Snow in Gyeongbok Palace

This was from a friend's facebook page: I love bonfires, and the colour contrast in this one's beautiful. I miss bonfires, and having clothes that smell like woodsmoke.


So it snowed again today, the flakes were big and fat, which is a good sign that it's not TOO cold (small tiny snowflakes often mean bitter cold; the fatter the flakes, the warmer the air.)

I took the chance to head down to one of Seoul's palaces, where snow stays on the ground a bit better, because they're walled, so car exhaust doesn't wipe it out the minute it touches down.

Here are some of my pictures.

These first few are from a park near the palace entrance.




The snow was really clingy and crunchy.




Inside the palace now:

Yes indeed, I did tread across pure snow, and yes, it WAS satisfying to despoil the untainted smooth snowy surface.

I don't know why, but it's absolutely human nature to want to be the first, or the only, one to do something. Give a 4-year-old a big piece of construction paper and a pair of (safety) scissors and ask them to cut out a triangle, and they'll ALWAYS cut it out of the dead center of the page (unless they've been taught by some conscientious mother to do otherwise). Yeah, the desire to go somewhere new, do something never done before, is part of what separated us from the animals perfectly happy to continue mucking about in the sea. . . but it's an interesting thing to notice.


This was a lake. During the summer, crumple a cracker into it, and it teems with grey and the occasional orange carp.


I believe the mountain pictured above is also the mountain dead center in the mountainous, symbolic screen that you can see behind the king's throne in the picture below.


This thingy is in the middle of a lake that got nearly frozen, and snowed over. . . it must be important. It's also on the money.

(I guess the Bank Of Korea wasn't as hot on the tree, though)

The tree below is a fantastic, gnarly old thing. It's supported by two or three little bars, and fenced in, and I get this funny feeling it has a story, but I have no idea what it is. It looks like a kid trying to keep his hair from sticking up to me.


This guy rolled a snowball out of snow that sat upon a gravel path, and then split it open, to discover the snowball had picked up sand and gravel along with the snow, creating the same stratified effect one can see in a place like the Grand Canyon, except much, much younger.


That's all for now.


for more looks at the ins and outs of Korean palaces, here's a nice photo/written tour of Changdeok palace, the palace closest to my house.

from "Sweetmeats" by Andrew Bird:

Do you wonder where the self resides
Is it in your head or between your sides
And who's going to decide its true location?
cause it's a question for the centuries
from communion to mad cow disease
but is it worthy of a song - all life's location?

I like him. More with each album.

I'm going to a "writers in Seoul" meeting today at 3pm. Hope it goes well.



The day Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary (the US electoral system gets more confusing to me everytime I learn something new about it), they had THIS picture on the front page of EVERY newspaper.



Which is an awesome, but mostly just terrifying picture.

Having THAT on every paper in the newsstand made me think of this scene from "Being John Malkovich", one of the best weird movies I've seen.


I don't know why, but creepy pictures make me smile.


(from the cover of "I care because you do" an electronica CD by Aphex Twin -- really good artist, but creepy album covers.)

Here's another. . . look twice, and then you notice, YIKES!



(one of his videos from this album also mocks the objectification of women in music)

Lovely. Just lovely.

from the online comic http://XKCD.com

have you ever heard someone say "I miss you" with such wordless eloquence?

Photo update.

come on, people. comment already! I think I'm the only one reading my blog anymore!

*with the exception of BradJ*

or is this your passive-aggressive way of telling me to start writing shorter posts?

So the Tell Me song is a ridiculously huge dance craze. It was about five below zero (celsius) this night, but these hardy girls were still out, shaking booty, doing the "Tell Me" dance to advertise soju (which the original "tell me" singers, the Wonder Girls aren't even old enough to drink yet).

Plus, watching these, adult women dance, didn't make me feel like a creep, the way watching the 14 and 15-year-old wonder girls do.

I can't imagine how these poor ladies stayed warm: it's not like they have any body fat to store heat, either, unlike hairy Roboseyo, whose chest hair is like constantly wearing an extra t-shirt.

Buying pirated movies always includes the chance of some unintentional comedy in the subtitles. This is from the movie, "Lust, Caution", a huge hit here in Asia, and controversial enough in China to have some of its erotic scenes censored.


