Wally Nes’ Blog

After our first installment the impact didn’t just stop.

#1, Sitting.

Sitting is hard. Most of us have been spoiled with chairs growing up and even those of us that have know of the uncomfortable chair and all the different forms and guises it comes in.

In Korea, luckily, we’ve not had any run-ins with these uncomfortable chairs. One comes to our place and will notice we have no chairs. No furniture of any kind actually*.
This is what makes sitting hard. We have no chairs, so we sit on the ground. But we work/play/lounge/watch with laptops. which we precariously balance on different parts of our anatomy.
There’s the knee-hop, which is comfortable, but not very stable
There’s the doggy style, which is very stable but results in significantly less screen time for the “dog”
There’s one leg out stretch, which isn’t stable but can easily be held in place with one hand and has a low maintenance threshold.
There’s . . . well, you get the pictures, a hundred different ways in which laptop operating can be accomplished.

When sitting in unusual positions it has happened to all of us that blood flow gets cut off. We’ve all stood up to the feeling of millions of little pins and needles shooting through our veins. If we were lucky we’ve never had to get up to a completely non-responsive leg followed swiftly by an amusing (hopefully) and not too painful (again, hopefully) crash to the ground.

So why do I mention this . . .  well, it seems knee-hop is very comfortable . . .
But only until you try to get up.
You’ve had sleeping legs from sitting incorrectly?
You’ve had sleeping arms from your partner lying on your arm while hugging them?
Execute the knee-hop incorrectly and have a sleeping penis!**

Also, turns out that the knee-hop puts my belly in contact with the audio plug opening bits, putting me under constant low-voltage

#2, Jaded

We’re it.
I see people’s reaction to stuff here and it’s 7 kinds of awesome.

Look, look, look. They make plastic versions of their food so you can see what you get!!!!!!
Japan had that.

DAYUM, would you look at the way that girl is dressed??????
tbh, it’s just short. It’s not even any kind of crazy.

OHmahgad, the subway is so clean and it runs on TIME!!!!!
OK, admittedly, that is kinda nice. But they don’t run as often as the Tokyo network. And not as on time as the Swiss.

Fashion victim hikers
I’d be shocked, but only mild amusement fills me as Europe/America has its share of couples with matching bikes and *shiver* anoraks.

The food, it is so exotic
Really? I mean, we’ve lived in other places in SE asia, it’s just rice, little vegetables, meat/fish and hotsauce. Lotsa hotsauce.

None of the women here EVER go out in public without make-up
Yeah, but at least some of em don’t wear heels. You’d never see a Japanese woman without foundation either. In Korean faces it’s just easier to see as the heads don’t wobble so much.

Men here wear shiny suits
A friend of mine got married in one of those.

#3, The bread.

Korea, Korea. You’ve come from pretty basically a 3rd world country, earning less than €1,- per capita on average, to what you are now in only half a century. On your road here you’ve had help, you’ve had examples, you’ve had role-models.
You’ve learned so much from the Americans . . .
Including those thing you really should have asked to the French or the Dutch.
I have it on some good authority your cheeses are bad duplicates of American cheese . . .  BAD duplicates of what are already considered bad cheeses.
And the bread . . . your staple for that is based on wonderbread . . . really?

What we won’t suffer for our lifestyle. Wonderbread . . . .

#4, We’re getting fit.

Well . . . fitter. I haven’t gotten all my sport moments planned in yet, but I went from living in Holland, with a verticle gradiant of some  0.004, to living some 100 metres vertical above our metro/bus station. We travel back and forth to this bus/subway station once a day, sometimes twice.
Raphaëlle also experiences this, but she refuses to write funny blogposts about it. Though she uses a few choice words with me to describe it.

#5, Our English, it is improving.

Which might be considered odd. In Japan we were surrounded by the Japanese and the Japanese fiercely adhere to Engrish.
The Koreans aren’t any better or worse than the Japanese in this, or at least, not that we can tell. Slightly different accent, maybe a bit better/worse at the language itself.  The T-shirts are about as funny/comprehensible. Yet, here . . . our English improves.

