the Seminar

Have you ever wanted to become one with the wall paper behind you? To just disappear into the background so fluidly that no one would notice? Maybe, everyone was trying so hard not to notice you that you just felt like it was happening anyway. That is how I felt today.

It all started with Tony Jeong.

Tony was my old boss in Toronto, and he taught me a valuable lesson about loyalty. See, Tony would do anything for me, and he never let me down when I asked him for something. And I never let him down either. I also tried to be that way with all of the staff at the school the Tony owned (I was the director). Things went the way they would and I left the school on good terms. So Tony calls me up a few weeks ago and asks me to participate in a couple of marketing seminars here in Korea with some new agent he signed on. I figure; "I'm here" and I think "he's not"... why shouldn't I help out? Never dream of refusing, not in a million years.

So, it's Wednesday and I take the KTX (Korea train X) to Seoul early in the morning. I've done a few of these marketing deals in the past; a crowd of skeptical parents who want to send their children to Canada to study English or a crowd of youngish ex-ESL students-come-entrepreneurs who are interested in making money off of parents who want to send their children to Canada to study English. I tag along, stand up and tell a few jokes about Toronto, state a few good things about my school and sit down. Piece of cake... piece of cake...

Made it into Seoul Station at 11:43, 2.5 hours on the high speed train from Busan, Seoul is always raining and I always leave behind blue skies and sunshine in Busan. I meet Andy in the station, he is a very well organized and efficient man who resembles Jet lee and speaks fluent and enthusiastic English. We get into a mini-van; myself in the shotgun seat and Andy in the back, and off we go. The minivan contains two women and a driver who where later introduced as regional managers. They weren't as enthusiastic as Andy. Actually, I believe I had 5 or 6 seconds of eye contact with each over the next 5 hours.

12:00 noon, on the road in Seoul and I hate the traffic. We spend the next hour driving at a snail's pace through downtown Seoul. It is raining and there is nothing interesting to see out the windows. 1:00pm - we arrive at the school where the seminars is to be held, we got lost and backtracked for 20 minutes to make a u-turn... left turns aren't popular in Korea. After much waiting the seminar begins in a fair sized classroom with about 20 people. Most seem to be students of the school who were cajoled into attending by their teachers, the rest are the moms.
Andy plays an promotional video for my old school in Toronto, and then I am on... I walk up to the front of the class and say hi....

I've been teaching elementary kids for the last two years, I don't like to be misunderstood nor be disregared by a group whom I am addressing.

Sometime after the "hi"and before the "My name is.." I realize that none of them understand a damn word I am saying. I know this for a fact, I have finely honed instincts especially calibrated for Koreans, that indicate to me whether my words, each one as I go, are understand... none are.

Let us just say I was brief...I even made fun of some of the students in the video they had just watched....

only Andy laughed.

So, poor Andy carried on after and delivered a rousing seminar about Canada and studying and something or other. The whole thing was in Korean and I understood very little. This led me to really understand how little I know about the Korean language after all the time I've been here. I did hear the word "student" (Hak Sang) about 20,000 times however. I also heard my own name on a several occasions and looked up just in time to meet the whole room's gaze. After Andy's presentation, the students in the room were offered a chance to have their English level checked by yours truly. About a dozen students miled around for around 20 minutes after this offer was made. I was set up in the corner of the room at one side of a desk with an empty chair ready on the other side, like a palm reader, or a carnie working some deadbeat booth, no one seemed interested ...


...and I found myself trying to blend in with the wall paper

Spring Marathon - Busan

Just a quick blog about my first 10k marathon. It was really hard to train for, and it ended very quickly without me having to dream up tortuous memories to carry me through the last few kilometers.

It is a milestone for me, I feel so happy for having finished every Goddamn step.. .

This is a little finish line action, I am just really happy I finished the damn thing without stopping.

Final time was 55:06

Jangsan (Mountain)

So there we were, Kevin O'Shea and I, a little ripe from last evening's St. Patrick's day festivities and seeking some fresh mountain air to slake our parched livers. We had played at u2 the night before and had a good show, aside from a collapsed mic stand, a collapsed guitar amp (grrrrrr!) and an audience member collapsing onto the stage. Unfortunately, by the morning our laurels had become wilted and so we quested on towards the mighty peaks of Jang mountain...

Yep, rising 1200 meters above the ground, Jangsan is a behemoth for the quads and lungs alike with a total of 3.6 km of trail to cover before achieving the apex...

But what a view!!

So many little lives... from above it all looks so tiny and type casted. Yet, those are homes and lifetimes of work down there. The blocky leggo thingy's are highrise condos for the rich and upper middle classes, the nicer ones go for half a million USD.



Haeundae New Town, my home away from home... a giant's set of dominoes.

The Beijing Circus - Video

Ok, so I have a youtube account now.

Big deal!

So what!

I've joined the online sensation enjoyed by millions. People with a single shared desire...to upload, upload, and upload some more. To give back a little to one from whom we have taken so much.

Anyway, this is from the Beijing Circus and is set to the music of the Apostles of Hustle.



The last two acts were really to much for the eyes to believe.

Music Video

So my digital camera takes video without any audio. No fear! No task is too daunting for Windows Movie Maker.

My first music video....



The footage is from Shanghai and the MagLev train which rockets back and forth from downtown to the airport in Pukong.
The music is something I recorded over top of the first 7 minutes of George Lucas's THX 1138.

Full Moon Fever

Sunday, March 4th The first full moon of the lunar new year marks a special tradition in Korea. People gather around a large cone of dead wood and bramble and then line it with banners and packages containing wishes for prosperity, health and high test scores. Around 7pm the large pile was set ablaze. The fire started out slowly but soon billowed into a major blaze, despite the driving rain, with smoke and cinders pouring over the heads of the several hundred or so spectators who braved the wet conditions to witness the spectacle.







