Cellphone Trombones and Sad Typhoon

The last several weeks have been disappointing.  This was supposed to be the monsoon season, where the gods would pour massive quantities of rain on East Asia.  After having lived through this once before I must say that this year has been rather disappointing.  It has been very dry, and very hot.  To make things worse, it has also been unforgivingly humid as well.  There have been a few bouts of rain here and there, bringing a sweet release of cool air, but they have been few and far between. 

Then the news came of Typhoon Bolaven.  I heard about it from a new acquaintance of mine who had his finger much closer to the pulse of local affairs than many of the locals.  I still have to thank him for the moment of satisfaction I had when I asked one of my local co-teachers if there was any news or things that Rachel and I should know about before the storm hits.  She looked at me very strangely, not having heard that there was a massive storm heading her way.  The anticipation of this storm was quite palpable.  The local governments were preparing for the worst, mobilizing emergency services, and people were stretching tape across their windows.  Honestly Rachel and I were rather excited. 

It was bad enough for our school to realize that if the public schools were closing down that they had better close doors too.  Now with a day off and a massive storm on the way, I was getting ready to sit back in a lawn chair, drink in hand, and watch the storm roll on in.  We made sure that we were well stocked with supplies, extra water, and other goodies, and I must say that it was all rather disappointing. 

Now, I am not under stating the damage that Bolaven has caused.  Several people have been killed, many more have been injured, and there has been a great deal of property damage.  But by the time the winds got up to Seoul, it wasn’t much to worry about.  We even went down to the bank to take care of a new annoyance. 

Caution: this next paragraph is filled with ranting and raving about some petty cell phone issues.  If you really don’t want to pay attention to this digression and want to read more about the storms, just skip down to the end of the paragraph.  Still reading?  Right, so I don’t know who, how, what the fuck happened with our cell phones, but somebody fucked up!  I had thought it strange that Rachel had been getting so many more text and phone calls from random people than I did, and I just chalked it up to the  fact that the advertisers knew that she was a woman and therefore more likely to listen to advertisements for Lotte Department store.  Seriously, she has been getting texts from them.  Where the fuck was I?  Right, anywho somewhere, somehow, someone fucked up Rachel’s phone bill.  How this happened, when both Rachel and I signed up for automatic bill payments at the same time, the same way, but apparently something wasn’t correct.  Over the last day or two we had been having trouble making calls and texting, so we just assumed that something was completely wrong. We then get a phone call from the phone company at work explaining the situation.  So we had to pay 3 months or so of back payments before moving on to other things. 

So for those of you who skipped to here I am calm and everything is fine now.  Typhoon Bolaven has passed and everything is alright now…well no.  As it turns out there is another major storm heading our way.  This one, called Tembin, was hovering off the Chinese coast because of Bolaven, and is now heading our way.  So we are going to get hit not once, but twice by major storms.  The first one was downgraded from a Typhoon to a tropical storm, and it’s looking like the second one will be doing the same, but still.  Now Tembin is going to run much, much closer to us than the first one, and I will be curious to see if it is going to be worse.  

Oh Gods here it comes!

Ok, so I have also been avoiding writing about this for a long time as well.  K-Pop is one of those unavoidable forces of nature that comes with living in South Korea.  With the success of Gangnam Style in the states as a bit of a cult phenomenon, I can’t help but write about the bizarre WTFness of K-Pop (and Korean commercials too).  Now you may be wondering what these two things have in common, but as it turns out there is a trend here of doing commercials as music videos.  Seriously, I’ll take the time to point out a several minute soda commercial that plays much more like a music video than you would think. 

First example- the famous girl group T-ara, doing a short video for outdoor ware.  As someone who has far more wit than I once suggested, the clip makes perfect sense.  This clothing is perfectly marketed to the cat person, accordion playing, hiker crowd, so the commercial makes perfect sense. 