You see, most of our friends are waeguks.
And it seems 80% of waeguks here are either GI or English teacher. For some reason we have yet to fraternize with any American General Infantry types (Though we met an Army wife) which makes ALL our friends English teachers.
They use big words too.
And can explain their proper usage.
Leery, wary with a negative connotation. New word learned.

Now, if we could only get around to doing that with Korean.

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* Written on the day we’re having a closet and a bookcase delivered
** Being of male gender helps with this fascinating new experience.

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Quote of the Day:

I am like a taxidermist, I’ll mount anything.

- T-shirt of woman on my commuter train in Japan

And Korea’s first World Cup football game. But we’ll get to that later.

As a member of the press, well, at some point I had been, it was of course my duty to report on this event.

To be honest it started out on a low note. A low note for the festival, but a high note for us. It has been 30+ degrees in Seoul for a while now and it’s annoying the crap out of me. I am having problems sleeping, concentrating and moving for periods of time longer than 2 minutes (I have a LOT of sweatglands it turns out). The morning of the Festival was marked by rain. Lots of rain. The temperature in our bedroom went from 31 degrees the night before to having to find a blanket at 06:00, evening out at 22 degrees. Heaven-sent. Though it would prove to be annoying later on.

Rain ruins a gay festival as fast as tears ruin a drag-queen’s makeup, as a friend said. And indeed the turnout had been a lot smaller than the organizers had imagined.

There were some snags getting you these pictures as I was filling out the details on my press pass. If EUROAVIA gets any gay propaganda btw . . .  sorry. Korea isn’t a place where you can freely step forward as gay. And a lot of people don’t take kindly to having their pictures put on the internet in relation to homosexuality as it may impact their lives (Getting fired for this is still commonplace apparently). There’s someone who wrote a little something about the ethics of blogging a while ago, and this may be a good point to refer to that post. Blatantly posting the pictures I took could harm these people’s lives, even if we think the reasons for that are silly/outdated/whatever.  If you are currently blogging from some place where freedom of expression isn’t guaranteed and you post pictures of someone painting an anti-government banner a lot worse can happen to them than getting fired.

Before you take pictures, please ask if it is OK for the people on the pictures.
Blur out people’s faces if you do post them.
You are not free to sell your pictures to other media (newspapers etc)

The blurring out does not apply to those stars that are known to be gay. Though I only thought to look up who these people were after I’d pixelated Seok-Cheon Hong’s face already.

The opening wasn’t terribly exiting though we got to see the afore mentioned Seok-Cheon Hong dancing without his shirt in the rain. I’ve seen far, far less attractive men dance . In the mirror, for instance.
It was hard to see though, through the umbrellas.

I won’t post any pictures of the floats and the parade as there’s too much blurring to be done and you end up with a picture-soup. Some debate regarding the feminist implications of the two (supposed) lesbian dancers. Though it might just have been a ploy to lure in straight men. We’ll need to look into the porn culture here (Hoozah, cultural relevance to porn found!!!!) before we can judge on that.

After the parade we ended up back at the stage and we thought we’d seen pretty much all there was to see. We were about to leave to have dinner when these guys took the stage.

We thought they were just the cutest thing we’d ever seen. Hopping about and doing little cat/rabbit paw things on the rhythm of some K-pop.

Little did we know they were about to be followed by these adorable little guys grooving away to Oh Mickey – Toni Basil and Girls Generation

I’m sure there are heaps and heaps of things to say on why this is . . . homosexually immature. Compared to the Netherlands where the vast majority of homosexuals hold 9-5 jobs and watch Lingo at the end of the evening it was terribly interesting to see this kind of energy released at showing you’re gay. Good for you.

But all good things come to an end. Especially when your stomach is growling and food will be served at your local watering hole showing Korea’s first World Cup game vs Greece.

I won’t tell you who won. These are the photos from the bar:

Really, do I even have to tell you?
Poor Greeks, after that economic disaster they’re going through to be thrashed like this.

Had it not rained I’d've taken in the game at City Hall which looks something like this in good weather with a match on. Maybe thursday.

