Another Show

So this weekend we're playing in Seoul again. Same club, slightly bigger show.

If any of you are interested in dropping by, it's at Club Spot in Hongdae (the Honggik University area in Seoul) at 10pm.

Here's the poster for the show, and below it is the profiles poster for the bands playing. We're the newbies, so we're going first, but that just means that we get to make everyone disappointed with everything they hear from that point on, which we're okay with.

Either that, or we suck, but there are better bands to listen to later, so people won't be as angry at us for being terrible. We'll see how it goes.





It should be noted that the guy on the left in our picture isn't actually our bass player anymore, but since none of you know either him or the guy replacing him, that's all I feel the need to say about that at this point.

I'll let you know how it went after the weekend's over.

Later!

DMZ & More

So last weekend we went on an excellent excursion with folks from our church to the DMZ.

It made for a very tiring weekend, since we had to leave Cheongju at 5:30am in order to get to Seoul in time for the tour, and I had decided that rather than deal with only getting a few hours of sleep, I might as well just stay awake and then sleep Saturday night. I think it worked.

Anyway, the DMZ tour itself was really cool. There's still a major section that I'd like to visit, but we've got tons more time for that.

Basically, there are two types of tours that you can take. One goes to Panmunjom, the re-unification village and Joint Security Area (the only place where both sides co-exist - in a way). The other, the one we were on, visits the Third Infiltration Tunnel.

Since the end of the Korean War (1950-53) the south has discovered 4 tunnels dug by the Northern army under the DMZ and into southern territory. The most recent one was found in the North-East part of the country -- in 1990.

Anyway, the third one was discovered in 1978, and is the one that got closest to Seoul. I think it reached within 45km. The tunnel was reportedly designed to move 30,000 troops per hour, although after having been inside a section of tunnel, I think that might be a bit of an overstatement. Either way, it's a pretty clear threat and a sobering idea to think that there may well be army folks tunneling under the DMZ at this very minute.

The other thing is that when the Korean War broke out, it only took the North 12 days to push all the way to Pusan before the South and UN forces combined to whomp them back almost all the way into China, before the North and China combined to whomp the South and UN all the way back to just about the exact place that they started, only with more living people on the peninsula and they were all three years younger.

The tunnel was neat. Crammed, but neat. After being discovered, the Northern army coated the walls of the tunnel in black coal dust-type-stuff to try and convince the South that it was really just a mining tunnel and not a military operation at all. The South wiped off the dust, revealing granite, and the rest kinda told itself.

Another neat bit of the tour was when we went up a mountain to a place called the Dora Observatory. It was (is?) a briefing room, and has the North-facing wall made entirely out of windows, ostensibly to allow the brief-ees to look at the jerks they're being told about by the brief-ers. It was really really hazy **side story here, I'll put it at the end** so it was quite hard to see much besides scenery, but outside they had those tourist binocular-things where you pop in a coin and get to see really far for about 3 minutes or something. I found some that said "for military use only" and then discovered that they were always on and didn't need any coins, and then discovered that they either didn't mean the sign that said "for military use only" or they weren't paying attention. Either that or I'm on a list now and have a very short time to live. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Anyway, the binoculars were surprisingly effective at cutting through the fog that I was expecting to be seeing close-up, and they actually revealed a decent view of the stuff that you could actually find. I saw the North's flag on a huge steel flagpole, a propaganda village, and an industrial complex at work. It was all very neat, and eerie at the same time.

One thing the tour guide told us is that up to a few years ago, both sides actually had enormous sound systems set up to blast the other side with propaganda about how awesome it was to live there. Any visitors to the observatory would be bombarded by party tunes from the North, along with a narrator that continuously told you (in Korean) how wonderful life was up there and how much everyone was enjoying having so little food that they have to boil the bark off trees and eat that for breakfast lunch and dinner. I was a little sad that they stopped doing that, since it would've been really cool to hear.

Incidentally, the reason that there are no pictures accompanying this post is that for the vast majority of the tour, you're not allowed to take pictures at all. Most of the time, if they see you taking pictures you run a very good chance of being arrested and treated as a likely spy for the North. I can't imagine that'd make for an awesome Saturday, so I left my camera at home.

So those were the two main stops on the tour. At some point I think I'll be going on another one with some other foreign folks from here to visit Panmunjom and then my "Biggest Military Standoff in the World" tour will finally be complete.

Oh yeah, one more thing. On this particular tour, they spent a lot of time really emphasizing the efforts to re-unify Korea (or Corea -- I'll explain that later too). To me, it seems like a pipe dream as long as there's still a Kim dynasty loony running stuff up North, but whatever. I suppose it's good to have dreams. Point of interest -- it's now very weird for me to say "South Korea" referring to the country in which we now live. I just call it Korea. It's even weird for me to hear other people call it that. Here, they just call it Korea. It's not two countries to Koreans, it's one that's been divided for 50 years. Any maps of Korea that you see in schools will have the entire peninsula, and all the provinces and cities of the North labelled in exactly the same way that the cities in the South are. Even officially, the country's aren't called North and South Korea. "North Korea" is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (which is funny because the only thing that's accurate about that name is the word "Korea") and "South Korea" is simply the "Republic of Korea."

