Bubbles.

So this place next door to my school has a bubble machine they run from the balcony all day long.

It's fun to watch people walking by, suddenly startled by bubbles drifting into their paths, and then avoiding, or chasing, or popping, or swatting at them. (See the bubbles?)


When they touch the pavement, the bubbles usually pop, of course, as bubbles do.

But when it rains, and the pavement is wet, the bubbles stick in half-spheres, like bits of glow growing out of the pavement, on one of the busiest streets in Korea, and people walk by without even noticing them, and it makes me happy that such fascinating little things are all around me.



Most people don't even notice them, and, perversely, that makes me happy too, because if most people don't notice them, but they give me so much great joy when I spot them, it makes me think. How much of the wonderfullness (wonderfulousity?) in the world goes unnoticed -- is the difference between hating and enjoying, and immensely loving your life, just a matter of paying more attention to little wonders, and noting the little wonders for what they are? And if 99.9 % of the people don't notice these little bubble-globes, how many brilliant little scintillae am I also missing, because I haven't learned yet how to pay enough attention to them?

To paying more attention!
Have a vivid day.
Rob

Tamie wants me to post more often.

So this is for her.

Check out this excellent, thoughtful post I just read in one of my friends' blogs.

Among other things I did while sorting through all my stuff. . .

I also sifted through scads of old photo negatives, and got London Drugs to scan the best ones, the keepers, onto CD, so that I could preserve them in digital form.

Here are some of the best ones.

Matt's new haircut in Japan


Me with my favourite class ever -- from my first year in Korea.


Me in a field of dandelions.


Me in a tree in Stanley park.


I hid a camera in my sleeve, and took a picture with my university's president as I walked across the stage to receive my diploma, at my university graduation.


Kids playing at a palace on Korean Thanksgiving Day.


Dancing with an old lady. Full story here.


One silly Christmas: finishing a roll of film with mom, Deb and Dan.


At an airport in Ontario.


My second favourite picture of my mom and my nephew. (The favourite one wasn't in my pile of negatives. Dad has it somewhere.) I think this one really shows the special relationship my nephew and my mom had.


Hope those pictures made you happy!

love:
Rob

Look what I found!

Highway 22 in Alberta is also known, appropriately, as the Cowboy Trail.


Here are some pictures from google images. (See? Who needs a camera, really?)

Curses!

I have mentioned before in this space how I have no luck with cameras.

I always either lose them, forget them at home, or forget that I have them, and so fail to take any pictures. Any way you slice it, the end result is that I finish my trips with few or no pictures. It always seems to go the same way. The pictures in the posts below were all taken with my cellphone camera, which I had to turn on and wait forty-seconds before I could use it, so many of the prettiest views I had in the road never got photographed, because they were gone before I could take a picture.

Here are the pictures I wish I could show you.

___ the mountain ranges that kept seeming to turn up exactly at the spots in the rockies where there was a passing lane, so that I was always so concerned with passing or being passed, and navigating corners safely, that I never got around to taking pictures of any of the snow-capped mountains footed by mirror-still lakes.

___ Highway 22 Northbound from CrowsNest Pass, Southern Alberta. If you ever get a chance to drive around in Alberta, you need to just get on Highway 22 and drive as much of it as you can. It runs parallel to Highway 2 (or Queen Elizabeth Way 2), the main corridor from Lethbridge to Calgary, Red Deer, and Edmonton; however, instead of having towns and gas stations all along its roadsides, it has huge foothills covered with yellow grass and cattle ranches, fences enclosing giant acreages, and the occasional deeply rutted river valley, steep-banked, and widened by floods.

___ The shores of Long Beach, Vancouver Island. The vegetation here slopes up like the front of a race car, razed down to that shape by terrifying winds and storm weather that washes entire trees ashore during the winter. Climbing on those logs was like being a little kid again, and watching the giant waves crash in (best surfing in Canada on Long Beach), then seeing what those waves did during the winter (huge piles of tree-trunk-sized driftwood right up next to the forest) was humbling and elevating at the same time.

___ The picture I'm glad I CAN'T show you: Banff downtown (previously one of the prettiest, cutest main strips in any town), all under construction as they expand it to fit Banff's growing tourist industry (sigh. so sad)

Imagine taking a highway exit expecting, looking forward to this:


And instead getting this.


