Korean Idol

James, a fine lad from the wilds of Doncaster, flew in from Shanghai just in time for the finals of Korean Idol. The champion for the last three years has been Heidi (not from the Alps) whose unique style always goes unopposed. This year would prove to be different. It was an ugly battle that took place over dinner.

1st up: Heidi and drumming talents.




2nd up: James and his equally talented girls Rachel Lynn and Jes.




Many apologies to Mr. Jon Bon Jovi and to those of you who willingly watched these clips. You will never have that time back again and for that, I'm sorry.

5 Straight? Are you mad?

Tuesday. It's only Tuesday and the steepest part of the climb to hump day. This week has just started and already it feels like it could be a candidate for the longest one of the year. Last week was only a three day week and the one before that was a zippy four days. Expecting me to make it a full five days straight is a tad unreal and frankly cruel. I'm not alone in thinking this way either.

So tomorrow after lunch all the teachers are off to the movie theatre in Gwang Myeong to take in an afternoon flick. This may ease some of the pain but if I'm forced to watch Pirates of the Caribbean (I watched it opening night)I'm sure I'll break under the pressure of this exaggeratedly slow motioned week.

Happy Birthday Buddha

Tomorrow is Buddha's birthday and old people all around the country will flock to temples to drink rice wine and soju all day long. For me it means a four day weekend. I stole this picture from a friend's website and if you look closely you can find an impostor among the Buddha's.

Mandatory Art Class

About once a week one of the mom's puts on an art class for some of the other desperate housewives in the area. Today's class was to create a scene out of dried flowers. Seeing as she had a lot of left overs she asked if the teachers would like to take part in what turned out to be a mandatory art session. (Be Creative Damn you!)

I got to the class a tad late and found the other teachers blending in shavings of blue pastels for the sky and green for the ground. As I started up mine I envisaged a mountain in the corner so I held back on colouring the sky on one side of the mat. This caught the attention of the teacher who frantically came and tried to fix my ways. She then pointed to all the others who followed the directions perfectly. I pretended to understand but continued working at building up a green mound.

The teacher tried her best to make me stop but soon gave up when she saw the creative juices flowing out of the other male teachers. They dared to make the sky blood red and the ground as purple as an eggplant. Here is my creation now available on E-Bay under the Cheesy Art Section:

Nin Jit Jan Jerry Kan

My friend Rachel Lynn is almost done her contract and will do the unthinkable and head home. Her plans on getting there are complex and involve multiple Visa's. She hates to fly and so is trying her best to make it back to Vancouver without being airborne. She will take a ferry to China and then take multiple trains until Europe and hopefully a cruise to New York or Montreal where she can catch a bus out West. It sounds like an amazing adventure and one she isn't shy about talking about.

A couple of weeks ago Saejin , Rachel Lynn and I went for a Friday beer. We spent most of the time looking through Rachel Lynn's Russian phrase book trying our best to pick up the language (or annoy others around us). Unfortunately for Rachel after hours of goofing around, her book now only opens to the chapter on "Making Love In Russian." By the end of the night we had only one sentence stuck in our heads, "Nin Jit Jan Jerry Kan" but we each think it means something different. What's worse is we can't find it in the book anymore and still insist it's Russian. This brings us to last Friday where we all joined Heidi for dinner in Itaewon. As dinner morphed into drinks our Russian phrase soon cropped up and the only way to find out what it meant would be to ask a pro.

So we walked over to the bar we've so insensitively labeled the "Russian Whore Bar." We don't venture in often but when we do we have a blast. It's a bar firmly stuck in the eighties and Russian pop songs are played in a high rotation. Once we were comfortable in the bar I made friends with a couple of Mongolians who knew Russian but failed in understanding me. (It must of been the Western Russian dialect I choose to use that screwed them up.) We spent a good chuck of the night dancing and sampling Vodka and all I can say is I'm glad Rachel Lynn is the one off to Russia. The way I felt on Saturday makes me never want another vodka anything again and you can "nin jit jan jerry kan" that!

