Fine Whine With My Meal(s): Korea Day Four

Day Four: Lunch of the Living Dead/The Science of Bathroom-ology

As the tears drop sideways down her face/
I end up talking in the tongue of a different race/
And as the flight touches down, my watch says 8:02/
but that's midnight to you.

Well, Graham was really singing about Japan, and conflating Japan and Korea is a very bad thing in these parts. But until someone writes the definitive song on jet lag, "Discovering Japan" is as close as you're going to get.

I dreamed headlong collisions in jetlag panavision/
I shouted 'sayanara', it didn't mean goodbye/
But lovers turn to posers, show up in film exposures/
Just like in travel brochures discovering Japan

Thank God for the iPod.

SIR JOHN CRAPPER WOULD ROTATE

Today was really all about eating, but let's begin with a loose end (gak!) from yesterday's discussion of the Korean home - Korean Bathrooms.

They are different. Here is a nifty picture:



Notice that in this one there is a shower curtain rod (unusual) and no shower curtain (completely standard). There is a drain on the bathroom floor and water is expected to splash out of the shower and exit from the drain. I presume this is some echo of the public bath-house but I'm much to modest to check that out. ;-) This means the bathroom floor is wet much of the time and right inside every Korean bathroom there is a pair of plastic slippers so you can go to the bathroom or use the sink and mirror without soaking your feet. In a nice bathroom such as the one pictured, there is a platform of some sort at the base of the toilet as well as one by the tub. These allow you to stand, magisterial, above the muck. The bathroom floor, needless to say, is depressed from the rest of the household floor and there is a sturdy doorjamb to ensure that no water escapes into the rest of the house. On the outside of the bathroom door is a mat with a towel so you can dry your feet on the way out if you showered or if your feet got wet.

Which brings us to towels. That thing you see (if you squint) hanging by the sink is a shower towel. Korean towels are slightly larger than washcloths and particularly prized for their skimpy weave and near complete inability to absorb water. Thus they require vigorous use, some contortion, and time, to be useful. When they are useful, it is primarily as exercise and by the time you have dried the shower water you will be soaked in sweat and the showering process must begin again.

Well, that's the Yang way and probably explains why most Korean stores don't sell deodorant. They don't have to. Koreans don't smell bad when they sweat. The ones who did ended up dying of exhaustion in their bathrooms.

Darwin rules.

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

Had my third traditional Korean breakfast today, this one at Ed's parent's house. I took a picture because even the table looks like nothing western. It's about 10 inches high, since you eat sitting on the floor. And it is covered in food. This one featured a rib-sticking rice dish, a fried(?) fish and a variety of vegetable matter (prominently featuring Kim-chee, of course).



Ed's dad sat down, looked over the whole array then looked at me and asked if I wanted Soju. I sat, shocked ....... shocked I tell you, that my reputation as an international drunkard had crossed the line from the Occidental to the Oriental nations. I demurred.

Later I asked Ed if that was a normal breakfast question. He predictably replied that it "was a Korean tradition" and then began randomly pointing out objects around the room and claiming that they warded off bad luck and evil spirits. But Ed says stuff like that and when he tripped on a Korean throw rug on his way to the bathroom, he stopped that chatter for a bit.

It was a good breakfast but it still doesn't stack up to the mushroom and beef porridge of two days ago.

And as good as all the breafasts have been, when I get to breakfast that first morning at the Imperial Palace hotel and the obsequious (and with the money I'm paying they damned well better be obsequious!) staff asks me what I want for breakfast?

Omelette, pancakes, mimosa.

Rinse with a coffee and repeat.

LUNCH WITH THE KLINGONS

Having survived a soup that featured the exploded entrails of a lamb liberally larded with the congealed blood of a pig, I was feeling pretty confident about my ability to navigate my way around the Korean table. Hell, the breakfasts had been a bit odd by my standards as well, but I'd had no trouble. Liked most of it in fact.

So, when it was finally time for lunch with Mr. Park I was feeling pretty good. And when he said he was driving us down to the coastal town of Anmunjon I felt even better. Nothing like a meal in the bracing sea air. And it was actually quite a scenic spot, sort of like Moss Landing in California.



We walked into a nice clean place that had a view of part of the bay and sat on the floor. Mr. Park ordered the "sushi special" and some Soju. The waitress quickly rolled over a two-trayed cart of dishes and started unloading.

Started unloading piles of things that would be used, in a country that possessed taste-buds, to attract sharks. Ah, but there it all was dolled up on the cute little plates they use in these parts. I dug in and ate all kinds of things I really hate. As it happens I have become quite a partisan of the red sauce Koreans use.

it covers up the taste of most everything, if not the texture.

