Pondstar.

2011-02-02T15:56:00.004+08:00

Wishing my family and friends joy and prosperity in this new year, may ur wealth multiply like rabbits! Huat ah!

2011-01-21T17:26:00.004+08:00

It’s not exactly my favourite topic to revisit. But I am appalled when I visit toilet cubicles which look like the aftermath of nuclear shitbomb explosion. It’s a rude shock for me because:

1. This often occurs at ‘posh’ corporate toilets which are adorn with golden taps and gaudy paintings, and frequented by the most senior management executives of organisations. And the smell emanating from the toilets are often fetid enough to leave you gagging at the toilet sink, praying for the next dose of air freshener to be triggered immediately. This has led me to draw the simple conclusion that the richer and more powerful you get, the smellier the shit you leave.

2. That is some serious concrete (or maybe semi-liquid, depending on the byproduct) evidence that the human race have not evolved, at least in the aspect of learning how to defecate in a decent manner so the next in line can have the simple luxury to.

To draw parallels - life is like encountering a row of smelly cubicles. You have to pick the least unpleasant one and make the best out of it. Everyone has their own way of dealing with it, and honestly, it depends on the situation. There are 2 main methods that I know of.

The inverted A-frame
This is only feasible if you have lots of toilet paper resource at your disposal. Basically, you layer 3 strips of toilet paper on your toilet seat, so that you can do your business comfortably without the urine stains or shit patches from irritating your butt. Some people do the mummy version, ie wrapping tons of paper around the toilet seat which is not very ecofriendly.

The 2nd method is the Standing squat position. This is handy when the toilet paper resource is limited or the shit left on your seat is so thick that no amount of paper is possible to protect you. You will have to position yourself in a squatting stance, while flexing your absl muscles to drive your dump to the hole. Other versions include the squatting on the toilet seat, which is not really recommended because there is the possibility you might just slip through or leaving the next occupant no choice but to adopt the 2nd method.

2011-01-14T10:40:00.002+08:00

JJ's song 她說 has been accompanying me to work these days.
Pretty well written song by Sun Yanzi, but JJ trumped it with his vocals.
Making it an awfully challenging song for ktv sessions.

Some micro analysis over the lyrics:
....
"等不到天黑煙火不會太完美 (Beautiful line...)
回憶燒成灰還是等不到結尾" (What does this mean??? Doesn't quite make sense to me)

I will probably gain some enlightment, after another 100x on repeat mode.

2011-01-08T10:44:00.001+08:00

Its the time of the year again.
The time of the year to start clearing the house.
And chase away spiders, cockroach, lizards and whatever uninvited guests from the drawers and cabinets.

Its the one of the rare times of the year, when you revisit the mementos and stash of junkets that you have accumulated over the year, perhaps even over the years. Movie ticket stubs, too-cute-to-throw keychain souvenirs from family vacations and AAA rating Chinese essays to show off to someone one day.

When you start doing the packing, you notice that you have gradually changed over the years. And realize that things you thought were important to retain, weren't really that important after all. You just need to be rational, heartless and throw, in order for the packing/cleaning to be fruitful.

That's easier said than done. More often, it ends up in a reshuffling and rearranging exercise. From one drawer to another, or to another section of the house.

You can literally hear the voices of the items pleading not to be thrown. It is quite amazing how some items are able to constantly avoid the fate of being discarded by me.

One of them being this fake wooden katana that I have, buried deep in my cabinet. Like an annual ritual, I will pull the katana out, wield it, swing it a couple of times to hear the swishing sound and sheath it back.

It feels strangely empowering, to pretend to be a samurai for that few minutes.

Okay, so much for being a samurai, time to slash the trash.

2011-01-02T11:30:00.000+08:00

New Year - Goodbye 2010

Personally, I am not all that into the New Year and countdown thing. Being more of the traditional superstitious Chinese, I tend to regard the Chinese New Year as the official one. But its still good, I can always do with the extra holidays and holidays make good corporate banter.

I must say 2010 was a good year for me.

I made my 1st career switch. For the better, at least for now. And I have people to thank for. My girlfriend for pushing me to realise how much I have missed in life and how much more I will miss in the future. Jw for sending me the career links. My brother for helping out with my applications.

I did my first ICT, which was a refreshing good break after my exams. I paid back most of my sleep debt during the period and chalked up pretty good sleep mileage to last some late nighters.

I made my first investments in 2010 and hopefully they will pay off in the next couple of years.

Regretfully, I lost my waistline before the year end.
I attribute it to a couple of factors: a severe decline in work and exam stress, Bundaberg Rootbeer & berlinjau chips, undisturbed sleep and sloth. My immediate agenda on my New Year resolution would be to get the waistline back before CNY.

Great year, nonetheless.
Let's hope 2011 will be better. Cheers.

2010-10-30T10:42:00.001+08:00

Its amazing how korean pop is able to transform the music industry.
I never imagined that words that were used to incite infant urinary glands like shhuushuushuu or xu xu xu
for that matter will ever make it to the chorus line of songs. Marvel the power of the girls.

2010-07-06T07:57:00.000+08:00

2008-03-30T12:55:00.002+08:00

:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

2008-02-25T00:19:00.000+08:00

Guide to elementary Singlish (by Liwei)
1. just add "lah/lor/lei" at the end of the sentence

2. when you wanna your friends to do something...
like ask him/her to go out with you
come lei/go lei
add a lei

3. don't use this kind of english to the ang mohs (caucasians)

4. liao = already
example: I go there liao
I went shopping liao

5. I don't know = "i dunno leh'

6. 你馬給我一點面子嘛~~ = why dont you give me face lah~~

7. never say "然後" = 我今天考數學, "and then"我考的很爛。

8. "他馬的" "我的老天爺啊" = 挖勞ㄟ, wa-lou-eh

9. "幹, 這超鳥的" = that's so lame~~(這個聽說是時尚用法)

10. 幫第三點補充一下 ang moh就是紅毛的台語也有人說紅毛人 ang moh lang

2007-12-26T18:58:00.000+08:00

I'm blogging from a PC 방 in Incheon Airport New town right now. I just sent my family off at the airport having spent the past week with my family on a package tour in Korea. I'll say its a good closure because I was able to share some of my experience with my family, snacking at the roadside stalls, sightseeing etc. It was just a pity that they couldn't get to see the snow in Seoul this time round.

There's some kid having Jang Woo Hyuk's song on the repeat mode while playing Starcraft.
I suspect this song will be replaying in my head as I leave Korea tomorrow. If it is able to beat Wondergirls' infectious "Tell me".

I guess good things must always come to an end. This 4 months hiatus from the hectic NTU life was an enjoyable and memorable one. It is with a tinge of sadness that I type this post.

There are lots of thing that I will miss from Korea.

Drinking. Singing. Dotaing.

Food. Jajangmyeon. Rapoggi. Samgyupsal. Bibimmyeon. Gimbab. Kimchi maybe. hah.

Sights. Autumn maple leaves. Naechangshan. Pusan. Yonsei. Snow. Seoul. Sinchon. Ewha. Myeongdong.

People.
Liwei, Crystal, Ariyo. Travelling, meal, drinking, shopping, sightseeing buddies.
The i-house people, my roommate, Andrew.
Korean friends, Edward, many thanks for allowing me to put up at your house and lending me the handphone. Not to mention all the advice regarding getting around places and where to find stuff.
My language exchange buddy, Hyeong Chan, I'll remember that last karaoke night, that was good time although it was the first time we sang together. It was an indescribable feeling to be able to sing Fly to the Skys' songs with someone, especially with a pro :). Shiok!

Ok, enough of reminscing, or rather documenting for the purpose of reminscing in the future.
I'd better head to look for a 찜질방 (sauna) around this unfamiliar area, I pray my navigation skills and my half fucked Korean will me able to secure me one, if not I would have to spend my night at a lubsub Love motel, or some sleazy nightclub.

Aww. The Jang Woo Hyuk song is still playing in the background.

2007-12-19T22:35:00.000+08:00

Most exchange student will tend to miss home after a while. Family, friends. Food. The clean streets. The Singlish, the 'F U la and the "chao CB". Other than that I wouldn't say I missed home very much, maybe cos I skype pretty often and hearing my mum's voice helps to assuage most of my worries and homesickness.

I don't have the dying urge within me to get back to Singapore. Maybe because I have become accustomed to the Korean culture. Or perhaps, love the people that are here with me now. Sometimes I wished I could transfer my family and friends from Singapore using an UFO catcher machine and let them join in the fun.

The two things that exchange students dread would be failing their courses here and leaving.
Theres a high possibility that the former might come true for me, considering how hard I played even during the exam period. Out of 5 papers, for 4 of them I drank the night before and for 1 i had a terrible hangover that I had to resort to circle random MCQ answers.
I think I set out one of my objective as 'play hard study hard'
In Korea, I learnt to play hard..as for the study hard part, hahaha I guessed it never happened.

Packing luggage can be an annoying thing, when you are faced with the knick-knacks that have some bizarre sentimental value like stolen soju cups, expired tickets, used admission tickets, "Lust, Caution" ticket, unused condom (that my roommate gave me).

Anyway, those stuff can be still be packed...given a big enough luggage or a big enough wallet to afford courier service to deliver back home. Just because its Ko-rea, it doesn't mean that cou-rier is cheap, its not. hurhur. And I am sorry for the terrible pun, i just couldn't resist it.

After several hours of packing, I managed to get most of my stuff into my huge luggage. What I couldn't sort out was my emotional baggage. I hate having baggage, emotional or physical. In fact, I think the two are linked. Sure, luggage is a sign of worldliness, but too much luggage is a sign of neediness.

We all have baggage. I think it’s impossible to experience life without collecting baggage along the way. Baggage full of countless events we’d never forget, memories that stretched beyond the memory sticks of our cameras or even stolen camera. And we have baggage that we wish we could leave unclaimed with the hope that someone else will know what to do with it. With a little work, we can all take the baggage that we’ve crumpled into little balls and shoved into spaces that are too small out of hiding, examine it a little to see if it’s worth holding on to, and if it is, neatly fold it and decide if it is worth pursuing.

I think I’ve done a pretty good job of organizing the piles. I’ve started to neatly pack most of mental duffle bags of memories here in Korea. Hai..

I should be out drinking but I guess not, maybe I will leave that to tomorrow night.
My last night as a Yonsei exchange student before I depart from this place which filled me with priceless moments and precious memories.

2007-12-17T01:06:00.000+08:00

Hmm actually I've accumulated quite a lot of blogging materials but I am way too lazy to blog.

Come to think of it some stuff shouldnt be placed on blog/facebook..nights of decadence, drinking would be meaningless to anyone apart from myself. I can easily review my personal photos when I am trying to mug hard in Ntu next semester and relive those seoul crazy nights.

Sightseeing is also pretty meaningless when you go alone. Dongdaemun is dongdaemun. Ok shopping, what else? Its the people that you travel with that makes each trip special and unique. Same goes with drinking. If you ask me drinking beer/soju tastes like crap, but its the company that you are with and the entire atmosphere that makes its lively.

Shyt, I am in a pensive mood after coming back from a Tarot card/fortune telling session in a cafe in Sinchon. Hai.

2007-11-27T10:13:00.000+08:00

Seoul is Asia's costliest city for expatriates...
make that for exchange students too.
Hoho, why am I not surprised.
I am getting so poor now..even shopping for souvenirs costs a bomb. Sigh.

2007-11-25T10:12:00.000+08:00

Winter Kimchi
Kimchi, the uniquely pungent mixture of fermented vegetables, is a superbly palate-pleasing kimchi to delight every taste. A global favorite, kimchi is a food that adds zest to all kinds of meals and its appeal cuts across all social, economic, ethnic and geographical boundaries. You see the poor and the rich consuming it in Korea, whether its Gwangju, Jeongju, Seoul or Pusan. Its everywhere. Kimchi adds zest to all goods. Kimchi is an excellent contributor to the human body. You just need to visit most male toilets to find out. People leave testament of unflushed long coils of sausages. The length is absolutely amazing.

Yonsei University collaborated with KT&G (Korea's one and only tobacco company) to organise a Gimjang (winter making) event to make kimchi to distribute to needy children and monks.

Cabbage and gochujang sauce in bags. Cabbage bags. The ajummas volunteers who are working on it. We got a hang of it after a while but our production speed was much slower than the ajummas.

So much blood. Haa our baby that we produced. The frills resemble the umbilical cord.

No points for guessing what we had for lunch. Kimchi with pork. Kimchi really goes well with anything..no matter how bad the main/side dish is. Look at Ariyo's painful expression, lol.

The international group. Well..actually we were the only students that were helping out. Btw the girl with the white cap is a looker. Shes thai and hotter than kimchi. Damn hard to concentrate on making kimchi. Ha.

After a while, two broadcasting stations came and needed to grab some international students for their interviews, so Tomoyo and me was 'arrowed' to do the interviews.

However, if u watch the clip, you wouldn't see my interview because I think they cut my portion. -.- Wa lao. But I was featured in the other stations' broadcast just that I am unable to find any online clip. In this one, you can see me faking the kimchi making process for the camera though. Haha. Btw this post is super backdated, I'm getting lazier to blog...

외국인 유학생들 ‘사랑의 김장 담그기’ 동참

http://www.pixcow.com/empasv/yonhapnews/40235

2007-11-10T17:57:00.000+08:00

Gwangju

Gwangju is supposedly well known for its art and culture (paintings, traditional crafts). Unfortunately we just missed their art festival which ended a day before we arrived. And most of the stalls weren't open when we were there..which was a shame.

Works of budding artists on display at the subway station.

Works during their middle age.

Epic works produced at the peak of their artisan careers. I couldn't resist a caress.

For our lunch, we went to a famous BBQ restaurant, which was recommended by the locals, for some barbequed pork.

Pretty classy and good ambience for a BBQ place.

We ordered a bottle of soju, which turned out to be complimentary (i love their 'service'). Our faces were still red when we boarded the taxi to the bus terminal. The taxi driver asked us if we drank soju and we just laughed it off.

Cheers! Eh, wheres my cup?

The skyline as we boarded the bumpy bus ride back. Took us 5 hrs to get back to Seoul. It was so bad that I nearly puked on the bus...for anyone going there next time, I recommend taking an express train, KTX.

2007-11-06T16:47:00.000+08:00

Cheongup, Naechangsan aka Maple Story

Cheongup, early in the morning.

After our night in the motel, we grabbed some mandus (dumplings) for breakfast and squeezed our way up an awfully packed bus all eager to head for Naechangshan.

"Eh, nabei cheebye la, chao gina heng lui la!!"
"Ok uncle, relac la"

The best place to head to admire maple leaves in Korea was Mt Seorak but we had missed the period as we were having our mid terms. Therefore we decided to settle for the second best: -Naechangshan where lots of Koreans from different parts of Seoul flock here just to admire the maple leaves.

Its such a big event in Korea that They even had helicopters from SBS and KBS (Korean Tv companies) to cover this. We tried to wave but they think we must have appeared pretty idiotic. But it turns out that, the rest of the people saw us and stared up to the sky to wave to them, Lol.

Makeshift Roadside stalls selling food, snacks : persimmons, grapes, corn, candies, honey products, dong dong ju (another traditional rice wine). Check out the huge pig on the grill.

They even sell birds. I have no idea what species they belong to but they sure don't look like chicken, judging from the size. Two poor birds with their legs spread-eagle. I bet they were caught while they were mating.

Along the way the trees were tinged with brightly coloured leaves.

At the entrance to the park, we were discussing and figuring out the price of the admission fee, when we were approached by this Korean girl who asked us, " 你们是中国人吗？"
To which, we vehemently answered 'No' and proudly replied that we were Singaporean, Taiwanese and Hong Konger. Her face lit up and asked us to follow her. It was a warm feeling, having people bringing you around, especially if you are a stranger in this foreign place, haha.
She and two of her friends were studying Chinese in Jingang University and she was the most proficient in Chinese, having studied the language for 3 years.

The bunch of us walked and talked, engaging in halting Korean and Chinese dialogue and occasionally posing for pictures and taking snapshots.

Canopy turning brilliant crimson with the autumn leaves.
Lovely.

Oh fall. Thats what I came Korea for.

