Climbed Dobong Monain. Killed My Legs.

Turns out Dobong Mountain is a steep bastard of a mountain to climb. I was out of practice, so it took days before I could do things like stairs again.

But once you get to the top it's crunking beautiful.

Here's a panorama I took last wednesday. Click on the image for a full-size picture.

Chuseok...the Two Best Things To Do in Seoul

In case you doubted my word about Spam for Chuseok before, here's an oldy but goldy blog post about it: yeah.

And in case you didn't have any Chuseok plans yet, and because you're hooped for getting out of town now, in case you're stuck in seoul, because tickets have been sold out for about seven weeks already, as another expat whose gotten stuck in Seoul before on Chuseok, when you can't be sure ANYTHING will be open, let me give you some tips about the best things to do on Chuseok:

1. Go to Namsangeol Folk Village.  This is the Folk Village right near Korea House, right near Chungmuro Station, right near the bottom of Namsan (Nam Mountain) right near downtown Seoul.  Every chuseok they have tons of stuff to see - performances on the stage, activities like making songpyeon or your own paper-mache hanbok doll, and the like.  There's lots to do, and a lot of demonstrations of traditional Korean arts.  The park isn't too big, and the stage area has a lot of seating, but it might help to reserve a seat: a few times I've gone and had standing room only.

2. Climb mountains.  Particularly the busy ones.

One of the genius things about Seoul, that's never promoted in the Hi Seoul promotional materials (stupidly) is that there are about twenty great mountain hikes, ranging from "I could do this with my step-mother" to "better bring your climbing gear" in difficulty, all within reach by the Seoul Subway and Bus System.  Public transportation still runs on Chuseok, as do the odd taxi, so you can definitely get there, and they're mountain trails: it's hard to close those, isn't it?

Head up to the north end of the #4 Subway line, choose a peak, and strike out for it, get up to Uijeongbu and do likewise; check out this list of mountains in Seoul, or this one, or this one.  Or do Bukhansan, which holds the guinness world record for busiest mountain, meaning it's the one mountain in the world where climbing it will stress you out, or the one mountain you SHOULD climb if you like being around crowds.  Yes.  It's the COEX of Mountains.  But on Chuseok, there will be fewer people up there than any other day, because most folks are with their families.  So take the chance... and September to October are PERFECT climbing weather in Korea.  And Koreans are seriously NEVER more pleasant than when they're on the mountain - it's one of the sweetest aspects to the culture you'll ever find.

Also:

They're gorgeous.

Inwang Mountain and JjimDalk: Awesome Day

Given such fantastic weather, Girlfriendoseyo, Mom-in-law-oseyo, and I climbed Inwang-san, or Inwang Mountain, this Saturday.

The mountain was in fine form, with cherry blossoms and magnolias still in bloom.

The tree cover had pink peeking through.

The air was clear enough to see from Inwang Mountain, all the way to the 63 Building on Yeouido.

Girlfriendoseyo playing with her dog.  Cherry blossoms through the opening in the wood grove.

Mother-in-law-oseyo loves the mountain.

After a good climb on the mountain, we had a special treat in store: Andong JjimDalk.  Andong JjimDalk is so good, that it's just not worth eating it anywhere except in Andong... but Girlfriendoseyo heard that some of the JjimDalk restaurants in Andong will actually deliver their recipes to you in Seoul, if you order them a few days ahead of time.  Girlfriendoseyo did exactly that.  We'd been planning a jjimdalk party sometime, but before we ordered it to eat with a bunch of friends, we wanted to try it, and make sure it was the same stuff on deliveray, as it was in Andong.  After climbing the mountain, Mother-In-Law-oseyo warmed up the recipe that had been delivered, and readers... it was almost as good as making the trip to Andong.


A bit closer:

And this, readers, is a picture of a full, and happy Roboseyo.

Bravo my life!

And then, on the way home, I saw something amazing: on the subway, this old lady got on the subway, and fell into the most amazing kimchi squat I've ever seen. She curled into a tiny ball on her heels, fell just about asleep, and no matter which way the train pitched, rolled, accelerated, and decelerated, she stayed put. I've never seen a kimchi squat so stable. People were getting on and off near her, and bumping her, and she was unperturbed. Impressive.

