hell, the breakfasts had been a bit odd by my standards as well, but I'd had no trouble. Liked most of it in fact.
So, when it was finally time for lunch with Mr. Park I was feeling pretty good. And when he said he was driving us down to the coastal town of Anmunjon I felt even better. Nothing like a meal in the bracing sea air. And it was actually quite a scenic spot, sort of like Moss Landing in California.
We walked into a nice clean place that had a view of part of the bay and sat on the floor. Mr. Park ordered the "sushi special" and some Soju. The waitress quickly rolled over a two-trayed cart of dishes and started unloading.
Started unloading piles of things that would be used, in a country that possessed taste-buds, to attract sharks. Ah, but there it all was dolled up on the cute little plates they use in these parts. I dug in and ate all kinds of things I really hate. As it happens I have become quite a partisan of the red sauce Koreans use.
it covers up the taste of most everything, if not the texture.
We had put most of it away when a 5th diner arrived and new plates had to come to our table.
As I looked over the new array I worried I was becoming nauseous. At the edge of my vision I could see a plate that seemed to be crawling with something.
I took a shot of Soju.
Just to steady my vision.
And looked again.
The plate was still crawling.
20 disembodied tentacles crawled around on a plate.
More Soju.
Mr. Park took his chopstix (the difficult all-metal Korean type) and grabbed at one of the moving pieces. Well, it was moving, but it didn't want to go. It clung to the plate with all the sucker-plates it had. A war of wills ensued. But it would be a rare amputated bit of of sea-creature that could beat a South Korean in a contest of this type and after 15 seconds or so Mr. Park ate the damned thing.
I took another shot of Soju.
For once, it didn't help.
I flashed back to something I had read about people who ate octopus tentacles. Apparently ..... well not even apparently.. as I had seen.... the tentacles are still functional. And the tentacles can kill people by attaching to their throats and choking them to death.
By the time I came back to reality over half of the critters were gone and the remainder were clumped up on one corner of the plate apparently trying to reassemble themselves into something that could escape. Well, that one at the upper left of the photo tried to go over the wall solo, but the others huddled together in some futile gesture of support or defense.
And four Koreans were looking at me expectantly.
I snapped a photo in a lame attempt to stall:
This resistance was, as heroines in bodice-rippers often aver, to no avail.
Four Koreans were looking at me expectantly.
Faced with this adversity I steeled my nerve. I knew what I had to do.
I curled up in a ball and played dead.
When the waitress came across the floor at me with a filleting knife I gave up that charade.
I looked beseachingly at Ed.
Ed looked back sympathetically and snarled, "chew it to make sure it's really dead."
I ate one of the goddamned things. Perhaps the chewiest thing I have ever eaten it long outlasted whatever cover the red hot-sauce could give it.
I'll just note that tonight is the first night on this trip I've suffered any intestinal complaint. And while I believe that my little tentacular (ex)friend is currently beyond any attempt to escape?
It sure seems like he is.
Tomorrow promises fresh Hells. Market time.. perhaps some bookshopping. Even tea?
Who knows……
Friday, December 23, 2005
Scenes of Domestic Life: Korea Day Three
Anyway, I left yesterday without explaining my first night drinking with the lads. It was a very traditional thing. A trip to the bar to get drunk and eat a lot of noshy food, a trip to the karaoke Bang for a bit of mutual humiliation. Below is a picture of Jae towering over her puny secret admirer.
Then, as karaoke concluded and when I thought I might get away with only that, a sudden decision was made to head downtown for some reason that was unclear to me. What was clear to me was that it was already midnight and I was very tired. I was actually pretty sober as I had not drunk much beer and the karaoke was, as is usual, alcohol free. Still, somehow, there was some fear of hangovers in our group and to address this fear we had to head downtown and drink more while having some soup.
We got to the restaurant after driving by a tableau of various drunken scenes. Taxis were swarming the downtown like flies and driving in their incredibly insane fashion. Every cab I've been in is a stickshift, and the drivers slalom around like Olympic skiers and just when it seems there has to be an accident they glide around it with the occasional beep of a horn. The lanes painted on the road aren't even advisory to these guys and traffic lights are treated with the kind of casual insouciance I associate with James Bond bantering with the mad criminal genius de jour.
This attitude towards driving, actually, is shared by all mobile Koreans. Motorcycles routinely careen down sidewalks (as do bicycles and several kinds of transportation that fall messily in between), buses drive like they can't see anything on the ground, cars park on curbs and up sidewalks and it's pretty much a miracle that the streets aren't painted with blood by each dawn. Which wouldn't be a tragedy, really, as each merchant would carefully clean the area in front of his store and by 9 am the evidence of last evening's abbattoir would be on its way through the sewer system. Work would resume as the survivors would have funerals to pay for.
Despite everything I anticipated, we lived until downtown and got another bottle of Soju and enormous bowls of soup. There was a sign --- well.. here is that sign..
And then the soup came. It looked dubious, even by the "if you can capture it, cut it, or conceive of fitting it into any kind of cooking apparatus it must be edible" standards of Korea. Here is a fuzzy picture of the thing.
It is time to step back a bit and note that I had asked Eddie not to tell me what I was eating before I tried it. This bowl, however, looked so much like Klingon food "Ghaaaak is better served alive!") that I broke my vow not to ask. Eddie reminded me of our deal and I said, "ok, I'll try it and then you tell me what it is." I chopsticked up one large piece of particularly noxious.. er... "stuff" and took a big bite. Eddie smiled and said... "congealed pig's blood."
FREAKING CONGEALED PIG'S BLOOD!
To my credit (I think?) I didn't vomit. I choked the whole thing down while focussing on the only ingredient in the soup I could actually identify, the rice. This beautiful "food" not only contained the congealed pig's blood, but also most of the part of the lower intestinal tract of a lamb.
Then I just focussed on the *extremely* drunk Korean guy who was sitting with a friend in the room behind us and wished I were dead.
No such luck.
When we tried to return to our apartment, no taxi would pick us up. There were 5 of us.. a problem for the small cabs in Seoul and particularly with a fat gajiin like me as one of the 5. The cabs would stop (well, "stop" in the sense of rolling by at about 10 miles an hour), hear our request and accelerate into the distance.
We finally got a cab by offering it our Secret Admirer's trip back across town and we were back to the apartment by just before 2. Just before 2, Eddie sagely noted, was still drinking time, and out came more Soju.
I staggered off to bed shortly thereafter. Typically, I woke up two hours before the Korean Krewe who seem to have highly developed "sleep it off" skills. I headed down to the PC Bang to drop off some work and the post I did yesterday. Got a call about 10 and headed back to the apartment for a breakfast of Kim Chee and rice.