Ok I think I'll skip the comments.

After having a great time admiring the autumn tintage, we decided to head to Gwangju. It was already 9 plus when we reached there. We had this crazy idea of buying a bottle of Dong Dong Ju (a different version of rice wine) and spend our night on the streets drinking it to keep us warm.

However, our innate need to find a proper shelter was so strong that we decided to scout for a decent accommodation. Slightly tipsy and weary from an entire day of walking, we walked along the streets and stumbled into a sleazy part...which happens to part of Gwangju's red light district. And there were pretty looking girls tugging our sleeves and calling us 'Oppa', they were saying that they will throw in 'service', Lol. Due to our budget constraints and moral conscience, but more of the former, we didn't manage to experience that bit of Korea. Aww.

We finally found our lodging.
Yet another motel.

VHS collection somemore. Haha. So retro.

2007-11-06T16:28:00.000+08:00

Jeongju, Cheongup and Gwangju Trip

I haven't blogged for a long while because I had lots of projects and homework to catch up with.

Anyway, Liwei, Gary and I decided to make a short getaway from Seoul during last weekend to the abovementioned areas which were mainly the South South part of South Korea. Actually, our main purpose was to check out the maple leaves in Naechangshan but we decided to explore the other places since they were nearby.

Departure from Express Bus terminal. It took approximately 3 hrs to get there or maybe longer. We were easily the youngest people on board the bus.

We arrived there only to discover that Jeongju was...quite rural. The streets were pretty quiet. And we were walking around to look for a decent restaurant to have our lunch. (We didnt plan too much for our trip, maybe only one night of itinerary planning, so everything was pretty impromptu and extremely 'bagpackish').

The restaurants that we stepped into all had a weird smell. We were wondering if they were serving dog meat..because the smell was really fetid and vomit inducing. (I apologise if I am being culturally insensitive but I really couldn't take the smell there :| ). Finally we settled for a shop that didn't smell so awful and we ordered Jeongju Bibimbab which was their local specialty dish.

Our bibimbab, which tasted fairly ordinary. They served us 8 side dishes! but none of them tasted good :(((. And they had a special 'sidedish' which looked like flattened beans. They turned out to be silkworm larvae. Apparently they believe that these larva are nutritious and high in protein. Liwei was so disgusted by the sight of it that he wanted to leave the shop. Only Gary made the bold attempt to sample it but he nearly vomitted. Lol.

After our lunch, we headed out to their traditional village area which was their main cultural attraction.

We went in to their medicine store and went to sniff around the medicine and poked at the herb soap that they were making. There was a middle aged woman who spoke to us in rather fluent english and we were stunned when she explained to us the herbs and process involved in making the soap.

An art and craft shop. Their papercraft is amazing. I think Korean's paper technique is more superior than China's even though Chinese were the pioneers in paper making. Kick ass.

My abject sexual fantasy. Hahaa

Xiao Ao Jiang Hu.

Liwei taking a quick relief. The traditional way.
So now we know the secret behind kimchi making. Hehe.

I love their traditional woodcraft and sculpture. So inspiring! Sensual and artistic.

Playing traditional games at the village with some locals.
Some old folks playing chess. The Korean version allows elephants to swim across the river. Maybe Korean waterways are more shallow.

We left our scribbles on a guestbook at some Revolution Museum. Gary wrote that he was looking for a Korean girlfriend. And I just wrote, me too. Haha.

Nice lily made of paper. And nice balls. Extremely artistic piece.

If your chinese is good enough, you'll understand the first picture. Its a tortoise btw.
Gary playing with a football at their gate which was a tourist attraction. We weren't supposed to enter in the first place. Lol. Much less play around with a ball.

We had noodles at some famous noodle restaurant in Gyeongju. Yes. I am a sucker for noodles. I guess I inherited my father's genes.

In the evening, we took a bus to Cheongup so that we could get up early the next day to head for the mountain to admire the leaves.

Upon arriving, we walked around to try to look for reasonable accommodation to spend the night. We settled for an average motel which cost us 40,000 won (thats around 64 dollars) for 3 persons.

Our program when we turned on the TV. Well..thats the standard channel for all motels in Korea, irregardless of Seoul or anywhere else. Motels are meant for couples to have a fun night out/ husbands to cheat on their wives /wives to cheat on their husbands. Hoho.

We just sat there transfixed to the screen. Even though we keep complaining that the sex was unnatural with lots of feigned moaning and they didnt even reveal the nether regions.

It was pretty funny.Imagine 3 guys silently watching porn and all refusing to take their shower.
Haha.

I'll continue the rest on another day. The dorm is cutting the internet supply now. Grr.

2007-10-30T16:14:00.000+08:00

I'm finally done with my mid-terms!
Now I can play with unfettered abandon without the nagging thought of exams. Haha, well...not that I studied real hard but enough to do okay bah, at least I hope so. I'm been going out very little during the exam week. Mainly camping in my dorm to read my slides, dota.

Most of my meals were settled with cup noodles. In fact, I've consumed so much over the past week that I think I am now certified to do a review on Korean cup noodles.

The cup noodles here are pretty good and theres a good amount of variety to choose from. Shin ramen, KimChi ramen, Maruchan ramen, Spicy ramen, Udon ramen & Seafood ramen.

Prawn flavour noodles. Non spicy. Kind of like Myojo prawn flavour. Its good to have this when you're sick though because its mild and good comfort food. You think of Singapore food and you realise that your soup gets more salty because of your tears dripping into the water. Haha just kidding.

Spicy noodles. Er..I think its obvious from that reddish soup base. The noodles (tang myun) are more like mee sua which is different from the typical cup noodles. So-so.

The Kimchi. This is cheap and good. Lots of noodles, good for fulling the stomach. I'll skip introducing Shin Ramen, you can easily find it available on the shelves of all Singapore supermarkets.

The 'higher class' version of Kimchi flavour noodles by Nongshim. They use dehydrated soup base with tofu cubes and big slaps of kimchi. This is good shyt but kind of costly. So I hardly consume them.

Bibimmyeon. Basically its noodles mixed with gochuchang just like bibimbab. I love this. But I love the real thing even more. Of course, the egg is sold separately.

Chachangmyun! My favourite noodles but somehow processed chachangmyun doesn't taste anything close to the real thing. In fact, it tastes really different especially in terms of the black bean paste and the elasticity of the noodles.

A smaller version of chachangmyun. Good for light supper before going to bed. Its fit for girls with small mouths. But definitely too little for me. I can finish it in one swoop.

Spaghetti. Would've tasted like the authentic stuff if the noodles were thicker. Nice but the portion was too little and pricey.

My all-time favourite! Ra men bokki. Ramen with spicy sauce that they use for tteobokki. Its so good that I swept all the remaining cups off the shelf. I am going to pack a luggage of this back to Singapore.

2007-10-28T09:33:00.000+08:00

Teen Teen Agricultural Fieldtrip (Day 2)

Milk for the morning.

The next morning, we headed out to Taeshin Ranch to get our milk from the Korean cows.

We had to walk through this long path between the cows. I nearly fainted while getting myself across. The stench was bad as with all dairy farms in the world. If hell were to really have 18 levels, this would probably be the 9th level and the International House male toilet would be the 10th level.

Milking the cow. Took me a while to get the warm milk squirting into my palms.

I've seen Singapore bred cows and I compare them with the Korean cows. Koreans have bigger teats than their Singapore counterparts. Maybe its the climate or the food that makes their assets bigger. Cows, yes cows. I was referring to cows.

Got onto a tractor to take a leisurely tour of the farm.
We got warned by the owner of the farm not to disturb the sheep because they had weak minds. -.-

An ass carrying another.

Ariyo bulling. Tsk tsk. This is turning into a bestiality site, haha.

Making ice-cream later. We spent 20 minutes mixing the milk and strawberry flavour over a tub of ice-cubes. Which we consumed in less than 2 minutes.

I checked the itinerary and it said that we were supposed to visit some HUB farm to do some HUB candle. I was curious and my mind was throwing up ideas as to what HUB was.
LUB? RUB? WTF was HUB? Toa Payoh HUB? Our mystery was solved when we arrived at a greenhouse filled with plants. Ooh HERB Farm. We had curry lunch there which had me craving for prata... T-T.

Our try at making herb candles. I picked the lemon flavour because I don't really fancy the smell of lavender.

And at the end of it, we received a certificate of completion, which commended us for our 2 days of slacking. WORK and STUDY programme! HAHAH
From the Minister herself. And a genuine signature instead of a electronically generated one.
Wahahah. I love the Korea Government.

2007-10-27T23:01:00.000+08:00

Teen Teen Agricultural Fieldtrip (Day 1)

I just came back from this wonderful trip which was sponsored by the Korean government (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry). It was a field trip where international youths from various universities in Korea were invited to immerse in the Korean traditional culture.
I was initially clueless as to what we are actually doing during the trip except the idea of a free hanbok (traditional Korean costume) enticed me so much that I arranged to take my exam earlier than scheduled so that I could attend this trip.

We took a long bus ride out of Seoul before arriving at a folk village called Oeammaul.

We felt very much like them. Young and excited.

We alighted from the bus and there were people from Arirang who were filming us like we were some bigfuck superstar. Apparently, this was some high-profile event and this was the first time that the Korean government is organising a cultural trip for international exchange students. There were 10 students representatives each from various universities: Chungang, Sungkyunkwan, Seoul's Woman, Hanyang, Dankook, Kyunghee and Yonsei University.

We got a taste of how life was like in the rural areas.

The folk village was much bigger than the small one in Seoul since its in the rural area. This one we could view the mountains spanning across the borders of the village..unfortunately, its difficult to capture that on camera.

I just love the scenery and the architecture of their traditional huts.

Our residence.

The folk village was much more modern than I expected and had facilities which resembled Pasir-ris chalet. Their floor heating was extremely comfortable and kept us warm in spite of the freezing temperatures outside. My only gripe is that they didn't had heater for shower but then again, its supposed to be a 'traditional farm stay'. Ha.

Bibimbab. I love free food. I didn't spend a single cent during two days. WOhoo!! Not to mention the freebies that I received. And for the experience that money can't buy.
Gong. Me in my oversized hanbok, which resembled more of a baggy hiphop suit.

Our first activity after our lunch was to learn how to play traditional Korean instruments. We were assigned instruments and they taught us the basics. DO NOT underestimate the simple gong (that I was assigned) its the leader of the entire orchestra. and much harder to play than I thought.

Ariyo with his face mask. The other four Yonsei girls with the unpainted masks.
I will not display my mask picture because I think its such a flop that even elementary schoolkids can probably do a better paintjob than me.

Random pictures

Pounding ricecakes from a huge lump of rice which was probably enough to make 200 pounds of Tteokpokki (Ricecake).

I think I sprained my hip from swinging that freaking heavy mallet. These ajeossis are way fitter than me, heaving and pounding the dough with the mallet as if it were some play dough.

Ariyo having a competition with Michael from Germany. Tough battle. They were equally matched, both refusing to budge.

Mixing out dough and enjoying our ricecakes. With Shihkye (a refreshing and naturally sweet tasting drink made from rice) which tastes like barley.

I know what it resembles but its not. The man is merely putting a contraception to prevent the rice from exploding out from the machine. I don't know specifically how this works and I won't pretend to know. The rice is supposedly done when the machine explodes.
Organic explosion. Pop-rice.

The German guy commented on how amazing the Koreans can make so many things from rice, ricecakes, drinks, crackers. I totally agree.

Ariyo helping out with the ajumma to squeeze her sacks. Its always good to have young men to help them out once in a while.

Giving the games a try. Some stick throwing contest.
Ariyo attempting the tightrope walking.

Ancient torture. S&M. The ajumma's whack was more wicked than the korean girl's on my right.

At night, we had fun making panjeons Korean pancakes and drinking Makgoli, korean rice wine. Korean rice wine is dangerous for me because it tastes like beer minus the unpleasant aftertaste that beer has, so one can get drunk pretty fast on Makgoli. Notice that I have no pictures. Haha.

The males.
The Yonsei group! The privileged few.

2007-10-20T22:18:00.000+08:00

Gyeongju

My vision when we woke up. We were on the bus heading to Bulguksa temple, which was one of the most famous and frequented temple in Korea. In Korea, and Seoul especially, you'll see so many churches that you forget that there are actually Buddhists residing in Korea.

We also went to the Sokkuram Grotto nearby to look at the shrine, which was renown for its Shilla religio-artistic work. Both Bulguksa and the grotto were UNESCO's World Heritage sites..they were nice but one peeve about these sites, they are so packed that it kills the mood.

Holy water ar..reminds me of the Sembawang pond where people soak their feet.
Some scripture which looks like a giant TV screen with text.

Maple. Children drinking water.

This has to be my most religious day in Korea. I went to two temples!!

Courtesy of our talented photographer Ariyo. Haha.

Souvenir shop. Tablets where people wrote wishes, which will be used for construction of temple extensions/ new structures.

Artistic shots by Crystal.

I like the Korean kids here so much that I am so tempted to smuggle a few back to Singapore to keep. In a dungeon or groom them into future BoAs or Ha Ji Wons.

We went to many other mini places but I shall not blog in detail because I do not have the luxury to. We stopped by this field and we started camwhoring.

We were trying to take CD album covers-like photos. hahah.

Scenery by the road.

Teletubby set? Or some magical Boob land?.. Its actually the graves of some important Korean generals.
At some lake/pavillion where a king used to stroll and enjoy his leisure time feeding ducks.

Our last stop was to drop by their famous Hwang Nam bakery to try out their bakery. Tasted pretty good but not exceptionally fantastic. Like the ordinary tau sa pastries. I still prefer the chewy ricecake filled pastries they have here in Seoul bakeries.

2007-10-20T22:10:00.000+08:00

Pusan Continued

After a night at our guesthouse, we set out for Taejungdae which was a tourist attraction composed of Shinsun (Taoist Monk) Rock and Jujunja (kettle) Island. Some place where some king sat and look out to the sea to meditate...something along that line.

Shyt, I think I am becoming more artistic. Or maybe its the place, I can never take this sort of photos in singapore.

I love their vandalism.

It was a photo competition between Ariyo, Liwei and I to see who could take the nicest photo of that spot.

Having a greentea shake while waiting for our tram ride.

The Jagalchi fish market. Fish and shellfish are sold fresh to consumers, almost right off the boat. The area is lined with tanks containing all sorts of fish, eels, squid, shellfish, and mollusks. Some areas have workers preparing the seafood for long term storage. We watch as the fish get scaled, beheaded, chopped up, and served for us all in record time.

Our lunch. We ate some eel/catfish/ suckerfish like creature..which was still wriggling when they served us. The HK girls were extremlyy freaked out that they left to scour for their own food. Tsk. It taste pretty good even though we couldn't make out head or tail the parts we were eating.

After that, I wanted to try sashimi but no one seemed interested.

So, we went for some traditional Korean pancake, their form of seafood pizza with leeks and onions.

After lunch, we went around Nampodong? (honestly I forgot most of the pusan area names), which was a shopping district of Pusan. Trendy shops and branded shops aplenty..so we did window shopping since we didn't have much money. Boutique selling the clothes that Eun hye wore in Coffee Prince.

In the evening, we took a train ride to Gyeongju...

Our guesthouse where we retired for the night after a tiring day of sightseeing and late night drinking. We had some crazy punishment for Ariyo since he was allergic to alcohol, we forced him to drink up 6 packs worth of concentrated coffee...which left him in an uber high mood, just like the rest of us who were intoxicated with soju. Hahaha. But he suffered worse than us because he couldnt sleep at all.. and puked coffee. Lol.

2007-10-20T10:39:00.000+08:00

Pusan/ Gyeongju Trip

Many things happened during this trip. Some memorable, some unpleasant but.. well it was a good trip on the whole. We planned the itinerary, booked accommodation, and had to scroll korean websites for info (especially for PIFF- pusan international film festival) beforehand.

Liwei, our taiwan friend, was our official tour guide since he had the lightest academic load. But the late nights of planning took its toll on him, making him rather shagged.
Train tickets. In a nice 红包..maybe not angbao since its not red. Maybe lanbao 蓝包, but it sounds wrong, ah nvm.