Quite a let-down, unless you happen to have a fetish for heavy machinery. (Which I, categorically, do NOT).

___ I wish I could show you pictures of my friends. Especially Mel and her two wonderful little boys (you can click on the link to her blog on the side of this page and see that), and pictures of Tamie and me in Lynn Canyon, and me and Anila and Antaya watching TV together, as cozy as kittens.

Here's a picture that almost perfectly recreates my first experience in Agassiz since October 2005.





Along with my camera curse, I have a sunglasses curse.

Every time I travel, I lose a pair of sunglasses. The trip where I danced with some crazy old ladies was the first trip that started this trend (I'd finally shelled out for a pair of shades I quite liked, and they broke. Shouldn't have sat on them, I guess), then I bought another pair in Japan, only to lose them in Malaysia. I bought another pair (with playboy bunnies on them) in Malaysia (you can see them here) but one of the tiny little nuts holding the glasses part onto the frame came off, so you know it's only a matter of time for them. Well, at a random gas station with my kid sister Antaya, I saw a pair that I quite liked, bought them, and used them all through the sixty-plus hours of driving I did in July, but then, on my last day of driving, I think I took them off to use an ATM machine, or to put Irish Cream syrup in the gas station coffee (didn't help the coffee, either) and forgot to pick them back up again (the same way I lost the camera I got with my university graduation present money, except that time I was climbing a mountain, and changing out of sweat-soaked clothes). So I'm back to my usual cursed, sunglasses-free self, thinking about just wearing a hat all August, rather than getting heat exhaustion from the criminally hot sun all month long, and needing nine hours of sleep a night.

My usual policy with things I keep losing, breaking, or otherwise seeming to have bad luck with, is just to give up. I will no longer buy expensive cameras or sunglasses, because I'm just throwing my money away. Of course, there are some of those kinds of battles I WILL continue to fight -- for example, I will continue zipping up any slippery flies on any cursed pairs of pants I may one day own, but I certainly won't get myself frustrated buying cameras and sunglasses, when they just get lost, and I prefer journals and hats anyway.

sw

More about Canada.

Driving to Creston was really pretty.


But Vancouver Island, where I saw Matt's older brother Joel get married, really took the cake. We travelled all over that island, and every corner held another gorgeous view. Really, I just can't get over how pretty Vancouver Island was: I might just have to spend six years there at some point in my life. :)




In Creston, I gave Becca's kids a clown nose to play with. They really enjoyed playing with it. Carrie-Ann smiled and laughed when she saw it on her brother Matthias. . .




Bethany had a habit of taking it out of Carrie Ann's hand so she could play with it.


But once she finally got her hands on it, she knew what to do.

This is one of my favourite songs right now. More about my trip to Canada soon.

Warning: it's noisy.


That's "I'll Believe in Anything" by Wolf Parade, the song that's been cropping up on every mix CD I make these days.

This is another one of my favourite bands these days. The White Stripes rock. They have a new CD out.

This is noisy too.

Rag and Bone



This isn't noisy. I like it too.

Scythian Empire


Even Mel, who hates when I talk about music, liked this guy when I played him for her in 2005.

His name's Andrew Bird.

Back in Korea Safely!

This was funny.



This one has a bad word in it, but when I sent it to my brother, he said "Yeah, I laughed because it was exactly your sense of humour." It's true. It's basically the video I'd make if I had the know-how and needed to make an ad for a fictional product.

Power Thirst


The cicadas are buzzing outside. That's right: I'm back in Korea. I borrowed my brother's car and buzzed all over the Pacific Northwest -- it was sick how much driving I did, from Red Deer Alberta, to Agassiz, to Portland, Oregon, back to Langley, up to Comox (Vancouver Island) ALL over Vancouver Island, to see Matt's older brother Joel's wedding:

this is where Joel had his wedding. Around the corner and down a trail is a heart-stoppingly beautiful waterfall, beside which he and his wife Emily exchanged vows. The country in Vancouver Island is just so beautiful, I don't even know what to say, except that I sure loved driving around it for three days.

And the Finlaysons are a wonderful family, and I know I'll always have a home there in Comox if I need it.




