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!