We had put most of it away when a 5th diner arrived and new plates had to come to our table.

As I looked over the new array I worried I was becoming nauseous. At the edge of my vision I could see a plate that seemed to be crawling with something.

I took a shot of Soju.

Just to steady my vision.

And looked again.

The plate was still crawling.

20 disembodied tentacles crawled around on a plate.

More Soju.

Mr. Park took his chopstix (the difficult all-metal Korean type) and grabbed at one of the moving pieces. Well, it was moving, but it didn't want to go. It clung to the plate with all the sucker-plates it had. A war of wills ensued. But it would be a rare amputated bit of of sea-creature that could beat a South Korean in a contest of this type and after 15 seconds or so Mr. Park ate the damned thing.

I took another shot of Soju.

For once, it didn't help.

I flashed back to something I had read about people who ate octopus tentacles. Apparently ..... well not even apparently.. as I had seen.... the tentacles are still functional. And the tentacles can kill people by attaching to their throats and choking them to death.

By the time I came back to reality over half of the critters were gone and the remainder were clumped up on one corner of the plate apparently trying to reassemble themselves into something that could escape. Well, that one at the upper left of the photo tried to go over the wall solo, but the others huddled together in some futile gesture of support or defense.

And four Koreans were looking at me expectantly.

I snapped a photo in a lame attempt to stall:



This resistance was, as heroines in bodice-rippers often aver, to no avail.

Four Koreans were looking at me expectantly.

Faced with this adversity I steeled my nerve. I knew what I had to do.

I curled up in a ball and played dead.

When the waitress came across the floor at me with a filleting knife I gave up that charade.

I looked beseachingly at Ed.

Ed looked back sympathetically and snarled, "chew it to make sure it's really dead."

I ate one of the goddamned things. Perhaps the chewiest thing I have ever eaten it long outlasted whatever cover the red hot-sauce could give it.

I'll just note that tonight is the first night on this trip I've suffered any intestinal complaint. And while I believe that my little tentacular (ex)friend is currently beyond any attempt to escape?

It sure seems like he is.

Tomorrow promises fresh Hells. Market time.. perhaps some bookshopping. Even tea?

Who knows……

Scenes of Domestic Life: Korea Day Three

Anyway, I left yesterday without explaining my first night drinking with the lads. It was a very traditional thing. A trip to the bar to get drunk and eat a lot of noshy food, a trip to the karaoke Bang for a bit of mutual humiliation. Below is a picture of Jae towering over her puny secret admirer.



Then, as karaoke concluded and when I thought I might get away with only that, a sudden decision was made to head downtown for some reason that was unclear to me. What was clear to me was that it was already midnight and I was very tired. I was actually pretty sober as I had not drunk much beer and the karaoke was, as is usual, alcohol free. Still, somehow, there was some fear of hangovers in our group and to address this fear we had to head downtown and drink more while having some soup.

We got to the restaurant after driving by a tableau of various drunken scenes. Taxis were swarming the downtown like flies and driving in their incredibly insane fashion. Every cab I've been in is a stickshift, and the drivers slalom around like Olympic skiers and just when it seems there has to be an accident they glide around it with the occasional beep of a horn. The lanes painted on the road aren't even advisory to these guys and traffic lights are treated with the kind of casual insouciance I associate with James Bond bantering with the mad criminal genius de jour.

This attitude towards driving, actually, is shared by all mobile Koreans. Motorcycles routinely careen down sidewalks (as do bicycles and several kinds of transportation that fall messily in between), buses drive like they can't see anything on the ground, cars park on curbs and up sidewalks and it's pretty much a miracle that the streets aren't painted with blood by each dawn. Which wouldn't be a tragedy, really, as each merchant would carefully clean the area in front of his store and by 9 am the evidence of last evening's abbattoir would be on its way through the sewer system. Work would resume as the survivors would have funerals to pay for.

Despite everything I anticipated, we lived until downtown and got another bottle of Soju and enormous bowls of soup. There was a sign --- well.. here is that sign..



And then the soup came. It looked dubious, even by the "if you can capture it, cut it, or conceive of fitting it into any kind of cooking apparatus it must be edible" standards of Korea. Here is a fuzzy picture of the thing.



It is time to step back a bit and note that I had asked Eddie not to tell me what I was eating before I tried it. This bowl, however, looked so much like Klingon food "Ghaaaak is better served alive!") that I broke my vow not to ask. Eddie reminded me of our deal and I said, "ok, I'll try it and then you tell me what it is." I chopsticked up one large piece of particularly noxious.. er... "stuff" and took a big bite. Eddie smiled and said... "congealed pig's blood."

