Blogs from South Korea, Asia - page 360

....and then there was another ticket in my hot little hand (Vietnam...I stare at the letters and let the word slowly seep into my consciousness), a thick piece of paper, once a magnificent tree on the edge of suburbia somewhere, now a neatly packaged promise of my impending adventure. I have forsaken Korea as of late- denied its ability to entice me, to bring me into the 'foreign mystique'. Five minutes on a patio in Insadong, solitarily sipping subtle and refreshing Iced Green Tea while hoards of mingling Saturday shoppers meander though the streets below (an image of Hemmingway with olive skin and a black, bowl haircut and blsck and white striped shirt, sitting at the table across from me pops into my mind), in some way, has brought back an interest in the culture of ... read more

I’d been staying with a friend in Seoul, South Korea. He was teaching English there and had a flat just out of the city centre. This photo was taken near his flat one evening before we all (me and his flatmates) went out for dinner. After the meal I wasn’t feeling too great and decided to head back to his. It was only about 9pm, so he put me in a taxi and told the driver his address. But when the taxi got there the fare was about three times the amount that it had been when it took us out in the first place and I realised he was taking the piss in a big way. So I tried to contest the price with the help of my trusty phrasebook. It wasn’t going well ... read more

Again, I deleted any photos of the kids to protect them from Googlers. This is not so much a journal as a chance for you to see some pictures. The first picture shows the bus coming up to the bus stop. It's the yellow van with blue and red writing on the front. This is the 유치원 'yu chi wan' (preschool) bus that the children ride to and from preschool. The next picture is of the kids getting off the bus. The lady is one of their teachers / 선생님 'son sayng nim'. Many of the children on the bus know me as their 영어 선생님 'young au son sayng nim' (English Teacher), and they say, "Hi! I love you." The following pictures are of the children with their "driver's licences" pinned onto their shirts and ... read more

So while my brother and my father were basking in the California sun I too was taking in the joy that is a summer day in an amusement park. In all fairness, Disneyland IS slightly more exciting, slightly more "magical" than Everland, but this could be the childhood memories I have to create this highly exaggerted perception of DIsneyland as the be all and end all of childish fantasy. Though it wasn't "the be all and end all", Everland offered its own menagerie of delights for me to sink my teeth into for the best day of the year. With descriptions of rides verging on the obscure ("a fun ride on a dragon flying excitingly!"), to slight variations of somewhat familiar children's characters (the flume ride features a set of pelicans hanging out in sailor outfits ... read more

I'm going to let go of this inhuman thing known as objective thinking for just a tad while I write this (and I'll be basing my generalizations on the 8 or so people I've studied... quite extensive!) Soccer. Lets start with 90% of soccer fans in Korea (trust me on these statistics... I'm a certified psychologist). They cheer, they boo, they say the following lines "Good job!", "oh no/yes!", "What's wrong with that person?!", and the ever elusive "WAAAAGGGHHHHHHHHHAAAAA!!!!!" ---- (Okay, that's what it sounds like to me... ) This in itself is not a whole lot strange, it's that these 90% are about 100% fake fans of soccer. All they know is when something bad is going on, something good is going on, and the two different kind of reactions to give when the ball ... read more