Happy commuters on the KTX express train. (Gary and Ariyo)
View from the window. Trains are kind of fast in Korea, which makes me wonder why do we take so long to travel on Sg MRTs since our island is so small?!!

At our guesthouse which we booked through busanbagpackers.com . Reasonably priced considering our late booking. I chose to sleep on the floor which saved me 5,000 won..the equivalent of 10 ice-creams! / McDonald's meal.

Our first stop was at some old folk town where we discovered that we were the youngest creatures in that vicinity. Yes look at the amount of cabbage that have for kimchi. Food for thought: Do rabbits in korea eat kimchi?

At Haeunde beach (probably their most famous beach) in Pusan. Kind of nice..its natural sand. Its usually packed with flocks of pretty girls in bikinis during summer..but well..summer is over and I made a :( drawing in the sand as a display of my disappointment.

PIFF (Pusan International Film Festival) the reason why we chose to go during that period. Royston Tan's 881. We wanted to catch the closing movie Evangelion 1.0 but we were unable to get the tickets. Because we didnt start queuing since early morning. So we just snapped pictures to act like we went to the film festival, which we did. The venue. haha. And we witnessed the closing ceremony too.

Went to check on girls making sandcastles. And yes. we were only admiring the sandcastles.
But seeing girls moulding lumps of sand made me build my own sandcastles in my head.

Actually we took a lot of nice photos on the beach, using Crystal's camera but some fucker stole it from us while we were drunk and giggling merrily on the subway. So I'm only left with the ugly pictures from Pusan..like of me. haha.

We took a cruise and saw lots of seagulls..flying around us. I could literally examine its armpit from where we stood. The seagulls surrounding us made it resemble a scene of a korean drama. I cant remember which one though.

Some lighthouse.

No, we didnt have dinner at this restaurant..instead we settled for an 'interesting' dinner which was partly my fault because I was such a smart alec to decipher the korean characters wrongly.

Turned out that we ordered..pig organs stew.I don't really have an aversion to pig organs since I was trained to eat those from young. I consume pig liver, kidney on a regular basis..pigs' stomach once in a while. As for intestines, I rarely touch them. In Singapore, pig organ's soup is a common thing...but somehow the broth there was kind of 'special', lol, the taste was quite overbearing , which freaked the two HK girls and Crystal out. We paid like 7,000 won, damn pain sia. T.T

...Blogging fatigue. I have too many stuff to update and I am so tired. 3 more mid-terms to go and lots of activities planned out for the weekend. And late nights of dotaing, watching serials and youtubing sure doesnt help.

Hop over to Ariyo's blog to read more about pusan happenings. :D
Btw, I did a guest blog entry there too. On crazy ajummas. hahah.

2007-10-20T10:27:00.000+08:00

I had this sudden urge to blog, which is not exactly the wisest thing I should be doing right now, considering that this is the mid terms period. I just had my first paper on Wednesday, which I smoked so much that as if my answer sheet was an unrolled cigarette. And I still have 5 more to go next week. Yonsei exams are so stressful that I play at least 2 games of dota every night and spend time on msn to convince myself that I don't need to study. I am treating it so lightly that I think I might just be asking for a painful lesson. Lol.

The leaves are starting to turn yellow, some red. The winds are getting more chilly. Temperatures are plunging, its getting colder by the day. Its 5 degrees and its not even winter. You know its cold when you walk on the streets and you notice that your shirt has two more buttons - on the left and right of your chest.

2007-10-07T11:39:00.000+08:00

Saturday.
We went for our last and final day of Yon-go-jeon games. We were late for the rugby games and Edward was playing for Yonsei too. We lost..our 3 straight loss.

The most amazing thing is no one actually watches the game in detail and everyone is just following the cheers, yelling and singing at the top of their lungs for the entirety of the game. We chose to sit far from the madding crowd, because we couldn't keep up with their frenzied cheering. Its not that we are not supportive..its just that our bodies couldn't handle all those movements and jumping and screaming. Old people mah. I just woke up with a sore back and butt this morning.

Ariyo was extremely enthusiastic about watching the soccer. I was just waiting for the opportune moment to shout 'Kayu!" but I never had the chance too. Because the yonsei players keep falling down, some good acting of course and the referee awarded numerous fouls in favour of yonsei. :D ..but Yonsei just drew with Korea 0-0.

With girls like these in your cheerleading team., how can one not be motivated?!!!

Asking so earnestly. I'd die once.

Maybe twice.

Make it 4.

Omg. Maybe many times over.

Both Korea and Yonsei Universities used the advertisements to make some snide remarks about each other. The suanning was very hilarious and done in a professional manner, using Korean variety shows celebrities, parodies of Prison Break and famous Korean commercials, which appealed to the masses.

As usual, fireworks are being spammed..at appropriate moments to get the crowd going or to cover up a nasty foul. I am seeing so much fireworks here in Seoul that I am becoming a little blasé. Lol.

A balloon of Korea University hovering above the stadium.
Yonsei lost 3 games to Korea university and drew one. The ice hockey game was cancelled. Which means we performed terribly on the whole. But who cares? Everyone's more concerned about the partying after the games. Haha.

Now comes the fun part.
Both Universities' students will make their way to Yonsei after the games. Note: not the winning school's area. Reason being Yonsei is located in the most happening and seh area. Like how you will never hear SMU students telling NTU peers, "EhHhH, go Jurong point parteerr boh jio!"

The street was ready for us to party. The shops were getting ready for the 'hungry ghosts'. Here's a cosmetic shop distributing free beer and some light snacks.

In Sinchon, you're supposed to get your group of people and sing a cheer and do a dance that you've done all day at the stadium in front of a local restaurant, store, bar, etc until they give you something free. If they do you're supposed to go back there a couple times in appreciation. If they don't, you're supposed to never go there again.

Everyone wants a piece of two-two fried chicken. Classy restaurants are not spared either. They got mobbed badly by a group of hungry raiders.

You can get dishes, ranging from fried chicken to pancakes, pastry, popcorn, snacks and drinks, soju, beer and miscellaneous stuff like flowers, or even hats, depending on which shops your group/human train visits.

It was so packed, that the prefered means of transportion to form a human train. We had hours of entertainment standing next to either a Yonsei or Korea University Congo line and giving everyone high fives and singing the yonsei songs and screaming "SARANG HANDA YONSEI!" (i love yonsei) and shouting "Yonsei" at the Korean Uni students faces. It was fascinating from an exchange student's perspective. WHY DOESNT SINGAPORE HAVE CRAZY SHYT LIKE THIS? It was a real eye opener.

Korea Uni and Yonsei students having some PK battle cheers. Some groups even have the girls perform sexy dances for restaurant owners. HOHO!

A korea uni's train. The mentors' club people, pausing a while to catch their breath while deciding which bar they should head to get free drinks.

The human train can move at alarming speeds. Pretty chaotic but helluva fun.

After a while, we spotted the Cheerleaders aka power-rangers gang, they were heading to school for a closing ceremony concert! Immediately, I broke off from my group to trail them like a paparazzi stalker. Actually I wanted to take cheerleader's picture but her entourage was too protective of her, they even had people to act as her bodyguards for security, so I only ended up with blurry shots.

The cheerleader enjoys some kind of mini cult status in Yonsei.
Save the cheerleader. Save the world. Now, I believe Peter Petrelli. I wished I could freeze time like Hiro.

Performances from our sister school, Ewha University.

The girls had sexy and slick dance moves . From the way they gyrate their hips and twist their bodies..I think if army guys were to watch them, confirm one litre of nose blood.

Enjoying the free beer and popcorn. Which were given out free in the campus. WHY NTU doesnt have free beer??! Wa lan eh. I drank moderately because I didn't want to repeat another episode of merlion in Sinchon. There were revellers just downing copious amounts of alcohol (soju) and beer (by the bottle, literally), so it was not surprising to find the streets of Sinchon reeking of puke in the aftermath of the celebration.

Me and my Korean language exchange buddy, Hyeong chan. We were so high that we didn't even notice that we were dancing and singing so close to each other until Crystal pointed out to me. Jaeran, Liwei and Gary. Check out Ariyo's blog for more coverage, this entry is way too long..

I never imagined myself to get so high in a school campus. Indisputably, this is going to be one of my best nights in Seoul. And a highlight of my university life. 사 랑 한 다 연세!

2007-10-05T22:55:00.001+08:00

Yongojeon is Yonsei University's "friendship sports festival" with rival school Korea University. It was damn good. I have never seen so many people cheering in unison -- singing, dancing, jumping, waving -- all without the help of any illegal drugs whatsoever. But the fun of Yongojeon isn't in the baseball, basketball, ice hockey, rugby, or even the soccer. It's the binge drinking that occurs after the festival. I am so fucking drunk now.

I should be blogging when I am more sane, but we'll be going for more games and drinking tomorrow, so I am going to prevent blog backlog. More photos and less text.

Gathering at Sinchon station. Sea of blue.
I am dulan with the ang moh in the right picture. Keeps flirting with the japanese girls. CCb damn buaya.

Making our way to the Sports Complex stadium to watch our first game of yongojeon - Baseball.

Check out the Korea University strength, the people docked in red. Blue= Yonsei.

I swear I was not taking pictures of the girls. Haha. Anyway, there were ltots fo chiobus and models strutting around. Damn shiok day.

The cheerleaders which resembled power rangers in their costumes. Cheering is so different in Korea. They just go on forever, one cheer after another. NO STOP> crazy shyt. No wonder Koreans were pwning during World Cup.

Ariyo,Me and Ye Hwan (kr). Grp photo.

Me against the backdrop. Looks like it has been photoshopped but believe me, its 100% original. Guys wearing cheongsams. That is how passionate and enthu the students are about Yonsei.

After, we lost baseball. We left the stadium before we witnessed the humiliating defeat by Korea University. We decided to move to the basketball games.

The cheering was super crazy. Normally in sg, we cheer only when we score or losing. Here is so diffeent they just go on like Energizer bunnies.

We lost our 2nd game basketabll). The scrawny and small built players got pwned so badly by the Korea University's tall and muscular players. The korean players were so tall that most of them had no problem dunking and pulling the rim.

Korea Uni celebrating the win..Yonsei bball team apologising for their loss. Gwenchana.. YOnsei Fighting!!!!

Korea uni's tiger costume. I think they are cute. The costumes I mean.

Grabbing samgyupsal for dinner with the Mentors' club people after the games.

People still high after the games. Korean and Yonsei students doing combine cheers and dancing. I gtg sleep now.. damn shagged and drunk.

2007-10-02T21:09:00.000+08:00

Gearing up for Yon-go-jeon. (the games showdown between Yonsei and Korea University). The streets leading up to Yonsei in Sinchon were filled with banners to celebrate this event. Looking forward to Friday and the weekends when the action begins!

Today, Mandy and I met up with Derek, a Korean student whom we met during our Business Communication. He brought us to this place in Sinchon called Mindulre Youngto, more famously known as Minto.

The building is shaped like a castle, which makes it quite prominent in Sinchon.

Its a cafe and a cool hangout place for Korean youths and couples. I vaguely recall Edward telling me to visit this place if I had the time.

Their recruiting ad. If you get hired, you're probably hot enough to make guys spill their coffee. I've heard about how stringent they are when it comes to hiring waitresses and waiters. Only those good-looking ones and pretty looking ones could serve their cups..of drinks.

The entrance, pretty impressive. Had a princess-like feel to it, haha.
The waitresses here dress up like those Japanese cosplay maids.

You pay 5,000 won (8 bucks) and get coffee/tea/juice/latte refills, plus one bread, ricecakes or a cup of ramen. Its a nice place and it's built to encourage people to sit around for a bit, chill and relax. Popular with people studying, chatting or going on dates. Well, most of the people there were on dates, from what I observed.

The dishes were pricey and so we just did refills and chatted. They had several floors and I think the waitresses kind of rotated once in a while, so it was pretty good ^_^. Our poor Mandy was complaining about the lack of male eye candies though. Lol.

With a waitress. :P. With Derek.

2007-10-02T19:23:00.000+08:00

I'm quite busy recently..with dota (having made a remarkable discovery recently.. dota can run on macbook!! thanks to ariyo) which explains why I haven't been updating so frequently. As for homework, so far it's still manageable..but I foresee an avalanche of stuff, projects, assignments pouring in after this week.

Anyway, here's an old entry about what we did on Chuseok itself. We originally planned to go Lotte World but we had some miscommunication and so, we shelved Lotte World to a later date. Crystal and I decided to join Gary, our HK friend, to explore Incheon instead. Ariyo was tired and therefore didn't join us on the expedition.

Crystal and I spent 3 hrs in the subway because we forgot to transfer and we landed in Suwon, much to our horror (which was 20+ stops away from our destination) and we had to travel back to Guro and then to Incheon.

Chinatown in Incheon. We arrived there, train lagged.

Chinatown was not quite the Chinatown that I expected. It was unlike the archetypal Chinatowns but rather, it came across as a little obtrusive in terms of architecture and the shops. Mmm. Looks a little sinister right.

There wasn't much to see in Chinatown apart from several shops selling 'authentic' Chinese stuff like tiger skin and China dolls -.- and beads, jades and other accessories that didn't really appeal to jaded tourists like us. The rest of the streets were just lined with plenty of Chinese restaurants. According to the signboard there, Jajangmyun supposedly originated from Incheon Chinatown.

Jajangmyun at some grand looking Chinese restaurant.

We had been wanting to eat some mooncakes badly because we couldn't find any in supermarkets or on the streets. The only place that we could find mooncakes was in Chinatown. However, they only had several flavours of mooncakes and the kind they sold were..er quite different la..its more like 豆沙饼. We bought several back for other Asian friends. The Chinese lady selling mooncakes was damn sly. Damn. Sometimes I hate Chinese for their unethical business practices. Chinese are the worst.

While having our jajangmyun at a Chinese restaurant, Gary suggested that we explore Wolmido which was a distance away from Incheon. After dinner, we took a stroll to Wolmido, a place which I suspect tourists and exchange students hardly venture because its kind off the beaten track. And right at the extreme western end of Seoul.

The stroll was approximately half the distance you take to walk from East Coast to Changi beach. Walk. Walk. Talk. Walk.

At last..!

They were having a carnival there and we went to amuse ourselves by watching people screaming and jumping while taking rides. The games were kind of expensive and furthermore, we just had our dinner and I didn't want to leave noodle puke on viking seats.

Viking about to smash into the building.

Scary movie! WasSuPpzzz

A game stall. Objective was to hit the plastic frogs and get them to land on the revolving metal plates. The more frogs you had the better your prize will be.

Ajumma demonstrating her power. Ppang!

While walking out of the carnival area, we heard exploding noises and we saw lights in the skies. Our eyes momentarily lit up too.
Fireworks ar!

We bought a 13 shots firework gun (? i don;t know the name of it) each and some sparklers.

Gary's explosive shot. My weak shot. Lol

No lanterns on Mid Autumn Festival. Sparklers and fireworks are pretty good substitutes too.
How come the image reminds me of F4. Oh no.

This guy bought 5 boxes of 'dynamites'. And lined them together. Spectacular display of fireworks. A pity fireworks photos are hard to take, so we didn't bother after several tries and ...just watched in awe as the iridescent projectiles exploded into Seoul night sky.
Lovely.

2007-09-26T21:36:00.000+08:00

Soju Night
After visiting the palace, we went Insadong but I'll skip that part because I think I'll visit the place again another day.

Crystal suggested that we head to get some soju cocktail. And I thought 'Why not?".. Clearly underestimating their soju (korean vodka).

After walking aimlessly in Sinchon, I decided to call my roommate, Andrew the ABK who was a serious alcholic (he's proud of it) to consult him for some soju advice. He recommended Festival in Sinchon which served soju at reasonable price. I was glad to have him as a roommate because there are just too many drinking places in Sinchon to choose from. One can literally spend hours standing on the streets and gazing at neon lights trying to make out the korean words and prices.

"Seoul, especially Sinchon, is a drinker's paradise". according to my roommate.

We ordered 5 flavours of soju cocktail, which were served in teapots. I found it quite intriguing because I have never drank cocktail from teapot or maybe I am just sua ku.

1st pic: from left to right (Peach , cherry, lemon, grape, yoghurt)
Limited colours because we had limited strength. Just 4 exchange students.