FREAKING CONGEALED PIG'S BLOOD!

To my credit (I think?) I didn't vomit. I choked the whole thing down while focussing on the only ingredient in the soup I could actually identify, the rice. This beautiful "food" not only contained the congealed pig's blood, but also most of the part of the lower intestinal tract of a lamb.
Then I just focussed on the *extremely* drunk Korean guy who was sitting with a friend in the room behind us and wished I were dead.

No such luck.

When we tried to return to our apartment, no taxi would pick us up. There were 5 of us.. a problem for the small cabs in Seoul and particularly with a fat gajiin like me as one of the 5. The cabs would stop (well, "stop" in the sense of rolling by at about 10 miles an hour), hear our request and accelerate into the distance.

We finally got a cab by offering it our Secret Admirer's trip back across town and we were back to the apartment by just before 2. Just before 2, Eddie sagely noted, was still drinking time, and out came more Soju.

I staggered off to bed shortly thereafter. Typically, I woke up two hours before the Korean Krewe who seem to have highly developed "sleep it off" skills. I headed down to the PC Bang to drop off some work and the post I did yesterday. Got a call about 10 and headed back to the apartment for a breakfast of Kim Chee and rice.

As I type this Jae is heading down south on the bullet train and Eddie and I are hanging out on the warm floor watching the news. This afternoon we head down to see his father and stay down there. Eddie promises there won't be abusive drinking, but I'll believe that when I can't see my liver pulsing gelatinously through my varicose-vein shot skin.

After a nap we hopped on the 631 bus from Korea to Gimpo. This ran through some pretty gnarly traffic jams as one main street we were on was in the middle of extensive construction of some sort. This gave me a chance to goggle at the "apartment forests" as we drove through them. Koreans live in structures that don't appeal to some westerners as they are essentially apartments that one must purchase.

The original Korean housing looked something like migrant farm-worker motels in the States. A bunch of very small, one-story houses which were built wall to wall, though not necessarily in the shotgun style that might imply. Some were built on hills so the clusters extend upwards and sideways and are connected in whatever way then can be. The point of all that is Koreans are used to living cheek by jowl and when it came to building "homes" they went apartment style. Apartment style with a bit of a difference though, since a house needs to have a front and a back. This means most apartment/houses go all the way through the building and have a deck of some sort on the front and back. Eddie says that this is because traditionally (the Korean excuse for everything) people wanted houses the wind could blow all the way through when you opened the front and back doors. To this he gnomically added that women loved this and children hated it. He then returned to a bowl of something a bit awful which he ate with apparent gusto. An apartment building will normally consist of columns of apartments every two of which share a stairwell and elevator shaft. Here is my lame drawing of that:



Because of the cheek-by-jowl nature of these apartments, real estate is handled differently in Korea. I had read that you used different real-estate agents for different neighborhoods, but the buildings made clear why. You buy a "house" in Korea and you are also buying two very close neighbors - the people above and below you. There is no space to ameliorate sound or smell, or anything else. So the real-estate agent's job is not just to find the right "place," but also to get you into a good situation. Once you buy, you are stuck. This is probably not such a large problem in the newer units. I am currently at Ed's parent's unit and it seems very insulated from the neighbors. But our unit in Seoul is very different and if we had a noisy upstairs neighbor it would be a real drag.

Anyway, these apartments are built in close clusters and very tall. When you get among them it can be disorienting in a way that that is difficult to demonstrate without a crazy fisheye lens.

We rolled through them to Gimpo, where Ed's parents live in a very nice "house." It was high-school reunion night for Ed's dad, so we accompanied him to the re-union where he was able to announce Ed's marriage and various successes. Apparently I was a good visual aid to this, since I was clearly an English speaker and Ed was clearly able to communicate with me and make me feel at home. This is a good thing in Korea, because although everyone has technically learned English, that "technically" is in the same sense that some Catholic girls remain technical virgins. Korean schools apparently focus on reading and writing, not speaking, so fluency can be valuable.

