Arbor Day is no longer a national red-letter day, but people still remember it, and this year, there's a sweet event happening near downtown Seoul. On March 27, near Gwanghwamun Station (line 3) there's a tree planting event on Inwang Mountain (one of my favorites). This is the kind of community event that I think expats should be finding out about, and joining.
So readers, I'm planning to go there on the 27th, and plant some trees. If you want to join me, let me know! I'll be writing about it on the 2S2 Blog as well, and you can let me know if you want to come from the 2S2 Facebook Group. Click on the picture for the full-size version.
Great news, readers: first, Foreigner Joy and some friends have started a 2S2 chapter in Bundang, so if you live over there, you no longer need to trek up to Insa-dong to connect. Sweet!
However, the really exciting news is this: as per every month, 2S2 Seoul will be meeting as well.
Now, just as last Saturday, the awesome Chris in South Korea and the lovely Jo (short for Jehosaphattina) hosted a great swing dance + ice sculpture-o-rama, this weekend, the amazing Paul Ajosshi, from the great site, Paul Ajosshi, will be hosting the next one, Saturday at 2pm, at the same place as usual: the second floor of the Twosome Place near Exit 1 of Anguk station, at the North end of Insadong. The full run-down for the day is here, and it involves two neighborhoods, lots of good food, and a subtitled performance of the classic play, "The Cherry Orchard" complete with a way to reserve tickets in advance and save money, and you should go, dear readers!
KoreaBridge.net is a mostly Busan-based website that's trying to become a useful Korea info forum for the rest of the nation. I was asked to do an interview about getting around and seeing Seoul for them. It was fun talking about my favorite city, though every time I have to talk about it, I realize both how much, and in the end, how little I really know about this place.
Anyway, if you want to hear my take on some of the different famous districts of Seoul, or if you're looking for a basic scouting report on traveling around Seoul, it's a good place to start.
Do Make Say Think is one of my favorite bands, and they played in Seoul a couple Sundays ago. They play what is often labeled "Post-rock instrumental" - longer compositions, usually without vocals (save a few la la choruses), almost like Jazz, but with more of the dynamic contrast you hear in some kinds of rock music -- lots of loud/soft, and atmospherics. It's the perfect band for me, because I'm all about the bliss-out, wherever it can be found... and dear readers, it can be found here.
So after a bit of searching to find the exact location of the venue, my buddy Evan and I headed down about twelve flights of stairs to the concert space, which was a big ol' cavernous room in the basement of a building not far from Hongik University's main gate. Evan and I grabbed seats on the risers at the back of the room, and watched On Sparrow Hills - an expat band, who reminded me of Frightened Rabbit, and did a good job of warming up the crowd, and then Vidulgi Ooyoo, a Korean bliss-out/shoegaze band with a female lead singer who didn't sing often enough, and who sounded, as Evan said, "Like the Cranberries got as high as f$*#" - especially when the singer was singing. I concur.
Here's a little of what the first two bands sounded like.
a picture of vidulgi ooyoo
Then, after very long break between sets, Do Make Say Think came on. They didn't talk to the crowd much, other than a few "I see a lot of English teachers here today" kinds of cracks. Here's a bit of their sound -- note the loud/soft shifts, and sudden changes in arrangement - from their patented everybodyplaysatonce to a soloist and back, etc..
But the problem, as always, is that live music is like nothing else. So watch this clip, but if you want to get a feel for what the show was really like, then play it as loud as possible, and project it life-size against a wall in your house, and then turn the projected life-size people into real people. That's what it was actually like to see.
I'm happy I went. I had a great time, and I'm thrilled that some of my favorite bands are finally coming to Korea: most of my favorite bands are not the arena-filling-type bands, so while Guns'n'Roses might will stop in here, Seoul is often skipped by smaller bands. It's not really my place to theorize why, but there you have it. But great show! It was also my goodbye hang-out with my man Evan, who's gone back to Canada now. More on him later.
Problem: beyond a certain point, unless it's Lady Gaga or something, concert photos look the same for pretty much every band.
They have horns.
The crowd was really into it. Most of them seemed to be very familiar with DMST, particularly the girl who was next to us on the bleachers, who nearly exploded in her seat once the headliners came on.
I've been leaving pages open on my internets for a while now, planning to write about them and not getting around to it. Sometimes cleaning my desktop takes as much time as cleaning my room.
1. Get a load of this article. It's my (Western? English? North American?) training in the five paragraph essay that makes me think this article looks like my first step of writing - the freewrite - after which I'd encourage my students to take that writing, throw away most of it, and find a main point. Brian in JND pointed this article out, and mentions that one rhetorical form in Korean writing seems to be to circle around a topic, and then deliver the main point as late in the article as possible; someone raised on thesis statements and topic sentences spends the entire time reading such an article going "give me a freaking statement of purpose already!" I'm sure it could be very effective if done well -- jokes are told that way, aren't they? -- but let's just say, either because of translation, or because of the original article, or cultural rhetorical forms, this one doesn't come of quite that well.
