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.