The short version is Ed's dad seemed happy about everything and we returned to his house for some drinks and after-meal nosh. This is another nice thing about Korean drinking culture -- it is very rare to only drink.. there must be food accompanying drinking. Ed's mom really put on the dog (metaphorically!) as we had several kinds of nuts, raisins, passion fruit, Asian Pears (way superior to the US domestic version), peeled mandarin oranges, persimmons, Ginko seeds and lotus seeds. We went to sleep early, interrupted only when Ed's snoring drove me into another room. ;-)

Here is Ed's dad, after a few to many shots of Soju, attempting to rouse his geriatric fellow alumni into going up to the Joint Security Area (DMZ) and "re-unify those Damned Commies Right Now!" (That or he's pointing proudly at Ed)



It is now about 8:30 in the morning and only the spectre of a day with Mr. Park (not Ed's dad) darkens anything. This is a guy who made a very serious point of drinking me into a coma in the states, so I'm a bit worried. And in some kind of seizure, Ed agreed last night that we would move our meeting with Mr. Park from tonight up to 11 this morning. Not that we will get away any earlier as we have to spend the night down there.

Part of the experience I guess.

10 great things about Korea

1) Taxis everywhere and very cheap
2) The cell-phones you can rent at the airport
3) The PC Bang costs about $1.20 an hour (on the way to Gimpo actually saw one for 60 cents an hour)
4) You will never suffer a vitamin deficiency if you eat Korean food
5) Heated floors (this may be the single greatest achievement of the Korean culture across the centuries)
6) The "oh fuck it" approach to problems
7) The *first* bar we visit
8) The exchange rate is close enough to 1000 to 100 that you can understand what you are paying on the first day
9) Palaces, of course
10) How Seoul lights up at night -- it's neon Xmas every night.

5 not-so-great things

1) Hae Jang whatever the Hell... ("kook", actually, which seems about right)
2) Crazy People on the 1 line (more about that later)
3) Koreans spit like they are Chinese4
) Korean chopsticks are made of slippery metal which they claim is more sanitary, but makes them slippery as hell.
5) The "last" bar we visit

TOMORROW: The Swine DO make me eat a living thing and what is it with the bathrooms?

Domestic Life: Korea Three

Anyway, I left yesterday without explaining my first night drinking with the lads. It was a very traditional thing. A trip to the bar to get drunk and eat a lot of noshy food, a trip to the karaoke Bang for a bit of mutual humiliation. Below is a picture of Jae towering over her puny secret admirer.



Then, as karaoke concluded and when I thought I might get away with only that, a sudden decision was made to head downtown for some reason that was unclear to me. What was clear to me was that it was already midnight and I was very tired. I was actually pretty sober as I had not drunk much beer and the karaoke was, as is usual, alcohol free. Still, somehow, there was some fear of hangovers in our group and to address this fear we had to head downtown and drink more while having some soup.

We got to the restaurant after driving by a tableau of various drunken scenes. Taxis were swarming the downtown like flies and driving in their incredibly insane fashion. Every cab I've been in is a stickshift, and the drivers slalom around like Olympic skiers and just when it seems there has to be an accident they glide around it with the occasional beep of a horn. The lanes painted on the road aren't even advisory to these guys and traffic lights are treated with the kind of casual insouciance I associate with James Bond bantering with the mad criminal genius de jour.

This attitude towards driving, actually, is shared by all mobile Koreans. Motorcycles routinely careen down sidewalks (as do bicycles and several kinds of transportation that fall messily in between), buses drive like they can't see anything on the ground, cars park on curbs and up sidewalks and it's pretty much a miracle that the streets aren't painted with blood by each dawn. Which wouldn't be a tragedy, really, as each merchant would carefully clean the area in front of his store and by 9 am the evidence of last evening's abbattoir would be on its way through the sewer system. Work would resume as the survivors would have funerals to pay for.

Anyway... despite everything I anticipated, we lived until downtown and got another bottle of Soju and enormous bowls of soup. There was a sign --- well.. here is that sign..



And then the soup came. It looked dubious, even by the "if you can capture it, cut it, or conceive of fitting it into any kind of cooking apparatus it must be edible" standards of Korea. Here is a fuzzy picture of the thing.



It is time to step back a bit and note that I had asked Eddie not to tell me what I was eating before I tried it. This bowl, however, looked so much like Klingon food "Ghaaaak is better served alive!") that I broke my vow not to ask. Eddie reminded me of our deal and I said, "ok, I'll try it and then you tell me what it is." I chopsticked up one large piece of particularly noxious.. er... "stuff" and took a big bite. Eddie smiled and said... "congealed pig's blood."

FREAKING CONGEALED PIG'S BLOOD!

To my credit (I think?) I didn't vomit. I choked the whole thing down while focussing on the only ingredient in the soup I could actually identify, the rice. This beautiful "food" not only contained the congealed pig's blood, but also most of the part of the lower intestinal tract of a lamb.

