At the HiAnimal Show

Did a little bit of editing for the folks at 10 Magazine, and got paid off in tickets to various art exhibits. Looking at them this morning we discovered that one was just down the street at the War Museum, so we headed off to see it. Pretty bizarre with that combination of nature/reality and artificiality that Koreans are so good at producing.

Yvonne molested every exhibit she could

 


 

 

Til one molested her back

 


And I marveled at the artificiality

Boxeo

Caribou Agonistes

Bestiality Exhibit

Lion IZ King!

 

 

 

 

Rudolph In His Native Environment

Kind of weird, but thoroughly enjoyable.

Its' like Wikipedia KNOWS me!

So I'm trying to remind myself how to post graphics on the wiki...

and my search gets this:

 

It's like the know who I am!^^

The end of Malaysia, for now

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Long View of Batu Caves

So, after the presentation it was off to lunch with Professor Mustapha and her friend, who were absolutely hysterical. We had got a hint of that the previous evening when the parking lot had given us a bad ticket and we couldn’t exit. Mustapha and friend played Mutt and Jeff for us while we waited – the classic answer after the friend had to park the car sideways and run upstairs was, “oh, the tickets fail all the time.” Which seems to suggest a problem, and surely enough, as we began to (finally) successfully pull through, we noticed another car with a bad ticket and we think (hope, really, since the folks in the other car didn’t speak English, that we pantomimed to them what they needed to do. Or, they are still trapped in the parking lot, getting weaker as I type. By about the third night, the underground-parking-lot weasels, teeth sharp as razors and claws fetid with the gore of previous victims, will come!).

The lunch was good, and afterwards they took us down to our new hotel, which was in every way superior to the other one, including a rooftop bar that sold three pints of Carlsberg for $55Sing.  After we got to the hotel we first went (Yvonne’s addictions always coming first) to the Junk Bookstore, which was actually pretty cool. I picked up a slender volume of PG Wodehouse stories, and Yvonne got, well, whatever kind of thing it is Yvonne gets. Returning, we took advantage of the rooftop bar, and then ordered dinner from room service.

The next day was the big tourist day.  Which really wasn’t much. We went to Batu Caves, which was conveniently on the subway, and here we met the only real touts we would meet on the trip, selling little knick-knacky stuff. Batu Caves was cool, but dirty and smelly. The smell has to do with bat guano, I think, but the Caves were also cleaning up from some kind of previous festival. Monkeys, roosters, and pigeons were pretty much everywhere, and we watched with amusement as a very young boy was swarmed by pigeons. We were less amused, later, when some monkeys got fairly aggressive. On the way down from the  two chambers of the above-ground caves we stopped to take a tour of the Dark Caves. This was completely worth it, and I was amazed at how many people walked right by it without considering it. 45 minutes of nature lecture and awesome sights and sounds (or lack thereof, sometimes).  Then it was back into town and a trip to the Petronas Towers, which we checked out, but we did not end up going onto the tower bridge, because only single tickets were available for the next few slots, and we had a dinner date with a professor Manaf an her husband. Yvonne did manage to borrow an umbrella from the hotel and lose it within 20 minutes, setting a new person best for her.

In-Cave Waterfall

Dinner was grand, with a lot of chit-chat about cultural differences and misunderstandings, and it ran a bit long, and then back, as we say in rap, to the hotel.

The next day began, of course, with me making the nearly fatal mistake of listening to Yvonne.^^ This was partly because I had made a bone-headed mistake of my own. AirAsia, concerned for our travel, had sent us an email noting that it was Chinese New Year’s weekend and that travel times, and particularly time spent in airports, might be extended. I wondered why they had sent that out to me  nearly 4 days in advance of the weekend, but I dutifully set out to check in online, where I promptly entered my passport number incorrectly. Ooops!  This meant we should probably get to the airport even earlier than we had planned. Fortunately, Yvonne told me that we were leaving from KUL’s main terminal and that would make everything much easier, as we could take the express train. Except, of course, that we  weren’t leaving from the main terminal, which I only figured out after we were already on the train. Fortunately there is also a bus-shuttle between the main and low-cost terminals, and even with leaving to the wrong airport, we got to LCCT in just about the same time it would have taken to go directly.

