Breakdancing is cool, I've always thought it was cool. When I was at school in Utah I took a breakdancing class at the field house, and I learned some cool moves, but they didn't offer a follow up course the second semester, and I never practiced the few moves I did learn and so any nascent skills I had never turned into anything. It's too bad, it's easy to think about how much time has passed since then and think about how good I could have potentially become if I had kept practicing a lot.
When I came to Korea, I knew that this country had a lot of skilled bboys, and I had the vague goal of finding some battles or events to check out but I never really remembered to look into it at all when I was killing time on the internet.
A while back I saw a trailer for a breakdancing documentary called Planet BBoy, and it was finally released on DVD, and thus made available to internet piracy, a couple months ago. After I downloaded and watched it, I got fired up on breakdancing and plunged into the internet to find some events going down in Korea, figuring a weekend trip up to Seoul was due anyway. After scanning through a bunch of crap results from Google late Friday night I found a forum that had a two-on-two battle listed for the following weekend at the Daegu YMCA. This was triply convenient since the timing was right, it was in my city, and it was at the YMCA where I went every Saturday for Korean-language classes anyway.
The next day I had my Korean class and confirmed the event and got super pumped up. The following weekend, after class and lunch, I showed up at the gym and there were a bunch of Korean people milling around, practicing and what not. The battle itself was quite long - first every team got a chance to battle another team, with the teams getting better later in the first round. It took at least an hour, and during the break before the next round a lot people left which was too bad since the following rounds were when the bboys broke out the big moves - the windmills and flips and choreographed two-man dances and moves using the other partner.
Here's a demo by one of the judges who is from the Gamblerz crew, a team that won the Battle of the Year in 2004, which is basically the World Cup of breakdancing, and the subject of the documentary Planet BBoy:
There was even a team of waygooks (foreigners) which was pretty cool to see, but only one of them was good even though they made it as far as the semi-finals. This was due entirely to the skill of the one guy, and particularly one move where he removed his hat in the midst of windmilling, put it in his mouth, froze the windmill, and flipped it with his mouth back onto his head as an ending move.
Here's another video of the other semi-final battle. Check out how ridiculously flexible the one team is:
The team in the foreground won and went on to the final battle for 300,000 Won. Too bad I never kept up practice from those classes in college, that could've been me on film. Except for the dudes on the really flexible team, I could never do that.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Monday, December 8, 2008
Life Sucks!
I am full of life. Miserable, miserable life. It's growing inside of me, oozing out of my mouth and nose, and it's not my life, and it's making me sick. I don't know exactly what sort of life it is, but I don't want it in me any more. I've been sick to varying degrees for three weeks now. The fluctuations have been such that most of the days that I've felt really bad have been on weekends. On one hand this has been bad because it kills my weekends, but on the other hand it's good because for most of the time I've felt really bad I didn't have to deal with classrooms full of screaming Korean teenagers.
Back when I was at Golgul Temple, eating vegetarian food in typical Buddhist fashion with a bunch of other foreigners on the tour, I nailed a huge mosquito as it was buzzing around our food. I felt pretty good about my reflexes, and ridding the world of one more pest until I realized that Buddhists are against killing anything, as far as my limited knowledge on Buddhism is concerned, and that had any of the monks noticed my lethal instinct-driven reflexes, they probably wouldn't be that impressed. Well, whatever. What about right now, when there are foreign life forms in my body, causing me to cough and sneeze and have headaches and stuffy noses and fevers? Germs are a form of life, and they simply pursue the perpetuation of their own species. This is the common goal of everything living, and as far as I'm concerned, the only inarguable definition of "the meaning of life". Whatever germs are inside of me right now, while pursing their own self-preservation and reproduction, are making me feel like shit, and it is my bodies involuntary response to attempt to create a holocaust of these germs.
Our bodies have evolved to kill, or attempt to kill, any form of life that gets inside of us and gives us trouble. That's how nature works. I wonder what a Buddhist monk would say about that. I wonder what anyone who is against the destruction of life would say about that. They would probably say you should avoid killing things if possible, but unfortunately "should" and "if possible" invite inevitable differences in opinion any time they are used. I looked up "do Buddhists kill?" on Google, and one of the first hits is quite appropriate to what initially got me thinking about the subject, "Buddhists, do you kill mosquitoes?" The "best answer" listed underneath the question isn't what I found most interesting here. It's the next answer, by the lunatic who claims that mosquitoes won't bite Buddhists because real Buddhists control their smell and heat so that mosquitoes won't be attracted to them. If the internet is good for nothing else, it at least reassures you that you are smarter than someone out there.
I think it's because I am a foreigner and Koreans think I am utterly inept that my co-workers and friends take such care to make sure I am getting better. Really, this probably translates to the obvious fact that I unable to speak Korean to get help myself. When I was first feeling bad when I went into school a couple weeks ago, the nurse gave me some medicine and stayed late to personally bring me to a clinic and pharmacy after work. The next day she bought me a scarf and gave me a massive jar of citron tea (both pictured above, along with a banner that will need updating come next spring). My co-teachers keep asking me if my house is warm enough, or if my clothes are warm enough, and if the Korean weather is too cold for me. My climbing friend Ilhan brought me some homemade fungi tea, apparently rich in antioxidants and vitamins, made from fungi raised by his father, and made into a tea by his wife, and just this evening, two weeks later, he swung by my apartment to give me some warm liquid in a packet that tasted like spicy dirt, and supposedly helps to keep my temperature up, aiding my bodies natural tendency to burn germs out, otherwise known as running a fever. I know it wasn't anything too bad though, because he has a cold too, one I probably gave to him at some point, and he drank one of the packets down with me.
I hope these germs die for good soon. Recovering from a sickness, minor or not, makes me appreciate how good it is to feel healthy. I was supposed to go to a darts tournament this weekend but I was sick. I was supposed to climb in a bouldering competition, but I was sick. It's nice to feel good enough to do those things without having to think about whether you feel good enough or not. Life, in general, is a good thing, but when some strange species of life gets inside of the body that houses my own life, that strange species of life really sucks and needs to die and get the fuck out.
Back when I was at Golgul Temple, eating vegetarian food in typical Buddhist fashion with a bunch of other foreigners on the tour, I nailed a huge mosquito as it was buzzing around our food. I felt pretty good about my reflexes, and ridding the world of one more pest until I realized that Buddhists are against killing anything, as far as my limited knowledge on Buddhism is concerned, and that had any of the monks noticed my lethal instinct-driven reflexes, they probably wouldn't be that impressed. Well, whatever. What about right now, when there are foreign life forms in my body, causing me to cough and sneeze and have headaches and stuffy noses and fevers? Germs are a form of life, and they simply pursue the perpetuation of their own species. This is the common goal of everything living, and as far as I'm concerned, the only inarguable definition of "the meaning of life". Whatever germs are inside of me right now, while pursing their own self-preservation and reproduction, are making me feel like shit, and it is my bodies involuntary response to attempt to create a holocaust of these germs.
Our bodies have evolved to kill, or attempt to kill, any form of life that gets inside of us and gives us trouble. That's how nature works. I wonder what a Buddhist monk would say about that. I wonder what anyone who is against the destruction of life would say about that. They would probably say you should avoid killing things if possible, but unfortunately "should" and "if possible" invite inevitable differences in opinion any time they are used. I looked up "do Buddhists kill?" on Google, and one of the first hits is quite appropriate to what initially got me thinking about the subject, "Buddhists, do you kill mosquitoes?" The "best answer" listed underneath the question isn't what I found most interesting here. It's the next answer, by the lunatic who claims that mosquitoes won't bite Buddhists because real Buddhists control their smell and heat so that mosquitoes won't be attracted to them. If the internet is good for nothing else, it at least reassures you that you are smarter than someone out there.
