奥の細道：The Narrow Road to the Deep West

The most racist restaurant you've ever seen...

Well, perhaps you've seen worse.  And perhaps this will seem not racist to people - at the very least, it's certainly playing on some stereotypes.

This is a fairly recently-opened burger joint in Edae.  It offers traditional American-style cuisine in a laid-back atmosphere where you are surrounded by pictures of an ecstatic-looking black man, who appears to be named Bobby, in his underwear. From the looks of him, this guy is a wrestler or something - or at least famous enough to have his own burger chain.  Sadly, Google does not give me any hits for Bobby's Burgers except for Bobby Flay's Burger Palace.  And since my best friend hates Bobby Flay, we shall certainly not be giving him any publicity on this blog.

Seoul - Edae Bobby's Burger

The restaurant's tagline, written on another poster that I did not take a picture of, is "Eat! Drink! Run!" and although I can see why someone would feel the need to bolt out of a restaurant with such disturbing decor, running is not exactly something you want to do on a stomach full of burger and shake - the results tend to be messy.  Unless of course, Bobby is chasing you, in which case the restaurant is trying to help patrons burn off the calories they just consumed?  Honestly, it's really hard to tell and I for one don't want to test whether or not I can outrun Bobby on a full stomach.

Here's another shot of the outside windows of the restaurant.  "Come and ENJOY the taste of America.  Falvor [sic] will BLOW your mind. Come and have A PARTY IN YOUR MOUTH!!"  

Seoul - Edae Bobby's Burger2

Well, that settles it.  Too much coming and blowing for me, and I never was fond of parties in my mouth.  Add to that the threat of being chased by Bobby grinning maniacally in his underwear - yeah, I'll pass.

It doesn't really work that way...

Kids are awesome.  They also have no knowledge of how anatomy works, which is great, and by that I mean hilarious.  A few months ago I ended up teaching two of my 7 year-old boys the word 'breasts' which, while slightly awkward, was preceded by one of them, Edward, doing some truly memorable to convey what he was talking about. 

The last couple days have been remarkable in the fact that I have had 2 of my students ask me about anatomical things, and so I thought I would share, because I'm sure you'll laugh too.

Yesterday, during a discussion with Mars Class (my 3rd year 7 year-olds), I mentioned my little sister, which my students always find interesting.  Raina had some questions for me about it.

Raina: Ms. Rivera, you have a big sister?
Me: No, I'm the big sister.
Raina: Oh. But, you have your children, right?
Me: No...
Raina: Really? But, then why do you have this? [patting herself on the chest and pointing at me]
Me: ....That's not quite ...

On Thursday after I take the kids down to wait for the bus I sit in the Funhouse with Pluto class until they all leave, and today Eugene and Clara came over to me as I sat down to play with my skirt. They my first-year 5 year-olds - they just started learning English in March but they pick it up very fast. And even when they don't know English, they are very expressive.  And it's so cute - they call me Ms. Bera because they don't realize my name has 3 syllables.  or they think Ri is my surname (Korean surnames are usually 1 syllable, and given names are 2) and Bera is my name.  It's really hard to be sure.

Anyway, they were leaning over my lap to look at my sequins, and Eugene pats me lightly between my legs and says, "Ms. Bera, 고주 마누까?"  (How many penises do you have?)

Clearly, one gains penises as one grows older, regardless of sex.  Should I have 23 of them?  That would be weird.
Note: I found out later that someone translated ts wrong for me.  He actually said, "Did I touch your penis?" Still weird though.

which brings us to our Korean Word of the Day! (Sadly I've not posted one of these in a while. Have to remember to do that, cause I learn new words all the time now.) 

고주 gochu : red pepper.  also, slang for penis. (small but spicy, anyone?)

Now, go forth and do good with your formidable language acquirements!

Cat Picspam! ~requested by Sha

When I was in high school, I remember my photography teacher saying she wished her students would stop taking pictures of their cats.  Sorry, Ms. Kent.

Click to embiggen.

I know I haven't seen the 4th season.

But I keep running across wonderful Doctor-ness on my Twitter feed, so I wanted to share.

Tenth Doctor: The Musical

This video is brilliant.� If you haven't seen the end of the 4th series/the specials, you'll be a bit spoiled. but it's awesome nonetheless.�

And this I found in the Private Velvet Rope Club (the Doctor Who Mature Rav thread).� Someone posted it but only said they found it on the GQ Doctor Who meme.� I find it hilarious, and I haven't even seen Eleven in action.

GQ11

this just showed up on my facebook.

    Hi Sio---. I guest you looking for sperm partner. I am male, asian, healthy, well educated bachelor degree, and enjoy life.
if you have interest for this, you mau response my into my detail, and would give you more detail of me.

cheers

monang.   


I'm kinda floored. Best part? When you click on the person's profile, it says they are female.

and now, a bit of happy.

Natural Gas Knitting Ad

to my neighbor. and his mother.

Dear passive asshole who claims he is the owner of my building:

Tonight was bullshit, for a few reasons.  So much so, that it has actually given me a headache.  And after I have written this, and hopefully calmed down from my current state of fuming, I can go eat dinner in peace and it will go away. 