The cherry flavour tasted like some disgusting cough syrup.
The yoghurt soju was still the best and voted the favourite among all of us.

We ordered five teapots of soju cocktail for the 4 of us. The lovely and concerned waitress had to double check if we were out of our minds because we rejected the offer of any sidedishes (panju) to go with our soju at first.

Before: Li wei (rep from Taiwan). Winston, Crystal (Sg) and Adam (China).

After:

Taking a break. Li wei wringing the last drops out of the soju teapot.

The signs of intoxication.

I dunno what I was trying to do.

Getting ready for the ultimate cocktail. We left some residue each from the 5 pots and tried to mix the 5 flavours. I forgot whose idea because I was thinking about kimchi cocktail or something.

Anyway, I was half drunk and way past my limit. So I decided against drinking the concoction.

3 'strawberry looking' shots. Me stickin to my cherry medicine shot.

Li wei just kept forfeiting games and had to drink copious amounts of the remaining soju.
I was pretty drunk by then. I think its quite obvious from the picture.

Moments later.
Merlion appeared in Korea.

I puked my dinner and soju out.
I stared at my puke. For a long while before heading to the toilet. Its like your brain feels lighter after vomiting. I thought I experienced some sort of epiphany or Eureka moment, I actually thought of some complex Maths equation before puking a little more while inching towards the toilet.

I felt damn bad. Because I know the pretty waitresses would have to clean my ugly puke later. I actually thought of licking the puke up to ease their workload.

I felt worse that I had drinking buddies who did not help me but kept blinding me with the flashes of their cameras. Gnn. Haha.

Making our way back to dorm.
Ok enough of blogging..gotta do my work which I havent touched for 5 days. Lol.

2007-09-25T10:38:00.000+08:00

Changdokgung Palace
After spending 3,4 hrs at the folk village (I never knew that I was that cultured, *beams), we made our way to the next stop of the day: Changdokgung Palace aka the 'Jewel in Palace" (Dae Jang Geum) filming place. Only Crystal and I paid to enter because the rest were rather shagged after days of walking and sightseeing.

We spent too much at the folk village and we missed the English and Chinese guided tours, so we had no choice but to the join the Korean tour.

Too many people walking around..nvm, I got little BoA in my picture.
The architecture was pretty impressive but they can't beat the sick Japanese carpenters of Kiyomizu temple who constructed the entire building without nails.

Some kid running around in the palace grounds. For some reason the kids love to run. I had to make him fall with my psychic powers. "FALL,Fall!" and he really did.
Thats for spoiling my picture. Tsk.

The hall where the ministers and officials gather. 陛下~ (pe-i ha)

A gate with my name. This gate should be made the UNESCO most valued World Heritage gate.

Their rooms. I think they need really good ERA agents to sell these rooms in that era. The rooms are much smaller than it seems. Photo taken by Crystal. To create depth, applying her pro film production knowledge.

Da Chang Jin's kitchen. Its so modern that its hard to believe that they filmed it there. Looks more like a kitchen that will serve kimchi pork cutlets with fried cheese ricecakes than traditional korean dishes.

The picture on the right is the toilet. Where they make their 大肠金 .

The pond where King Jungjong showed his affection for Janggeum.

Their servants quarters.

Celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival in Korea. To be continued.

2007-09-25T09:22:00.000+08:00

Namsangol Hanok Village
It was the start of the Chuseok Holidays and we decided to visit some cultural sites since most of the shopping areas were closed during this major and most celebrated holiday in Korea. Our first stop was Namsangol Hanok Village. It was a little crowded as they were holding special celebration and events for Chuseok at folk villages and palaces in Seoul.

The Village contains 5 houses that once belonged to extremely respectable familes in the Joseon period to offer an interesting glimpse into the lives of the upper class called Yangban of that time.

Ariyo eyeing for an unsuspecting victim to send into the water.

They had a booth for kids to try out their art&craft skills. Lovely dolls.

小长今
The litte boy checking out the girls. lol.

Kids were queuing up to play a traditional see saw.
Princess PK Battle!

Little boy pounding rice to be used for rice cakes.
1-2-3!

"Hwa-ighting!" Girl getting encouragement from her father before tossing the coin into the wishing well.

Whats a folk village without old folks? An old folk telling some story.
Lim peh says.. 'Goldilocks had 3 bears as friends..Papa bear, mama bear, little bear"

Caught a lady slacking in the house. Trying to pose as a wax figurine.
Idea sia. Pro duang-ing. Respect.

Ajumma teaching the little girls how to beat mens..clothes dry.

A picture of their storeroom/kitchen. Right: place where they store their preserved food in containers to make kimchi and other fermented stuff like soy paste. Out of curiosity, I opened the lid of one and fainted.

A lady demonstrating how to pray. The korean style of praying: rubbing your hands together in a circular fashion like making glutinous riceballs, well if you watch lots of k-drama you'd probably have seen this.

A kid posing in front of a traditional bedroom/ love shack.

Me. The Seoul tower can actually be seen from the village.
Li Wei and I grinding rice with our feet.

I spotted some Koreans dressed in hangbok and asked them to pose for a photo with me.
I should have kept a beard for this. Wasted sia. De-Flower-ers 4.

Just for info: The Untold Scandal (the R(a) show which featured Bae Yong Jun as the playboy in the Chosun Dynasty) was filmed here.

A korean girl pounding little boys with the wooden pestles.
Another girl working on some ancient weaving machine, which resembled some SM machine.

A 100 year time capsule for Seoulites at the Time Capsule Park nearby.
I overheard an Ang moh asking her tour guide if there was any toilet nearby. Must be wanting to plant her 'capsule'. hurhur.

Btw the kid kept running round in circles on top of the capsule. Moments later...
I guess the next picture speaks for itself.

My artistic shot.

How to look like a Korean (by me)
How to look like a Korean (by Liwei)

2007-09-24T02:21:00.000+08:00

MyeongDong and Namsan, Seoul Tower

Ariyo's buddy, Ki Won, and her friend made special arrangements to bring us out the entire day. Lunch at a famous tonkatsu restaurant in Myeongdong.

After our late lunch, we took a leisurely stroll through Myeongdong shopping district and made our way to Namsan.

It was a loong walk but worth the walk.

Cable car station where everyone was queuing eagerly to catch a ride.

Xu dong, our taiwan friend and Mandy's language exchange buddy.

Seoul Tower. Mt Namsan is the place which is featured in "Beautiful Days", where 李饼馅 viewed downtown Seoul at sunrise with his girl. I think "My lovely Samsoon" was shot here too. Outstanding landmark of the metropolitan city of Seoul.

My camera doing injustice to the night scenery. Got to see it yourself. Its lovely.

After photowhoring at Seoul Tower (which my photos didnt turn out very well -.-), we made our way back to Myeongdong. We went to eat yoghurt icecream at Red Mango again. Saw some graffiti on the wall of the outlet and I added some of mine too. Haha.

Condoms sold at subway. 0.3 mm thickness. hmm.

We had our dinner at 10 plus. At some restaurant in the alleys of Sinchon. We were looking for some non-spicy and non-fried food and with rice , for our dear Mandy, which was virtually non-existent in Seoul. Out of frustration, we just walked into one restaurant and just sat there and ordered. We were being served some spicy-looking soup, much to the horror of Mandy. Our sadistic Ariyo was excited at the thought of getting high from spice again.

In the end, it turned out to be not spicy at all. More like bak kut teh with pepper. -.-
The pork ribs were pretty good, the meat was soft and well cooked. I haven't eaten any pork ribs since I came Korea. The food kind of made me start to miss home and my mother's soup..for the first time.

2007-09-23T02:13:00.000+08:00

Asia Song Festival 2007
The fourth annual festival organized by the Korea Foundation for International Culture Exchange, a private organization to promote cultural exchanges and cooperation among Asian countries, featuring 14 stars from nine Asian countries.

The Seoul World Cup Stadium in Sangnam-dong, where the action was to take place.

We saw hordes of people alighting from the subway train and we knew that they were
heading for the same place as us.

Some protesters. Protesting for a cause..Support local kimchi perhaps?

Celebrities stickers and pictures being sold at makeshift stalls. FLocks of the teen girls. ajummas. Girls of various shapes and sizes were swarming around these booths.

Let me introduce the various camps.

TVFQX 东方神奇。If you dunno who they are, you are probably ignorant about asian pop. (dun fret, heres a guide to help, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TVfXQ)
The most vocal fan club. They certainly made their presence felt with their strikingly red outfits and sheer numbers. They made up 70% or maybe 80% of the audience.

Its intimidating to see a sea of red. They literally had battalions of hardcore fans who are ready to die for their idol any time. Or maybe more. My estimate was 20,000 DFXQ fans, alone. Many looked like they have been camping there to wait for their star since last night. With no solid food apart from feeding themselves with fantasies of their idols.

The Super Junior camp. Docked in blue. 2nd in terms of strength. Fast fact: This group has 13 guys, yea like some male version of Jap's Morning Musume. I know it sounds overwhelming, the large thirteen member boy band was formed with the intention of capturing many fans with different tastes. Super Junior is a group with a variety of styles, for each member displays a different charisma.

Actually theres another yellow camp. FT island, but I deleted the photo accidentally. FT Island is a five member band. Their songs are more into rap and punk rock.

Oh..and not to forget there was a F4 fan club but the turnout was dismal, as you can see from the picture. No passion and no budget. No people. Maybe some la, Chinese looking ajummas.

Collecting our tickets at the VIP booth. The queue was short compared to the neverending ones for the locals. They treat the foreigners like kings for this event since this event was to promote Korean culture and tourism. They gave us a goody bag with some maps, pamphlets and a Korean drama Ost. Nice.

Just me against the music.

Police brought in to beef up the security and prevent the possible mass stampede of thousands and thousands of ardent fans. For some reason, the image of 300 Spartan police screaming KoreaaAAA, spearing and hauling bodies into the air came to my mind.

Actually seated in front of them was a group of protesters who were detained. Their group leader came over to us and demanded that we delete their photos. Li wei had to delete his photo..since the guy spoke in a condescending manner. Nevertheless I was spared. I took the photo sneakingly and I slid my camera into my bag..so the value of this photo is probably worth more than DFXQ right now.

As you can see, we were seating quite close to the stage. Ok maybe not that close, but close enough. Later on, we moved closer. to the R2 section at the expense of the original R2 tickets holders. Hehe.

People starting to stream in. Nice banners they have. The estimate by Ariyo was 30,000 people -attended this Asia Song Festival.

The show begins!

Our MC and his female host, Eujin from S.E.S. Omg, shes lovely. And her english was good, without that annoying American accent that Korean girls always try to fake. I like her so much that I gave her space of 4 photos.

Lee Hyor-ri!! She was good but could've been better. She wore quite a lot of make-up and covered a lot of flesh, much to my..disappointment. Haha. Her dance was pretty hot though.

There were some singers that I didnt bother to take any pictures of. I'll just mention their names, Thai's Golf and Mike (some trans looking duo), some CMI Viet/Laos singer,

FT Island! A relatively new band in Korea but their tunes were catchy and got the crowd going. Their fanbase was small but stood out in terms of their creativity and energy. They were bobbling up and down with their yellow light sticks.

Super Junior. Those who love them will love them. I shant elaborate too much.

And we have our Taiwan representative..F4. Fag 4.
They were so gay that they only talked cocked on stage. And only vanness did some bastardized Chinese, America, Korean dance, which if you ask me, turned out like shyt. No offence to Vanness Fans.

"Should we tell them that we're...?"

Gigi. Rep from HK.

"Where is my ekin?" She looks haggard after Ekin screwed her bad. Ekin's a bad jerk. Tsk.

Looks good and sounds good. Mmmm.

SG Wannabe. A very popular group in Korea. Sg does not stand for singapore, it stands for Simon and Garfunkel. Check this song out 내사람 - SG wanna Be. I love their voices. Probably one of the best groups that performed last night in terms of vocals.

A-mei performed 4 songs too and was the only artiste that did the Chinese proud. Commendable effort considering that it was her first virgin performance in Korea and with so little clothes somemore.

Some review of the other performers. There was this Philippines chick who had a sweet, sexy voice and pretty good at stroking. Guitar of course. Ariyo was mesmerised by her stage presence and he insisted that she was the most beautiful girl of that evening.

Vicky Zhao was terrible, trying to do an imitation of Faye's Wong style. Sadly, a lazy voice with poor groove and red mascara doesn't make one a Faye Wong. Faye wong is inimitable and she's a class of her own. Vicky Zhao was so bad that I felt ashamed as a Chinese and I wanted to bury whatever vestige of my Chinese looking head into the ground like an ostrich.

Finally the act of the day was about to begin, much to the growing impatience of the DVXQ fans. The DVXQ go crazy everytime the MC/a singer mentions or the video shows images of them. Its totally insane. And its amazing to see how 'brainwashed' the fans are, haha. The power of boy bands.

They appeared with the most fanfare with the bloodcurling screams of their fans and pyrotechnic displays. They just spammed the buttons like the manager in "200 pounds of beauty", macham like free liddat.

Music knows no boundaries. Look at the ajumma flapping her hands fanatically at the sight of her idol.

Rising sun. And their famous hits.

They were pretty slick with their dance moves and Xiah and Hero had unique voices which complemented their pretty faces. No wonder the fans were so hysterical at the sight of them.
The thai girls sitting behind me were screaming at such a high pitch that I felt a little deaf after the event. We even saw a girl weeping. She was too overwhelmed with emotions. Some had to rest because they were about to faint. I am not kidding.

The crowd were shouting and screaming at the top of their lungs. Meek looking girls were clamouring to get the most of their idols by standing on chairs and taking camera shots. Suddenly, you start to wonder if this was a concert for DVXQ or Asian stars. Anyway, it was a wonderul night of music in Seoul and definitely a memorable one.

I'll add the videos and more pics later.

2007-09-22T10:04:00.000+08:00

Yonsei's Mentor's club held a Choo-seok Day at the Global Lounge for the exchange students to experience Korean thanksgiving together. Chu seok is a major holiday in Korea, celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar Korean Calendar, which happens to coincide with our Chinese MAF. During Chuseok, there is a mass exodus of Koreans returning to their hometowns, to perform ancestral worship rituals and get together with their relatives.

Its a really long holiday (3 days worth, can qie' our CNY) + 2 days of weekend, which means 5 consec days. But my professors had to spoil it all by saying something stupid like 'more homework" But who cares? Haha. I'm going to work on it only on the eve of the lessons.

During this break, the S'pore exchange students at Korea Uni are heading to Pusan. I've heard people going to Jeju and even ang mohs going to Shanghai/Tokyo. Without concrete plan and money, I am confined to my dorm..for now. Haha.

Ok I've digressed quite a bit. Now back to the event.

The Koreans demonstrating the ceremonial bows. The two must have ganna some ‘last minute’ arrow because they cocked up quite bad. Haha. At first, I still thought that they were exchange students.

The mentors screwing up because I think they couldn't understand what the MC wanted them to do.

Intitially, we had to pay 3,000 won for this event ($5) but we timed our arrival nice enough to enjoy the food and performances for free.

Experienced from high tea/buffet sessions in Singapore, we Kiasu Singaporeans did Singapore proud. We positioned ourselves well to get our food and we were the first to receive our food, much to the envious glares and ire of the other international exchange students.

But we couldn't care less, we joined the long queue right after we got our food, so that it was just in time for our second round.

Some tasted good and some just not. Just like Korean girls. One of the major foods prepared and eaten during the Chuseok holiday is Songpyeon(송편), a crescent-shaped rice cake which is steamed upon pine needles. Thats the colourful ones. I still think that Singapore nonya kuehs own these.

After food, we had a try at their traditional games. We went to try the throwing sticks game (i have no idea the name of the game). Basically we are supposed to throw the sticks into a basket from a distance. The one who got in the most sticks wins.

The indians training their little one to become a hunter. Btw Indians suck at throwing. (at least from what I observed yesterday) Koreans and Chinese are the best.
Taiwan versus China. China 1 Taiwan 0.

There were quite a lot of people and we just mingled around.

