Pre-Wedding Jitters....

Day three begins as usual. I awake confused. Which reminds me of something that happened the first night that I have neglected to mention. My room is on the first floor, and you literally walk in past the reception desk and four feet to the right and you are at room 107. Room 107, as all inexpensive hotel rooms I've been in while visiting Korea, has an outside door, and an entryway with two doors. The one ahead, as you walk in, goes to the bedroom. The one to the right goes to the bathroom.

I have made a brilliant illustration, for your elucidation, out of nothing more than Photoshop and a burning desire to communicate clearly (and the beautiful, beautiful cup of coffee that is having its wonderful effect on my brain). So if you ponder that graphic very carefully you will see that when you wake up at midnite or so, in your underpants and that is all? And you need to use the bathroom

The percentage move is to exit the bedroom from the first door and immediately turn left into the bathroom. The percentage move is not to continue straight ahead to the second door and enter the main lobby area... in your underpants and that is all.

I did not make the percentage move.

Oh well.. that was day one and what is done is done.

After the beating? The police were quite polite.

I woke up and watched more TV while I did some homework. Yesterday I mentioned advertisements on Korean TV. There are two things that really hop out as you watch Korean TV, one is that there are very few advertisements, and the second is how utterly opaque they are.

Ed says that TV originally had no commercials and that, therefore, Koreans are loath to watch them, particularly since they have to pay for cable. Weird, I never thought of that before, but in the US we pay for our Cable television twice. We pay the cable company to deliver it, then we have to watch commercials every 12 minutes. I suppose we pay three or four times if we have Comcast -- there has to be a price for the stinky service and rotten programming. But back to Korea... I'm not sure what the formal limits are, but if you watch a movie made in the US you will start to notice that every once in a while it fades to black for .5 seconds and then hops back. These are the network breaks inserted in the movie when it went to TV in the United States. The versions Koreans see still have these breaks, they just don't put commercials there. It makes movie watching a much nicer experience. And it is totally out of character since the rest of Korea is pretty much a full-time advertisment. Step into any public area and you will be deluged by ads on billboards, buildings, enormous screens on the sides of buildings (in the big city) and people agressively hawking all kinds of stuff on the sidewalks and in the subways. Just not on TV.

As to the content of the ads - very difficult to determine, until the very end, what the heck is being sold. And ad will set some kind of weird tone. One ad features a white guy playing the violin in the middle of the field. He is being observed by a Korean woman. As he plays, the ground grows grass, columns grow towards the sky and then ivy grows up and overtakes them.

It's an ad for a housing complex, though why it would make me want to purchase a house is completely unclear.

TV got boring and homework got done, so I headed off to Gimpo airport and reprised the first day's moment of Zen in the Starbucks there. An uneventful flight down to Kwangju ended when I was picked up by Eddie and Jae's older brother Jongkyou who drove me off to lunch, some delicious barbequed fish. Here's a picture of Ed with Jongkyou (and now the official documentation begins!). You will notice they are doing the only two things Koreans do besides breed like rabbits - using cellphones and eating (those of you with long memories will remember my claim that all Korean daily life is consumed in eating, discussing food just eaten, and beginning to plan for the next meal). We headed off to the hotel which has Ondol style beddings. Eddie and Jongkyou headed off to get haircuts and I played around with the old and relatively worthless computer in my room. It runs Windows 98, some version of IE that isn't 128 bit secure, and it won't read its own USB ports. Alas. So it's back to the PC Bang wit me!

I went off on a fruitless attempt to find some burnable CDs. When I returned Eddie, Jae, and Jongkyou were on the floor signing an enormous stack of tickets. After the wedding at the wedding place there is a reception, but no tickee no eatee...

NEXT UP: Hamboned and THE WEDDING!

Day Toodle... ooodle..oddle...ooh... that must have hurt!

I woke up and my clever plan had worked. By staying up the previous day I had completely reset my internal clock. Unfortunately I don't live in the Gobi desert, and that seems to have been where my clock was set to. And smashed by Bedouins just thereafter. I was a bit groggy.