The Chinese subtitles were probably simply run through Google Translate and edited in. Love that stuff.

For hours of entertainment, go to this site, which runs any phrase through Google Translate, into another language, and then back to English, to see what kind of mangled concoction comes out. It's hilarious.

My line from this site: "If what you have doesn't make you happy, having more of it probably won't, either," translated to Korean and back again, goes like this:

"To spread out and it was happy what will be extensive not to make, to be possible it compared to be, in addition."


Sometimes chalk outlines can make you cry.
(this was child-sized, right near where my former student was killed by a bus)

If I were the mayor of Seoul, I would make incredibly tough penalties for drivers of delivery scooters who go onto the sidewalks, and even tougher ones for their employers, who pressure their delivery people to skimp on safety for the sake of delivery time. You should see the craziness -- helmetless, flying down the sidewalks, gunning over crosswalks or through red lights -- it's insane.


It snowed in Seoul.
this happened.


And in front of City Hall, they built an ice playground, now that it's properly cold.

I like cold. I like seasons, I decided. I much prefer my seasons to behave as they should: if I saw a cat gathering nuts in the fall and hiding them in tree hollows, I'd probably freak out, and when early January feels more like late October, I get nervous, even as I enjoy the outdoors.


This is the shape of Admiral Yi Sunshin, one of Korea's greatest military heroes. He is also commemorated in a statue in Gwanghwamun, the beating heart of Seoul's Downtown.


Here's the real Admiral Yi, right out directly in front of the main gate of Seoul's most important Palace, generally recognized as a naval strategist on par with any in history.

OK, that wasn't the REAL Yi Sunshin, either (he's dead now) -- just the original statue that the ice sculpture imitates.


There was also an ice rink there, but it looked pretty poorly maintained -- uneven, with puddles and cracks and lots of carved-up snow, as such crowded outdoor rinks end up being. It'd be romantic, but onerous to skate there.



One thing I love about Seoul is that there are little back-alleys like this all over the place.


And if you head in there, you can find random little places buried around corners

with kitchens full of old ladies making INCREDIBLE traditional Korean dishes, with portions that'll fill you up, for about five dollars, sometimes less.


This one makes Kalguksu -- just plain old Korean-style soup -- but it's famous. It's been around for decades, the prices are still the same as they were in 1984, the decoration and atmosphere is nonexistent (or worse), with tacky posters on the wall at best,

(i mean, if this counts as atmosphere to you, you're laughing!)

it's crowded as heck (you bump elbows with strangers as you eat), there's only one thing on the menu. . .
but people line up out the door and down the alley to have a bowl during their lunch break. And Seoul is loaded to the rafters with little holes in the wall like this: in Canada, if a restaurant gets a good reputation, they usually introduce the "reputation surtax" whereby they charge as much as they can while still running on their rep; in Korea, that sometimes happens, but often part of a place's excellence is the pride they take in giving top-notch food at low low prices.

Plus, Korea is historically a peasant culture. The most famous foods are the kinds a farmer might eat when he comes in from a day in the field -- hearty, simple, and cheap. France or Japan take pride in the refined foods they served the upper class, and you'll still pay through the nose for five-star sushi or escargot, but the strength of Korea's cuisine is in the simple, hearty, healthy fare. Wonderful. (Plus, it's SO easy to eat healthy here for cheap.)

I don't know what's going on in here, but I'm not interested.

two I didn't take: from an expats in Korea facebook group:

parking for princesses only:
and. . . this baby knows what they're for.




take care, everyone! Hope you enjoyed my picture tour of the last three weeks!

-Roboseyo

the photo a day phenomenon

more about gender in Korea. It's weighed on my mind lately. I have a few female students looking for a job these days.

I don't know how I got on this topic, but. . .

this isn't a photo a day, but it's fun to watch -- it's like flipping through a book of norman rockwell paintings.
i think this one's like a celebration.



there's a whole ream of these out there. . . this one's hypnotic.



this one's my favourite: a tribute to Mel, Deb, Caryn, Christie, and Heather: my friends and family are expected to have 400 BABIES this year!



In "The Score", Edward Norton made fun of all the actors who pitch for a best actor nomination (cf. Rain Man, I Am Sam, What's Eating Gilbert Grape) by playing a mentally disabled person, by playing a thief who pretends to be a mentally disabled person, to get into the building he wants to rob. By adding another layer on top of the mannerisms of playing a special needs person, he pointed out the phoniness of the actors playing the trick, and also ended the trend.