Blogoseyo: Mountain Climbing Edition

Kimchi and Cornbread gives us a great list of Korea's mountains and national parks.

Trip to Damyang with Girlfriendoseyo

Well, I was going to exercise the full extent of my researching and sleuthing skills (step aside, Popular Gusts: there's a new kid in town), and google "Korean Ghost Stories" and then post the first four hits for a spine-tingling halloween post. . . but Brian and FatmanSeoul beat me to the punch. (I'll link to the first stages of my research, though, so you can get a feeling for the kind of terror I would have laid at your shivering feet. . . were I so inclined.)

So instead, here's a slide show and some great pictures of the gorgeous little town of Damyang in Jeolla Province, where I travelled last weekend with Girlfriendoseyo.

It's a pretty town, with a gorgeous (but crowded on Saturdays in Autumn) Bamboo Forest, and a riverside park right next to the forest. Perfect place to rent a bike. The food was fantastic (it being Jeollado) and as Brian mentioned in a facebook message: it's kind of a travesty that there isn't a Korea food blogger living in Jeolla-do and exploring the local specialties down there. (However, whenever Tourism Jeolla offers me a six figure salary (in Euros, thanks), I'm their man!)

At night, we walked back into the forest, now empty, with green lights planted all along the paths, creating ghostly, lovely shadows between the bamboo stalks. And it was silent. Almost dead silent. I haven't heard true silence (other than "I've stuffed my head under five pillows" silence) in Seoul just about. . . ever . . . so being able to actually not hear anything was a bit shocking, and glorious.

Great place. Wonderful. Can't wait to go back.

That slide show, then. The song is "The Naming of Things" by Andrew Bird, a favorite artist of mine.

rented bikes and hit a biking trail

in the forest proper: it's a popular movie filming location, too.  can't imagine why.

this street was just MADE for couples.

the photo doesn't do a single iota of justice to the scene in the forest after dark.  

I'll be back there again.  Oh yeah.

Crappy Cameraphone's last day in the sun (and a game of spot the unintentional pun I discovered on proofreading, and decided to leave in)

Heck, let's make it into a contest.

If you can spot the unintentional pun and name it first in the comments, you get to choose the topic for my next post. I reserve the right to veto topic suggestions that are beyond reasonable boundaries of privacy, length, and good taste (this is a blog, not a game of truth or dare, you know), but if there's something you'd like to know about Roboseyo, or Roboseyo's Korea. . . get out your fine-tooth.

Inwang mountain: the last mountain I climbed before buying a real digital camera.

Inwang mountain is the mountain just to the west of the blue house (where Korea's president lives).  There's a neighbourhood between them, but it's a very nice mountain.

This guy enjoyed the peak a lot.


The mountain looks down on a really charming little village that, due to lack of access, has remained a little less gentrified, commercialized, and uglified than the apartment-block mausoleums in other areas of Seoul.  Would you believe that a twenty-minute walk from this view, in the opposite direction, is Seoul's finance district, City Hall, and the epicenter of every protest?


I wound around the side of the mountain, on the north side of the six hundred year old wall that the old kings built to protect the palaces from raiders and invaders.  I'd just head uphill, and wind around to the next side street when I hit a dead end, and I stumbled into this sleepy little huttish area that could have been untouched since 1930 (judging from the people I saw living there, with no new neighbours since then, either).  How these little bastions survive without either turning into tourist-trap self-recreations or getting bought out by developers, I'll never know. . . but I'm glad they don't.

I picked my way through their tiered gardens (another OOoooold Korea method), and came upon this trail, which led up to the defensive wall.  Again, just to re-state: this scene was a 40 minute walk from Jongno Tower.  (50 if you go slow)
More layered houses, winding up the mountainside:

a view from a lookout point on one of the side-streets a little closer to the town-ish area (where lookouts were obscured by vegetation) -- some nice, rich-looking, gated-garden type houses were there as a buffer between the city and the little grandmother villa I walked through.  The views there were nice.
Inwangsan was great.  Here's the defensive wall; on the other side of it are a bunch of military defensive structures, lookout towers and stuff, as well as signs, "don't you effing dare enter" warnings, and certain directions you ought not point your camera.  But it's also pretty darn beautiful up there.