I think it's because I am a foreigner and Koreans think I am utterly inept that my co-workers and friends take such care to make sure I am getting better. Really, this probably translates to the obvious fact that I unable to speak Korean to get help myself. When I was first feeling bad when I went into school a couple weeks ago, the nurse gave me some medicine and stayed late to personally bring me to a clinic and pharmacy after work. The next day she bought me a scarf and gave me a massive jar of citron tea (both pictured above, along with a banner that will need updating come next spring). My co-teachers keep asking me if my house is warm enough, or if my clothes are warm enough, and if the Korean weather is too cold for me. My climbing friend Ilhan brought me some homemade fungi tea, apparently rich in antioxidants and vitamins, made from fungi raised by his father, and made into a tea by his wife, and just this evening, two weeks later, he swung by my apartment to give me some warm liquid in a packet that tasted like spicy dirt, and supposedly helps to keep my temperature up, aiding my bodies natural tendency to burn germs out, otherwise known as running a fever. I know it wasn't anything too bad though, because he has a cold too, one I probably gave to him at some point, and he drank one of the packets down with me.
I hope these germs die for good soon. Recovering from a sickness, minor or not, makes me appreciate how good it is to feel healthy. I was supposed to go to a darts tournament this weekend but I was sick. I was supposed to climb in a bouldering competition, but I was sick. It's nice to feel good enough to do those things without having to think about whether you feel good enough or not. Life, in general, is a good thing, but when some strange species of life gets inside of the body that houses my own life, that strange species of life really sucks and needs to die and get the fuck out.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Dry Your Clothes on the Floor
Your average domestic laundry system here in Korea is different than that of America. Generally speaking, there are no dryers, clothes are dried on lines or racks. This would be fine with me, except that it necessarily entails ironing shirts and pants since wrinkles air-dry into the fabrics, and I hate ironing. I can't do it well, and to make matters worse, my iron has a cord that's about two feet long so I have to set up my mini ironing board in a corner of my room where there is a plug low enough to the ground so that the iron can reach the board, which stands about six inches off the ground. It's annoying, but whatever, I compensate by not ironing stuff much.
Your average domestic heating system here in Korea is also different than that of America. The heat comes through the floor instead of through vents or radiators. This is pretty nice on your feet since shoes are not worn in homes ever. Sometimes I pick up clothes that have been lying on the floor all day or night and put them on, and am pleasantly surprised by how warm they are. This is especially good in the morning when putting pants on. Since there are no dryers in Korea, or ovens, leaving clothes on the floor is really the only way to get them nice and toasty before putting them on, which leads me to an interesting hypothesis:
I'm considering putting my clothes fresh out of the washer on the floor to dry - the direct heat will surely make them dry faster than cramming them all on my drying rack, and maybe even leave them less wrinkled, due not only to the heat, but also to the fact that they would be laying flat instead of folded over on a drying rung. Of course, putting clean clothes directly on the floor seems counterproductive, but maybe I can just make sure the floor is really clean. We'll see.
Your average domestic heating system here in Korea is also different than that of America. The heat comes through the floor instead of through vents or radiators. This is pretty nice on your feet since shoes are not worn in homes ever. Sometimes I pick up clothes that have been lying on the floor all day or night and put them on, and am pleasantly surprised by how warm they are. This is especially good in the morning when putting pants on. Since there are no dryers in Korea, or ovens, leaving clothes on the floor is really the only way to get them nice and toasty before putting them on, which leads me to an interesting hypothesis:
I'm considering putting my clothes fresh out of the washer on the floor to dry - the direct heat will surely make them dry faster than cramming them all on my drying rack, and maybe even leave them less wrinkled, due not only to the heat, but also to the fact that they would be laying flat instead of folded over on a drying rung. Of course, putting clean clothes directly on the floor seems counterproductive, but maybe I can just make sure the floor is really clean. We'll see.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Theater in 24 Hours
I won best actor and best script, two out of four prizes awarded at Daegu's first ever (I think) 24 hour theater project. That means that the shows involved were written, practiced, and performed in 24 hours - the show itself didn't last for 24 hours. I should clarify that I co-won the prizes; I won them both with my thespian partner Emma. The best script was more thanks to me than her, but the best actors award was more thanks to her than me, so as a team, it all worked out.
That's her in the middle with her Golden Pig that we got as trophies. Like every other Westerner you meet here in Korea, Emma is a teacher. She's British and she's like 34 which caught me off guard because she looks much younger. She's also small, so I'm sure that adds to it. That's Justin on the left. He wrote the play that won the best overall play award. Justin is generally pretty cocky and obnoxious and likes to be in control, but he's an all right dude sometimes. He brought a bunch of us new native teachers around Daegu when we first got here, showing us some Western bars and restaurants, and so on, but with the attitude that he was doing us noobs a favor like we would never be able to figure out the scene without him.
I had never been involved with theater before, nor had any interest in being involved with it other than watching some plays now and then. The reworking of The Odyssey into a parable of illegal immigration by a small group at a theater in Portsmouth stands out as one of the best shows I have ever seen, and some vague memories of Dr. Suess stories performed on stage at the Academy when I was a kid rate high too. I wasn't really planning to be involved in this 24 hour theater production either but I decided I could support a friend by doing so, and what the hell.
Kristin is a Canadian I met my first weekend here at the Daegu World Bodypainting Festival. She was a drama major at university (I think), and brought up the idea of forming a theater troupe to do some shows in Daegu once in awhile. I recall her mentioning the idea of a 24 hour production to me, and me showing a level of interest sufficient enough to be supportive, but low enough to avoid any sort of implied interest in actually being involved. Eventually she formed a Facebook group, got a bunch of people interested, and held some meetings that I kept hearing about because I so graciously accepted her invitation to the Facebook group. I volunteered to be an actor finally when she sent a message to everyone saying she needed more actors, and I figured I might as well do something different and all I would have to do is memorize some lines. I find that forcing yourself to do things you really don't want to do is hard sometimes, but usually beneficial, either in that you find you enjoyed it, or you get a better understanding of why you didn't.
On the night before the performances, everyone involved met at Club That and was split into teams and given instructions for rehearsing and performing the next day. There were six teams, each with a writer, about four actors, and some with directors. My team consisted of Emma, myself, the writer Gary, and (a different) Justin. Another girl was not feeling well but was supposed to meet us at Club That the next morning to practice. I sensed the play was going to suck when Gary was asking us for suggestions, and talking about using the roof, our assigned location, to stage a moronic tale of sex gone wrong and/or vomiting on passersby below. Fortunately, as I was strolling down the street the following morning, I ran into Kristin who reported that she never got a script emailed to her from Gary, and that she hadn't heard from him since she saw him out partying at 2AM. At this point it was easy to figure out that he had gone out and got loaded and forgotten about or not had time to write a script for us, which is really lame because Kristin said he had been completely gung-ho about the project beforehand. Like I said though, it seemed like he was going to come up with a shitty play anyway, and I certainly couldn't give him any sympathy for staying out late because I had only gotten four hours of sleep myself, thanks to my Korean lady friend Chunny wanting to go to an all-night dance club whose atmosphere was mainly cigarettes and vaporized sweat. Ugh.
Emma and I decided to do everything on our own after the sick actress turned out to still be sick, and the other actor, Justin, never showed up. I think all the other groups were deadbeat free, so I don't know what was wrong with ours. We were trying to come up with ideas and on the way to get breakfast, and I recalled that a few days earlier was World Philosophy Day, or something like that, and I lifted an idea for a play from this piece I read on the BBC's site. I used one of the moral dilemmas from the first section to frame a play in which a person is forced by some sort of abductor to choose one other captive to die, or else all of the captives die. After talking about the general idea of what we wanted to do, we were both pretty excited about it, and glad those other deadbeats didn't come out.
Our play consisted of three scenes, the first which poses the dilemma and shows someone held captive with a gun to his head, the second which examines the deciding captive's thought process, and a third which is the decision. The first and third scenes lasted about 15 seconds each, as the choice was supposed to be made in about five seconds. The second part is the meat of the play, where Emma represents the emotional side of the captive's brain, and I represent the rational side. We argue and debate over which of the other five hostages should die, based on what we can see of the strangers' ages, sex, and appearances.
There's me trying to talk some sense into her. We came up with the general idea of how things would work, but didn't feel that writing specific lines would be time efficient or any fun, so we half-winged the performance. We practiced beforehand a few times, but each time it was a bit different. We used shoes as representatives of the other hostages, work boots for a blue collar worker, a man's shoe and a woman's shoe for the androgyne, and so on. In the end, the play went pretty well. I was a bit nervous because it seemed like that was the thing to do, plus there were probably more than 100 people in the audience, which totally jammed the second floor of Club That. I was pretty impressed with the whole event, and I must give Kristin credit for organizing everything, and the other performers credit for putting together plays that were much better than what I expected to see. For our prizes, we won some free drinks and gift certificates which was pretty sweet. I stuck around after the other shows, which were all decent at worst, assuming you were near the front and could hear them - I hope I spoke loud enough during mine, only long enough to get my free drinks and reassert my dominance on the dartboards. I was still going on the four hours of sleep the previous night, and felt a cold coming on, so I cut out with my loot and shredded voice and went home to sleep for ten hours.