Of course the day started with the Prince of Lies changing our plan. I went wandering out in the neighborhood and called Eddie who said he was sleeping in until 10. This was odd since I thought he was supposed to meet his mother at the bullet-train station or something. But I wandered to the store and bought a sandwich for breakfast. This is always a bit of a crapshoot, since I can't read what's in them and the sideways view doesn't give much hint. Since Koreans put things in sandwiches that I wouldn't normally consider (crab, fish eggs, ginger, etc) the first bite can be quite alarming. One other odd thing.. the sandwiches are built in two parts and these parts do not contain the same ingredients. So you eat half of your sandwich and you'll have one meal, eat the other and you'll have a different meal. My cheap analysis of this is that it is the Korean way to try to replicate the bazillions of dishes that are served at any sitdown meal. Sandwiches, while convenient, must have originally struck Koreans as moronically uniform. So they did what they do with everything: they made it Korean.

Who knows what these wise savages have made of pizza? I'll have to try some while I'm down here - there is no shortage of Pizza Huts nor of demented Korean men riding scooters on the sidewalk delivering pizzas, over the flattened corpses of innatentive pedestrians, to a waiting world.

Anyway, I finish my breakfast and Eddie eventually wanders around. In the meantime I've been watching TV and it suddenly occurs to me that last trip every third station was showing some kind of ultimate fighting show (e.g. 'Pancrasse'). I haven't seen a single such show on this trip. Baseball everywhere (Korean, Japanese, and USA) but no pummeling. Some WWF, which I suppose I'll have to take as weak tea. Oh, and the weird porn.

Eddie tells me he has called off the day-trip to see his teachers down south. Which is probably good, because I was slowly evolving a plan that featured Soju and Korean porno which would have been enjoyable, but perhaps not the best use of my limited time here - Why do the two things here that I can do better back in the USA? Day-time drinking and gnarly porno is just plain better in the US. Bars open at 6 am and the porno includes such odd things as actual sex acts.

Anyway, Ed runs out to get himself some breakfast and we head back downtown. A bit more bookshopping (I purchase "Aloft" which has just been a great read so far) and then I head off to what is advertised as an "Irish Sports Bar" in the Westin Chosun. I'd really like to catch the NBA game. But the bar, predictably, is both empty and showing Korean baseball. I order a beer with my lunch salad and since this is still the workday it convinces my waitress that I am a hard core alcoholic and I can't eat three leaves of salad without her returning and trying to get me to order more beer.

I guess I actually like that.

Afterwards I walk back and hook up with Eddie for a brief period. I walk back to the Hotel and spend the afternoon doing schoolwork, yapping a bit on IM, and cleaning up some loose ends at work. Eddie shows up about 5:30, after having snuck a nap in and he hops across the street to pick up some munchies and Soju. We do the standard yap, drink, nibble, and watch Korean TV. Korean TV is notable for its ads and for its not ads, a Zen-like riddle I'll get to explaining sooner or later. The word is Jae's brother is gonna creep back into town, so we don't want to get too full or too drunk.

It's all about the balance!

A few hours later the boy calls and says he has been dragooned into staying late at work, so Ed and I go across the street for some barbequed bacon (which sounds weird, but think of rashers of bacon, not the US style) and more Soju. At about 9 or so we are both overwhelmed by a wave of sleepiness and return to our hotel rooms to crash. By 10:15 I have finished my schoolwork, have the iPod blaring louder than the airconditioner and am slumping towards Gehenna.

 

Out of Order? You're all Goddamned out of Order!

My computer is locked up in Ed's room and this sack of shit computer in my room couldn't handle Pong if you added RAM and a real monitor. It's 7 in the morning in Korea and we had the "pre-game" festivities last night.