Now, I have some criticisms of Korean cinema.  They aren’t major, and in many movies it works very well.  However there are a number of areas where the Korean’s philosophy of drama just doesn’t apply.  I have spoken about the mythical Korean comedy before.  A Korean comedy is a movie that uses humor and slapstick to set you up for the crushing despair of drama that is to come later.  Example, the Korean film “Sex is Zero”, which was billed as the Korean version of American Pie, sounded alright to me, and then I started watching it.  Now think about American Pie (any version will do) wouldn’t an abortion sub-plot where one of the characters suffers complications afterwards and the loveable, goofball protagonist (in this case Jason Biggs) has to carry Alyson Hannigan on his back into the hospital before she bleeds to death.  Yeah that will have the audience rolling in the aisles.  Now take this example- as I mentioned before commercials have often been merged with K-Pop videos for some strange reason.  In this one (which is not as long as the video suggests) is a beer commercial.  What a stalker plot has to do with selling beer I will never know.   

Now cell phones are one of the staples of the Korean economy.  Rachel and I have been fortunate enough to actually have very nice phones.  Now one thing that is still true is that famous characters sell, and Lucas in no less of a sellout here than back in the States.  While I am not sure when Darth Vader developed teleportation, I do think that it is amusing. 

There is a whole series of the Darth Vader commercials out there and I encourage you dear readers to investigate them more.  However all good things must come to an end, and LTE went with a new advertising campaign.  While I miss seeing Lord Vader randomly on TV, this next ad has a jingle that is nothing short of brilliant.  I even used it in class as an example of effective advertising (for my older students). 

Now at the beginning of this whole thing I promised a soda commercial, and since I am a person of my word here now is what I can only describe as the first in a series of commercials that all involve the same characters, whom have magically become pop stars through the power of Fanta soda.  These three characters (whom happen to match the three Fanta flavors) appear in commercial after commercial here in Korea.  This one is the first in a long series of videos; the most recent one even has some Caucasian prince (I can only assume that it’s Harry since the “good one” has already been taken), drops down in front of the female “orange flavor” pop star and proposes.  She then cries out Yes (in English) again and again.  Now this one is more of a mass spectacle of a commercial.  The translation, I find, does not matter, and in fact is much more amusing if you make up your own. 

And last but not least the sensation that inspired this whole blog, Gangnam Style.  First, a few things that you may not know about this video.  Gangnam is a district here in Seoul.  It is one of the more famous areas, where wealth, fashion, and youth all converge.  The occasional movie star can be seen there, and I go there every so often to play board games with nerds.  On a personal note I have been to a small number of locations in the video, and it is amusing to me to see them (most of them are along the Han River where I go to exercise).  Lastly, the video has a plethora of cameos by other Korean celebrities.  G-Dragon is the most prominent that I can think of (he’s the dude in the yellow suit that the singer has a dance competition with, and is one of the more well-known K-Pop stars), and there is also a famous comedian who is that dude in the elevator (you know the one).  Anywho, enjoy. 

There Must Be Some Kinda’ Way Outta’ Here, Said the Joker to the Thief.

No doubt many of you (my dear readers), whom are frequent visitors to facebook are well aware; Rachel has quit her position here at Avalon. 

Right, so how did this come about?  It has little to do with the culture, our living conditions, our relationship, or the students in the classroom.  If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you will be aware our boss is… well how can I put this politely?  She may very well be the anti-Christ.  I have written about her before and I feel no need to torture the poor horse (may it rest in peace) once again.  I do think it is worth mentioning that the problems that I have talked about did not disappear, and in some cases were exacerbated by our “dear leader” in the last few weeks.  The breaking point here was when she (Marie A) fought us over allowing students to use the bathroom during class time.  Now, at times this is a concern for some classrooms, but when a student, who obviously needs to use the bathroom is sent back twice and then becomes terrified of the boss, saying that “she’ll be fine”, and her saying that she is fine is then used as a point of evidence for supporting a position, is when the deal became broken.  I mean it isn’t as if our boss used a terrified student as justification.  The argument was not enjoyable.  She then proceeded to get offended later that day when I had handed in a piece of paperwork for Rachel, as a favor (rather than Rachel handing it in herself) and was ready to give Rachel an official write-up about this because she had missed the opportunity to throw her authority around/pull out the superiority stick.  Have we mentioned she is petty and insecure? No?  Well…

Rachel and I have been talking about this for some time and I have been holding off writing about it until we had made a decision and figured out what the next step is.  If there has been undo lack of communication and distraction on our end, this is partially why. 

