This is where I rang in the new year.

from a professional.
my own pictures.




It was fun. If you see a clown in a bright orange hat in these videos, it's me. 11 auspicious people rang the bell in Boshingak gate 33 times to ring in the new year. It was great being part of the ridonkulous crowd.



The white buses you see are full of riot police. You know, just in case.



Technically, you weren't allowed to sell or shoot fireworks, because people were injured last year (alcohol and explosives don't mix, friends. Don't try this at home.) But I guess the riot police decided it wasn't worth getting out the truncheons to stop people from shooting them in the air.

Either that, or they were busy sipping instant coffee in paper cups, 'cos it was FRIGGIN COLD!






I don't know if you can read the English on this can, but the prose always gave me a kick. I was so disappointed when they redesigned the can without silly words on it.
Even nice places have Konglish on the menus.
The lips stuff again. Not many teeth there.



Painting stripes on the road.
Poorly.


Happy new year and stuff.

Merry Christmas, all! A little more about Christmas in Korea

A few more thoughts on Christmas in Korea, interspersed with pictures I took downtown on Sunday afternoon and night. Plus a mini-story or two at the end.

A few basic rules of forfeiture, AKA the Having vs. Eating Cake corollaries:

1. If you don't vote, you forfeit your right to complain about the government in power. If you won't even participate in the system, where do you get off complaining about it? I'm not listening. (Hee hee. I'm such a cranky old codger.)

(what's wrong with this picture? absolutely nothing, in Korea. You get used to old ladies mopping around you as you do your business in men's rooms all around South Korea. Took a while, though.)


2. If you wear a low-cut v-neck blouse with a push-up bra, or a short skirt with mid-thigh-high stockings and high heels, you forfeit your right to complain about men staring at you. You know what men are like, and while I'm not excusing our male piggishness, it's a little naive to expect more from us.

3. If you're a country with the 13th largest economy in the world, a world leader in broadband penetration and telecommunication connectivity, and the world's largest microchip exporter, you forfeit the right to say, "don't critique our social issues: we're still a developing country."

Christmas in downtown seoul is shiny. There's an ice rink behind the castle wall.


4. If you don't dress properly for the cold, if you don't zip up your jacket and keep your ears warm and wear some gloves, you forfeit your right to complain that it's cold. You may say "I should have dressed more appropriately for the cold, that was bad planning on my part" and that's all. Or I will take it as tacit permission for me to mock your illogical position.

Yet everywhere I go in Korea, I see girls dressed in spring jackets with short skirts and thick stockings, no hats or gloves, and jackets that aren't even zipped up, stamping their feet and making pitiful puppy-dog faces and complaining "I'm so cold" in Korean: "Chu-aa~".

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, one must take care of basic needs (food, sleep) before one can worry about higher level needs (acceptance by the community, belonging, love, meaning) -- nobody ponders "what ARE my life goals?" when they're hungry; they mostly only ponder, "where can I scratch up some grub?" AFTER you've eaten, you might have time to wonder about the Grand Scheme.

According to Roboseyo's hierarchy of fashion, you only really ought to worry about style once your clothing has adequately protected you from the elements. If you put fashion above function, you won't get ANY sympathy from me when you complain about being cold or wet. Yet there's this disconnect between two, two, and four, here in Korea: as the winter's gotten colder, I'm told that short-shorts and miniskirt sales have actually gone UP! Some of the results are shocking.

I'd say we're looking at somewhere between 35-45% of the fashion-conscious-aged women at the mall on Sunday wearing springwear (at best) in the winter.

I mean, come on! How could that POSSIBLY keep her warm unless she has an emergency thermal blanket tucked into that bag? And it wasn't THAT warm on Sunday -- five celsius in the afternoon, tops.


The receptionists at my school got a kick out of my imitation of Korean girls who leave their jackets unzipped and then complain about being cold. One said, "Robert. Fashion is important." I answered, "Spring, summer, fall, fashion is important. Winter: WARM is important. Fashion is second." They got a good laugh out of it, but I doubt they're convinced.

