Happier News: My Brother Sultan Kebab Opens in Jongno

Know this guy?

Sultan Kebab, the wonderful "My Brother" place, has opened a second location right next to Jonggak Station, nearly across the street from Tomatillo. Look on your right when you come out of Jonggak Station exit 1 and walk toward Gwanghwamun on the main street front.

On the second floor of the same building is my favorite Indian Restaurant, Durga.

Omar, the owner,
has some new items on the menu, too: the baguette sandwich was nice, with a good chewy baguette, the revani was sweet and just heavy enough.



The grand opening is Tuesday, so I lucked out finding them open on Sunday evening. They were so new that some of the menu items hadn't even been programmed into the cash register yet...but the food was all there, readers. All there.

Buddha's Birthday...a bit of video.

The Parade in Seoul


The cutest float: Thomas, the Buddhist Tank Engine


outside Bulguksa Temple...
huh?


a kid playing ssireum with his mom in one of the parks in Gyeongju. Cute. Sweet bippy I envy Gyeongju their expanses of green stuff. (It had rained the night before, so it was extra pretty.)

Tell me how much I rock...

I showed Fatman Seoul and a few others' a nice little Ddeokbokki place Toppoki poktokpi place on Wednesday, and Fatman Seoul was kind enough to write it up. Go read it here.

I rule.

I also got what amounts to a shopping list from Robyn, a food blogger from New York (The Girl Who Ate Everything), and made her a map on Google Maps of all the places you can find the different foods she wanted to try in downtown Seoul. She's free to share it with anyone she likes, and I'm going to share it with you.

Go forth. Enjoy. Some of these are repeats from the food map I gave Brian earlier, and shared on this site in January. Some of them are new.

View Robyn's Food List in a larger map

Me likey this song.

Not a bliss-out, but I'm happy with Bill Callahan right now. His song "Eid Ma Clack Shaw" (he dreams the answer to his questions about life, and they are "Eid Ma Clack Shaw" haw haw haw). The rest of his album is soothing and spare, with just enough wit and pop to keep me happy. Imagine Nick Drake with a sense of humor and a baritone voice.

Go listen here.

I'm also happy because one of my favorite students from my last job just contacted me and wants to hang out, and I made another restaurant map for a pal, of places she should visit while in Korea, and she liked it, too. Also, I've been working out lately, and am starting to see the results, and I've recently developed the power of flight.* Yay me!

(* one of the sources of my current happiness may or may not be fallacious)

Corporal Punishment in Korea's Schools

Brian in Jeollanamdo's latest post calls bull on the education officials who claim foreign native teachers are not "ethically qualified" to teach Korea's children, when Korean teachers hit students with sticks, or humiliate them by forcing them to take off their skirts. Brian's article is rich with links to recent news stories and articles about the issue of corporal punishment, and a good place to get a quick primer on the topic.

see, sometimes stuff like this happens in Korea. (caught on cellphone camera) (warning: shocking videos of violence against children)


And this...



In response to public embarrassment over videos like this, rather than, say, re-training and firing teachers who hit their kids, teachers banned cellphone use in classrooms. ARGH!

yet the moral fiber of the native English teachers is called into question more often than the Korean teachers who do stuff like that. (read more about it at Brian) fact is, the foreigners working in Korea's schools are on a super-short choke chain leash, while the Korean teachers know that it's pretty much impossible for them to get fired, once they land that vaunted public school job.

I had a student once tell me that in Korea, the stick a parent uses to beat their child is called the "love stick," and the old trope that abusive teachers are the only ones who care enough to hit the kids still circulates from time to time.

Here's the Metropolitician's old post about his own problems with the Korean Teachers' Union.

And here's a picture of a white guy photoshopped into a picture of Anapji pond

And here's a picture of a white guy photoshopped into a picture of Anapji pond.
(to get the inside joke)

Help a mother out.

On Ireport, where people can submit their own articles on CNN's webpage, Stephannie White, the mother of Mike White, the teen-aged boy mysteriously killed in a Daegu sauna last year, has written an article about her struggle to plow through all the obstructions and foot-dragging, and get justice for her son. Link it, send it to your friends, blog it, digg it, tell people about it. If it stays at the top of the "most read" articles, it might be featured on CNN's Mother's Day program. Raising awareness and putting the story into the international press might be the thing that lights the fire under the judges and lawmakers involved in the case (given how sensitive Korea is to negative international press coverage) to get this thing resolved, and get some desperately-needed answers.

Hang in there, Stephannie.

Learn more about Mike White's death, other foreigner's deaths, and how you can help Stephannie White in her search for justice, at her website, Mightie Mike. Brian in Jeollanamdo's done a really good job of keeping on top of developments in that case.

A bit more about the weekend...