But, to begin.  Let me say, that yes, I realize that there are 4 bikes in the front area already.  I also realize that my bike will fit quite nicely between the others, with no problem and minimal hassle to anyone involved - and I might add that it did so for the last 3 days with no complaints from anyone.  But the other alternative is parking out in the carport area, which I wouldn't mind quite so much if a) there were something to lock the bike to, as I have been told by another resident that my bike could be stolen; and b) it didn't feel like it's just 'let's be asses to the weigukin girl because we can.'

Still there are other reasons this situation annoys me. 
-- the first time I was yelled at to move my bike, I had your mother and a boy who could not speak English show up at my door and demand that I move it.  Yes, not ask politely, and attempt to explain that there was no room, but DEMAND, as if I had done something horrible that I should have known not to.  Your mother was surly, rude, and all kinds of disagreeable, not to mention that she didn't even attempt to communicate with me, just foisted her grandson upon me like some in-person version of Babelfish, which, if you don't know, is a horrible, inaccurate attempt at translation software.  I don't speak Korean - that does not make me an idiot, or unworthy of basic courtesy.
-- there are spaces for everyone else's bike, but not mine.  As I write this, there are not 4 bikes in the downstairs area - there are two. In fact, there have been 2 since I got home. None of these other people have been told they must park their bike outside where it may be stolen.
-- there's that stolen bit.
-- there's that bit how my bike would fit neatly between the others, were it not for this excuse that you made up on the spot:
-- the door to the under-stairs cupboard has to be accessible.  BULLSHIT.  For one, the door is not accessible even when my bike is not inside.  secondly, i've looked in that cupboard, and of all the apartments in the building, I live closest to it.  I can bet you a reasonable amount of money that that closet is not opened everyday, because I would hear it.  thirdly - if the cupboard needs to be accessed, could the bikes not be moved a bit and then put back? or, -gasp- could the toys that are currently blocking one of the outer doors not be put into this cupboard, so they would be out of the way and there would be more space?
--that bit about my bike having been parked there for the last 3 days with no problems.
-- when I come home at night, it is very difficult to get my bike to the back of the building, since there are 4 cars already there and they are parked too close for me to get my bike through without scratching the paint on someone's vehicle. 

The point that I'm trying to make here is that you have made no attempt to be courteous to me in even the most basic manner in this, and that's ridiculous.  Note that passivity does not equal courtesy.  Courtesy might include something along the lines of, say, asking your mother to not be such a stuck-up bitch about the whole thing.  Really, there was no need for her and your son to knock 3 times on my door and ring my bell 5 times tonight.  Clearly, if I had wanted to answer the door, I would have.  It's hardly for lack of hearing the bell.  Also, she had no business touching, much less moving, my bike when I wasn't available.  I'm selfish about very few things - anything I have is usually available if someone needs it.  But I REALLY, REALLY, don't like it when people touch things THAT DO NOT BELONG TO THEM. IF IT IS NOT YOURS THEN DO NOT TOUCH IT.  WE LEARN THIS IN KINDERGARTEN, PEOPLE.  IT'S NOT A HARD CONCEPT. An apology would be nice, though I doubt it will happen.  I mean, she couldn't even make it up the stairs to your apartment before spouting off about me.  I didn't understand what she said, but again, I'm not stupid.  I could tell what she was talking about.

So those are my thoughts on the matter.  Moments like these are when I wish I had a universal translator and could combat such fucked-up-ness with the proper responses.  Then again, that would probably earn me attempted beatings from several old ladies.  But oh, how I wish for the talents necessary to put people in their place in multiple languages, almost as much as I wish for the ability to teleport.  Now I'm getting sidetracked, so I'll end here.    Please keep me posted if at any point you develop balls /the ability to compromise /your mother is suddenly stricken with an attack of consideration for others.

Sincerely,
the foreigner girl

18/365: Hyo-na

This is actually a picture that I took last September, but in the interest of editing the pictures I already have, I decided to clean it up a bit.  I liked the original picture pretty well, but I decided to play with the colors  a bit and make them brighter to get a bit more contrast than the original. 

 

I really like this picture of Hyo-na.  It's interesting to me because she is the only still place in the photograph.  She's very outgoing, but here she seems shy and uncertain - which is a very childlike quality, I find - the mutability and shift from confidence to vulnerability and back again.  It's one of the things that makes children fascinating, and one of my favorite subjects.

18/365: Hyo-na

Sep 15, 2009
Taken with my Panasonic DMC-TZ3
Edited with Microsoft Picture editor for contrast and brightness.

I liked the original picture, but I felt like the colors were a bit cloudy, so I upped them a bit. The resulting picture is almost neon, but I like it the same.

18/365: Hyo-na_bw

Sep 15, 2009
Taken with my Panasonic DMC-TZ3
Edited with Microsoft Picture editor for contrast and saturation.

And of course, a black and white version.  I think the lines in this one are interesting, since they draw you back to the wall where Hyo-na is, and the sense of distance is easier to feel without the distraction of the colors.