I had no idea that I was taken by Ariyo. -.-

The mentors club invited the traditional percussion group to perform. Koreans are rather enthusiastic about their traditional dance and music.

A girl doing a drum solo.
The group performing.

Some nabei ang moh thinks that she's fucking transparent. I was so tempted to borrow the drumstick from them to beat her until the skin of her stomach rips open. Sorry for my outburst.

The Mentors club also set up a booth for people to try their traditional costumes.

The clothes were a little big for me. Lol.

Crystal and her korean mentor. Linda, Crystal, Mandy and a taiwanese girl whose name I forgot. I am damn bad at remembering Korean and Chinese names.

After the event, they had leftovers and we asking if anybody wanted to 'da bao' gimbap (korean version of sushi). Typical of Singaporean behaviour, we seize the opportunity and we packed them home. for supper.

We went to walk around Sinchon and we explored a new part of Sinchon. A place with lots of love motels..and seedy establishments.

Motels where primitive man and woman first made fire.
Touch motel. Well..I guess this one's self explanatory.

After grocery shopping, we headed back to the dorm. Jonas ( some American who could speak Japanese and Korean) was looking for people to play Nintendo Wii with at the lounge. It was quite a big group with 4 Japanese girls , Jonas , Ariyo and I. Later two ABK (american born Koreans) joined in too.

Wii is really interactive and the games were creative and extremely good ice breakers. We were supposed to clear stages by performing task which appeared on the screen, by manipulating the Wii remote control. It was damn fun playing and laughing at the antics of others.

I think I must get one when I get back to Singapore.

2007-09-21T00:32:00.000+08:00

The weather is getting colder in Seoul. And I dread the rainy days with chilly winds.
Its even worse when we are facing a severe meat deficiency from our diet. Kimchi gets your bowls moving but I'm not getting much energy from their rice, noodles and vegetables. How I salivate in my dreams at night when I think of the roasted pork back home.

So I went with Ariyo, Crystal and Mandy to satisfy our meat craving. Samgyupsal! We paid 5,900 won per head for the buffet. Thats about 10 bucks, its considered pretty cheap by Korean dining standards. Our average cost per meal is around 5-6 sg dollars.

We went crazy at the sight of meat. Picking up slabs of pork and beef and started grilling them.

Looks damn fatty right? We couldn't care less. We were cold and hungry.
They also had pancakes and dumplings too, and they tasted pretty good too. We whacked quite a lot of plates. Well..thats so typical of kiasu Singaporean behaviour, hah.

Bacon after grilling it on the tray for sometime. Check out the cup of black water. FYI, thats not coke/pepsi. Thats the amount of oil mixed with burnt stuff dripping down from our tray. 5,000 won for anyone who dared to down it. Not surprisingly. no one claimed their prize.

Devouring my lettuce wrapped pork with kimchi and spring onions. Fantastic.

We got some octopuses too to join in the procession to our stomachs.

Small baby octopus. They stuff red pepper to these octopus head. Fiery hot. Not for octopussies.

How can we have meat without soju?
This is probably the best example of complementary goods in Korea. Its a warm feeling to have the soju heating up your insides. Ahh..

Cheers!

The mess we left. After sitting there to eat for 3 hrs. We were a little high after the soju and Mandy was starting to behave weirdly, which kind of freaked us out. Haha

After the meal, I wanted to try KTV under the effect of alcohol (which was quite different) so we headed to some real cheap noraebang which charged us 6,000 won for 1 hr (the cheapest that we can find in Sinchon).

But as the saying goes, 一分钱一分货 , the place was really run-down and the place reek of mouldy kimchi. An old ajeossi was manning the lubsup looking noraebang. He gave us a desultory stare when we entered and later, appeared a little dulan that we interrupted him from reading his papers.

The Chinese songs were old. Think Jacky Cheung's Wen Bie era.
The sound system and echo was terrible. And the best part:

You get porn for your mtv. LOl.

2007-09-18T13:23:00.000+08:00

Asia Song Festival.‏

From: 이명진 (xxxx502@naver.com)

Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 12:52:59 AM

Reply-to: 이명진 (xxx502@naver.com)

To: xxxxxx@hotmail.com

You have successfully applied to participate in the Asia Song Festival.

"Complete List of participants:

The Asia Song Festival, the largest pop music event in Asia, will open on Sept. 22 at the Seoul World Cup Stadium in Sangnam-dong, western Seoul.

The fourth annual festival organized by the Korea Foundation for International Culture Exchange, a private organization to promote cultural exchanges and cooperation among Asian countries, will feature 14 stars from nine Asian countries.

Among the foreign artists set to fly to Seoul for the festival are: Thai pop stars Golf & Mike, a male duo who also enjoy popularity in Japan; Lam Truong, one of the hottest Vietnamese singers, known for his Vietnamese version of Ahn Jae-wook`s "Forever"; and Peter Pan, a six-piece pop rock band from Indonesia.

JVKV, a popular Taiwanese boy band formerly known as F4, will also appear on the stage during the show as special guests. For many Korean fans the festival could be the last chance to see them sing together on a live stage. The group announced last month that they will officially disband in October with a concert in Taipei.

The 2002 World Cup venue will heat up even more as pop divas who represent each of their countries, and pitch their talent and charm against each other on the stage. Vicki Zhao, one of China`s most popular actresses and singers who won "Favorite Artist -- Mainland China" at the 2006 MTV Asia Awards, will showcase her versatility.

Also joining the "divas` party" will be Barbie Almalbiz, a songwriter and folk rock singer from the Philippines; A-mei, the "pride of Taiwan,"; Gigi Leung, a veteran Hong Kong actress and singer; and J-pop star Kuraki Mai. Representing Korea will be sexy A-list pop star Lee Hyo-ri.

In the past eight years, Japanese star Mai has released seven albums, 26 singles and several DVDs. Five of her albums reached number one in Japan`s Oricon charts. She has also released an English-language album in the United States under the name of Mai K.

Korean boy bands such as SG Wannabe, Super Junior and TVXQ (Dong Bang Shin Ki) will also join the event. Since the festival`s inception in 2004 TVXQ, whose popularity extends across Asia, have participated in the festival every year."

Lee Hyo ri!!

2007-09-15T23:38:00.000+08:00

I've got quite a lot of pictures so I have to be really selective.
For our weekend food trip, we headed to Sin Rim dong where we met up with Crystal's lovely korean friend, Ji Young, who showed us around the area. Sin Rim dong is supposedly famous for its pig intestines (Sun Dae).

Sin rim Dong where we embarked on our food mission.

Our first stop.
Nakji Bokkeum (i'm not sure if i got the dish name correct, anyway it was stir-fried octopus with gochujang sauce, veg and ricecake)

Innocuous looking food, I was still telling Ariyo how it looks like yu sheng to me.

It turned out to be so fucking wrong. THIS WAS THE SPICIEST FOOD I HAVE TASTED IN KOREA SO FAR>..
We got damn high after eating the dish. Ariyo kept exclaiming that he was damn high despite sweating profusely. Meanwhile, I was having a hard and hot time struggling to clear as much of the pot as possible because the two HK girls, Mandy and Linda, totally CMI, they couldn't handle the spice at all. HK people can only take dim sum, tsk tsk.

Look at them washing the noodles with water. Dots.

Even Ji Young remarked that the food was unbelievably spicy. Though her face didn't show it.
Just like how their faces don't go red after drinking. Maybe its their training since young.

I am a spice warrior. I cleared 2/3 of this.

The shop should give out a certificate or some form of accolade to recognise my achievement. I think I just did Singapore proud. I could feel my mouth, throat and stomach burning after that meal. I hope I don't see the toilet water turning red...from the spices or the blood from my burnt intestines. Wait..maybe thats why they sell the best intestines here in Seoul.

Ariyo and I. Notice how thick my lips are after the meal.
Crystal and Ji Young. The two HK girls are busy wiping their tears and blowing their noses.

Group photo

We went to grab some icecream to douse our stomach flames and shopped around the area for a while. We saw an ajumma chasing her dog on the street.

The dogs here are adorable, so unlike the street bitches, or stray ones that we see in Singapore. No wonder Korean enjoy dog soups. Maybe they think that they will become as adorable as them after nourishing themselves with dog essence.

We managed to shake off a portion of our meal after shopping around. We were hungry again.

Indulging in tteokpoggi (ricecakes). My eyes were closed -.- (it was unintentional).

Ji Young with her o-deng, Crystal with her ricecake.

Ice-cream at Cafe Island, where we just ate and talked cock for a while.

The girls shagged after camwhoring with their mobile phones.

I'm lazy to do proper narration from this point. Just pictures. Tired.

Yoghurt Ice cream shaving at Red Mango. Cost a bomb but its..good shyt.

Yes' Shopping Mall. Mini concert again. Being typical Singaporeans, we went to catch the free show.

The left guy is a member from Super Junior, accordingly to Mandy.
I dunno whos the female but she looks pretty good though, ha.

Performance by several boy bands. Good voices. Some of the bands were either rather new or way past their heydays and had to resort to perform at such public concerts. Haha.

2007-09-14T21:49:00.000+08:00

What's do you do when its cold in Seoul? The ideal solution would probably be having some meat and drinking soju but sadly I am not entitled to that. My notes are disappearing from wallet at an alarming rate. So I can only blog while enjoying the makeshift warmth of my comforter around my chair.

The original plan was to head to Myeongdong or Insadong or Apgujeong. But I think the weather marred our plans and we had to postpone our shopping trip and settle for something nearby...Megabox (a shopping mall cum cineplex) near Ewha University.

Caught in the rain. Me looking real sheepish, drenched and shivering.

After battling the rain and strong wind, we arrived at Megabox. Megabox is kind of similar to Singapore's Cathay. The human traffic was pathetic due to the inclement weather. We were approached at the entrance by this lady, who explained earnestly that she was representing her company to promote some credit card called Rainbow Sevendays, and was 'pulling' people to take part in their promotion. We told them that we were not locals and they insisted that we could participate and so we went up to stage after some cajoling.

Ariyo excited. Some clownish looking guy resembling some breadtalk chef who ran off with flour on his face.

We were supposed to try our luck by choosing a key out of 5 to unlock a mystery box. If it fits, the prize would be ours to keep.

The host exclaiming at the size of Ariyo's..oHh

and he managed to unlock the box!
Winning himself a free shirt and a water bottle!

Crystal, Linda also managed to get their prizes too. Apparently, the manager told the host to 'hint' to us which the correct key. Being the first one to try, I was too suspicious and I thought that they were trying to prevent me from getting the prize, when in fact they were holding the key out to me. That was a typical case of being a smart alec. Anyway the nice manager (the girl on the left) gave me the freebies too. :)

Some mini booth/set in the cinema for people to pose around.

After walking around, we managed to catch a little of amini-concert that was held for the opening of a new mall. They invited some small time stars, rappers and models to do some catwalk. Anyway, my photos were really terrible with the rain and 3 minutes of battery life left.

Some fashion show. The screen was too bright.

Some rappers. Quite hyper but seemed rather comical to me. Haha.

Some singer with a voice that sounds like Tei. Too bad I dunno what's the singer's name.
He seemed rather popular, considering he had some hardcore fans that were screaming out loud for him.

My battery life in wearing out too. Time for bed.

2007-09-12T01:55:00.000+08:00

Me in front of the Ewha Chapel.

EWHA..WAHAHA. We managed to revisit Ewha Women's University again. And I suspect many more 'accidental trips' there to come. *winks at Gary and Ariyo. Anyway the photos here in this post are courtesy of Ariyo because my camera is not well equipped to take shutter speed shots.

This time, we walked through the front page because we had the other girls as our entourage so we didn't feel so paiseh to enter. Haha.

Yonsei is just a stone's throw away from Ewha. We thought of purchasing a telescope and placing it our Yonsei dorm to just to check out the lovely scenery of the Ewha school premises. But right now I am cash strapped from overspending, so the telescope has to wait.

After taking a stroll around the school, we walked down to Women's street again. There's nothing for guys to buy at Women's street, so the guys got pretty bored and our eyes were on auto-roam. Scanning for..restaurants. :) What were you thinking?

We had dinner at a restaurant called Six pence in Sinchon. The prices were considerable reasonable for Western food. The ambience was okay. Plus, the waitresses were not too bad looking, haha. We initially wanted to take photo with them after our meal but we chickened out after I ate my kimchi and cheese Chicken wrap.

Shiok. I enjoyed my meal, or maybe I was too hungry.

Gary (HK) and I. Look at how hungry I was. Grabbing the chopsticks and quivering with excitement.

After our hearty meal (maybe not so for the girls), we took a leisurely stroll back to international house. On the way back, we got pretty lucky to see some pretty things walking around.

Got to go sleep now. Early class tomorrow. 잘자 'Nite people

2007-09-11T22:36:00.000+08:00

I haven't been blogging for a while...
Firstly due to the lack of pictures, lots of pictures are with my friends who promised to send me ..but I'm still waiting.
Secondly, I'm getting a little busy with schoolwork and stuff. Ya I know that I'm an exchange student and my academic time should be spent more productively like walking around the streets of Sinchon. I also feel a sense of moral obligation towards my project mates, hurhur, so I cannot slack too much and be more enthu.

Some random shots. And even more random comments.

The cars in Korea are the kings on the road, unlike Singapore where pedestrians are the kings. Here they don't give a damn if you are crossing a pedestrian crossing. They will still bulldoze you to death and not bat an eye as long as you are in their way. I wish the automatic parking system will transfer these cars to hell man. B18 : Hell.

My HK friend finally unraveled the mystery behind 'Why people always die in car accidents in k-dramas'. The answer lies in their wonderful driving.

If you get knock down in Seoul, blame it on ur carma.

Some wasted girl. Poor girl.
Looks fucking drunk. Or maybe both, I wouldn't know.

Koreans drink so much. Maybe too much.
Its amazing how much soju they consume in their lifetime.
Perhaps more than the soft drinks that I consume in my entire lifetime.
Don't be surprised but their sojus are actually much cheaper than their soft drinks.

Some people shooting something in the school campus. I'm clueless as to who the girl is. Probably just some small scale school production. Just for info, Yonsei campus was the place where they shot "My Sassy Girl" and "Beautiful Days".

Some grapes that I bought from Grand Mart. The grapes here taste like wine.
To eat them in Korean style, you've got to nibble off top the grape, suck out the grape pulp (yes they come off smoothly in one whole chunk) and you spit out the seeds and dispose the grapeskin. They are so intoxicating.
Trust me, after tasting these grapes, grapes will never taste the same again.

Other fruits found in the supermarket taste like crap and are damn expensive.
I paid 5,480 won for 6 apples. Thats like 9 dollars for 6 small apples.
CCB. I apologise for my outburst. But really Fuck man. That is daylight robbery.
But no apple how to keep the doctor away?

My stockpile of instant ramyun, chachangmyun.
I got an assortment so that I can savour all the different flavours during my stay here.
Yea, I know its unhealthy but I've got to watch my budget because I have been spending too much on food and icecream. hehe.

On the right is some microwave food (its supposed to be octopus with rice, but it tastes so SFI (army food) that I am not going to try it again)

Ok..back to my readings~annyeong!

2007-09-03T15:50:00.000+08:00

I just ended my rather long day of continuous lessons rom 9-4.50 classes...but I am not complaining. I am so looking forward to classes.
Hhhahaa. 여가 녀무 예쁘다 ^_^
Lovely.LaLala.

2007-09-02T19:41:00.000+08:00

Today, I felt the signs of heatiness creeping at the back of my itchy throat. Must have been the bibim guksu (noodles) or the chocolate pie that made me feel a little sick.

Had a real bad craving for meat today. It didn't help that meat, or pork in particular, is freaking expensive in korea. I realised that I have only had meat once in Korea after being here for close to two weeks.

I managed to join my roommate, Andrew, for a meal. He was in a comatose mood for the entire day and he just got up in time for dinner. He drinks like every single night till the break of dawn; most of the time, he gets into the room when I wake up in the morning. Ultimate hardcore drinker.

We took a slow walk to Sinchon and there were lots of couples out but I didnt bring my camera along so no photos..sorry guys. Well.. even if I brought, its hard to get good shots.

