LOL.. ESPN fellates Yankees even in loss..

Hard to tell what the score was in this game:

LOL... oh yeah... Yanks lose...

Raising the (Hanok) Roof

Saturday and the weather is grand in Seoul. One of my “online-only” buddies is Robert Fouser, a man who has devoted considerable effort in an attempt to save the hanok, the Korean traditional house.

On FB he announced that he was having a “roof-beam” ceremony for his hanok, so we decided to go. Grabbed a cab and got near where the site is, and then wandered around trying to find it (curse you IOS 6 and your lack of a Google Maps app).

On the way over we saw a traditional Korean band in the middle of the street and I joked that it was probably on its way to the ceremony, but in fact it was already dancing. It took about 15 minutes to find the place (with the help of a friendly Korea), and lo-and-behold, the band was there!

We watched the ceremony… some speeches, close friends bowing three times before a pigs head and then stuffing money into its mouth. Once the pigs mouth was full, the beam was revealed to be on the front of the table (with some Chinese characters – hanja – written on it, definitely for good luck. I should note that the pig is also a sign of good luck). The roof-beam was tied with two white banners, and the MC and various important people stuffed these tied areas with the money from the pigs mouth, as well as money that other guests gave them. Then the beam was raised to the roof, placed, and hammered down.

After that, it was pork and makkoli all around (Yvonne had some of the pork, but I had already eaten a tuna kimbap. We both avoided the booze.^^). I talked briefly to Robert, and then we wandered away to a bookstore.

 It was a cool ceremony, and I immortalized it on video, here:


 

Bookstore was cool also, but what you gonna say about a culpa and dropping 35 bucks on books?^^

Does it really mean that?

Grantland Editorial Staff Needs a Meeting!

Gwacheon HanMadang Festival

Even before the Chuseok holiday, Yvonne and I decided to get out of town. My idea was that I would go to Chuncheon and she would go to Gwangju, but she had a problem with this.

So it was that we decided to head to Gwacheon for its Hanmadang (one frontyard) Festival. Luckily it was easily reachable by the underground and after a light breakfast of cornpone, johnnycake, and light bread with hardtack (for balance)  we headed out.

We got there just after 2, which was a bit early as nothing was really going on.

We wandered around the outskirts of the festival until we found the “main madang” and sat down in the rather hot sun to watch some traditional Korean dancing. Then it was a short walk around the ‘main madang’ and a trip back out to the outskirts where there was puppetry, modern dance, and disembodied body parts – the typical fare one finds fair when a faire one finds.

Yvonne had brought homework to grade, making it fairwork, I suppose, and after a bit I wandered the town looking for a glasses shop as I was wearing a pair with its temples bent like, well, let’s stay away from Thai bars and say, bent like a modern dancer, and one lens taped in with masking tape.

No luck, but I did spot a boite, a hot boite I thought, and when Yvonne called me we met there for a quick beer and then headed off to see something that was going to involved garbage.

It was a coolish modern-art performance and it did include fire and confetti explosion, so I was well pleased. Then it was off so Yvonne could watch Korean traditional high-wire (well, about six feet off the ground) walking. I’m not sure how she’s missed seeing this before as it sometimes seems that the every Korean with a spare minute tosses on a clown suit, throws up a strand of nautical rope and performs for spare change.

Oh well, I headed off to check out the food (“alcohol”) stands and noticed that although there was an enormous bonfire being built, the schedule said it would not be fired up until after 9, and it was already getting a bit nippy. When Yvonne bailed on the semi-high-wire act, we both looked around and decided it was time to head home.

So we did.

 I believe the following film documents our experiences grandly.

Midweakly Report

My goofball wife thudded my plans for a complete night of sleep, and I now sit in my office with a big coffee trying to get my head back into one piece.

This was to be my first Wednesday to sleep in (My gig with TBS eFM), so it's a bit of a tragedy. It is nice to jettison one of my radio shows, because writing the scripts was more onerous than I thought, and particularly for the TBS one. Now I'll have more time for real writing. LOL, if I do it?

On the plus side (as you can read about here on KTLIT) I finally made it to the Seoul Literary Society, and met some rather posh folks. One upshot of this is that the Czech embassy has invited Yvonne (who will be invited if I am not sleepy!^^) and I to a 고기 (meat) festival this Friday night.  It is good to be a relentless social climber!

With the "typhoon" (it was brief and non-impressive in Seoul) gone, we return to night shots like this:

Weekended....

Second week of school is always a period of "settling in."