That's her in the middle with her Golden Pig that we got as trophies. Like every other Westerner you meet here in Korea, Emma is a teacher. She's British and she's like 34 which caught me off guard because she looks much younger. She's also small, so I'm sure that adds to it. That's Justin on the left. He wrote the play that won the best overall play award. Justin is generally pretty cocky and obnoxious and likes to be in control, but he's an all right dude sometimes. He brought a bunch of us new native teachers around Daegu when we first got here, showing us some Western bars and restaurants, and so on, but with the attitude that he was doing us noobs a favor like we would never be able to figure out the scene without him.
I had never been involved with theater before, nor had any interest in being involved with it other than watching some plays now and then. The reworking of The Odyssey into a parable of illegal immigration by a small group at a theater in Portsmouth stands out as one of the best shows I have ever seen, and some vague memories of Dr. Suess stories performed on stage at the Academy when I was a kid rate high too. I wasn't really planning to be involved in this 24 hour theater production either but I decided I could support a friend by doing so, and what the hell.
Kristin is a Canadian I met my first weekend here at the Daegu World Bodypainting Festival. She was a drama major at university (I think), and brought up the idea of forming a theater troupe to do some shows in Daegu once in awhile. I recall her mentioning the idea of a 24 hour production to me, and me showing a level of interest sufficient enough to be supportive, but low enough to avoid any sort of implied interest in actually being involved. Eventually she formed a Facebook group, got a bunch of people interested, and held some meetings that I kept hearing about because I so graciously accepted her invitation to the Facebook group. I volunteered to be an actor finally when she sent a message to everyone saying she needed more actors, and I figured I might as well do something different and all I would have to do is memorize some lines. I find that forcing yourself to do things you really don't want to do is hard sometimes, but usually beneficial, either in that you find you enjoyed it, or you get a better understanding of why you didn't.
On the night before the performances, everyone involved met at Club That and was split into teams and given instructions for rehearsing and performing the next day. There were six teams, each with a writer, about four actors, and some with directors. My team consisted of Emma, myself, the writer Gary, and (a different) Justin. Another girl was not feeling well but was supposed to meet us at Club That the next morning to practice. I sensed the play was going to suck when Gary was asking us for suggestions, and talking about using the roof, our assigned location, to stage a moronic tale of sex gone wrong and/or vomiting on passersby below. Fortunately, as I was strolling down the street the following morning, I ran into Kristin who reported that she never got a script emailed to her from Gary, and that she hadn't heard from him since she saw him out partying at 2AM. At this point it was easy to figure out that he had gone out and got loaded and forgotten about or not had time to write a script for us, which is really lame because Kristin said he had been completely gung-ho about the project beforehand. Like I said though, it seemed like he was going to come up with a shitty play anyway, and I certainly couldn't give him any sympathy for staying out late because I had only gotten four hours of sleep myself, thanks to my Korean lady friend Chunny wanting to go to an all-night dance club whose atmosphere was mainly cigarettes and vaporized sweat. Ugh.
Emma and I decided to do everything on our own after the sick actress turned out to still be sick, and the other actor, Justin, never showed up. I think all the other groups were deadbeat free, so I don't know what was wrong with ours. We were trying to come up with ideas and on the way to get breakfast, and I recalled that a few days earlier was World Philosophy Day, or something like that, and I lifted an idea for a play from this piece I read on the BBC's site. I used one of the moral dilemmas from the first section to frame a play in which a person is forced by some sort of abductor to choose one other captive to die, or else all of the captives die. After talking about the general idea of what we wanted to do, we were both pretty excited about it, and glad those other deadbeats didn't come out.
Our play consisted of three scenes, the first which poses the dilemma and shows someone held captive with a gun to his head, the second which examines the deciding captive's thought process, and a third which is the decision. The first and third scenes lasted about 15 seconds each, as the choice was supposed to be made in about five seconds. The second part is the meat of the play, where Emma represents the emotional side of the captive's brain, and I represent the rational side. We argue and debate over which of the other five hostages should die, based on what we can see of the strangers' ages, sex, and appearances.
There's me trying to talk some sense into her. We came up with the general idea of how things would work, but didn't feel that writing specific lines would be time efficient or any fun, so we half-winged the performance. We practiced beforehand a few times, but each time it was a bit different. We used shoes as representatives of the other hostages, work boots for a blue collar worker, a man's shoe and a woman's shoe for the androgyne, and so on. In the end, the play went pretty well. I was a bit nervous because it seemed like that was the thing to do, plus there were probably more than 100 people in the audience, which totally jammed the second floor of Club That. I was pretty impressed with the whole event, and I must give Kristin credit for organizing everything, and the other performers credit for putting together plays that were much better than what I expected to see. For our prizes, we won some free drinks and gift certificates which was pretty sweet. I stuck around after the other shows, which were all decent at worst, assuming you were near the front and could hear them - I hope I spoke loud enough during mine, only long enough to get my free drinks and reassert my dominance on the dartboards. I was still going on the four hours of sleep the previous night, and felt a cold coming on, so I cut out with my loot and shredded voice and went home to sleep for ten hours.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Crazy Taxi High Score
I bought some ice cream today on my way back from the bank on my lunch break. I have to go to the bank to pay my bills in person, cash only. I don't know why; the ATMs here all allow you to transfer funds quite easily from account to account, such as I did to the cable company to open up my account, but now I have to pay my cable bill, along with my other bills in cash in person. It's all right with me though, I don't mind a short stroll to the bank now and then to get out of the school and into the fresh air.
The ice cream was listed as 1500 won, rang up as 1500 won, but I only had to pay 750 won. I don't know why this is either. I saw the price on the screen and handed the cashier 2000 and she handed me back one of the bills and my change from the other. The same thing happens at my local convenience store when I buy ice cream, I only pay half of the listed price. I thought this was just because the guy at my local store, the Dongho Power Mart, was super nice and liked me, but it seems to be a more widespread practice.
Having the woman hand back the extra bill when I was trying to pay 1500 for the ice cream got me thinking about how honest Koreans seem to be when dealing with tourists/foreigners. Of course this particular event was really nothing noteworthy, and is really something to be expected pretty much anywhere, but I thought it was nice nonetheless. I was perfectly willing to pay the extra money, and it would have been that simple just to take it.
When I first got to Seoul for my orientation period, I went out with some friends I had met. We met Emily, an acquaintance of mine who had been in Korea for nearly a year at the time and she brought us out to a bar on the other side of the river from where we were staying at Konkuk University. When we were getting a cab back to our dorms, I thought that the cabbie was going the opposite way that we came from, and thought, oh boy, we're about to get hosed on cab fare cause we don't know shit about the city and its obvious. Turns out that we were indeed going away from the way we came from, but it was the shortest way because we had to get to a bridge that brought us right back.
Since that initial false alarm, I have not once felt I was getting gypped just cause I am a foreigner and don't know shit. In fact, the cabbies here in Daegu seem to pride themselves on getting you to where you go as efficiently as possible, which usually entails dangerous and illegal driving techniques. One evening I was downtown with Masa, who happens to be both the Man, and a Japanese climbing friend I first met at Seoraksan National Park in mid-September.
We were getting some beers and let the time slip beyond the reach of the last subway train back towards home, which is rather early at 11:30pm. Masa was crashing at my place so we found a cab to get home. As I said above, the cabbies generally make sure you get to wherever you're going quite rapidly, but this guy easily wins my Cabbie Speedracer Award. We regularly hit 140kph in 80kph zones and cut across lanes and back with no heed of what people usually heed when driving at high speeds, namely the law and safety. Deceleration and acceleration were equally exciting, respectively experiencing inertia as being jerked forward or pressed firmly back into our seats. Masa found the drive particularly exciting as we were getting tossed around the back seat, and the cabbie seemed to be encouraged by his whoops and cries. I think we got home in record time, and all that entertainment and transportation for about 11,000 won, quite a bargain, especially after Masa was estimating a taxi ride of an equal distance in Japan would be about six times as much, and I am guessing that the same ride would have been about three times as much in the states.