As I type this Jae is heading down south on the bullet train and Eddie and I are hanging out on the warm floor watching the news. This afternoon we head down to see his father and stay down there. Eddie promises there won't be abusive drinking, but I'll believe that when I can't see my liver pulsing gelatinously through my varicose-vein shot skin.
After a nap we hopped on the 631 bus from Korea to Gimpo. This ran through some pretty gnarly traffic jams as one main street we were on was in the middle of extensive construction of some sort. This gave me a chance to goggle at the "apartment forests" as we drove through them. Koreans live in structures that don't appeal to some westerners as they are essentially apartments that one must purchase.
The original Korean housing looked something like migrant farm-worker motels in the States. A bunch of very small, one-story houses which were built wall to wall, though not necessarily in the shotgun style that might imply. Some were built on hills so the clusters extend upwards and sideways and are connected in whatever way then can be. The point of all that is Koreans are used to living cheek by jowl and when it came to building "homes" they went apartment style. Apartment style with a bit of a difference though, since a house needs to have a front and a back. This means most apartment/houses go all the way through the building and have a deck of some sort on the front and back. Eddie says that this is because traditionally (the Korean excuse for everything) people wanted houses the wind could blow all the way through when you opened the front and back doors. To this he gnomically added that women loved this and children hated it. He then returned to a bowl of something a bit awful which he ate with apparent gusto. An apartment building will normally consist of columns of apartments every two of which share a stairwell and elevator shaft. Here is my lame drawing of that:
Because of the cheek-by-jowl nature of these apartments, real estate is handled differently in Korea. I had read that you used different real-estate agents for different neighborhoods, but the buildings made clear why. You buy a "house" in Korea and you are also buying two very close neighbors - the people above and below you. There is no space to ameliorate sound or smell, or anything else. So the real-estate agent's job is not just to find the right "place," but also to get you into a good situation. Once you buy, you are stuck. This is probably not such a large problem in the newer units. I am currently at Ed's parent's unit and it seems very insulated from the neighbors. But our unit in Seoul is very different and if we had a noisy upstairs neighbor it would be a real drag.
Anyway, these apartments are built in close clusters and very tall. When you get among them it can be disorienting in a way that that is difficult to demonstrate without a crazy fisheye lens.
We rolled through them to Gimpo, where Ed's parents live in a very nice "house." It was high-school reunion night for Ed's dad, so we accompanied him to the re-union where he was able to announce Ed's marriage and various successes. Apparently I was a good visual aid to this, since I was clearly an English speaker and Ed was clearly able to communicate with me and make me feel at home. This is a good thing in Korea, because although everyone has technically learned English, that "technically" is in the same sense that some Catholic girls remain technical virgins. Korean schools apparently focus on reading and writing, not speaking, so fluency can be valuable.
The short version is Ed's dad seemed happy about everything and we returned to his house for some drinks and after-meal nosh. This is another nice thing about Korean drinking culture -- it is very rare to only drink.. there must be food accompanying drinking. Ed's mom really put on the dog (metaphorically!) as we had several kinds of nuts, raisins, passion fruit, Asian Pears (way superior to the US domestic version), peeled mandarin oranges, persimmons, Ginko seeds and lotus seeds. We went to sleep early, interrupted only when Ed's snoring drove me into another room. ;-)
Here is Ed's dad, after a few to many shots of Soju, attempting to rouse his geriatric fellow alumni into going up to the Joint Security Area (DMZ) and "re-unify those Damned Commies Right Now!" (That or he's pointing proudly at Ed)
It is now about 8:30 in the morning and only the spectre of a day with Mr. Park (not Ed's dad) darkens anything. This is a guy who made a very serious point of drinking me into a coma in the states, so I'm a bit worried. And in some kind of seizure, Ed agreed last night that we would move our meeting with Mr. Park from tonight up to 11 this morning. Not that we will get away any earlier as we have to spend the night down there.
Part of the experience I guess.
10 great things about Korea
5 not-so-great things
TOMORROW: The Swine DO make me eat a living thing and what is it with the bathrooms?
Then, as karaoke concluded and when I thought I might get away with only that, a sudden decision was made to head downtown for some reason that was unclear to me. What was clear to me was that it was already midnight and I was very tired. I was actually pretty sober as I had not drunk much beer and the karaoke was, as is usual, alcohol free. Still, somehow, there was some fear of hangovers in our group and to address this fear we had to head downtown and drink more while having some soup.
We got to the restaurant after driving by a tableau of various drunken scenes. Taxis were swarming the downtown like flies and driving in their incredibly insane fashion. Every cab I've been in is a stickshift, and the drivers slalom around like Olympic skiers and just when it seems there has to be an accident they glide around it with the occasional beep of a horn. The lanes painted on the road aren't even advisory to these guys and traffic lights are treated with the kind of casual insouciance I associate with James Bond bantering with the mad criminal genius de jour.
This attitude towards driving, actually, is shared by all mobile Koreans. Motorcycles routinely careen down sidewalks (as do bicycles and several kinds of transportation that fall messily in between), buses drive like they can't see anything on the ground, cars park on curbs and up sidewalks and it's pretty much a miracle that the streets aren't painted with blood by each dawn. Which wouldn't be a tragedy, really, as each merchant would carefully clean the area in front of his store and by 9 am the evidence of last evening's abbattoir would be on its way through the sewer system. Work would resume as the survivors would have funerals to pay for.
Despite everything I anticipated, we lived until downtown and got another bottle of Soju and enormous bowls of soup. There was a sign --- well.. here is that sign..
And then the soup came. It looked dubious, even by the "if you can capture it, cut it, or conceive of fitting it into any kind of cooking apparatus it must be edible" standards of Korea. Here is a fuzzy picture of the thing.
It is time to step back a bit and note that I had asked Eddie not to tell me what I was eating before I tried it. This bowl, however, looked so much like Klingon food "Ghaaaak is better served alive!") that I broke my vow not to ask. Eddie reminded me of our deal and I said, "ok, I'll try it and then you tell me what it is." I chopsticked up one large piece of particularly noxious.. er... "stuff" and took a big bite. Eddie smiled and said... "congealed pig's blood."
FREAKING CONGEALED PIG'S BLOOD!
To my credit (I think?) I didn't vomit. I choked the whole thing down while focussing on the only ingredient in the soup I could actually identify, the rice. This beautiful "food" not only contained the congealed pig's blood, but also most of the part of the lower intestinal tract of a lamb.
Then I just focussed on the *extremely* drunk Korean guy who was sitting with a friend in the room behind us and wished I were dead.
No such luck.
When we tried to return to our apartment, no taxi would pick us up. There were 5 of us.. a problem for the small cabs in Seoul and particularly with a fat gajiin like me as one of the 5. The cabs would stop (well, "stop" in the sense of rolling by at about 10 miles an hour), hear our request and accelerate into the distance.
