Oh crap! I'm in trouble with blogger!

I just got a message from Blogger (which apparently EVERY OTHER BLOGGER received about six months ago) stating that my blogger account would be canceled, and my entire blog deleted, unless I reach the minimum quota of posts referencing the upcoming US election.

So anyway, I was thinking about the upcoming US election, and I saw this.

But then after thinking about that for a while, I also noticed this.

Fortunately, reading this helped me sort out my thoughts on the topic.

Is that enough, Blogger?  Pretty please?  Can I keep my blog now?

Update: Garrison Keillor, an American (there you go, Brian) has two abilities:
1. to pull a column out of his arse, say absolutely nothing, but say nothing so beautifully that you read the column twice more, just because you feel like something important happened, but you must have missed it somewhere in the link he somehow made between the sound of snow underfoot while walking to church and corruption in Zimbabwe or uncertainty about the housing market. However, when he DOES have an actual topic, his second ability is (drumroll please)
2. to hit the nail on the goldurn head with grace and wit.

Liam Lynch - United States of Whatever | Music Videos | SPIKE.com

Welcome, Korea Herald Readers

Hi there. If you're a Korea Herald reader who decided to check out my page after reading the "Expat Living" article, "Why Do Koreans Get So Defensive?", welcome!

While what I wrote there (if that link doesn't work, try this one) is a pretty good summary, it is certainly not all that has been said about the topic, either here or elsewhere, and of course, it should also be remembered that I am not the final expert about anything: I'm mostly glad that people are talking about this now, instead of feeling afraid to say anything, for fear of offending someone.

The series of essays The Korean and I wrote, with Gord Sellar's help (more later on him) about complaining expats and defensive Koreans are here, and they've started a very interesting conversation online, which I've tried to document with links and summaries.  If you haven't seen this online yet, I recommend you start with these:

First question:
Why do expats complain?
My thoughts. The Korean's thoughts.


Update 2: A couple more posts on the topic.
K-Rok
and Lost Seouls weigh in with the headline I like the most so far. Thanks!

some other responses from other pages
some e-mails I got
a wonderful, hilarious look at the history of complaining expats at the blog Popular Gusts
one more link that popped up a bit later on, that made me smile.

and another late addition which provides a COMPLETELY different view of it all.

and the Gypsy Scholar finally weighed in, too.

Second question:
Why do Koreans take Criticism about Korea so Poorly?
My thoughts. The Korean's thoughts.

some other responses from other pages

If this topic really interests you, also take some time to read the worthy Gord Sellar's views on the topic:
"Who's Complaining In Korea"
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

I also talked about this on the Seoul Podcast, here, during the first half of the podcast (before the whole thing devolved into a bunch of dirty bum jokes.)

And if you have something you want to say about it, go ahead and put it online, and send me the address where I can find it. Or e-mail your thoughts to me at roboseyo [at] gmail [dot] com or write them in the comment board to this page. If you're going to criticize me. . . go ahead, but try to have your ducks in a row, and check the rest of the conversation, to see that you aren't repeating something another person's already said.  I'm really glad if this discussion continues -- I think it's worthwhile for us to take a self-critical look in the mirror from time to time, and this is something that everyone bumps into after a fairly short time in Korea.

For posterity, then, or in case you haven't read them, or would like a fairly good summary of the discussion so far, and don't really care to do all the reading following all those links would entail: here are The Korean's Herald article (from the wonderful site, "Ask A Korean!") and my article in the Herald.  

PS: Thanks also to Matt Lammers, the editor of Korea Herald's Expat Living page, for giving us a soapbox excuse to draw attention to ourselves venue!

UPDATE: Gord Sellar's essay went up today, and it, too, is worth a read.  At the KH site, here, or here, kept on my blog, again for posterity.

Where I'm going this weekend...

The Andong Mask Festival, in Kyungsan Province, is pretty famous, and if you need to get out of Seoul, wouldn't be a bad idea.

Korea has a long tradition of Mask Dancing, and you can see some of it, and hear all the old traditional instruments.

And get out of the city, eh?




If you're not Korean, you can even set your goal to be this guy:


And possibly be featured on Arirang TV or Chosun Online (who love following white people around with cameras).

More information here.

More Roboseyo far and wide. . .

