Carving Up Korea

Happy New Year!

2010-01-02T00:06:00.001+09:00

Spent New Year's Eve having dinner and drinks in Itaewon with a work colleague and his wife. We got to about 11:55am without thinking about New Year's but then some revelers came in and counted down. I'd liked to have gone to Jonggak again, but frankly last night it was just too damned cold!!

2009 has not been easy. We've been pretty busy at work but very unproductive...still got a couple of irons in the fire at the moment and with a bit of luck 2010 will see us turn the corner...

Highway to the Danger Zone...

2009-10-26T22:35:00.000+09:00

Eschewed the dangers of the Korean highway stem and took the subway down to Moran to attend the Seoul Air Show. The weather was warmer than two years ago but was kind of hazy and with a low sun it was difficult to see some of the performances...still snapped a couple of photos:

They had an A380 there and I was kind of annoyed that we contrived to miss its flying demonstration...
They had the usual assortment of fighter jets including the F15 Eagle
And the F16 Falcon
And of course an aerobatic team, the mysteriously named Black Eagles who were neither black, nor flying F15s...

I think this manoeuvre was called the Challenger...
Flying close together... Doing their signature Top Gun move..."Watch the birdie" Finally, preparing for some carpet-bombing...

Natural energy...

2009-02-13T23:41:00.000+09:00

A man after my own heart...

2008-12-07T00:23:00.000+09:00

The traffic in Seoul is a lot better nowadays than it used to be. However, in my opinion it could be a lot better still because I think a fair few of the traffic problems are caused by selfish drivers being caught in the middle of junctions when the lights change (ever heard of box junctions??). There are quite a few hot spots like this including the South West corner of the Express Bus Terminal (avoid the road between Seocho Station and Express Bus Terminal at all costs on the weekend). I was in the area today and noticed one of those traffic greeters working at the Songmo Hospital just beneath the Bus Terminal. His job was to enable South-bound traffic to turn left across the North-bound traffic to enter the hospital and to enable traffic leaving the hospital to turn left out of the hospital across the North-bound traffic to heard South.

Although he was not one of those ornamental greeters whose sole job is to welcome you to the store or wish you farewell, I still kind of expected him to give a nice pleasant greeting. Instead I was assailed by a stream of invective against any Northbound vehicle that was blocking the hospital junction when the lights changed.

Hey Motherf***er, move your f***ing vehicle, you're blocking the f***ing junction you stupid f***wit.

It didn't half work though and he kept a good stream of sick people entering the hospital.

I still think that each junction should be a giant set of trapdoors and when the lights change the trapdoors open and any f***wit that is still on the junction is immediately sent to a gruesome death...

Catch Up: Regret of the Year

2008-12-07T00:22:00.000+09:00

My biggest regret of this year has to be my failure to make the most of the quarterly Hi Seoul Festivals (website on the blink right now?).
I completely missed the Spring one (I forgot). The Summer one offered a rather entertaining programme, to which I took the wife and kids but which was pretty much rained off the day we went. The Autumn one I was away for and I'm not sure what the dates will be for the Winter one.
Anyway, here's a rundown of the Summer one to entice you to attend next year. The first event was the Inaugural Han River Birdman Contest (offering $100,000 to anyone managing to cross the Han River). I actually umm'd and ahh'd with some colleagues for a couple of weeks about whether to enter or not (we figured it might be relatively easy to win a prize in the first one) until we finally missed the deadline.
Hope this guy wasn't pinning his hopes on the $100k for sending his kids to college as he pretty much dropped like a stone from there...
The evening included a JCV ballet with characters such as this... and the other evening event was some kind of aerial ballet/acrobatic concert which was pretty much abandoned as it was too dangerous for the musicians to be playing electronic instruments while suspended 20 feet in the air in a thunder storm...the first few minutes looked great though...I'd advise you to bookmark the website (if it ever starts working again) and check out the wide range of events they have on each quarter.

July Catch Up: Dubai

2008-12-07T00:21:00.003+09:00

Towards the end of July I went to Dubai for a week on business. I managed to grab a day during the week to actually see a few of the sites. Dubai is a bit of a strange place. During the daytime it looks like a giant building site (which I suppose is in truth what it is) yet at night it looks quite pretty. During the day it is very dusty and hot (although not as bad as I expected) and at night the dust is less noticeable but the heat is not.