We finally got a cab by offering it our Secret Admirer's trip back across town and we were back to the apartment by just before 2. Just before 2, Eddie sagely noted, was still drinking time, and out came more Soju.
I staggered off to bed shortly thereafter. Typically, I woke up two hours before the Korean Krewe who seem to have highly developed "sleep it off" skills. I headed down to the PC Bang to drop off some work and the post I did yesterday. Got a call about 10 and headed back to the apartment for a breakfast of Kim Chee and rice.
As I type this Jae is heading down south on the bullet train and Eddie and I are hanging out on the warm floor watching the news. This afternoon we head down to see his father and stay down there. Eddie promises there won't be abusive drinking, but I'll believe that when I can't see my liver pulsing gelatinously through my varicose-vein shot skin.
After a nap we hopped on the 631 bus from Korea to Gimpo. This ran through some pretty gnarly traffic jams as one main street we were on was in the middle of extensive construction of some sort. This gave me a chance to goggle at the "apartment forests" as we drove through them. Koreans live in structures that don't appeal to some westerners as they are essentially apartments that one must purchase.
The original Korean housing looked something like migrant farm-worker motels in the States. A bunch of very small, one-story houses which were built wall to wall, though not necessarily in the shotgun style that might imply. Some were built on hills so the clusters extend upwards and sideways and are connected in whatever way then can be. The point of all that is Koreans are used to living cheek by jowl and when it came to building "homes" they went apartment style. Apartment style with a bit of a difference though, since a house needs to have a front and a back. This means most apartment/houses go all the way through the building and have a deck of some sort on the front and back. Eddie says that this is because traditionally (the Korean excuse for everything) people wanted houses the wind could blow all the way through when you opened the front and back doors. To this he gnomically added that women loved this and children hated it. He then returned to a bowl of something a bit awful which he ate with apparent gusto. An apartment building will normally consist of columns of apartments every two of which share a stairwell and elevator shaft. Here is my lame drawing of that:
Because of the cheek-by-jowl nature of these apartments, real estate is handled differently in Korea. I had read that you used different real-estate agents for different neighborhoods, but the buildings made clear why. You buy a "house" in Korea and you are also buying two very close neighbors - the people above and below you. There is no space to ameliorate sound or smell, or anything else. So the real-estate agent's job is not just to find the right "place," but also to get you into a good situation. Once you buy, you are stuck. This is probably not such a large problem in the newer units. I am currently at Ed's parent's unit and it seems very insulated from the neighbors. But our unit in Seoul is very different and if we had a noisy upstairs neighbor it would be a real drag.
Anyway, these apartments are built in close clusters and very tall. When you get among them it can be disorienting in a way that that is difficult to demonstrate without a crazy fisheye lens.
We rolled through them to Gimpo, where Ed's parents live in a very nice "house." It was high-school reunion night for Ed's dad, so we accompanied him to the re-union where he was able to announce Ed's marriage and various successes. Apparently I was a good visual aid to this, since I was clearly an English speaker and Ed was clearly able to communicate with me and make me feel at home. This is a good thing in Korea, because although everyone has technically learned English, that "technically" is in the same sense that some Catholic girls remain technical virgins. Korean schools apparently focus on reading and writing, not speaking, so fluency can be valuable.
The short version is Ed's dad seemed happy about everything and we returned to his house for some drinks and after-meal nosh. This is another nice thing about Korean drinking culture -- it is very rare to only drink.. there must be food accompanying drinking. Ed's mom really put on the dog (metaphorically!) as we had several kinds of nuts, raisins, passion fruit, Asian Pears (way superior to the US domestic version), peeled mandarin oranges, persimmons, Ginko seeds and lotus seeds. We went to sleep early, interrupted only when Ed's snoring drove me into another room. ;-)
Here is Ed's dad, after a few to many shots of Soju, attempting to rouse his geriatric fellow alumni into going up to the Joint Security Area (DMZ) and "re-unify those Damned Commies Right Now!" (That or he's pointing proudly at Ed)
It is now about 8:30 in the morning and only the spectre of a day with Mr. Park (not Ed's dad) darkens anything. This is a guy who made a very serious point of drinking me into a coma in the states, so I'm a bit worried. And in some kind of seizure, Ed agreed last night that we would move our meeting with Mr. Park from tonight up to 11 this morning. Not that we will get away any earlier as we have to spend the night down there.
Part of the experience I guess.
10 great things about Korea
1) Taxis everywhere and very cheap
2) The cell-phones you can rent at the airport
3) The PC Bang costs about $1.20 an hour (on the way to Gimpo actually saw one for 60 cents an hour)
4) You will never suffer a vitamin deficiency if you eat Korean food
5) Heated floors (this may be the single greatest achievement of the Korean culture across the centuries)
6) The "oh fuck it" approach to problems
7) The *first* bar we visit
8) The exchange rate is close enough to 1000 to 100 that you can understand what you are paying on the first day
9) Palaces, of course
10) How Seoul lights up at night -- it's neon Xmas every night.
5 not-so-great things
1) Hae Jang whatever the Hell... ("kook", actually, which seems about right)
2) Crazy People on the 1 line (more about that later)
3) Koreans spit like they are Chinese4
) Korean chopsticks are made of slippery metal which they claim is more sanitary, but makes them slippery as hell.
5) The "last" bar we visit
TOMORROW: The Swine DO make me eat a living thing and what is it with the bathrooms?
Domestic Life: Korea Three
Anyway, I left yesterday without explaining my first night drinking with the lads. It was a very traditional thing. A trip to the bar to get drunk and eat a lot of noshy food, a trip to the karaoke Bang for a bit of mutual humiliation. Below is a picture of Jae towering over her puny secret admirer.
Then, as karaoke concluded and when I thought I might get away with only that, a sudden decision was made to head downtown for some reason that was unclear to me. What was clear to me was that it was already midnight and I was very tired. I was actually pretty sober as I had not drunk much beer and the karaoke was, as is usual, alcohol free. Still, somehow, there was some fear of hangovers in our group and to address this fear we had to head downtown and drink more while having some soup.
We got to the restaurant after driving by a tableau of various drunken scenes. Taxis were swarming the downtown like flies and driving in their incredibly insane fashion. Every cab I've been in is a stickshift, and the drivers slalom around like Olympic skiers and just when it seems there has to be an accident they glide around it with the occasional beep of a horn. The lanes painted on the road aren't even advisory to these guys and traffic lights are treated with the kind of casual insouciance I associate with James Bond bantering with the mad criminal genius de jour.
