Head on over to The Hub

There's a new meta-blog on the radar, and if you come here for news about Korea, you should make it your next stop. As you know, Korean promoters aim for Korea to become the hub of everything; well, thanks to the "Korea, Sparkling" advertising campaign, The Hub of Sparkle (cheers, old party pooper) wants to get in on that Korean wave. It's a meta-blog, that is, a handful of established Korea bloggers have put their heads together and decided to create a space where they can collect their individual input and offer a diverse, interesting look at Korea and its wonderfulness, goofiness, and quirkiness, and occasional backwardness or suckiness or still-working-on-it-give-us-a-bit-more-time-iness. There are a whole buttload of foreigners living in Korea now, and it's time to get working on forming a positive, open community where we can look at Korea's ins and outs, for better and for worse.

You can reach it by typing in www.koreasparkle.com or www.hubofsparkle.com

There'll be some WTF stuff, some culture and events news, stuff to laugh about, helpful info for life in Korea, some social criticism (hell, I don't know what the other posters will put up there), and, we're hoping, a lively, friendly discussion board where people feel free to weigh in and hash things out without worrying about trolls or snipes.

There are some pretty awesome K-bloggers involved, and the material on the site so far is really interesting, and we've only just started: I hope as it gets established, it can become a helpful resource for people who need to get their bearings over here. Anyway, I think it'll be worth your while to add it to your blogroll, favorite it, and make it one of your regular visits.

Here's the "Welcome to The Hub of Sparkle" introduction, from the site itself.

Now: here's a cross-post of something of mine (yup, I'm in there, too) that's been up over there for a little while now. (here)

One Gripe about that Andong Festival

Yeah, I had a great, wonderful time last week, and the fireworks were one of the most unique aesthetic experiences I’ve ever had…

But then, between rounds of sheer wonder, they did this:



Now, Girlfriendoseyo defended it, saying that maybe they chose those songs for the sake of the foreigners in the crowd. . . except that as far as I’ve seen, both Sinatra’s “My Way” and Josh Groban/Westlife’s “You Raise Me Up” seem to be more popular with Koreans than with the foreigners living here.

Am I asking too much, and/or being some kind of Eastern culture-fetishizing orientalist by expecting to hear Korean music — or at least mostly Korean music, like the jazz adaptations of traditional arirang music that were playing before the fireworks show (similar to this) — when I go to a festival celebrating Korea’s traditional culture?

Anyway, just to remind you: other than that hiccup, the other 98% of the fireworks show was unbelievably cool, and the music was a bit jarring, but not enough to be a turd in the punchbowl, and ruin the whole experience.

New Phone, Correction Plus Jo Gwon; also, Expats and the DEAR LEADER HIMSELF!

First: Dear Readers in Korea: I've heard that there are phone services which will allow me to get a phone account in my own name. Which ones (as in, which service providers? What do I have to do/bring, and where can I go?) More importantly: my current phone is in the name of a friend, and I want to get a new phone that has the same number as my current phone. . . does she have to be there for me to do that, or what are the necessary details for making that switch-over? Anyone who's done the switch, or could point me to some helpful information, would get a gold star of appreciation from Roboseyo.)


Second: this is beyond belief.

Spotted in an Athens, Georgia record store

He looks healthy to me.
(HT to these guys, via these guys. Why don't MY readers send me awesome links like that?)

OK, I have an announcement, but it's just going to have to become a post of its own, because Jo Kwon will make you laugh.


So third, as an update on the old JYP Post from Sunday...

I'm an idiot.

I looked at the post date, not the original air date of the Jo Kwon Youtube video on my PopSeoul post, and blundered badly enough to prove PopSeoul clearly does it better than ol' Roboseyo, chasing me back into my corner. I'll just have to keep giving you this goofiness (which I do well), because obviously fact-checking (an important part of celebrity gossip writing, and life in general, too) ain't my strong point.

So that Jo Kwon kid from the video 1. was that age back in 2001, and 2. is a boy. Not that you'd know it from that old video...

But 2. he's now grown up (a bit), looking older (though not a lot more masculine), old enough to be promoted (according to the linked article) as the male counterpart to female Korean Wave star Choi Ji Woo:

What do you think, readers?  See any resemblance?

