11th Korean Queer Culture Festival
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Blatantly posting the pictures I took could harm these people’s lives, even if we think the reasons for that are silly/outdated/whatever.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:
- 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.
- 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
Deze post is ook te lezen in: Dutch