Once we got there, the passport SNAFU was fixed up in a jiff, and it turned out the airport was relatively deserted, as we were traveling on the actual New Year’s Eve. Air Asia had sent the warning out early because travel the days before were hectic, but both Kuala Lumpur and Singapore had pretty much cleared out (lots and lots of Indians and Chinese go home, and most Malays head to their hometowns – a lot like what happens in Seoul at the same time.

The flight to Singapore is less than an hour, and we walked out of the airport, into a cab, and over to our hotel at  Joo Chiat, which thankfully was what had been advertised on the web. We walked around the neighborhood and had some awesome food at a roadside stand, then beers at a nearby pub. The neighborhood was pretty shut down, but what was open hinted that it would be a pretty partying neighborhood in regular circumstances.

Malaysia and Kuala Lumpur = Awesome. But it is goodbye

We shall get to all that title nonsense later, but for now a bit of, as PG Wodehouse might say, F-ing in the B (Not what some of you weirdos might think).

What did happen in Malaysia?

An unfriendly suggestion

First night we stayed in a bed-and-breakfast one train station from KUL. A nice enough place, but in the middle of nowhere. We had a glass of juice and turned in. The next day was a lovely breakfast and a conversation with a Canadian couple who were doing pretty much the same thing we were – hitting KL late at night, then hopping up to Langkawi the next day. Then it was off to a bus and to LCCT, one of the most chaotic airports I’ve ever been in, with masses of people milling about. No major problems though, and shortly we were on a plane to Langkawi. Once aboard Yvonne began a campaign of attrition against my stance we wouldn’t need a car. She alternated whining with shorter bits of whining, and then a bit of whining to mix things up. As I had no driver’s license with me, I was kind of against the plan (for reasons anyone familiar with Yvonne’s driving history might guess), but by dint of superior… well …. whining, she prevailed. So we got a small car and began our adventure of teaching Yvonne the difference between the right side of the road and the left, since Malaysia drives on the opposite side of the road from what we are used to. One other strange thing, the rent a car is turned over to you with the gas-tank meter already in the red, and the warning that you must “first get petrol.”  This was an adventure on at least two levels, the first being Yvonne’s right-left dyslexia, and the second being we had no idea where the hell we were, or where the gas station might be.  A couple of stops to confer with friendly locals, and had 30,000 ringgit of gas in the tank, which turned out to be enough for the entire island stay.

Excelsior!

Then it was off to Oriental Park. Like many 3^rd World-ish places, Langkawi is flocking with motorbikes and scooters, many driven by tourists who don’t know where they are going and are unused to driving on the left. The roads are also a bit narrow, so this was a “fun” thing to do that I don’t hope to soon repeat.  We got minorly lost a few times, but the island is small enough that we made it safely to our hotel, which was quite nice.

We had time to burn that afternoon, so we went up the Langkawi air-tram. Going up was kind of scary as it was a bit windy, and Yvonne was reduced to making little grunty noises of fear, while I pretended to not be on the verge of huddling in a fetal ball and whimpering my way to the top.  But we made it, and the views were certainly worth it. The tram stops at the first peak, where you can get off for one set of views, then makes about a 30 degree swing to the left, over one last appalling precipice, and then you reach the top, top.^^

Going down the tram was much easier as you were basically looking off to the far horizon, and not down and into the pancake-like death that awaited in the ravines below the cable.

A breakfast of some kind

Then back to the village, a bit of dinner, and 4 channels of really bad TV.

The next day we headed into Pentai Cenang to meet with a friend who was in Langkawi, coincidentally, “seeing a man about a thing,” a description that was intentionally vague enough that we didn’t really ask any questions. We searched for a bookstore, but one was closed for vacation, and the other was inexplicably closed. So, it was off to the stunning (by which I mean the heat stunned us insensible) beach, which gave awesome views of blue water, boats, islands, and bikini clad babes, whom Yvonne ogled with shocking lack of concern for getting caught at it.^^

Add caption

After a couple of hours of that, we headed back to Oriental Village and the hotel.

