Yea, Floorbears.

So a while back I talked about how awesome it was to go to places in the off season in Korea, because everyone in the country with the means and free time packs whatever is "the" place this season, and then completely abandon it as suddenly as they arrived. Now I know how awesome it isn't to go to places during the high season.

I casually mentioned to a teacher that I ran to the top of the town's "mountain"... More of a hill, even going as far as calling it a "himllountain" is generous. Anyway, he took it as a sign that I was an avid mountaineer, and invited me out to NaeJang-san. This being the season that all the leaves were changing, it was something that was not to be missed, according to him.

Now I'm from the Pennsylvania Poconos, and have lived every fall of my life in PA one place or another. I'm intimately familiar with the lifecycle of deciduous trees, and the annoying bullshit phenomenon of "leafwatching" that people from crowded places - i.e.New Yorkers and Jersians - get up to this time of year. So I really have no excuse to complain, as a split second of thinking about what going to a national park in a country with a population which boasts a density roughly 15 times that of the U.S., and a flock-like collectivist mentality too boot would entail.

Mr. Sim met me at 5:30. In the Godfucking morning. Of a Saturday. I figured it was to get an early start on the day, so that we could both be in our respective homes, chillaxin, watching Korean's duke it out one of the two Starcraft channels on TV by 12, 1 at the latest. Turns out it was because every morning's fog is completely opaque before the sun comes up. So after driving for two and a half hours at 40km/hr we finally arrive, to a line that was literally miles long. Mr. Sim explained to me that the mountain was so beautiful this time of year that it attracted upwards of 60,000 people every day. I could have mentioned that the point of getting out in nature is not to be standing ass-high in Koreans, but I was busy dozing and drooling all over myself.

Eventually we get out of the car, and began the hike. Beautiful mountain, great views, had a blast, camera died after two pictures. Oh well. Walked all over the place, but as a reasonably in shape 20 something dragging two 40 year olds behind me, I had a lot of time to check out the mountainside. Or what I could see of it under the carpet of leafers. Problem with 60000 people hiking one trail is that 30,000 of them are coming the other way, and when you're on a mountainside with about 3 feet of walking space between the sheer rockwall and the 20 foot drop off, the Pushy Old Korean Broad barging her way past can sort of grate.

Can't complain, got a few nice pictures, my favorite of which is included. Gotta love the terror on the Alpen Bear's face, and the fact that baby bear is gonna get squooshed no matter what. Little morbid, but you damn sure look up when you're near those signs.

Goddamn Blog Fuck!

This blog thing is hard... reciting the alphabet backwards while being whipped in the eye with a nickel in a nylon stocking hard. If it weren't for you people whining all the time, I'd have probably taken this whole thing down. Here's why no stories. The school put blogger on their net nanny so I can only access the PG-13 parts of the web at an internet cafe after work - too busy doing anyhting else, on Friday night - never again, or on Saturday or Sunday - too hungover. Eventually But here it is. Another post. That is all

P.S. Eventually I'll get around to posting more regularly, and here's what you're in for:

Angry, dishonest men selling fruit

Justifiably pushy old broads

Unjustifiably opulent apartments for Army guys

Mountainous clusterfucks

Korean Hallmark Holidays

Prepubescent Boy Drag Show School Festival Time!

By the way, I'm unwilling to look, but I bet there's at least one porno website out there that's all about backwards singing while being beat about the face with spare change in a sock. Probably has some pretentious name too, like Sock Play or something.

A Mix Supreme

I spent a lot of time making that Halloween mix, and a lot of time grousing about it, so I figured I'd post it so everyone can gaze admiringly upon it. Without Further ado, what could have been (single tear):

1 Red Right Hand - Nick Cave
2 Awoo - Hidden Cameras
3 Satan Is My Motor - Cake
4 Sex and Candy - Marcy Playground
5 Pretend We're Dead - L7
6 November Has Come - Gorillaz/MF Doom
7 Candy For Everyone - The Late BP Helium
8 The Killing Moon - Echo and the Bunnymen
9 Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) - David Bowie
10 Dead Man's Party - Oingo Boingo
11 Lollipop (Candyman) - Aqua
12 The Horror - RJD2
13 Electric Demons In Love - Electric 6
14 Abra Cadaver - The Hives
15 Date With the Night - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
16 Boogie Monster - Gnarls Barkley
17 Voodoo Lady - Ween
18 I Want Candy - MC Chris
19 Dracula's Wedding - Outkast
20 Halloween - Aqua
21 Satan Said Dance - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
22 Thiller - Michael Jackson
23 Ghostbuster's Theme - Ray Parker Jr.
24 Devil's Pie - Rhymefest
25 Rhino Stomp - Starlight Mints

Got through three of those before the night got douched up.

