Let the Ballot-box Stuffing Begin!

Ten Magazine has a survey asking people to vote for their favorite blogs. I've been nominated. I don't know if the winner wins anything except bragging rights... however, in the absence of the Golden Klogs (they might yet appear... might, if Hub of Sparkle goes back online and I can access it again with my computer), I strongly encourage all my readers to follow the link, and vote for Popular Gusts. I did.

New K-blog: Not Dead Yet

There's a new K-blog on the scene that you should be reading, if you aren't already.

Not Dead Yet, which I hope is an indication of its longevity-to-be, given the way several other Roboseyo featured K-blogs have gone mostly defunct (where are you, Dongchim? We need you!) is a cool new K-blog taking a well-researched analytical look at aspects of Korean culture. From the site itself: "This is a travel blog written by someone who majored in cultural anthropology, and whose idea of fun is wandering through the Sonoran Desert picking thorns out of my naked ass cause I sat on a cactus while trying to soak in the psychedelic desert scenery in front of me…"

In a recent post, NotDeadYet deconstructs the "Korea is 5000 years old" myth, and the effect the ahistorical Dangun origin myth has had on the current Korean study of history.

It's an interesting read, and there's other stuff on the blog worth reading as well, so go check it out. (for example: on "justified suicides" in Korea, and Who's to Blame for Korea's sex industry.)

April's K-Blog Of The Month: Female K-bloggers - Updated

I put out a request for Female K-bloggers over at Roboseyo a little while ago, and got a fantastic response. You see, it was with dismay that I saw the all female metablog "Naked In The Sauna" go defunct, and I really do think that a feminine view is important, and sometimes missing on some of the big K-blogs.

Sometimes, there are questions only a female can answer about Korea (at least without sounding presumptuous), and with that in mind, I am publishing this as a list of female bloggers in Korea: if you want to be on the list, let me know, and if you know someone who deserves to be on the list, or if one of these goes dead or defunct, let me know, too. I plan on linking this source on The Hub of Sparkle's getting-better-but-still-in-progress "Community" page, which I hope will eventually become a pretty good, regularly updated, one-stop "Get the basics in one place" source.

I'll try to put these into general categories, though of course some of these blogs will fit numerous categories, and being nothing more than a mere human myself, I might get a few wrong at first. Please be kind enough to correct me politely.

Roboseyo's K-blog of the Month for March 2009: On My Way to Korea

So there's a dude called Matt Strum, who is

just one American white-guy who loves everything about Korea. . . I’ve never been to Korea, but that just makes me try to learn and understand harder (as Koreans would day, with a heart of passion - 열심).

And he runs this blog called "On My Way To Korea" -- see, he plans to come to Korea, and from here, it seems like he plans to be the most knowledgeable first-year ever to arrive in Korea.

He runs an interesting little blog, where he tries to post every day. The posts are usually short, which makes it easy to peek over and see whats up (unlike certain blogs I love, but don't dare visit unless I have ten minutes free) and Matt's Korean Culture reading list is pretty eclectic: he'll run anything from tips on doing business in Korea, to language mini-lessons or vocab, to whatever movie or music video floated across his radar: it gives the blog a fun "whatever he can get his hands on" feel wherein the song that filled up the Korean radiowaves back in 2002 might show up next to the latest song by Girls' Generation, and sandwiched between a Korean language vocabulary list, an article about negotiating with Koreans, and a brief report on an urban legend making its way through the Korean memeosphere.


Of particular interest is the "Mastering Business in Korea" series, and the studying Korean wiki that he's hosting: you can go sign up yourself, and start posting articles about studying the language.

At this point, Matt's still just using his blog to study and get to know Korea before he arrives; I hope he keeps working on his site, and look forward to seeing what happens to the blog once he arrives.

Go check him out!

Roboseyo's K-blog Of The Month for February '09...before it runs out. Dongchim.

Well, better toss one of these up before the month expires.

I'm going to Andong this weekend, and I'm preparing for that, while slogging through my two hardest workdays of the week (Turds day and Fried day suck for me).

However, I'll drop in a quick recommendation for the K-blog of the month before I go, and I'm pleased that this might actually be a very little-known one.

See, I was thinking about giving it to Eat Your Kimchi, seeing as they took home a handful of Golden Klog Awards...but they already got lots of attention from me earlier this month, during Golden Klog Voting and such. They have a blog, a wildly popular youtube channel (maybe that's where all their votes came from: over 500 subscribers on Youtube), a podcast, and have been putting out some really top-notch stuff.