The next day we headed up the 7 Wells Waterfall. We left relatively early to avoid the heat. Oddly, no one else seemed to have thought of this strategy, and we were basically alone on the trail. We got to the top (a bit over 500 stairs at the last bit), and wandered around taking pictures. On the way up we’d spotted a couple of the bigger, brown monkeys on the island, who were swinging through the trees. Then down to the bottom of the falls (conveniently about halfway down the stairs), which presented a much nicer photo op.  On the way down we ran into a guy with three older women, who were laboring at about step 100. He asked us about the path, and we recommended they just go to the bottom of the falls, since the view from the top was a lesser version of the view from the top of the tram and neither, really was worth the myocardial infarctions his team of angels would suffer, nor the bad back he would get dragging their corpses down the stairs.

Next stop was off to feed the Macaque monkeys, which I let Yvonne do, as all the typing my job requires means that I need all 10 fingers. The non-macaque monkeys are browner, larger, and much more shy, but the Macaque are small, relatively friendly, and extremely, extremely interested in what you might have in your bag because, after all, it could be delicious. The "friendly" thing would turn out to be in distinct contrast to some monkeys we would meet later.

Yvonne wanted to go to “Book Village” (her addiction, again), which was on the map, but a closer scrutiny of reality (by me, of course) showed that it had been out of business for at least two years. Yvonne is Republican in the sense that she does not believe reality should impinge on what she wants, so it took about 45 minutes of…er… discussion(?) before I could persuade her that it would be a waste of time to head off across the island to see something that no longer existed.

Babylon on the beach

After that, back to Centai Penang and the Starbucks where, predictably, Mike was hanging out. I then headed to the beach-bar (Babylon, baby!), while Mike continued to drink coffee and Yvonne went out on another fruitless search for an open bookstore.

Eventually we all re-convened at Bablyon, drinking and chatting. About halfway into it, we saw a bizarre apparition. Three people came from the road. Two were women, in shirts with sleeves that ran to their wrists, pants that ran fully to ankles, scarves, hats, and two enormous parasols. These two were followed by a similarly dressed man, absent the umbrella, who never once turned away from his video camera, as he filmed the women’s procession towards the beach. Yvonne, Mike, and I, all looked at each other an in unison mouthed, “Koreans!”

As they passed, I asked them in Korean if they were Koreans, and the man just nodded, then grimly returned to his filming. They marched out onto the beach, promenaded this way and that, and then grimly filed back to the main road, never to be seen by us again.

Once back at the Oriental Village we went to the “Tiger Adventure” which turned out to be an orphaned tiger cub in a small enclosure. You could order a drink (and fries) and watch the tiger lay around or pace in looped figure 8s. It looked like a rather drab experience. We had the local equivalent of slushies and moved on after the tiger came over and posed for us.

The next day we hung out at beaches, fed more monkeys, stopped for a roadside drink, then headed to the airport. A quick flight to KCCT, a bus to KL Sentral, a slight wait there, and then the Malaysian Prof who had invited me to speak picked us up and took us to our hotel.

Purty Langkawi

The hotel was epic, among the worst we’ve ever stayed at, and a testament to what a skilled cameraman can do on the interwebs. The room was puny and smelt heavily of mildew, the television was broken, and there was no window. On the other hand, there were bugs, so maybe that evens things out. The shower never exceeded tepid, the doors and walls were thin wood through which the extremely noisy, and in one case repeatedly ill, neighbors could be heard. The hotel was also in the middle of nowhere. This was problematic because there was also no complementary anything, and we ended up ranging the soggy neighborhood until we found a restaurant that would sell us a bottle of water. The next morning, après-tepid shower, I was standing in the main room and felt something splash on the back of my neck.  Looking up, I could see a hole in the ceiling, which I could see entirely through. Fortunately, the one thing the hotel did have that worked perfectly was internet, so the first thing I did after we got settled was make sure to reserve a different hotel for the next two nights.

All that joy was amplified the next morning when Yvonne rose from her slumber, more like Mars the God of War than Aurora the Goddess of Dawn, and announced that she had lost her passport.