I guess that one of the reasons that foreigners don't get hosed so much, at least inasmuch that I am aware of, is that South Korea doesn't have a large enough foreign tourist industry to make it worthwhile. In Thailand, there is such a large tourism industry, largely cheap-ass backpackers or Ronald McBoyfriends with dyed hair and a middle-aged guy, that one must be careful when buying certain things like cheap bus or train tickets, or from what I've heard (I swear) "women", who may turn out to be what are called lady-boys there. Europe as well is quite well-known to have a thriving population of pick-pockets and petty thieves. I got my digital camera stolen there when I was in Prague in 2003, and chances are you know someone who got ripped off there too. Just look in a guidebook for most places, there is going to be a section on common scams, but there is no such section in my guidebook on Korea, and I am yet to see a need for one. Get enough tourists in here though, some fat balding aging white guys looking for young brides like in Thailand, or some hippy backpackers wanting to be able to say they've been somewhere you haven't, like just about everywhere you travel, enough people moving through to justify ripping them off, then I have faith that the scamming industry will pick up.
The ice cream was listed as 1500 won, rang up as 1500 won, but I only had to pay 750 won. I don't know why this is either. I saw the price on the screen and handed the cashier 2000 and she handed me back one of the bills and my change from the other. The same thing happens at my local convenience store when I buy ice cream, I only pay half of the listed price. I thought this was just because the guy at my local store, the Dongho Power Mart, was super nice and liked me, but it seems to be a more widespread practice.
Having the woman hand back the extra bill when I was trying to pay 1500 for the ice cream got me thinking about how honest Koreans seem to be when dealing with tourists/foreigners. Of course this particular event was really nothing noteworthy, and is really something to be expected pretty much anywhere, but I thought it was nice nonetheless. I was perfectly willing to pay the extra money, and it would have been that simple just to take it.
When I first got to Seoul for my orientation period, I went out with some friends I had met. We met Emily, an acquaintance of mine who had been in Korea for nearly a year at the time and she brought us out to a bar on the other side of the river from where we were staying at Konkuk University. When we were getting a cab back to our dorms, I thought that the cabbie was going the opposite way that we came from, and thought, oh boy, we're about to get hosed on cab fare cause we don't know shit about the city and its obvious. Turns out that we were indeed going away from the way we came from, but it was the shortest way because we had to get to a bridge that brought us right back.
Since that initial false alarm, I have not once felt I was getting gypped just cause I am a foreigner and don't know shit. In fact, the cabbies here in Daegu seem to pride themselves on getting you to where you go as efficiently as possible, which usually entails dangerous and illegal driving techniques. One evening I was downtown with Masa, who happens to be both the Man, and a Japanese climbing friend I first met at Seoraksan National Park in mid-September.
We were getting some beers and let the time slip beyond the reach of the last subway train back towards home, which is rather early at 11:30pm. Masa was crashing at my place so we found a cab to get home. As I said above, the cabbies generally make sure you get to wherever you're going quite rapidly, but this guy easily wins my Cabbie Speedracer Award. We regularly hit 140kph in 80kph zones and cut across lanes and back with no heed of what people usually heed when driving at high speeds, namely the law and safety. Deceleration and acceleration were equally exciting, respectively experiencing inertia as being jerked forward or pressed firmly back into our seats. Masa found the drive particularly exciting as we were getting tossed around the back seat, and the cabbie seemed to be encouraged by his whoops and cries. I think we got home in record time, and all that entertainment and transportation for about 11,000 won, quite a bargain, especially after Masa was estimating a taxi ride of an equal distance in Japan would be about six times as much, and I am guessing that the same ride would have been about three times as much in the states.
I guess that one of the reasons that foreigners don't get hosed so much, at least inasmuch that I am aware of, is that South Korea doesn't have a large enough foreign tourist industry to make it worthwhile. In Thailand, there is such a large tourism industry, largely cheap-ass backpackers or Ronald McBoyfriends with dyed hair and a middle-aged guy, that one must be careful when buying certain things like cheap bus or train tickets, or from what I've heard (I swear) "women", who may turn out to be what are called lady-boys there. Europe as well is quite well-known to have a thriving population of pick-pockets and petty thieves. I got my digital camera stolen there when I was in Prague in 2003, and chances are you know someone who got ripped off there too. Just look in a guidebook for most places, there is going to be a section on common scams, but there is no such section in my guidebook on Korea, and I am yet to see a need for one. Get enough tourists in here though, some fat balding aging white guys looking for young brides like in Thailand, or some hippy backpackers wanting to be able to say they've been somewhere you haven't, like just about everywhere you travel, enough people moving through to justify ripping them off, then I have faith that the scamming industry will pick up.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Free Fridge Art
I get flyers on my door at least a few times a week. Always for restaurants offering delivery and take-away, and though sometimes they are just taped to my door, they usually have a magnet. I guess most apartment doors in Korea are metal, or at least have a metal layer on the front, otherwise I don't know why restaurants would print out so many advertisements with magnets on them. Sometimes the flyers are a single piece of thin paperboard for a single restaurant and sometimes they are booklets with a ton of restaurants in them. I simply threw these away at first, but decided a more worthwhile use would be to put them on my refrigerator and think of the brightly colored advertisements as decorations rather than junk mail. Most of the print is meaningless to me anyway as my grasp of the Korean language is feeble at best. I'm hoping to fill up the white space on my fridge and maybe be able to arrange them so that there is some sort of order or color progression.
In this instance it may be a good thing that I can't understand or speak Korean since otherwise 1)I would not be able to look at these flyers as anything but trash and thus my fridge would be that much less colorful, and 2)I would probably be tempted to call out and order food if I was able to communicate with whoever answered the phone, and would thus be that much lazier and poorer. On the bright side, I have one from the pizza and fried-chicken place across the street from me that has the menu on it, so I suppose I could study that until I memorized what I wanted and go order some take-out without pointing and gesturing for once.
From what I can gather, food delivery here is a big business. Anytime I walk down the sidewalk, I have to remember to be on the look out for delivery scooters whipping past. Driving on the sidewalk is no big deal, nor is using crosswalks, driving on the wrong side of the road, or doing any of the above with one hand on the handlebars because they have to hold the huge insulated steel delivery box with their other hand. I've been told the delivery men whip around the city like this even in the dead of winter which must be absolutely miserable. I've already seen a lot of scooters with what I can only describe as handlebar muffs installed. These things are a warm covering for the hand grips with a short sleeve for your hand and wrist to go into. Rough job.
I actually got a knock on my door one time when I was not expecting anyone, and there was a woman standing with some food. She said something in Korean, I stood there like an idiot, she said something else and gestured with the food, I took a box of pizza in confusion, and then gave it back realizing that she was a delivery woman and that I had not, in fact, ordered any food. She showed me the address, which was correct, and she seemed to figure out I hadn't ordered anything and that was the end of the interaction, a bit perplexing for us both, I'm sure.
In this instance it may be a good thing that I can't understand or speak Korean since otherwise 1)I would not be able to look at these flyers as anything but trash and thus my fridge would be that much less colorful, and 2)I would probably be tempted to call out and order food if I was able to communicate with whoever answered the phone, and would thus be that much lazier and poorer. On the bright side, I have one from the pizza and fried-chicken place across the street from me that has the menu on it, so I suppose I could study that until I memorized what I wanted and go order some take-out without pointing and gesturing for once.
From what I can gather, food delivery here is a big business. Anytime I walk down the sidewalk, I have to remember to be on the look out for delivery scooters whipping past. Driving on the sidewalk is no big deal, nor is using crosswalks, driving on the wrong side of the road, or doing any of the above with one hand on the handlebars because they have to hold the huge insulated steel delivery box with their other hand. I've been told the delivery men whip around the city like this even in the dead of winter which must be absolutely miserable. I've already seen a lot of scooters with what I can only describe as handlebar muffs installed. These things are a warm covering for the hand grips with a short sleeve for your hand and wrist to go into. Rough job.
