Category: TRAVELS

Readymade Bodhisattva, “The Flowering,” Los Angeles/Riverside, and More

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This entry is part 67 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything to the SF in South Korea series on this blog, but that doesn’t mean that nothing’s happened in the field. It’s just that:  My interests have broadened out from SF to other forms of speculative or “genre” narrative (and, in a big way, to include tabletop RPGs in general), and a lot has happened in many other narrative genres and different media within Korea.   I’ve been a little less involved in the informal Korean SF world since 2013. We were abroad for a while, and then we had a kid and moved …

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Jeonju — A Culinary Pilgrimage

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I’ve long promised a roundup of places in Jeonju that I’d recommend to people… or, rather, places that I make a point of going when I’m in Jeonju myself. For anyone not in (or going to) Korea, well… this might be of less interest to you, unless you love reading abut amazing restaurants that you’ll probably never visit.

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Immigration Officer Second, Zombie Fan First.

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So Mrs. Jiwaku and I have been in Saigon a little more than a week now. A million things have been happening, but the funniest and most blog-worthy at the moment was what happened at the Immigration desk, after I got my visa stamp and just before we exited out into the airport proper to be greeted by our friends Nick and Chris. Mrs. Jiwaku went first, and the immigration officer had nothing much to say to her–he just looked at her for a moment, fiddled with her passport, and stamped it. But then I stepped forward. I happened to …

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Back in One Piece, More or Less

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I’m back in Korea. I should have left my camera at home: Fukuoka was rainy and grey, and though being there was pleasant, I didn’t feel like shooting any pictures, so the camera was just unnecessary weight. Will never again travel with my big huge brown briefcase: it’s just too heavy. One other annoyance was that my netbook was useful for writing, but not for getting online. With the exception of my (landline, not wifi) hotel room, I couldn’t get online anywhere in town. Granted, when I got home I discovered that the wifi capacity on my iPod touch had …

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Visa Run: Tokyo?

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Okay, so Tokyo can be expensive, I know. But a guy I know from back in undergrad (yes, you Malcolm) suggested it probably wouldn’t be much more expensive to visit than Fukuoka or Osaka, and there is more to do in and around Tokyo. (And it turns out return flight tickets to Tokyo for mid-late February can still be gotten for about W300,000. Besides, some part of me would rather wander around in Tokyo, and maybe wander off to Kamakura or Minami-Alps (which my friends here have praised highly) or even just or Hakone, than to pass just a few …

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Bracing Myself for Evisceration, But At Least I’ll Probably Still Have All My Horrid Teeth

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Well, Fukuoka here I come. I guess my SF-writer credentials maybe came in handy this time, for one of my proposed papers — “Another Undiscovered Country: Understanding the Particularities of Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in South Korea Through The Examination of 21st Century Korean SF Cinema” — got accepted for the 4th World Congress of Korean Studies (the site seems not to work in Firefox/Linux… I suspect you need Internet Explorer & Windows to load it, as I was able to get at it on my dual boot) which is happening late this September in Fukuoka, …

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Drunken Suit + KTX = Not Fun

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I’m on the KTX from Busan to Seoul now. The train actually offers an Internet connection for a flat rate of W1000 (a little less than a dollar US)… if you’re a Korean citizen running Internet Explorer on Windows, that is. Foreigners running Linux will have to have a dual boot and a Korean girlfriend to log them in. Yay for the Hub of Asia, I’m sure the whole Pacific Rim is just waiting eagerly to be denied basic access to most things! Not to mention drunken guys in suits on trains. Now, it’s one thing when you encounter a …

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Stuff Going On

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Been busy like mad, and traveling for the next few days, but briefly: I’m getting my students to release stuff (or let me release their stuff) online. The first in a series of projects is now up at YouTube: my Korean students considered popular stereotypes believed in Korea about foreign countries (like France, America, South and Southest Asia, China, and Japan) and then went out and asked people from those countries what they think and feel about those stereotypes. That’s how you turn a somewhat disturbing class discussion into a learning experience. More to come: remixes/creative work from my Media …

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in bangkok

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One thing I got to say — the raised pedestrian walkways make life a lot easier. I wish they were building that in Seoul, instead of a silly canal to Busan. (So we wouldn’t have to stand at every corner for five minutes waiting to cross the street.) Oh, and the VIP seats in the movie theaters? Well, maybe not VIP, but I saw Cloverfield (“Cleverfield,” I appropriately typoed) at the SFX cinema in Central World I think it’s call, and that was SO worth it. Airplane first-class style seats. Blanket because the aircon is so high. Fine time. Wish …

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Going Soon to Thailand-Way…

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Got my tickets booked up, and now I’m just trying to book places to stay in Bangkok and in Rai Leh. But to get myself in the Bangkok mood, I stopped by Somtow’s World, since he’s probably the most famous Thai I know of, aside from the King, of course. It’s odd I’ve never read any of his books — though I do have a copy of Spaceship & Haiku on my shelf at home — given the interests we have in common. He’s a composer, and I studied composition; he’s an author of spec-fic, and so am I. But …

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