Now, on to the details.  There have been a number of worried nights and dreadful speculation, but all will be well and we have worked out the details to do what must be done so that everyone can get the best out of this.  In the legendary words of Douglas Adams, “Don’t panic”.  Fortunately, Rachel has been frugal enough, and I make enough for us to live comfortably here with only one income.  I had a very long talk with a good friend of mine who gave me some good advice on the situation, and we can make the finances work.  We worked out a way to remain and not have to worry about being separated and so on and so forth.  We have set up a budget, a plan, and we have even stashed away some cash for leisure time and getting to that oh so wonderful spa that we enjoy so much.  I am also planning on getting to the cinema more often, just because it’s cheap, good entertainment. 

Now the question about idle time is certainly the next issue.  Rachel has been looking into grad school for some time and she now has ample time to study for the GRE and start getting all the paperwork together for this to happen.  We even found a testing site here in Seoul should we need it.  There are numerous things that we can do (and for cheap).  We have started going on river walks together and she has decided that there are a number of lovely spots that she can start taking frequent constitutionals. 

What will we do next is the next most important question.  Well, we are not sure.  It would not be hard to get new gigs after my contract expires.  This might work out because we can take our time and actually scope the place out ahead of time and make sure that there isn’t a bright neon sign saying “bat-shit insane lunatics are inside, abandon hope, all ye who enter here”.  Maybe we’ll move on to other things.  Honestly, we don’t know yet.  But we have made this decision and we are progressing forward with our plans. 

What I do know is that I can handle it here, and Rachel was at her wit’s end with Marie A/ “dear leader”/ whatever else you want to call her.  Things are a lot less bad now than they had been, and they will get better. 

We are going to get through this together. 

Busan Vacation day 4

Day 4:

Psychic refrigerators.  Unlike other blog entries where I try to set a theme or some type of image that I want to go through the whole entry, this is just an amusing story that will be over well before the end of this entry.  So one more time, psychic refrigerators. 

So here we are at the end of the day back in our apartment in Seoul and it is amazing to me that everything that I am thinking about happened today.  When we woke up this morning, we enjoyed some lovely room service that I had secured the night before.  Rachel enjoyed some toast and cereal, while I had a bowl of beef bone soup and rice.  We were out the door a few hours later and on the train to Onchujung.  Our goal was a famous spa that was just off of the local mountain.  Looking at those hills made me long for hiking.  Several times in the past I had many adventures on those peaks (I even got lost more than once, but I saw some amazing things along the way). 

Oh the Psychic refrigerator!  So when we checked out of the motel this morning the desk clerk somehow knew that I had drank a beer from the mini fridge the night before.  Now the cleaning lady had not been there and I had not left the room since drinking said beer.  My only conclusion that makes any sense to me is that the refrigerator must be psychic.  It watched me take a beer out of its secure place and telepathically warned the desk clerk to charge me the appropriate amount of money when we checked out.  Because the lady at the desk clearly KNEW that I had had a beer last night from the mini fridge.  Scary.  

Anywho the spa… this place was massive.  There was an air of class about the whole place and a little decadence as well (I approve).  Now the common room was nothing impressive, nor were the hot pots.  What was impressive were the baths.  This place had a massive room that had every kind of water that you could think of.  Salt baths, milk water baths, outdoor baths, and even grotto pools with a TV.  A few interesting things were the tile chairs that had water running down them, the sleeping pools, where your head is positioned out of the water to the point where you could probably sleep there.  One that was a personal favorite of mine was the waterfall shower.  Here the water pours down with a great deal of force.  It honestly felt as though the water was massaging me as well as getting me wet.  The other was this shower outside the salt baths that shot water from many directions.  Overall I approved greatly. 