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As the more perceptive amongst you may have noticed there’s been an addition to my pages. That’s at the top right corner, if you’re wondering. Next to the photo archive, which will continue to show the pictures of my life until Seoul, there is now also “Pictures of Now” which will be showing the pictures I put online now.
I split the photo pages for 2 reasons:

1. The size of the photo archive has surpassed several hundred megabytes (The actual pictures of Japan alone need 2 DVDs, and my camera is only a 3.2 megapixel one) and the program I use needs to ascertain if things have changed since the last upload. This is good, as it fixes errors automatically and allows for easy changes to be made. However, it is currently spending some 20 minutes scanning for these changes before uploading the new content, which was getting annoying.
2. I lost some of the original photos. I made 2 backups. 1 on a mobile HD and 1 on DVDs and I was sloppy in doing the latter. The mobile HD didn’t survive the trip here (though I’m taking it to a store to see what can be salvaged) so I’m short 3 trips worth of original photos. As I no longer have them, the program doesn’t recognize the need for them to be online anymore. Had I added Seoul to the old archive it would have removed those trips.

Next to the photos of this last weekend some of the pictures of earlier weekends and random forays, including the very visual but completely not blogged about Buddha’s Birthday parade. As I likely won’t blog about it either I’ll give you this little description of it and then you’ll have to decide for yourselves if you want to click that link. It took 2.5 hours from the first people in the parade to the last to pass our vantage point. 2.5 hours of parade in that folder. Well . . . 2.5 hours and 4 sturdy AA batteries worth of parade at least.

This is Wally, signing off, leaving you with a picture of the moon that shone down on us that day

So we’ve stuck a toe into the pool that is the Korean language.

We’re at a point where we can make a sentence. Though we have to sorta mumble the last bit as Korean end with all it’s honorifics at the end and . . .well, we’re confused. We don’t actually know how to properly conjugate verbs because the end of the verb is too cluttered up by honorifics. That -i before the honorific we know could be an indicator of past tense, plural form or could be a different honorific. Just because you’ve had one already doesn’t mean we’re done with the honorifics, you silly waegook (foreigner).

So we’ll focus our attention on numbers. I mean, after Japan, how bad can it be.

Let me state first, that when I wrote the post I link to above, I was not as versed in Japanese as I am now so I will elaborate on Japanese counting first.

The Japanese have 2 counting systems. The Japanese, and the Sino-Japanese (which is what I described in that post). Both are relevant to other things. Now, the counters I hinted at in the post above, are quite numerous, and depending on what you are counting you use that suffix together with either the Sino-Japanese counters or the Japanese counters. Ordering futatsupon(Japanese counter – long, this, cylindrical things counter) beer will get you frowned upon and if there’s two of you, you’re futari(Japanese counter – counter for something or other), not niri(Sino-Japanese counter – counter for something or other).

So please, dear Deity, let Korean numbers be easier.

The Koreans have two counting systems. Damn

The reason for the last column isn’t numerical but due to pronunciation rules in Korean. End a word with s and it’s pronounced t. Which, as you can tell by the Korean number of 4 makes it hard to understand my name.

The Koreans use different counter suffixes for everything. Not looking good.

Now, the Japanese use one of the two to count with one counter. Let’s see how the Koreans do that:
Counter: Day

Counter: None (which is something you can do in Korean, but you just say “The First” in Sino-Korean. Wrong counter )

Now ain’t that just clear as day.

I’ll leave you with this little gem:
The time, here is currently, Yeolhan shi (11 hours) sibil bul (11 minutes)
Tell me if you get that.
Yeol = 10 (Korean)
Han(a) = 1 (Korean)
Sib = 10 (Sino-Korean)
Il = 1 (Sino-Korean)
Shi = hour, Bul = minute

You count hours in Korean, and minutes in Sino-Korean.

Not only are the Koreans as annoying as the Japanese in counting, THEY MAY ACTUALLY BE WORSE.

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Quote of the day:

This blog is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate

- Wally, blatantly ripping off Douglas Adamn