This attitude towards driving, actually, is shared by all mobile Koreans. Motorcycles routinely careen down sidewalks (as do bicycles and several kinds of transportation that fall messily in between), buses drive like they can't see anything on the ground, cars park on curbs and up sidewalks and it's pretty much a miracle that the streets aren't painted with blood by each dawn. Which wouldn't be a tragedy, really, as each merchant would carefully clean the area in front of his store and by 9 am the evidence of last evening's abbattoir would be on its way through the sewer system. Work would resume as the survivors would have funerals to pay for.
Anyway... despite everything I anticipated, we lived until downtown and got another bottle of Soju and enormous bowls of soup. There was a sign --- well.. here is that sign..
And then the soup came. It looked dubious, even by the "if you can capture it, cut it, or conceive of fitting it into any kind of cooking apparatus it must be edible" standards of Korea. Here is a fuzzy picture of the thing.
It is time to step back a bit and note that I had asked Eddie not to tell me what I was eating before I tried it. This bowl, however, looked so much like Klingon food "Ghaaaak is better served alive!") that I broke my vow not to ask. Eddie reminded me of our deal and I said, "ok, I'll try it and then you tell me what it is." I chopsticked up one large piece of particularly noxious.. er... "stuff" and took a big bite. Eddie smiled and said... "congealed pig's blood."
FREAKING CONGEALED PIG'S BLOOD!
To my credit (I think?) I didn't vomit. I choked the whole thing down while focussing on the only ingredient in the soup I could actually identify, the rice. This beautiful "food" not only contained the congealed pig's blood, but also most of the part of the lower intestinal tract of a lamb.
Then I just focussed on the *extremely* drunk Korean guy who was sitting with a friend in the room behind us and wished I were dead.
No such luck.
When we tried to return to our apartment, no taxi would pick us up. There were 5 of us.. a problem for the small cabs in Seoul and particularly with a fat gajiin like me as one of the 5. The cabs would stop (well, "stop" in the sense of rolling by at about 10 miles an hour), hear our request and accelerate into the distance.
We finally got a cab by offering it our Secret Admirer's trip back across town and we were back to the apartment by just before 2. Just before 2, Eddie sagely noted, was still drinking time, and out came more Soju.
I staggered off to bed shortly thereafter. Typically, I woke up two hours before the Korean Krewe who seem to have highly developed "sleep it off" skills. I headed down to the PC Bang to drop off some work and the post I did yesterday. Got a call about 10 and headed back to the apartment for a breakfast of Kim Chee and rice.
As I type this Jae is heading down south on the bullet train and Eddie and I are hanging out on the warm floor watching the news. This afternoon we head down to see his father and stay down there. Eddie promises there won't be abusive drinking, but I'll believe that when I can't see my liver pulsing gelatinously through my varicose-vein shot skin.
After a nap we hopped on the 631 bus from Korea to Gimpo. This ran through some pretty gnarly traffic jams as one main street we were on was in the middle of extensive construction of some sort. This gave me a chance to goggle at the "apartment forests" as we drove through them. Koreans live in structures that don't appeal to some westerners as they are essentially apartments that one must purchase.
The original Korean housing looked something like migrant farm-worker motels in the States. A bunch of very small, one-story houses which were built wall to wall, though not necessarily in the shotgun style that might imply. Some were built on hills so the clusters extend upwards and sideways and are connected in whatever way then can be. The point of all that is Koreans are used to living cheek by jowl and when it came to building "homes" they went apartment style. Apartment style with a bit of a difference though, since a house needs to have a front and a back. This means most apartment/houses go all the way through the building and have a deck of some sort on the front and back. Eddie says that this is because traditionally (the Korean excuse for everything) people wanted houses the wind could blow all the way through when you opened the front and back doors. To this he gnomically added that women loved this and children hated it. He then returned to a bowl of something a bit awful which he ate with apparent gusto. An apartment building will normally consist of columns of apartments every two of which share a stairwell and elevator shaft. Here is my lame drawing of that:
Because of the cheek-by-jowl nature of these apartments, real estate is handled differently in Korea. I had read that you used different real-estate agents for different neighborhoods, but the buildings made clear why. You buy a "house" in Korea and you are also buying two very close neighbors - the people above and below you. There is no space to ameliorate sound or smell, or anything else. So the real-estate agent's job is not just to find the right "place," but also to get you into a good situation. Once you buy, you are stuck. This is probably not such a large problem in the newer units. I am currently at Ed's parent's unit and it seems very insulated from the neighbors. But our unit in Seoul is very different and if we had a noisy upstairs neighbor it would be a real drag.
Anyway, these apartments are built in close clusters and very tall. When you get among them it can be disorienting in a way that that is difficult to demonstrate without a crazy fisheye lens.
We rolled through them to Gimpo, where Ed's parents live in a very nice "house." It was high-school reunion night for Ed's dad, so we accompanied him to the re-union where he was able to announce Ed's marriage and various successes. Apparently I was a good visual aid to this, since I was clearly an English speaker and Ed was clearly able to communicate with me and make me feel at home. This is a good thing in Korea, because although everyone has technically learned English, that "technically" is in the same sense that some Catholic girls remain technical virgins. Korean schools apparently focus on reading and writing, not speaking, so fluency can be valuable.
The short version is Ed's dad seemed happy about everything and we returned to his house for some drinks and after-meal nosh. This is another nice thing about Korean drinking culture -- it is very rare to only drink.. there must be food accompanying drinking. Ed's mom really put on the dog (metaphorically!) as we had several kinds of nuts, raisins, passion fruit, Asian Pears (way superior to the US domestic version), peeled mandarin oranges, persimmons, Ginko seeds and lotus seeds. We went to sleep early, interrupted only when Ed's snoring drove me into another room. ;-)
Here is Ed's dad, after a few to many shots of Soju, attempting to rouse his geriatric fellow alumni into going up to the Joint Security Area (DMZ) and "re-unify those Damned Commies Right Now!" (That or he's pointing proudly at Ed)
It is now about 8:30 in the morning and only the spectre of a day with Mr. Park (not Ed's dad) darkens anything. This is a guy who made a very serious point of drinking me into a coma in the states, so I'm a bit worried. And in some kind of seizure, Ed agreed last night that we would move our meeting with Mr. Park from tonight up to 11 this morning. Not that we will get away any earlier as we have to spend the night down there.
Part of the experience I guess.
10 great things about Korea
5 not-so-great things
TOMORROW: The Swine DO make me eat a living thing and what is it with the bathrooms?
Then, as karaoke concluded and when I thought I might get away with only that, a sudden decision was made to head downtown for some reason that was unclear to me. What was clear to me was that it was already midnight and I was very tired. I was actually pretty sober as I had not drunk much beer and the karaoke was, as is usual, alcohol free. Still, somehow, there was some fear of hangovers in our group and to address this fear we had to head downtown and drink more while having some soup.