After the spa we hoped the subway to the train station, and after a rather disappointing lunch we were on our way.  It was a quick ride and before we knew it the vacation was over.  Overall, I have no regrets.  There were some down moments, but also several good ones.  I miss Busan already.  I miss living there.  Even now, sitting here at my computer, my belly filled with chicken and beer (it was the only place open this late) I want to go back.  I suppose the one thing that I am taking away the most from this trip is a renewed vigor to make my way back to my old city. 

Anywho, we have one day for laundry and so on and so forth left before it is back to the grindstone and neither of us want that.  But meh…what can you do.  

Busan Vacation day 3

Day 3:

Now remember how yesterday I was talking about carnival rides as a metaphor for my emotional state?  Good, I just wanted to remind you.  Now this day started off rather rocky.  We woke up late and ended up searching for nearly an hour for lunch.  We went into the massive department store and ended up not getting something to eat there.  The place was really crowded and it was a little confusing as to how to order and pay.  But it was a massive collection of all sorts of foods from across Asia, along with a few others.  But after being turned away from several places and even finding some of the most ridiculous combinations of food that I have ever seen (“French Pizza” that served mostly Japanese food) we finally settled on fast food. 

From there we spent a good long time running around on trains to get our return train ticket for Seoul.  It was actually a good thing that we did that as they were starting to run low on tickets.  

I’ll admit that I was starting to feel a little down.  I mean after yesterday with so many things that I was hoping to see gone, I realized that most of the things that we had done we could have done here in Seoul.  Well that changed today.  Now there is a funny thing about the beaches here, they are closed and patrolled by beach cops after 6:30 or so.  Now with this in mind we still got on some swimwear and wandered down to the local beach here at Gwangan.  Even though we were too late to do any swimming (nor did we actually have a towel), we walked along the water’s edge with our feet in the sea looking for sea shells as we went along.  We actually managed to find a small pile of intact shells that are quite pretty. 

This was the most authentically Busan-ish event of the trip.  As the sun was going down, we sat at an outside table drinking expensive drinks and eating cheap Mexican food (Sadly the reverse would have been a better option in my opinion, not saying anything was bad about the drinks, just that the food could have been better).  As the sunlight went down the lights of the city came up and we watched the bridge lights come up, setting a perfect picture to the whole scene. 

After having our fill, we wandered around the beach and re-discovered a small spot that I had found several years ago.  So remember those carnival rides that I spoke about in the beginning?  Well here is where I bring them back up again.  I remember finding this place years ago and thinking how strange and cool it was that there was a run down, gritty carnival just off the beach.  At night years later it was still just as run down, but that added to the novelty of it.  Rachel and I got on a Viking ride and despite the rundown nature of the place the ride itself was quite safe, but the steel ramps that led up to it were quite dangerous in my opinion.  We played a few games and Rachel was happy to get in some air-hockey.  We continued to follow the path that led up to a small amusement park with rides that I would be no doubt too large to get on.   My personal highlight was getting Rachel to hop on what I will call “Robo-Giraffe”.  Now “Robo-Giraffe” had many brothers and sisters including “Robo-Puppy” and “Robo-Panda”.  These machines are large animals that are meant to be ridden (presumably by small children) and move around the immediate area.  No, no not like those plastic helicopters that used to be outside of every K-Mart/Kroger/etc that we would always beg Mom and Dad to put us in as kids.  I mean they actually moved around.  They even have a steering wheel for some control.  Now picture this if you can… a busy amusement park with people and expensive equipment and so on.  Now add in a number of roaming robots, shaped like cute/adorable animals, being guided by the hands of small children.  Yeah, it is cute isn’t it, and awesome and scary at the same time. 

Well another day down and this is our final night in the city.  We have our tickets and we have a whole afternoon to play with before we have to leave.  Who knows what will come of it, but I think we might have something rather enjoyable in mind.  

Busan Vacation day 2

Day 2:

Everyone goes through this at some point.  I remember my parents talking about seeing their old neighborhood from when they were children, and looking on with remembrance and a little despair.  Things change, they always do, but it’s when so many things change and for the negative and you become faced with the undeniable reality that what you knew in the past is no longer there. 