And despite (or maybe because of) being promoted as the male doppleganger of a major female star, our buddy Jo went out and got himself....

A FLIPPIN' SIXPACK!!!

He's lucky to have that sixpack, and can also rest content in knowing that he's still at best, the third prettiest male star in K-pop (as well as at worst, third most androgynous) thanks to Lee Jun Ki:

(remember lee jun-ki from this totally commentary-free post?)

And Bae Yong Joon.



Finally on a slightly more serious note, Kesumo of K-ROK added a little something to the "Why do Expats Complain" discussion which I found worth reading, appropriately titled, "Wah wah wah."

She discusses Korea's rapid development, and the way it leaves the older Koreans, basically, living in a country they no longer recognize as theirs: here are my favourite lines:

Can you imagine coming of age eating tree bark to survive and consulting shamans, and then in the number of years M*A*S*H was on the air, people around you –including your children and grandchildren -- are talking on cell phones, drinking overpriced coffee, and worshipping Prada? You haven’t just been left behind in the dust. You’ve been left behind on another freakin’ planet.

Thanks for adding your thoughts, Kesumo.

But everybody: don't forget about that phone thing. Help me out. I'm too busy with midterms to look it all up myself.

Katie I'd Like To Use One Of My Lifelines. BWAHAHAHAHAHA

Tina Fey returns to SNL, just to tear Sarah Palin a new one with satire

Saturday Night Live doesn't like to share, so you have to go watch it on NBC's site:
http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/couric-palin-open/704042/

http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=r36Xc0GG4iQ

Holy cow, that was closer than I even realized.

Hold on... does this work?
It just gets funnier and funnier...right to the last minute, which is as funny as all but a few of Saturday Night Live's magic moments (more cowbell, anyone?) Satire, bar none, is the best way to eviscerate someone... maybe even better than one of these. (how do you like THAT, Gomushin Girl? Who's evil now?)

If Saturday Night Live did this to me, I don't know how I'd look at myself in the mirror.

Move over, PopSeoul!

So I randomly stumbled across this on Youtube (I SWEAR I was not searching for Wonder Girls)

Super-Pop-Producer JYP has been taking online auditions for his next manufactured pop band, including this 13-year old kid (meaning 11 or 12 western age), Jo Gwon, who (especially in her first dance audition in the video) shows off a pretty good voice (for a kid) a really fantastically goofy knack for rocking up a crowd with wacky dances. With a little polish (see 5:40 - 6:40), I'm sure she could be the next product off the JYP shelf.

Meanwhile, the dance lesson part of the video (starting at 3:38) is just. plain. weird. at 4:48, you get to watch JYP, a big grown-up male, teaching a bunch of eleven and twelve year-old possible future products, all girls, how to twist their torsos like sexybacks (a skill he successfully imparted to his most successful proteges)...and it's just weird, is all. (Though when Jo Gwon, who's obviously there for her pipes and not her steps, tries to do these kinds of moves. . . it's really really funny in a cute, not-yet-perverted-or-commodified-youth, i-don't-understand-the-suggestions-this-dance-move-makes-so-i'm-just-imitating-my-dance-coach sort of way.)

Youtube is loaded with JYP Audition videos, ranging from pretty impressive to kinda cringeworthy, QUITE cringeworthy, even MORE cringeworthy, to, uh, this. As always, there are a few young girls who seem to have taught themselves to sing by watching The Little Mermaid over and over.

In other I Wanna Be A Star news, there's a new star getting a pretty big buildup these days. . . with one problem.

Her name: 혜나 or "Hye-na" in Korean, is being written on the posters in a way that could cause some, uh, confusion, if she ever goes international.

Does anybody else here spot the problem?


Anyway, here's one of her videos from youtube...this one gets kinda crazy in the middle.


And here's another. This one's pretty hot.


So, uh, good luck, Hyena.

"Thanks, Rob."

(A Very Special Update: Otto, of "I, Foreigner", in linking to this page, said some of the nicest things I've had said about my blog so far: (and he hasn't even read the stuff I deleted, thinking "too bizarre")  From the write-up:

If you are looking for a blog ... that will make you say “WTF!” before you burst out laughing, a blog that will make you wonder if this man even has a job to have time to find stuff like this, then look no further.

Thanks Otto. You just made my day, and possibly my week.

