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.

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.

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.