Dubai: like an ugly girl, not bad-looking in the pitch black...
I got to the see the original 7 star hotel...
I got to see the partially constructed tallest building in the world (note the yellow dust)...
I managed a quick dash out to the desert...
and realised that although my point and shoot camera is quite good, sometimes it just can't handle what I want to do...eg. trying to take a photo of sand bloeing of the rifdge of the dune...
Watch out mate!!
Finally, I even managed to squeeze in a few hours on the slopes...
Although if you're any good at skiing, then Ski Dubai is really only good for the novelty value of saying you've been...

July Catch Up: Korea

2008-12-07T00:21:00.001+09:00

A review of photos taken in July reveals that we don't appear to have done much at all. The highlight was taking the kids to a collection of bouncy castles in Ilsan. This was great for me cos I could indulge my inner child while pretending that I was just being a fun dad...

Grandad, I thought you were in England...
Trying out some camera trickery...

Holiday! Celebrate!

2008-12-06T01:46:00.002+09:00

Madonna once sang

If we took a holiday,
some time to celebrate,
just one day out of life,
it would be so nice

and I'm sure we all echo that sentiment. Well unfortunately we're going to be doing a lot less celebrating in 2009.
Whereas this year we enjoyed 11 mid-week bank holidays, next year we'll only have 6 as five of them (March 1 Independence Movement Day, Buddha’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day and National Foundation Day) will be on either a Saturday or Sunday in 2009. Moreover, one day each of Lunar New Year and Chuseok will be over the weekend so you miss out there if your company is not in the habit of giving you an extra day instead. Finally, Chuseok coincides with National Foundation Day although since both are on a Saturday, we're not really missing out any further. Anyhow, don't be looking to book that long weekend to South East Asia cos you probably won't have any long weekends....

Catch up: June 08

2008-12-06T01:45:00.000+09:00

June, for me, was sandwiched by a trip to the UK at either end as I flew the kids back to spend a month with the Grandparents and then went to collect them. I was lucky enough to be able to schedule a couple of meetings on the first trip to grab a couple of days break but the return trip I was out of the country for only 65 hours with 25% spent flying to England, 50% being in the UK and 25% flying back to Korea. And my 30 odd hours in the UK included 2 nights.

Anyway...some photos (click each photo for larger versions):
Somewhere over Russia and someone's in my seat!!!

Just enough time to eat a couple of meals and take in a sunset...

...then back to Korea for our monthly hike in the mountains.

Went to see Korea again and regretted it again...

and got back from England for the second time just in time to celebrate my birthday.

Vot a load of VANK...

2008-12-06T01:44:00.000+09:00

A german company has produced a map where place names are displayed in the English translation of the original etymological meaning of the name. However, they're likely to get in trouble with VANK for they have translated the sea to the East of Korea as "Sea of the Sun's Origin" and they have left Dokdo off altogether. The places from Korea that do make it to the map are Capital (Seoul), Mount Cauldron (Busan) and Land of the High Serenity for Korea itself.

I expect VANK to use the Land of the High Serenity's superfast "between mesh" to do some damage to the atlas-maker's "woven fabric place"...

Catch up part one of ??

2008-12-02T23:43:00.001+09:00

Long time no see. After much nagging from my mother, it's time to start updating this again. Scanning through my archives I noticed that I pretty much stopped blogging in May and so over the next few days or weeks I'll make a few posts so you can catch up with everything I've done in the past six months...

At the end of May I went to the Philippines on business. We were quite busy so I see that I only have pictures of sunsets...(click on the photo for a larger version)

Tomorrow, back to the UK.

Stop hogging the duvet!!!

2008-05-26T22:07:00.001+09:00

Football...

2008-05-12T00:46:00.000+09:00

Last day of the Premier League season today and I've got two matches playing simultaneously on my computer. I shall be watching Chelsea v Bolton and Wigan V Man Ure to determine who wins the title and I shall be keeping up with other scores to see which two of Reading, Fulham and Birmingham will be relegated.

While the season is winding down in the UK, it's in full-swing here in Korea and today I took the kids to the Seoul World Cup Stadium to see FC Seoul v Incheon United.

There were around 29,000 fans there (probably a lot more since the number of fans is presumably based on tickets sold and they were letting in juniors for free if they had a special voucher and also all under-6s go for free without any ticket at all) so the atmosphere was quite good.

Before the match started the fans rolled out the ubiquitous giant banner...
Then some chanting and fireworks to get us underway...

The match was very open with opportunities for both sides (although the strikers for both teams were decidedly average so not as many goals as there might have been). The main striker for FC Seoul is Ju-Young Park (박주영), who I think is extremely over-rated. In some ways he is like Christiano Ronaldo (think the posing and the arrogance), while in others he is not (think talent). Nevertheless, he is very popular with the FC Seoul fans judging by the number of people who have his name and number on their shirts. The great thing about watching these games, as I've mentioned before, is that the kids go in for free and my ticket is just 8,000won and therefore it doesn't stress me out if they're not foucssing on the game all the time, or if they're even distracting me from watching the game. In actual fact they quite enjoyed today and watched most of the match. They clapped along to the chants at some points and danced a little when there was music...

