Something I love about Seoul.

In Canada, if you see a steakhouse restaurant on a street, and YOU want to open a steakhouse, you think "Oh. There's already a steakhouse here. I should open a steakhouse somewhere else, where there's a need."

In Korea, instead of thinking "Oh. I should find a neighbourhood with NO steakhouses, and open a steakhouse there", entrepreneurs think, "Oh. I guess this must be a good place to open a steakhouse. Maybe I should open one here, too."

It has been explained to me that the hope is that later, another steakhouse will open there, and another, and soon, that neighbourhood will become known as "steakhouse town" or "the steakhouse district", and people will come from far and wide to sample the amazing steaks on Steak Street, and that the competition will keep prices down, and keep each individual steakhouseiere honest and committed to quality, while the area's new reputation as Steaktown will draw enough extra traffic that you'll make up in volume what you lose in cutthroat price/service competition.

Because of this tendency for Korean shops to cluster, you get neigbourhoods all around Seoul known as "potted plant district", "bulk fabric district," and pretty much any other service or product you can think of, will have one area somewhere in Seoul known as a hot spot.

Another funny thing is the random, TOTALLY random combinations that will converge on a particular neighbourhood -- an area won't have ONLY steakhouses. It'll have steak, cellphones, cosmetics and antiques, all concentrated in a small area, so that within a ten minute walk, you'll pass eight antique shops, four cellphone sales or service centers, five cosmetics shops, and three steakhouses.

My neighbourhood is known for tuna sashimi restaurants and a spicy seafood stew, and there's one little alley with about a dozen barbequed pork restaurants. Also, hanbok, the traditional Korean dress, for good measure.







Here are some other odd combinations I saw walking around today, shopping for a new chair. It's like that old sesame street segment, "One of these things is not like the others", except it's "all of these things are not like the others"

chairs, shelves, home safes, and printshops

(around the corner: textiles, lighters/engraved items, linens, and dried fish)

one block over: sewing machines, (from industrial to home-use sized) wood latticeworks and detailing, electric circuitry

(around THAT corner: more electronics components, power-tools, and porcelain bathroom fixtures, and flooring supplies, light fixtures)

across the street (approaching my house)
trophies, fresh seafood (restaurants), Buddhist icons and paraphernalia (statues, robes, shoes), traditional musical instruments, and sign-makers

(around the corner from that: a neighbourhood with about a hundred fifty shops selling jewelry, jewelry packaging (ring boxes, etc.), gems, and literally NOTHING else. I have NO idea how these places can stay afloat, except that there are just THAT many people living in Seoul, and they ALL go there to buy jewelry.)

(there's even a block near my house that carries specialized doctor's office and laboratory equipment, along with pirated DVDs, watch repair (with electric alarm clocks too), and street food)

The nice thing is that within a forty-minute walk of my house I can find literally ANYTHING I want to buy, for prices that only cutthroat competition could create, but the drawback is that I have to know which direction to walk, or I'll never find it. It's like a Walmart exploded, and then grew copies of each of its parts, kind of like the brooms in the Sorcerer's Apprentice section of Disney's Fantasia.



A former coworker swears she once stumbled upon an alley of nothing but prosthetic limb shops. Just imagine. There are enough amputees in Seoul to support an entire block of prosthetics shops, and (the kicker is), instead of planting prosthetics shops in spaced-out locations, so that there's one conveniently close, no matter where you live in or around Seoul, they've all bunched together onto this one little street, to steal each other's customers.

Makes me shake my head.

I love this city! I guess I understand the logic, but it still surprises me sometimes. How many printing presses does one neighbourhood need?

~Rob

If you live in Canada. . .

If you live in Canada, Follow this link. Get upset. Write a letter, or five, or ten. A country that claims to be one of the top five in the world needs to look very carefully at a situation like this. It's a heartbreaking post from my friend Mel, who's a paramedic, and saw it.

Some pictures.

On festival days, go to a folk village or a temple, and you can see demonstrations of traditional Korean games, including this one -- like in the cartoons when you jump on a plank and fulcrum and you shoot somebody up in the air, except in Korea it's an acrobatic form. Dancers/acrobats do turns and twists and stuff in the air, and send each other way up high. I was once told by a friend that noble women, who were usually confined in their palace walls, would play this game to see over the palace walls, to the world outside.



At temples, especially during festivals, you get these big stacks of candles set out for people making a wish or prayer.



Here's a picture of a shiny street. I call the neighbourhood where I work "megawatt alley".



I saw this ad poster. It made me smile. Western film history (Wizard of Oz) and ancient Chinese history together. The wizard of Beijing. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. . . "

I've always wished I were bright enough to use the line "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" when I'm talking bulls__t and somebody calls me on it.


This restaurant name makes me laugh, because it's making fun of Konglish.

I got blisters on my feet by walking too much in a new pair of shoes, but now they're finally better. I like walking around -- I walked right over one of the downtown mountains, and that made me happy. Now I'm gonna go outside and find a street I've never walked down before.

