Traffic

Traffic here is crazy. I've almost been hit three times, and one time, I was shaken up so bad I had to lean up against a phone booth and catch my breath. No one stays on their side of the streets, almost everyone cuts corners, and traffic lights are not very visible and seem more like a guideline than the law.

As a country that has almost entirely reconstructed itself since the Korean War, Korea is a development success story. It does however have its share of growing pains. One such pain is the traffic! A culture that has only had the car as a commonly accessible commodity for three or four decades sure has been among the things that has taught me the value of human life, and its frailty beside these speeding behemoths.

My ex-professor and friend (or so I'd like to think lol) Dionne Brand recently won the Toronto Book Award for her novel What We All Long For. I must confess I haven't read it yet; I am more familiar with her poetry. I read her book of poems "Inventory" before I came to Korea and it was incredibly inspiring. It was one of the only pieces of art that motivated me to create myself in recent memory. Congratulations to Dionne and go buy her books! She's really, really good!

Miscelleria of Modernity (on your knees biotch)

Well, what do you know? After I write a blog about a magazine that doesn't pay me after I published in their rag, I get the freakin cheque and free copy sent within two freakin' days. I'm stunned. Obviously the new staff is PR savvy!

My neighbour keeps bringing me delicious Thai food cooked by his wife. I think he's trying to butter me up for something: a grand plan to blackmail our boss or something like that. I don't want anything to do with it really, but I secretly hope the gods wreak vengeance on behalf of my beleagured coworker (long story that involves some compromising info).

My lover wants to take a Tantric workshop and a dominate/surrender workshop. I think he wants to spice up our sex life or something. It's really a sweet gesture because I think he's thinking of me. I like to dominate people. Don't tell, please.

In case you're wondering, the photo below is of hundreds of baby jellyfish.

Hanging out at the coy pond, feeling coy.

One of the biggest corporations in South Korea is Dae woo: you've probably heard of them. They've got their thumbs in many pies: cars, stereos, even department stores. I found out recently General Motors owns a stake in the company. It's mind-boggling how a few people basically own the whole world, and let little peons like me make a liveable wage, while many others make a hardly liveable wage and endure incredibly shitty working conditions.

Forget about a big fish in a small pond: I'm a microscopic plankton. Love me.

George Bush IS intelligent.

Look. He's got the whole world talking about him, thinking about him. Maybe most of it is negative, but you know what they say: there's no such thing as bad press. The occasional ridiculous verbalism does not automatically make someone stupid. Think about it. I say stupid shit all the time and I was the most sought after student in my Master's degree cohort. The only difference is that I don't have zillions of cameras on me at all times to catch my "Bush-isms."

No. I simply don't believe it's possible to ascend to the top of the most economically and militarily powerful country on the planet (though I don't think they are any more) without at least having the intelligence to recognize intelligence and surround yourself with it.

That said... intelligence is a neutral quality; it does not automatically translate into moral "rightness." George Bush is a bad, bad man.

The Mighty Cicada

This is a picture of the loudest insect on earth: the cicada. Cicadas live as larvae under the ground for over a decade, then they come out, they sing their song, lay eggs or fertilize eggs, and then die. I think of them as magic creatures, prehistoric, wise, and powerful. How else can such a small thing make such a big noise but magic. Yes it's physics, but the best magic is always based on the material nature of the world.

I bring cicadas up because one of my students brought in two of the largest cicadas I've ever seen to class today. Everyone except him and me freaked out. The cicadas stayed speechless, stunned by their erstwhile captivity. If aliens tried to contact intelligent life on earth during august, all they would hear was a relentless metallic buzz, drowning out the traffic and the conversations below.

Small Face, Lovely Breast

This ad was one I saw on the Busan subway. It advertizes a small face, but lovely breast. I think it is for plastic surgery, which is fairly popular here. The most popular form of plastic surgery is the replacement of the hymen!!!! (or so I'm told). I wonder what's wrong with big faces? Maybe the Korean sense of beauty strays more towards finer features. I personally like big round faces...

I'm not exactly skinny, but I'm not nearly fat by North American standards, and I had one of the young students write me a letter, asking me why I was so fat. I laughed. Finally, the gender divide seemed erased as far as the expectation of female thinness goes. It made my day! I gave another group of students an assignment to draw and describe their best friend, and one of the girls described her best friend as fat!