A week in the States...

2008-05-02T00:36:00.000+09:00

While some people get to take 3 months off to swan around the USA, the rest of us have to make do with a 5 day business trip and so it was that last Monday I jetted off to LA for a week.

It almost started with a disaster at check-in when the airline announced that the only row with three seats together was a row that they weren't planning on using cos the personal monitors were broken and one of our party said we'd take it anyway (what is it with the Korean obsession with doing everything together?). Luckily common sense prevailed and we were soon distributed through out the plane and ready for our flight.

It was a 10.5 hour flight to LA with a 16 hour time difference and consequently we got there 5.5 hours before we left, although personally, I'd prefer it if it wasn't a Monday that I had to live through twice. Mind you we lost most of that 5.5 hour gain waiting to dock at the terminal, waiting to get through immigration, waiting to get our luggage, waiting to get our rental car and then driving out to our hotel in Laguna Beach. The hotel was just one of the major chains but it was quite comfortable and each room had a jacuzzi although somewhat bizarrely it was in the room rather than in the bathroom.

Anyhow, after getting ourselves settled we took a walk along Laguna Beach...It was very pleasant after the hustle and bustle of Seoul. Of course, sometimes the Californian beach lifestyle is not all it's cracked up to be.... The next morning we were up bright and early and ready to start work. But first, breakfast on the terrace among the Birds of Paradise... After that it was a day of hard work and we only just got back to the hotel in time to catch the sunset...We made good progress with our work on Tuesday and therefore we'd finished our work soon after lunch on Wednesday. Of course if you're on a business trip with Koreans you have to go and play golf... and after that we just wondered around enjoying the OC. On Thursday we chose to go wine-tasting. (Well, I was driving and the others were wine-tasting). We went to the Ponte Family Estate Winery in Temecula... My colleagues were able to choose 6 wines to taste out of the many available and of course being Koreans those six mouthfuls completely wiped them out... The grapes were still very small so there wasn't that much to see...But it was a pleasant enough way to spend a day...Driving back to Laguna Beach we were thinking how it would be very easy to get accustomed to such a lifestyle... We had just enough time to take in one last sunset...

Before it was time to head off to the airport for our flight back to Seoul... Here we are taking off for the 13 hour flight back to Seoul (why does it take 2.5 hours longer to get back to Korea than to fly from Korea?)

Strewth mate...George Bush has got a few Kangaroos loose in the top paddock...

2008-04-29T22:47:00.001+09:00

Five to be exact....(click to make the photo a little bigger - so you can actually see something)

I saw these planes and wondered if there were really five Qantas jumbos or if someone had put a huge mirror in the middle of LAX. Anyhow, a quick check of the Qantas website shows me that there are 6 daily flights forom Australia to LAX. Here we can see QF 175 from Brisbane, QF25 and QF93 from Melbourne and QF11 and QF148 from Sydney. Don't ask me which is which. The sixth flight was QF107 , also from Sydney, but she had flown on to New York at this time and wouldn't return until the evening.

I want to ride my bicycle...

2008-04-29T22:38:00.001+09:00

Our reason for being in Chamsil was to head over to Olympic Park to ride bicycles (well a quadricycle to be precise). They have bikes that will sit three adults and two kids or six adults and two kids and so we rented one of the smaller ones. I think it was about KRW15,000 for an hour. Here are the kids sitting on the bike. We spent a happy hour riding around with me doing most of the work.....
Although as I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the cherry blossoms have been and gone, plenty of other blossoms were in full bloom... Finally, after wearing ourselves out chasing around, we took the subway home...

H.I.D. Hidden Intelligence Detachment

2008-04-29T22:21:00.001+09:00

I thought it was illegal to display the North Korean flag or pictures of Kim Jong-Il in South Korea or maybe that law has been rescinded. Anyhow, while walking the streets of Chamsil a couple of weeks ago I cam across the following scene... What's that I hear you ask? Some missiles pointed at the North with Kim Jong-Il's name on them? Well, they're only inflatable missiles (in case it wasn't obvious from the photo) The chinese characters on the missile say 世界(World 세계) 平和 (Peace 평화) 威脅用 (Used to threaten 위협용).

