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Me standing in North Korea
Demonstrating the irreverence that's bound to get me killed some day. They make you pay to get a cart at the local Walmart type store (Emart). The motivation behind this I’m guessing is that you’ll bother returning the cart where you found it if it gives you your money back. Nine cents ain’t getting that cart pushed back. I’m also more likely to push that bastard home and leave it on the side of my house like Dan Goodrich used to do back in the old neighborhood. Elections suck in the US, tons of commercials on tv and such, but at least they don’t drive up and down your street at eight in the morning on a Sunday with loudspeaker trucks. I wish I was a Korean citizen so I could vote against these devils. Getting fit is easy, ingest less calories than you burn in a day. Getting fit while making absolutely no lifestyle changes whatsoever, therin lies the rub. Most girls don’t consider a Pace picante sauce jar a cup, or at least not a classy one. Because North Korea sank that warship and relations are worse than they’ve been in a long time I thought it’d be an ideal time to finally visit the DMZ. It’s a strange bit
North Korean Soldier
What age do you stop getting the urge to moon enemy combatants? of the world. The Joint Security Area is where the two armies, technically still at war, have joint security responsibilities for their meeting area. Basically there are a series of four houses, and each house is divided exactly down the middle into North and South Korean sides. There is a table for people to sit in the middle of the room, which is also divided. There are also two villages, called alternately Freedom Village and Propaganda Village depending on your perspective, with the two tallest flag poles in the world that kept getting bigger as the two sides tried to one up each other. It’s basically a trip to a Korean pissing contest. Our trip was spiced up with the threat from the North that they were going to kill a tour group in retaliation for accusations that they torpedoed the South Korean ship. The tour guide was unintentionally hilarious for his discussion of “eye fighting” with North Korean soldiers and his insistence on placing articles where they don’t belong (“in the Korea we like to eat the rices). In the interest of directing my family’s worry to a more appropriate target I think I should comment on the most
likely way I may die here in Korea. In Colombia, as anyone who visited can attest, routine taxi rides are certainly life’s greatest peril. Here I would say that getting my face taekwando’ed off by a motorcyclist is probably it. I tend to be fairly bellicose with them as they drive all over the sidewalks and I justify it by pretending it’s for the kids’ safety, but really I just find it annoying and therefore refuse to move when they honk wildly behind me. There's a teacher here who refuses to adapt to Korea and feels strongly and vocally that Korea should adapt to him who got owned on the subway by a sixty year old woman to my great amusement. The subway was packed as twelve of us took the rush hour train to a training and although he was blocking the door people were trying to leave through he loudly declared that he wasn’t going to move for them… until a 60 year old asian women half his height pushed him to the ground. Spring finally showed its lovely face and I’ve been celebrating by attending lots of baseball games, the zoo, the horse track and some outdoor
Lying down game
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198572/Find-odd-place-lie-face--Is-pointless-internet-craze-yet.html music festivals. The zoo is enormous, but the best animal watching was the human one as strange Korean dress was out on full display. Much like a Mexican day laborer sporting the “Daddy’s Little Girl” t-shirt many Koreans think it’s a good idea to wear shirts with non-sensical and humorous English on it. The best one I’ve seen was an old woman in a shirt that read in glittery letters “doing whores.” If you were going to visit a zoo and a race track and had to guess which allows you to drink you’d go with the horse track right? You’d be wrong though. The track is very strange, the infield is all kids on bicycles and roller blades, families having picnics and coffee shops. The race-viewing bleachers look like the Russian roulette tables in Deer Hunter with seedy looking folks pouring over their racing mags and chain smoking like high school kids with low self esteem. I lost some money, kept my self esteem and was enormously entertained. I also saw a Steven McCurry exhibit where one of my entourage started screaming and threatening one of the ubiquitous aggressively impolite ajummas. In a culture where you won’t hear a
Han River Park
Just doing some lunges single soul talk on a full subway this made everyone very uncomfortable, except me who found it hilarious and couldn’t stop laughing. I tried to warn them that we ‘Mericans put our old people in homes (read: prisons) and don’t respect them at all. I wouldn’t consider myself to be superstitious, but I will admit to relying on some pretty shaky science sometimes. Example: Let’s say there’s some chicken whose integrity is questionable at best. I’ll eat it, disregarding its pink chickeny center but will follow it with a shot of tequila in order to kill any bacteria. The theory behind this is that I didn’t get sick in Mexico, and I drank a fair amount of tequila. Now you can see why I won the National Science Olympiad medal in high school. For a place where it rains this much Koreans are sorely lacking in their umbrella etiquette. There’s something about a lot of the ugly white dudes here dating hot Koreans that makes me want to yell “STRANGER DANGER!” Creepers. The kind of dudes who collect their fingernails in ziplock bags. I read this on a teacher’s blog the other day and found it pretty amusing and dead
Ecuador v South Korea
The sendoff game before the World Cup, it was awesome.
Sandrine, Maria, Adam and Raul. on: “We got the applications to teach summer school in our mailboxes at work today. I put mine in my ‘To Do’ pile, right on top of my application to get punched in the junk.” My summer plans are forming, and mostly involve China. Anyways, I’m enjoying Seoul again like I did in the beginning, predicated mostly on the positive turning of the seasons. Happy 5th birthday to my niece Sam, she’s getting all grown up and I’m missing it which is the worst part about living so far away. Happy Half Birthday to me also, I’m expecting gifts. Oh and I finally wrote that paper I was supposed to finish five years ago, so there’s that.
A boombox is not a toy,
~T
Movie: Diving Bell and the Butterfly or Princess Mononoke
TV: Community is a great show. The last scene with Abed and Troy is usually the best part.
Album: A.A. Bondy - American Hearts, These Four Walls by We Were Promised Jetpacks or Two Gallants - Two Gallants. The first is folksy, the second indie rock, the third a mix of the two.
Book: Read both Pyongyang: A Journey Into North Korea, a
Sam, Trav and Tegan
Three people I don't see near enough of. non-fiction graphic novel about a trip to North Korea and Bukowski’s Post Office. Both were excellent.
I am not Korean. But I wish I was because it would make my interest in Asian women much less creepy" ~ Jim Gaffigan
Why are their bushes so big? ~ My friend Ra discussing Korean pubic tendencies.
“I could never live there, I like seasons, I like having seasons too much.” ~ Person from Omaha
“Yeah, I like having seasons too, that’s why I live somewhere where we skip the shitty ones.” ~ Person from Southern California.
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Jeni
non-member comment
I'm awesome
I think it rules that just Tuesday I told a friend "since there is tension between North and South Korea, I bet my brother goes to the DMZ." I'm glad that I know you that well. :) *not that i'm cool enough to use the DMZ acronymn, but i felt it was appropriate.