In a coffee shop in Korea you will hear many camera shutter sounds coming at you from all directions. These sounds are being emulated by cell phones which are being used prominently here as the new digital camera. It doesn't really matter which coffee shop you're in, Starbucks, Coffee Bean, Holly's, Tom N Toms the incessant sound is inevitable. Now, you may be thinking, "What's wrong with taking photos with your comrades in a shop every now and then?" if that were the case, I would be saying the same thing as well. However, they are not taking pictures with anyone. They are taking a picture of just themselves. Numerous ones at that.
In fact to market on these self-voyeuristic tendencies cell phone companies sell phones with a "self shot" camera feature. Where your cell phone has a double lens, one on both sides of the phone. This way you can look at yourself in the display screen as your taking the picture. Here's where the hypocrisy comes in. You would think that having this self-shot camera would allow you to take one photo and feel satisfied. This, again, is not the case. One must take at least 15 photos to feel fulfilled, and even then it's uncertain. They'll fix themselves repetitively in between shots, but never really change their smile or their pose.
Now, some may argue that perhaps these people are merely budding photographers. I beg to disagree, they lack gallimaufry in their shots. I will hand it to them though, they ace looking good in photos, and finding the perfect angle, to photograph themselves that is.
I can understand the want to present yourself well. It's a very necessary commodity in Korea. It's insanely competitive so you must be ready to compete with others appearance and intelligence.
To be continued...
Saturday, July 25, 2009
What are you shopping for?
I usually think of all these interesting and awesome things I want to write about in here while I'm out. Then, when I get back and have time to write things down I'll just forget. Besides that many of the things I talk about are so completely random.
Oh well, here's the update: we started intensives this week. Which means I have to be at work at 7:30am. Therefore, I wake up at 6am, and those who know me well also know I am NOT a morning person in the slightest. I am teaching a few more classes this semester one of which is called American Culture. This class is, by far, one of the most fun classes I have gotten to plan for. Last week I did a comparison of American versus Korean greetings. How we shake hands...then as an added bonus I showed them a YouTube video of the Crips (a gang) handshake.
I then had the kids try to reproduce it. It was hilarious to see them attempt it. If anyone has any good ideas for American Culture, let me know. I want to discuss slavery and the civil war a bit with them, but I'm not entirely sure what else....
I also have an essay class - which I'm not a huge fan of because I have to teach it 3 times a week. Which means I have to come up with something to do with them everyday. It's tiring. It also gives me a taste for what a real teaching job would be like. I have to give it up to teachers...you have to have a lot of creativity to figure out something new to do everyday. One fun thing I've had them do is sign up for Merriam Websters word of the day. Which forces them to familiarize themselves with some really outlandish words. E.g.: Pachydermatous, Absquatulate, and skosh. Which, funny enough, the Internet spell checker does not even know. I do also get some relatively entertaining essays from them though.
Let's see aside from that...We went to MT a few weeks ago (Membership Training). Which was interesting. Everyone from my work packed into 2 big Avalon vans and drove off to some place a bit outside of Seoul. We stayed in these 2 really big hotel rooms. Everyone ate a lot of sam-gyeup-sal (BBQ) and got drunk. Then, we all went to sing karaoke and played weird team building games. In fact, the one Korean male teacher we had was so excited about all the events he carved a fake microphone out of a carrot.
We finally get a vacation this upcoming week, and it could not be more welcomed!
Aside from that I'm just hanging out here - completing the daily grind, and patiently waiting for my contract to be up. The school did request that I extend my contract until December 9th, which I am considering...
It's a really nice day today. I can see the mountains outside my window. The trees peaking out over them is so nice. You know (or maybe you don't), Seoul is completely surrounded by mountains. It's a city right in the center of a mountain range. Come to think of it, I'm not really all that good at describing things...so maybe I never mentioned that before.
The following words are not for the feint of heart, or children...if you're easily offended or not mature please stop reading now.