Spam

The lunch lady at school has nicknamed me "No Thank You" because I'm constantly turning down any sea food based slop she or her crew serve. On fish days she comes over and inspects the empty sections of my tin tray carrying a long face. She then tells the other teachers how guilty she feels that I'll be hungry. Again this month she's taken it upon herself to fry up thick slices of canned Spam just for me. I have no heart to tell her Spam is 100 times worse a fate than any fish she could send my way.

I use every ounce of energy to not show my disgust as I chew away on the spam. It works out best if I can eat it all down in less than three bites. Anymore and the texture and salty taste of the stuff reminds me of what I'm eating setting off my gag reflexes. I also let my mom's voice take over in my head counting out the total number of bites it will take to work my way through the pile of spam. If I'm lucky there is a sauce I can dip the stuff in but this is rare. Why people choose to eat this stuff is beyond me.

Subways

My first ride on the subway alone many moons ago was one that left me lost. Twice. Rumbling along underground now it's hard to see where I went wrong that day. Seoul's subway is laid out in eight different lines and unlike Tokyo, if you can't read the language, English signs are everywhere. While getting to my destination has become easier I'm still working on remembering the most important rule to proper Korean subway etiquette:No talking.

Ninety percent of travelers are either trying to sleep (Koreans can sleep anywhere) or are engaged to the electronic device of their choice (cellphone, MP3, video game, portable TV or the truly perverse all in one).

If you are caught talking, chances are you are trying to sell something. Most of the stuff targets the ample supply of old people who, as it turns out, will buy anything on sale. The range of products is unlimited. As long as it fits in a box and costs at most ten bucks then it can be hawked.

A second group of reliable noisemakers are the religious ones praising GOD. They confidently board the cars and start marching from one end to the next spilling out recycled words. The truly good ones are the ones who throw in English when they pass by, "Hallelujah, God Loves You."

Another group of chatterboxes ride the subway late at night and have just finished up the compulsory drinking session for work. The red faces and smell of soju hanging out around their mouths are their giveaway. But you want these people to talk, it's when they are silent you need to be worried. This means their livers have had enough and are busily sending out signals to the stomach to send what's left on a wild ride. You don't want to be caught next to this person.

The final group who constantly break the silence of the subway are us foreigners and our voices seem to ride above any other noise. Honestly it's not our fault.

A Well Earned Beer

The sun was standing clear in the sky showing off all day and with skin pastier than toothpaste I needed to enjoy as much of it's glow as I could. To start off I joined my students and a couple of the teachers for a 5 km run in the Gwang Myeong City Marathon.

After this I joined Saejin and headed off to meet his friend Myoung Soo and his latest (and hopefully last) girlfriend Ji Young. We decided to set off for Namsan Tower as it was one of the few clear days that Seoul gets (hence the Gothic look of my skin) and take in the views of Seoul. The original plan called for a cable car ride to the top but once we saw the line of people we chose to walk our way up. It's a nice little hike and to avoid unsightly sweat marks we took our time.


Both Saejin and I rolled our eyes when we were greeted with the sight of the happy couple. Matching outfits may be popular with old people back home but they're old and tend to look the same anyway. Koreans take it to another level with trendy young couples strutting down the street in "couple T's" bragging about their love and depressing all the singles out there.




As for the beer, it was magical.

Phallic Friday

A picture of a nice little park near my place to end the week on.

Nanta: Cookin'

Heidi continues her run of visiting guests and this time she's on a mission to hit something touristy everyday. Last night Saejin and I joined her and Tanya to watch the Nanta: Cookin' performance. Both Heidi and I had seen it before so we knew the show has two parts in it where audience members are asked/persuaded/knocked on the head and drug up onto the stage. This is why we sat well inside the aisle leaving both Saejin and Tanya vulnerable to being plucked from their seats (we're nice like that).