(Cheonggye stream in downtown seoul puts up christmas lights every year. The poor-quality camera almost makes the light fixtures MORE impressive, because it looks like one big roman candle, instead of structures strung with lights.)


I'm developing a theory that the fashionistas and style-makers are using ridiculous styles like miniskirts in winter basically as a way of flaunting their power over the poor fashion slaves who feel compelled to follow trends. In 2001, every time Avril Lavigne saw some poor teeny-bop fashion victim wearing a tie over a tank-top, she probably secretly high-fived herself and thought, "YEAH! I'm awesome! She's wearing that awful getup because of ME! Poor chump!"



I imagine those contrarian stylemakers like the Wicked Witch of the West, staring at Dorothy's image in the crystal ball, laughing maniacally and cackling, "Shiver, my pretty! Shiver! Mwahahahahahaaaa!" We'll know for sure it's nothing but a power trip of theirs if they make heavy wool sweaters or scarves the stylish thing to wear next July, just as a final "Eff You" to their poor fashion slaves, rubbing in the skirts in winter trend by refusing those poor ladies a single season of clothing comfort. That's my prediction. Put it on the books. See if I'm wrong. I probably will be, but windbags like myself like to speculate. Fills up the hours.



What the heck? I don't know. This inflatable whatonearth was in the window of an art gallery in Insa-dong, the culture/tourist heritage area. Lots of galleries, and this one ALWAYS has something weird in the window.


On the Christmas Music front:

Dire news: it happened. It ACTUALLY happened. I was sitting in an ice cream shop eating a sorbet, and after a shabby Korean cover of Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" (why why why do they love Mariah so much here?), that asinine song you've heard me complain about here before, came on:

"Last Christmas, I gave you my heart. . . "

FOUR TIMES IN A ROW! The George Michael version, then the Bi version (Korean star) then a techno/discopop + children's choir mix, and finally it was the first song (and its chord progression was the foundation) in a medley of, seriously, FOUR of the ten tackiest Christmas songs in existence. I actually stayed in the ice cream shop after I finished my ice cream, in utter disbelief, as one slowing his car down to gawk at the car wreck and see if that's blood or oil, just daring that damn medley to top itself and actually get worse, and each new song in the medley WAS! From "Last Christmas," it went to "Happy Christmas, War Is Over" to "Do They Know It's Christmas" to "Feliz Nevidad" and then I really did have to go, before I felt the urge to injure myself with a plastic ice cream spoon. I'm disappointed to tell you that I was wrong: every Starbucks in Korea DIDN'T spontaneously implode in response to that awful lineup. Good thing, too. The Peppermint Mochas this December are quite nice.

I like blue lights best.


This is cute: the Korean language doesn't have a character for the "V" sound, so the "V" sound is usually substituted with the Korean character bieup, which sounds about halfway between a "B" and a "P". This leads to the cute pun on this brand: Viewty, when pronounced by most Koreans, sounds exactly like the word "Beauty".





As always, the station was attended by some Viewtiful girls in short skirts, but I've ranted enough about the latent (and totally accepted) sexism in Korea for one post (it seems protesting would be immodest I guess -- I asked Girlfriendoseyo about the state of feminism in Korea and she described what English speakers call lip-service).


(But did you know the OECD released statistics stating that Korean women work more hours for less pay than any other country in the OECD, and unlike in the Netherlands, where college educated women have a 20% higher employment rate than women without, Korean college educated women's employment rate is actually 2% LOWER than women without! I'll leave the comment board open for theories as to why that might be.)

Back to light stuff:

Santa and Rudolph's freaky love-child.