Unless things become unsettled..

Which leads us to Tuesday, when I ate the weirdest thing in the world..

And perhaps the evilest..

It looks like this:

Which claims to be something like "dish pizza" or "spoon pizza."  But looked more like what would happen if a French breakfast knocked up an English breakfast and as a result there were a late term abortion.

BTW... late term breakfast abortion tastes AWESOME!

The next day, however?

I was having butt abortions... about every 45 minutes.

so.. enough about that..^^

Then there's this whole Buckwheat Festival thing...

One of the last things my lovely wife did was buy one of those Chia-pet type things that swore Buckwheat Seasons Would Ensue!

I was skeptical and mocking, indulged in some mockumentaion, and thought about creating a mockumentary.

But when she planted it on an Wednesday night?  The next day it looked like this:







 and quickly grew to...



 Shortly thereafter...

 This buckwheat makes pancreatic cancer seem slow moving...

In conclusion, however, I have to say...

My camera sucks, so you really can't see how my nightfall crushes yours!

Lee Hyoseok "Buckweat Blossoms" Festival, Bongpyeon and a great pension down there

 The Lee Hyoseok Buckwheat Festival (named after his super famous in Korea short story "When Buckwheat Blossoms Bloom") was on this weekend, so the wife and I decamped.

The bus ride down was uneventful, thankfully a full half-hour shorter than the guidebooks said. We got to Jangpyeong (the nearest town with an intercity bus station) and found a hotel that was basically right across the street from the train station. There is also another hotel on the main street, on the edge of town. From the outside it appeared more modern, but we had already got a room, so we were set. When our attempts to order a pizza without phoning the order in were rebuffed, we went to the Discount Mart and got crackers and cheese. Yvonne got a vat of some kind of hideous meat-product, and proceeded, with several crackers, to demolish the thing. This was very good for me, since the stuff smelled like monkey-anuses (or what I imagine they would smell like). While we shopped for this stuff a woman began chatting us up, and introduced us to two young girls who, she said, would be serving as hospitality guides at the festival. We laughed and promised to look for them.

In the morning it was a quick cab ride (about 8 chun, as the rates are a bit higher) to the festival

There are multiple ways in, but if you head in from the main strip of Bongpyeon you go through a long alley of pochang-type stalls, selling food, shoes, and other assorted things. I took one picture of Yvonne standing by the entrance and in protest my camera committed suicide!  Consequently all the photos here are from my iPhone.

The Last Photo!

Walk through the parking lot and you have the choice of two bridges, one all of stones, the other occasionally bridged by multiple lengths of thin tree trunks. For the less adventurous, there is also a fully modern bridge to the right.

Buckwheat in its natural state

Across the bridge you trek over some wood paths – narrow when there are multitudes of people, past a couple of pens with sheep and donkeys. Then it is up some stairs to a raised wood walkway to the left that meanders through the fields of buckwheat (pretty impressive in bloom) and past a variety of goofy photo opportunities with decorated chairs, benches, and cutouts of various kinds. You can follow this to the left until it peters out, and then loop back, up against the back of the park, past several restaurants.

The Ultra Confusing sign of schizophrenia (Note - 2 "You are here" notations^^)

Then it is back down to the road, and the pathway that leads up a short but often sharp trail (this is to the far left of the park, as you look at the park from the entrance).  This path leads up to the munhakwan, which charges a nominal fee (2 chun and lower) for entrance. There is also a funky little teahouse where 3 chun buys you a glass of maemil tea. One wall is covered in books, all of which are in Korean.

The museum is kind of cool, although only one little bit is in English and don’t expect the staff to have any English at all. It begins with Lee Hyoseok’s history and literature, and as you work your way around it counter-clockwise you soon enter a section on the history and uses of buckwheat (food, fabric, pillow-stuffing). It’s kind of cool, particularly the photo-essay on how buckwheat jelly (more like Jello, actually) is made – buckwheat jelly is a pretty regular form of banchan on tables around Korea, and I had no idea it was made of buckwheat.

The Museum Itself

Above the teahouse and museum there is a trail that runs the upper edge of the park and in a lovely little grass glen, there is another trail that runs through some beautiful woods, above the back of the park and off to god knows where. As it had just rained, the woods were overflowing with mushrooms and various kinds of fungi, but strangely not one ajumma could be seen picking them.

Back down to the front of the park and over the ‘real’ bridge and you come to the entertainment and food section of the festival. There were about 8 booths selling 8 versions of things buckwheat. I can say that the buckwheat makkeolli tasted just the same as any other makkeolli, but the buckwheat bread is quite good. This is right adjacent to Gasan Park, which is a small square of greenery in the middle of town.