After that I drove back up to Abbotsford, then to Comox to see my sister Rebecca, and finally back to Red Deer. Altogether, I logged more than 65 hours driving around the Pacific Northwest. Sick. I think it put off my owning a car for another two years. Not until I own a cabin by a mountain lake.

Two things.

1. I took it all away! I can't believe it!

I had twelve (count'em, twelve) boxes of stuff left behind from my time in Canada, that I'd basically asked my dad to store in my old bedroom closet when I left for Korea in 2005. Problem is, then Dad went and moved, and I had no more place to keep all my stuff that I might, possibly, maybe need in the future when I go to grad school, have kids, or feel a hankering to read my old university textbooks.

Well, thing is, I spent so much time storing it, but I couldn't even remember what I had in there anymore -- must not have been very important to me!

Plus, I had no more PLACE to store it, as my family'd all spread out and moved on from our Agassiz times. My brother was kind enough to keep all twelve boxes !!! for me while I planned to come back to Canada, but also included the proviso that I MUST do something about it when I DO get back to Canada.

So this week, my main task has been to go through all that stuff and find out what's REALLY important, and what's just staying around for no good reason.

I finished. Four boxes of books and old clothes, a bag of trash, and probably one box I'll have to send to Korea, and one box Dad said I could send and have him keep at his house -- for some of the keepsakes that are irreplaceable, like Mom's baby diary of her pregnancy with me, yearbooks, etc.. It's amazing, when you think about it, how much clutter people generate in their lives -- living transiently, moving around, sure simplifies what's ACTUALLY important and what isn't. Today I loaded old clothes and stuff with "memories" (not very spectacular ones though) onto a truck and passed them on at value village. By the same token, I brough a whack of photo negatives to London Drugs to have them scanned onto CD for me. It'll be good to have that when I've passed on a lot of the other relics.

I feel freer now. Less encumbered, to be rid of so much stuff. Stuff. Yech. Now the trick is just not to think about it, so I don't start second-guessing the choices I made about what to keep and what to get rid of. Oh gee.

But really, the stuff isn't home. There's not really any such thing as home, other than the place where you feel safe and loved. (Watch Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events for more great thoughts on home. Or listen to Tom Waits.) Having that stuff around doesn't make me more in touch with my past, and getting rid of it doesn't unmoor me, because I know who I am, and who I was, and I've already learned what I had to learn from those times of my life.

Still, it was strange taking it away to the Value Village deposit.


2.
You know the stuff that everybody says is "great" but it just doesn't resonate with you? Like when somebody says "You HAVE to see Braveheart! It's, like, the BEST movie EVER!" and you watch it, and it just doesn't do anything for you? These days, as much as everybody loves Bob Dylan, I just don't dig it. I'd rather someone go for clarity than obscurity in their lyrics. His singing style is very expressive, and his best (Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks) holds up with anything ever made, but I just don't find myself reaching for my Bob Dylan CDs very often.

And then the other stuff that people sniff at, but that always makes you happy? As lightly as he's regarded by many, I just can't stop enjoying Cat Stevens. Beyonce also always makes me smile, and by gum, what's wrong with having Hanson on your hard drive? I like some of the classic stuff too, but not because it's Very Influential in the History Of Music, because it's friggin great music, enjoyable and worthwhile! Maybe "Desolation Row" is deep, but "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" (and "Wake Me Up Before You Go") make me want to dance!

Isn't it funny how we can feel self-conscious about other people's ideas of "greatness"? Now I'm guilty of doing this myself -- as a music afficionado (which is a music snob's equivalent to a cynic saying "I'm not a cynic; I'm just a realist"), I sometimes put on airs and say sniffy things like "Yeah, that's not bad music. . . for its intended audience" or "No, if you listen to it a few more times, it'll grow on you"

But I've recently decided to stop listening to music because somebody said it's great, and only listen to it if I enjoy it. I'll still listen to anything, but there are some styles that just don't make me really, compulsively listen again and again. And I'm OK with that. I deleted "Songs in the Key of Life" and Pink Floyd from my hard drive, for the same reason I threw out my "Chaucer" book -- as impressive as it looks to have it on the shelf, I don't actually read it.