Everyone likes Rap!

Ok, squid is getting a little old. It's all fun and games until a beak gets stuck on your tongue, or they forget to remove the stomach. Seriously, the beak is like a bird's foot - it naturally snaps shut, and muscles have to be flexed to open it. Getting it off a taste bud is equivalent to digging a popcorn kernel out of your gums, and about as appealing to watch. And if you think eating squid is gross, imagine eating what squid's already eaten. Yuck about covers it.

Been here about two months, and I've eaten pretty much every food this country has to offer. Scale of 1-10, nothing really gets above a 7. Somewhat disappointing, but we've finally figured out how to get hold of most of the things we need to cook what I no longer feel chauvinistic calling "real food". If that sounds bad to you, consider the fact that these guys go nuts for "Italian" food that would send Chef Boyardee into an apoplectic Gordon Ramseyesque fit. I've made it my life's goal before I leave to teach one Korean how to make a half decent tomato sauce. I'm just payin' it forward, it's what HaJO* would have wanted.

Learing about the ups and downs of living in Korean Mayberry. Plus side, there are so few foreigners that everyone knows everyone and you need to be open and friendly if you ever want to speak your own language. Went to Seoul two weekends ago, and when I warned a lady that her beer, which she had placed on the felt of a pool table, was about to be smashed by a smashed Korean girl trying desperately to count to fifteen so she could finish racking the balls, she replied with "Why are you talking to me?" followed by a brief tirade in an ugly accent that, since we were watching the rugby world cup, I pegged as South African. Might have been British, but my mental meanness Venn diagram has a lot of overlap between "asshole" and "White South African".

Downside to a small community: You're stuck with what you get. White Seoulites might be 90% pricks, but that still leaves more cool people than the entire foreign population of Iksan combined. And with a small group, the one or two turds will float right to the top of the bowl. For our Halloween Party, I spent about three days working on a Halloween Mixlist for the Saturday night party at the bar.

Brief background: I've always said the most amazing thing in the world would be a soundsystem hooked up to a computer hooked up to the internet. Bar quality sound system + stealing all the music on the internet = my own personal Shangri-La. Pick 3 songs, sit your butt down and enjoy the Everyone's Favorite Song Musical Gumbo all night. Too bad the RIAA would shut you down in a hot second right? Not in Korea, where the international copyright laws are not so much played with fast and loose as used to line the cages of a dog farm. And if I can go off on a tangent, dog farms are the most depressing things in creation. Ever see the deer hunter, or Missing in Action? Imagine the prison cells from those movies, filled with cute fluffy dogs. I've got no problem with eating the poor bastards, but dogs might be the only self-herding livestock on the planet. For crap's sake just name them and pet them once a day and they'll never run away!

Anyway, we find a bar where the jukebox is limited only by your imagination, Zombo.com style, and me and my buddy mike proceed to go so hog wild on the thing that the bartender buys us a mixing board. Fast forward about two weeks and the thing has become a microcosm of America. Democracy doesn't work people, Hamilton was right! I can handle the random Korean broad coming up and playing Toxic/Let's Get Retarded/Crazy in Love. Despite the fact that those are literally** the only western songs they know, I just accept it and move on. But when a random American jackass comes up to the DJ booth, refuses to budge the entire night, clears the entire playlist, plays 3 Outkast songs in a row, ending with Wheels of Steel(?!) has so many people screaming at him that he stops the music cold and consults with his friend about what to play next (Play some rap. Everyone likes rap.) and demands anyone with an idea about how to make things fun again write their request on a slip of paper and hand it to him. It's a very lucky thing for everyone involved I broke my homemade cricket bat popping balloons on the bar.

So anyway, things don't all suck, but I've written about the fun and cool, needed to vent a bit. All done.

*Haley Joel Osment. We're bosom buds.

**Literally literally, not literally as in "I laughed so hard I literally shit my pants." Literally as in, any time a Korean asks to hear a song, it will always be those three. No more no less.

'Course Here They Just Call It Thanksgiving...

(Written 10/4)

Hey guys?

What's crackin, you crusty ol' consarnits? The Westerners, myself included, have begun speaking in ridiculous, outdated, or polysyllabic words:

1. so that we can say whatever we want around Koreans, who may or may not know English, but definitely do not know prestidigitate or defenestrate

2. so that we don't return home speaking like gibbering idiots and gesticulating like we have to over here.

"HELLO.... MOM.... IT... IS... VVVVERY... NICE... TO... SEE... YOU... AGAIN...."