We settled for a restaurant which served Samgyupsal (grilled pork belly/ 五花肉 ) and we ordered two plates. It was so good or maybe we were really hungry that we ordered two more plates. They were rather generous, giving us considerable slabs of pork belly.

Sam gyeop sal is basically pork bacon that is served on grill with kimchi, onions and vegs. The cooked meat is supposed to wrapped with lettuce/ gunip, along with some cooked rice and some ssamjang (i think its made of gochujang and some other stuff), and eaten out of hand like a springroll.
Oooh, I just love the melting fats with the paste, kimchi and the leaves.
SO heavenly.
I guess four months later, I am going to return to Singapore looking like a pig.

Not my picture. For illustration purpose

2007-09-01T23:00:00.000+08:00

I am so addicted to this clip.
Just love the way they blend their voices together, 默契 100%. Rox.

2007-09-01T11:06:00.000+08:00

I woke up at 12 after a terrible night out clubbing. By terrible, I mean awful experience.

Furthermore, the damage to my pockets was substantial and the only thing I was thinking while taking the cab back, was the bowls of jajangmyun I could have gorged myself with, had I not gone clubbing.

The mentors club organised a cellphone trip for international students to Gangpyeon. Korea uses a different band from the rest of the world, which is why our handphones wouldn't work there. However, so far I haven't heard anyone being able to explain it using proper technical terms.

We were supposed to gather at the main gate of Yonsei.
It was a wet day. The weather has started to turn chilly.
Girls with boots have started to appear. Ah, the harbingers of autumn. Finally I can kiss goodbye to the unbearable summer. I love Cold-rea!

Umbrella Party

Ariyo doing his ah-beng stance in the streets of Korea, "WHY are we waiting?"

After an extremely long delay due to poor organisation by the mentors, we arrived at this huge mall called TechMall, which sold electronics products like our beloved Sim Lim square/Funan.
Nothing really spectacular. We walked around trying to look for second handhandphones that suit our tastes and more importantly budget. I was glad that Edward passed me his second hand phone, which saved me the trouble of shopping for one.

Men love widgets.

Colourful phones and even more colourful prices.

We were tinkering with Adam's 500,000 won Hp (~SG$800+ hp). 3 men excited over feeding some pet dog and keeping it happy. Lol.

I was as tired as the little girl after walking rounds and rounds of handphone counters.

Our korean guides from Yonsei brought us to a restaurant for dinner. We asked for bulgogi because we were craving for meat badly.

Our korean guide, the one on the right of the 1st pic.

The shop owner gave us two additional plates of meat and some complementary ginger tea because we were exchange students. haha.

The meat was gone so fast that I couldnt take a photo of it. Ariyo fervently scraping the remnants with his chopsticks.

Sg, Hk, Chinese and the Koreans. My eyes are closed again.
O I am starting to believe that I have smaller eyes than Koreans.

2007-08-30T18:09:00.000+08:00

We went down to Seoul immigration office to apply for some weird card called 'alien registration card', which was required of Korean visitors staying for more than 90 days. That pretty much sums up how the nationalistic (maybe mildly xenophobic?) Koreans view foreignors. "Aliens" @-@ Lol.

We transferred at Yeongdungpo-gu and alighted at omokgyo. We walked for a stretch before arriving at the immigration office. Got a free sample of some malt candy like snack from the ajeossi. Damn sweet. and sticky. like caramel. I figured I had enough sugar today to send a ADHD kid convulsing to the grave.

I love free stuff. :>

Ariyo's and my applications were processed rather swiftly. Our queue numbers were up even before we finished filling up our forms. Sadly, our Chinese counterparts weren't so lucky, they had to wait for approximately 2hrs? for their turn. The seoul government even allocated an exclusive level to cope with the masses of Chinese exodus.

While waiting for them, Ariyo and I went to grab some donuts to fill our stomachs.
We dropped by dunkin' donuts. And ordered donuts worth 1700 won each.

Plonked our butts by the window seats and ate our donuts while watching passerbys go by.
Playing around with food.

Lends a whole new meaning to do..nuts. Thanks to Ariyo for supplying his balls.

Doubly sweet. *U*KIN Donuts. I love the chewy feeling of the glutinous filling.

Little girl eyeing my candy stick. -Not for sale-

After that, we went back to look for our Chinese friends, Adam and Yuan Yuan, and we took the subway to Ewha's Women's University. We were gushing exuberantly about the 'beauty' of Ewha we had preconceived through conjured images and hearsay.

We were supposed to look for the swimming pool. But it was hard with all the barricades and renovation going on.

The school in a dismal state. And we realised that school hasn't started.
DiSaPPointed wE weRe.

Nevertheless, we were rewarded with some Beethovens. Kudos to Ariyo, our talented photographer, for these shots, at our request. I hope his gf doesn't slaughter him. Lol.

The Ehwa girls are such hot commodities. Look at the number of children they have even before they finish uni.

Happy men.

2007-08-29T21:34:00.000+08:00

Roadside stall (Old post)
I was walking down the streets near Edward's house, trying to look for Kim's Restaurant to have a meal of kimchi fried rice. After walking for 15 minutes, I still couldn't find it and decided that I was probably not fated to eat there. My hunger pangs made me gravitate towards the nearest food stall..which was a roadside stall.

Roadside stalls are a good option for people who are looking for cheap food who don't mind the passer-bys and the fumes from the cooking. The stall had a license, so it seemed pretty hygienic to eat there. Even if it didn't have, I'd still eat there because I was so hungry that I could eat an entire pig.

The intestine looking thing in the tray is called Sun dae 순대 ,a Korean blood sausage that’s steamed and served with assorted organs. They use the pig's intestine and stuff it with flour and pig's blood, to make it resemble the real intestine. I really wonder how they are able to come up with such a creative dish. It has a soft texture and a distinctive smell that causes many people to hesitate to try it.

The first time Edward bought Sun dae back for supper, I didnt really want to try because it..smelled a little foul. Btw, sundae is not the mcdonalds' kind of sundae hor, if you think it's sweet, you're in for a rude shock.

It has an acquired taste and I like it so much now.
Now every time I catch a whiff of its dry, earthy odour, it’s hard for me to resist stopping for a bite.

My meal. I know the ramyun looks ordinary. (yes,it is. I can cook that as well as her or maybe better)

Anyway, I ordered ramyun and some deepfried stuff with spicy sauce (I forgot the name of it) I decided not to be too adventurous. That adds up to 3,000 won. (ard SG$5) Most meals cost around 6-7 sing dollars. I can feel blood streaming out from my pockets everytime I foot my bill for meals.

The ajumma noticed that I was having a hard time picking the ingredients because I could asking what was this and that. And now I cant remember anything. Haha. Out of slight exasperation and perhaps obligation to satisfy the curiosity of this poor traveller's palate, she told me that she'd let me have one of each to try, much to the hearty delight of my stomach. It wasn't a fantastic but nice meal.:))

My failed attempt to take a photo of the ajumma's face. She refuses to let me take her picture despite my 'pleading' and sycophantic extolling of how pretty, beautiful she was. Oh man, I can feel my cheeks burning and hairs standing. Hahaha

2007-08-29T14:06:00.000+08:00

I'm pretty lazy and tired after walking around the school. So i'll just post pictures and add some captions.

Most of the buildings have a layer of creepers growing over them like a layer of moss. For some reason, they remind me of some green tea mousse cake. Maybe I was hungry.

Its the vegetation that probably makes the place look nice. If Singapore had a nicer climate. four seasons, NTU would probably transform into an attractive campus too.

I grimace when I think about our Yunnan Garden, with the Chinese professors strolling with their mistresses. Maybe I'm just overly biased. Haha

They even have nests for birds. Their parks are also lover's nests. Lots of Yonsei students making out. In bright daylight.

Its so heavily vegetated that it feels like the campus was constructed in the middle of Bukit Timah Nature reserve. Minus the awful humidity. The heat is going down now..the chilly winds and rains have arrived.

The international house where international students stay.
I know it doesn't look very nice but the important thing is that the people residing are nice. hehe.

A view of my room. Messy. Its pretty much, in this state throughout the day. Haha.
I think I'll go for a nap now. Yawnz.

2007-08-28T08:07:00.000+08:00

I woke up with a dull ache in my head and little patches of rashes over my arms.
After all that drinking last night with a group of international students after the welcome party (which was horrible). I guess I don’t really enjoy meeting people in that way. A little soju does help to break the ice a little. But I got pretty wasted rather fast. I shall leave out the details because it got a little blurry at the end too, I didnt know what I was doing, I think I was giggling in my bed.

In the words of my roommate, “Theres nothing else that they do in Seoul, except drink, Drink , Drink!” My roommate is a law student from University of Memphis, who has a Korean mum and Ang moh father. The Korean ancestry probably explains his knack and love for drinking.

Yesterday was an unproductive day, which consisted of lots of small little things that isn’t really of blogging material, like lugging suitcases, washing laundry and checking out the girls in the laundry room.

Ok, got to get ready for orientation

2007-08-26T22:03:00.000+08:00

This entry is about my place of residence for first 4 days of stay in Korea.

It has been an enjoyable time staying with a Korean friend whom I can communicate with rather well since he is able to converse in English and Chinese. Although there are some breakdowns when he fails to comprehend my Singaporean English. And likewise, I cant make out his Korean English. In such cases, we make assumptions/ guesses of what we were trying to tell each other.

Since I have arrived, I have been exposed to the way Koreans go about their day to day activities, their food preferences, their quirks, their love for drinking, singing.

I have exposed myself in many ways. Including public bathhouses, which I have never done so, in sg. But I believe there are still many facets of the Korean culture that I have yet to discover.

Heres some photos of my friend's room.

My friend insists that I sleep on his bed…while he sleeps on the floor. I really need to thank him for his hospitality.

My stuff encroaching into his private space. His room is equipped with a mini-kitchen, which is good for doing light cooking. Most Korean males can cook. And they usually settle at least a meal at home, since eating out can be rather expensive.

Lastly,
The girl who accompanies me to bed every night.

Haha.

2007-08-26T21:02:00.000+08:00

Wedding Special

Sunday morning. We were supposed to attend Edward’s cousin wedding.
I met Edward at the McDonald near yonsei after his TOEIC paper and we took a train down to Samseong, where we took the limousine bus to the hotel prima seoul.

We went to look for bride..and there she was in a brightly lit room posing for the photographers with her bridesmaids. It was much later that I realized that I just missed a good chance for a photo shoot.

I entered the wedding hall, feeling a little weird, knowing that I was probably the only non-korean in the entire room.

I just tagged alongside Edward as he introduced me to his friends and relatives as his Singaporean chingu. We sat at the table and there was already lots of food on the table, bread and ricecakes , mochi-looking cakes and needless to say, there was kimchi. I was wondering who was going to occupy the two seats beside me. After a while, the bride’s mother and father answered my question by …settling themselves comfortably in the seats. and then I saw the white sign on table (the Bride’s family table). -.-

I was rather quiet throughout, due to my inadequate grasp of the language (some of the Edwards’ relatives, his father and grandfather spoke Chinese to me). I only managed to hold a decent conversation with Edward’s sister’s friend, Brenda. She was a native English teacher, teaching in Daegu through phone, who was hoping to switch to become an Emirates air stewardess. Not bad. hurhur. Other than that..basically, I sat there, observed and took pictures.

Here comes the groom.
Apparently the groom is some rich guy, who is the CG director for The World, some Korean movie that is showing in Korea right now.
In Korea, it’s a dream come true for a girl to hook up with a rich guy. Everything’s covered. If you watch enough k dramas you’d probably know that the male side needs to prepare the house and the female side need to provide the furniture. So if you’ve got a uber rich husband, you can ignore the part about getting furniture.

The bride.

My camera is not doing justice to her. Not my fault.

Kid feeling bored just like me. For a moment, we shared the same thoughts: Can they stop mumbling crap and just get on with the ceremony?

Looks like a set from some Korean drama. With the bubbles and dry ice to create a winter sonata effect.
Please make your mother cry ah. But actually quite sad. I also wanted to tear.

I think I was too near the stage and had an overdose of dry ice.

The entire cast. Family photo, my friend is in light blue. I caught them while they weren’t ready for the camera.

Among the bride’s friend, Miss Korea..look for her yourself, but according to my friend, she isn’t that pretty. I heard that Son Ye-jin 손예진 was her friend too but she wasn;t invited because the bride was afraid that she would steal the limelight. Lol.

Edward and I.

Time to head home after the wedding..his sister is going to stay over at his place.I hope we have enough space to sleep tonight...

2007-08-26T17:02:00.000+08:00

Day at Myeong Dong
Arrived at Euljiro Ga 1 Station after some experimenting with the bus service and the subway station. Heng I didn’t get lost. Surprisingly, Korean people are rather helpful with providing directions.
Finally met the rest of the NTU gang, Ariyo (my other Yonsei counterpart), Nicholas and Esther (the couple from Korea Uni).

Myeongdong is a financial and high priced shopping district, famous for their trendy fashions and fashion accessories. Streets of shops, distributed in a iron grid-like pattern and they also had several large department stores like Lotte Department Sore , Migliore. Not to forgot the street side vendors, who were peddling their hawkerfare or their merchandise and entertainment acts.

We walked in circles hunting for cheap and decent food, which was virtually non-existent. And the cheapest they had was some restaurant selling Korean dishes like ramyun, bibimbab etc. for 5000 won. Esther, Ariyo and I ordered barley bimbibab (vegetables- sprouts, cucumber, radish etc with a dollop of gochujang sauce) served with barley rice, which I didn’t really enoy. And Nicholas made the wisest choice of ordering ramyun.

We were eating the vegetables in the big metal dish and scooping from the rice in our rice containers…when one of their waiters shouted, “ 喂，你们是中国人吗？这个不是这样吃的 !” We were supposed to throw the rice in like all other dishes (the Koreans have a penchant for mixing stuff)..and we guffawed at our horrendous mistake. Damn malu.

We just lowered the Singaporean image in the eyes of the Koreans,by several notches. On hindsight, we discussed that we should have replied that we were from China.
The food was getting more distasteful as we chewedthe vegetables. It was a hard dietary change for a carnivore like me. I struggled to finish more than half of my food. Ariyo cleared all of his (amazing, but at a price of enduring a terrible war at the subway toilet two hours later, haha). Esther cleverly tagged Nicholas to swap dishes with her, because it was not what she had expected. Poor Nicholas. Lol.

After paying for that unsatisfying meal, we walked around aimlessly like some bloated zombies slacking around after lunch break and commenting on the endless crowds they have. Finally, we decided to head to Migliore (it’s the nearest) because the sun was starting to kill people again. I heard the NUS guy who went to Korea Uni suffered from a heatstroke. Maybe not enough blood going to the head above bah.haha.

and we were greeted with floors of shops. Shops and shops.

The clothes there are damn nice. Koreans have a good fashion sense. Indeed.
But the prices were quite an eyesore. Or rather,just the men’s stuff. Female shoppers would be in wonderland when they head to myeongdong and dongdaemun. Can shop till drop.

Some teddy bear shop. There was a big teddy bear figurine outside too but I never pose, cos it will look very gay.

Everywhere was packed with lots of people , both young and old, mainly between twenties and thirties, couple, which was made worse since it was a weekend. The good thing was it allowed us to catch glimpses of pretty stuff when the crowd movement was a snail’s pace. Ariyo and I tried to catch a few hot chicks but they proved to be elusive and seem to know that cameras were zooming in on them.
Sigh.
A little success, with Ariyo camera and my set up as a decoy.
My camera takes roughly around 10 secs to start up, another 10 secs for my hand to stop trembling from excitement and 10 minutes for me to lament my loss when my photo subject is out of camera sight.

After window shopping..
We decided to visit Myeongdong Cathedral for a change. We were greeted with a building shrouded in a brown net as they were undergoing restoration. What a bad timing. Nevertheless, we managed to enter and we caught a wedding in progress. The ceremony was rather long.. their pastor kept chanting ‘sou sou…” everytime before he ended with Amen. We had no idea what was that. But we could only discern certain words like Father , happiness, male and female in Korean.

We escaped from the cathedral before the masses clogged the exits. Nicholas suggested that we head to the Cheonggyecheon river at City Hall, with some help from the locals.