If it turns out I miss it later, I can always replace it, and then I'll know there was more to it than I thought.

By the way, everybody reading this should find out about a singer from Toronto named Feist. I'm not saying it's great, I'm not saying YOU'll like it, but I do. Also, an album called "From Here We Go To Sublime" by The Fields.


bye now.

Rob

mmmBop!

My dad gets married tomorrow.

A good counsellor, a good listener, and a good conversationalist will allow a person to set the terms of the conversation, rather than guiding the conversation to his/her own personal conversation comfort zones through too much talking, conversation manipulation, or leading questions. Good listeners get out of the way, and only assert their presence enough to keep the speaker moving in the right direction.


I think the best poems are that way, too: rather than TELLING you what you ought to see, and feel about a particular instant in time, a good poem just says "Look." and lets you taste a little experience, and good poets will put you right there beside them, so much that you don't even notice their presence: you're just sitting there yourself, looking at the same thing a poet noticed once.


It sounds so simple to use words to clear a way for a reader's own imagination to find a beautiful space, but then, it sounds so simple get a medical doctorate: just go to school for years, and work really hard! It's easy, too, I suppose, to be successful in business: find a need, fill it better than your competition, and make sure people find out! Easy peasy, lemon squeezey!


Rilke said, "Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines."


Here are some poems worth a lifetime of gathering sweetness, because instead of just saying


HEY READER! HERE IS SOME SWEETNESS I FOUND, AND NOW I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT!


the poet just says: "I was here." or, even better, "look"


and why do the poems need to MEAN anything more than what they say, really? can't it be enough to say, "a frog jumped into a pond. Plop." (that's a loose translation of the most famous haiku ever written)


(all translated by Kevin O'Rourke, from a book on Korean Poetry I carry with me every day)


Ha Wiji:
(untitled -- but a perfect, perfect picture)


The guests have gone; the gate is closed;
the breeze has dropped; the moon is sinking low,
I open the wine-jar again and recite a verse of poetry.
Perhaps this
is all the joy a recluse ever knows.





Evening; Self Portrait
by Cho Byunghwa


I've cast off in life what may be cast off;
I've cast off in life what may not be cast off,
and here I am, just as you see me.




Prank
by Kim Namju


A sunbeam
the size of a
chipmunk's tail
sits
on the doorstep
of my cell.
I'd like to scissor slice it,
pop it down my throat,
melt my frozen body
as spring snow melts.






(this next one is the best erotic poem I've ever read)
hwang chini


I'll cut a piece from the side
of this interminable winter night
and wind it in coils beneath the bedcovers, warm and fragrant as the spring breeze,
coil by coil
to unwind it the night my lover returns.





if you don't like poetry, tough. Maybe my next post will be about the transformers movie or my favourite foods in Canada or trucks and shiny power tools. But for now, think about something beautiful you've seen, and how YOU'd share it with the people around you.


I have to go to bed now. My dad's getting married tomorrow.


love

Rob

Why I love Where the Wild Things Are

Yes, it's connected.



Tamie (in the comments to my last post) wants me to give more information on just why I love "Where the Wild Things Are".

1. The story is so simply written, yet fantastic -- in the OTHER meaning of the word -- full of fantasy and whimsy. It's melancholy and beautiful and a bit eerie but sad and great. One of the few pieces of art for children that dares to strike that haunting, slightly scary, sad tone that sticks in the mind forever, and makes fairy tales about forests and wolves so fascinating. (Others are: The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Iron Giant, The Neverending Story, the most recent Peter Pan movie, and, surprisingly enough, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events - I don't know about the books, but the movie nailed it, perfectly balancing lively and sad. [For another amazing, maybe best ever, example of this literary tone, read "Coraline" by Neil Gaiman -- in an interview, the author (creator of the Sandman graphic novels) says it's a strange book because adults read it as horror, but children read it as adventure. He's exactly right.] I haven't read it, but I think Alice in Wonderland might match this tone. A world that's amazing but a little scary, too.)

2. The artwork is just SO darn beautiful.

Exactly the kind of monsters a kid would want to play with.

and 3. Max is exactly like me. (Though I'm sure 80% of the kids, big or small, in the world, would say that - that's the amazing thing about some stories. When the main character is like everyone.)