11/365: Nikki's First Sale

I actually took these photos last September, but I have so many photos on my computer that need to be edited and sorted that I will probably be posting newly-edited photos quite often this year.  I think it's perfectly acceptable, since my goal is to work on that aspect of my photography too, not just to take more pictures that never get processed.

So here are these.  They were taken at an Itaewon SnB meeting, the night our dear Nikki announced that she was finally ready to start selling her hand-dyed yarn.  Of course, we all love her stuff.  Abbi, however, got the distinction of being the first one to purchase a skein, and I caught it on camera. 

11/365: Nikki's First Sale

Sep 1, 2009
taken with my Panasonic DMC-TZ3.
Edited with Microsoft picture editor for contrast and brightness.

I really like the color version of this picture, although I don't like the orange-ness off it.  I feel like maybe the color palette in here isn't varied enough? And I really wish I could have fixed the orange glow, but I'm not so great yet with messing with color settings.

11/365: Nikki's First Sale_bw

Sep 1, 2009
taken with my Panasonic DMC-TZ3.
Edited with Microsoft picture editor for contrast, brightness, and saturation.

-sigh- There is a part of my heart that will always love black and white photography.  And I really think the bw version of this shot has more interest to it.  The color diversity (lack thereof) isn't as distracting, and I like the lines of Abbi's and Nikki's arms, the way it goes from Abbi's very clear face to Nikki's blurry face. (I tried to get a shot of her that wasn't blurry. She kept laughing.)

Comings and goings...

Yeah, it's been a while.  But when is it not, between my posts?  Hell, maybe one day I will even post all the posts I have planned but never actually written and posted.  Or not.

I came back to Seoul for my second year a few weeks ago, and while I would love to write a long post about what it means to finally be back home and all the thoughts that I have had about the whole process of being back - I just don't have time, frankly.  And I feel like I ramble a lot on this blog anyway.  Suffice it to say, I'm here, I'm home, and I'm happy.  

And I have so much to do, but this year, I feel like it will be different - it occurred to me that I am a quarter of a century through my life and even though that seems like not much, it also seems like I will not have enough time to do all the things I want.  If there is anything I have learned, it's that years go by much more quickly than you think they will.  As of this year, it has been a decade since I started high school.  Wow.   It seems I spend so much time berating myself for not getting done with the things I want to do, and I'm going to try to fix that.  We'll see how it goes. 

So here I am, settled in again. Coming home has been wonderful - new bike, new job, new apartment, old friends... life is good.  Of course, there have been changes.  Like this:

March 2010 - Ang and me!

This is my friend Ang.  She's from Australia.  I don't remember exactly when we met, sometime last year, but we have ridiculous amounts in common, like teaching kindergarten and Coco Ichibanya and a love of bath houses. She knits and sews and makes ATCs (I am envious of the latter two) and writes and is widely considered to be Hedgehog Rescue Korea.

This picture was taken last Monday when we met up for one last trip to Coco and Red Mango before she goes home to be a governess on a sheep farm with no internet access.  I will send her letters and pictures and miss her lots.  And maybe, just maybe, when she comes back in September I will be able to ask her about some sort of glue and understand the answer that she gives me and perhaps present her with her very own fluffy animal hat, since she found mine so very amusing. 

So there are sad things about coming homes.  But there are also good things.   Things like this:

March 2010 - Lemon over Tancheon

and this:

Feb 2010 - Tim at On the Border

This is my friend Tim.  I've known him since my second-year Japanese class and even though we didn't become very good friends until after he came back from Japan, he's wonderful.  He's the person who convinced me to come to Korea and his birthday is exactly a week before mine and he's one of the sweetest people ever unless you're a Korean woman or someone with a really bad haircut/fashion sense, and then he will rip into you like no one's business and make everyone around laugh hysterically in the process.  We sing "Moulin Rouge" together at noraebang and check out Korean boys on the subway, and he finds me the most amazing hats.  He's still here, until he leaves me to go to graduate school. 

Oh, and last but not least:

March 2010 - Cait at Taj Palace

This is Cait.  She's from North Carolina, but we met here at our first Stitch'n'Bitch meeting September before last and then we went to Itaewon and ate Indian food and we've been pretty much inseparable ever since.  She's a total yarn enabler, and she's been all kinds of cool places and has sketchy stories to rival mine, though in not quite the same quantity (I am rather unique in that respect).  She's hilarious and should probably be placed with Matthew in the "not allowed to talk while people are eating/drinking" category.  She loves burritos as much as I do - as she put it, "My default setting is Mexican." She's totally as geeky as me, in some different ways and some same ways and I love her to bits.  She's here for another year and then she will go off to ... somewhere without internet access with the PeaceCorps for 2.5 years and maybe we'll meet up and have dimsum with Julie in D.C. again.


These are some of the people who make Seoul home for me.  Home for me has always been dependent on the people who are there - when I was little I used to dream about having a house where all of my friends could live together with me.  As I grew older I realized that would never work, and it made me sad to think that I would always be separated from someone, no matter where I was.   I don't think I will ever be resigned to the fact of it, as evidenced by my continual and fervent wish for the ability to teleport, but I've learned to deal with it by enjoying our time together as much as possible.

And on that cliche note...