Then I just focussed on the *extremely* drunk Korean guy who was sitting with a friend in the room behind us and wished I were dead.

No such luck.

When we tried to return to our apartment, no taxi would pick us up. There were 5 of us.. a problem for the small cabs in Seoul and particularly with a fat gajiin like me as one of the 5. The cabs would stop (well, "stop" in the sense of rolling by at about 10 miles an hour), hear our request and accelerate into the distance.

We finally got a cab by offering it our Secret Admirer's trip back across town and we were back to the apartment by just before 2. Just before 2, Eddie sagely noted, was still drinking time, and out came more Soju.

I staggered off to bed shortly thereafter. Typically, I woke up two hours before the Korean Krewe who seem to have highly developed "sleep it off" skills. I headed down to the PC Bang to drop off some work and the post I did yesterday. Got a call about 10 and headed back to the apartment for a breakfast of Kim Chee and rice.

As I type this Jae is heading down south on the bullet train and Eddie and I are hanging out on the warm floor watching the news. This afternoon we head down to see his father and stay down there. Eddie promises there won't be abusive drinking, but I'll believe that when I can't see my liver pulsing gelatinously through my varicose-vein shot skin.

After a nap we hopped on the 631 bus from Korea to Gimpo. This ran through some pretty gnarly traffic jams as one main street we were on was in the middle of extensive construction of some sort. This gave me a chance to goggle at the "apartment forests" as we drove through them. Koreans live in structures that don't appeal to some westerners as they are essentially apartments that one must purchase.


The original Korean housing looked something like migrant farm-worker motels in the States. A bunch of very small, one-story houses which were built wall to wall, though not necessarily in the shotgun style that might imply. Some were built on hills so the clusters extend upwards and sideways and are connected in whatever way then can be. The point of all that is Koreans are used to living cheek by jowl and when it came to building "homes" they went apartment style. Apartment style with a bit of a difference though, since a house needs to have a front and a back. This means most apartment/houses go all the way through the building and have a deck of some sort on the front and back. Eddie says that this is because traditionally (the Korean excuse for everything) people wanted houses the wind could blow all the way through when you opened the front and back doors. To this he gnomically added that women loved this and children hated it. He then returned to a bowl of something a bit awful which he ate with apparent gusto. An apartment building will normally consist of columns of apartments every two of which share a stairwell and elevator shaft. Here is my lame drawing of that:



Because of the cheek-by-jowl nature of these apartments, real estate is handled differently in Korea. I had read that you used different real-estate agents for different neighborhoods, but the buildings made clear why. You buy a "house" in Korea and you are also buying two very close neighbors - the people above and below you. There is no space to ameliorate sound or smell, or anything else. So the real-estate agent's job is not just to find the right "place," but also to get you into a good situation. Once you buy, you are stuck. This is probably not such a large problem in the newer units. I am currently at Ed's parent's unit and it seems very insulated from the neighbors. But our unit in Seoul is very different and if we had a noisy upstairs neighbor it would be a real drag.

Anyway, these apartments are built in close clusters and very tall. When you get among them it can be disorienting in a way that that is difficult to demonstrate without a crazy fisheye lens.

We rolled through them to Gimpo, where Ed's parents live in a very nice "house." It was high-school reunion night for Ed's dad, so we accompanied him to the re-union where he was able to announce Ed's marriage and various successes. Apparently I was a good visual aid to this, since I was clearly an English speaker and Ed was clearly able to communicate with me and make me feel at home. This is a good thing in Korea, because although everyone has technically learned English, that "technically" is in the same sense that some Catholic girls remain technical virgins. Korean schools apparently focus on reading and writing, not speaking, so fluency can be valuable.

The short version is Ed's dad seemed happy about everything and we returned to his house for some drinks and after-meal nosh. This is another nice thing about Korean drinking culture -- it is very rare to only drink.. there must be food accompanying drinking. Ed's mom really put on the dog (metaphorically!) as we had several kinds of nuts, raisins, passion fruit, Asian Pears (way superior to the US domestic version), peeled mandarin oranges, persimmons, Ginko seeds and lotus seeds. We went to sleep early, interrupted only when Ed's snoring drove me into another room. ;-)

Here is Ed's dad, after a few to many shots of Soju, attempting to rouse his geriatric fellow alumni into going up to the Joint Security Area (DMZ) and "re-unify those Damned Commies Right Now!" (That or he's pointing proudly at Ed)



It is now about 8:30 in the morning and only the spectre of a day with Mr. Park (not Ed's dad) darkens anything. This is a guy who made a very serious point of drinking me into a coma in the states, so I'm a bit worried. And in some kind of seizure, Ed agreed last night that we would move our meeting with Mr. Park from tonight up to 11 this morning. Not that we will get away any earlier as we have to spend the night down there.