I love "Where The Wild Things Are"

But as much as any of those other things, WTWTA is one of the items from my childhood that I had buzzing through my head all through the time I grew up, but (as with most childhood things experienced before one learns to start making lists and names of everything), I never caught the book's title. I just had this little, mysterious box in the corner of my mind with monsters and trees growing out of bedrooms and wild things that were scary and funny and who wanted to play with me, and who would protect me from the other wild things in my closet, jumping out of the picture frame above my brothers' bed. (During the day it was something like a windmill, but at night it seemed to be a wolf, looking at me.) Many many years later, I was in my buddy Jon's dorm room at university, and he had a children's book on his shelf. "How strange," I thought, "that this fellow has a children's book on his shelf when he's going to a very grown up university". So I pulled it off the shelf and there it was: that strange little corner in my memory had a title! I got really excited.

There were only three other times I remember that happening. 1. the song With or Without You, by U2. I remember the bassline and the vocalist singing "I can't live with or without you" -- I knew U2 was cool because my 9th grade music appreciation teacher, Mr. Davies, liked them, and Achtung Baby was the first CD I bought, on the same day as I bought my CD player (can still sing all the words to "One" "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" and most of the words to "Mysterious Ways"), and we listened to "Zooropa" all the way across the prairies when we moved to BC, but I didn't know they sang "With Or Without You", or that THAT was the title to the elusive song. Then I borrowed "The Joshua Tree" from my buddy Geoff in high school, put it on, and heard "Where the Streets Have No Name" -- knew it from 9th grade music class -- "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" -- knew it. Thanks, Mr. Davies. And then "With Or Without You" came on, and it clicked. I knew that U2 wrote that song, and that they were my favourite band before I even knew their name.

2. "Peace Train" by Cat Stevens. I heard the melody on the radio once way back when we lived in Cobourg (ie, before my fifth birthday), and it stuck in my head, and always made me happy; when I wanted to feel happy in Elementary school, I'd hum that tune to myself from time to time. When I was working at the Kilby Store and Farm, Kjersti told me Cat Stevens ranked with John Lennon as one of the greats, that had that magic je ne sais quoi in their songwriting, and I was curious. I listened to my friend's Cat Stevens "Best Of", and it was good -- really good, I became a fan! But it didn't have "Peace Train" on it -- so later I bought a different Best Of for myself, and that DID have "Peace Train" and I realized that Cat Stevens, like U2, had been making me happy for years before I even knew it was him.

3. 99 Red Balloons by Goldfinger -- I didn't know who sang this song until I looked it up just now, but I've heard it a lot in karaoke bars (noraebang) in Korea. The word "99" tipped me off: I thought it was about Wayne Gretzky (see top of blog post) when I was a kid, and I thought the words went "99 Is Superstar" instead of "99 decision street. . . " "99 dreams I have had" etc.. Goldfinger is NOT one of my alltime favourite artists now. The others still are.

These days, I'd have to rank Radiohead, Tom Waits, Spencer Krug, and probably Prince, above U2 on my favourite artists list, but that's not so much a slam on U2 as praise to the other guys. Especially Tom Waits. I played some Tom Waits for #2 (see my second post previous) and she said "It sounds like he's singing straight to my heart" and she hit it bang on the nose.

Have any of you had that experience? Finding back something you thought you'd lost from your childhood? It's pretty cool, because it's not often nostalgia and discovery combine.

Where the Wild Things Are

I just wanted to make a post to tell everyone how much I love "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak. They're making it into a movie, which I'll never watch, for the same reason I avoided seeing "The Cat in the Hat" and the film version of "Rob's Most Precious Unspoiled Memories".

There's another post below in case you haven't read it.

Love
Rob

Little did I know. . .

Dear Melissa, who updates her blog almost daily, which is amazing to me, says that people will post more comments if I post more often.

:)

but I'm not gonna start apologizing. I have my own things going on these days.

Among them,

1. Yoga class! I'm taking a yoga class and it's great! It's ALL in Korean so I just have to keep popping my head up to see what everybody else is doing. That's fun. I park myself as close to the center of the room as possible, so that whatever direction my spine and limbs are twisted, I'll still be able to crane my neck and see someone. I'm starting to recognize some of the regulars. That's fun.