So who is displaying such provocative items? Well, no less than the Hidden Intelligence Detachment (and also here) This sign says "What have I done for the Motherland today?" "Special Operations Against the North" and a review of their website shows that it is a group set up to commemorate agents sent to infiltrate the North on special ops that never came back. All I can say is that they're not doing a particularly good job of staying hidden here....

Butterfinger Pancakes...

2008-04-28T23:03:00.001+09:00

Once upon a time they used to have Denny's in Seoul. It was in Myongdong until the Asian Financial Crisis of '97. At various times since then there have also been various other pancake restaurants but never have I seen anywhere where people would queue up for half an hour for a table. Never that is until last weekend.

I mentioned in a previous post about our aborted attempt to eat at Butterfinger Pancakes. Well, undeterred we set off a couple of hours earlier the following week although that proved to be only just in time to beat the mid-morning rush. The place has tried to style itself as an American style diner with an open kitchen... We weren't sure what to expect, after all some places in Seoul do mock-western food with a degree of incompetence unrivalled anywhere else in the world and thus it was with some trepidation that I ordered a pancake brunch and Sunme ordered a waffle brunch. Emily certainly enjoyed her orange juice... I didn't know Heinz made maple syrup..? Finally the food came but we were so hungry that wasn't any time to take any proper photos of it...Emily is looking satisfied having finished hers. An empty plate...you can't get a better restaurant recommendation than that!

Someone call Health and Safety...

2008-04-28T22:36:00.000+09:00

2008-04-28T21:21:00.002+09:00

You're probably aware of all the fuss recently as the olympic flame wends its away around the world. Originally there was concern about whether Beijing hosting the 2008 Olympics is appropriate given alleged human rights abuses in China and this was compounded by recent events in Tibet. Well, I just thought I'd let you know how the Olympic logo for the Beijing Olympics was designed...

Kim Kong...

2008-04-28T21:14:00.000+09:00

One of the great things about Seoul is all the really quirky things you come across. For example, at Hakdong Junction (학동 사거리), you can see a giant gorilla wearing a North Face backpack trying to climb a building.

Charity begins at home...

2008-04-21T00:20:00.001+09:00

Anyone who has kids knows that they grow out of their clothes really quickly. When clothes get too small for Alex and Emily, we tend to pass them on to a friend of ours who also has a son and daughter, each approximately a year younger than ours. They are called Chanwoo and Chanbi.

Today at bedtime Sunme was supervising Alex and Emily brushing their teeth. She noticed that their toothbrushes were getting a little ragged and so she said to the kids that she would get them new ones tomorrow and that they should throw these ones out as soon as they brush their teeth tomorrow morning.

Quick as a flash, Emily replied, "I'm not going to throw it out, I'm going to give it to Chanbi". Such altruism, such charity...I only hope Chanbi will get good use from it!!

Cherry Blossom Season Update...

2008-04-20T00:00:00.000+09:00

It's over for another year. All those petals that looked so pretty on the trees last week are now browning in the gutter like confetti...

Diversity in the workplace...

2008-04-17T22:01:00.000+09:00

Recently in the elevator at work they've been playing a video sent over from global HQ in New York. In it the Global CEO sits down to chat with some employees about what a great place my company is to work. There are five employees, 3 men and two women, 2 white, 1 oriental, 1 south asian and 1 black and one of the men is camp enough to suggest to anyone (except the typical korean) that he is probably gay; all in all I think they're trying to show that it employs a diverse bunch of people although there was no sign of any disabled people in the film. But it all seems a bit crass to have got that perfect mix. I mean sure all these different groups do work for the company but the distribution is not as implied in the film.

Anyhow, it turns out that the Korean branch of the Firm is updating its publicity brochure (or possibly its annual report - I didn't get the full details) and they wanted a photo to show the diversity of the firm. Therefore they got on the phone to my department and asked us to take a photo "of koreans and foreigners working together". We duly set up a fake meeting and took some photos...again, you can see 5 employees, 3 men and 2 women, 2 koreans, 2 whites and a japanese. Don't be fooled, there are but a handful of foreigners at my company and you can see most of them here!

People hanging on my every word. What they are actually looking at is the details of my hotel for my trip to LA next week...
You mean it's right on the beach? Are you sure you're going there for work?

More Cherry Blossoms...

2008-04-16T22:30:00.001+09:00

You don't necessarily have to go to one of the proliferation of cherry blossom festivals to see lots of pretty flowers. There are plenty of cherry blossom trees around...here you can see one of the roads in our apartment complex... View of a tree from the balcony of our apartment... I'm sure these would look better with a blue sky background... Of course, I already mentioned that I prefer magnolia blossoms so here are some pictures...please let me know which you prefer...