Nanoomi Party... Rocked!

So on Saturday night, I got in trouble with my wife.

I stayed out way late, and didn't have the consideration to call her and let her know where I'd be, or what I was doing.

Poor form, Roboseyo.  I cooked her pancakes the next day, and we biked around Samchungdong on our new bikes (more about that later) and things are all cool now...



But the party I was at...

oooh boy.

So Nanoomi.net is a website called a "bridge blog" - a blog attempting to bridge the cultural gap between the English language and Korean language bloggers in Korea.  They're affiliated with Tatter & Media, a group that syndicates a lot of power bloggers in Korea, and helps them connect with the kinds of promotional materials companies like to offer to bloggers, now that they've figured out that blogs have influence.  So if Samsung is looking for a super sexy, curly-haired blogger who likes dumb youtube clips, in order to give him a really sweet digital video camera, they'd be able to say "Oh. You should call Roboseyo, and give your free stuff to him!"

I contribute to the Nanoomi.net meta-blog, which is a kind of a who's who of the K-bloggers you've been reading on my sidebar.  I think it's a great, and actually a very important project: anything that's on its way to building understanding across the expat cultural divide is worth it in my book.  Once the blog is going strong, group translation will be the next step.  Awesome.  You can read about the party here, at Lee's Korea Blog (one of the people I met for the first time: looks way different than I expected), the first blogger on my sidebar to write about it so far (though it was mentioned by one of the co-posters at The Marmot's Hole: Mr. K himself attended as well).

Check out a write-up of the event, with tons of great pictures, at "my jimin story"

Now, it's a funny thing when bloggers get together: we go around the circle:

"I'm Rob.  I'm Matt.  I'm Mike.  I'm Anna.  I'm Simon and this is my wife Martina." and so forth.  And everybody nods politely, with slightly glazed eyes.  Then we go around the circle again:

"Roboseyo.  Popular Gusts.  Metropolitician.  Indieful ROK.  Eat Your Kimchi," and everybody goes "aaaAAAAAaaaaahhh!" and the party's on.

Who was there?
ooh boy... the ones I saw were...
and those are just the ones I spoke to/recognized.  Many of them, I met for the first time.

The author of the book "secret diet"
Indieful ROK
Seoul SubUrban
Mental Poo
The Marmot (and Robert Neff, one of his co-posters)
Lee's Korea Blog
Seoul Eats
Gusts of Popular Opinion
Fatman Seoul
KT Lit (Korean Literature in Translation)
Zenkimchi
Metropolitician
Eat Your Kimchi
Paul Ajosshi (who performed magic tricks for some bloggers' kids who came)
ArtPoli

... and if I missed you, pipe up in the comments!
sorry Stafford.

I liked most of them quite a bit.

And of course, there was trouble... started by yours truly.


Did you know my first Korean nickname was "troublemaker"?

It's true.

There were a few I wish had been there, and you know, I had to put up with my nemesis, Dan Gray, from Seoul Eats.  We even traded insults for a while.  Then we settled down and chatted: had an illuminating conversation.  Did you know his nose looks that way because of an inherited family genetic defect?  It's true.  I'm not just making that up right now.  He's also the only person in his extended family who snores at a volume below 60 decibels (55 decibels) because of this time when he was 23 and a little girl beat him up by punching him in the nose.  All true facts.  Serious.

So check out Nanoomi.net.  It's got an interesting thing going, it's building momentum, and I think it's going to keep getting better.