We got to the restaurant after driving by a tableau of various drunken scenes. Taxis were swarming the downtown like flies and driving in their incredibly insane fashion. Every cab I've been in is a stickshift, and the drivers slalom around like Olympic skiers and just when it seems there has to be an accident they glide around it with the occasional beep of a horn. The lanes painted on the road aren't even advisory to these guys and traffic lights are treated with the kind of casual insouciance I associate with James Bond bantering with the mad criminal genius de jour.
This attitude towards driving, actually, is shared by all mobile Koreans. Motorcycles routinely careen down sidewalks (as do bicycles and several kinds of transportation that fall messily in between), buses drive like they can't see anything on the ground, cars park on curbs and up sidewalks and it's pretty much a miracle that the streets aren't painted with blood by each dawn. Which wouldn't be a tragedy, really, as each merchant would carefully clean the area in front of his store and by 9 am the evidence of last evening's abbattoir would be on its way through the sewer system. Work would resume as the survivors would have funerals to pay for.
Anyway... despite everything I anticipated, we lived until downtown and got another bottle of Soju and enormous bowls of soup. There was a sign --- well.. here is that sign..
And then the soup came. It looked dubious, even by the "if you can capture it, cut it, or conceive of fitting it into any kind of cooking apparatus it must be edible" standards of Korea. Here is a fuzzy picture of the thing.
It is time to step back a bit and note that I had asked Eddie not to tell me what I was eating before I tried it. This bowl, however, looked so much like Klingon food "Ghaaaak is better served alive!") that I broke my vow not to ask. Eddie reminded me of our deal and I said, "ok, I'll try it and then you tell me what it is." I chopsticked up one large piece of particularly noxious.. er... "stuff" and took a big bite. Eddie smiled and said... "congealed pig's blood."
FREAKING CONGEALED PIG'S BLOOD!
To my credit (I think?) I didn't vomit. I choked the whole thing down while focussing on the only ingredient in the soup I could actually identify, the rice. This beautiful "food" not only contained the congealed pig's blood, but also most of the part of the lower intestinal tract of a lamb.
Then I just focussed on the *extremely* drunk Korean guy who was sitting with a friend in the room behind us and wished I were dead.
No such luck.
When we tried to return to our apartment, no taxi would pick us up. There were 5 of us.. a problem for the small cabs in Seoul and particularly with a fat gajiin like me as one of the 5. The cabs would stop (well, "stop" in the sense of rolling by at about 10 miles an hour), hear our request and accelerate into the distance.
We finally got a cab by offering it our Secret Admirer's trip back across town and we were back to the apartment by just before 2. Just before 2, Eddie sagely noted, was still drinking time, and out came more Soju.
I staggered off to bed shortly thereafter. Typically, I woke up two hours before the Korean Krewe who seem to have highly developed "sleep it off" skills. I headed down to the PC Bang to drop off some work and the post I did yesterday. Got a call about 10 and headed back to the apartment for a breakfast of Kim Chee and rice.
As I type this Jae is heading down south on the bullet train and Eddie and I are hanging out on the warm floor watching the news. This afternoon we head down to see his father and stay down there. Eddie promises there won't be abusive drinking, but I'll believe that when I can't see my liver pulsing gelatinously through my varicose-vein shot skin.
After a nap we hopped on the 631 bus from Korea to Gimpo. This ran through some pretty gnarly traffic jams as one main street we were on was in the middle of extensive construction of some sort. This gave me a chance to goggle at the "apartment forests" as we drove through them. Koreans live in structures that don't appeal to some westerners as they are essentially apartments that one must purchase.
The original Korean housing looked something like migrant farm-worker motels in the States. A bunch of very small, one-story houses which were built wall to wall, though not necessarily in the shotgun style that might imply. Some were built on hills so the clusters extend upwards and sideways and are connected in whatever way then can be. The point of all that is Koreans are used to living cheek by jowl and when it came to building "homes" they went apartment style. Apartment style with a bit of a difference though, since a house needs to have a front and a back. This means most apartment/houses go all the way through the building and have a deck of some sort on the front and back. Eddie says that this is because traditionally (the Korean excuse for everything) people wanted houses the wind could blow all the way through when you opened the front and back doors. To this he gnomically added that women loved this and children hated it. He then returned to a bowl of something a bit awful which he ate with apparent gusto. An apartment building will normally consist of columns of apartments every two of which share a stairwell and elevator shaft. Here is my lame drawing of that:
Because of the cheek-by-jowl nature of these apartments, real estate is handled differently in Korea. I had read that you used different real-estate agents for different neighborhoods, but the buildings made clear why. You buy a "house" in Korea and you are also buying two very close neighbors - the people above and below you. There is no space to ameliorate sound or smell, or anything else. So the real-estate agent's job is not just to find the right "place," but also to get you into a good situation. Once you buy, you are stuck. This is probably not such a large problem in the newer units. I am currently at Ed's parent's unit and it seems very insulated from the neighbors. But our unit in Seoul is very different and if we had a noisy upstairs neighbor it would be a real drag.
Anyway, these apartments are built in close clusters and very tall. When you get among them it can be disorienting in a way that that is difficult to demonstrate without a crazy fisheye lens.
We rolled through them to Gimpo, where Ed's parents live in a very nice "house." It was high-school reunion night for Ed's dad, so we accompanied him to the re-union where he was able to announce Ed's marriage and various successes. Apparently I was a good visual aid to this, since I was clearly an English speaker and Ed was clearly able to communicate with me and make me feel at home. This is a good thing in Korea, because although everyone has technically learned English, that "technically" is in the same sense that some Catholic girls remain technical virgins. Korean schools apparently focus on reading and writing, not speaking, so fluency can be valuable.
The short version is Ed's dad seemed happy about everything and we returned to his house for some drinks and after-meal nosh. This is another nice thing about Korean drinking culture -- it is very rare to only drink.. there must be food accompanying drinking. Ed's mom really put on the dog (metaphorically!) as we had several kinds of nuts, raisins, passion fruit, Asian Pears (way superior to the US domestic version), peeled mandarin oranges, persimmons, Ginko seeds and lotus seeds. We went to sleep early, interrupted only when Ed's snoring drove me into another room. ;-)
Here is Ed's dad, after a few to many shots of Soju, attempting to rouse his geriatric fellow alumni into going up to the Joint Security Area (DMZ) and "re-unify those Damned Commies Right Now!" (That or he's pointing proudly at Ed)
It is now about 8:30 in the morning and only the spectre of a day with Mr. Park (not Ed's dad) darkens anything. This is a guy who made a very serious point of drinking me into a coma in the states, so I'm a bit worried. And in some kind of seizure, Ed agreed last night that we would move our meeting with Mr. Park from tonight up to 11 this morning. Not that we will get away any earlier as we have to spend the night down there.