Then we walked to the edge of town in search of some non-buckwheat late-lunch. At the very edge of town, like a whorehouse, biker bar, or Republican Party campaign office, the BBQ’s hung out in shame, clustered against their more popular buckwheat-based restaurants.

PSY is everywhere

A look at Naver maps the day before had shown a couple of pensions out that way, and so, with dinner destination set, we wandered out a country road about 200 yards before seeing about 6 signs advertising pensions to the left, and off we went, across a bridge and to the first pensions. One was up on a hill and looked pricey. The other was by a river, four little abutting cottages, and it was only 80 chun a night. There was only one room with a bed, which Yvonne wanted, but it was not ready. So, we left our stuff and wandered back and had dinner at a restaurant that had a very live and very big cow tethered in front of it.

This lucky cow is the restaurant's mascot and we later saw him being driven somewhere in the bed of a pickup truck

I have an idea for a clever caption that would result in Yvonne killing me.

The pension was totally awesome and one of the proprietors 으나 speaks brilliant English. So when you look at this website: http://www.mdarae.com/ and only see Korean, don’t freak out… give them a call or send an email. You probably wouldn’t want to stay here in summer as it is electric-fan only, but in temperate weather it is great, and within easy walking distance of the fairly small “downtown” of the town.

Late-lunch was good, and we went back to the pension to wait for evening. At about 4:30 we headed out back to the entertainment/food area, and as we sat there, lo and behold, the two girls from the night before came up to us and offered to take us sight-seeing.  Turns out they were 15 year-old best friends, and after the initial bouts of shy giggling (pretty funny, considering they rousted us) they turned out to be really good guides and happy to practice their English and let me practice my Korean.

Yvonne and our Canny Native Guides

Then it was back to the pension and perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever seen on TV, “Dinosaur Park.”  The premise of the show was that some amusement park had a time machine and was going back in time to trap prehistoric critters through a “time portal.” But out intrepid heroes didn’t just go back to ANY time, instead they chose to go back just prior to the asteroid-strike that killed the dinosaurs.  This seemed unnecessarily risky to me, but what do I know. Other ludicrosity included a man in shorts and boots keeping up with Tyrannosaurus Rex just after the narrator has cheerily informed us that the T-rex can travel at speeds of up to 40 miles an hour. The “Dinosaur Park” had ‘enclosures’ made of sapling-trunks roped together, and in at least one case the fence was less than the height of the ostrich-like creatures it was supposed to contain.

Yvonne, needless to say, was entranced!

The next day we talked to the nice people at the pension, then walked into town for some coffee and buckwheat bread.

It took a second to catch a taxi, and we got to the Jangpyeong Terminal about 20 minutes before the next bus.  Happily, there were seats available (one weird thing about inter-city buses is that you have to buy your tickets on the day) and we were off to Seoul.

Two more pics of Yvonne

Spring Semester Ends - Spring Rolls DIE!!

Aaah.. went to work and stayed until 5, because that's when grade changes ended. Not so many requests this year.

Headed home and the wife was out, so I stopped at the Thai place and got their super-burny chicken rice.  Grabbed a beer and headed home.

Wife had been home (determined by phone call) just before I got there and had left the AC on which is brilliant. Ate the food, have sipped some of the beer, may just nap.

The last two days were the IFC Colloquium, which was brilliant, but far away and a lot of time. On the positive side I am now a $500 an event speaker, which will totally disappear when I return to the Empire.^^

This weekend is for reading and editing.... how sweet is that?

More Rabid Doggerel

I doubt my eyes and become oblivious;
Ignore my ears, elude the obvious ;
Use both hands to grasp the tenuous ;
And model myself on the truly ridiculous

I love the way things really aren’t,
And how they can never be,
I enumerate things that just don’t count,
And look for things that I can’t see

I use pointed logic to make no sense;
Point my path towards the deadest ends;
Adopt darkest foes as dearest friends;
Wear the false gravity foolishness lends

I love the way things really aren’t,
And how they can never be.
I enumerate things that just don’t count,
And look for things that we can’t see

My bundle’s my burden, my safety my strife;
I embrace the wide world with a smile and knife;
In a bower take nonsense to be my sweet wife;
Which makes perfect sense when the sentence is life

I love the way things really aren’t
And how they can never be
I enumerate things that just don’t count
And look for things that we can’t see