Love:
Rob

more bubbles on the street

this august has been unseasonally wet. Most augusts are really really hot and humid in Korea, after a couple rainy weeks in July, but rainy season is all out of wack this year.

but if life gives you lemon, make lemonade, and if August gives you rain, take more pictures of bubbles on your street.





living where I do, there are a few hobos I see running around regularly. I've started to get to know some of them.

There's the one who keeps knives taped on his walking stick. Don't mess with that one. There's the one who's dressed in black and has a gangster moustache. He looks kind of young, he's always at least half-cut, but he also has a tendency to take a few steps that look as if he's about to go into a pretty darn powerful taekwondo jump-spin-kick. I wouldn't want to tangle with this one. I think he's a gangester, he looks like a tough old bastard.

My favourite is the one who looks just a bit rotund still, and every time I see him he's carrying a newspaper. I like to imagine he's a poet, composing poems in his head. He has these bookish looking glasses, and he always has a coy half-smile that makes it seem like he's perfectly content to be a hobo, as long as he has a cardboard box to sleep in and a newspaper he can sleep under after he reads it.

The nice thing about hobos is, even the gangster-looking one isn't intimidating or menacing in the least. In most western cities, if there's a public park known as a hobo hangout, people go out of their way to avoid walking through it, for fear of being mugged for drug money or something. In Korea, even in downtown Seoul, if you leave the hoboes alone, they'll leave you alone. I love this country.

Here's something that makes me happy.

Two of my most wonderful friends have come into contact and become friends through the links on the side of my blog page. I LOVE when my friends meet/connect with each other. Spread the network!

I have a five day weekend, and I just got back from a short trip out of town. Mercy me, the landscape was almost like being back in Canada. In Korea, mountains are described as deep instead of tall, because of the layers of mountains behind each other, each going closer to the horizon.

After that, I watched "Howl's Moving Castle" with my girlfriend at my house. Entrancing! Gorgeous! Rapturous. Miyazaki's the same guy who did My Neighbour Totoro, which I've discussed before in my blog, and he just might be my favourite single artist working in movies (thought Charlie Kaufmann, the writer of "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is also in contention, as well as the cinematographer that did "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", and "Hero". Miyazaki's stories are charming and touching; the animation is technically dazzling, but always serves the story. He respects his audience, and stays true to his characters at the same time as creating dramatic conflicts of motivation. Often/usually, his moments of violence or clash are hinted at rather than portraying violence onscreen -- you will see the trap set and sprung, see the chase, or the aftermath, but the violent action is left unshown. His worlds are full of magic, but the magical creatures work by a logic as cohesive (even more cohesive and sensible) than the Harry Potter world.

(PS: here's my beef with Harry Potter. Why can a wizard just do fifty spells in a row -- wouldn't that be exhausting? I mean, every other difficult task a human can do: lifting a heavy weight, convincing a stubborn person to do something, defeating a person in hand-to-hand combat, shooting an orange ball through a small hoop while five people protect it -- are physically or mentally exhausting, and most take practice to become good at it. Why doesn't Hermione need to take a break and recharge? All she needs is to know the right words and the correct wand movement, and she can perform ANY spell, as often as she likes, as quickly as she can repeat the incantation and perform the correct wand movement -- if magic were real, wouldn't there be certain spells that would take a lot of training to learn, or that would demand so much willpower you'd be exhausted once you'd finished it? I'm sorry I just think that if there WERE wizards and witches, and there WERE a killing curse, it would be such a powerful bit of magic that even a dangerous, powerful wizard would be exhausted for two days after performing it. Maybe the difference between a powerful and a weak wizard would simply be how much magic they can perform without exhausting their energy stores. Maybe I'm really asking, "where does the magic COME from?" with this musing. . . oh well. Rabbit trails.)

I'm happy these days. I got a note from my funniest student saying "I really appreciate your teaching", and that's always warming (especially because adults don't do that as often as kids do). So I'm happy now.

Ummm...

So in the last two months, here's the input I've had for my blog:

1. "less writing. all that text is daunting"
2. "you post way too infrequently"
3. "you post just frequently enough to help me feel updated without burdening my busy life with information overload"
4. "less videoclips and more writing in your updates, please."

By which I've decided I'm just going to manage my blog how I like it. Because any old whatchamacallit from who knows where can read this thing, I DO have to be aware of what goes on here, but I will continue to post things that make me happy, whether they fit YOUR preferred medium or not. And if you don't like the internet clips, well just remember that I'm the guy who chose those particular clips as the ones I wanted to share with you, so think of them as an alternative way to get your finger on the pulse of old roboseyo -- kind of like the way people sometimes say "Can I look through your music collection" just to get a different kind of handle on a person than you can get from reading e-mail or having a conversation or listening to them tell stories. I can't exactly show you another angle of myself by bringing you to my favourite restaurant or posting the smell of my cologne, so clips will have to do. Also: be aware I only post the stuff I really love -- I don't go looking for stuff to put on my blog; only the cream gets on here -- the kind of stuff I'd be excited enough in person to say "OK, I'm gonna pause the conversation for three minutes to play you this song."

