Jinhui and I have started studying Japanese together, primarily due to the fact that we gave our TV away and need something to do to pass time in the evening. Anyhow we’ve learned hiragana so far and have learned how to read a random assortment of words totally out of context, and in an effort to get used to typing in Japanese, I’m going to record those random words I’ve been learning here.
あい : 사랑 (love)
いえ : 집 (house)
うえ : 위 (up)
おい : 조카 (nephew)
あおい : 파랗다 (blue)
おおい : 많다 (many)
The other day I saw a ton of really insane stuff. First, while sitting on a bus stuck in traffic, I saw a flat bed truck. On the back of that truck was a huge, white Converse All Star sneaker roughly the size of your average S.U.V.
As I got off the bus I saw the most wild traffic accident ever. A truck, which had been carrying cases of soju had gone around a corner too quickly causing the load (of soju bottles) to fall out of the truck and onto the street. Part of me wanted to run out there like Homer in that Simpsons episode when he finds a turned over sugar truck, and tell the guys, “You go get help! I’ll stay here and protect the soju!” But in reality all I could do was kick myself for leaving my camera at home.
So I’m turning it over to you. What did you see / do on a day when you forgot your camera?
No Brain is a band that I like. They sometimes do things like cover the Sex Pistols or record theme songs for sporting events. And sometimes they rock out on their own shit. This is No Brain rocking out on their own shit. The song is called “”넌 네가 반했어.” Enjoy!!!
And now because we care about you all so much, here’s a live version of the same tune…done by the same band. Enjoy!
On Sunday evening, Jinhui and I traveled to Seoul to witness the 8th annual Seoul Drum Festival. We had gone together last year, and had enjoyed ourselves greatly. We were therefore looking forward to seeing it again. So after a quick dinner at Lotteria, we hopped on a bus and head for Seoul.
Last year, the event was held on the grounds of City Hall, which was pretty decent. This year the event was held at Kyunghui Palace (경희궁), and I for one was not please with the change. The seating at Kyunghui Palace wasn’t as awesome, and in addition the stage seemed to be much lower than the stage from the year before. This made things like seeing what was happening or taking photographs a little bit difficult.
Anyhow, my gripes about venue changes aside, we had an awesome time. Jinhui and I had some beers and saw six percussion groups (or teams as they were refered to as in Korean). Now in the style of my rock show reports of old, I’ll give you a rundown of exactly what it was that we saw.
First up was a group called New Dimension from Belgium. New Dimension were one of those percussion groups that rocked out on trash cans and chairs as opposed to actual drums. While they put on a decent show, I’m kind of over the trash as a percussion instrument gimmic…I saw STOMP and Skeleton Key do the same kind of junk like 10 plus years ago. Do we really still need to be doing to garbage can thing? Anyhow New Dimension, if you want to rock out on trash at least rock out on some unique trash that others haven’t already done to death. Oh and one other thing, while I was watching this group perform, I couldn’t help but wonder if they brought their trash cans and chairs with them or if they picked them up when they got here.
Following New Dimension was the group Jamstick from Korea. Jamstick rocked out on all sorts of drums, xylophones, and at one point crash helmets. They also had a keyboardist that accompanied their drumming. I kind of liked Jamstick mainly due to the fact that they made outstanding use of xylophones and / or glockenspiels, both of which are excellent instruments.
Unfortunately Jamstick fell into the trap so many Korean musicians (indie rock bands, pop stars, rappers) seem prone to fall into: incredibly longwinded explanations between songs. Maybe this is because I grew up with anti-showmen like Kurt Cobain and that dude from Stone Temple Pilots, but I find these verbose monologues to be tedious and pretty much ruin the flow of the entire set. But enough ranting, they played “Devil In A Blue Dress” as a marching band so they were pretty alright in my book.
Next up was the band, Safara, from Senegal. These dudes (and ladies) were awesome in all kinds of ways. For starters everyone in the group was sporting face paint and robes, which made them look way more awesome then guys that took the stage in black t-shirts. Secondly they had these two ladies who busted out the most insane dance moves the entire time. These women were rocking the kind of moves you’d see in a film featuring “witchdoctors,” and it was totally awesome! And as a quick aside, one of the dancing women from Senegal was white, which at first struck me as odd, but in reality isn’t any weirder than Seo Taiji’s white drummer…or me for that matter. Safara were also the only group of the evening to feature singing which was pretty awesome. But the thing that was the most awesome about Safara was the fact that they had the most phallic looking instrument I’ve ever seen in my life. Awesome!