Part of the experience I guess.
10 great things about Korea
1) Taxis everywhere and very cheap
2) The cell-phones you can rent at the airport
3) The PC Bang costs about $1.20 an hour (on the way to Gimpo actually saw one for 60 cents an hour)
4) You will never suffer a vitamin deficiency if you eat Korean food
5) Heated floors (this may be the single greatest achievement of the Korean culture across the centuries)
6) The "oh fuck it" approach to problems
7) The *first* bar we visit
8) The exchange rate is close enough to 1000 to 100 that you can understand what you are paying on the first day
9) Temples, of course
10) How Seoul lights up at night -- it's neon Xmas every night.
5 not-so-great things
1) Hae Jang whatever the Hell... ("kook", actually, which seems about right)
2) Crazy People on the 1 line (more about that later)
3) Koreans spit like they are Chinese
4) Korean chopsticks are made of slippery metal which they claim is more sanitary, but makes them slippery as hell.
5) The "last" bar we visit
TOMORROW: The Swine DO make me eat a living thing and what is it with the bathrooms?
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Temples and Snow
DAY 2
Was all about the snow and the cold. I went to sleep at about 10 the night before and slept as solidly as I have in years. Warm floor and cold air, I guess. Woke up at about 5:30 and did some work, then headed out into the snow at about 7. Got some pictures (below). Headed back in when Eddie and Jae awoke and called me. I don't think I mentioned it yesterday, but one really cool thing about Korea being so wired is that you can rent in-country cell phones at the airport for a few dollars a day. That's a good deal if you're likely to get lost, as I almost always am.
Eddie says that it snow in Seoul isn't really news, but to me it looked like it was the first time it had ever happened. Traffic was snarled, women were slipping and sliding all over the place (this may have had to do with the fact that they were all, unnacountably, wearing high-heels in a snow storm). At the train station they alternated putting down dirty rags and cardboard boxes at the top and bottom of each stairway or escalator. These were quickly soaked and dirtied by the crowds pouring over them and became useless. In some places men were melting ice with small, hand-held torches, but to do that they were kneeling directly in the way of oncoming commuters. It looked very disorganized to me.
Eddie explains this is just the Korean way of doing things.. pour people at the problem and overcome it ant-style. This approach became useful to us when the water main serving our house broke while I was out taking my walk, but was completely fixed within six hours. Eddie says this is the "fuck it principle." That is to say the Korean "fuck it principle" which goes "fuck it, we might as well fix this as quickly as we can." An unusual fuck it principle, but it worked for the water.
We walked out for a delicious breakfast of porridge (actually a rice stew, sort of) with meat and mushrooms. Kimchee of course and the ever-present cup of tea. We don't drink much else but alcohol, but the Korean diet is so rich in soups and other water-bearing dishes (a bowl containing nothing but two slices of horseradish and a cup of flavored water is the most hydrous example I can think of) that combined with the tea we spent half the day doing things and half the day looking for restrooms. Fortunately restrooms are everywhere in Seoul and are extremely clean.
After breakfast it was off to the Computer Bang so I could post yesterday's tripe and smell last night's cigarettes. Cheap though.. about a dollar for a bit less than an hour of intarweb this and that and the major bits of my work done. As we wandered around the slippery roads we contemplated forming a blues band called "Seoul Men" only because we had decided that there needed to be a Korean Blues album titled "Soju and Cigarettes."
Then it was off to two touristy destinations. The first was Unhyun-goong (goong means palace and Unyhun is the name of the mountain behind it. The second palace was the Changduk-gung. They were of two entirely different styles, and to make sure no one's download chokes I will post photos of the more ostentatious one today. I'll be going back to both when the POSSLQ gets here, so I'll post the other then.
A picture of Mr. Palace:
A detail of the Taancheong architectural style of ceiling painting. Used in temples and palaces only. If a local tried this they would be kilt:
A pattern detail from the Taancheong style of ceiling painting:
The King's fishing hole on a currently frozen lake. Not a biggish problem because he is a currently dead King and has little call to fish:
Walking along the palace fence we see someone fermenting something typically hideous and Korean (could be Kimchee, could be bean paste, could be some Hell I know knothing of:
I asked Eddie why the Taancheong style had been developed and and he said it protects people from demons and bad luck. I reminded him the king was dead and the palace had been repeatedly defiled by the Japanese, but he just cursed and repeated that it protected people from demons and bad luck. This is quickly becoming one of Eddie's stock answers when he doesn't just ignore me completely and pretend he can't speak English. Some of his others are:
"It doesn't matter, just taste it!"
"oh that? It's a Korean custom. You'll get used to it."
"Just one more bar and then we go home."
Now he runs them together, but he's added a new one. It used to go something like: "It doesn't matter, just taste it. It will help protect you from demons and bad luck. And it's a Korean custom. You'll get used to it."
Recently he added, "it probably won't kill you."
He added this after a night of revelry ended us up at the "Original Best Restaurant in Seoul." The other restaurants were merely imitators, I guess.
Anyway, one of our party members has a local secret admirer and we had to go out to the bar, karaoke, and dinner with him which ran til 2 in the morning and almost concluded with us unable to get a taxi back to our apartment. It also involved the most loathesome thing that I have yet eaten in Korea and, as in most funky countries, it was presented as a hangover cure. But that tail must await tomorrow as I am off to the PC Bang to send this little note off. Today we must bus south to meet Eddie's parents.
This can only end in tears! ;-)
Last pic is just one of the typical kind of jumbled signage you see hanging all over the place in Seoul. No zoning laws that I can make out around here. The pic also shows a bit of the snow we've had, though the massive amounts of traffic quickly destroy it as it lies on the street.
Now I'm off to try to pay for this time on the computer without a friendly (by which I mean English speaking) Korean in sight.
I'll write you all from prison....
Was all about the snow and the cold. I went to sleep at about 10 the night before and slept as solidly as I have in years. Warm floor and cold air, I guess. Woke up at about 5:30 and did some work, then headed out into the snow at about 7. Got some pictures (below). Headed back in when Eddie and Jae awoke and called me. I don't think I mentioned it yesterday, but one really cool thing about Korea being so wired is that you can rent in-country cell phones at the airport for a few dollars a day. That's a good deal if you're likely to get lost, as I almost always am.