Sometimes, the lack of a "V" is a little funnier: one day, my best friend Matt was walking through a riverside park and came upon an outdoor concert of five hundred middle-aged women. When the performer finished a song, they chanted, "ANCHOR!" (which is how Koreans call for an encore) and the singer shouted, "PAPSONG!" (popsong). The singer started singing, and the old ladies sang along. Problem was, because of the V-B/P substitution, as they sang along to the old '80s song, the end result was 500 middle-aged women jumping up and down with their hands in the air, not able to pronounce "I'm your Venus," and hollering "I'm Your Penis" instead.


Lee Hyori is one of the hottest Korean stars these days (has been for a while.) For all the fanboys, here's a new way to get close to her (if you don't mind endorsing soju at the same time).


More lip/smile/teeth related stuff:
Hyori again (from above) -- showing surprisingly few teeth for a photo spread.


Ad for lip gloss.

There are creepy santa statues everywhere. Some are lifesize enough that they startle me as I walk around, making me go, "Bwah! Somebody's standing there! Oh wait. Nevermind."


On Friday, my face froze this way. I guess that'll be it for the rest of my life. Better hold on to the friends I already have.


This is my favourite picture from the city hall pictures. You're not supposed to climb up inside the rainbow seashell monument, but the security personnel were too busy, I guess, stopping people from leaning on bridge railings (see story below). I'm really proud of the composition and the light/dark contrast of this picture: this is about as good a picture as you can get on the cruddy cameraphone I have. This, or the layered coloured leaves picture from my Kyunghee university post.


EVERYBODY had a camera -- it was like nametags at a convention. I was afraid that if I put my cameraphone in my pocket, somebody'd ask me to show it to them or they'd have to escort me off the premises.


Every direction you moved, you were walking through somebody's picture.



At COEX mall, there are 3-D movie posters where you can interact with the movie ad, and take pictures in it, or sit in the chair, or stand behind Hannibal Lecter's mask so that it looks like YOU're the one in restraints. Cool, especially for a shutterbug-mad population like downtown Korea's.


I was gonna play a game of count the cameras, walking around on Sunday night, but I ran out of fingers and toes in five seconds.


My second favourite picture from right at the head of Cheonggye stream.


Mini-story 1: my girlfriend is funny.

We were walking across one of the bridges over Cheonggye stream (pictured above) and we leaned against the bridge. Some dude came up to tell us we couldn't lean on the bridge for safety, but he told us in Korean. Girlfriendoseyo (normally a very sweet not-making-waves type of person) decided she wanted to lean, dammit! So she turned to the Korean safety guy and said to him, "Whaaaat?" EXACTLY the way some Californian tourist might say it. He repeated himself in Korean and (emboldened by being with me, clearly an outsider, and thus able to get away with pretending to be a tourist,) she kept going, "I'm sorry. What's wrong? What is it? Why?" she asked as he stammered, "No lean. Umm. . . sorry. . . no. . . lean. . . safe. . . lean no!" she said, with a perfect, vacant intonation, "Why noOOoooot?" and, completely out of English words, the poor guy made a funny half-smile and said, "Secret".

We howled. . . as soon as we were out of earshot from the guy.

Christmas is more fun if you're with kids. . . or at least in a public place where you get to watch them.
Mini-story 2: my most unexpected smile this Christmas day (I had all the expected ones from spending it with Girlfriendoseyo [we cooked spaghetti together], but this one was the bonus.)

I was walking around with Girlfriendoseyo outside Sookmyung Women's University, and she asked me to carry the bag of stuff she bought from the stationery store. I pretended it was so heavy I couldn't walk in a straight line (it was a very light bag), and got some grins from a group of people walking by. True to Roboseyo form, I hammed it up a bit more once I had a reaction, and so I curled around and started hobbling in a circle, as if I couldn't walk in a straight line at all. The people who'd smiled at me before were gone, walking away with their backs to me, so I thought I was doing it solely for Girlfriendoseyo's benefit, but suddenly I heard this rattle-rasp and wheezy laugh of this wonderful old woman with a raisin-wrinked twenty-five-years-in-the-rice-paddy face, just hooting with laughter at my silliness, swinging her hand to slap the table where she sat, and rollicking side to side with her eyes grinned right shut.