Not just her passport, of course, but every form of identification she had.

All in one purse.

All in a foreign land.

This was, as we Koreans say, a wicket with a bit of tar on it (we normally say this while at templestays). Massive search revealed nothing, so we developed a plan, which Yvonne forgot every 15 minutes.

Our driver arrived and HURRAH! the lost passport had been lost in the car the night before. So we were, for the moment, good.

The presentation went very well.  It started about 15 minutes late, so I had to hurry a little bit at the end, but that’s good, because it means I have room to cut and sharpen before I do the version of it in Seoul. Yvonne said the history part was a bit dry and dull, so that will need to be spruced up. The room in which I did the presentation was cold, like icy cold, and I was glad to be the person up on stage, because it meant I could pace around to stay warm. I was well received, although a Buddhist professor did have some questions about my analysis of how Buddhism affected Korean han. This will be a good thing overall, as that is one of the weak points of my argument, and this taking it on the road thing is intended to discover the weak points…

And with that, presentation moderately successful, I leave the rest to the next post.

A Book? By Me?

Seems possible and verging on likely....

for a series of presentations I'll be doing in Kuala Lumpur and Seoul, I've been developing a kind of "Idiot's Guide to Korean Literature."  This is partly to cement my own understanding about all this shite I'm supposed to be an 'expert' on - since as they say, you never learn something so well as when you teach it. It's also because it would be a killer handout at the presentation.

It's also forcing me to delve into things I'm quite ignorant about, already including classical Korean literature and soon to include its poetry....

In a lunch with the division, this popped up and professor Cho (who is kind of our big powerful dude in the institution) asked me about my plans and when I mentioned this and that I was going to take it to LTI and other places after I had the rough draft done, he nearly choked up his kimchi jiggae. He said, no, let's do this as a bilingual book and publish it through Dongguk's academic press.

To which, after exploring what that would mean for my copyright rights, I agreed. So it seems like the thing is on.

I present in Kuala Lumpur on Feb 7th, and hope to have a complete rough-rough draft by that time.  Then, I present again in Seoul on March 31, at which time I should have a 'real' rough draft. I set that down for a month while I re-read all my source materials, then have a go at a final draft.

Should be fun.^^

ANDONG SOJoUrn

The trip down to Andong began trippily, as they all do. After concluding another three hours of awsomely culture-packed wisdom in my discussion and presentation class, I caught a quick taxi back home. While quickness would be the general feature of a weekend in Andong, we'd only be 50/50 반 반  by the time we concluded our next ride.

Anyway, Yvonne was at home waiting, and we stuffed our stuff (how often does English make a noun/verb combination like that, where the verb can be done to the noun?) into packs and headed out to catch a taxi to Cheongnyangri Station, with our tickets purchased well ahead, as on a Friday night this is a super busy line. The taxi got caught in every traffic jam in Korea, two in Bangkok, and one in a factory in England, which coincidentally produced jam-related products. Not the ones you're thinking of, but ones related to toes. Still, there was a moment at which we thought we wouldn't make the train.

We got to the train station with about 20 minutes to spare, and the super efficiency of the employeees at KORAIL got us on the train with at least 5 minutes to spare.

The train was a Mugunghwa, which those of you who know me know I love immoderately.

It's a train with an entire care dedicated to PARTAY, including semi-decent internet access on about 4 computers. It's a club car, norae-bang car, and massage-chair car, yet so much more.

However, as we were late, that car was utterly full.

At first I thought the computers were being used, but when I actually went into the car, I discovered it was just some dickish Ajosshi using the seats. Korean trains allow "standing" tickets, and the standees are amoral bastards, with only one idea in mind, finding and keeping some kind of seat. So, similar to politicians and pederasts in the United States.

I purchased a beer and returned to my seat with Yvonne, filled with hatred of Korea, and feelings of personal rejection.

But within an hour the train stopped at handful of stations, two of which seemed to be transfer stations to some other important places, and the "standing" customers in our car eventually all found seats...

Which sent me back to the PARTAY car, and in fewer than 10 minutes I was at a computer surfing gay goat porn, which is how I always prefer to travel.