Part of the experience I guess.


10 great things about Korea

1) Taxis everywhere and very cheap
2) The cell-phones you can rent at the airport
3) The PC Bang costs about $1.20 an hour (on the way to Gimpo actually saw one for 60 cents an hour)
4) You will never suffer a vitamin deficiency if you eat Korean food
5) Heated floors (this may be the single greatest achievement of the Korean culture across the centuries)
6) The "oh fuck it" approach to problems
7) The *first* bar we visit
8) The exchange rate is close enough to 1000 to 100 that you can understand what you are paying on the first day
9) Temples, of course
10) How Seoul lights up at night -- it's neon Xmas every night.

5 not-so-great things

1) Hae Jang whatever the Hell... ("kook", actually, which seems about right)
2) Crazy People on the 1 line (more about that later)
3) Koreans spit like they are Chinese
4) Korean chopsticks are made of slippery metal which they claim is more sanitary, but makes them slippery as hell.
5) The "last" bar we visit

TOMORROW: The Swine DO make me eat a living thing and what is it with the bathrooms?

Temples and Snow

DAY 2

Was all about the snow and the cold. I went to sleep at about 10 the night before and slept as solidly as I have in years. Warm floor and cold air, I guess. Woke up at about 5:30 and did some work, then headed out into the snow at about 7. Got some pictures (below). Headed back in when Eddie and Jae awoke and called me. I don't think I mentioned it yesterday, but one really cool thing about Korea being so wired is that you can rent in-country cell phones at the airport for a few dollars a day. That's a good deal if you're likely to get lost, as I almost always am.

Eddie says that it snow in Seoul isn't really news, but to me it looked like it was the first time it had ever happened. Traffic was snarled, women were slipping and sliding all over the place (this may have had to do with the fact that they were all, unnacountably, wearing high-heels in a snow storm). At the train station they alternated putting down dirty rags and cardboard boxes at the top and bottom of each stairway or escalator. These were quickly soaked and dirtied by the crowds pouring over them and became useless. In some places men were melting ice with small, hand-held torches, but to do that they were kneeling directly in the way of oncoming commuters. It looked very disorganized to me.

Eddie explains this is just the Korean way of doing things.. pour people at the problem and overcome it ant-style. This approach became useful to us when the water main serving our house broke while I was out taking my walk, but was completely fixed within six hours. Eddie says this is the "fuck it principle." That is to say the Korean "fuck it principle" which goes "fuck it, we might as well fix this as quickly as we can." An unusual fuck it principle, but it worked for the water.

We walked out for a delicious breakfast of porridge (actually a rice stew, sort of) with meat and mushrooms. Kimchee of course and the ever-present cup of tea. We don't drink much else but alcohol, but the Korean diet is so rich in soups and other water-bearing dishes (a bowl containing nothing but two slices of horseradish and a cup of flavored water is the most hydrous example I can think of) that combined with the tea we spent half the day doing things and half the day looking for restrooms. Fortunately restrooms are everywhere in Seoul and are extremely clean.

After breakfast it was off to the Computer Bang so I could post yesterday's tripe and smell last night's cigarettes. Cheap though.. about a dollar for a bit less than an hour of intarweb this and that and the major bits of my work done. As we wandered around the slippery roads we contemplated forming a blues band called "Seoul Men" only because we had decided that there needed to be a Korean Blues album titled "Soju and Cigarettes."

Then it was off to two touristy destinations. The first was Unhyun-goong (goong means palace and Unyhun is the name of the mountain behind it. The second palace was the Changduk-gung. They were of two entirely different styles, and to make sure no one's download chokes I will post photos of the more ostentatious one today. I'll be going back to both when the POSSLQ gets here, so I'll post the other then.

A picture of Mr. Palace:




A detail of the Taancheong architectural style of ceiling painting. Used in temples and palaces only. If a local tried this they would be kilt:



A pattern detail from the Taancheong style of ceiling painting:



The King's fishing hole on a currently frozen lake. Not a biggish problem because he is a currently dead King and has little call to fish:



Walking along the palace fence we see someone fermenting something typically hideous and Korean (could be Kimchee, could be bean paste, could be some Hell I know knothing of:





I asked Eddie why the Taancheong style had been developed and and he said it protects people from demons and bad luck. I reminded him the king was dead and the palace had been repeatedly defiled by the Japanese, but he just cursed and repeated that it protected people from demons and bad luck. This is quickly becoming one of Eddie's stock answers when he doesn't just ignore me completely and pretend he can't speak English. Some of his others are:

"It doesn't matter, just taste it!"
"oh that? It's a Korean custom. You'll get used to it."
"Just one more bar and then we go home."