Instead, I lay before you, someone you probably HAVEN'T heard of, because it's a very new blog (almost too new to even have appeared on the golden Klogs), but has been putting some really funny stuff out: Ladies and Gentlemen, Dongchim

Now, Dongchim, any teacher of children knows, is when a kid (hopefully a kid: grown-ups who give dongchim are best avoided) makes a little two-handed gun shape with their two index fingers, sneaks up behind you, and tries to ram those fingers right up your bung. Like this.


Apparently, Dongchim is an important enough part of Korean culture to make a statue of it.

Yech.


You can play the game here, if you like, but I'm going to make you agree you're a weirdo to do it. "By clicking this link to play the dongchim game, I fully confess and acknowledge that I'm a weirdo. Weirdy weird weirdo."

But Dongchim the blog is more than just a pair of intrusive digits: it's a comedy site that's putting out some clever material so far.

My favorite so far is the report of Buddhists frustrated on their path to enlightenment flocking to Korean convenience chain store "Buy The Way" in order to purchase what they could not find through mediation and renunciation. "Desperate Buddhists Flock to Local Convenience Stores".

The site's only about two months old, so it won't take you long to go through the archives. I, for one, am glad to see new comedy blogs coming out on the K-blogosphere: as great as they are, one can only go through the Yangpa and the other Yangpa and the really old Yangpa's archives so often before wishing for new material. Fortunately Party Pooper still updates.

The other satiric K-blog I like these days is Dokdo Is Ours, but he/she/they have also had enough promotion from the golden Klogs, that it's Dongchim's turn.

Roboseyo's K-Blogs of the Month: November and December

So bein' busy and all, I didn't quite get around to my K-Blogger of the month award for November. My bad.

To make up for it, today I will give you two K-Bloggers worthy of recognition.

The first one is well-known around the K-blogs, but I'd like to take a moment to say something nice about Korea Beat anyway. See, Korea Beat's blog is simple: the layout is simple, the premise is simple, but Korea Beat does something really valuable, by regularly, consistently translating articles from the Korean media into English. Even takes requests.

The article choices range from goofy to noteworthy, celebrity news, stuff relevant to the expat community, examples of horrible journalism, to weird court cases, the occasional (usually bizarre) picture, and serious stuff, and provide a look at Korea, from the horse's mouth. I'm especially fond of the weekly "Most-Read Naver Stories Of The Week" series, where Korea Beat recaps the articles on Naver, Korea's most popular web portal, which received the most hits this week. There isn't a huge amount of pontification (kind of the opposite of mine, where I'm about never current, but always have lots to say about whatever story I'm late to the game on), but I'd have to say Korea Beat is one of the most reliable Korea Blogs out there. Give it a look, if you haven't already.

So, that's November covered.

Next, I'd like to draw your attention to another newcomer.

One nice thing about doing a K-Blogger of the Month series is the same thing that sucks about living as an expat in Korea:

See, there are so many comings and goings that even if you DO know where it's at for a while, people are constantly going home, showing up, losing interest, and such, so that keeping your bearings on where your friends are at here, and staying on top of K-Blogs is a bit like doing a foxtrot on the deck of a sailboat on choppy seas. My second year in Korea was the hardest for this personally, because all my first-year friendships, which I approached the same way I approached friendships back home (on the assumption they'd be around for a while) moved on to wherever else, faded away, lost touch, you know. For building lasting friendships, this sucks. However, for finding new blogs doing interesting stuff that deserve a look, it's great. It's also a bit of hope for bloggers plugging away in obscurity: other than the very few of us who are here for the long haul, eventually, several, many, maybe most of the blogs that currently get more hits than yours, will repatriate or move on, so all you have to so is stick around, keep making worthwhile stuff, and eventually you'll make it on the list. Sure, you're not gonna pass some of the ones who started ages ago, who have been in Korea, and possibly writing about Korea, since the days when people had to know how to write HTML code to have a blog, but other than them, you'll get there.

That said, a blog I like these days is OK Korea. It's a very new blog, only posting since October, with a really nice look and layout. OK Korea posts a lot of photos, and slice of life video clips, with a very "Hey! Look what I saw!" kind of feel. OK Korea isn't (as far as I know) a professional photographer or anything, but does know where to point the camera to get a look at Korea's fun wrinkles and quirks, without feeling the need to add the kind of "Koreans are weird" commentary that some bloggers throw in there whenever they show something different from How Things Are Back Home.  So once again, go give OK Korea a look; won't take you long to read the posts, because they're not text-heavy, so have some fun and add it to your RSS feed.