As you can see, despite the sleepy villa on the approach, we're just THAT close to the big-ass city.  (The mountain you can see in the distance with the blurry, crappy cameraphone tower white smudge on it, is actually Namsan, with Seoul Tower.)


Went back to the same place again this weekend, and took more pictures: the 능소화 (Google Translate says they're "Neungsohwa" flowers) were out in full colour today; they're one of girlfriendoseyo's favourite flowers, so we had a real nice walkabout.

Girlfriendoseyo likes gardens.

A little too much.  (She pretended to climb the wall as a joke; that gave me a good laugh, so she posed like this. . . she's not ACTUALLY Girlfriendoseyo the B&E artist. . . as far as I know.)


The fallen petals are also fantastic.





Girlfriendoseyo says these flowers' name means, in the original Chinese, "the flower that mocks the sun" -- that is, the flower so beautiful, it even taunts the heavens.


Maybe somebody else tried to climb this wall too many times.  A lot of barking dogs on this lane, and the most unfriendly wall I've seen south of the Demilitarized Zone and outside of the military bases.

This seems like a perfectly lovely fusion restaurant. . . until you pronounce the name like a Korean would, switching the "R" out for an "L".



Finally, at the bottom of Inwang Mountain, in Puk'ak Dong, there's a heavenly coffee shop.


It actually felt like being back in the Pacific Northwest, between the look, the smell (beans roasted on site) and the atmosphere.  The specialty hand-drip coffees were obscenely tasty, for a very reasonable price.

The place had some reputation, too: we actually had to wait for a table!




Other pics: the receptionists at my workplace are hilarious and charming.  I took a picture of them together that didn't turn out well, so I said "Sorry.  Bad picture.  One more time." and they both did that, because of the "One More Time" song I wrote about before, but can't justify posting as a clip a second time.  This is called the "ET Dance."

Finally (and these, in case you haven't noticed, were taken with the new, good camera). . . a bit of goofy Korea:


>Are you sure we're in the MEN's shirts' section?  (why Korean men wear pink shirts)
(Hooray for Bean Pole)

The store and the brand's name is FUBU, standing for "For Us, By Us" (citation) -- it was a company started by African-American entrepreneurs when they noticed that most urban clothing marketed toward African-Americans was made by white-owned companies.  The company has since become very successful.  Now, I must defer to other bloggers and experts on the topic of black culture without black people (for example, Korean rappers flashing gang signs and talking in weird mixes of Konglish and Ebonics -- Kebonics? Ebonglish?), but I realized the name FUBU is a bit of a misnomer in COEX mall in Seoul, because there just aren't enough people of African descent who shop at COEX, to keep this store in the black.  I suggest a name change: FKBU -- For Koreans By Us.
Here's a video featuring a Korean hip-hop stars, Crown J, at the end.  Brian thinks he's a poser and a douche; agree or disagree?  Discuss amongst yourselves.   Decide for yourself also whether something like hip-hop culture is such a liquid concept that it can be separated completely from the culture that created it, and still keep some kind of legitimacy, or whether it's been totally co-opted and exploited. . . along the way, you can listen to an awful English rap in this one, count how many other reference to American culture are. . . um, raped, and pick out which singers use pitch-correction, before Crown J throws down his badass gang signs at the end.


You can listen to this other Crown J track, for more information, and decide what you think about him.  All I'm gonna say is, I don't watch Korean MTV.


Interesting as cultural artifacts and examples of fusion culture. . . but not quite enough to a spot next to the pink shirts on my page.

Weekend pics (stay on till the end) . . . and a story.

I had two interesting classes in the last week: see, I have two free-talk classes, which are the highest level we offer at my school. One of them is what my sister-in-law calls a "clam bake" -- that is, the opposite of a "sausage party," an all-female class. It's actually a wonderful class, and we've had some really lovely conversations about family, woman issues, whatever, as well as a few good laughs.

Well, one of my students came into class all steamed becasue her boyfriend (in very poor form) not just looked at a poster of a hot model in a bikini (which are rife these days, and which, being a guy, I would have defended him for doing -- those posters are specifically designed by advertisers to ensnare us dink-havers into looking, so it's difficult to say he was out of line for that. . . however, he also COMMENTED on it to his girlfriend, which isn't cool -- ogling whilst in the presence of one's girlfriend should ALWAYS be done surreptitiously, if at all.