Following Safara was a Korean group known as Drumcat. Drumcat were pretty decent, but they probably would have been better if I weren’t a married man that had to feign complete and utter disinterest in the fact that Drumcat consisted of six sexy ladies in tight pants pounding drums and rocking out. And oh how they rocked out! I mean they did a cover of “Du Hast” for crying out loud (here by cover I mean that the song played over the PA and the ladies smashed big ass drums during it)…and they had pyro! If I had to complain about something I guess it would have to be the fact that they all had really bad 1970’s shag haircuts. Yet even with that massive disadvantage they still managed to look hot.
Next up was the Korean group 하타 (Hata). These people took traditional Korean percussion instruments (including that huge ass drum) and mixed them with silver jumpsuits and big plastic hazardous waste drums. I guess they were pretty ok, if only for the silver jumpsuits and the use of that huge drum (see the photo at right). As a quick aside, when they hit that thing you can feel it in your guts…it’s that deep! Anyhow, like New Dimension, I found their choice in garbage to hit kind of boring. Dudes, there’s other garbage in the world!
The final group of the evening was 풍장21 (Poongjang 21). v 풍장21 was your standard issue 농악 (nogak…aka farmer’s music) group. I’ve seen this kind of group so many times in my three plus years of living here that I’m kind of bored of it. I mean the first time I saw this kind of band I thought they were awesome, and I still think that it is awesome, but it’s got to be totally awesome for me to get into it. These guy were alright, but they weren’t awesome to the point that I wanted to get up and do some ass-shaking dance moves. However for some reason the only thing I am able to take decent pictures of is 농악, so of the pictures I took that evening, 70% of the good ones were of this group.
Anyhow with the drumming done for the evening, we got on the bus and headed home again. It was a nice event, even if we were stuck sitting behind some dirty hippies.
Click here for photos (if you care about crap like that).
Unless you live in a cave or haven’t been born yet you probably know of North Korea’s claims that it successfully tested a nuclear weapon. I told you on several occassions that I don’t do politics, or current events here (unless it involves sex, animal attacks, pop singers, or some combination of the three), but once again I’m going to break with tradition, and not only talk about current events, but also editorialize. Humorous anecdotes about my life will return shortly.
Dear President Bush & Posse,
Hi, my name is Wyatt. You probably don’t know me, but I have some information that you might find crucial in the days to come. Before you rush into anything like a landed assault on North Korea as a result of their little chemistry experiment, I think you should check out the following video.
Dude did you see that? They strapped cement wheels to their face and got them smashed with sledge hammers. That means their faces are tough enough to withstand both have a cement wheel strapped to it and a sledge hammer blow. And the ninja stars?! Seriously let’s not fuck with these guys. In some ways this video footage scares the shit out of me more than the fact that they have might actually have nukes now. But it’s not my job to tell you how to do your job…I think that’s your job. So let me just leave it at this: Do you really want to have to brawl guys with cement wheels on their faces, and if you do, could you please approve my wife’s visa faster so I can get off this pennisula before you chose to do so?
This is the Chuseok Redux, you’re sitting in a jazz club wearing a beret. Oh wait, that’s the Slow Jam Redux…the Chuseok holiday wrap up looks more like this:
Wednesday, the day before Chuseok, was spent making songpyeon (송편). The early stages of songpyeon construction are a lot like the early stages of bread making, only like 100 times stickier. That dough has the consistance of gum, and I now understand why people from the times of yore used a big ass hammer to make this shit. Anyhow we made an assortment of songpyeon in both green and white. I was personally in charge of the chestnut filled ones. We made the green ones first, and man were mine ugly. They were huge, cancerous behemoth looking pieces of crap, but I leveled up quickly, and by the time we made the white ones, mine were indistinguishable from the ones the seasoned veterans were making.
Other junk that happened on Wednesday involved me riding a bike around my immediate area attempting to score some sort of paper that was needed for ancestral memorial rites to no avail. Also my wife (along with my sister-in-law, and mother-in-law) cooked a lot of other non-songpyeon type food stuffs.
The following morning at way too early o’clock, I was roused from my slumber to clean up the house, and set the table so that Chuseok could commence. With such things taken care of, it was time for Chuseok related festivities, which were pretty much the same as Lunar New Year related festivities, only instead of eating rice cake soup we ate taro soup. Guests came to our house, chowed down on some food and drank some brews, and then they headed back from wence they came.