My old school is gone, and my favorite place to hang out is gone.  These two places were amongst some of the most positive experiences that I have had.  Both are gone.  The buildings are still there and in one case the sign was still there, shadowed and aged like a grim reminder of a childhood fantasy that has long since moved on.  The only comparable image that I could think of would be visiting an old carnival from your childhood, seeing the plastic faded the paint peeling, and seeing everything filtered with dirt and water stains. 

Ok so let me talk about something that isn’t as depressing.  We spent the majority of the day running around town trying to find stuff from the last time that I was here.  Seomyeon hasn’t changed much, except for the fact that they actually added buildings and took streets away in one area.  Yes that’s right, I got lost in one area because the streets literally changed.  Rachel and I got some lunch and had one of the cutest moments where a little girl and her mother walked up to our table and the mom asked us “My daughter was wondering where are you from?”  I knew just enough Korean to answer her in complete sentences. 

We wandered around the local beach and got some delicious ice-cream, feeling the wind on our faces.  I love the smell of sea water.  Some people talk about the romantic attachment to the sea, and I can understand it.  For me it isn’t the salt so much as it is the smell of open water.  We got some dinner around the local university.  Now here is one moment where things went the reverse way.  This Indian restaurant was visited by a number of us one night long ago and it was terrible.  This night however it was delicious.  The pewter glasses were a strange touch.  And speaking of wandering I thought that we could just walk back to the hotel after dinner, but big dumb Jack went the opposite way.  We didn’t walk too long or too far, but it was the last straw in my fantasy of thinking that I still knew and was part of this city. 

Well tomorrow is another day and perhaps I can start going about learning the city all over again.  

Busan Vacation day 1

When I was in Japan oh so many years ago, I remember keeping a small journal as I traveled.  I wrote down my thoughts, comments, and so on of the day and every so often I got a chance to reread my little scribbles and it takes me back to those times.  That’s the whole point of a journal, isn’t it?  My thoughts exactly, and so with all that in mind, I shall now expound on the details of our summer vacation to Busan. 

Day 1:

So after a long day of teaching and confrontations with “Marie A” that left the taste of bile in our mouths, we were off to sunny Busan.  Now as many people know I lived in this city once before and I still love it as one of my all-time favorite places.  We were well prepared for our journey with my black backpack and our KTX tickets pre-purchased. 

Ah, the KTX.   For many of you who do not know, the KTX is the high speed train that connects the major cities here together.  There are others, certainly, but this train is fast, comfortable, and felt much like an airplane.   The seats are comfortable, the bathrooms look identical to an airplane’s, and there are even two different trollies that run through the cars, one for coffee, and the other for yogurt/beer/snacks.  The only complaint that either Rachel or I had is that our ears began to do terrible things whenever we went through a mountain tunnel (which was often). 

Right, so after a few hours we made it to sunny Busan.  Memories flooded back into my consciousness and I knew exactly where and how to get to our hotel.  With no trouble at all we negotiated the subway, and got into our lovely, lovely hotel room.  The Press hotel is certainly steps up from the run of the mill hostel, and much better than your average “love motel” (author’s note:  Space is a high commodity here in Korea, and as such local youngsters who wish to, shall I say…do what young people do, they need space to do that in, and since most locals live with their families until they are in their late 20’s, home isn’t an option, hence “love motels”).  I digress.  Our room was a very nice one.  Jacuzzi, massive TV, free internet, large bed, and the toilet seat was even heated.  Did I forget to mention that the hotel is fairly close to the beach?  We didn’t have a view, but it’s very nice all the same. 

So, the first thing we needed when we got unpacked was food.  That having been decided, it was off to Hyundae beach where the tourists flock.  There is a lovely Irish pub there where we found (another franchise identical to the one we like in Itaewon).  The breeze was coming off the open windows, the beer was delicious, and it was wonderful.  The beach was overly crowded and as it turns out, closes after 6:00pm.  So with the day winding down and our strength not at 100% from a combination of stress, late nights, and travel, we found ourselves inside one of the local mega malls watching Dark Knight Rises for the second time.