Construction of the "pyre".
(photo courtesy of http://kevinoshea.blogspot.com/)

The completed burning thingy,

and an anxious crowd of umbrellas.

The smoldering hunk of burning...ah, whatever...
That's a spotlight and the TV in the beside it was playing
commercials for booze.

Eventually the fire kicked up and cooked up everyone's new year wishes real good!!

Fire at night is very hard to take clear pictures of...

Bejing V - Temples, Palaces and Acrobatics

As per any tour, there are high points and low points. Considering all you are able to see in a limited time with the aid of an experienced tour guide and tour bus, sometimes it is worth a pearl factory or two.

Despite my own misgivings, the night time shows in Beijing are really outstanding. The first evening we attended an acrobatic show. Which was composed of around a half dozen mind boggling acts of physical inhumanity. It began with the two man dragons balancing on large (yoga?) balls and ended up with 15 girls in peacock dresses riding around the stage on one bicycle.
The Kung Fu show was a bit strange however. I had seen the show in 2002 and it was really good. The Shaolin monk show back then included a relatively bare stage and a series of demonstrations of their abilities and fighting styles; smashing bamboo staffs and rocks over body parts, balancing, leaning necks on sword blades to name a few.

This time around someone had decided to revamp and modernize the show. There was lights, music, a storyline and lots of modern dancing...even a love interest!!

At least they still served beer.

The Summer Palace was the residence of the emperor during the...well, the summer and is dominated the man-made Kunming Lake. Making a lake by hand seems a little extreme, but the emperor or empress needed to keep cool. There is an expression that the Chinese have about this, or at least that our tour guide has about this; "The people are the water and the emperor is the ship...the people must keep the emperor from sinking by hoisting him afloat, without a ship, the water has no meaning".

There is the really long walkway that runs along the length of the shore line where the main residence lies. This was for walking...for the emperor to take walks along. The whole thing is hand painted and every inscription and image an original. On the far side of the palace are some gardens and a stone boat which serves and an ironic comment on the fact the the empress Cixi (not a very nice woman...killed her son to keep power) diverted 30 million taels of silver(about 80mil. USD on today's market) to restore the palace for her retirement. The money was diverted from funds that were designated for the Chinese navy.

The Temple of Heaven and Earth is another example of the emperor's power and prestige.

The temple's main function was to offer the emperor a place to come once a year and pray for the harvest. The emperor was considered by the population to be the "son of heaven" and a god in his own right. The singular head of state was also responsible for rain too. On the day the emperor would visit the temple, the royal guard cleared all of the streets of Beijing

and strict silence was enforced.

These days, the grounds outside the temple have been taken over by card players. They are unusually quiet though...

Beijing IV - The Great Wall

On the Second day of our trip we went to Juyongguan Pass which is section of the Great Wall which connects two mountain ranges. This section of the wall is known as the Badaling pass of and is located about 50km north of Beijing.

On the wall '07

It was roughly 6,352km long when it was in its various stages of completion. These days it is has fallen into disrepair and has only been restored in small sections where tourists visit. Ironically, the wall deteriorated as a result of people from local villages vandalizing it and removing the stones in order to repair older homes and construct new ones.

On the wall '02

It was my second trip to the wall and the first time I had the chance to climb it (the first time there was a cable car to take us to the top). The climb as hard, steep, and impossibly crowded neat the base. However, it thinned out dramatically the closer we got to the summit and we were able to get some good pictures. Getting a shot of anything in China without someone else in it is a major task.

The hardest thing about the climb was the fact that the wall twisted and turned its way up the mountain and that the steps were uneven and completely irregular and random in their spacing. It was explained to us that this was to slow down invaders who had breached the wall and were attempting to use it to move troops unharassed through the mountains.

It works...

Tiananmen Square - Revisited

My first visit to China was in July of 2002. I was teaching in Daegu, South Korea at the time and this trip represented a lot for me. I had always held a fascination with China and many of its cultural symbols and icons. I was mainly intent on seeing the great wall, which was a life long ambition of mine, and the Forbidden city.

Despite my expectations it was Tiananmen Square that had the most resounding impact, the effects of which echoed long after

I had returned to Korea and eventually to Canada. So, there I was two weeks ago when I returned to the square, armed with watching a few hours of Frontline documentaries and a digital camera. I got the same sense I had of the sqaure the first time. We entered from the South end which is lined with giant red flags and a tall square stone statue. The East side of the square is flanked by the Great hall of the People and on the west side there is the Chinese National Museum, curiously no one ever talks about visiting that one. On the northern end of the square is the entrance to the Forbidden city.

When I was walking through the center of all of this, I felt a strong nagging pull; a sense of gravity or weight. This square is the political and cultural power center for a huge nation of billion(s). Not only that, but it is a power that follows rules other that ours. A power that has grown since I had last visited. Standing in the middle of the square is like standing in the middle of the audience chamber of panel of stone and iron giants.

Then I shook it off and started trying to sneak pictures of the soldiers like all of the other tourists were doing.

Coming into the back of the Square from the south east.

The Chinese National Museum


The North end of the Square and the entrance to the Forbidden city.

Gotcha!!

Well, Soldier's don't like to have their pictures taken and will threateningly warn off cameras, which makes them enviable targets. There is a lot of apprehension amongst visitors here with regards to the massacre in 1989 and the police controls. There is definitely a strong police and military presence in the square and, since '89, it has been shut down every night at 7pm.

An infamous image...

The hotel from where it was taken.