The yoga building's elevator is so slow you have to either laugh or punch something, or (best of all) laugh and take the stairs. Punching the stairs hurts.

The upshot of this is I feel great. I eat lunch early, do my last morning class, spend two hours writing, go to yoga, spend an hour writing, eat, teach my evening classes. Those kinds of days make me happy.

But they keep me away from my house, where I can post on my blog.

Sorry, eh? You'll be happy to know that, while I'm tantalizing all of you with the missing details of my life, I AM enjoying those missing details immensely.


2. I'm not ready to tell everybody about number two yet.

3. The weather's beautiful, so Im back in exploring-my-neighbourhood mode, trying new restaurants and sandwich joints and tea rooms, and finding the most comfortable place to bust out my word processor and type.

4. I got a word processor. Did I mention this before? It's a little machine simpler, sturdier, and cheaper than a laptop, that I can carry with me ALL the TIME and type on it, so that I can work on my stories or plays any time I want, instead of having to wait till I get home to my laptop, or carrying my laptop everywhere and worrying about a rainstorm, or a thief, or a dropping incident (of the clumsy mishandling brand OR the petting zoo brand), or any such terrible thing ruining my laptop. This is great. Every week I'm typing about ten pages on my word processor that wouldn't have gotten written if I had to return to my room to work.
Along with all the pages I would have typed anyway. It makes my writing SO mobile.

5. I get to plan going back to Canada.

6. I just had a perfect weekend. I saw Ocean's 13 (I enjoy both George Clooney AND Heist flicks, so the Ocean's films are great for me -- kind of like eating Barbeque Chicken and talking with Matt -- two things I like teaming up together!) I saw my old friends from SLP, and had a great time with them -- they're so comfortable, because we worked together and travelled together. Then on Sunday I ate a Canadian style truckstop breakfast with Anthony (who's a class act), and next I climbed a mountain with Matt and Heyjin in my old neighbourhood, after which I sat outside a 7-11 and drank Japanese beer in big cans, talked and laughed with my best friend and his wife, and when that was finished, we went to a sauna, and then we had GREAT barbeque pork for REAL cheap in Matt's neighbourhood -- the good things just kept piling up this weekend. It was almost unbelievable, how much ultimate awesomeness can fit into a weekend. A bit like this video (if you're not up on your pop culture, don't bother, but if you are, your head might just explode):






Fun conversation class:
The Would You Rather Game. My favourite this week was
"Would you rather be intensely aware of others' body odours, OR have a bad body odour, but not realize it?"

Love you all!

Take care, eh?

Rob

I seem to have lost all my readers.

Not a single comment on my Buddha's Birthday extravaganza!

Very well. Here goes:

This is a game I play with Sally. She says "Guess what?"

and I answer with totally silly suggestions until she gets bored of my randomness and just tells me what's on her mind.

(We stole this game idea from my dear friend Tiff, who just got married, and also, is awesome.)

Here are some examples:

"Hey Rob! Guess what?"

"Your elbows are growing teeth."
"You learned how to pick things up with your toes."
"Gravity will stop working from 2-4pm on Wednesday for maintenance."
"From now on, all you need is luck instead of love, and the Beatles song will be changed accordingly."

And so forth.

So, all my wonderful readers:

Guess what?

(keen points for making me laugh)



(I watched game 5 of the Stanley Cup hockey final today on tape delay, after avoiding computers all day long so I wouldn't be tempted to check the score. I explained to my Korean students how, once a Canadian's hometeam is eliminated, Canadians will always root for any Canadian team still playing for the Stanley Cup. After that epic meltdown in game five (an own goal in an elimination game? Come ON, Canada! That's humiliating! As humiliating as visiting your wife's aerobics class for a session and collapsing! [backstory to that comment]) I get to explain the phrases "meltdown" "go down in flames" "choke" and "crash and burn" as well as "mental toughness" "resilience" and "clutch" (in the negative) to my students today. At least the MVP (and all the stars) on the winning team was Canadian.)

The Buddha's Birthday festival

Let it be known that I added pictures to this post, and a few more comments, and a few more jokes: go ahead and reread it. The jokes really are that good. Really. And if you'll believe that the jokes are that good, I have some riverfront property in Seoul to sell you!