After quickly cleaning up our homestead we headed out to Jinhui’s grandfather’s house (her mother’s father), where since she was technically no longer part of the clan didn’t have to do any work. Me, being a man, only had to drink soju and eat food, so I did that. We then went with a totally awesome posse that included three random kindergarten students, some old Korean mens, me and my in-laws, and one of Jinhui’s cousins who totally looked like he could kick some ass (the dude was huge…like Hulk Hogan sized arms and junk). There we offered dried fish and poured one out for our dead homies our deceased ancestors.
With that out of the way we headed home, where I promptly fell asleep. It was 5:00 in the evening. At 10:00 Jinhui (who apparently had fallen asleep in the living room), and I both woke up and for the next 4 hours watched a ton of really random junk on TV and ate some ice cream. All in all it was a decent day, but I’m glad for Jinhui’s sake that this was probably her last Chuseok. I really feel bad for women on these holidays. All day long they cook and clean, with few chances to rest. Quelle domage! Anyhow that’s pretty much the end of my poorly written Chuseok related rant. There’s not really much else to say. Oh, I wore a hanbok (한복) because I own one and figured Chuseok would be a good excuse to take it out of the closet. Really now, this is the end. There is nothing else for me to say that I can think of at this time. But probably if someone leaves a comment I will remember more anecdotes of the events of the day. So…I’m finished now.
Perhaps the greatest thing about living in a foreign country were holidays I had absolutely no vested interest in. Prior to getting married, my Chuseok holiday consisted of little more than getting a bunch of beer and instant food the weekend before the holiday and then rocking it like a viking with beer, chips, and crappy movies until the holiday was over. Now that I’m married, I thought that this tradition would have to die. Apparently I was wrong.
The time is yesterday morning at roughly 9:30. My wife and I are sitting on the couch in the living room watching some manner of crappy television, when she turns to me and says, “I want to have some of that wine.” She had gotten two bottles of wine as a Chuseok gift set from her place of employment.
“Alright, we can have some later today,” I reply.
“How about now?”
She didn’t have to ask me twice. We cracked that bad boy open and spent the day drinking and watching music videos from our youth. I learned a lot about H.O.T. and Seo Taiji. Like the fact that the Seo Taiji song, “Come Back Home,” is the exact same song as Cypress Hill’s “Insane In The Brain.” I also learned that my wife prefers Pearl Jam to Nirvana regarding songs of my youth.
Anywho after a morning and afternoon spent stinkin’ and drinkin’, when evening rolled around we headed into Seoul for a little shopping. We purchased a jewlery box, two stone bowls, and some everyday use chopstick and spoon set. We grabbed some dinner and then got on a bus headed back home where we called it a night.
This is a plea to all my Canadian readers (I know for a fact at least two of you exist). Will either you, or one of your countrymen (or women) please for the love of Christ write a walkthrough on how to go about dealing with your country’s government? I mean Street Fighter 2 had a walkthrough, and that game was a hell of a lot easier than Canadian government institutions.
For those of you just tuning in, I had a bone to pick with Canada about the way they do criminal background checks. It turns out that a great deal of this anger was misdirected and premature. It turns out that apparently one doesn’t have to go through the process of getting fingerprinted and waiting 150+ days in order to get a Canadian criminal report. Nope, it turns out that all one has to do is provide a name, address, and (in the case of my wife) passport number, to any of the local police forces and they will check out your national criminal record and ship out the results to you in anywhere from a week to 14 days depending on the police force you choose to use. We picked the guys in Winnipeg, mainly because they were the cheapest and also didn’t require fingerprints (which as I explained eariler was kind of a hassle to get here).
So here we are thinking we’re in the clear. Oh not quite. Like most things, this service does not come for free. Unfortunately, Canada, as I mentioned before, is a developing country, and therefore has no way to pay for this service online or by using a credit card. Additionally Canadian currancy frightens them, since they stated that they would not accept payments made in cash. No, they want a check. Unfortunately for us, we live in Korea, a country that has moved beyond (or perhaps never had) a checking system. Here everything is paid for either with cash, or a credit card. So we went in search of a money order.
The post office didn’t have any, but they insisted that you could get them with ease at the bank. The first bank we went to didn’t have them, but told us that you could score them at a bank that did international exchanges. The international exchange bank didn’t have them either, but told us that we could get money orders in American dollars at Citibank. This would have been fine, save for the fact that we were sending this shit to the provinces, and it stated that they only dealt in Canadian funds (unlike the central…federal? government who would gladly accept American dollars). Fuck!