We settled for dinner at KFC, just to try out their fast food. The chicken is less oily there and they were environmental friendly. They actually bother to reuse their plastic cups, instead of using Styrofoam ones. The design is so nice that it is now in my bag now. My fellow Singaporeans were KFC cup thieves too.

We ate and talked while we waited for the skies to turn dark so that the light would be up to illuminate the river and make it more beautiful.

The Cheonggyecheon river used to be damn polluted.. I dunno what they had last time, maybe decaying kimchi? Industrial waste, animal swill. Soju bottles?

The 6km river was part of the Government’s urban redevelopment to improve the environment in the downtown area of the capital. Like our Clarke quay.

It not only serves as a spot for locals to relax but it is also helping to reduce air pollution and ease the "heat island" effect, where temperatures in urban areas are higher than their surroundings. Ok, I’ll skip the geog part.

The river was not really that amazing. Apart from the artificial meanders, mini-rapids, terrains, vegetation. The amazing part is that there are so many people there! Ariyo remarked that it looks more like Ganges.

Aunties, children washing their feet, oblivious to the poor policeman blowing his pathetic whistle. Kind of reminds me of midautumn festival by the river. loL.
Girls having a fun, rowdy night by the river

There were many couples dating. Maybe the vegetation had other purposes..banging by the river bank.lala.
Ajeossis and ajummas (uncle,auntie) not missing out the fun.

Poorly taken photo by me

There were lots of shops along the riverside. The bright light transformed the landscape to a beautiful one. I have to admit seoul at night is beautiful is much nicer than day. We had a hard time taking pictures at night due to our camera’s limited capabilities. Btw, most of the pictures featured here are courtesy of Nic and Esther’s camera.

Haven for night revelers with their ubiquitous noraebangs (KTVs), bars,pubs restaurants, clubs.

Someone's handphone just crashed..into a car.

On our way back we witnessed a car with a gigantic handphone smashed right into it, getting ready to be towed away. The entire ‘set up’ looked really convincing and attracted quite a group of concerned Korean citizens who began snapping pictures with their handphones right away. Their marketing strategies are really effective..but how come there’s no brand of the handphone. Lol

Soon after, we reached the subway station and we split up, heading for our respective lines, thus ending a wonderful exploration in Myeongdong and Cheonggyechong.

For more information, you can visit my travel mates’ blogs. They have nicer photos n better writeups. No time no time!!
www.ariyokr.blogspot.com
www.ster-light.blogspot.com

2007-08-25T10:58:00.001+08:00

The weather is so hot now..I just went out to get a razor (because I was starting to resemble a hybrid between ancient cavemen and a tiongster) and I was tortured by the merciless sun, leaving me with a sweat soaked shirt. It was a bad move to omit bermudas from my travel items. Gnn.

My initial plan was to go out and explore the neighbourhood a little, looks like I have to abandon my plans. I was a sad sight after climbing that flight of steps above.

Some kids playing games, wanted to join them but no coins.

Now i m stuck in the room with only my undies and the fan blowing straight at me. This entry took longer than expected. Ok gtg run already to meet up with the Ntu people at Euljiro Station.

2007-08-24T21:07:00.000+08:00

I woke up this morning, with the dreadful realization that I failed to skype my mum as promised. Oops. Shall call later.

I was supposed to get up earlier to accompany to help Edward’s cousin , Hye Jin, move some stuff as she was getting married to some rich guy (and they were going to move to some swanky apartment in Gangnam, the most expensive part in seoul). Her place was near hongyik university, so we went there to take a look.

Hongyik University is an uni known for its arts students, something like La salle school but also reknown for their girls, according to Edward. “Not as good as Eunhwa, but good. Better than yonsei”

I want that flower girl, ha.

It was their convocation day (Yonsei’s was today too) so there were lots of people selling flowers…immediately 四马路 ca came to my mind.

Edward, my korean friend.

If you are wondering what we were doing with the swivel chair, it was actually supposed to be moved to another place. We were walking around the streets with the swivel but it was handy because we got eat toast at the roadside while seating on it, much to the amusement of the roadside hawker.
Morning toast by the roadside. Rating: ok, actually all breakfast taste the same to me. Becos my tastebuds only wake up slightly before lunch. Toast with omelette and a little ketchup..which seem a bit weird to me. Hmm.

We made our way to Hye Jin's apartment and we helped to transport her sofa bed, wardrobe and some other furniture onto a truck mover but I was rather clumsy, not too used to moving stuff lol. Nevertheless, we were thanked for a decent job and were invited to attend her wedding on Sunday. “Dress code is tuxedo” Dots..where to find? Haha, I have to scavenge for some black cloth and see if I can make it.

We followed the truck mover uncle to Gangnam and Edward pointed to me the places of interest like the Han River (where the Host resides), Seoul tower and tinted vans which transported actors and actresses. We deposited the furniture at some storehouse at some apartment, which I only found only during lunch that it turns out to be his uncle’s apartment, and his uncles owns the entire building. -.- wtf man.

We took a train from Gangnam and went to Coex Mall.

Coex..its a place for exhibitions and conventions but it resembled more of a shopping mall, with lots of shops, boutiques and restaurants. We did window shopping. I was surprised to know that they even had Giordano in Korea, the prices are rather expensive ($80 for bermudas, !!)but I have to admit that the clothes are much nicer and the selection is much wider. I think girls will go crazy la but thank god, I’m a guy with a watchyourexpenses system working within me. Damn tempting.. but I must resist..maybe until I get to Myeongdong. Fyi, regarding the pic on the left:the girl's hand in the advert displayed on the huge mobile is Kim Tae Hee's.

We headed to a restaurant called Omu Tomato where they served omuric (omeletter+ rice), which didn’t sound very fascinating to me. The queue was quite long and we waited about 20 minutes. I ordered some chicken leg omurice and it was tangy with its barbeque sauce, cheese and the egg wrapped fried rice was accompanied by some side dishes like kimchi ???(its ? and not Unicode,cos I dunno wads the name) cubes and pickles. Awesome possum. I am running out of adjectives soon. Lol

Heres the pic:My leg omurice,nice.

After lunch, we took the subway from Samseong back to Hongdae and we took a bus back home, the Korean public transport is rather efficient, that is if you know where you are heading. With transfer (from Mrt to bus), you don’t have to pay the bus fare if you have the transportation card. F ezlink man. Smrt should learn from them.

Once back, he fixed dinner (curry rice with his mum’s preserved vegetables) while I blogged lol. I feel damn paiseh but he insisted that he needed no help. The salted preserved leaves, i think its called gunip went well with the curry gravy.

After dinner, we headed to the public bathhouse for a scrub. Damn shiok. But sorry hor, no pictures because nudity is not permitted on this blog. We stripped to our birthday suits and after the initial awkward giggling (just me), we proceeded to the hot water bath to soak ourselves. I wept silently for the loss of numerous sperms who were boiled alive and who would have gladly opted for more glorious death.

After immensing ourselves in a steaming 'cauldron', we went into the sauna (with herbs), which resembled Gobi desert with the corpse of a unfortunate Chinese medicine trader, who lost his way in the desert, because I thought I detected the smell of burning flesh and herbs.

The objective was to ‘burn’ our skin and make it ‘chao ta’. . Next, I was guided to scrub away the dead skin at the shower area. After scrubbing hard, you’d be amazed and disgusted at the same time, at how dirty your skin can be. You can see the dead skin rolled up with the dirt to form noodle like strands of grime.

My friend does it once a month and therefore, he gave a ‘wOw’ when he scrubbed my back. 22 years of dirt leh. No la. Actually I am exaggerating. Haha.

Next, we headed to the cold bath and the cold ,dry sauna. And we repeated the same thing. It was one of the most refreshing shower I have ever had, second to the shower after coming home from BMT.

There were elderly folks sleeping in the restroom after their scrub and it was common for people to stay overnight there. And they do have those eggs that they often feature people eating in Korean dramas.

We grabbed some water, drinks, apples and Pocari sweat at a nearby supermarket to replenish our dehydrated fluids from the bath and headed back. And I am blogging while he is mugging some micro economics shyt (some hardcore cheem economics stuff with giffen goods and double demand curves and Korean scribblings).
That’s all for now. Signing out. 비군해요 ..

2007-08-24T17:01:00.000+08:00

Seoul!
Wow, these two days have been a rush..with little time for me to spare. From now on, I will just blog whatever that comes to my mind, so please pardon my haphazard thoughts, recollections and poor grammar. I will try to cover a day in this entry.

I left Singapore with many well wishes from my family and friends, thanks to all :0
At the airport,I was surprised to meet Pamela (VJ schoolmate) and my RI classmate, Xunming , didn’t know that they were a couple now. And they were sending off their friend who was also leaving for ….Korea. Haha, it’s a real small world.

It turns out that there were four other SMU students who were bound for the same flight as me, 3 were heading to Korean Uni (Yonsei’s friendly rival, think ACS vs RI) and another girl was going to Inha University for exchange.

The flight was pretty smooth. Although I couldn’t sleep well on the transit flight, even with the stormy weather, the dreamy silhouettes of the Thai stewardess, and an enlarged bedspace for me to lie down as my other seat was unoccupied) .

After arriving at Incheon airport,I very 厚脸皮的 tag along the Smu clique, haha. But moving along as a big group was more efficient. And they had a Korean friend from Inha Uni to welcome us..well actually just the Inha exchange student la. She was pretty…helpful, she provided me directions to get to Sinchon after dispatching the Smu people to Korea Uni (their time was tight as they had to rush for be on time for their orientation) I spent my limousine bus ride, weighing my loss of not exchanging contacts with Miss Inha..

Oh my entries are going to sound so bimbotic from now onwards.

It was a long and excruciating bus ride.. because I was worried if my Korean friend, Edward, would dua me and leave me wandering the streets of seoul. 七月 Qi’ Gue’ in seoul is not fun la.

I lugged my fuckingheavy luggage across a stretch of road to Sinchon subway to establish my contact with my Korean friend, Edward. There were four pay phones and only one worked. Korea is too advanced in telecommunications, they don’t bother to repair their payphones, cos only noobs use them,lol.

My fears were unfounded after I reached him on phone. And he took a short while from his house to get there. It was good to see a familiar face in an alien environment.

We decided to take a cab because my luggage was too hard and too uncool to be seen moving along the streets of happening seoul. It was a decent place to stay. Well most Korean students stayed in one-room apartments like these. Those poorer students stayed in haksuk-chips (boarding houses with thinwalls, where you can hear your neighbours having ‘funtime’), which thankfully I have been spared after I was moved up from the waiting list for international dorm).

I placed my luggage at his place and we went for lunch because our stomaches couldn’t take it anymore. My first meal in Korea was settled at a traditional Chinese restaurant and we ate chachangmyun at my request, haha.Chachangmyun
The real thing definitely owns the instant noodles that they sell in Sg. My plate was left with a puddle of watery sauce, cos apparently I lack skill and its something to do with my 'spit', saliva, thats what Edward told me.

After noodles, we both had an icecream because the heat was a little overbearing, their hottest month is August, which is around Sg’s temperature. I had a Jaws icecream (resembling a shark), gray coloured icecream with strawberry filling inside. Nicee. But got no picture because the weather was too hot so the icecream melted too fast. Haha.

We proceeded to settle some admin stuff: opening a bank account at Woori Bank in Yonsei campus. The campus is large and beautiful, its like a nature reserve, their buildings are sort of like those ang moh universities. I’ll do another entry about the campus another time. The girls are synonymous with the beautiful campus, rich with elegance and excellence. Lol.

We walked around the streets of Sinchon, with him as the tour-guide pointing out interesting sights and aspects of the Korean culture. Sinchon is like a yuppies area with lots of eateries, pubs and shops for people to chill, grab a drink, watch pretty stuff strut around, chit chat. There are lots of students around there because of the nearby universities like Yonsei, Ewha's Women, Sogang, Hongik, and Kyunggi. Its like SMU area multiplied by 5 times and a lot of more human traffic and lovely , quaint shops thrown in. Soon I forgot about Miss Inha and I was immediately assuaged when I looked at the throng of passerbys in Sinchon. O beautiful seoul ^-^

Btw my friend told me that he wanted to go Ewha women’s university to do a local exchange but subjects couldn’t match. Aww.
He told me in a serious tone: “Winston, Ewha students are the best.”
I was puzzled because I always thought that Seoul university students were the elites.
It took a while for me to realize what he was referring to. Their students were the cream of the crop. Korean beauties. Best that the nation has to offer. Lol.

We went for a quickie at Krispy Kreme after walking around for some time. That was a real sweet day. My eyes were satiated ffrom the eye candies and my mouth from the sugary coated glazed donuts.

After that, he invited me to join him for dinner at his best friend, Ricky’s place, also within the Sinchon area. Ricky is also from Yonsei and he just got back from a year exchange in Netherlands. And they were discussing relationships stuff (which was real funny) and they switched occasionally from Korean to English and back to facilitate my poor understanding of Korean. The original plan was to fix dinner at his place but they couldn’t decide what dish to whip up and they even consulted their mums lol.

Moments later, I fell asleep at Ricky’s place after watching TV from the computer about a competition of starcraft gamers (they were bubbling excitedly about that particular classic match which was screening but much to their disappointment, I wasn’t into starcraft..).

I woke up and they told me that they decided to go Sinchon because they couldn’t come up with a dish, so we went to eat tteokbokki(떡볶이. Then we went to grab some beer at a grocery store and Ricky suggested that we head to a forested area in Yonsei for our drinks. We sat there, talked, swatted mosquitoes and tried to interpret some funny looking sculpture. We hastily finished our beer as the mosquitoes started to congregate in numbers around us as if they were preparing for an orgy.

After light-drinking, we plodded back home and Edward tried to find some entertainment for me. “Let’s watch movie?” He recommended “Memories of Murder” and I recommended Bourne Ultimatum, “ok,let me go download” he replied . I was provided a demonstration of the sick downloading speed of their wired network. 5 mins for a 700mb+ movie on p2p. Another 5 mins for CD2. Ccb. Maxoline Ultimatum. No wonder they don’t need to go cinemas to watch shows.

But…I was damn shagged and I fell asleep shortly, 20 mins into the show..because of the sightseeing and lack of sleep on the flight.

And seoul…that was my first day in seoul.

2007-08-22T17:59:00.000+08:00

Finally, I finished packing everything into my humongous suitcase..i think I brought lots of xtra stuff like swimming trunks and even bak gwa, which might come in useful for barter trade since I heard pork is expensive in Korea. “One LG Shine Hp for 4 slices of 美珍香 bak kwa, deal?”
Ok crap aside, my mother passed me enough medical supplies to save several lives. I bundled enough cables to tie peoples’ limbs up and maybe some spare to double up as a whip haha.
Had a hard time closing my suitcase with all that stuff but I still can’t rival Borat and his chicken.

I had a checklist to record the items that I was bringing over to make sure that I didn’t omit anything. Over the past few days, I have been doing a mental checklist of ‘the last xxx” that I wanted to do before I go over.

I had my last sicko ktv session.
I had my last supper last night.
I went to catch my last movie, or rather my first, Bourne Supremacy at Cathay with my brother.
I drew my last facebook graffiti the other day before my hand was overstrained and died out on me.
I watched Tora Tora gold for the last time in my sanctuary before I transferred some over to my laptop, in case I am bored over there. ;)
I walked around town to imprint into my memory my last impression of Singaporean girls, so that I can make a fair and accurate comparison with the Koreans. Btw the schoolgirls seem to have the idea that shorter girls equate being hotter, heh you don’t need to show all to look good. Primary sch girls these days resemble sec sch girls of my time, sec-> jc girls and from the way some jc students strut around with their makeup and elevated assets (I dunno why the butt always stick out,hey I am not a perv).. wa, I have to double check if I alighted at Aljunied man. How times have changed.
I played my last dota game minutes ago…and I lost. With a new razor copperhead somemore. Wtf. I feel like a disgraced warrior..

After writing so much, I just realized that I sound as if I am Lincoln Burrows accepting his impending doom in the gallows. Maybe I might be a suitable candidate to answer the Sunday Times Life ‘what's your last meal going to be?” question. Haha. I am really peeved and disgusted by those pretentious people who quote all the haute-dishes just to flaunt their wealth and epicurean, exotic taste.