Think of it as me communicating with you in multimedia. and it's good stuff, I'm posting. really.

In that vein, without apology, here's the cleverest commercial I've seen in ages: cute, touched with a little pathos, and about an important subject. It won awards in Germany.

I love tom waits. And Pixar.

That song was called "I'm Still Here" and it's a good third of the reasons I love tom waits. This next one is called "Hold On" and along with Martha, I Hope that I Don't Fall In Love With You, The Heart of Saturday Night, and Time (none of which had satisfactory versions on Youtube), is my favourite Tom Waits ballad.



Wait. found "Time"



He also does wacky strange amazing interesting stuff like this. Without ever using a synth in any of his music ever. "Hoist that Rag"



(this one, if you listen to the words, is absolutely hilarious. Cemetery Polka)



though rough, his voice is surprisingly musical -- it fits his arrangements and atmospheres perfectly every time. plus, the lyrics are, to a song, beautiful and interesting and the most poetic songwriting I've read except Leonard Cohen.



You don't have to, but I like him.

(also listen to him tell a story. he's an awesome engaging performer, to boot. Song: Cold Cold Ground)


However, what you DO have to see, and will almost certainly like, is Ratatouille.



The people over at Pixar have made yet another wonder of a movie. This one's about a rat that wants to be a chef in Paris. He meets a sad-sack kid who needs a boost, and they collaborate to try and get Chef Gusteau's old restaurant back on its feet.

It contains two of my three favourite Pixar moments of all time. 1. when the food critic takes a bite of the ratatouille, the way they show the impact food can have on a person is perfect, perfect, perfect. Worth the entire hour and a half leading up to that point. 2. when they use sound and colour and shape to describe the way tastes mix together, two or three times in the film. It's pure genius, and a bang-on representation of how tastes are unique, and create something new when they mix.

(The other favourite Pixar moment, and one of my favourite moments in all of film, is the last five seconds of Monsters Inc. So understated, but again, perfect.) I'm not putting up clips. You have to see the movies. The clips wouldn't mean as much without the movies around them, anyway.

(one more of tom: can't resist: "I don't want to grow up")

Some pictures for you. To make you happy and stuff.

A common sight in Korea, the ginseng capital of the world, is pictures (or jarred specimens) of the ginseng root that resembles a human as closely (or shall we say anatomically) as possible. Sometimes they even have man and woman. Ginseng was originally thought to be healthy because it sometimes took humanoid forms -- so obviously it must be good for humans! Later, we discovered that it actually IS healthy! This was on the side of a subway car.


I've decided I like tea more than coffee. . . though it really ought to have honey in it instead of sugar. If I'm gonna be a tea-drinker, I may as well be a tea snob of some kind or another.


At simpsonizeme.com you can find out what you'd look like if you were a character on the simpsons. Does it look like me ? What say you?


Sometimes chipmunks are cute.


But usually I think they're scary.


Oh yeah. One more thing.



Intrigued?

Some silliness and some juggling.

There's such a fine line between crazy and awesome.



The second one's even better than the first one. This is the kind of stuff you might see on a gameshow -- celebrities watch a video clip, or have to partake in some ridiculous game, and then their reactions are filmed and repeated, with much audience response.



This one gets funnier the more times you watch it.



There's nothing crazy about this one. Just a lot of awesome. Pay attention: he doesn't repeat a trick!



His name's tim kelly. He's the world champion three-ball juggler.



Look at how big his hands are.

This guy even more so: huge gorilla arms.

This clip becomes better when you know the backstory: there's this guy named Chris Bliss who goes around juggling three balls in cool patterns to this exact same music, so this guy basically is doing the juggling equivalent of a rapper's diss track -- trumps Bliss in every way, with five balls. His name is Jason Garfield, and I don't know if he's world champion in anything other than awesomeness. Hold on (yay internet) he IS the three-time world ball-juggling champion. He's also (if you watch some of his podcast videos) a bit of a jerk. . . but if you're the world champion at something, I guess you've kind of earned the right to be an arrogant jerk, so I won't criticize him, but I don't have to like him. If you could have found a guy who could beat him, Muhammed Ali would have stopped saying "I am the greatest," too.




I finished the first draft of a play this week. I'm sure happy.

this is really funny too.

This is really funny. I don't know how to embed it, because it's from another page than youtube, but it made me laugh a lot.

OK im sick

that's why I'm posting so much today.

this is my favourite Korean tv commercial ever.



I have cracked up entire dance floors by doing this dance when this song comes on. For some reason, seeing a white dude make a Korean pop culture reference counts as a show-stopper her. I think it's my curly hair.