I'm still smiling about that old lady: I love old people. They don't give a flying rat's ass who sees them laugh at the things they like anymore: they're old, they've paid their dues. They don't bother doing a "modest" twitter behind a shielding hand, either. If they think something's funny, they let it rip, and I love that. Old people who don't care anymore, and little kids, who don't care yet are far and away the most fun for people-watching.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I love you all a lot, and I hope your holidays are full of revelations and observations and crammed with tiny details of joy.

Grasping and veering: the moment

The moment

so here's the thing.

In the effort of giving one's all, of being actually In The Moment, appreciating The Here And Now, there are pitfalls.

I've recently had trouble with the old cliche that you ought to live each day as if it were your last, because that's a non-viable lifestyle. If I woke up this morning and Gabrielle the messenger angel visited me in the shower and told me that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I'd be dead by midnight that day, I'd make a certain set of choices:

What would you do?

I'd find a way to be with as many of the ones I love as possible; I'd eat the best food I knew; I'd write a letter or phone the people I could not have around me; if I were in Korea, I might try to cheat time by flying to Vancouver, crossing the international date line, and stealing an extra sixteen or seventeen hours. I'd do my damndest to die happy, whatever that means.

The thing is, I can't live each day as if it were my last. That's a pretty manic kind of day, jettisoning all responsibilities, etc.. I'd get fired after two days of living each day as if it were my last. You see the problem.

That silly old adage, I suppose, is actually intended to encourage people to live without fear, and maybe also, to live with an integrity such that, if one DID die suddenly, one could stand before God and say one has no regrets, if nothing else.

One part of that, I think, is living in the moment: being mindful of the world around, of the wonders visible all around creation, to be fully Present for the experience of being alive. That requires its own kind of courage -- to know, and then live according to, one's priorities, rather than other's perceptions, measurements, or expectations, is important to actually finding joy.

I think there are many ways we get trapped out of really Being Present, but recently I've been thinking about two in particular: veering and grasping.

I said to Girlfriendoseyo once, "There are some things that can't be fully experienced if you hesitate." This is especially true of relationships, I think. If my default approach is caution, if I'm hedging my bets before I know anything, I might shut myself off from something real, because I wanted to stay safe. My old roommate Anthony taught me the word velleity -- it means "the lowest level of motivation" -- that vague hankering one never gets around to acting upon. "I should work out more." "It was a long time ago, but I ought to apologize, really." Often the old objection, "sounds too much like work" prevents us from really investing and getting passionate about something. Sometimes, we're just afraid of what it might demand of us if we really pour ourselves into something.

A sports writer I like (Bill Simmons) discussed this in a column once as it applies to sports: some athletes DON'T prepare the best they can for their sport, so that they have an excuse ready if they fail -- if Quarterback A loses the big game, he thinks "I'll work out this off-season, instead of just drinking beer and driving my motorcycle" -- his excuse is ready-made because of his own lack of effort. He let himself down, but he can boast that "I could have won the game if I wanted". If Quarterback B loses the big game, he has nothing to fall back on -- "I trained and prepared, brought myself to the absolute peak of my ability physically and mentally. . . and I STILL failed." That's a much lonelier failure, because there's nowhere to hide. Some people do the same with relationships -- "I've been hurt before, so I'll hold back on this new one, so that I'm limiting how much she could hurt me, if it doesn't work out" -- but holding onto that old baggage might keep me from reaching the peak of the mountain! Maybe the loss hurts more if one's fully invested, but I'd much rather have a "gave it my best and it didn't work out" in my past than a "woulda coulda shoulda" -- I think the regret of woulda coulda shoulda's linger longer.