(These days, somebody needs to mock the "beautiful female star gets ugly to win best actress oscar" trend (see: Kidman, Nicole; Theron, Charlize, etc.,) in the same way.)

likewise, when this video came out, the "picture of yourself every day" trend was officially over.




(hee hee hee)


(ps: imagine being the guy who decided to do "a picture a day for six years", only to have somebody else do "a picture a day for four years" and put it online a year before you, and steal your thunder. Somewhere, there's a person saying "dammit, I got greedy. Eight years was too long: now I'll just seem behind the times". There's also someone who got five years of pictures swallowed by a crashed hard drive. Poor schmoe.)

From 2003. . . and right tragic.

In 2003 a land-claim dispute between Korea and Japan started heating up. There are a couple of islands called Dokdo in Korea, and Takashima in Japan. I won't get into the whole story, but when Japan made a claim on Dokdo, Koreans responded with all the rage and resentment stored up from memories of decades of Japanese colonization, back before World War II.



Now I'm not saying Japan is in the right here; they did a lot of things that are nasty and ugly and disgusting and dehumanizing during the colonial times -- I've talked about the Comfort Women (see the posts about moral authority from November), and that whole episode is so totally reprehensible and tragic. . .



but responding with this kind of hatred puts Korea in the wrong, too: these are pictures drawn by elementary school kids, and put up in a subway station. Maybe the teachers were intending to show a little rah-rah-nationalism, but encouraging kids to draw this kind of poisonous stuff ought to lead to a day of serious reckoning for the teacher's union, abusing their influence over elementary school kids.



My old coworker once got an essay that read like this: "When I grow up I want to be a soldier so I can fight the Japan and kill many Japanese for Korea," and kids don't hate like that, unless they're taught to do so by someone they trust.



Not that there's anything wrong with nationalism, if it's a source of identity and belonging. That's totally positive. However, if it becomes a means to attack, marginalize, disparage or scapegoat another country or another people, well, that's ugly and wrong and sometimes dangerous. Korea's not the only country guilty of it -- right now the nationalist rhetoric is at a fevered and dangerous pitch in the good old USA, too, but it's just tragic when it comes to these kinds of displays.

The longer you go through these pictures, the sadder it gets.

This is where ideology goes wrong. . . I love Korea, but this kind of thing diminishes us all.



I hope most of the schoolteachers in Korea were sober-minded and responsible, and this was just the work of a few, ignorant, renegade ideologues. . . I hope. . . but this is all it takes to give a country a black eye: a few angry people who stop using their heads. These pictures made it into the news in Japan and they (along with other dokdo, comfort women, and assorted nationalist anti-Japanese rhetoric and protests) led to a drop in Japan's friendly attitude toward Korea from 69% of survey respondents in 2002 to 36%.



Sure, Japan did some bad stuff. . . but I feel like when humans do ugly things to each other, we should respond with grief, not with hate, and CERTAINLY not by teaching children to hate.

This makes me sad.






My next post will be positive, I promise.

just sad. . . with a funny aftertaste.

The newly elected president of Korea (to be inaugurated in February. . . I think) is thinking of closing the ministry of women's equality. Read this page. What he ought to do, I often think, is to give it some actual teeth for social change. The state here's pretty shabby, when it comes to the international gender equality measure.

Sigh.

I'm not sure which would be worse: if this cover-story is true, or if this is how far the Japanese former-PM would go to deny his resignation was due to systematic party failure.

Irony and uber-nationalism.

There's a movie called D-War or Dragon War that you might have heard about, but haven't seen (unless you're one of my readers who lives in Korea). I'll link to the preview here, but I won't put the clip up. The movie just hasn't earned it. Sorry. It's pretty terrible, and by sitting through it (I'd rather get a filling without anaesthesia), I've earned the right to criticize it if I wish. However, its maker made a play on Korea's nationalistic pride to try and sell it here in Korea, as he also tried to market it in America (it was even set in L.A.). Nationalistic pride or none, the movie's acting, direction, and most of all, writing, were just not good enough to attract an audience in the States: as Patroclus and Michelle Wie both learned, if you want to play with the big kids, you gotta have the chops! The grab for publicity, and the play on national pride, were perfectly encapsulated by the movie's closing credits in Korea, where he played Korea's greatest, favourite traditional folk song, while running a long description of the director's career and accomplishments (basically begging for approval), including pictures of himself in a director's chair and other film credits, and ending with his guarantee that his film will be successful around the world . . . "for Korea".