So we headed home, dejected. What could we do? Flying to Canada to deal with this was out of the question for two reasons: 1) It was too expensive. 2) I probably would have punched a Mountie in the face for causing my wife and I such annoyance, and then would have been sent to Canadian jail (which if the Trailer Park Boys is to be believed, might not actually be that bad of a thing). So the only option that seemed to be open was to ship the documents to my family in the US (a country where one can get cashiers checks) and have them ship the documents and check to Canada.
So basically I don’t know who I’m pissed off at. I’m pissed off at Canada’s government for sucking ass six ways to Sunday. I am pissed off at Korea for not having the outdated method of payment required to do business with Canada. I’m pissed off at America for making the wife and I have to jump through such hoops to obtain a paper that says she didn’t do any crime during the one year that she lived in Canada. And, I’m pissed off at myself for getting pissed off about such stupid bullshit. I’ll be glad when we have a paper that says, “Jinhui, you didn’t do crime in Canada.”
On Sunday morning, the family and I piled into my father-in-law’s automobile and we drove off to family obligation part 2 (part 1 being Saturday’s trip to Daejeon). The second part of this past weekend’s family obligations was some sort of meet and greet luncheon in which my clan offically met my sister-in-law’s fiance’s clan (Cripes that was a mouthful…or since I am typing, a fistful).
Anywho, we were at a restaurant in Jamshil known as 龍水山 (용수산) when we met the fiance’s family. Now, I have no real problem with her fiance. I mean he’s a nice enough guy. Hell he gave be a case of Heineken for my birthday! But, if I were a woman, and not married, but still retained all my personality traits, I wouldn’t want to date / marry the dude. He’s a little boring. Having a conversation with him is kind of like pulling teeth.
And now I know why. The meeting took about three hours, and in that time I don’t think his father said a single word. His brother didn’t either. His sister talked a little bit, but it was usually under her breath, and kind of creepy…like a witch or that chick in The Exorcist. She scared me. His mom was alright; probably the most outgoing, but still on the quite side.
Prior to leaving that morning, I had recieved my marching orders like everyone else in our platoon, but I had a special top secret mission, and that was: “Don’t make an ass of yourself.” Sitting there in the opening hours minutes, was pure torture. I wanted to jump up on the table and do the Charleston, or attempt to get the entire restaurant to join me in a musical number (hey it happens in musicals all the time), anything to destroy that dreadfully awkward silence.
You know that kind of silence that is unsettling? Yeah, we had that going on. Luckily my father-in-law has the gift of gab. He’ll talk up anyone about anything at anytime. Unfortunately there were a lot of one word responses, and even the most talkative person can’t do much with that…so he started talking to me. I shot my wife a look, “Is this okay? Can I respond to him?” I didn’t wait for her to wave me on to third. I saw an end to the dreadful silence and went for it.
Luckily at this point food arrived. And man did it arrive! I’ve lived in this country more than 3 years now, and at this particular restaurant I had eaten roughly 3 out of the countless plates of food we were served. For you see, this restaurant served us traditional palace cuisine. Hell yeah dudes, I ate like a king, and oh was it good! I’m not a real artsy guy, especially when it comes to food, so long as it tastes good, but this food not only tasted awesome, it looked fantastic as well.
I can’t really remember every single dish that was served and due to the nature of the event I didn’t really think it was appropriate to whip out a camera and be all like, “Dudes hold on a second! I wanna take a picture of this lotus flower wrapped sushi!” So I’m going to attempt to recall exactly what it was that I ate, from my memory alone…and my mind is not exactly like a steel trap.
I know there was 죽, and the aforementioned sushi that made use of lotus flowers. For me though, the standout dish was 신선로 (shinseolo) primarily due to the awesomeness of the dish in which it was served. Other foodstuffs served that day included rice with 팥 (sweet red beans) cooked in a lotus leaf, 구절판 (gujeolpan), 불고기 (bulgogi), and 잡채 (japchae). For dessert, we were served some 떡 (ddeok) as well as some 약과 (yakgwa) and a cup of 복분자차 (bokbunjacha / raspberry tea).
After the meal was completed, there was some more awkward silence and a period in which people attempted to set a wedding date, and from there we said our goodbyes. The fiance’s family departed first along with my sister-in-law. Then the rest of us got back in my father-in-law’s automobile and headed back whence we came.
On Friday afternoon, Jinhui and I had to go to the violent crimes division of our local police station so she could get fingerprints taken. This is what happened…if movies like 살인의 추억 and countless other Korean cop movies are to be believed.