Well, to balance that gripe out with a laugh, I told a story about a time I was out with girlfriendoseyo:

We were walking by a bus stop, and I spotted, as we approached, one of those long-legged, beskirted sort of specimens that keep some men in Korea way longer than they need to be. . . but I was with girlfriendoseyo, so I thought very specifically, "MUST. . . NOT. . . OGLE!" and focused my gaze with laser-intensity at the pedestrian overpass nearby.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Girlfriendoseyo giving that very same h-h-h-hawttie a big-old up, down, and back up again.

"LeeeEEEEEEeeerrrrrr" would have been the sound-effect, if this were one of those old 1960s Batman TV episodes.

So I turned to her, with a hurt look on my face, and said, "Were you looking at that girl?" Girlfriendoseyo knew she was busted, so she nodded.

"Do you think she's prettier than me?" I said, and made my chin tremble.

We had a good laugh then, and had another good laugh with my all-ladies class, and we started talking about girls checking people out on the street, which is a conversation I've never had before.

(ps: Magnetic Fields is playing as I write this, and they just used the word "unboyfriendable" -- sweeet)

So, anyway, here are the things I learned, and sure, it's only a sample-size of four, so I'm not going to be writing any scholarly papers, but it was interesting nonetheless:

1: Women look at other women more then they look at men, when they're out walking the street. (Usually for the sake of comparison.)

2: In the street, (at least these) women's attention isn't caught so much by a man's looks, as the way he acts: particularly, a women's attention will be caught by a guy who's acting sweetly to his girlfriend. (talk amongst yourselves as to why this might be; for now, it was interesting enough just to learn that)

however

3: When watching TV, women look at the men more than the women. At least these ones did. That was interesting, too.

We theorized as to why that might be, and we came up with this:

Women (to be broad-brushy) are more interested in a man's character (though we all know men are generally more visual); the men seen on TV are generally celebrities that (these) women have seen before -- they get a chance to kind of gather a series of impressions about the men on TV, to get a feeling for what their characters might be like, which makes them more interesting to watch, while the men passing in the street are probably impossible to meet, impossible to get to know, so the mere look of them isn't as interesting.

Anyway, that's what we hypothesized that day. It was a really interesting class, and I learned something about women. Cool.

Next: I had ANOTHER free-talk class which (that day) was all men, and we talked about drinking (may as well throw a proper sausage party, you know?) The two men also REALLY got a kick out of my teaching them the phrase "sausage party". Well, I mentioned how I love Korean drinking culture -- you never see Korean men more friendly and jovial than when you're drinking with them (and if you can somehow dodge being goaded into drinking WAY more than you planned to, it's a fantastic experience). I've argued here before that I'd love to see Kora's drinking culture separated from its business culture, for various reasons (though I'd be sad to see Korea's drinking culture vanish completely).

And one of my students asserted (without any prompting), "I don't like drinking culture as much these days: it seems more extreme, and there's more rudeness and violence in drinking districts than I seem to remember when I was younger." Such a frank admission was really refreshing, and then he followed that up by saying, "But my boss is trying to curb that kind of unhealthy alky-culture: he's encouraging us to be more moderate during office dinners" -- a pair of sentences that filled me up with hope and happiness.

Then we got back to telling hangover stores.


aaaand. . . pictures.

From the Puk'hak expressway, where I went with Girlfriendoseyo (avoid the Italian restaurant at the lookout point there: the service was awful. Not the worse we've EVER experienced, but definitely the second worst. [you have to ask nicely if you want to hear those two stories]):











look at all the colours of green (pics from my flickr account)




. .. a mulberry tree?

The weather on Sunday was the most perfect I think I've ever seen. Just look at that sky.
I climbed Buram mountain with Matt in the morning:


We could see all the way to Gwanaksan (way south of the city) from Buramsan (way north of the city)


And, for good measure, there in Gyungbokgung station. . . a naughty horse from the Shilla Dynasty. I guess we know what was on their minds back then. . .

I didn't realize C&B stood for Cannon and Bells.

Now do I need to include the close-up, for any who doubt what it is?

Yeah. Surprising, unexpected appearances of phalluses occur in Korea from time to time (see here for more)-- you just never know when one will, um, pop up.



Anyway, that night, one more of that cute neighbourhood I walked around with Girlfriendoseyo