You can hear the sad, haunting melody of the Arirang if you skip to about the three minute mark of the video clip above. It's a wonderful song (when it's not being abused by film directors in cheap grabs for movie-approval-through-association-with-national-pride). Everybody joins in, and it gives me chills, and the melody is one of the best I know. I also love the performance leading up to the ending refrain, but if you need to skip to the end, go for it.

Anyway, it was crass but clever of Mr. Shin to tack National Pride onto what (from where I stand) looked more like a lurid act of blatant self-promotion, because just that easily, he placed his poorly-written, badly-directed, and horribly-acted movie/ego-trip above critical reproach. An attack on his movie was an attack on Korea, and Korea's entire culture, rather than just an honest review of a bad movie.

The silliness all came to a head when a single Korean film critic was brave enough to step out of line and tell the truth: "hey, everybody, did anyone else notice this was actually a terrible movie?"

Rather than a rush of other critics flying to his side and saying "THANK YOU! I thought so too, let's end this nationalistic silliness and call a spade a spade," that lone critic was attacked by many angry Korean netizens, it's not in the article, but one of my students told me the critic's life was even threatened.

It's sad and ironic to begin with that many Koreans bought into this guy's cheap play on national pride, and stood behind a movie that will more likely damage the Korean film industry's reputation abroad than promote it, but to shout down a critic trying to be honest is just too much. Not that netizens from ANY country are well known for being rational, sober-minded thinkers, but still. . .

And it's unfortunate that this train-wreck was the movie trying to break into the American market. There are a few great Korean movies out there. (Oldboy won second prize at the Cannes film festival a few years ago, and The Host was better than any Hollywood monster movie . . . probably since Jaws, hitting every note perfectly, and switching from satire to thriller to family drama on a dime,) so why offer this mess up as representative?

Here are some links that discuss D-Wars' awfulness,

and also netizens' blind nationalism causing them to defend the indefensible (the quote from the director at the end of this article is a hoot.)

At movies.yahoo.com, you can browse user reviews. . . notice the frequency of complete A+ reviews with broken English in the write-ups.

on IMDB.com Koreans have been logging on and giving D-Wars 10/10 ratings to balance out the 1/10s given by non-Koreans. (Note the high concentration of highest possible and lowest possible scores on the "who rated this movie" chart.)

but they couldn't save its abysmal score on rottentomatoes.com

In light of all that, to go with this incident, I had a funny moment in one of my classes last week. I brought up the knee-jerk nationalist netizen flaming of the movie critic, and asked a question about the way nationalism often goes so far in Korea that sometimes reason goes out the window, and when something starts sounding even a little critical, one runs into a lot of defensiveness, even in areas where it's generally acknowledged that Korea needs reform (for example, education, gender equality, or lookism). One of my students took umbrage, and told me, "You should be more positive. Why do you have to criticize Korea so much? Why can't you just accept it?" . . . if I wasn't taken aback at having my sincere and (I thought) neutrally-phrased questions answered with defensiveness, I might have been quick enough to snap back, "I rest my case."

I felt a bit stymied: I've lived in Korea for the greater part of my adult life now. I've read books about Korea, asked a lot of questions, studied the language and discussed Korean issues with a lot of different people. I try to have a generous, open-minded, non-judgmental, but well-informed view of what I see here, and being well-informed requires an honest look at both the positives and the negatives. If I criticize something, it is in hope of improvement, not for spite or mean-spiritedness, and certainly not because I think Korea should become exactly like Canada; I try not to talk about things I don't know about, or add qualifiers that "I might be wrong" and "please correct me if I'm wrong" or "this is just what I've observed personally". Basically, I've been here a long time, I've read the tourist brochures, and I wish I could dig a bit deeper without being accused of being a hater. . . but maybe conversation class isn't the time and place to do that (sigh). I like to think that if somebody came to me and, in the course of the conversation, we discussed Canada's social problems, with well-informed and thoughtful views, that I'd listen carefully, but maybe I'm just flattering myself.