On the other hand, I realized another way people shut themselves out of truly experiencing a moment last Saturday: Girlfriendoseyo and I walked out to the middle of Mapo bridge on the Han River in Seoul, because over by 63 Building (the tallest building in Korea), there was a fireworks festival. I opened my eyes wide and watched, taking in as much as I could, from the delay between flash and boom, because of the distance, to the jostling of crowds, to the whistling of traffic conductors keeping people off the lanes still open to traffic. A large (huge) number of others, instead of watching the fireworks, held their cameras up in the air, pointed them at the fireworks, clicked, and checked in the display screen for what they had. Instead of enjoying the moment, they removed themselves a step from the actual experience, by filtering it through a camera. Taking a picture of something as ephemeral as fireworks strikes me as completely defeating the purpose of going to a fireworks show, unless you're a pyrotechnician yourself, collecting data on your rivals.

They may as well have stayed home and watched them on TV, or downloaded clips of fireworks displays from the internet! Why go in person if you're not going to BE there? (Yes, that's Be with a capital B.) Some moments are like water -- they're meant to run through your fingers and be gone, and if you catch water in a bowl, it loses a lot of the beauty it had when it was in motion, jumping over rocks and scattering light in every direction.

Camera culture is strange to me -- cameras only catch one of the five senses, and give no sense of story, and to me, if it's not a story, it's not a memory. My best memories from Malaysia are tastes, running jokes, textures of food or sand, sounds and voices. Ditto for my trips to Japan. You can't take a picture of washing all that sand down the shower drain after spending a day at the beach; you could, but it wouldn't show that little bit of sand that ALWAYS goes in the wrong direction. Even the dancers I saw in Osaka, if I took a picture of them, would have lost the excitement and motion that imprinted them on my memory. Cameras can't catch any of that, so I always feel that pictures are terribly inadequate keepsakes of a place, unless they bring about the memory of a story.

The main thing is just this: a camera removes me from the Here And Now by one step -- I'm now seeing the world through a viewfinder instead of through my eyes -- and looking at the picture is poorer again than the viewfinder display. Even more, the taking of a picture is an attempt to make permanent moments that are often best appreciated for their very fleeting nature, and stepping back from those times of spontaneous fun often kills the spirit of fun anyway.

I feel like I cheat myself out of truly experiencing life if I hesitate and guard myself, and I also limit myself by trying to keep moments that are meant to pass by. (Veering away, or grasping too tight.) Some rare pictures catch something more than just the images -- an expression, a sense of love between two people, or a sense of fun, and some people are really good at catching that (I'm thinking of my brother-in-law's pictures from my father's wedding), but for me, I'd rather open my eyes as wide as possible, turn on my senses, and experience things, as fully as I can.

And later, I can write about it.

One nice thing about cameras, and their attempt to catch things (though it removes me a little from my Here And Now) is that, though it doesn't bring back the smells and sounds for me, it DOES allow me to share my life with people who couldn't be there with me.

(Irony alert)

Here are some pictures I took from a Eulalia festival in Seoul, in Sky Park near World Cup Stadium in Seoul, where I went with Girlfriendoseyo, complained about people who hide from reality behind cameras, and then took about a dozen pictures, hypocrite that I am.

But I did it for YOU, my wonderful readers. I hope you like them.


They look like wheat, but they're about six feet tall.



The reason there's a whole park full of them is because when the sun is low in the sky, they blaze with pure white, catching the sunlight like a spider-web.



In full blossom, from close up.

I have no idea of the purpose of these plants, but they're sure pretty.


In the low sun:


They looked much nicer in person (back to that old "why bother to capture it" thing)

The one drawback: you can never quite pretend you're in the countryside when there are so many people,

when there are mounted lights (for the open-air concert to start later, and to light up the plants in the evening)


And when speakers ALL through the park are playing the Korean pop-song equivalent to Roy Orbison.

Curses!

I have mentioned before in this space how I have no luck with cameras.

