It really isn't the time of year for this..

And it's emblematic of the grit in my brain.

There isn't supposed to be shit like that floating about at this time of year.

Last week was flatish.. The BKF did not win the contest he was in. I had to retool what I was doing in two classes, though in the adult class that means a change to a drinking expedition with them each Friday - which should help me learn Korean in the way the BKF has always suggested .. in a bar with some guys. Finally, my ongoing competition with the "butt-smell" that comes from the drain in my bathroom continues to drag on with no clear winner.

Still, I think I've lined up a student to help me with my Korean, and two of my classes are cancelled this week.

Had a lovely walk with the OAF to the big park in the center of town.

So, why am I whining?

Cause I GOT that!

;-)

I are Konfuzed...

Explain this for me.

First a bit of explanation.

All the Miguk shows on Korean TV have been chosen to scare the shit out of Koreans about the US. We have all the CSI/slasher shows, all the criminal prosecution ones, and Monk which has an advertisement showing a cow with a flower (Amurican BAD Beef icon) and presents the hero as insane.

Oh, that kind of show and Wrasslin’! So it ain’t all bad...

But I’m watching CSI:NY4 and every character is a super genius (not like MAF, but maybe close). They can solve a crime with the slightest bit of evidence – they can see through any ruse – they can profile a killer based on two words used in a High School yearbook.

And yet, they go to a doctor’s house, cleverly subvert the lock, and walk in with their flashlights on. OK, perhaps that’s a bit more subtle than turning on all the lights and cops might do it this way. But it turns out, of course, that’ it’s a crime scene.. all lovingly detailed in flashlight beams as they discover it. Nothing but corpses here, my friend.

In the door, across the hall, up the stairs, into the bedroom, all by flashlights.

Then they explore the entire crime scene by flashlight.

When they leave the crime scene to return to their lab, that scene of brilliantly intense and gory explications (verbal and scalpel) of the "body" of evidence?

Flashlights still on.

Why didn’t one of these geniuses turn the lights on?

Surely it would have been easier to find that all important evidence?

I’m confused.

The Internationale...

The Balloon Festival was, as I had predicted, “international.” Also, as predicted, some Korean lads tried to rap and … well .. just check out the “A Flock of Seagulls” hairdo on the one kid,

Compared to the bartenders’ championship, though, there were actually some other internationals at the event and the name kind of made sense. One of the balloon operators had even been flown in from Texas. The Chinese students from the “BPU Nearly a Bizness Skool” were nowhere in evidence. As usual Student Services had picked them up at 9:30 in the morning and dumped them off at the festival site. Someone needs to alert them that nothing really starts at any festival till mid-afternoon and thus they are boring the students to tears by dumping them into empty venues.

I walked over to the park, which took about two hours, and when I got there things were just beginning. The OAF had been sick, so she took public transportation to the event. We were both starving and ate some 닭길비 (Chicken Galbi) that was nothing like any other Galbi I’d ever eaten and was mainly notable because it didn’t seem hot at first, but kind of crept up on you as you ate the stuff. Here is OAF, happily shoveling it in (Please note her “drunken-master crossed chopsticks” style).

Then the water-droppin helicopter came by and left us a lovely rainbow.




The balloons started to go up, but emblematically, the “It’s Daejeon” one got started, and the collapsed back to the ground, the victim of an unseated valve somewhere at the top of the balloon.

up

And brutally down

Then it was off to the “Bio-Sphere” where the “mini-massage” fish worked on the OAF’s tangled cuticles.

Finally, a long (and mainly hopelessly lost) walk to the Weizen House where we ate bad German food and I drank beer along with many other BPU staff members. This long walk finally concluded when we found a PC Bang and I looked up the email about the location. On the 103 bus line, said the invite. So we wandered around (this whole lost process took about an hour and a half), found the bus line, hopped on the bus, and 2.5 blocks later and one right turn we were at the restaurant. I felt relieved AND retarded.

A taxi home, a visit to the Pirate Ship bar next door, then off to bed.

Today we head to downtown South Central to see a band with some of our friends in it. I need to stay undercover, since I got a pretty good redneck sunburn yesterday.

This and that

Patience is a virtue, but I lost my virtue long ago...

These multiple Korean classes have combined to make me muuy (Korean for “very”) confused. LOL.

And the Dongguk job seems to be sort of fading off into the distance - one of the positions has already dissapeared and my second meeting in a row has been called off.

I hope that will sort out, but don't anticipate a problem getting another job whatever turns out with Dongguk.

Today we head out for the Balloon Festival downtown. Being that it is in Korea it will undoubtedly be called the “International” balloon festival and necessarily feature Koreans trying to rap and a bunch of dance troupes of varied skills.

Korean rap is ridiculous to anyone who grew up around the US version. The essentially foppish style of the Korean young man doesn’t work for rap. Seeing four spindly dudes with hairstyles from “America’s Next Top Model” try to act ghetto is amusing mainly for how far it is from the real mark. There’s also the fact that the ‘real’ rap moves, like profanity, swearing, crotch-grabbing, tattoos and drug and alcohol use, simply aren’t allowed onstage in anyplace in Korea that I’ve been. So you get this really silly version of rap that makes the wiggas back in the US seem completely OG.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, the B-boy dancing here is world-class and always worth watching. The traditional dances are pretty good as well and when the inevitable group of Korean pre-teens playing drums and gongs comes out I’m, well, I’m hella down. ;-)

Korean attempts to do “International” dance leave me cold. I suppose this is partly because it is almost always expressed in belly-dancing. There is something odd about Korean women trying to belly-dance. I can’t put my finger on it, but it looks wrong and that isn’t about ethnicity – the style is just slightly off somehow, but I can’t get in touch with my inner gay-choreographer to figure out what the problem is. It’s just there. I suppose part of it is that Korean women are slim-hipped and generally small-breasted – you don’t get that feeling that you’re watching the in-between space above hips and below breasts.