Anyway, here's something I love about Korea:

Arirang is the unofficial national anthem, and holds a special place in Koreans' hearts, kind of like "Waltzing Matilda" to Australians, and the "Hockey Night In Canada" theme to Canadians.




(da da da dum dum deeeeeee, da da da dum dum de deeeeee, (everyone together now) da da da dah dah deee ba ba dum bee dah dah dum dee. . . )

(for the Aussies)



Here is a rough translation of the words to the first verse (the one sung most often) of the Arirang, adapted from a translation by Young-hae Chang:

Arirang, all alone
I am crossing arirang pass
if you leave me, my love,
your feet will fail you
before you even walk ten leagues.

It's a sweet, melancholy song, full of "han" (Korean word for a deep, sad longing for a better, but lost, time and/or place -- akin to the world-weary traveler's emotion when he thinks of a home he can never return to.) And it even turns up in soccer chants.



Man I love this culture.

Roboseyo saves the world. . .

I offered a solution for how to save the world earlier on this blog. Here's another. It was tagged on at the end of the previous post. . . but I don't think anybody read it, because I added it a day later.

In the new, global world, here's another thing I would do if I were king of the world:

I'd make an irrevokable law that, for the countries with the 30 largest populations, economies, and militaries in the world, the rest of the world gets to participate in their leaders' elections, with the Restoftheworld vote having a 10% say in the final election results -- 90% nationals, so that the home country gets most of the vote, but in a world where a world leader's decisions touch so many other countries, isn't it fair for the rest of the world to have a say in their leadership, too?

(I'd also cancel all veto powers in the UN: I'd change it so that unanimous minus one were enough to mobilize on security council decisions, so that rather than China vetoing UN action in Burma, unanimous minus one would have been enough to get peace-keepers in there. Same for the US vetoes on oil and Israel/Palestine related-type things.)

Any reactions?

and if you don't care for my world-saving solutions, how about this one:

Turns out, peeing on tourists is a BAD thing. Who knew?

Korean Trot Music

Remember my post a long time ago about dancing with the crazy old ladies on the boat? I tried to describe the music then, eventually giving up and saying it's impossible.

Well, this is what it was like. . . except faster. This is what old people listen to here. You hear it in taxis, on the street, on outdoor stages for open-air shows, and (worst of all) on loudspeakers in otherwise nice parks. Really, the only thing to do when you hear music like this (not unlike disco and certain kinds of country music) is to get out your pointer fingers and dance. Listen in particularly to the slow vibrato and the quirks in vocalisation -- trot singers (that's what it's called) imitate this style right across the board.







The best thing about this musical style is that it's usually VERY easy to sing, which makes it a smash hit in the karaoke bars (noraebang here -- singing room). Sometimes you hear a song on the radio and you think the radio play is just a formality: this song was totally written to go straight to the karaoke bar and become a sing-along hit. Kind of like sometimes in N. America you hear a song and you go "wow. That song must have a GREAT video," or sports broadcasters justify a player with poor skills by saying, "He's GREAT in the clubhouse! A real glue guy!" Here we go. This is what we danced to on the boat that day, not the exact song, but this tempo, and EXACTLY this sound.



Here's a picture from that brilliant day.




This is Shiina Ringo, my favourite Japanese artist so far. She's fun as anything! She reminds me of Bjork with guitars.



and holy cow there's a lot going on in this video (spanish subtitles, fun as anything music, a japanese artist flaunting cultural stereotypes with MTV editing. . . interesting.)

heh heh heh

Two American institutions, together at last.




I'll put a proper post in here sometime, but I've been busy lately, and haven't had time to find the shiny spots in life. They're out there, and I'm still a happy cat. . . just bear with me until I can get some pictures downloaded or something.

-Roboseyo


Heh heh heh.

pointed satire. I've ranted about this before, here on my blog.




And in case you don't trust the Mass Media to help you choose how to vote (if you have a vote) in the 2008 election, here's an information-rich clip that will probably influence many voters more than a 4-page spread in a newspaper -- was it the 2004 election where I heard of a survey that said America's main source for information about the electio candidates was the opening monologues of the Letterman and Leno Late-Night Talk Shows?