We hit Andong at about 11, and a very short walk in front of the station led us to an awesome array of motels, from which we chose the 문화  (or, "Culture," which I only later realized might refer to something unsanitary), which checked us in for about $35 for the night. Computer with internet access (but shitty IE 6) and television included. Relatively quiet, ondol, and an electric blanket which I fear Yvonne now loves far more than me.

We liked the place enough that the next morning, before we headed out on our local rounds, we employed the establishment for one more evening's enjoyment. Despite the fact it didn't have a porno channel.

In the morning, icy and cold, we headed out to Hahoe (하회)  village, which, in the horrible interstitial regions between Korean language, Korean Romanization, and pronuciation, is actually pronounced, Ha-hway.  Go figure, particularly if you are a mathematician (spills to my dead homie Stevie B.). The bus picked us up pretty close to the hotel, and in the scrum for entry (we had all lined up at the bus-stop and then the bus inexplicably stopped 20 yards before that, and well over the lake of icy water between the sidewalk and the street) I got on about third and ran to the back of the bus for key tourist seats.

Then it occurred to me that Yvonne had no money to pay the fare, so I fought my way back to the front of the bus and grabbed the unpopular (absolutely no foot space) seats right behind the driver.

When Yvonne got on, I was able to slide her the money she needed to pay, and we were away.

Just before leaving, the only other foreign couple got on the bus, a rather heavy-set dude (and you know that means something if I'm saying it) and a rather less heavy-set woman. They had to stand.

Which a lot of people had to do, because the bus was utterly jammed by stop one.  This makes me wonder about what happens in the tourist season, since Andong runs no more buses at that time, and it must be a hellish experience when there are scores of people trying to get on board. It's weird, and it must be horrible.

Anyway, we finally got to the place, and then disembarked to buy tickets. Apparently I was the only person on the bus who noticed that while we had been disembarked  to buy tickets, the bus continued into the village proper. This little bit of notice-if-ication would be a good thing later.. Once we had tickets, we had access to a shuttle bus into the village...

First, though...

사자

Outside the village was the mask museum, which was awesome.  A ton of Korean masks and a brilliant collection of masks from around the world. As a citizen of the United States I have to admint feeling a bit let down by our side, as other than a few masks from Native tribes, we were weakly represented.

Then the shuttle bus into the village. Hahoe is pretty cool, having an impressive history and being situated in a lovely spot. Because of the cold and iciness we did not take the ferry across the river, which would have allowed us to climb a 650 meter cliff to see the village from above/across the river. It was icy enough on the flat and when I plummet to my death it will not be by accident, and it will be onto a bunch of Yankees fans and not into a river.

We wandered about from place to place, with many places being closed for the season.

Once there, Yvonne was preturnaturally keen to leave, so after about an hour we headed back towards the front.

Which is where a funny but good thing happened.

Having noticed that the bus dropped us all off but still headed into Hahoe, I was curious if there was a bus stop in the village.  Sure enough, take a look at that map and there is an ambiguously named 'bus stop.'  I guessed this was where the empty bus had to be, so we headed there and, lo and beholden to everything there was the bus, with no line to enter.

LOL... then the bus took off and headed to the busstop just past the ticket window.

There, waited the hordes.

The bus immediately transmogrified from the bus with two cute couples (I count Yvonne and I among them) and one weirdo, to the bus with 8-million people standing including, no suprise, the foreign couple we had seen earlier...

I enjoyed watching the swine stand uncomfortably as we swayed and lurched towards Andong.

Once back in town, Yvonne and I made several unsuccessful forays at local, like within 4 blocks, tourist sites, but it was after 5 and they were closed.

So, we decided to head to the city market and its last section, which features a cluster of Jimmdalk (spicy chicken stew) restaurants.

We wandered until we found a restaurant that wasn't crowded - Yvonne seems to go for that, though I prefer the crowded ones as I expect, probably wrongly (Koreans will line up for anything that has received a good review in Korean press, and in our neighborhood this means the line up for bad burgers and coffee that is only decent at the only coffee shop in Noksapyeong that requires you to drink outdoors!) that crowded means good.