I always either lose them, forget them at home, or forget that I have them, and so fail to take any pictures. Any way you slice it, the end result is that I finish my trips with few or no pictures. It always seems to go the same way. The pictures in the posts below were all taken with my cellphone camera, which I had to turn on and wait forty-seconds before I could use it, so many of the prettiest views I had in the road never got photographed, because they were gone before I could take a picture.

Here are the pictures I wish I could show you.

___ the mountain ranges that kept seeming to turn up exactly at the spots in the rockies where there was a passing lane, so that I was always so concerned with passing or being passed, and navigating corners safely, that I never got around to taking pictures of any of the snow-capped mountains footed by mirror-still lakes.

___ Highway 22 Northbound from CrowsNest Pass, Southern Alberta. If you ever get a chance to drive around in Alberta, you need to just get on Highway 22 and drive as much of it as you can. It runs parallel to Highway 2 (or Queen Elizabeth Way 2), the main corridor from Lethbridge to Calgary, Red Deer, and Edmonton; however, instead of having towns and gas stations all along its roadsides, it has huge foothills covered with yellow grass and cattle ranches, fences enclosing giant acreages, and the occasional deeply rutted river valley, steep-banked, and widened by floods.

___ The shores of Long Beach, Vancouver Island. The vegetation here slopes up like the front of a race car, razed down to that shape by terrifying winds and storm weather that washes entire trees ashore during the winter. Climbing on those logs was like being a little kid again, and watching the giant waves crash in (best surfing in Canada on Long Beach), then seeing what those waves did during the winter (huge piles of tree-trunk-sized driftwood right up next to the forest) was humbling and elevating at the same time.

___ The picture I'm glad I CAN'T show you: Banff downtown (previously one of the prettiest, cutest main strips in any town), all under construction as they expand it to fit Banff's growing tourist industry (sigh. so sad)

Imagine taking a highway exit expecting, looking forward to this:


And instead getting this.


Quite a let-down, unless you happen to have a fetish for heavy machinery. (Which I, categorically, do NOT).

___ I wish I could show you pictures of my friends. Especially Mel and her two wonderful little boys (you can click on the link to her blog on the side of this page and see that), and pictures of Tamie and me in Lynn Canyon, and me and Anila and Antaya watching TV together, as cozy as kittens.

Here's a picture that almost perfectly recreates my first experience in Agassiz since October 2005.





Along with my camera curse, I have a sunglasses curse.

Every time I travel, I lose a pair of sunglasses. The trip where I danced with some crazy old ladies was the first trip that started this trend (I'd finally shelled out for a pair of shades I quite liked, and they broke. Shouldn't have sat on them, I guess), then I bought another pair in Japan, only to lose them in Malaysia. I bought another pair (with playboy bunnies on them) in Malaysia (you can see them here) but one of the tiny little nuts holding the glasses part onto the frame came off, so you know it's only a matter of time for them. Well, at a random gas station with my kid sister Antaya, I saw a pair that I quite liked, bought them, and used them all through the sixty-plus hours of driving I did in July, but then, on my last day of driving, I think I took them off to use an ATM machine, or to put Irish Cream syrup in the gas station coffee (didn't help the coffee, either) and forgot to pick them back up again (the same way I lost the camera I got with my university graduation present money, except that time I was climbing a mountain, and changing out of sweat-soaked clothes). So I'm back to my usual cursed, sunglasses-free self, thinking about just wearing a hat all August, rather than getting heat exhaustion from the criminally hot sun all month long, and needing nine hours of sleep a night.

My usual policy with things I keep losing, breaking, or otherwise seeming to have bad luck with, is just to give up. I will no longer buy expensive cameras or sunglasses, because I'm just throwing my money away. Of course, there are some of those kinds of battles I WILL continue to fight -- for example, I will continue zipping up any slippery flies on any cursed pairs of pants I may one day own, but I certainly won't get myself frustrated buying cameras and sunglasses, when they just get lost, and I prefer journals and hats anyway.

sw