Ring a bell? Good lord I hate money stress

So what happens next?


this one's hat tip to schwim,

Duck Tales explains the financial crisis:

The won is dropping like a bag of unwanted kittens in a river.  I'm not sure whether I should send everything to Canada now, before it drops now, or send the minimum possible and hold onto my won until things get better.  Yup.  Things are bad enough that I'm actually THINKING about stuff like this.  In 2004 or so, 870 won bought a Canadian dollar.  Now, it takes a bit over 1100.  If I send a thousand dollars home, I'm losing about $300. 

Yech.

In Case You Missed It...

This video was buried near the end of the really long Andong Mask Festival post. . . and I wanted to bring more attention to it, because this was one of the loveliest experiences I've had in all my travels, and I'd like to share the wonder.

In case you said "Post too long already. Will not watch." -- if you did that, you made a mistake, missing out on this one.



Skip the rest if you like, but watch this video. (Hang on to the end, too: there's more.)

In Seoul on Saturday?

On Saturday October 4th at 1PM, I'm gonna be in the Starbucks near Kyungbok Station (Subway line 3). I'm gonna climb Inwang Mountain, a great little mountain right next to downtown Seoul, with important history in Korea's Shamanistic past. On the way down, we're gonna walk through a cool little preserved mountainside village, and end of in one of the nicest, tastiest coffee shops I've ever been to.

The climb's not too long, and not too difficult, so you shouldn't have much trouble. . . don't wear high heels or flip-flops, of course, and maybe bring an extra T-shirt to change into if it's hot, and a water bottle. I'd like to head out at about 1:30.

If you want to join me, come on! The best way to enjoy Korea is to get out and do stuff like this. Come to the Starbucks instructions, with pictures, in this video clip.


It helps if you send me an e-mail at roboseyo (at) gmail (dot) com, or send me a note on facebook (search for Roboseyo) so that I can expect you, and we don't leave anyone behind who wanted to come. Come and enjoy one of my favourite parts of Seoul with me.

-Roboseyo

Andong Mask Dance Festival, Scenery, and Really Really, Ridiculously Good Food

So I heard about this thing called the Andong Mask Dance Festival, one of those Korean culture touchstones and all. Girlfriendoseyo explained to me that Andong is the heartland of Korea's confucian heritage -- the guy whose face is on the 1000 won bill lived there, and his house made it onto the money, too.
So something cool is definitely cooking in Andong, and we both needed, badly, to get out of dodge, anyway.

What is the meaning of this picture?  Keep reading...

So Andong it was. Rattling around in the train, starting at Chongyangni in standing room only, and moving into seats after the first hour, we got out of the city, and began to wonder as the city dwindled away.

The countryside is checkered with rice-fields shaped both regular and irregular, on average, about this size:

A really overbearingly beautiful sky kept us looking out the window.
Rickety old train stations
Instead of the fancy new ones with radar motion detector sirens to whistle if you step over the yellow line: this.
Finally, we arrived in Andong, at about 1pm.

Lunch time. 

Now, possibly my favourite Korean food is JjimDalk -- a special kind of chicken dish with sweet and sour soy-based spicy sauce, clear chewy noodles, and some veggies (most notably onions, carrots and potatoes) tossed in for balance.  Good eatin' dear readers.  If you can't make it to Andong (though you really should), the best place I've found in Seoul so far is right next to Boshingak Bell by Jongno Station. . . but I'll write more about that place another time.

On Saturday, we went to Jjim Dalk street, where about a dozen restaurants serve the famous dish, and the ridonculously harsh competition, plus the reputation of the town, plus the reputation of the street, has refined each place to the point where no place outside of "Chicken Street" can come within the same flippin' ORBIT as these places.

The Jjim Dalk (찜닭), and dear readers, I believe I have eaten enough of it to be able to say, was perfect.  In every way.  The freshness of the meat and vegetables, the balance of the sweet honey tang with the dark soy, the spiciness just enough to bring the other flavours out on a now-sensitive tongue, and the portion was...uh...a lot.  Seriously, by the end of the meal, I was counting bones trying to figure out if they'd secretly given us more than one chicken.  "Two necks I tell you!  And thrEEEE legs!  They gave us at least one and a half birds!  Those over-feeding fiends!"  It might have just been one chicken in there, but it felt like seven by the end of the meal, and it looked like two for sure:
So we did what any sensible pair of epicures would do, given a portion of perfect food large enough to fill us up twice over...
Tried to eat it all anyway.  That was as far as we got. . . pretty respectable, though.  I managed to maw down a few more noodles after we took this picture, but it had reached the point where my mind and my throat were holding negotiations each time I tried to swallow, so we had to leave some behind.