May day and the kickoff to the Hi Seoul Festival hit a snag when protestors stormed the stage. Yes, the lunatic fringe is at it again, but as far as I can tell, mostly they're just damaging their own credibility now. A year ago, they had the majority of public opinion of the beef thing, but by over-playing their hand, turning violent(er) and not knowing when to walk away, they've gone from seeming like democracy freedom fighters to public nuisances. Memo to the protestors: blocking traffic is not a good way to gain public sympathy; nor is attacking police in a place where there might be international reporters, and where there ARE lots of foreigners. If there's one thing Koreans can all agree on, it's that the country must not be made to look bad in the world's eyes. Thanks to Korea Beat, I found these videos of the protest, at JetSetZero.

Next: Tuesday's Cinquo de Mayo party in Jonggak was great, I met a bunch of cool people, and saw some old pals. Girlfriendoseyo even came out and had a nice time chatting with some of my blog pals. That makes me happy. In other news, that evening, a food blogger from New York named Robyn (site she writes for, her own blog) showed up in Seoul, and was greeted by a few of Seoul's foodies. I managed to capture this wonderful picture of what happens when you eat out with food bloggers/writers.

I met some really cool people... I hope my jokes were as funny as they sounded in my head. I suffer from the "will say anything to get a laugh" illness, which people who know me take in stride, but which is sometimes surprising to new people, when I start a sentence with "So a funny thought occured to me while watching walrus porn the other day..." or somesuch.

I'm working through my Gyeongju pictures now. Some good stuff there. Soon, readers. Soon.

Until I get my Camera Back... A Question

First: the question.

Does anyone here know of a good Korean language tutor who operates in the Dongdaemun-gu/Jongno area? I'm looking to bone up on my Korean more actively. Please either contact me through one of the channels on the sidebar, or leave a comment on this post.

Option two:
Or...if I can find two other people who want to join me and take a (cough of embarassment) low level Korean course on Saturday afternoons, we've officially reached the threshhold of three at which time Korean language schools will open a class for us. I know of one that's reasonably priced, offers a once-a-week class from 2-5, and if you join me and sign up, I'll show you one of the awesome restaurants I know in Jongno every Saturday after class. So if that sounds fun to you (I can at least guarantee the food'll be good), leave a way of contacting you in the comments.

OK. So I had a great response to the female bloggers page, and that made me happy. I'll update the list with the omissions named in the comments when I get the chance. Until then...

This weekend I went to Gyeongju for the first time. Yeah. It's embarrassing that I've been living in Korea for so long, and holding forth on Korean culture and stuff, and never made it to some of the places people visit in their first month, but in the last year, I've been filling in some of those gaps, getting my butt out to Andong, and now Gyeongju.

Next on the list: Jeju Island and Seokcho (which I've been through, on the way to Geumgang Mountain in North Korea [ha! I've been there! Have you?] but never actually stopped in to see).

That said, even if there are gaps, I try not to talk about things I don't know about, and am happy to admit when I'm wrong, so back off, huh?

Next:
I went to Seokguram Grotto on Buddha's Birthday, which is the only day of the year they open the glass barrier and let you walk in and around the Buddha, which is one of the most impressive Buddhas in all Asia. Here's a picture of it,

but as usual with superlative works of art (and this Buddha scores alongside VanGogh's Irises, and a hair ahead of Klimt's Judith as the two greatest works of art I've seen in person), seeing a picture and seeing it in person is about equal to the difference between reading the lyrics and sheet music to Bob Dylan's album Blood on the Tracks, and listening to it in a quiet room on a rainy afternoon the day after breaking up with your longtime love.

Then, I went and left my camera at Girlfriendoseyo's house yesterday, so I'll have to post pics later.

Until then, here are two pictures I filed away "to post sometime" and never got around to doing.

1. seen in a halloween costume shop in Namdaemun (stolen off a friend's facebook album)
would a mask like that fly in North America? Just wonderin'.

Next: all those people who continue to debate the appropriacy of Shin Saimdang on the Korean 50000 won note (have any of you seen these yet? What's going on? I still haven't), here's an image that clearly sends the message of female empowerment...another option, perhaps?
(more of my suggestions for the 50 000 won note here)

And another of those culturally unaware, awkward acronyms...
"Dude, I'm totally arguing with my girlfriend so much this week. She must have Pre-Medical School."

April's K-Blog Of The Month: Female K-bloggers - Updated

I put out a request for Female K-bloggers over at Roboseyo a little while ago, and got a fantastic response. You see, it was with dismay that I saw the all female metablog "Naked In The Sauna" go defunct, and I really do think that a feminine view is important, and sometimes missing on some of the big K-blogs.

Sometimes, there are questions only a female can answer about Korea (at least without sounding presumptuous), and with that in mind, I am publishing this as a list of female bloggers in Korea: if you want to be on the list, let me know, and if you know someone who deserves to be on the list, or if one of these goes dead or defunct, let me know, too. I plan on linking this source on The Hub of Sparkle's getting-better-but-still-in-progress "Community" page, which I hope will eventually become a pretty good, regularly updated, one-stop "Get the basics in one place" source.

I'll try to put these into general categories, though of course some of these blogs will fit numerous categories, and being nothing more than a mere human myself, I might get a few wrong at first. Please be kind enough to correct me politely.