Here's me (Superman) Robin (friend from Agassiz, in pink [come to think of it, I should have worn my Batman shirt. Har har har.]) and Matt (my best friend/brother), at the Buddha's Birthday Lantern Festival Parade.

I think I glowed in the dark last Sunday night when I went to bed, I was so happy.

Thursday the 24th was Buddha's birthday, a major holiday here in Korea (not as big as Christmas in North America, but definitely a bigger party than Easter).

According to legend, when baby Buddha was born, he took seven steps, including one in each direction (north, south, etc.), and then pointed with one hand at the sky and one at the earth. There were numerous images of the baby Buddha standing in the center of an opening lotus flower (don't know what happened to his mother, but there you have it), standing and pointing up with his right hand and down with his left.





See?

But anyway, whether he sprang forth from a flower like Venus from a shell, or came from a mommy and a daddy like most other human beings, the fact remains that Buddhism, Protestant Christianity and Confucianism vie with eachother for status of most dominant cultural influence on the Korean mind (with Confucianism winning in a rout, in my opinion).

(Did you know Confucius is in the guinness book of world records for the man with the longest genealogy in the world? There are still people in China who can chart their ancestry to Confucius, named "K'ung Pu" in Chinese [yes, that K'ung Fu], something like eighty-five generations, and more than a million descendants later.)

Well, Sunday morning, I met my friend for a truckstop breakfast in Itaewon, at a bar called "The Rocky Mountain Tavern", where you can not only watch hockey games on tape delay, you can eat eggs and bacon, and hash-browns and toast, just like at Denny's, except, instead of going "Wow, this greasy-spoon coffee is awful," you go "Wow. This awful coffee is just like home!" (That's when I knew it was time to go back to Korea -- when even Tim Horton's coffee stopped being a joy, and started being commonplace to me.) Then, after a short interlude at home, I met my friend Robin from Agassiz, who now lives in a suburb south of Seoul (still accessible by subway -- YAY Korea!) and we went for a stomp around my neighbourhood to see the lantern festival.

We met up with two other friends, named Narae and Yunmi, two funny, smart ladies I meet at my school, and we wandered through downtown Seoul. Entire roads near the Jogyesa Temple (one of the most important temples in Seoul) had been closed for the festival, with stage shows, music performances, martial arts demonstartions, and some really good break-dancing, and also some really cute junior (kid-sized) break-dancing. There were booths demonstrating Buddhist and Korean culture, including food samples, painting and drawing, costume and outfits, and so forth. As the day wore on, we chatted and wandered around different neighbourhoods, ending up back at my favourite restaurant in all of Seoul (and it takes some doing to earn that status with me), to eat some sparkling (meaning delicious, not shiny) Indian food, then stepping out of the restaurant just in time to see the first parts of the parade pass at the next intersection up.

The parade was just like a western parade, except totally different. Take all the kilts and uniforms and change them into traditional korean robes and dresses, and switch the high school floats with people demonstrating Korean swordplay or old ladies carrying lotus flowers, and replace bagpipes with traditional Korean gongs, cymbals, drums and shrill double-reed instruments. And no shriners. Or church groups, seeing as it was Buddha's birthday. I guess the Christians stayed home that day. . . or maybe changed their stripe for an afternoon.

Well, with my friend Robin beside me, and amazing Indian food in my belly, and a day of walking around at my back, I found my best friend/brother Matt watching the parade near my house, and sat with him-- I don't know how the day could have gotten much better, short of random poeple walking up to me and saying "You seem like a nice guy. Here. Have some cash." I told Robin that if I were any happier, there'd be two of me; the whole downtown was full of celebration and people dressed in their finest Korean clothes.

The park near my house was all strung up with a latticework of lamps hanging from every high point to every other high point, all glowing with candles or electric light. The whole park, surrounded by walls to block light, was dark except these orange and green orbs hanging all around. From crashing cymbals and music outside, to this great quietness inside the park, and the peaceful spell of paper lanterns was a stunning contrast. The pictures didn't turn out, so to help you imagine how beautiful the park was, look at the picture below, and use your imagination to replace all the Audrey Hepburn with glowing, hanging paper lanterns.