Here's Girlfriendoseyo, looking as full as a . . . really full thing.

(A little more here:)

and more again about Andong JjimDalk at FatmanSeoul, here.

Girlfriendoseyo found a really nice guest house that was originally built 600 years ago by a writer.  

We slept in buildings like this.
And this.


Which were heated like this:
The old way, with a fire burning under the floor.

In the morning, we ate this:

some of which was probably taken out of these:

Pots for storing pickled side-dishes like kimchi.

The mask festival, then.  

It was cool.  Dancing, lots of people, the city put its best foot forward.  We didn't have time to catch TOO much of the mask dancing, what with everything else going on, and the weather and scenery being so splendid. . . but the mask stuff was cool, too.

Traveling to and from places was actually one of the highlights, as the scenery in Gyungsan province reminded me of the BC Interior, kind up up Okanagan Valley way, with the mountains a little lower and the land a little more domesticated with beautiful rice paddies.

The rice plants were nearly yellow, which means they're almost ready for harvest, and the heads were bowed almost right over.

Taken around Hahoe Folk Village, as the sun got low in the sky:Hahoe Village was in fine form itself: this might be one of the better pictures I've ever taken...

More of the Hahoe Folk Village countryside and sunset (with special guest Jumping Fish at 2:05):

People actually live in this village.  You can even stay there--a few of the places put up guests.

The sunset was amazing, from start to finish.

This was the performance spot where the musicians set up during the fireworks show. This is another of the better pictures I've taken in my life.

But the possible highlight (if you HAVE to choose between the countryside, the jjim dalk, and this) was the fireworks:

Now I'm sure I've spelled this wrong in Korean (feel free to correct me in the comments), but over at the folk village, they do this thing called 선유줄불놀이 Seonyu Julbulnori: 

Traditional Korean fireworks.

I'd explain the whole thing... but just watch the video.  It's worth it.  These things were so beautiful.

These fireworks were different than others -- usually the aim of a fireworks show is spectacle.  Big, loud, amazing, people say "WOW!" and small children scream in fright.  These ones were so mellow and peaceful -- like bright flower-petals floating to the ground, and it created an ethereal atmosphere that was gentle and lovely, instead of the usual, expected thrills that fireworks bring.  Maybe the cognitive dissonance: "This isn't what fireworks are supposed to be like!" heightened the experience, or the fact Girlfriendoseyo and I TOTALLY did not expect this experience... but I got blindsided by beauty this weekend, dear readers.  Gobsmacked around a bit.

Video: Fireworks.  Hang on for a surprise at the end.

(photo from Ohmynews)

Here's a great picture of the 줄불놀이 - Julbulnori - from this site.

and a few other places, where people with better cameras than mine took better pictures than mine, of the fireworks.

When English Teachers Don't Get The Support They Need. . .

My heart sinks every time I read a post like this.  From "I, Foreigner."

Yeah, getting native speaking teachers in every school would help Korea speak English better. . . but there's more to it than just sheer numbers.

My new philosophy is “Do as little as possible”.

If a student asks for help then I will help. If they don’t, then I won’t. I will teach the students who care and claim there wasn’t enough time to give everyone individual attention. The end result will be the same, so why should I stress myself out in a system that cares more about making everyone look good than about what the students learn?

I'm sure Korea's not the only place this happens. . . but wherever it happens, how dispiriting.

Sigh. Hang in there, Otto.

Happy Birthday K-Rok

A blogger whose blog I follow recently celebrated her 38th birthday (congrats), and dropped this hilarious line:

And if one more 23-year-old told me “age is just a number,” he was going to get kicked in the nads. And then he was going to get told: “pain is only in your head!” Of course age doesn’t matter when you’re 23, schmuck!

Congrats on your birthday, and woe to the next 23-year-old who rubs it in.