I warned you, so I'm not going to apologize for the following words. I forgot to mention a really interesting experience of mine from last weekend. My friends and I ventured to the red light district. Not even a mile from my house there's an area where you walk down the alley and boom, you hit a shopping area. That is, if you're in the market for a prostitute. It was seriously the oddest and most bizarre experience of my life. There are all these "shops" with big windows which are kind of like sliding glass doors. Inside the doors are chairs where the hookers sit, in their underwear. They walk around the rooms as they are on display. Some of their heels are incredibly high, some of them dress more risque than others. The point in fact, however, is that for 80,000 won ($80) they are yours for a half an hour. As we walked down the road it was really strange. They have pink lights shining out from behind them, and some of them have puppies walking around the rooms with them...kind of cutesy, and disgusting all at the same time. I have to admit though as we were walking down the street I could hardly really look at anything but the road straight in front of me, and wish I could just get out of there. First, it felt really shady walking down that road as we would see Korean men walking around too...definitely not for the same reason we were. Second, I felt a little bad that we were walking down there for the pure curiosity of it...I mean there has to be some awful reasons these women are selling their bodies. As we were walking down some Korean guys approached my friend, Brett, and told him that foreigners were not "allowed" on this street. He said that because the prostitutes will not take foreign men's money. If they do, they will lose their Korean business...which apparently is what keeps them afloat. The hypocrisy of this culture is mind boggling. I'll get into that in another post later on though. Either way, once we walked a bit we decided we wanted out. There's only one way in and one way out of the area though so we had to walk back the same way we came in. No one really said anything to us or bothered us, but no one really had to. We didn't want to be there.
If you're interested in what it looks like check out the following video. I didn't take it, but I absquatulated it off YouTube. This video doesn't really give a good portrait of what the one near my house is like. The one in the video is smaller, and it is also shown during the day so there aren't really any people.
And on that note, I'm out.
Oh well, here's the update: we started intensives this week. Which means I have to be at work at 7:30am. Therefore, I wake up at 6am, and those who know me well also know I am NOT a morning person in the slightest. I am teaching a few more classes this semester one of which is called American Culture. This class is, by far, one of the most fun classes I have gotten to plan for. Last week I did a comparison of American versus Korean greetings. How we shake hands...then as an added bonus I showed them a YouTube video of the Crips (a gang) handshake.
I then had the kids try to reproduce it. It was hilarious to see them attempt it. If anyone has any good ideas for American Culture, let me know. I want to discuss slavery and the civil war a bit with them, but I'm not entirely sure what else....
I also have an essay class - which I'm not a huge fan of because I have to teach it 3 times a week. Which means I have to come up with something to do with them everyday. It's tiring. It also gives me a taste for what a real teaching job would be like. I have to give it up to teachers...you have to have a lot of creativity to figure out something new to do everyday. One fun thing I've had them do is sign up for Merriam Websters word of the day. Which forces them to familiarize themselves with some really outlandish words. E.g.: Pachydermatous, Absquatulate, and skosh. Which, funny enough, the Internet spell checker does not even know. I do also get some relatively entertaining essays from them though.
Let's see aside from that...We went to MT a few weeks ago (Membership Training). Which was interesting. Everyone from my work packed into 2 big Avalon vans and drove off to some place a bit outside of Seoul. We stayed in these 2 really big hotel rooms. Everyone ate a lot of sam-gyeup-sal (BBQ) and got drunk. Then, we all went to sing karaoke and played weird team building games. In fact, the one Korean male teacher we had was so excited about all the events he carved a fake microphone out of a carrot.
We finally get a vacation this upcoming week, and it could not be more welcomed!
Aside from that I'm just hanging out here - completing the daily grind, and patiently waiting for my contract to be up. The school did request that I extend my contract until December 9th, which I am considering...
It's a really nice day today. I can see the mountains outside my window. The trees peaking out over them is so nice. You know (or maybe you don't), Seoul is completely surrounded by mountains. It's a city right in the center of a mountain range. Come to think of it, I'm not really all that good at describing things...so maybe I never mentioned that before.
The following words are not for the feint of heart, or children...if you're easily offended or not mature please stop reading now.
I warned you, so I'm not going to apologize for the following words. I forgot to mention a really interesting experience of mine from last weekend. My friends and I ventured to the red light district. Not even a mile from my house there's an area where you walk down the alley and boom, you hit a shopping area. That is, if you're in the market for a prostitute. It was seriously the oddest and most bizarre experience of my life. There are all these "shops" with big windows which are kind of like sliding glass doors. Inside the doors are chairs where the hookers sit, in their underwear. They walk around the rooms as they are on display. Some of their heels are incredibly high, some of them dress more risque than others. The point in fact, however, is that for 80,000 won ($80) they are yours for a half an hour. As we walked down the road it was really strange. They have pink lights shining out from behind them, and some of them have puppies walking around the rooms with them...kind of cutesy, and disgusting all at the same time. I have to admit though as we were walking down the street I could hardly really look at anything but the road straight in front of me, and wish I could just get out of there. First, it felt really shady walking down that road as we would see Korean men walking around too...definitely not for the same reason we were. Second, I felt a little bad that we were walking down there for the pure curiosity of it...I mean there has to be some awful reasons these women are selling their bodies. As we were walking down some Korean guys approached my friend, Brett, and told him that foreigners were not "allowed" on this street. He said that because the prostitutes will not take foreign men's money. If they do, they will lose their Korean business...which apparently is what keeps them afloat. The hypocrisy of this culture is mind boggling. I'll get into that in another post later on though. Either way, once we walked a bit we decided we wanted out. There's only one way in and one way out of the area though so we had to walk back the same way we came in. No one really said anything to us or bothered us, but no one really had to. We didn't want to be there.