I actually got a knock on my door one time when I was not expecting anyone, and there was a woman standing with some food. She said something in Korean, I stood there like an idiot, she said something else and gestured with the food, I took a box of pizza in confusion, and then gave it back realizing that she was a delivery woman and that I had not, in fact, ordered any food. She showed me the address, which was correct, and she seemed to figure out I hadn't ordered anything and that was the end of the interaction, a bit perplexing for us both, I'm sure.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Your BELLY
Certainly, living so close to my school is a benefit. It's five minutes or under on foot, and my proximity to work was a concern of mine before I moved down here after the orientation in Seoul. I had the idea that the Daegu Metropolitan Office of Education would possibly toss me and some other teachers all in an apartment building and leave us on our own to figure out how to best get to work. I imagined shitty scenarios of having to figure out a bus system and sit through 45 minute rides, or spend 20 minutes walking everyday. Fortunately the DMOE, my employer, and that of the other native speakers who got the job through EPIK, just assigns us a school and leaves the housing up to them. I say fortunately only because things worked out well for me. Whoever at my school was in charge of hooking me up with an apartment did a good job. It is close, as I have said, but it is also relatively new, as is my school and the entire neighborhood I live in and around because I am on the edge of the city where all the development is pretty recent. My apartment is also a decent size. It's would be small in America, except for maybe in New York City, but compared to the pads of some other native teachers, I really lucked out. I have a kitchen that has enough room for a nice table with four chairs that was kindly furnished for me, and my bedroom which is accessed by two large sliding doors from the kitchen has a good sized bed and enough room for a small couch if I ever come across one. The bathroom is pretty small but I also have a storage/laundry room.
My apartment is pretty nice, and like I said, certainly convenient, but I guess the proximity has a downside too. Namely that of having my students everywhere around the neighborhood, and having some trying to follow me home. These two kids, Sang-gi (left) and Sang-kyung (right)
and another friend ran into me as I was walking home the other day. Sang-kyung kept saying I needed to memorize his name, so I practiced it a couple times. When I saw him today and snapped the above photo, three days after he had me memorize it, he asked me what his name was and covered up his name tag. Fortunately I had just taked the photo and zoomed in on it and read his name off it cause I didn't remember. Ha, sucker. Sang-gi, who has serious ADD and speaks little more English than "Your BELLY, show me!" managed to ask where I was going, half in Korean, half in English. I noticed they changed the direction that they were walking in when they saw me, and after I responded I was going home and asked them where they were going, of course they said they were going to my home too. "Party" and "tour" were a couple of words they managed to spit out in English, plus "Your BELLY" one or two more times. That's actually pretty funny, every time I see Sang-gi, that's the first and usually the only thing he says; he want's to see my stomach for some reason. At least he remembered one vocab word from the English camp my school held on a Saturday about 6 weeks ago.
I just kept walking as these kids were shoveling fried ramen into their mouths and jabbering on in Korean. They asked where I lived, do I take a bus, a subway? I live this way, no I don't, and no I don't. I could have just lied and walked around until they got tired of following me but I didn't want to. I got to my apartment building and opened the door to head up to my floor, and had to physically block the pesky little bastards from squeezing into my building. "No. Go home." "AHN-i-yo." I got halfway up the stairs and they tried to sneak in behind me, thinking I wouldn't see them. I held out my arms and flapped my hands like I was shooing them away which was a mistake cause that's essentially the gesture Koreans use to say "Come here." I got them out again and finally watched them leave from the landing after a couple minutes of loitering around the outside of my building.
So now they know what building I live in, but not which apartment is mine. There's only six apartments, being a three-story building with an art studio on the bottom, so I guess it wouldn't be too hard to figure out. Only a couple students actually know which apartment is mine, and that's cause they live upstairs, but they're cool. One of them brought me some grapes as a gift one night, and their mom is friendly and wouldn't let them bother me. Plus they don't have ADD.
My apartment is pretty nice, and like I said, certainly convenient, but I guess the proximity has a downside too. Namely that of having my students everywhere around the neighborhood, and having some trying to follow me home. These two kids, Sang-gi (left) and Sang-kyung (right)
and another friend ran into me as I was walking home the other day. Sang-kyung kept saying I needed to memorize his name, so I practiced it a couple times. When I saw him today and snapped the above photo, three days after he had me memorize it, he asked me what his name was and covered up his name tag. Fortunately I had just taked the photo and zoomed in on it and read his name off it cause I didn't remember. Ha, sucker. Sang-gi, who has serious ADD and speaks little more English than "Your BELLY, show me!" managed to ask where I was going, half in Korean, half in English. I noticed they changed the direction that they were walking in when they saw me, and after I responded I was going home and asked them where they were going, of course they said they were going to my home too. "Party" and "tour" were a couple of words they managed to spit out in English, plus "Your BELLY" one or two more times. That's actually pretty funny, every time I see Sang-gi, that's the first and usually the only thing he says; he want's to see my stomach for some reason. At least he remembered one vocab word from the English camp my school held on a Saturday about 6 weeks ago.
I just kept walking as these kids were shoveling fried ramen into their mouths and jabbering on in Korean. They asked where I lived, do I take a bus, a subway? I live this way, no I don't, and no I don't. I could have just lied and walked around until they got tired of following me but I didn't want to. I got to my apartment building and opened the door to head up to my floor, and had to physically block the pesky little bastards from squeezing into my building. "No. Go home." "AHN-i-yo." I got halfway up the stairs and they tried to sneak in behind me, thinking I wouldn't see them. I held out my arms and flapped my hands like I was shooing them away which was a mistake cause that's essentially the gesture Koreans use to say "Come here." I got them out again and finally watched them leave from the landing after a couple minutes of loitering around the outside of my building.
So now they know what building I live in, but not which apartment is mine. There's only six apartments, being a three-story building with an art studio on the bottom, so I guess it wouldn't be too hard to figure out. Only a couple students actually know which apartment is mine, and that's cause they live upstairs, but they're cool. One of them brought me some grapes as a gift one night, and their mom is friendly and wouldn't let them bother me. Plus they don't have ADD.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Jesus, That's a Spicy Marinade
Tonight is game six between the Samsung Lions and the Doosan Bears. The Lions play baseball here in Daegu, I caught a game back in the regular season and it was great. The most expensive tickets listed on the board were 6000 won, or about $4.50 at the current exchange rate. Plus you can bring in your own beer and food. The Lions are the series underdogs and are fighting to stay alive in the league semifinals, and, hold on a second, I want to go buy some ice cream.
Ok, got it.nThe guy at the Power Mart is the nicest guy ever. He always gives me some sort of discount, and is always smiling and says "have a good night" in English. I think that the Lions won the championship last year, but this year they are two runs down with three innings to go in their season, potentially. There weren't too many people at the game I went to, over a month ago when they were battling for the pennant, but understandably the games have been sold out recently, from what I've heard.
That ice cream was great. My mouth feels nice and cool now. I was dying earlier when I was eating dinner. I bought some dweji gogi, or thinly-sliced pork, and pan-fried it with a spicy marinade I bought and some garlic and onions and peppers. When I was at E-Mart earlier this evening, I was contemplating my Korean marinade choices since I couldn't find any Western-style barbeque sauce. By contemplating, I mean comparing the one line of English on each of the bottles. I decided to go with the Smart Choice High Fiber Hot Spicy Pork Bulgogi Marinade because if the Smart Choice brand name doesn't doesn't lend itself to an obvious choice, the rest should.
I guess I forgot that time when I was in Thailand, where all the food is spicy by default, sort of like Korea, and I saw a dish explicitly listed on the menu as spicy, and I thought "Wow, something that is described as spicy in a country where everything is spicy without even having to say so. This must be really spicy. I should try it." My lapse in reasoning occurred with the last sentence: "I should try it." My reasoning should have instead continued like this, "Damn, that must really fucking hot, I'd better stay away." Well I ordered it, a garlic chicken salad, and I couldn't eat even half of it. Easily the second hottest thing I've ever eaten.