Well, I've pretty much decided who I'd choose now (if I had a vote). (remember back when policies and ideas were the thing -- thank goodness that fad has finally passed. SO much THINKING!--isn't there something very intrinsically wrong with the very fact people are bandying about the word "electability", rather than looking at the actual quality of the candidates?)

It's been a while since we've had a survey on here. . .

So I drank the Heroes kool-aid after all.

I don't have a TV at my house, and don't really miss it, but after seeing a few episodes of the TV series Heroes (which EVERYONE is talking about here in Korea these days) at my friend's house, I bought season one on DVD for cheap.

And, like the X-Men movies, The Bourne Identity, and Jim Carrey's The Mask, the best part of watching a show where people suddenly discover they have superpowers is entertaining the wish-fulfillment fantasy of what would happen if you discovered YOU had superpowers --

A good third of the fun of watching The Bourne Identity series is the daydream that, one day, when somebody threatens YOU, YOU'LL suddenly bust out deadly martial arts and super-spy skills, too; in the movie "The Mask", where the green mask brings out the side of your character that you hide in public, and gives it cartoonish super-powers, and it gives me a ninety-minute-long daydream about what side of ME would come out if I put on that silly mask. Ditto for x-men -- you can fantasize all day about which x-men power would be most fun, most useful, most frightening, and so on.

So in tribute to the TV series Heroes, the survey question is: which superhero power do YOU wish you had?

(and don't say x-ray vision, because then everybody will know you're a perv)

Two rules/qualifiers (just because everybody always says these ones -- like in Korea, you have to say "AFTER your parents, who is your hero?", because otherwise that's all you'll hear):

Don't say Superman's powers, because that's like going to a restaurant and ordering one of everything on the menu. Ditto for saying "Peter Petrelli's [from Heroes] power: the ability to absorb other people's superpowers": that's like saying "If I found a magic lamp I'd wish for a hundred more wishes." -- and kind of defeats the purpose of choosing. EVERYBODY would prefer to have ALL the superpowers, but if you had to pick one, which would it be?

Man this guy's funny.

Jim Carrey back before he "made it"

This is where I rang in the new year.

from a professional.
my own pictures.




It was fun. If you see a clown in a bright orange hat in these videos, it's me. 11 auspicious people rang the bell in Boshingak gate 33 times to ring in the new year. It was great being part of the ridonkulous crowd.



The white buses you see are full of riot police. You know, just in case.



Technically, you weren't allowed to sell or shoot fireworks, because people were injured last year (alcohol and explosives don't mix, friends. Don't try this at home.) But I guess the riot police decided it wasn't worth getting out the truncheons to stop people from shooting them in the air.

Either that, or they were busy sipping instant coffee in paper cups, 'cos it was FRIGGIN COLD!






I don't know if you can read the English on this can, but the prose always gave me a kick. I was so disappointed when they redesigned the can without silly words on it.
Even nice places have Konglish on the menus.
The lips stuff again. Not many teeth there.



Painting stripes on the road.
Poorly.


Happy new year and stuff.

I guess everybody's doing one of these.

For me, in the words of my old Creative Writing bud, Sparkey, 2007 has been kickdonkey awesomepants, friends.

A rundown of reasons for the spring in my step:

1. Girlfriendoseyo: we met in April, we hit it off almost right away, and it just keeps getting better and better. You've heard guarded hints roundabout allusions about her on the blog, but friends, I'm crazy about this woman. We like all the same things, and (______________ insert your own mushy cliche here__________________). It's pretty great.

2. Teaching adults. No more pee fights, tattle-tales, crocodile tears, or insane mothers. Instead, I learn from my students: there are areas where they actually know MORE than me. A lot of areas! I'm actually kind of dumb, except in a few fields.

3. Words - I've written more in this year than probably any three years previously. Seeing as writing professionally is my stated life goal, that's pretty significant.

4. Living downtown - every day living in the downtown is like a people-watcher's festival. And I get to be a tour-guide when my friends come into the downtown.

5. My Colleague/Friends -- I have some friends here who are really cool, including one gentleman who has invited me to his family's house, and who's opened up, despite big differences in age and culture, and really made me feel welcomed and appreciated as a westerner living in Korea.

6. Rosetta Stone - an amazing language study program that's building my vocabulary, my spoken Korean, and (most importantly) my confidence in speaking Korean. It's been a real boon, and I'm really enjoying the noticeable improvement in my Korean ability.