If you're interested in what it looks like check out the following video. I didn't take it, but I absquatulated it off YouTube. This video doesn't really give a good portrait of what the one near my house is like. The one in the video is smaller, and it is also shown during the day so there aren't really any people.
And on that note, I'm out.
Monday, July 6, 2009
What makes your throat sore in only 3 hours time?
I'm starting with a few pictures from Sokcho because I think I left those out of a previous post. So, these are from a few weeks back when my friends from Avalon and I went out of town.
This is a picture of the mountain that we climbed up. It is called Ullsan-bawi mountain. It took a long time and comprised over 800 "stairs" that we had to go up. However, in actuality it felt like we were mountain climbing. In fact, some people were wearing helmets. We didn't get that memo.
Did any of you know that 70% or Korea is mountains...we found that out, the hard way.
Finally, just hanging out at the top. It took us a while, but we finally made it up there. After we got up to the top we considered just staying there forever. It was a really great experience though.
Moving on, Michael and Brian were here visiting this past week. It was really nice having visitors. I got to show them Seoul, and I think they enjoyed their time here. We did a lot of things so to recap it all here would take a really long time. We went to N Seoul tower, Children's Grand Park Zoo, Gyeongbokgong palace, Deoksugung palace, the War Memorial Museum, Suwon Fortrees, and Suwon Korean Folk Village...to name a few things. By far the coolest thing, for me, was Suwon fortress because I had never been there before.
Michael and I actually took a picture that I think he's going to send to the Record there.
The very last thing we did while they were here was soju night and noraebang. The boys put up a big fuss about noraebang saying they didn't want to do it. Michael said that he would MOST DEFINITELY not sing. Welll a few shots of soju and 3 hours of noraebang later they were singing a different tune, literally. That is also the answer to the question which is the title of this particular blog entry. Noraebang makes your throat sore...if you do it for 3 hours straight.
This upcoming weekend Mark and I have to do this team building activity where we spend the night at some place with all of our co-workers...should be interesting. I have to remember to charge my camera battery...I had forgotten when Mike and Brian were here. So I had to rely on them to take all the photos.
More to come.
This is a picture of the mountain that we climbed up. It is called Ullsan-bawi mountain. It took a long time and comprised over 800 "stairs" that we had to go up. However, in actuality it felt like we were mountain climbing. In fact, some people were wearing helmets. We didn't get that memo.
Did any of you know that 70% or Korea is mountains...we found that out, the hard way.
Finally, just hanging out at the top. It took us a while, but we finally made it up there. After we got up to the top we considered just staying there forever. It was a really great experience though.Moving on, Michael and Brian were here visiting this past week. It was really nice having visitors. I got to show them Seoul, and I think they enjoyed their time here. We did a lot of things so to recap it all here would take a really long time. We went to N Seoul tower, Children's Grand Park Zoo, Gyeongbokgong palace, Deoksugung palace, the War Memorial Museum, Suwon Fortrees, and Suwon Korean Folk Village...to name a few things. By far the coolest thing, for me, was Suwon fortress because I had never been there before.
Michael and I actually took a picture that I think he's going to send to the Record there.
The very last thing we did while they were here was soju night and noraebang. The boys put up a big fuss about noraebang saying they didn't want to do it. Michael said that he would MOST DEFINITELY not sing. Welll a few shots of soju and 3 hours of noraebang later they were singing a different tune, literally. That is also the answer to the question which is the title of this particular blog entry. Noraebang makes your throat sore...if you do it for 3 hours straight.This upcoming weekend Mark and I have to do this team building activity where we spend the night at some place with all of our co-workers...should be interesting. I have to remember to charge my camera battery...I had forgotten when Mike and Brian were here. So I had to rely on them to take all the photos.
More to come.
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