Eddie says that it snow in Seoul isn't really news, but to me it looked like it was the first time it had ever happened. Traffic was snarled, women were slipping and sliding all over the place (this may have had to do with the fact that they were all, unnacountably, wearing high-heels in a snow storm). At the train station they alternated putting down dirty rags and cardboard boxes at the top and bottom of each stairway or escalator. These were quickly soaked and dirtied by the crowds pouring over them and became useless. In some places men were melting ice with small, hand-held torches, but to do that they were kneeling directly in the way of oncoming commuters. It looked very disorganized to me.
Eddie explains this is just the Korean way of doing things.. pour people at the problem and overcome it ant-style. This approach became useful to us when the water main serving our house broke while I was out taking my walk, but was completely fixed within six hours. Eddie says this is the "fuck it principle." That is to say the Korean "fuck it principle" which goes "fuck it, we might as well fix this as quickly as we can." An unusual fuck it principle, but it worked for the water.
We walked out for a delicious breakfast of porridge (actually a rice stew, sort of) with meat and mushrooms. Kimchee of course and the ever-present cup of tea. We don't drink much else but alcohol, but the Korean diet is so rich in soups and other water-bearing dishes (a bowl containing nothing but two slices of horseradish and a cup of flavored water is the most hydrous example I can think of) that combined with the tea we spent half the day doing things and half the day looking for restrooms. Fortunately restrooms are everywhere in Seoul and are extremely clean.
After breakfast it was off to the Computer Bang so I could post yesterday's tripe and smell last night's cigarettes. Cheap though.. about a dollar for a bit less than an hour of intarweb this and that and the major bits of my work done. As we wandered around the slippery roads we contemplated forming a blues band called "Seoul Men" only because we had decided that there needed to be a Korean Blues album titled "Soju and Cigarettes."
Then it was off to two touristy destinations. The first was Unhyun-goong (goong means palace and Unyhun is the name of the mountain behind it. The second palace was the Changduk-gung. They were of two entirely different styles, and to make sure no one's download chokes I will post photos of the more ostentatious one today. I'll be going back to both when the POSSLQ gets here, so I'll post the other then.
A picture of Mr. Palace:
A detail of the Taancheong architectural style of ceiling painting. Used in temples and palaces only. If a local tried this they would be kilt:
A pattern detail from the Taancheong style of ceiling painting:
The King's fishing hole on a currently frozen lake. Not a biggish problem because he is a currently dead King and has little call to fish:
Walking along the palace fence we see someone fermenting something typically hideous and Korean (could be Kimchee, could be bean paste, could be some Hell I know knothing of:
I asked Eddie why the Taancheong style had been developed and and he said it protects people from demons and bad luck. I reminded him the king was dead and the palace had been repeatedly defiled by the Japanese, but he just cursed and repeated that it protected people from demons and bad luck. This is quickly becoming one of Eddie's stock answers when he doesn't just ignore me completely and pretend he can't speak English. Some of his others are:
"It doesn't matter, just taste it!"
"oh that? It's a Korean custom. You'll get used to it."
"Just one more bar and then we go home."
Now he runs them together, but he's added a new one. It used to go something like: "It doesn't matter, just taste it. It will help protect you from demons and bad luck. And it's a Korean custom. You'll get used to it."
Recently he added, "it probably won't kill you."
He added this after a night of revelry ended us up at the "Original Best Restaurant in Seoul." The other restaurants were merely imitators, I guess.
Anyway, one of our party members has a local secret admirer and we had to go out to the bar, karaoke, and dinner with him which ran til 2 in the morning and almost concluded with us unable to get a taxi back to our apartment. It also involved the most loathesome thing that I have yet eaten in Korea and, as in most funky countries, it was presented as a hangover cure. But that tail must await tomorrow as I am off to the PC Bang to send this little note off. Today we must bus south to meet Eddie's parents.
This can only end in tears! ;-)
Last pic is just one of the typical kind of jumbled signage you see hanging all over the place in Seoul. No zoning laws that I can make out around here. The pic also shows a bit of the snow we've had, though the massive amounts of traffic quickly destroy it as it lies on the street.
Now I'm off to try to pay for this time on the computer without a friendly (by which I mean English speaking) Korean in sight.
I'll write you all from prison....
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
First Post From Korea
018-696-1125
The trip began, as they so often do, at the bar. Eddie called me on the cell and said "At 8:25, have a gin and tonic ready for me at the table so we don't need to waste any time."
He showed up early.
We drank at the bar, drove up to SFO and then drank at the bar there. By the time we got on the plane I was so drunk I could barely stand. I felt as though I had arrived in Korea early! Because I was so drunk I slept pretty soundly through the first seven hours of the flight (including a filet mignon dinner, I am told. I say "I am told" because I wasn't awake to see it and this is just the kind of mean trick Eddie would play on me). Sleep was occasionally interrupted by the obligatory infant wailing out of control. This kid seems to ship with the 747 (at least he's been on any intercontinental flight I've been on) and unfortunately, because it isn't mine, I can't throttle the little bastard. I dozed intermittently, and with a hangover for the next three hours of the flight. With about two hours to go I got into the back of seat TV action and watched some Kurt Russell movie about a family of superheroes. Asiania served up breakfast before we landed and I turned down the pancakes in favor of a shrimp-rice concoction that came with a tube of hot paste I can already sense I will regret tomorrow morning.
You know what I mean.
The flight also had a cool show which continually updated what speed we were going, how high the plane was, the temperature outside and an animation of where we were over the ocean (or Japan or Korea). It probably wouldn't have been nearly as cool if I had discovered it early in the flight and watched painfully incremental progress across the sea, but since we were already over Japan and almost home it was kind of neat.
At Customs I drew my traditional official - the one who lives in constant state of amazement at the cool things which surround him and the idea that he may someday master their purposes. This, sadly, was not that day and so I stood in a line that seemed trapped in amber as the lines to either side zipped by with alacrity. I don't speak a word of Japanese, and the Japanese guy behind me didn't speak any English, but we had an animated conversation of gestures, grunts, and nasty facial expressions in which we agreed the guy checking our line was subhuman. Since the guy checking our line was Korean, this came particularly naturally to my Japanese friend who was no doubt ruing the loss al that last World War.
This conversation came after my first bit of culture shock which was foisted on me by the book "Culture Shock." Well, all the books really. They all harped on how the five Confucian relationships created a status-based society in which older men were all-powerful and could push there inferiors around. In each book the example was of a man who skipped to the head of the line to purchase something. So, when the nice Japanese guy started to move up next to me I went in to full "oh no you're not cutting on me Mr. Thinks He Has More Status Dude!" I deployed my computer case, camera case and elbows. I moved up so close to the people in front of me that we were touching.... I was a mess. So I gave up. Jump the line on me, I won't stop you. ;-)
My Korean partners zipped through their customs and were waiting for me on the other side.