Now he runs them together, but he's added a new one. It used to go something like: "It doesn't matter, just taste it. It will help protect you from demons and bad luck. And it's a Korean custom. You'll get used to it."

Recently he added, "it probably won't kill you."

He added this after a night of revelry ended us up at the "Original Best Restaurant in Seoul." The other restaurants were merely imitators, I guess.

Anyway, one of our party members has a local secret admirer and we had to go out to the bar, karaoke, and dinner with him which ran til 2 in the morning and almost concluded with us unable to get a taxi back to our apartment. It also involved the most loathesome thing that I have yet eaten in Korea and, as in most funky countries, it was presented as a hangover cure. But that tail must await tomorrow as I am off to the PC Bang to send this little note off. Today we must bus south to meet Eddie's parents.

This can only end in tears! ;-)

Last pic is just one of the typical kind of jumbled signage you see hanging all over the place in Seoul. No zoning laws that I can make out around here. The pic also shows a bit of the snow we've had, though the massive amounts of traffic quickly destroy it as it lies on the street.





Now I'm off to try to pay for this time on the computer without a friendly (by which I mean English speaking) Korean in sight.

I'll write you all from prison....

First Post From Korea

018-696-1125

The trip began, as they so often do, at the bar. Eddie called me on the cell and said "At 8:25, have a gin and tonic ready for me at the table so we don't need to waste any time."

He showed up early.

We drank at the bar, drove up to SFO and then drank at the bar there. By the time we got on the plane I was so drunk I could barely stand. I felt as though I had arrived in Korea early! Because I was so drunk I slept pretty soundly through the first seven hours of the flight (including a filet mignon dinner, I am told. I say "I am told" because I wasn't awake to see it and this is just the kind of mean trick Eddie would play on me). Sleep was occasionally interrupted by the obligatory infant wailing out of control. This kid seems to ship with the 747 (at least he's been on any intercontinental flight I've been on) and unfortunately, because it isn't mine, I can't throttle the little bastard. I dozed intermittently, and with a hangover for the next three hours of the flight. With about two hours to go I got into the back of seat TV action and watched some Kurt Russell movie about a family of superheroes. Asiania served up breakfast before we landed and I turned down the pancakes in favor of a shrimp-rice concoction that came with a tube of hot paste I can already sense I will regret tomorrow morning.

You know what I mean.

The flight also had a cool show which continually updated what speed we were going, how high the plane was, the temperature outside and an animation of where we were over the ocean (or Japan or Korea). It probably wouldn't have been nearly as cool if I had discovered it early in the flight and watched painfully incremental progress across the sea, but since we were already over Japan and almost home it was kind of neat.

At Customs I drew my traditional official - the one who lives in constant state of amazement at the cool things which surround him and the idea that he may someday master their purposes. This, sadly, was not that day and so I stood in a line that seemed trapped in amber as the lines to either side zipped by with alacrity. I don't speak a word of Japanese, and the Japanese guy behind me didn't speak any English, but we had an animated conversation of gestures, grunts, and nasty facial expressions in which we agreed the guy checking our line was subhuman. Since the guy checking our line was Korean, this came particularly naturally to my Japanese friend who was no doubt ruing the loss al that last World War.

This conversation came after my first bit of culture shock which was foisted on me by the book "Culture Shock." Well, all the books really. They all harped on how the five Confucian relationships created a status-based society in which older men were all-powerful and could push there inferiors around. In each book the example was of a man who skipped to the head of the line to purchase something. So, when the nice Japanese guy started to move up next to me I went in to full "oh no you're not cutting on me Mr. Thinks He Has More Status Dude!" I deployed my computer case, camera case and elbows. I moved up so close to the people in front of me that we were touching.... I was a mess. So I gave up. Jump the line on me, I won't stop you. ;-)

My Korean partners zipped through their customs and were waiting for me on the other side.



We exchanged money with a dour man in a box and got cell phones from some lovely women in Santa's hats. I'm now with in Incheon airport with Eddie happily chattering away on one of the cellphones. It is about 8 in the morning and it is really nice to be someplace where no one can talk to you. Jae is up on the third floor doing some arcane paperwork she needs to do to udpate her visa for the US. Airports are pretty much the same, so I don't feel in-country yet. The only thing different about this airport is that everyone seems to be asian and the cops have gaudy uniforms that would fit in a Gay-freedom parade.Every once in a while a US army person wanders by on the way to somewhere, but other than that I'm the only white guy for as far as view stretches.