Pretty lovely, wasn't it?

By the time Robin spotted the cotton candy she'd been seeking all afternoon, I was randomly grinning to split my face, and jumping up and down unprompted. It was all I could do to keep from dancing around like the crazy Dutch tourguide who accompanied Heyjin's tour group.




It's been a good time. Buddha's birthday itself was the 24th, but it rained that day, so I met Sally, the genius, and we went to see a circus. After the circus (which was, as before, amazing: see previous posts) I met the lady who gave me my dental work a month ago. You may hear more about her later, but we had a very nice time eating at the nicest sandwich restaurant I know in Seoul, and generally hanging out together, walking around in the rain, sharing an umbrella.

In July I'll return to Canada to see my Dad's wedding. That'll be nice. I miss my connections in Canada, but I'll tell you, Korea's sure amazing these days, too. It's been really good to me.

Recently, a few of my Korean friends have criticized me for having too many words and not enough pictures on my blog.

Sorry. Words are my medium and my passion, and my camera's nothing but a junky little cellphone digital. I just got a webcam, but I can't exactly carry that around town and take cool pictures with it. The cord isn't very long.

Yes, that's what I just said. I got a webcam! Now, you can meet me online, if you like! I can broadcast myself over MSN or whatever. . . but it's a little strange: partly, it's just like looking in a mirror, so I want to do the same things I usually do in a mirror: make funny faces, and see how it looks. But then, there's someone on the other end of the webcam watching, going "weirdo" plus, now I have to put on a shirt when I sit down to chat online. Sigh.

Oh well.

Here are some pictures from the day.

Historically, the swastika is a symbol meaning "well-being" -- Hitler and the Nazi party kind of took the image and wrecked its original meaning. In Asia, especially south asia and places with a strong Buddhist, Hindo or Jainist tradition, it's still used in its original meaning. My old apartment was near a mountain that had a temple on its slope, and the temple had a two storey high swastika wishing goodwill upon our neighbourhood. It's also often on the entrance of Chinese doctors' offices (where you can get traditional Asian treatments like accupuncture, pressure or heat treatments, etc.)

It was pretty dark, that's why the colours and contrast in this picture are a bit wacky.

Many floats from the parade.


The parade was shiny.


Of course, no Korean cultural experience is complete without a nod to asskicking robot warriors. I'm not sure how old the tradition of asskicking robot warriors is in Korea's culture, but it plays an important role in the entertainment industry now: at least as important as plastic surgery!




I'm pretty sure dragons go back farther than asskicking robot warriors. I'm not sure by how much though. They share one trait: both have humans inside them, controlling their movements. That's about all they share, though. Would YOU rather be a dragon, or a human with a cool mecha warrior suit? (Life's so full of difficult questions! Another one: would you rather have a time machine that can travel backward two minutes, so that you can always think of a good comeback, or a remote control that changes the channel/topic/person when somebody starts talking about something boring?)


These were impressive. One of the dragons on a different float actually breathed fire!

Below is what you see in a Korean parade instead of men and women wearing kilts or little shriners hats.




And this is what you see instead of "Community Local High School Class of 2007" and waving cheerleaders and jocks.



Heyjin's Dutch tour group all wore orange. When Dutch people wear orange, it's like Canadians wearing a maple leaf pin: if you know anything about the country, you'll know what it means. The colour orange is a nice marker: easy to spot, but not as overbearing as a stars and stripes cowboy hat. Helped keep the group together, too.


To imagine the street below in its normal state, replace EVERY SINGLE PERSON you can see with an automobile, and you'll know what rush hour looks like next to my school.



The contrast here: come around an alley corner narrow enough that two people would have to turn sideways to squeeze through at the same time, and look up at an eighteen storey building. I love Korea.


Here's the Tourguide Coby once again, for good measure. By the end of the night she was pulling old Korean gentlemen out of their chairs and forcing them to do some dancing turns with her. It was FAAAANTASTIC.



Everything I love about Korea in a single day, seriously. Days like this just keep piling up -- if I enjoy my life any more I might pop.

Hope you're all feeling the same way!

Love
Rob

Oh yeah. This one again too.