The last place that we went on the tour was a newly build train station that eventually is supposed to be a connecting station to catch passenger trains to the North. It's quite huge, so they're really thinking big. Anyway, they had a couple passport stamps specifically for that place, so my passport has those in it now.

**side story ahead**

I found out why it was so hazy. Apparently every spring for a couple weeks the Gobi desert spends most of its time being battered by winds that kick up a whole crap-load of yellow sand/dust and carry it over the Yellow Sea and dump it on to Korea. This is completely normal for Koreans. To the point where Betty actually asked us, "You don't get yellow dust in the springtime in Canada?"

This weekend (it's Saturday today) we're playing at Pearl Jam for a birthday party, and next week there's another show in Seoul. Updates and information to follow. I'll put up the posters for the Seoul show too.

Later all!

Oh yeah, the Korea/Corea thing. Well you see kids, back in the day, Korea was spelled with a "C". At least, the western name for it was. The Koreans call their country 한국 which is fine cause it's their country and they can call it what they want. It reads Han Gook, which I think is the origin-point of "gook" as a racial slur against orientals (which is not a racial slur at all here, no matter what anyone tells you). Anyway, back to the story. Around the turn of the 20th century, Japan went on another conquering binge and took over Corea. Over the course of their near-50-year occupation, it occured to the Japanese that it was slanderous and horrifying to have a colonized state with a name that supercedes their alphabetically, so they renamed it with a "K" so that in an alphabetical list, Korea would be below Japan.

I swear I'm not making this up. I've got a shirt that I bought at Pearl Jam, and the owner always spells it Corea on everything -- business cards, shirts, everything.

Okay that's that. On with my Saturday!

Highlights from a visit

So this post will more than make up for a couple weeks of blog inactivity, I promise. It will take you on a whirlwind journey through the neatest bits of the last couple weeks, and leave you gasping for air.

If it doesn't, once you're finished, go back to the beginning and read the whole thing again, but hold your breath this time. That oughta do it.

For starters, these last couple weeks, our friend Veronica has been here visiting from Peterborough. It's always great to see familiar faces and get to show people from back home around this crazy country (hint, hint, hint to anyone who's considering a trip to the far east!). We went to some pretty neat places, and hopefully she had a good time, notwithstanding the *ahem* eccentricities of Korean cuisine.

The rest of this post will be broken down into days, but not necessarily dates, cause my memory has enough trouble extending beyond breakfast this morning.

So without further ado:

DAY 1 (or something. The trip to Sangdangsanseong at any rate)

So some of you may remember seeing this post WAY back when. These pictures are from the same place, a mountain fortress about 4km outside of the city. Really quite a nice place, and we discovered that it's even nicer when it's not the day after you finished a 20-odd hour trip to a brand new country where you'll be living for the next terrifying year. Really, it's awesome. There's a 4.3km wall that follows a mountain ridge surrounding a valley area where historically the support troops, etc for the fortress would be housed and have their barracks and armories and other stuff. Now, however, there are a bunch of little restaurants and tiny hotels and stuff, as well as a little farming village in the valley.

Anyway, here's a picture of Veronica and Becca with one of the gates along the wall in the background.



And here's a shot looking along the wall into the distance.



So that was a neat day. Good times were (I think) had by all.

DAY 10 (or something. The first day of the concert weekend in Seoul anyway)

We were (as far as I was aware) supposed to be doing a sound check at the club at 6:00pm on Saturday, so Veronica, Becca and I headed up to Seoul Friday night, so we could get a day's sightseeing in beforehand. Jess and Brandon (awesome people) let us crash at their place on both nights of the weekend, which was excellent.

So on Saturday morning we awoke and got on our way. Our first stop was a palace called Changdeokgung, which served as a secondary palace compound for the ruling families of the Joseon dynasty (the primary palace is about ten minutes up the road from this one). Seoul has been the capital of the Korean peninsula for centuries, so there are loads of old palaces all over the place, and we've always been meaning to take a tour of one, so we were super excited. Brace yourself, cause there are a bunch of pictures on the way.

This is the main gate of the palace compound:


You aren't allowed inside the compound unless you're on a guided tour, which seemed a little silly at first, but once you combine the knowledge of how FREAKING HUGE this compound is with the fact that after only a few years of being open to the general public back in the 1970s, the whole place had to undergo about 5 years of renovations, it gets a little more understandable.

The next place we encountered was the Throne Hall:


It's a little hard to see in this picture, but if you look closely you can see the throne hall in the background. Just kidding. Actually, if you look closely at the ground, you can see that there is a walkway that's been raised in a two-tier fashion leading to the throne room. The highest tier was only to be walked on by the royal family. No-one else was allowed to set foot on it. The next tier was reserved for the royal family's closest servants and officials. The rest of the folks had to walk on the regular ground.