If you go to the "Special" sidebar of the Korea Herald Online, you will see the latest manifestation of the "Why Do Expats Complain?" meme The Korean and I started back in the Summer. Tomorrow, in the same place, you will find my write-up on "Why do Koreans Get so Defensive" and on Thursday, Gord Sellar will be there with "What Makes a Happy Expat?"
In other news, I was invited by Joe of Zenkimchi to a ridiculously good meal at "Star Chef," a wonderful fusion restaurant in Maebong, south of Kangnam. FatManSeoul was also there (her writeup here), and Zenkimchi Food Journal even edited together quite a nice video of the whole thing.
This is fusion food as it ought to be -- rather than the UN-creative stylings of replacing the usual shredded cabbage with a bit of spaghetti, throwing honey mustard sauce on the Korean fried rice, and putting Kimchi on a toasted ham sandwich (which is the usual dull way of Korean "fusion" restaurants), this guy is actually mixing flavours of different cultures in ways that are interesting and new and really intriguing. As well as jaw-droppingly delicious.
Yanni presided over the affair, with his video, his jazz shoulder, and his moustache setting the tone for the night, on widescreen TV.


You'll catch me a few times on this video, which presents the food well enough that it remains interesting all the way through, even though it's only about food. That's just how good the food was. Joe and Jen are much better at talking about food than I am, but you'll here a few lame roboseyo jokes here and there and some of my semi-drunken braying, if you pay attention.
This is the space where I will put the great photo Jen took of me, which she promised to send me, but hasn't yet...and I hope she will, and that she's not mad at me for teasing her a bit in my video (next).


(oh there you are, Peter!  Thanks, Jennifer!)

and here is my video (not nearly as good as Joe's, but shorter) with mostly pictures of food, and a bit of Jennifer loving on her camera (she bought a new lens that day). Watching the two food bloggers take pictures of the food ("Food Porn" -- an apt description) was fun as heck. (For the best of the food porn, check out FatManSeoul and ZenKimchi's posts on the place. But gee golly wow, it was good eatin'!)

And Yanni was pleased, and smiled down upon us all.

Amazing photos of North Korea

HT to Schwim

Big pictures, but amazing ones, compiled or taken by Eric Lafforgue, a photojournalist who attended the Pyongyang mass games this September, and seems to have done other work in North Korea during the year.

The North Korean Arirang Mass Games are amazing and terrifying at the same time: getting 60000 performers to move in unison is incredible, but if you think about the methods they probably used to train them . . . yurg.

You can see some of North Korea's natural beauty, but also note, with one glaring exception, the amount of suspicion in the eyes of North Koreans when they look at this foreign photographer. Two of my favourite from the series:




See the whole series here.

Eric Laffrogue's Flickr photostream: more here.

Video from the 2007 North Korean Mass Games: given their limited resources, this is miles more impressive than the Beijing Opening Ceremonies. Imagine what North Korea would do with an unlimited budget.
And those are people holding cards in the background.

those are all kids, by the way.

video of preparations for the games.

To all the guys who declined my housewarming party invitation last weekend...

Ya sure missed out. Jeez, boys, what's the matter with youse?

A few fellas showed up. . . but they were sorely outnumbered.



Gender ratio aside, a good time was had by all; I love having an apartment big enough to host people, and a kitchen big enough to cook.

For the rest. . . don't worry, all. This won't be the last time I have a house party. 'Till then, be well.

This has NEVER happened before in Korea...

Never happened before, I say. NEVER!



Does that bubble song remind you of anything? Say, Canadian singer Feist (who was way cooler before she sold out. No lie: here's Mushaboom.)



This is the FIRST TIME I've EVER heard of something like this.



Needless to say, I'm shocked, SHOCKED, and disappointed. (HT to Brian for this one)

This will never stop being funny:

The headline on the Yahoo News item:

"Schwarzenegger, Top Legislators Reach Budget Deal."
(story here)

The thumbnail picture beside the headline on Yahoo News (blown up a bit for blogger):



(no sign of the picture in the actual story)

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.

So, Roboseyo, what is a 제사?

Warning to my family: be ready for this one. It's about Mom/Jane.

Soundtrack: Bach, BWV 1068: "Air" 


OK. So here's the thing. Last Monday, September 8th, was the three year anniversary of my mother's death.