So back to tonight. Maybe I should have gotten the regular Smart Choice High Fiber Pork Bulgogi Marinade, but I didn't. At first the food was just hot cause it was right off the frying pan, and the rice bed was right out of the rice cooker. That's the worst, when the temperature is so hot that you don't notice that the spice is way hot too. Well my nose was running and my face was red when I was about a quarter of the way in, and I only had so much beer left to chase it down with. I tried to eat a bit more and just got scorched so I let it alone for awhile. I guess it wasn't as hot as the chicken salad in Thailand, 'cause I was able to finish it after the temperature cooled down a bit. Anyway, that ice cream was real good. The Lions are still down by two and they only have one inning left. I was going to have the pork gogi with some potatoes that have been sitting around for almost a couple weeks that I have been meaning to mash up, but that seemed like too much work. Potatoes stay good for awhile too anyway, I think. Cooking is tough because you can't just look around a supermarket and buy the same stuff that you're used to cooking with back in the states. And no one cooks with ovens, they don't consider ovens a basic appliance, and I think I've only talked to one person in my whole time here that has one. So basically I've had to adapt my cooking style, what there is of one, to the food I can find and recognize. It's not so bad. It's easy enough to throw some rice in the cooker and fry up some mandu, or buy some bulgogi and eat that, or even just go down the street to E-Mart and order something at the food court. And half the time I end up eating out anyway, especially with Korean culture being so group-oriented and all. For example, last Thursday I bought a pizza on the way home from the school field trip to an amusement park cause I was so hungry I couldn't be bothered to shop for and cook food. And then Friday I had to leave school early and go downtown for a meeting some some folks that I am going to be working with to judge an English essay contest, and they brought me out to eat after that, as seems par for the course anytime you have any sort of meeting. Saturday I was at the temple and got fed there. Sunday I got brought out to dinner by the people who were filming me and the Swedish babe Fanny for the promotional video. Monday night I ate out with the other English teachers from my school to celebrate the open class, or demo class I guess you could call it, the previous Friday. Tuesday I guess I cooked a meal, or more accurately combined the dregs of what was left of food scrounged from my cupboards and fridge. Wednesday I met some other native English teachers downtown and we chowed on Western food at the Holy Grill. So I guess with my meal tonight, that makes two meals I've made in the past week.
Well shit, the Lions just lost. Season over.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Golgusa Temple Stay
I went on a temple stay this weekend. I had always thought a temple stay would be a super relaxing time of sitting around meditating and doing yoga and philosophical insights and whatnot, and I'm sure many are, but this was more of large tourist destination. Meaning, of course, a bunch of foreigners taking pictures and doing things wrong. Now I don't mean to make the weekend sound like it was bad, because it was not, it just didn't meet my expectations, based on almost nothing more than stereotypes marinated in imagination, of what I wanted a retreat at a Buddhist temple to be.
Plus, we, the group, all 100 of us, were only there for about 24 hours. The schedule was tight even before we got to the temple. We left Daegu, had X amount of time to eat lunch at a restaurant on the way, X amount of time to visit the Gyeongju Museum we stopped at, and X amount of time at the ancient observatory we saw after that. I think that, even though the stay was not an easy, laid-back time, the experience would have been better if I had stayed a week or more, and really gotten into the routine.
Lunch on Saturday was good cause I got to sit with some friends I hadn't talked to for awhile, and also meet a Swedish exchange student who was model-caliber hot. When we got to the temple, we sat around in a large group and had a sort of introduction to the area. There is a Grand Master at the temple a dozen or so monks, and some people who seemed to be in training, or on an extended visit, or something. There were even a couple foreign monks there, French I believe, who did a fair amount of the translation and explaining to us tourists.
The main attraction of Golgulsa (Bone Cave Temple, I think?) is not the temple itself. The original burned down a few hundred years ago, and the new one is small and unimpressive. More of a shrine. The main attraction is a 20-foot Buddha carved out of a blotchy, pockmarked stone face. It's over 1500 years old, and exists thanks to an Indian monk who wandered on over here back in the day.
We had a list of activities that included Zen yoga, Sunmudo, a Zen martial art unique to Korea and similar to Taekwando, but with meditation involved, a tea drinking ceremony, a ritualized breakfast ceremony, and a few worship ceremonies, including a predawn worship that we had to get up at four AM for.
Basically, we sat cross-legged a lot, which causes my hips and knees to ache when I attempt to stand up. I am familiar with this discomfort from eating out at Korean restaurants where you sit on the floor. I thought that after two months I would start getting used to it, but no such luck so far. Maybe this temple stay helped out a bit since I was aching so much. After the last event Saturday evening, a Sunmudo demonstration, I heard my name called out as I was getting ready to head to bed. I had forgotten I agreed to do some filming for a promotional video or something when one of the Korean chaperons approached me earlier. I was supposed to do a tea ceremony with Fanny, the super hot Swedish girl I mentioned early. They wanted us to act as a couple, which I had no qualms with. Oh, and it turns out that she actually had done some modeling in Sweden, nice! Anyway, I didn't do the tea ceremony with her, they had Chris, a British guy I sat next to on the bus, do that. Instead, they put me in the monk clothes and asked what I remembered from the martial arts practice earlier. I had to rack my exhausted brain but remembered most of a side-kick they had us practice. So while everyone else got to go to bed, I tried to do this side-kick for a camera, underneath only a spotlight in the dark Sunmudo academy, with the French monk trying to get me to do the motions properly. He was clearly not too impressed with my skills, and I felt that reminding him I had spent five minutes learning this earlier in the evening as opposed to practicing for years would have been futile, so I just did my botched side-kick for the camera, and then a meditation routine with no complaints.
One totally sweet thing about Golgulsa is that upon the knobby, blotchy rock face that the Main Attraction Buddha is carved out of, is that there are many small shelves and nooks with more Buddha statues of various sizes. Pictured here is one such Buddha, the Buddha of hard rock. Please reference "Metal Health (Bang Your Head)" by Quiet Riot.
Sunday, after a quick nap following the ritual breakfast, Paru-Gongyang, which was supposed to be silent despite a number of people dropping bowls as they tried to transfer the cleaning water to and fro, and people talking and so on, I was called out to do some more filming. I wasn't too upset about missing the tea ceremony I was scheduled to do, and it turns out that this time I was supposed to be the fake boyfriend of Fanny. Sorry Chris, but all is fair in love and war. They had us sitting on top of a hill looking like we were meditating, and then walking a lot, pretending to laugh and point at stuff and smile, always smiling, always smiling MORE. We did a whole lot of this before we went to catch the last half of some more Sunmudo (we got to skip the entire hour of the tea ceremony, yesss). We were going to do some more filming after that, but some shit wasn't set up, so we went back to the 108 bows and missed only the first five. Apparently Buddhism's bible-equivalent says there are 108 different human agonies and so we bowed for each one. And not just standing and leaning over bowing, that would be easy. Standing up, hands in front, down on your knees, hands still in front, lean over, part your hands, head on the ground, hands on the ground, and up, 108 times. It wasn't so bad after you lost count and said fuck it and just went through the motions and got lost in your thoughts, which is probably roughly the point. I didn't have too much of a problem with it since I try to keep myself in a respectable state of health, but some people couldn't cut it, though most people did it well enough. I gotta admit that afterward, walking down the hill, my legs were a bit weak though. Then came lunch, some news that the filmmakers wanted me and Fanny to do some filming on a campus back in Daegu later in the day, and some free time to further explore the tiny area. One of my roommates and I went on a little hike up a small trail I spotted above the Buddha. I was hoping it would lead to a vista, but no such luck, or at least, we didn't go far enough if it did. Just some nice forest and a few (burial?) mounds here and there on the trail.
No surprise that most people slept on the bus ride back to Daegu, after waking up at four AM and all. Back at the city hall, Fanny and I got whisked away to be filmed some more, laughing and smiling, and smiling more! the whole time. She mentioned someone told her we looked like ABBA together. I was just proud I could fit a stereotype of a foreigner. I've always felt that stereotypes have to come from somewhere, bad or good, though probably bad, mostly. This last shoot went on about an hour, and we spent a fair amount of time staring up at a pinecone beyond the camera and being jolly before the crew took us out to dinner and we chowed down on some dweji galbi, and that's two weekends in a row for me with that dish. The meat and beer was welcome after a miserable 24-hour stretch with neither. It definitely felt longer though, just knowing that you couldn't have meat or booze. Or kill things. I really missed killing things during those 24-hours even though I did kill a mosquito during lunch or dinner on Saturday. Oops.