7. Moving into an apartment with no TV. TV sucks.

8. Downtownucopia: the variety and quality of restaurants in the downtown make eating a joyous practice over here in downtown Seoul. discovering that good food is one of my main pleasures in my life was also good -- putting one's finger on the things that makes one happy, sure helps one REMAIN happy. In no particular order, I really love:

-Indian in Jonggak -Blood and Cow Stomach Soup -the Oktoberfest microbrewery -spicy beef-bone stew -california rolls and sushi -beef bone soup (with AMAZING kimchi) -world class dumplings -okonomiyaki -the Moroccan place I just discovered -the funny old lady who's been making pickled garnishes and organic side dishes her entire life -the fat, old Chinese ladies who make dumplings and never smile

(If any of you readers lives in Korea and wants to know where to find these places. . . let me know in the comments section. We'll figure something out.)

9. Living closer to Matt, hiking more often, and generally getting healthier, in large part because of his influence.

10. Blogging as a new, more enlightened, more frequent way of keeping in touch with my loved ones in Canada (and elsewhere), and being able to share a little more detail than you can fit into a bi-monthly, text-only e-mail update.

11. Almost all of the friends I've kept close tabs on back in Canada are doing better now than they were last year -- you know who you are. Yay for you! I'm all squirming with happy for you.

12. Going to Canada in July to see my Dad's wedding, Matt's brother (and my surrogate older brother) Joely's wedding, and all the other people I saw then, too.

13. A MILLION BABIES -- like, everybody I know is having a baby. Except me. It's awesome, and overwhelming, and awesome, and exciting, and awesome.

14. Is a luckier number than thirteen.


the bummers:

Myspace, Facebook, Internet, Blog, Youtube, Collegehumor.com et. al = New Years resolution 1: waste less time on the internet.

With all that good eatin', it's easy to get fat, fast.

I didn't call home enough: I have no landline anymore, so all phones home must be cellulexpensive, plus, I'm a bad son/brother/friend/uncle/grandson/stalker. I just don't do my duty enough.

Thanks God, and everybody else involved, for a fantastic year. I'm glad to be alive, and really happy with my situation these days.

I love you all!

Take care.
Love:
roboseyo

My friend's thinking about coming to Korea. Here's what I wrote to him.

Lists and point form are dead giveaway signs of sloppy, lazy writers. Though they'd say it's just that they're very organized thinkers, or maybe accustomed to making presentations, in truth, top ten lists and bullet-points are sure-fire signs a writer has a weak idea, or doesn't have the time or inclination to write proper transitions, the way a professional would. So I'm lazy. It's a blog. Your refund is in the mail.

My bud is about to graduate university, and he told me he struggles with indecision and a kind of lack of direction; I've taken out personal details, but basically, here is what I said to him about how travel can help one get a better idea of what one wants out of life. I kinda liked what I wrote, I think it lays out my feelings about traveling (especially when you're young) as a means for personal growth.

--kindly substitute the world "travel" any place where it says "come to Korea" -- our conversation specifically concerned coming to Korea, but traveling anywhere can have the same effects I describe here, if you travel for long enough, and especially if you spend a longer period of time in one place.


--

Whether Korea will help you be more decisive depends on why you come here, and what you do once you're here.

Here's how coming to a foreign country will help you:

1. you'll get out of the circle where you grew up, and see a totally different way of living, thinking, acting. Suddenly you'll see that things you thought were "the way things are" are actually just "the way things are in my family" or "the way things are in small-town western Canada". There are things I thought of as “Right” that were actually just “how we do things in Canada” That can be a bit of a mind-f*ck. However, once you get THROUGH the culture-shock, you'll have a much better picture of what is essentially you, and what is actually just your culture talking, or your upbringing, and you'll have a chance to measure those things against another way of living, and decide if you want to hold onto them or start bending your idea of what it means to be you/Canadian/human.

2. Because a small percentage of people speak English, the pool from which you choose your friends is smaller than in Canada, and you end up hanging out with people you wouldn't hang out with in CA. My best friend now is a guy who, if we'd met in Canada, I'd have just about run the opposite way to huddle with my bible-study friends -but when we started getting to know each other (because there was noone else to talk to), it turned out we were pretty much soulmates.