Honestly I've used the word "excoriate" so many times that I've been threatened with a beating by the Crazy Scottish Guy.

I'm not sure if every group of mixed Westerners has one, or if all Scots are like that, but it seems everywhere we go, every group of westerners has a rowdy Scot, a few Frattish Canadians, a wierd, off-putting older guy from America, and one haggard Englishman who's been bobbing around the far East like so much human jetsam for the last 20 years, drinking and doing God knows what and God knows whom, respectively, and looks it. First time we met our British guy, we spent the rest of the day thinking of things that he's probably said after a night of drinking. One of the best was "I don't remember vomiting in a puddle of my own pass-out..." We thought we might have misjudged him when we didn't see him at the bars the first two weekends, but that was because he rolled into town with around 40 bucks to last him one month. He has a Thai girlfriend who he sends most of his money to. No comment. He eventually got the boss to give him an advance. The first thing he bought was a set of speakers, the same ones I got on my first day here, and the second thing was a TON of hooch for the 5 day weekend we had for Korean Thanksgiving. Needless to say, we've become fast friends, although I don't know if I can hang with his level of debauchery. I think I slept about 6 hours out of 72 at one point. You hit a wierd stride on the third day. You don't feel tired or hungover anymore, but you clearly are not banging on all 8 cylinders. Both me and my one friend started hallucinating that the all Koreans we overheard were speaking English with a British accent. Very wierd. I almost approached two random girls on the subway because it's so rare to meet a westerner, and hey, there are Asian Brits too, until I realized that everyone was speaking English, and yet somehow I couldn't understand a word. And then I freaked the eff out.

So for Korean Thanksgiving we went to Pusan, which is like Korean Miami. Cool thing about Korea is that Koreans are terrified of the cold. We went to Haeundae, Korea's Waikiki, which I'm aware is not in Miami, but you have to mix your metaphors sometimes to convey any information. Since it was after August, the only Koreans on the beach were gawking at the weird Westerners swimming in water that "everyone knows" will give you hypothermia this late in the year. It was about 70 degrees. I got a sunburn in late September for God's sake! And it's not just because it's usually very warm here that they're sensitive to cold, there were a bunch of drunken Southeast Asians weaving through the swimmers on Jetskis (not cool), it's just the culture. Anyway, a beach that usually looks like this
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/45/182475456_3a91c21548.jpg
was all ours (pretty cool) and there's no open container laws here. (very cool) But yea, travel is cheap if you know where and when to go, motels don't take ID, so you can steal whatever you want and ransack the minibar and there is always a Westerner bar in every town. I think I understand Gaydar, because we haven't missed yet. The places always try for a "Cowboy" feel, there's graffiti all over the walls, and LCD Soundsystem blaring from the speakers because that's the only music Americans, Canadians, and the Eurotrash can agree on. We get two weeks off in the wintertime, and we're thinking southern hemisphere... Jakarta, Hanoi, or Goa. And we're takin' votes

Speaking of booze, one alarming thing that I've learned is that apparently the Korean sake, Soju, is now catching on in trendy bars in America. This needs to stop. Immediately. This crap will rend our fair Republic unto tatters. Apparently it used to be ok, and the topshelf stuff is, but after the war, there was a rice shortage so a lot of manufacturers switched to pouring water on straight ethanol, and then adding sugar so it didn't taste like weak moonshine. It smells, and tastes, and affects you, like you poured rubbing alcohol into Zima. Each bottle is 30% alcohol, and costs you the equivalent of $1.20, and your motor skills for the next two days. Somehow or other Koreans think it tastes good, and pound the stuff all night, every night. These guys drink like they expect to wake up in a bathtub full of ice with their liver gone in the morning.

While I'm on the subject of horror stories, I thought I'd drop this knowledge on you. When we first got here, there was apparently a lot of care taken to handle us and keep us in a western bubble, but eventually we broke out, and the bathrooms, Almighty Christ on his Throne, the bathrooms! I thought I was scarred when I had to use a bidet at school a week or two ago, but one hungover morn, I found myself in an internet cafe in an older building and walked in on this:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.planetesl.com/img/toilets_1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.planetesl.com/information/toilets.html&h=244&w=200&sz=56&hl=en&start=7&um=1&tbnid=W4LNCFAPikxPyM:&tbnh=110&tbnw=90&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dkorean%2Btoilet%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den
To those of you asking what that is, and how you use it, you know damn well, so quit playing dainty. It's a freaking hole in the ground, and for the record that picture is wayyyy cleaner than you're likely to find around here. Brightside, I should have exquisitely muscled thighs by the time I leave.