Still, Koreans come at these things with considerable enthusiasm and that always makes festivals fun. The rapping and belly-dancing may be wildly misguided to a Western eye, but the enthusiasm is contagious and the desire to share public moments is a very refreshing change from California.

With that said, I guess I need to start walking towards Expo Park.

Wooot!

Not only did I receive news that ALL classes are canceled next Wednesday, but I just received a call that my Admin class tonight is canceled!

To the bar!

Blast from the Past

Man.. saw this on the Gomushin Girl's website - you have to love the "Lucky Pierre" reference tossed in there:

Defeating the Lazy

Ah.. the things I do to get work done.

While searching the internet for literature supporting my next abstract I came across the perfect book on Questia. I snagged about 50 pages of it onto my thumb drive, but made a deal with myself that I couldn’t look at it until I had finished/started several things I needed to do today.

First, I went to the evening Korean class. Very difficult – most of the students are above me, but it is also going to be very helpful if I stick it out. Then, after reading “organization” posts over at Reassigned time (here and here), I decided that I needed to organize and catalog all these various articles, journal articles, and the copy-right infringed cool books I had copied by printers here. This is pretty much done, if you accept the dodge of all the articles I put in the folder called, “Need to Sort.” ;-)

Also labeled all the CDs and DVDs I’ve burned and tossed out all the detritus. Cleaned the house a bit.

Now I have 50 pages of killer copy, two beers I just snagged from the store around the corner, and no classes until 6:10 tomorrow night. Mega-bonus.

Tomorrow I will get 50 more pages of the book, but the price of admission will be my Korean homework in both classes, as well as finishing up the article archiving (it’s all going into Excel) and a bit of necessary shopping (shoelaces, earbuds, and a .25 to .25 inch speaker cable.

Learning Korean: Now it Begins?

Today should be the start of a leap in my Korean speaking ability as I have put together a nifty little schedule of instruction.

On Tuesday I have the beginner class offered by BPU to foreign staff. About an hour and a quarter of really basic stuff.

On Wednesday I have a two hour class with some instructors here, one native and one not. This will probably end up being two hours a day.

On Thursday I will meet with my tutor whenever I can. One and a half hours here.

Friday I go to the restaurant and take an informal lesson from the bosses' wife. This will probably end up being 45 minutes or so.

If I keep this up (unlikely?) I should improve my Korean at least a little bit. Which would be a good thing as it is currently shit.

One class down and three to go for this week..

Back in the Saddle?

I’ve been a bad blogger. Between the end of the conference last Monday and the rush to get my second paper (for the World Cultural Tourism Association) off by last Wednesday night, I was in a haze of writing, reading, and re-writing. After that got done the 901 club turned into a norae-bang fest and as a consequence I was up until 2am Friday morning. This, or course, wrecked Friday.

Saturday was the “International Daejeon Bartender’s Chanpionship” in the Convention Center downtown. This was surprisingly entertaining, although the only international thing about it was that I was there (One miguk), the OAF was there (one little Indian) and BPUs business school bussed in a load of Chinese students. One of the judges was from somewhere in the UK and, true to his culture, spent most of his time acting drunken and over-familiar.

The contestants were all from Daejeon and all seemed to know each other. The competition was sloppy but fun. Every contestant dropped something at least once, and some were like the proverbial manna from the sky. There were a bunch of decent individual gags, but the flow was pretty bad. This was exacerbated by the fact that most contestants stayed behind the bar and the images of them that were projected onto the screens were from the same perspective as the crowd already had. Thus it was hard to see what was going on.

The one guy who was clearly the best (we didn’t stay around for the judging because they brought out dancers immediately after the competition – Korea loves its dancers at ALL public events) technically was also the best in showmanship, and was clearly also some kind of athlete as he, compared to the other contestants, bulged with muscle.

At halftime of the competition I went around and sampled the (sample-sized) samples of the vendors. BV wines was there, completely ignored by the Koreans, and it was nice to taste a semi-decent wine. The lowlight of the vendors was some awful hooch mixed from an energy drink and Jagermeister. Sure, I drank it, but man was it foul!

I’d like to see what a real “international” bartenders championship looks like, because even with the flaws, this was fun enough that the OAF (and therefore I) chose to skip the free bus back and watch the completion of the finals instead. We ended up walking back home, which took a couple of hours, and dining on French fries and fruit, with a dessert a few hours later of fried sogogi..

Wha....?

One of the real joys of living in Korea is reading the surreal and often incomprehensible "Ssomi and Hobo" by Artier Lee. This one seems to have been loosely(!) inspired by the Chinese space walk, but it's kind of difficult to tell.

Word on the street is that the translation is bad (it is apparently done in Korean), but I kind of like it. It's a good cartoon to read when you're hungover and nothing makes sense..