The painful part of the hangover is gone and now I'm in that nice tired hyper-receptive state that sometimes comes with hangovers. Everything has a sort of grainy texture to it which is just right as the sun has come up yellow and suffusing the smog out the window. There is a little dusting of snow on everything and Incheon is a silver-ish color, so it looks like everything is painted in a flat yellow/gray palette. I hope to pop out and get a photo whenever Eddie tracks Jae down.




Which I did do. And then we hopped a bus to Seoul. Bus drives through some pretty alarming landscape dotted with factories pouring out smoke and deposits us in Seoul next to picture number 2. I went all the way to Korea and found a San Jose strip mall!



We grabbed a cab over the the apartment and got set up, then headed down into Seoul for lunch. The rest of the day was spent at lunch(about three hours) with another Korean while we waited for Jae to finish some business at the US Consulate. Which we also walked past - it had about 15 fully-loaded riot police and a line that was literally around the block. The riot police, it turns out, are everywhere. We passed a bunch more at the Japanese embassy and I saw riot police tucked away in little nooks and crannies everywhere. They also keep an alarming (to my eyes anyway) number of hoosegows on wheels available on the street.

They are lined up and waiting to go.

Home to some social drinking, in bed by 10 and slept on the excellently heated floor like a baby. Those heated floors are just the thing. Woke up this morning at 5:30 and headed out into the light snow to take pictures. But that is for tomorrow...

Happy, fed, and quite cold in Korea!

Something That Is No Doubt True: But I'm Not Sure I Cared To Know

When rewarming a person, at the point the rectal temperature is rising, the atrial temperature is still falling.

Which is from the truly great "Making Light" site.

But I don't want to hear about it while I'm sitting here in my atrium.

First Badministration Post

I just have a feeling it won't be the last.

The guy who is going to be my next higher up met with me and another person. We started talking about deadlines for materials and when construction would begin. Guy says. "Well, what if rwellor could get you all of the materials by (Date redacted)?" I hop in rather sharpish and note that the date he proposes is well after I will be off on vacation. He looks around, confused. Turns to the other person and with what he thinks is a firm jaw says, almost yelling, "what if rwellor could get you all the materials by (the date days after I will no longer be around)?"

weird... completely ignoring reality and that I "am a human being!"

then on the way out (about an hour before quitting) badminstrator drops, "oh, so-and-so needs a report on a project by tonight." Tonight is three hours away and this has never been mentioned to me before. I say it probably can't be done, but rush back to excel and pump it out. I walk it over to the "so-and-so" that badministrator said needed the report for the evening's meeting?

Nice.

She was never planning on going to the meeting. She, unlike the badministrator, was thankful to see the report and did things the badministrator would never do like ask questions. She grasped it and had me come to her meeting the next morning where, giving me credit, she summarized it neatly.

I'd much rather work for her. ;-(

I'm Agnostic on Narnia - But Shouldn't Little Tommy Get a Reach Around?

Hmmm...

never cared for Narnia because I never read any of the books. Tried "Screwtape Letters" and that so put me of C.S. Lewis that I could never return. Still, when the fundies try to use Narnia to attract more folks to the charnel house? Why does it look like a kiddie-cluster-fuck?

DJ R-bizzle D-Whizzle back in the house?

Good lord.. I am not the world's worst rapper...

this guy is

"The Awakening combines solid beats with a unique vocal style to create a poetic, yet positive effect."

If by solid beats you mean casiontonerrific and by unique vocal style you mean complete lack of flow. And why "poetic, yet positive?"

The mind fairly boggles...

When I get the laptop to the desktop I have to link one of his raps.... yee gawwwwdZZ!

Songs I Can't Sing the Chorus To (On my iPod)

A short list and the complete list is probably dominated by Liz Phair. ;-)

These are pop-ish songs I truly love, but when I play "sing-along" I run the risk of having my co-workers call security. And I'm not talking "Cold Hard Bitch" by Jet.. I'm talking songs that are by nature obscene or make me sound like I'm about to go rent a postal uniform and an UZI

"Give Me Your Hot White Cum" Liz Phair
"Fuck and Run" Liz Phair
"Fuck You" Whole Wheat Bread
"That's When I Reach for My Revolver" Gang of Four
"Homocide" 999

A short list... but what I have off the top of my head.....