All week, I'd been in a bit of a funk; especially this weekend: between eating the heavy, tomatoey, beefy leftovers from the housewarming party (more on that later), sitting around instead of doing stuff for Chusok vacation, and it being the three year anniversary of my mother's passing. . . I felt a bit blue: this was sticking in my brain, and I didn't know what to do about it: we Canucks don't really have a ritual that handles this particular situation, and sorry, dear readers, but a whiny blog post just doesn't do my mom justice.  

Fortunately, I mentioned this to Girlfriendoseyo, and even MORE fortunately, her culture DOES have something precisely for those times when, no matter how long it is past the loss of a loved one, you still CAN do something about it.  It's called Jesa - 제사 and it's basically a tribute to the dead.  (It's not the same one people do for Chusok and New Years, but it's there, in the handbook of Korean rituals and rites for the ancestors.)

Now don't anybody think I've switched out and decided to become an ancestor-worshipper or anything -- I've spent the entire week leading up to Chusok explaining to my students that the Chusok rites for the ancestors aren't really so much worship as paying respect to the dead, and yes, I DO think there's a difference.

Even then, I would argue that this jesa was a different beast again than what Koreans do on the anniversaries of their loved ones, not least because Mom wouldn't feel comfortable with me going the whole nine yards and scouring the city to find her exact favourite foods, the way one ought to for a proper Jesa.  Sorry, but Dutch bakeries are few and far between in Korea, even in Seoul, and I think she'd let that slide; however, I also think that she'd be comfortable with me performing a mini-jesa, for the sake of giving release to these weird pangs that have been bugging me this week.

So no, I'm not repudiating Jesus' blood, or blaspheming Allah, or pissing on the rituals the good Buddha and Confucius have left behind for us,  nor am I declaring loyalty and devotion to Mom, as if she were the one who could speed my way through purgatory and lead me on the path to enlightenment.  It's my mom, a human being, like the others; settle down there.

I'm just finding a way to say goodbye, even though it's long after we westerners (mistakenly) figure that one ought to have moved on, even though some goodbyes never actually end -- 'cause you know, Mom's not gonna be at my wedding, period.  And dammit, I should be allowed to feel bad about that from time to time, and if Korea has a ritual designed specifically for this kind of thing. . . sweetums!

So, I bought a tray and a candle and a bowl -- of the bowls in the shop, I intentionally chose the one Mom would probably have bought (no almond rings. . . but I'll at least do that much).

What I bought:

I boiled up some spaghetti noodles, and put on Bach's "Air on a G-String" -- funny name, but an important meaning in our family.  If you hit play up at the top, you're listening to it now.

I got together a few pictures of Mom that I like, and set up the incense, the candle, and the pictures by the window.  Why the window?  Just seemed like the right place:

If any of you know how a real Jesa goes, and what I did wrong, I'll kindly ask you to stay out of it.  This was something I had to do, and its meaning for me and how I feel about my departed mother has nothing to with whether the tray was oriented in the right compass direction, or whatever else I got wrong.

One thing I know: Koreans stand their chopsticks up in their rice when they honour their ancestors.  It's harder to get a fork and spoon (no knife: see that, dad?) to stand up in a bowl of spaghetti -- but I at least got one picture of it before I set them down.
I lit the candle, set the music on "repeat" and sat.
(camera flash: then I turned off the light)
I sat on the floor and missed my mom for a while, and it was exactly what I needed to do.

I'm not going to go into an extended breakdown of all the wonderful things my mother was (though she was); I also won't go into an extended explanation of the wonderful women who have been good-hearted enough to fill in the vacancy as surrogate-mothers (Raema and Kelly aka Mom Schneider and Mom Finlayson) and step-mother (Mary-Anna), even though they are all wonderful. 

Instead, I'll just leave it at this: I feel better now, and however I go about doing it, Mom deserves to be missed from time to time.  I'm sure she has much better things to do than check whether the spaghetti I set out for her was leftover or fresh -- I mean, if heaven's so boring its inhabitants could be bothered to check how their descendants are honouring them back on earth, why the heck are we being good, trying to get there?  And yeah, I've probably butchered the ritual about as badly as can be, but I don't give a rip, because I feel better now.

Love you Mom.  Hope you're having a great time over heavenwards, but you're still missed here on planet Roboseyo.

(Mom's Eulogy here)