This was not her being mean or anything (I don't think so at least). The Koreans just have a different sense of honesty about these things...

Lost in Translation

For a native English speaker, there are many signs in Korea that cause one to pause and maybe have a private giggle. I took a photo of this sign on the ferry to Ulleung-do, an island in the strait between Korea and Japan. My friends and I thought it was a very funny translation. You often see T-shirts that have laugh-inducing English slogans on them. One memorable one I saw today was "Fuckin Design T-Shirt Store."

Since I spent too much money in Seoul (it is quite a bit more expensive than Masan, as you would expect) the weekend before, I decided to take it easy last weekend. On Sunday I hiked halfway up Mt. Mahakasan to find the café I discovered the last time I hiked. I intended to get a beer to sip while I finished “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth (excellent book, incidentally). I sat down and started to read, but no one came over to take my order. I noticed that there was people only at the one table, and they were laughing and carrying on. Looked like they were having a good time. After about half an hour of reading and taking photos, the aforementioned people waved me over.

The only woman of the group vacated, and from what I understood, she was the patroness of the café. Next thing I know, I’m being offered moccoli (rice wine), plum wine, and kimchi (pickled cabbage) with tofu. One of the group was due to travel to Canada himself, to Vancouver. He was also a chiropractor. As I had begun seeing a chiropractor in Canada before I left, I tried to let him know that I would be interested in seeing him as a patient.

This was the first time that I got frustrated by the language barrier. No matter how hard each party tried to understand the other, I could not get his business card or phone card. He kept asking for mine, and weird as it might seem, I still don’t know my number because the school takes care of all my bills and subtracts it from my salary. About an hour later, I ambled down the lower portion of the mountain, slightly tipsy.

World Cup Fever

A few nights ago I went to see the Korea vs. Togo World Cup game; It was being broadcast in most public locations: sports bars, billboard screens, the local stadium, and on a huge screen in a large construction site. My friends Tim and Amy accompanied me, and by this enormous department store downtown we met a few Korean friends. One of them, Yung-tek, is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life. He greeted us with gift bags, having bought us each a red “Fighting Korea” T-shirt. I went to put it on over the T-shirt I was already wearing, but Yung-tek insisted that I take off my current T-shirt to put it on. I obliged, and he and his friends proceeded to laugh at my prodigious chest hair. I blushed!

We bought snacks and beer in the department store, a sprawling multi-floor deal that is like Walmart in its “you can buy anything here” approach to retail. Next, we headed over to the construction site, part of a swath of swarming humans, all decked out in red shirts, armbands, headbands, face paint, and glowing devil’s horns. I couldn’t believe my eyes. They had erected a temporary pavilion complete with spotlights, huge balloons, a stage for entertainers, and television cameras. There was maybe a thousand people there, all cheering, chanting, and waving inflatable rods, that, when struck together, make a shallow snare drum sound. When combined, the resulting percussion is considerable.

In between entertainment acts, I somehow became separated from my friends. I looked for them briefly, and then felt that this was a futile activity, so I sat down to enjoy the proceedings. I watched most of the first half from this location, occasionally looking for my friends. Just before the game started, I heard a string of Korean announcements, and I could have sworn that I heard my name and something about Canada. I did not believe my ears though, and so I missed the obvious: my friends had secured a public announcement to try to reconnect with me. At the break, Togo was up 1-0, and I headed to the rear because many people were making their way out of the construction site. There was a bottleneck, so I thought I would have a good chance of finding them there.

I had forgotten my money on my bed, and I didn‘t know the way home, so I would have had to find a bank before I caught a cab. All of a sudden, through the loudspeaker I can hear my friend Tim’s voice say in English “Trevor, if you can hear me, meet Tim at the camera between the two towers.” I was thrilled; as I was hungry and thirsty and they had all the snacks I could alleviate my bodily discomfort and enjoy the rest of the game with good company. Korea scored two goals in the second half, and every time they scored, they fired off fireworks and people got up out of their seats, hollered, hugged each other, and slapped each other high fives. We went out for drinks after Korea won 2-0 to the jubilation of the people.