Plus, we, the group, all 100 of us, were only there for about 24 hours. The schedule was tight even before we got to the temple. We left Daegu, had X amount of time to eat lunch at a restaurant on the way, X amount of time to visit the Gyeongju Museum we stopped at, and X amount of time at the ancient observatory we saw after that. I think that, even though the stay was not an easy, laid-back time, the experience would have been better if I had stayed a week or more, and really gotten into the routine.
Lunch on Saturday was good cause I got to sit with some friends I hadn't talked to for awhile, and also meet a Swedish exchange student who was model-caliber hot. When we got to the temple, we sat around in a large group and had a sort of introduction to the area. There is a Grand Master at the temple a dozen or so monks, and some people who seemed to be in training, or on an extended visit, or something. There were even a couple foreign monks there, French I believe, who did a fair amount of the translation and explaining to us tourists.
The main attraction of Golgulsa (Bone Cave Temple, I think?) is not the temple itself. The original burned down a few hundred years ago, and the new one is small and unimpressive. More of a shrine. The main attraction is a 20-foot Buddha carved out of a blotchy, pockmarked stone face. It's over 1500 years old, and exists thanks to an Indian monk who wandered on over here back in the day.
We had a list of activities that included Zen yoga, Sunmudo, a Zen martial art unique to Korea and similar to Taekwando, but with meditation involved, a tea drinking ceremony, a ritualized breakfast ceremony, and a few worship ceremonies, including a predawn worship that we had to get up at four AM for.
Basically, we sat cross-legged a lot, which causes my hips and knees to ache when I attempt to stand up. I am familiar with this discomfort from eating out at Korean restaurants where you sit on the floor. I thought that after two months I would start getting used to it, but no such luck so far. Maybe this temple stay helped out a bit since I was aching so much. After the last event Saturday evening, a Sunmudo demonstration, I heard my name called out as I was getting ready to head to bed. I had forgotten I agreed to do some filming for a promotional video or something when one of the Korean chaperons approached me earlier. I was supposed to do a tea ceremony with Fanny, the super hot Swedish girl I mentioned early. They wanted us to act as a couple, which I had no qualms with. Oh, and it turns out that she actually had done some modeling in Sweden, nice! Anyway, I didn't do the tea ceremony with her, they had Chris, a British guy I sat next to on the bus, do that. Instead, they put me in the monk clothes and asked what I remembered from the martial arts practice earlier. I had to rack my exhausted brain but remembered most of a side-kick they had us practice. So while everyone else got to go to bed, I tried to do this side-kick for a camera, underneath only a spotlight in the dark Sunmudo academy, with the French monk trying to get me to do the motions properly. He was clearly not too impressed with my skills, and I felt that reminding him I had spent five minutes learning this earlier in the evening as opposed to practicing for years would have been futile, so I just did my botched side-kick for the camera, and then a meditation routine with no complaints.
One totally sweet thing about Golgulsa is that upon the knobby, blotchy rock face that the Main Attraction Buddha is carved out of, is that there are many small shelves and nooks with more Buddha statues of various sizes. Pictured here is one such Buddha, the Buddha of hard rock. Please reference "Metal Health (Bang Your Head)" by Quiet Riot.
Sunday, after a quick nap following the ritual breakfast, Paru-Gongyang, which was supposed to be silent despite a number of people dropping bowls as they tried to transfer the cleaning water to and fro, and people talking and so on, I was called out to do some more filming. I wasn't too upset about missing the tea ceremony I was scheduled to do, and it turns out that this time I was supposed to be the fake boyfriend of Fanny. Sorry Chris, but all is fair in love and war. They had us sitting on top of a hill looking like we were meditating, and then walking a lot, pretending to laugh and point at stuff and smile, always smiling, always smiling MORE. We did a whole lot of this before we went to catch the last half of some more Sunmudo (we got to skip the entire hour of the tea ceremony, yesss). We were going to do some more filming after that, but some shit wasn't set up, so we went back to the 108 bows and missed only the first five. Apparently Buddhism's bible-equivalent says there are 108 different human agonies and so we bowed for each one. And not just standing and leaning over bowing, that would be easy. Standing up, hands in front, down on your knees, hands still in front, lean over, part your hands, head on the ground, hands on the ground, and up, 108 times. It wasn't so bad after you lost count and said fuck it and just went through the motions and got lost in your thoughts, which is probably roughly the point. I didn't have too much of a problem with it since I try to keep myself in a respectable state of health, but some people couldn't cut it, though most people did it well enough. I gotta admit that afterward, walking down the hill, my legs were a bit weak though. Then came lunch, some news that the filmmakers wanted me and Fanny to do some filming on a campus back in Daegu later in the day, and some free time to further explore the tiny area. One of my roommates and I went on a little hike up a small trail I spotted above the Buddha. I was hoping it would lead to a vista, but no such luck, or at least, we didn't go far enough if it did. Just some nice forest and a few (burial?) mounds here and there on the trail.
No surprise that most people slept on the bus ride back to Daegu, after waking up at four AM and all. Back at the city hall, Fanny and I got whisked away to be filmed some more, laughing and smiling, and smiling more! the whole time. She mentioned someone told her we looked like ABBA together. I was just proud I could fit a stereotype of a foreigner. I've always felt that stereotypes have to come from somewhere, bad or good, though probably bad, mostly. This last shoot went on about an hour, and we spent a fair amount of time staring up at a pinecone beyond the camera and being jolly before the crew took us out to dinner and we chowed down on some dweji galbi, and that's two weekends in a row for me with that dish. The meat and beer was welcome after a miserable 24-hour stretch with neither. It definitely felt longer though, just knowing that you couldn't have meat or booze. Or kill things. I really missed killing things during those 24-hours even though I did kill a mosquito during lunch or dinner on Saturday. Oops.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Climbing with Shaun and Marissa
I guess it's about time I start writing something. I've been in Korea for a month and a half at this point, and I have been a combination of busy and lazy as far as writing a blog is concerned. It's a Sunday night and I've already cooked dinner and cleaned the dishes, bought some food for the week, showered, watched a movie, surfed the Internet for awhile, and put my laundry away, so I guess I don't have many other distractions. Today and yesterday I spent climbing at crag called Yeongyeong, somewhere shortly north of Daegu. Both today and yesterday I met Shaun and Marissa at the rock, and both today and yesterday I made a mess of getting there via public transportation. Today wasn't as bad of course, since I had about three hours practice of fucking up yesterday. After I got out of my language class yesterday at one, I had lunch and wandered aimlessly around downtown looking for a bus up to Palgongsan, thinking it would be easy to spot one since Palgonsan is supposed to be such a popular park for hiking and checking out Buddha statues and temples and so on. I didn't have to wander around too long before I realized it would be futile. I asked a woman at the YMCA where I take my courses if she could help me, and she looked up a bunch of info but couldn't find the stop Marissa told me to get off at. Turns out Marissa was telling me the bus number, not the stop, and that was my first mistake. After walking to the bus stop, and waiting ten minutes for what would eventually turn out to be the wrong bus, I started to get on only to ask if it was going the right way and be told that no, I had to go to the other side of the road, which is where I waited fifteen minutes for one going the correct direction. As I got toward the end of the line, in Palgonsan Natural Park, my suspicion of being very much in the wrong place grew stronger and stronger. I finally asked the bus driver, which I should have done in the first place, and he spit out a bunch of Korean at me which I understood none of, save the fact that the general idea was that I was in fact way off. He put me on another bus and explained what this retarded foreigner was looking for. I went back down the mountain and was dropped off at a small stop with the vague hint I was supposed to change buses here. I didn't get which way I was supposed to be going, or which of the four buses that stopped here I was supposed to be on, so after asking the drivers of the first three routes that came by, and crossing and recrossing the road at least three times, I finally got, by process of elimination, correctly on the fourth bus that came, which I was on about ten minutes before I had to get off and wait for another bus, which finally brought me to the crag, visible from the road, nearly three hours after I had set off.