3. Because your family's way back in Canada, you can know for damn sure that you can stand on your own two feet if you make it here, and the confidence of knowing that you MADE it without a safety net, will stay with you always.

4. It'll change the way you think (if you actually engage with the differences here, rather than just reacting defensively to them).

5. By making the ballsy decision to hop an ocean to get a job, you'll see, and know, that you CAN make a big decision. That might (probably will) empower you to make decisions more boldly.

6. If part of the reason you often feel indecisive is because certain people in your life are smothering you with their opinions of what you should do, this will give you a time-out, so that you can start looking in the mirror and seeing your OWN face, instead of theirs projected onto you.


Here are the things it won't help you do:

1. It won't help you find that thing you're really passionate about (unless it just happens to be studying Korean). The reason I usually know where I stand on something [he had commented on that as a trait he admired in me] is because I know what's important to me, and I measure most of the other decisions I make against that. It keeps the small stuff in perspective and simplifies my choices. The process of finding out what you're passionate about is a deeply personal one, and a change of setting can submerge those questions for a while as you adjust to changes, it can give you a space where you can examine them without distractions, too, but it won't make them go away, nor will it automatically answer them -- they'll never go away until you face them and answer them yourself. If the surroundings you're in now are making it easy for you to coast instead of grabbing the steering wheel and finding the answers, maybe travel will help, but there's no guarantee it will, unless you travel with the goal of using the travel time to go through that exploratory process, and then DO it.

2. It won't make you a stronger, more independent person just by the mere virtue of being here. If you come with the aim of learning about yourself and stretching your boundaries, you still have to put yourself out there once you're here -- some people come to Korea, form a comfort zone as rigid as they had back home, hang out only with westerners, eat ONLY western food, and complain that Korea's weird and everybody talks funny. They leave after a year and they haven't learned anything about Korea, or themselves. They’re still just as narrow-minded, ignorant, and insular, as they were when they came. Others come to extend their irresponsible, fun college life for another year before they have to start being responsible, and basically live fast and hard, drink a lot, party and chase Asian girls (or guys), and (again) don’t learn a single thing about themselves or the world.

Once you're here, you gotta be intentional. Meet people, travel around, learn about Korea, maybe learn some Korean, make some friends that are very different from yourself, try to understand how they think, maybe read some books, and see what comes of it. All these things can be done right where you are now, but you're kinda FORCED to do them if you come to Korea, because your old comfort zone is in Canada, so you can’t fall back on it when things get tough.

If you’re looking for a new direction, Korea’s a good way to make a clean break between your New self and your Old self, but you still have to do the work. Wherever you live, and whatever your situation, the onus still falls upon YOU to find out what (in Good Will Hunting's words,) "blows your hair back" and then pursue those things above all else. Korea can help with that, and odds are you’ll probably become stronger, more flexible, more confident, and more independent, but the meaning of life won't drop into your lap when you step off the plane, or on the third Tuesday of your eleventh month here, or something. You still need to dive into situations you’ve never experienced before, get in right up to your elbows, and see what happens.

Knowing what you want out of coming to Korea is at least half the battle, I'd say, and personally, I think Korea would blow your mind and change your life, in a lot of good ways, but of all decisions, you have to make this one yourself, and not because anybody else is telling you what you ought to do.

Roboseyos year-end music list.

This is what's been rocking my speakers this year:

Old friends:
Tom Waits (especially Rain Dogs and Alice)
White Stripes (especially White Blood Cells, Elephant, and their newest, Icky Thump, ROCKS)
Nick Drake (especially Pink Moon)
Modest Mouse (sorry, Matt)
Prince

Old standbys:
Shut Up, I Am Dreaming by Sunset Rubdown
You Forgot it In People by Broken Social Scene
Return To The Sea by The Islands

New friends that are becoming old friends (and released new material this year):
Do Make Say Think
Andrew Bird
The Arcade Fire


Growers (these are the ones that grow on you, the more you listen to it)
Jens Lekman
Roots and Crowns by Califone

Not For Everyone, but Growers All The Same:
Person Pitch by Panda Bear - gave it another listen when my favourite music website named them best of 2007; growing on me.
Fur and Gold by Bat For Lashes
Ys by Joanna Newsom
From Here We Go To Sublime The Fields