You'll also notice the rows of stones that look like headstones along the pathway. Those are rank indicators. During processions and other official ceremonies, various dignitaries and officials stood according to their level of office, each behind their designated rock.

Here's a better view of the rocks.


Inside the Throne Hall, as the more insightful of you have probably already guessed, is the Throne. It's really quite an impressive chair.


Say what you want about Korean dynasties. They knew how to build a chair.

The next bit that we saw were the various living quarters. Interesting tidbit. According to Confucianist moralism, the king and queen had to be separate during the day, so they each had their own separate living quarters. At night, however, they still shared a bedroom. And not just any bedroom, OH NO! A bedroom with THIS over the doorway!



That sign says in Chinese (roughly) "Place for the Making of Great Things"

Seriously.

They couldn't be together during the day, but at night they both tucked themselves in to the "Place for the Making of Great Things".



Moving on.

We also saw another group of living quarters, which also gave an excellent example of old-school ondol heating systems. For those of you not in "the know," the ondol heating system is perhaps Korea's greatest contribution to the maintenance of foot warmth ever. Almost every Korean building/room features this delightful invention. The modern incarnation is in the form of heated pipes running under the floor, causing the entire surface to be warm/hot, heating the rest of the room that way. Back in the day, they could only heat concrete-floored rooms, because there would actually be a furnace underneath, keeping everything NICE and toasty.



We also got to see a garage featuring some of the royal family's cars:



The picture didn't turn out wonderfully because the cars were all behind glass, but you get the idea.

The palace compound also features a "secret garden," thus named because only the royal family were allowed inside, lending it a certain ambiance of secrecy and mystery from the point of view of the common folk, who have a habit of being the ones responsible for coming up with the names for all these wacky places.

We didn't see it, not cause it's still a secret, but just cause it's closed during the winters. We did see a really cool lotus pond (completely devoid of ... lotuses? Loti?... flowers because it was, as I've implied, winter).



There was also a building that we found out was an ancient university right there as well. Looks like a sweet place to study.



On our way back out, we passed by a cool little stone archway. The inscription is made up of ancient-style Chinese characters, but the gist of it is that whenever you pass under the archway, you add a year to your lifespan.



I went under about 4-5 times, just to be safe, but I never stopped wondering how many people had hit their heads on the low stone, thereby drastically lowering their life expectancy. Then I stopped tempting the heathen gods and went about my business.

After the palace, we went to Insadong, a really neat market district that we also went to with my parents. It was insanely busy that day. Here are two pictures, facing opposite directions, to give you an idea of the crowds.




Just outside of the Insadong area, we stumbled upon a really cool looking gold-ish (if not golden) spire type thing. Right in the middle of a street.



It was about at this point that I was told over the phone that we didn't actually have a sound check planned for that night, which cause enough problems later at the actual show, but which had the pleasant bonus of allowing me to accompany other folks at dinner. We went to a place called Carnie Station, because 22,000won for a meal of all you can eat and drink sounds pretty sweet.

This is what we saw (bearing in mind that I kept the picture-taking in the restaurant to a minimum).




Basically, it's a help-yourself Korean BBQ restaurant. Magical.

Not really entirely worth it financially due to the overall cheapness of food here, but still something to see.

From there we went to the show, which you've already read about, so I'll skip ahead to...

DAY 11 (or something. The second day of the concert weekend in Seoul anyway)

So on Sunday we got up, fairly late, and proceeded to sit around for a while longer while we figured out, with Brandon and Jess, what we wanted to do with ourselves that day. We ended up deciding to go back to Insadong, since there was still some more shopping to be done and the crowds were such the day before that it was occasionally uncomfortable to just stroll around and look at all the really neat stuff they have there.

Including an inexplicably terrifying installation art display that was made to look like it was supposed to be the kind of thing that kids would play in, only without the inevitable psychological scarring that would invariably result in a 4-year-old's exposure to this:



WHAT THE CRAP IS THAT THING?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

JEEZ!!!

Anyway, after some more shopping, Brandon and Jess took us to this really rad restaurant (always avoid alliteration) that totally feels like you're eating in a huge treehouse. It's full of little rooms that seem to appear from nowhere, and semi-floors where you're able to sit, but not stand, and neat stuff like that.

This kinda gives you the idea:


The food was excellent, but the best part was this incredibly delicious bamboo leaf wine that they had. It comes in a bamboo chute decanter thing, and the cups are also bamboo. Totally awesome. Tasted like apple juice.

After dinner, we bid them a fond adieu (they're currently at the start of a one-month tour of S-E Asia -- jerks) and came back to Cheongju.

Another week of us doing our regular, fairly boring routine, and Veronica was on her way back to Canada, after an all-nighter, a 4:30am bus ride from Cheongju to Incheon, and then we took a 9am bus back to Cheongju, a cab back to our place, and fell into bed to sleep away the rest of our Saturday.

Good times.

So there's your long-awaited update. There's more stuff happening this weekend (hint: it involves the letters D, M and Z) so look for another update fairly soon.

Till then,

Ta-ta!