Now it's late and I'm sleepy.

Have a good one, all.

-rob

By the way: if you want to be a Roboseyo K-Blog of the month, send me an e-mail with your link, and three reasons why I should feature you, in less than a hundred words.  What do you bring to the table?  That failing, I regularly graze at the Korean Blog List and add a few newcomers to my RSS feeds, so get your name on there, and if you catch my eye, you'll be a candidate.  From there: write a good blog.  It's that easy, really.

Roboseyo's K-Blog Of The Month: Kimchi IceCream

(crossposted at Hub Of Sparkle)

Yeah, I know you were all expecting me to tap The Hub of Sparkle for this month's blog of the month. . . and I probably would have, 'cept for this.

Kimchi Icecream just popped onto my radar with a drop-dead hilarious account of everything that could possibly go wrong at a Korean hospital's allegedly International Clinic. The post title gives a hint at what happens in the story: The Nurse Who Could Speak English (emphasis mine), but oh, dear readers, the dearth of English speaking nurses at the International clinic is just the beginning of the story, and his account of the "Oh shit! A foreigner! I'm terrified of using English!" face (a face I have seen all too many times myself), among other things, is hilarious, too.

It's a blog by a cat named "Jason," who according to the bio, has lived in Korea since 2005. His writing shows that he HAS paid his dues, but he doesn't get into the kinds of prescriptive or sweepingly generalized bullwinkle certain other K-bloggers do (cough cough). He peppers his posts with photos of characters from The Muppets, the Simpsons, and such, as a funnier way of adding emphasis than exclamation points and smileys. :)

(source)

He also uses humor to approach certain topics that other expats would use as an excuse to gripe (see his post on "the foreigner/chopsticks conversation" here).

He also likes putting up a. lot. of. pictures., of various places around Korea, which is fun, and from time to time (for example, check out the Jogye Temple series on this post) he reels off a little stretch of really lovely photography. And let's be honest: a blogger who throws a whole ton of photos at y'all is a lot more fun than a blogger who throws reams and reams of uninterrupted text out there.

Good job, Jason. Hope so see more of you around the K-blogs.

--Roboseyo

(hold everything!  

Update: Brian just reminded me that this was the same Jason who left a very kind and encouraging comment on Otto (of I, Foreigner)'s discouraged English teacher post.  

OK.  Let the inaguration continue.)

Joe Mondello Shows us How Its Done: K-Blogger of The Month for September

I've been thinking about doing this for a while, but this post finally pushed me over the edge.

Remember back in April, I tagged Brian from Jeollanam-Do my April Blogger Of The Month for his stuff about the Coreana Nazi ads, which eventually got the attention of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and coverage on international news outlets.

Well, I've been thinking about featuring a kind of K-Blogger of the month every month, and doing a brief write-up about one of the Korea Bloggers on my blogroll (see sidebar). Today, Joe's latest post, has finally prompted me to do it.

Without further ado, to give credit where it is due, here is September's K-Blogger Of The Month.

Joe Mondello has been in Korea a way long time, and speaks Korean really well, as well as playing a respectable mandolin.


Joe is one of the expats who has lived in Korea for a long time, and still manages, on his blog, to try to walk a mile in Korean shoes, tries to offer up the benefit of the doubt wherever he can. You can see in his writing that he certainly does have things he likes and dislikes about Korea, but those things do not seem to cause him to lapse into bitterness or unabashed judgementalness. Meanwhile, he has a wry sense of humour that takes a while to spot, but that is consistently refreshing and occasionally hilarious, once you know when he is talking out the side of his mouth. (Writing out the side of his keyboard?)

He is very perceptive, and subtle, and prefers to tell stories (he calls them slices of life) over making proclamations. I think this is a very good approach to living in a different culture. I respect him a lot for it.

Anyway, Joe also has decided that, when he sees Koreans acting like "ugly Koreans" (you know what I mean) rather than confronting and pushing about, he will shame them into remorse for their inexcusable behaviour with his own class and politeness. Taking the high road like this, when one is being constantly watched anyway, the way we paleskin bignoses are, is probably the best way to go anyway. That we could all do the same.

Well, here is an anecdote Joe shared about being a good guy in the face of all the peer pressure to litter and spit in the street, and buddy, I admire the heck out of him for reacting to this situation with so much grace, given that he has probably spotted this exact situation five hundred times. Here. Read his story.

Here's to you, Joe. Well done, sir: I raise my glass to you and your "good foreigner" directive. May we all be as generous and gracious on our bad days as well as our good.