So, not a very popular joint, as we had walked past all of those....

As we finished (or really didn't, since the Jjimdalk is really a meal for three people), who should walk in but the other foreigners...

Yeah, we were being stalked!

They turned out to be a couple, with the woman currently teaching in Korea, and the man visiting.

We chatted for a while, but eventually Yvonne and I had to leave, for a quick trip to the Weolyoung bridge.

 

On the way we quickly stopped at our hotel (The foreigner/tourist section of Andong is quite compact) and then headed a block away to catch a cab. The cabbie swept us out to the bridge. From across the river the bridge, a pavilion in it's midsection, and an extremely well-lit structure on the hill behind it are an awesome sight. I had caught this view on the train down to Andong (though from a slightly higher perspective of the train tracks, which made it even more awesome) and wanted to come back.  We walked across the thing, but couldn't find an easy access to the well-lit building, so after a bit of tracking about in the snow, we high-tailed it back across the bridge, just in time to see a taxi that had been waiting there, red light on, lose patience and drive away.

The cruel snow bit at our exposed flesh, the wolves howled, and on the frozen banks of the river, the ice-weasels engaged in the ritual combat that keeps their ragged fangs sharp for their carnivorous tasks!

So we began to head across the street to a coffee shop to have a cup and get a call-taxi. When, praise allah, another taxi appeared at the site to drop some tourist off, and we nipped into it a bit sharpish, and got a ride back to downtown.  Our transportation luck on this trip was so awesome that to make up for it we will likely be struck a bus rammed into us by an out of control subway train.

Once back in town, we headed to the "mall" section of town hoping that something was going on, but it was the lull week between xmas and new years (the xmas tree had already been turned off) and we were there dead early. So, two drinks at the WA bar and we headed back to the motel to watch various shite movies, in English at least, until sleep came.

Which was fitful, since Yvonne was in full-snore mode and the wind was whacking away at something loose in our hotel room window.....

We woke up on Sunday just after 9, still a bit tired and with Yvonne ill (she'd had a cold most of the trip). Still, we struggled out to the bus-stop to catch a bus to Bongcheong-sa, a temple, but when the bus pulled up the driver told us it have been closed by snow - that is the snow of the previous night, which must have towered over one centimeter in height.

Still, there is no discounting Korean incompetence in the face of snow, and as we turned away to walk back towards the train station, who should we run into but our Canadian stalkers on their way to the bus.  Looking back at the bus we noticed that two rather determined looking Koreans in full Everest-gear had hopped on the bus despite the news the bus would not go to the temple.  This made me go back and ask the bus driver how long, once the bus turned back, the walk through the snow would be if we wanted to achieve the temple.  He said it would be an hour, and that would mean an hour hiking back.  As it was utterly frigid and howling wind, we did the French thing and retreated.

So, back to the coffee-shop we'd had coffee in the previous morning and a resetting of goals.

We hit the two places we'd missed the previous day, with the Museum of Modern Culture being, for lack of a better phrase, insanely awesome. Every exhibit was interactive and most were in Korea, Chinese and English. The place itself looks unprepossessing from the outside, but the bulk of it is underground and.. well.. insanely awesome, including (perhaps the least technological of all the wonders), a place to take pictures of your friends in masks, with a pretty perfect blue-screen background.

The only slightly weird thing was that they had a wall of Andong and mask-related things for sale, but you couldn't get them at the museum. Each object had an address and phone number to contact for sale, and many of them were different.  While Andong in general is good for tourists, its bus schedules are idionsyncratic, it deals with snow even worse than Seoul, and it's marketing is a bit incompletely thought through.

Still, awesome.

We finished all that excitement and still had over 5 hours in town. I overruled Yvonne's desire to go the Andong Folk Village, and instead had us hop a cab to the Soju and Traditional Foods Museum

OK, so I was wrong.^^

A totally boring exhibit in a warehouse in a boring part of town.

Luckily, we were able to grab a cab in which the cabbie got my bad directions to the Folk Museum. I knew it was out by the dam, so in Korean I asked him to go near the dam. Once he had that destination I tried to explain what we really wanted, which came out as the pathetic 안동  폴크 (As close as I could phonetically get to "folk") 문학관. To which, after some consideration, he replied 민속 박불관 and of course he was coming correct.