That means I'm hung over. I don't understand.. I outweigh every Korean who was in the room last night by 50 lbs but I know that that the wretched swine will be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I see them this morning. I took copious notes last night, and one of the boys took copious pictures I hope to get my hands on today.

I was beaten up by an old woman.

I ate something Ed called fish that was "marinated in a bad way" (I can't believe a Korean said something like that about marination). I'm not sure that's a fair analysis because, after all, who doesn't like fish that tastes as though it had been soaked in ammonia?

I was the belle of the ball.

I "earned" $200 and then gave it back (that would be convenient right at this moment for a hooker or a western breakfast... actually, bugger the inscrutable swine... breakfast eaten off of the stomcach of a hooker....

This morning we will be off to get Ed made up and to the wedding. There is the promise of an afternoon off. Jae says there is a PC Bang right next door and if so there will be pictures.

For now I can only look out my window at the early morning smog which obscures the Sun and feel the White Man's burden..

It feels like a hangover...

Part Two: Flexible Spines, It's in the Bag, Meeting with Eddie's brother

The Theme of this trip will be "happy, happy, Jae, Jae" and in that spirit I include a picture of the Joy Mart

My heart sings with the voice of thick liquid barely squeezing by fatty deposits!

Jae and Ed and I headed off on foot to Insadong (a nice artsy shopping row) and lunch. We wandered a bit and then Jae had to head off to the bullet train to go back down to Kwangju and her parents. Eddie and I headed towards the new bookstore in town ("Something and Lundi") and he looked for pieces for possible translation and I looked for the book I would use in my Survey of Critical Approaches course. I found one and then headed back to email the prof to make sure it was ok. Eddie stayed at the bookstore because his job was a bigger one. I spent the remainder of the afternoon doing coursework and having inexplicable trouble with font-loading in Word, a problem that is also going on today.

Tomorrow Ed is heading off to see some of his teachers. This has cause a big ruckus. There is a pre-wedding exchange of valuables to a Korean marriage and rather than try to explain it myself I will indulge in a bit of copyright infringement.

Before the wedding, the groom's family sent presents to the bride and her family in a box called a Ham. Additionally, the Hamjinabi (person who delivered the Ham) and a small group of close friends of the groom also took a pot of Bongch'i Deok (red bean rice cake) from the groom's family. The bride's family would have a small party for the group, offering them food and drink for their efforts. The ceremony of delivering the Ham has evolved into a major event for friends of the groom, with the bearers "selling" the contents of Ham to the bride's parents. (In recent years, the groups have become very boisterous, demanding large sums of money that they promptly spend on alcohol.)

The Ham usually contained 3 items. The Honseo (marriage paper), wrapped in black silk, specified the name of the sender and the purpose (marriage) of sending. It symbolized the dedication of the wife to only one husband. The wife was to keep this document with her forever, having it buried with her when she died. Ch'aedan was a collection of red and blue fabrics, used to make clothing. The blue fabrics were wrapped with red threads, while the red fabrics were wrapped with blue threads. The two colors represented the philosophy of Eum/Yang (Yin/Yang)

So, as always seems to be the case with me, the issue is Ham. This has to get to Jae's family on the day before the wedding, but Ed can't really carry it around while he is visiting old colleagues. And the option they had come up with, which is really untraditional and had everyone on edge, was to drop the Ham off tomorrow. But that ruins the whole idea of the delivery of the Ham (and I have now lived a complete life if I can type "that ruins the whole idea of the delivery of the Ham" and not be making it up). I have suggested that I take it on my flight and thus protect the sanctity of the entire commercial venture. ;-)

That seems to be where we are at this point.

Ed and I went out and got two beers, some soju and some mango juice and sat in his room, which is 3rd floor and was very warm, drinking and talking guy bullshit until Jae's brother showed up. We drank a bit more and headed out for a bit more soju and dinner. I fell apart at about 10 and slept until 4 or so in the morning. I was able to get back to sleep for another 3 hours and consider that a pretty good job, considering.