Bidets are horrible though. I still have to wait for my parents to die to say for sure whether using one is the worst thing that will ever happen to me, but it's definitely in the running. Too bad hating French people is passe by now.

Also, never tell a scottish person to shut his Scot-hole. They will take umbrage. A whole heapin' helpin' of umbrage.

Annyonghi kaseyo!

It's So HOT here!

And yet, milk is such a wonderful choice...

(Written 9/19.)

Seriously, Bobby?

December year round? It's about 99 degrees here and always around 100% humidity. On the plus side, Tom, you were COMPLETELY right. You know what I'm talking about. So I've been here for two weeks, and while I miss the kind of things you can get in a cosmopolitan, uncrowded country with land that will grow anything (Dryers, a good haircut, cheese, wine, beer, fruit, Ipod accesories) I do like being one of twenty Westerners in a "provincial" town of 300,000 people who are so unused to foreigners they have absolutely no reservations about saying and doing some of the most hilarious racist things in the world. Kids and adults have asked me why my nose is so "high", why it's so big, if my eyes are really blue, what I do to my hair to make it look like that (I wish I knew, I'd love it if a Napoleon Dynamite 'fro became the style over here) They love to yank at your arm hair, and one of the black teachers had a kid try to rub the color off his skin, and has been called "chocolate man" and complimented on his smooth chocolate skin on several occasions. I feel like having my hair straightened and dyed black, and getting a nose job, just so the kids will pay attention.

The kids are a blast. I was worried they'd be super reserved like it said in all the guides, but except for a few of the shy ones, you can't get them to shut up. And they learn the wierdest words. Think it's off putting to be called beautiful by a 13 year old boy? How a bout a cluster of giggling schoolgirls (who as it turned out, all were on the way to the doctor for pinkeye) following you for a block yelling "handsome" in your face? What in God's name do you say to that? As for the shy kids, they are REALLY shy. As in, crippled with stage fright among 20 other kids their own age who they spend all day with when called on to recite a sentence that THEY wrote. I have one kid who's M.O. is to hide his face behind a sheet of paper when he says anything. But otherwise, they're nuts. Let them pick their own English names. I've seen Big Daddy too many times to pretend I didn't know what was coming. I ended up with three Monkeys, a Hitler, a Spaghetti, a Sanchez, an Eduardo, and a Keyser Soze. In one class I talked about America and American presidents first, and one kid decided to be George Jefferson. He realized his mistake and tried to correct it, but I was having none of it. 3rd period Friday is my new favorite hour.

Foods good, if you have no compunction about what you're eating. I've had snail soup, fish heads, tentacle omelettes, (tentacle everything really, this is a bad place to be a squid), and one soup that seemed like they dredged the bottom of a pond. Really brown, silty consistency, with seaweed and whole, unshelled crayfish. All of it tasted awesome. Only problem I have is that they never really caught onto butchery out here. Seems like they just hack at the animal wildly until something falls off and throw it on the fire. Bone-in everything, from chicken, to fish, to bacon. I've been thinking of opening a restaurant that just serves chicken fingers, salmon fillets, and prime rib. It'd blow their minds.

Culture's ok. I'm picking up the language as much as someone who left his dictionary and is miles from an English bookstore can. It's wierd. The written language was specifically designed by royal-appointed linguists so that "a wise man could learn it in a morning, a fool in ten days." I had it down in about 4. So I'm an illiterate who can read. I've learned not to sound out street signs near Koreans, because they assume I'm fluent and just hit me with a torrent of words I don't know, and refuse to believe I can't speak korean, cause I just read that sign. TV's ok too. Still waiting on cable, so I can get English language stuff, but there's this Korean show we've dubbed Old Lady Showdown. Some soap where middle-aged women stoneface stare at each other for at least one minute long scene every episode. Very intense.
Got to head to class. Keep fighting the good fight you guys.

Chapter the First: In Which Our Intrepid Hero Ignores The Rough Equivalency Of Writing A Blog To Scrawling Homophobic Graffiti In A Toilet Stall.

At least people read the graffiti in a toilet stall, and you've got a 1 in 10 chance at a laugh, which is more than I can say about any blog I've ever read. Except for those run by certain friends of mine who shall remain nameless, so that everone I know can bask in warmth of the assumption that I mean them. (I don't). Didn't plan on becoming a weblogger on the Infoputer Superhypernet, but a friend suggested I put some emails home he missed out on up on one, and it seemed like an elegant solution to my problem of how to ignore all the friends back home I promised to write to, while still bitching about things that interest no one but myself. So stay posted.