We exchanged money with a dour man in a box and got cell phones from some lovely women in Santa's hats. I'm now with in Incheon airport with Eddie happily chattering away on one of the cellphones. It is about 8 in the morning and it is really nice to be someplace where no one can talk to you. Jae is up on the third floor doing some arcane paperwork she needs to do to udpate her visa for the US. Airports are pretty much the same, so I don't feel in-country yet. The only thing different about this airport is that everyone seems to be asian and the cops have gaudy uniforms that would fit in a Gay-freedom parade.Every once in a while a US army person wanders by on the way to somewhere, but other than that I'm the only white guy for as far as view stretches.
The painful part of the hangover is gone and now I'm in that nice tired hyper-receptive state that sometimes comes with hangovers. Everything has a sort of grainy texture to it which is just right as the sun has come up yellow and suffusing the smog out the window. There is a little dusting of snow on everything and Incheon is a silver-ish color, so it looks like everything is painted in a flat yellow/gray palette. I hope to pop out and get a photo whenever Eddie tracks Jae down.
Which I did do. And then we hopped a bus to Seoul. Bus drives through some pretty alarming landscape dotted with factories pouring out smoke and deposits us in Seoul next to picture number 2. I went all the way to Korea and found a San Jose strip mall!
We grabbed a cab over the the apartment and got set up, then headed down into Seoul for lunch. The rest of the day was spent at lunch(about three hours) with another Korean while we waited for Jae to finish some business at the US Consulate. Which we also walked past - it had about 15 fully-loaded riot police and a line that was literally around the block. The riot police, it turns out, are everywhere. We passed a bunch more at the Japanese embassy and I saw riot police tucked away in little nooks and crannies everywhere. They also keep an alarming (to my eyes anyway) number of hoosegows on wheels available on the street.
They are lined up and waiting to go.
Home to some social drinking, in bed by 10 and slept on the excellently heated floor like a baby. Those heated floors are just the thing. Woke up this morning at 5:30 and headed out into the light snow to take pictures. But that is for tomorrow...
Happy, fed, and quite cold in Korea!
The trip began, as they so often do, at the bar. Eddie called me on the cell and said "At 8:25, have a gin and tonic ready for me at the table so we don't need to waste any time."
He showed up early.
We drank at the bar, drove up to SFO and then drank at the bar there. By the time we got on the plane I was so drunk I could barely stand. I felt as though I had arrived in Korea early! Because I was so drunk I slept pretty soundly through the first seven hours of the flight (including a filet mignon dinner, I am told. I say "I am told" because I wasn't awake to see it and this is just the kind of mean trick Eddie would play on me). Sleep was occasionally interrupted by the obligatory infant wailing out of control. This kid seems to ship with the 747 (at least he's been on any intercontinental flight I've been on) and unfortunately, because it isn't mine, I can't throttle the little bastard. I dozed intermittently, and with a hangover for the next three hours of the flight. With about two hours to go I got into the back of seat TV action and watched some Kurt Russell movie about a family of superheroes. Asiania served up breakfast before we landed and I turned down the pancakes in favor of a shrimp-rice concoction that came with a tube of hot paste I can already sense I will regret tomorrow morning.
You know what I mean.
The flight also had a cool show which continually updated what speed we were going, how high the plane was, the temperature outside and an animation of where we were over the ocean (or Japan or Korea). It probably wouldn't have been nearly as cool if I had discovered it early in the flight and watched painfully incremental progress across the sea, but since we were already over Japan and almost home it was kind of neat.
At Customs I drew my traditional official - the one who lives in constant state of amazement at the cool things which surround him and the idea that he may someday master their purposes. This, sadly, was not that day and so I stood in a line that seemed trapped in amber as the lines to either side zipped by with alacrity. I don't speak a word of Japanese, and the Japanese guy behind me didn't speak any English, but we had an animated conversation of gestures, grunts, and nasty facial expressions in which we agreed the guy checking our line was subhuman. Since the guy checking our line was Korean, this came particularly naturally to my Japanese friend who was no doubt ruing the loss al that last World War.
This conversation came after my first bit of culture shock which was foisted on me by the book "Culture Shock." Well, all the books really. They all harped on how the five Confucian relationships created a status-based society in which older men were all-powerful and could push there inferiors around. In each book the example was of a man who skipped to the head of the line to purchase something. So, when the nice Japanese guy started to move up next to me I went in to full "oh no you're not cutting on me Mr. Thinks He Has More Status Dude!" I deployed my computer case, camera case and elbows. I moved up so close to the people in front of me that we were touching.... I was a mess. So I gave up. Jump the line on me, I won't stop you. ;-)
My Korean partners zipped through their customs and were waiting for me on the other side.
We exchanged money with a dour man in a box and got cell phones from some lovely women in Santa's hats. I'm now with in Incheon airport with Eddie happily chattering away on one of the cellphones. It is about 8 in the morning and it is really nice to be someplace where no one can talk to you. Jae is up on the third floor doing some arcane paperwork she needs to do to udpate her visa for the US. Airports are pretty much the same, so I don't feel in-country yet. The only thing different about this airport is that everyone seems to be asian and the cops have gaudy uniforms that would fit in a Gay-freedom parade.Every once in a while a US army person wanders by on the way to somewhere, but other than that I'm the only white guy for as far as view stretches.
The painful part of the hangover is gone and now I'm in that nice tired hyper-receptive state that sometimes comes with hangovers. Everything has a sort of grainy texture to it which is just right as the sun has come up yellow and suffusing the smog out the window. There is a little dusting of snow on everything and Incheon is a silver-ish color, so it looks like everything is painted in a flat yellow/gray palette. I hope to pop out and get a photo whenever Eddie tracks Jae down.
Which I did do. And then we hopped a bus to Seoul. Bus drives through some pretty alarming landscape dotted with factories pouring out smoke and deposits us in Seoul next to picture number 2. I went all the way to Korea and found a San Jose strip mall!
We grabbed a cab over the the apartment and got set up, then headed down into Seoul for lunch. The rest of the day was spent at lunch(about three hours) with another Korean while we waited for Jae to finish some business at the US Consulate. Which we also walked past - it had about 15 fully-loaded riot police and a line that was literally around the block. The riot police, it turns out, are everywhere. We passed a bunch more at the Japanese embassy and I saw riot police tucked away in little nooks and crannies everywhere. They also keep an alarming (to my eyes anyway) number of hoosegows on wheels available on the street.
They are lined up and waiting to go.
Home to some social drinking, in bed by 10 and slept on the excellently heated floor like a baby. Those heated floors are just the thing. Woke up this morning at 5:30 and headed out into the light snow to take pictures. But that is for tomorrow...
Happy, fed, and quite cold in Korea!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)