And the last pic is of the identity-obscuring bits of rubber that surround the row of love-motels which surround our hotel. They are the things that look like the should be hanging in a car wash. Ed says they are still used to provide protection, but I think they're more like advertising now. In the old days they used to be low enough to hid car license-plates, but now they are creeping up a bit.

Korea: Part Deux, Day il

Not quite so much drinking on the way over to Korea this time, probably because I was not in the company of any Koreans I know. Had a beer at home when the packing was over, the birthday presents for POSSLQ hidden in various areas she'd never check (In the dishwasher, in the dryer, where the cleaning fluids are in the cupboard -- I think you see the point of those places?). Then I had two beers at the airport but couldn't drink more because I was being watched by the scary "happy, flying taco guy" who might has well have come from Korea himself with his forced happy dementia and strategically covered crotch. In any case, I had two more glasses of wine on the plane. Well, thimble-fulls really, as Asiana has moved to cups which contain less than an average sized swallow. Then I tried, pretty unsucessfully, to sleep. No screaming kids, and the seat between me and the Korean woman next to me was empty, I just didn't sleep well. But I wasn't hungover on arrival, which has to count for something.

Like not having drunk enough.

On the plane I worked on the long-fiction piece for my fiction class. Funny, you can pretty much date the death of this blog to the day I started my first class in the Master's program. It just sucked all the fun out of writing anything but a check.

Anyway, flight was uneventful and I arrived in Incheon at about 5 am. Eddie (the prince of lies!) had emailed me with a plan change.. he wanted me to come to Gimpo airport and then give him a call as he would be in town on social calls. So, at Incheon I cleared customs, exchanged money, rented a cell phone, and caught a bus to Gimpo. On the flight I had already moved over to Korean food (Asiana offers meals in Korean *or* English, so to speak) in an effort to have less bowel-extrusion on this flight. So when it was time for breakfast at Gimpo I went with some glutinous rice concoction covered with unidentifiable (and likely a good thing)meat. It was about 7:30 at this point and I had decided not to call Ed until 8 or so. I went into the men's room to change shirt and put on my belt. I packed my belt so I wouldn't be hassled at security --- it was bad enough I was stupidly wearing my "Bad Boy Bail Bonds" T-shirt, which the TSA people thought was hysterical as they repeatedly cavity-searched me. Once on the plane I immediately got my traditional effort to lose my tickets and money underway. Thankfully the woman who was sitting next to me noticed, as we deplaned, that I had left my portfolio containing tickets and all contact info on the seat.

I'm a maroon. But I got to Gimpo.

And, as I was tired of having my pants fall down and my T-shirt was coated in Korean red bean paste I went in to the bathroom, changed, and came out looking for a outlet to hook up the computer when.... Kaboom! Ed's mom caught me from behind. Eddie had been at his dad's house in Gimpo and up since 5 as dad is ex-military. Now, see.. if Eddie would just share little things like that with me? We'd have met up an hour earlier, no one would have been confused, and Ed's dad would have paid for my breakfast. But it's never that simple with Ed, who must always take into account the demands of his Dark Lord and Master when he makes simple plans. It makes me sigh...

Eddie and Jay were dressed in identical shirts purchased from the "Extremely Gay" collection. Bright pastel shirts, plaid internal collars, and some unidentifiable animal over the breast. I must get a picture of them in these. As I hope I will get to later, these shirts were just one part of a wild onslaught of clothes that Ed and Jay have been given by relatives. Anyway, Ed's parents went off to do whatever they do and the three of us were alone.

We had a brief moment of Zen at the airport Starbucks (Ed and Jay were happy to get a second away from the family) and then caught the 5 line into Seoul to find our extremely inexpensive (30 bux a night) rooms in the semi-hostel Beewon Guest house. Not a place I'd take my mom, but perfectly adequate. Has cable and a wireless network, so I really can't bitch. We got my room first, then Ed's. I checked his out and headed back to mine. Ed said he'd be "down in 5 minutes." I'm not sure what wer were going to do, but there it was. In three minutes Eddie called me from upstairs and said he would "be down in a half an hour." I knew this would be more like 45 and so I checked out the TV (Yes, I have totally lame Korean Porn, which you will see soon) and pulled out the computer. Oops, forgot to bring the power adaptor. Eddie and Jay were still completing the mysterious tasks that they could only do alone after finally getting out of their parent's house and...oh... I guess it isn't that mysterious.