Turns out we needed a better plan. Anyone who knows me, knows I hate attention so when the performer onstage made her way near our seats I started to look elsewhere starting first with my left shoe, then the right one before checking out the opposite side of the theatre. There I followed the other performer in his search for a woman when curiosity got the best of me. I looked back to the girl near us and suddenly I was caught in a stare down.

I did my best to ignore her but then I saw her going for an audience peer pressure moment (an even worse fate) and thought it better to get the event over with. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought but definitely worth more than the lousy hand phone accessory I got. Below is a link to the exact part of the show that I had to do, I would of been the one on the left.

Joel's House Warming Party

It's been a long month since we all got together for a binge drinking session. This month it was a new venue, Joel's new place, and we were lucky to have special guest in Min. Of course we tried to hide the drinking session behind a potluck dinner but with only finger foods present the drinking ended up being the main event.

These are the only nice pictures on my camera from that night. The smaller ones are the ones when the booze started taking over. 1st: Heidi has a hard time telling jokes so to help distract herself from laughing way before the punchline she has decided to tell jokes via shadow puppets. 2nd: Shelly's first hot look of the night. 3rd: Joel and RL having a romantic moment. 4th: Shelly's second hot look attracting Jamie Lee. 5th: Jamie Lee and I doing our best to scare anyone not with us out of the bar.

Friday's Fry Up

Wearing a suit with the legs quietly tucked into rubber boots and your tie secured in the breast pocket all under a Tillie hat may not be orthodox gardening gear but it works for our school's principal. Since the weather turned nice the garden has become his main office and the teacher's have to chase him here to get their paperwork signed.
Friday afternoon we got to sample the first of his efforts with some nice leafy lettuce to wrap barbecued pork in.It was a good way to end a lazy Friday that involved zero teaching and just a lot of games to celebrate Children's Day.

Why I Love Korea # 73

Personally I find autumn to be the greatest season of all time but the springs in Korea are a close second. Sometime in the past the plants here all got together and created a time line for when they would bloom. They mastered it so well that from the start of April to the end of May there will always be colour around. Instead of jogging yesterday I went for a hike and took some pictures of what I usual struggle past. Here they are:

HiSeoul Festival

Each spring shortly after the cherry blossoms turn to green and just before the other flowers blow away, posters start popping up around the city. They invite everyone down to the City Hall for the HiSeoul Festival. Here the main stage is set up and have a whole whack of different performers from around the world try their best to entertain.

On Sunday, Saejin and I made our way here to take in whatever was going on. We then spent the next half hour completely absorbed in the Russian rockers and the dance troupe commanding the stage. The main singer was a plump full bodied woman who could of sang without a microphone and still been heard. The dancers jumped, turned and flipped one another to help translate the songs into an understandable story. This was all nice and dandy but my eyes were locked elsewhere. I loved the band and their ultra hip blue and white space age/70's glam rock outfits. I wish my camera could of zoomed in that extra bit to capture them better but here they are anyway.



Check out the high heels and blue capes. Next years Halloween outfit is planned if I can track down their tailor.


After our ears began to ring in Russian we moved to the side of the stage where we caught a better glimpse of Freddy Mercury part two rocking out on the accordion.

Know Your Cuts of Meat

It was a quiet weekend that wasn't supposed to be. Saejin and I had planned to join our friends in Suncheon on Saturday but the last flight out of Seoul left at 6:30 and Saejin was still stuck at work. To make up for it, we treated ourselves to a good meal and wine at a French Restaurant in Itaewon.

Later on in the night we met up with Yun Jeong for some beer before we deciding to see a movie. Time problems continued to follow us as the last showing was at 12:30 and we got there at 1:00 am. To make up for it, we went to find some street food. There were three tents lined up on the street and we gambled on the empty tent being the best. Not a wise pick as the hammered server struggling to keep her eyes open cooked up some awful grub. To fill in the uncomfortable silences the bad food and drunk lady brought on we tried to identify all the meat on the table.

Can you guess these yummy bits of animal? If you get it right I'll buy you a drink.