Marissa and Shaun had already been climbing since about 11 and it was about 430. I met them both about two weeks ago in Busan at the Tre-X games. We were all competitors in the sport climbing category, mainly as token foreigners in this international sports competition since we all did quite miserable in the competition itself - but everyone got a free weekend out of it, and officially became international extreme athletes, so we were winners in our own way. Shaun is tall lanky Australian with persistent dark stubble to match his shaved head, and is quite humorously vulgar. Marissa is a North American - Canadian, American? I don't remember, like there is even a difference, sorry to offend any Canadians - and has lived in a tent in Alaska, a shack in Washington, east Africa, and has been in Korea now for a few years. The Tre-X games was a great opportunity to meet a bunch of other English-speaking climbers, some of whom I already knew, some I did not, like Marissa and Shaun. There is a great website called koreaontherocks.com that is a pretty extensive English language resource for climbing in Korea, and it's forums and message boards provide plenty of opportunities to meet other climbers.
I only got a few climbs in each day since I got there later than them both days, thanks to my reliance on public transportation. Which is fine, since I most of my climbing experience is in bouldering, and although its starting to change now that I am sport climbing more, my strength and endurance are pretty low for long routes. Saturday I made a bee line for the top of a 5.10c for my first climb, unleashing a nest of centipedes on the way up as I grabbed an undercling. I was only aware of this as Marissa yelled up, "Way to unleash the centipedes," which I at first took for some sort of metaphorical compliment, but it turns out that she was being quite literal. We had a laugh about that once I got down, and unleashing the centipedes instantly became the euphemism of the weekend, much like doing anything in an Xtreme fashion became en vogue for Shaun and myself during our weekend stint as international extreme, sorry, Xtreme, athletes.
On Sunday, my first climb was leading a 5.10b which gave me a considerably harder time than the 10c, or even an 11a that I climbed the day before. I was struggling when I was at the top, but managed to get withing clipping distance of the anchor at top and was putting the rope in...nope, I fell.
Some falls, you can feel your grip slipping and you are aware that you are about to go right before you do and appropriately prepare yourself, but this fall gave me no indication I was about to fall and I was probably down about three feet before I could even curse myself. It wound up being about a twenty five-foot fall, at least half of the entire climb, since I was so far above the last bolt, and I had a lot of slack out. That was my first lead fall, and I must say I couldnt've asked for a better one. Marissa and Shaun down below seemed more excited about it than I was, and apparently I nearly hit my head on a rock outcrop, but I didn't notice it. Good thing I didn't since life is nice, and especially since last weekend when Shaun and Marissa were climbing with Greg, another climber I met at the Tre-x games and Marissa's roommate, he got dropped almost ten feet and broke a vertebrae. Ouch. If I split my skull open they have foolishly thought they were cursed or something. Greg seems to be doing alright though. He can walk around and has a brace to wear should he have to do more than walk around the apartment. Greg is a super strong climber, and I didn't realized this until we were watching a climbing video at his and Marissa's place and he was in it, and filmed many of the parts he wasn't in. No Permanent Address, maybe you climbers out there have seen it - check out Greg Foot's bouldering part in the Hueco Tank's. Apparently I am associating with some real skill. Anyway, Saturday night was good, I drove back with Shaun and Marissa and the four of us went out for dinner to eat some dweji galbi (not sure on that spelling), which is a delicious variety of pig that you throw on the grill at your table and eat up with the galaxy of side-dishes that Korean food is all about. Next on the agenda was a DVD room - these are places you can go to watch a DVD in a private screening room. Private screening/dark sex den, I suppose I should say. If the idea of getting a dark private room for cheap to "watch a movie" isn't suggestive enough, our room with its massive futon covered in off-colored stains and supplied with Kleenex and even a full bathroom with shower may give you a hint...although I think the bathroom was more for the employees since there were toothbrushes and toothpaste, and a full selection of toiletries living in there. Pretty sketchy, but what the hell. We watched Hot Fuzz. Greg and I had seen it before, but Shaun and Marissa hadn't, and they loved it as they should have, since it is hilarious and great.
Here we see Shaun belaying Marissa on the right side of the photo. On the left we see a Korean climbing the 10b I fell off. For an idea of how far I fell, my feet were above the top of this photo, and I fell to about the third bolt up, about five feet above and slightly right of the Korean guy. Sweet! Maybe twenty-five feet was an exaggeration. Maybe it wasn't. Whatever.
Marissa and Shaun had already been climbing since about 11 and it was about 430. I met them both about two weeks ago in Busan at the Tre-X games. We were all competitors in the sport climbing category, mainly as token foreigners in this international sports competition since we all did quite miserable in the competition itself - but everyone got a free weekend out of it, and officially became international extreme athletes, so we were winners in our own way. Shaun is tall lanky Australian with persistent dark stubble to match his shaved head, and is quite humorously vulgar. Marissa is a North American - Canadian, American? I don't remember, like there is even a difference, sorry to offend any Canadians - and has lived in a tent in Alaska, a shack in Washington, east Africa, and has been in Korea now for a few years. The Tre-X games was a great opportunity to meet a bunch of other English-speaking climbers, some of whom I already knew, some I did not, like Marissa and Shaun. There is a great website called koreaontherocks.com that is a pretty extensive English language resource for climbing in Korea, and it's forums and message boards provide plenty of opportunities to meet other climbers.
I only got a few climbs in each day since I got there later than them both days, thanks to my reliance on public transportation. Which is fine, since I most of my climbing experience is in bouldering, and although its starting to change now that I am sport climbing more, my strength and endurance are pretty low for long routes. Saturday I made a bee line for the top of a 5.10c for my first climb, unleashing a nest of centipedes on the way up as I grabbed an undercling. I was only aware of this as Marissa yelled up, "Way to unleash the centipedes," which I at first took for some sort of metaphorical compliment, but it turns out that she was being quite literal. We had a laugh about that once I got down, and unleashing the centipedes instantly became the euphemism of the weekend, much like doing anything in an Xtreme fashion became en vogue for Shaun and myself during our weekend stint as international extreme, sorry, Xtreme, athletes.
On Sunday, my first climb was leading a 5.10b which gave me a considerably harder time than the 10c, or even an 11a that I climbed the day before. I was struggling when I was at the top, but managed to get withing clipping distance of the anchor at top and was putting the rope in...nope, I fell.
Some falls, you can feel your grip slipping and you are aware that you are about to go right before you do and appropriately prepare yourself, but this fall gave me no indication I was about to fall and I was probably down about three feet before I could even curse myself. It wound up being about a twenty five-foot fall, at least half of the entire climb, since I was so far above the last bolt, and I had a lot of slack out. That was my first lead fall, and I must say I couldnt've asked for a better one. Marissa and Shaun down below seemed more excited about it than I was, and apparently I nearly hit my head on a rock outcrop, but I didn't notice it. Good thing I didn't since life is nice, and especially since last weekend when Shaun and Marissa were climbing with Greg, another climber I met at the Tre-x games and Marissa's roommate, he got dropped almost ten feet and broke a vertebrae. Ouch. If I split my skull open they have foolishly thought they were cursed or something. Greg seems to be doing alright though. He can walk around and has a brace to wear should he have to do more than walk around the apartment. Greg is a super strong climber, and I didn't realized this until we were watching a climbing video at his and Marissa's place and he was in it, and filmed many of the parts he wasn't in. No Permanent Address, maybe you climbers out there have seen it - check out Greg Foot's bouldering part in the Hueco Tank's. Apparently I am associating with some real skill. Anyway, Saturday night was good, I drove back with Shaun and Marissa and the four of us went out for dinner to eat some dweji galbi (not sure on that spelling), which is a delicious variety of pig that you throw on the grill at your table and eat up with the galaxy of side-dishes that Korean food is all about. Next on the agenda was a DVD room - these are places you can go to watch a DVD in a private screening room. Private screening/dark sex den, I suppose I should say. If the idea of getting a dark private room for cheap to "watch a movie" isn't suggestive enough, our room with its massive futon covered in off-colored stains and supplied with Kleenex and even a full bathroom with shower may give you a hint...although I think the bathroom was more for the employees since there were toothbrushes and toothpaste, and a full selection of toiletries living in there. Pretty sketchy, but what the hell. We watched Hot Fuzz. Greg and I had seen it before, but Shaun and Marissa hadn't, and they loved it as they should have, since it is hilarious and great.
Here we see Shaun belaying Marissa on the right side of the photo. On the left we see a Korean climbing the 10b I fell off. For an idea of how far I fell, my feet were above the top of this photo, and I fell to about the third bolt up, about five feet above and slightly right of the Korean guy. Sweet! Maybe twenty-five feet was an exaggeration. Maybe it wasn't. Whatever.
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