Anyway, I had my first foray out into Seoul and found and purchased an adapter after a torturous communication process featuring gestures and hand position that must have included something insulting in most any culture. Then it was home to watch more TV and wait. I came across a porno so completely Korean that I filmed it from the TV screen with my video camera. It is available here in QT and here in WMV (WORK WARNING -- no real naughty bits, but some breasts and simulations of things you might or might not recognize).

Anyway.. that was the morning.... I was deadly tired, but wanted to make it through the day to start on the resetting of my internal clock.

NEXT -- Cheating on the POSSLQ - Bookstores in Korea.

Alviso Snaps

WATER STRIKE


BRAVE BIRD


CHOO-CHOO


BIRD IN FLIGHT

Eeeeeew!

Perhaps the weirdest face I've seen in a mainstream advert in some time. Looks like a mix between Louis Armstrong and the Black Jiminy Glick. Worse, in the real advert there are animated tears (of what look to be ammonia liquid) coursing down the guy's face.

While this face will certainly pull eyes, I can't see how it will be appealing.

My Neighborhood (Snapshotz)

I suppose it's a good thing, I just find it odd in such a (relatively) wealthy neighborhood. I trim my orange tree in a vain attempt to de-junglify my backyard and when I drop the clippings out front for pickup the neighbors descend. All this while I sit at my computer working on my Fiction class...

Friday Bird Blogging

just some bird in the backyard watching me trim the orange tree...

Aaah.. Adverteasing!

Ah.. the Atlantic came in, and if there is one thing more fun than exploring the nooks and crannies of academia it is exploring the nooks and crannies of advertisements.

Why?

Because it keeps me from my schoolwork!

Here's a really nice advert from a corporate swine. The things I like:

• Notice the use of part of the "Target" pallette. So that places the colors for all of us. We don't even have to think about colors because in the last two years we have seen this semi-orange and that blue (though not normally this saturated) so many times. The only risk this runs is that some of us might subconsciously miss the yellow and green. ;-)

• It moves from left to right in increasing levels of complexity. You can get the message from the left panel. If you turn to the next page you have already got, in a glance, what they want you to know. US = 3%. Time to panic folks. Then the little "So what does that mean for us" slides you niftily over the the next panel full of detail

• And they do a sweet job of presenting that detail. The "letter in an ad" is a great way to present dense text that would look insane if it were just laid out as normal ad text. And the letter, PDA, clippings, notepad and sketches automatically chunk information just the way you'd want and allow some nice visual differences.

A sweet advert by some corporate criminals. I give it 4 dollar bills leaving the consumer's wallet (You can see this pic in all its enormous glory by clicking on the picture below).

Here's another truly great one...

More criminal fucks... but what a nice job of taking the simple curve of a woman and tying GE's image to it. I went back and forth, visually, on whether I preferred the woman with our without the bandage on. I think I preferred the picture with the bandage off and that it was slightly more visually arresting. But the thing is that when you actually recognize that the bandage is not print, when you go to the trouble to peel it off and reveal what lies beneath? They have you visually and kinesthetically. Which is a neat trick to pull in a magazine ad.

.........

Finally an ad that can be classified under "Complete fucking lie" and looks like it was envisioned and created by that "Painter of Light" guy who uses the religious iconography, unusual light sources (if by unusual you mean physically impossible), and happy scenes that belie the reality that he is a fat drunken abuser who urinates on Winnie the Pooh (Not that there is anything wrong with that!)

which I prefer to see as

but I'm a cynic