I don’t tend to read food blogs, but in the past year or so, there seems to have arrived a meme spreading around Korea that Korean food must be popularized in the West, as Japanese food has been. I suspect this is not just because Japanese food being popular irks your average nationalist in Korea — Japan’s international popularity in general does, after all — but also because, if you go to some places in North America, you’ll see Koreans running many of the “Japanese” restaurants. (In such places, side dishes of kimchi are often available in far greater occurrence …
Tag: Korean culture
How Much Does 빨리빨리 Cost?
A metaphor, for what it would be unwise to simply relay, and now a new tag for my blog — “allegories from life”: Torjan rose from the desk and went to the door of his workchamber, about to make his way to one of the lecture halls. The room was enormous, and he had finally figured out how to open the magical windgate to bring a cooling breeze into the room that had grown steadily warmer with each passing month. But when he reached the chamber door, and stepped out, he made a strange discovery. That was: the lock refused …
You Do Realize That You’re Baring Your Soul To Me, Right?
I’d heard from others that teaching Creative Writing to undergrads, one tends to see things that those students don’t or can’t express anywhere else. In Canada, I recall hearing classes tended to have to wade through story after story of students’ first sexual experiences, of their best or worst sexual experiences, of imagined sexual experiences, and of course the perennial fantasies of sexual violence (mostly by male students). Well, I am happy to report that this isn’t my experience in Korea.
Bluepill
I get an email from my workplace, and what’s the first image in the content? Yup, it’s a scattering of blue pills. Of course, for someone who hasn’t seen or didn’t care for The Matrix, this has no real symbolic significance at all. It’s an appropriate image for the link to an article about the impending launch of a College of Pharmacy at our campus. But for someone who’s seen The Matrix, the Blue Pill has a rather ominous meaning, for Morpheus tells Neo that if you take the Blue Pill, “the story ends, you wake up in your bed …
Question for Y’All , and a Little Manifesto
Is it just my imagination, or do administrative bureaucrats at institutions of higher education in Korea seem to be the sort of people who, through sheer incompetence, simply got shuffled from position to position until they ended up behind a desk? Sometimes the people sorting bottles in community centers, working jobs created especially for people with special needs come to min, actually. Test For Theorem: Step 1: Submit an abstract for a conference. Step 2: In the process of writing the paper, realize you had it wrong in your abstract, and change the scope, content, and thrust of the paper. …