Which we got out to, turns out it is just past the bridge, and enjoyed tremendously, even though the second floor managed to be colder than the outside.

Then, a short walk back to and across the bridge, and just as we were discussing getting a cup of coffee and a call taxi I looked down the road and saw the city bus pulled over by the side of the road just about 100 meters behind the bus stop. Which, we hustled and bustled to, and less then 10 minutes later we were on a bus that trundled us back to city center.

We ate some Andong Galbi and I had a chance to taste some of the famous Andong Soju. It's famous for two reasons. First, it is supposed to be made the "old-fashioned" way, with original style ingredients and no artificial anythings. Second, its alcohol content is at least 2 times higher than that of normal soju.  Unfortunately, it tastes absolutely horrible. I had tasted soju *from* Andong (NOTE: Because of Korea's bizarre chaebols and local authority rules, every region has its own soju that cannot be sold outside of that regions) and it tasted better than the Seoul version. But the "Andong Soju" (which implies the higher alcohol rate) tastes like medicine, and Yvonne was utterly delighted to watch me struggle and grimace my what through a bottle (for science... FOR SCIENCE!  I wanted to see how much drunker I would get.^^). As we walked towards a coffee shop, I occasionally burped up a bit of it, and it reminded me of eating liquid-capsule vitamins as a child; it tasted pretty bad going down, but even worse when belched up from a full stomach.

Then it was off to a PC Bang for me, remaining at the coffee shop for Yvonne, and a romantic re-meeting around a heater at the train station....

And the train, the mighty Mugungwha, and the road home..

More of the transience of fame thingie..

For those who just can't get enough (of my double-chin!), here I am on the front of the Uni's web-site

And, for a slightly less appalling look, I have a 25 minute video interview on KBS online:

Tonight just after 7, join me and lovely host Adrien on Arirang's Catch the Wave, where we will interview author Sang Pak.

http://www.arirang.co.kr/Radio/Radio_Home.asp?PROG_CODE=RADR0145&MENU_CODE=101530&sys_lang=Eng

For all of you who miss my nasal but scratchy voice, I'm on that show once a week, Sunday night at 7 (Korea time) and I'm told it is also available of AOD on iTunes, but haven't figured that out yet.

Here we are, pre-회-식!

"He Ain't No Human Being!"

Exactly one week ago I was given my exciting honorary citizenship in this here town. Unfortunately the event was on my standard day off, so I didn't get to cancel any classes, but other than that it was a swell event.

My buddy the Czech Ambassador was there, so we swapped small talk and talked inspecifically about some kind of project in the future.

Then it was time to take the stage, where we all lined up, and the Mayor came by and awarded us in St. Valentines' Day Massacre style.

Sit down again and listen to some surprisingly good entertainment. Normally they just trot out the drums and gayageum, but this time they had a kind of fusion band that was really quite good and did songs I could see as quite useful for background music while studying or writing. Because I have yet to receive any of the promised photos of this event, you will have to settle for this picture of me bedecked in my finery.

The lunch was good, and then a very few of us took off on a tour of a hanok in Bukcheon, and the new City Hall and Library. Again, surprisingly good events and the planners of the whole day deserve a raise for not going for the safe and traditional stuff at most banquets.

Here we are at an inexplicable craft:

And then it was off to tea (the worst beverage on this side of a Masai toff). So I stared out the window at the awesome falliage (patent pending!):

 Finally it was off to City Hall, which sports this killer 7-story greenery facade:

Also worth noting is that at the top of City Hall there is an awesome Cafe with some of the cheapest drinks in Seoul, normally about ₩2,000.

Two days after all this, the lovely folks at LTI Korea sent me this awesome orchid, which will now slowly begin to dehydrate to death under my uncertain care:

 



 And, last but not least, on the Sunday Arirang radio-show it was time to celebrate with Adrien, and lay out my goodies (a proclamation, a rapstar medallion, and a card that gets me free entrance to any Seoul City facilities.

My Spalling is bat!