Article here. There were kids around. Some of them saw their own parents swept out to sea. South Korea’s weather agency had forecast there would be strong winds and high waves in the area but did not issue any advisory… Er, did not bother, perhaps, might be a fairer description? What’s the point of having the tech and forecasting if you don’t put the word out? I mean, we even had hail advisories in my hometown, and we had hail, like, once every few years at most. I’m not saying Korea ought to be exactly like Canada. I’m saying it …
Category: KOREA
The Positives of Foreign Students Around (And How to Maximize those Benefits in Korea)
I’m in the middle of a pile of essays in my composition class, in which approximately one out of four students is from China, and an incident in class last week came up that I wanted to post about. (I was grading the essay that we discussed in class crit last week, which I’ll discuss in a moment.) I posted last week about the violence that broke out in Seoul among Chinese students at the Olympic Torch/Free-Tibet rally. As Brian in Jeollanam-do noted, the Korean government’s handling of the situation has been, in some cases, disappointing, for example declining to …
Seoul Demo, 2 May 2008
UPDATE (3 May 2008): The demonstration on the 3rd sucked. As usual for 21st century Korea, when something is good, the first thing that happens is microphones and a sound system are brought in, random yahoos blab into the microphones (or, worse, sing) for hours on end, and the crowds end up becoming an audience, not participants. I wandered off, disappointed, when some teenaged boy was onstage cussing out Lee Myung Bak, and snapped a few more shots of the crowds who turned out, but nothing too special. (I’ll upload them later.) Lime and I ended up going for dinner …
On the “US Beef Scare” in Korea
I wrote a comment on Marmot’s for the first time in a while, but the comment hasn’t shown up. (Perhaps the number of links in it got it caught in the filter.) So I thought I’d post it here, in case it doesn’t show up for a while yet. WangKon936 posted about popular Korean concerns regarding the changes that Lee Myung Bak’s Administration has made to the regulations on the importing of American beef in the USA, restrictions put in place in 2003, and relaxed somewhat in 2006, out of fear of mad cow disease. His comments imply that Korean …
Chinese Violence in the Streets of Seoul
Last Saturday, I was heading in to Seoul to meet my friend Jeffery, and I saw some of my students at the train station, headed the same way. They’re nice kids, some Chinese exchange students, and we chatted until it was my stop. One of them asked me if I knew about the Olympic Torch Relay in Seoul the following day, and I confessed that I hadn’t heard. I’m kind of glad, too, because if I had, I might have anticipated what happened, and gone with a camera. Which would have been smashed to pieces, along with my face, by …
[Some] Koreans’ Perception of The West Wing
A few weeks ago, in one of my classes, we watched that episode of The West Wing titled “Han,” where a North Korean musician playing in the White House informs President Bartlet of his wish to defect, in preparation for a panel discussion on the depiction of leaders in American media. (We also looked at scenes from a King Arthur film that the department had on hand.) I found my students had some interesting things to say about it, though. Well, not “say,” in many cases, but I always have students write up a Prep Sheet and a Reaction paper, …
Impeachment Petition online
UPDATE (5 May 2008): It’s over a million signatures now. Original Post: I know, I know, Korean netizens and all that, but still, you’d think Marmot’s might have posted the story before me, yet I couldn’t find it.There’s an online petition at Daum calling for the impeachment of President Lee, basically just over dumb policies and scandalous news we’ve seen in the last four months. It’s at 56,000+ signatures, at the moment, but some netizens are claiming that 10,000 signatures mysteriously disappeared sometime last night. There are also T-shirts available online with the naughty-looking rodent logo that appears on the …
Attention K-Pulp Fans: Bow Down To A New Master
Masterly Master Lee‘s site is the Korea-blog you need to check out. I just ran across it the other night, in search of information about the “Two Sisters” video (the remake of “Venus”) a few posts back. Chock full of forgotten (and not-so-forgotten) Korean pulp goodness, and a wealth of reviews and information for anyone into popular culture! This one’s in the sidebar, and that doesn’t happen too often.
What in the World?!?
So I was looking around for Hwang Sin Hae videos on Youtube, and found this bizarre Korean remake of that song Venus, by Shocking Blue. (I think of it as “by Bananarama” but that just shows my age and ignorance.) What the hell is this from? Video pasted in below for you non-LJers.
Seoul Audiences: or, How to Buy Seats for a Classical Music Concert in Seoul, and What I’ve Seen of Late
Over the last couple of months, I’ve seen an unusual number of orchestra concerts, and mostly they’ve been quite good. I’ll get to all that in a bit, but I want to generalize a little about concertgoing in Korea first. The programs here tend to be even more conservative than what I was used to in Saskatoon, Sasktchewan, the last time I was attending classical music concerts regularly. In Saskatoon, you would often see a contemporary composition open a concert — often enough that I had something to really look forward to most of the time. But in Korea, it’s …