UUuu, “I would like to have King Escargots with Caciocavallo Podolico, truffles and Foei gras at this Muddy Grass restaurant and as for the desert, I would prefer the delectable Curry Ice cream from Ben and Curry’s, as for drinks, I would love the Absolute LL (Liew Lian), a durian cocktail prepared by the finest cockstir-rers of Bukkekehehe.”
Yucks, I doubt the food they quote even taste nice.

I’m a heartlander and my list is pretty simple: “I would like to have my Defu lane prata and mee rebus, with a bowl of Hougang laksa and a plate of oyster omelette from Old Airport Road.” Eat till shiok and no regrets. 

All systems go! I am ready.

Mood: Excited.

2007-08-22T08:34:00.000+08:00

旅行的意义

The preparation to exchange has been an arduous one. I planned it quite a well back.. prior to entering university. Picking up basic Korean phrases from phrasebook, watching Let’s Speak Korean series, chionging k dramas and the love for the language and culture served as a reinforcing cycle to strengthen my desire to get my butt there.

Quite often people ask me why I wanted to go Korea? (probably thinking to themselves: just go for a tour there la. Go there exchange for fuck)
Here’s the few standard answers that I always generate.
To get my dose of plastic surgery and come back 200 pounds slimmer and hopefully handsomer.
To look for BoA, my abject object of fantasy since my hormonal raging teenage days.
To eat chachangmyeon everyday. Haha.

While there’s pretty much of stereotyping we do of the Koreans and I hope to find out more about this intriguing bunch of people and discover more about them and about myself. Travelling is a moment that comes when we are out of our element and allows us to see, or feel, or think, anew. The fact of the matter is that one of the main wellsprings of travel motivation is the ambition to achieve a certain kind of distinction. To go where few have gone, to see what few have seen, to have done what few have done. I would really love to explore a different side of Korea. I’ve already seen the ‘tourist’ side of korea. It would be meaningless and a waste of money if I live my next 4 months without doing anything that I can do in Singapore or that I have already done in Korea before.

Anyway here’s really what I hope to achieve there. To improve my Korean, to become more independent, to just let loose, and not be bound by curfews, academic stuff and indulge in some wild fun. The only word in my head now is hedonism. Haha. Hmm let’s see how it works out.

2007-08-21T21:59:00.000+08:00

I was on the bus today and I overheard a bunch of HIHS (Holy Innocent Primary School) kids talking:

Fat kid: 老师这样晚才release 我们..
Small kid with specs: ya lor, 很lol leh
Kid with chubby girlfriend: I thought Lol 是 laugh out loud?
Small kid with specs: Lol 是left out later.

Wa.Kids jargon nowadays so happening. I feel damn left out.

2007-08-20T17:56:00.000+08:00

Ok I have decided to return to blogger to blog. The main reason being..vox.com doesn’t allow non-vox users to comment. After two years and I am still irritated with blogspot’s image posting. Damn annoying. I gave up after cross posting about 3 posts from vox.

Facebook
Yesterday, I was reading the ST article about facebook and I thought to myself, why are we so caught up with all these social utility stuff like friendster, myspace, theneighbourhoodfuckiforgotthename, staticnamedatabase etc or for that matter, blogging.

Why do people spend an inordinate amount of time on them, replying responses, doing graffitis . Its fucking addictive because its like doing something and shouting to the whole world that we are doing it? Maybe it isn’t much different from people uploading their sex videos on youtube.lol
Or like adult maplestory, except that the foodfights replace killing creeps, social groups replace guilds/clans and gifts replace purchasing lovely outfits for your online id.

It essentially encourages users to seek the quest for popularity and is an ideal haven for narcissists, camwhores, braggadocios, posers, stalkers and not to forget: kaypoh aunties/uncles who enjoy scavenging for something juicy to serve during mealtime talk:
“EHH… XXX just poked xxx on Fb leh!...”
“huh?! Isit? I tot being poked = being ….ed already?”
“Yah”
“I didnt noe they two..OMgzz!”

I am so guilty of displaying the traits of each abovementioned. Lol.

2007-08-20T11:57:00.000+08:00

On KTV and Teo Heng
Just got back from yet another wild ktv thrashing session @ Teo Heng.

It takes lots of chemistry and camaraderie to come out of ktvs, feeling like we have just conquered world and accomplished something great. I don’t profess to be a good singer (in fact I’m a noob-in-training) but I must admit I have k-buddies who can sing really well.

If we were to trace our ktv history..it goes quite f….a…….r. We started visiting ktv outlet at Delfi orchard back in our JC days as a class when ktv was still largely associated with lubsup bars and sleazy ktv hostesses. Then Ktv became a hot phenomenon and kbox, partyworld started opening many outlets and everyone began jumping on the bandwagon.

We sang often enough to know where certain songs could be found, which outlets have pirated MVs with midi sounds, out of sync lyrics or wrong MV images, and which drinks served at XX have to be avoided at all costs.

When we are in most comfortable state, we are able to unleash our potential like that big-bad-fox in Naruto, which otherwise lay dormant / underdeveloped during perfunctory and sluggish ktv sessions with strangers/ mass group ktv sessions, which I prefer to absent from nowadays. It becomes another boring session where everyone chooses to err on the safe side, selecting all the ‘wont go wrong’ songs to sing. Yawn.

The real fun only begins when people start to attempt insane delivery of songs. It doesn’t matter if you are able to pull it off; it’s the effort that counts. Hackneyed as it may sound: If you never try, you will never know.

We were able to produce some remarkable duets and occasional miracles like small dolphin wails (cos its mini 海豚音s, not fully developed yet haha) amidst all the confusion: visceral falsetto shrieks, guttural lascivious wails and inevitable走音s.

All in that mystical room number 10 at Teo Heng KTV.

Tonight.
We sang ‘My Way” around 6 times. or 7? We lost count. Lol.
We repeated songs from gary's n jay's repertoire to perform some PK. (PK= Player kill, in which we tried to outdo each other.)
We sang and we donned our pseudo 4 heavenly kings personas. Aiya but I think my Jaky is a flop, ha
We sang until our adjourning Ktv neighbours (some ang mohs) gave us the WTF-these-guys-r-doing look as they exited.
We sang until Teo Heng closed and wished we could continue till the break of dawn.

Alas, we are unable to escape our short-lived destiny like all successful groups, bands. I was touched because they all made it despite late lessons, sore throat and early lessons the following day, since it was our last sicko session together before I return to Singapore in Dec.

We ended off with our 4 men, PK , eclectic version of 不能说的秘密, which we recorded on Junping’s hp along with some other tracks. Haha.

不能唱的PK - 郑兴论剑，何时再战？十二月十号房。不见不散。

P.S.: Gabriel, thanks for fetching all of us back :)

2007-08-12T22:07:00.000+08:00

Revisit and random thoughts.

Pondstar ah Pondstar.
Its an funny feeling revisiting this very first site where I first started scribbling a little of my thoughts, feelings, pieces of memories. I was re-reading my old entries, way back in 2004 when I was writing about hwa chong girls which I saw on bus trips to camp and army regulars who pisssed me off during my army days. I remember I used to cringe when I read through some of the stuff that I wrote. Hah.

Two years. Thats a long time. Enough for people to clock 1500km if you run 2.4 km everyday. Enough for people to achieve considerable academic success. Enough for some to have a few girlfriends and maybe get a couple of fucks. I dunno.

I was thinking about how much I have changed after JC.
Matured? Nah.
Cynical. Yes.
A little more disillusioned about the society and people.
Pondstar.
Still the same old me, no grandeur dreams of becoming some entrepreneur or saving the world.
Wishing only to be a small shining star in a small pond.

Life is one fucking tiring rat race.
We compete with our friends and our imaginary foes for cheese.
We erect mazes for ourselves to run around in. When we can just relax and chill and enjoy some cheap cheese together. Maybe I am just a lost, disgusted rat in this convoluted and relentless race.

2007-08-02T13:26:00.000+08:00

Best and Sickest KTV Session ever had.

It began with an innocent sms from Gabriel “ Tmr ktv u can?”
After several sms exchanges, we decided that couldn’t wait until tomorrow and headed down to Teo Heng.

(Teo Heng is a remote budget KTV outlet located in the Katong Shopping Centre and no, its not a lub-sub ktv)

The start of every KTV is always boring. Everyone needs time to warm up. Frankly speaking, we weren’t exactly in the best state for ktv and I was starting to regret a little. Gabriel had only recovered 70% from his 9 hr overnight KTV hangover (9-6am), Junwen was still sore from his union camp cheering, Junping was tired from scolding his disciple during tuition. And I was suffering from an acute stomachache due to watermelon & 28 weeks later (but that’s another story for another time).

I am not exactly sure where we started to hit the right notes. I suspect it was around the medley of 信乐团 songs, then we were on fire. We went crazy. We infected each other. And like the saying goes, the rest is history.

If it’s possible to get drunk from singing, we probably did. We were in an inebriated state from all that yelling, screaming and falsettos that we generously laced our songs with.

Gabriel was shouting ecstatically that he managed to do his highest ‘Oh’ note (ever attempted) singing 沉默玩具. A truly Eureka! moment.
Junping was delivering his MC Hotdog song with his slick rapping skills. I still think he’s the best rapper I have seen in my KTV sessions. Lol.
And Junwen was doing some amazing harmonizing and hitting some really really high notes. (I wished my music vocabulary was more than these, haha)

We outperformed beyond our wildest expectations, song after song. If you ask me, I think Superwoman sounds bland on my iTunes now after hearing the one with the amount of variation we injected into it. Haha. Awesome.

We stripped songs and raped each stanza and line, doing our own 编曲 , playing with deliberate pauses, R&B, hiphop and rap versions, singer imitations/signature styles, head voices and godly whistle registers (not done by me, haha..i think jw and gab managed them comfortably in their fully unleashed form).

We were acting so smirk and contemptuous, deriding our poor neighbours who were singing (did-i-hear-张栋梁?) sappy love ballads and brushing away songs with remarks like “No kick!”. Then Junping decided to pose us a challenge.

I think we are ready lah. "杨陪安我相信. "
The killer song, which no one ever attempts, unless you really want to sound and look really silly - hunched over, clutching your balls and struggling to fire off some impossible notes beyond your body. Junping managed to be on par with 杨陪安! but we only lasted for a while. Maybe the next time we will be able to clear the entire song.
We finished on a ‘high note’ with 曹格's 世界唯一的你 .
I wished we had it recorded and uploaded on youtube or something. Wad a pity.

This entry is probably going to sound like lots of hogwash and hot air but this has to be documented because to us, it was simply one of the best and sickest and most memorable KTV sessions that we‘d ever had. Sick_o!

2007-07-26T12:05:00.000+08:00

Windmill
Feeling extremely bored during the hols, I decided to assemble a windmill woodcraft.

Windmill Woodcraft
The assembly was supposed to be idiot proof and required only minimal effort. However, I failed to consider the country of the manufacturer and was having a hard time smoothing the rough edges with the tiny, thin. flimsy piece of sandpaper that they provided. After rubbing for around an hour, I think the paper was less than an mm thick and I could feel my fingers burning from the friction.

After assembling the pieces, the windmill looked really plain. So I decided to colour it. I dug up my poster colours which were all either in powder form or caked. So I went to buy a palette and a paintbrush, and tried to beg for some varnish from an auntie from a hardware shop but she refused to give me. Nvm. Stingy people will never make good businessman. No wonder the shop always look so empty. Ha.

Painting gives me great joy. For some reason. Its like breathing life into something.

When you paint you're really in the moment, so you're not thinking about anything that disturbed you from years ago or any anxious thoughts about the future.. like whether your next supper is going to be the last. You trust your subconscious when you paint, applying slow tedious strokes and making decisions along the way and it’s just a huge thrill.

Here's the finished product. With One Piece characters :)

2006-04-09T21:34:00.000+08:00

It started innocently. With my virgin title. For the past two years ago, I find myself
spending an inordinate amount of time huddling in front of my television and my
dvd player soaking up Korean dramas.

I’m addicted to korean dramas. I cant do without them like how Koreans cant live without kimchi.

I cant remember exactly how many I’ve watched. Heres some that I recommend,
노란손수건 (Yellow handkerchief), 상도 (商道) ,이도(医道）, Hotelier..ahh theres just too many. For complete listing, please find me. lol. By the way, I’ve only completed a fraction of what my mother has watched.

A look at my mother’s stash. Bags and drawers are filled with serials.

Actually theres another layer behind which is concealed. This is only part of the total
asset she has. The rest are in transit (on loan to relatives/friends/neighbours)
Definitely more than the *ahem* collection I have. I figured out that the
combined property of my mother and my aunt might actually be enough to set up a
mini Korean drama rental store.

I was surfing around when I came across a site which highlighted the draw factors of Korean
drama serials and why they rank superior compared to HK and Japanese drama. The
heydays of Japanese and HK drama serials are over. I don’t even want to talk
about our local dramas. It makes me ashamed and cringe whenever I look at their
clichéd dialogues, hackneyed and shallow plots and atrocious acting. I’ve bold
out the factors that have been identified as the factors which led to the rise
in popularity of Korean dramas.

Purely and emotionally portray love, friendship, tragedy, loyalty, respect, and general
family values.

Not to forget their heart wrenching love/life stories. Eg. Glass shoe, well portrayed historical
figures such as대장금(Jewel in Palace) and injecting novel themes: the successful
rise of a female, which is rarely covered in historical genre, and the elements
of traditional food and medicine.

“Zoe Sister, Sorry. O Please dun cry. Come have some of my rice cakes…”

Highly romantic stories of people beating the odds to find and experience true happiness.

Personal favourites: Love at Harvard, Full house

Relatively little violence and sex.

True for the sex part. After all the dramas are meant to be family shows so they don’t do it in
front of kids. As for the violence….the husbands/boyfriends/males always seem to
get bullied, beaten and verbally abused by their female counterparts
(girlfriend/mothers/stepmothers/grandmothers/classmates…).

Cliffhangers, cliffhangers, and more cliffhangers from one episode to the next.

I've learned that complicated plots full of pathos and high drama are standard. Korean writers
seem to know how to write cliff-hangers. They tease, they titillate. You cant fall asleep without finish watching because you are still worried about the plight of the poor little girl. My daily limit to 2-3 episodes per day always end up becoming 4..&..5& 6, which explains why I always end up like a zombie in camp the following day.

Each Korean TV mini-series refreshingly has an ending. No Season 2, no sequels, etc. Most
series are between 10-20 episodes (each episode = 60 minutes).

I’m watching a 118 episode one right now. I think my mother is watching a 190+ episodes serial.
Erm..maybe they were referring to the mini ones.

Korean actors and actresses are BEAUTIFUL people.

Fully concur. Then again more than 75% of them went under the knife. But who cares. Beautiful.

Beautiful (and unforgettable) musical scores.

You know that you’re hooked when the opening/ending theme just keep going on and on in your
head. It’s a syndrome. You go oo lala lu lala haju ola hadada kadada haju lada..hey hee ah..hee e ay when you watch Jewel in the Palace. You go la la la wo wooo.. da la da la when you think of the perfect girl in Love in Harvard. I don’t know about other Korean drama junkies but I sing them secretly (mainly composed of undecipherable pseudo-Korean character syllables) when I’m walking
alone. That is the power of Korean dramas. Ok back to my DVDs.

2006-02-11T12:51:00.000+08:00

Janus Migration Completed.
I have decided to abandon blogger due to the below reasons
1.I cant count the number of times of posts mysteriously vanished after posting.
2.Superlag.
3.Limited functions and unorganised.
4.Troublesome to host songs.
5.Its time for something new.

My new blog's address- http://www.wretch.cc/blog/pondstar for whoever who reads this blog. Feel free to write in the guestbook. I'm still in the midst of doing the layout though.

2006-02-10T17:46:00.000+08:00

Was allowed to fall out early today so I decided to catch a movie with my camp mates. There were several movies on my i-wan-to-watch-badly list, namely Dick & Jane and Fearless and Womb Raider. Oh, and I not stupid too.

"~~Dick and Jane~~ I didnt feel like laughing today.

~~I not stupid 2~~. I didn't have any girl to bring along to lend my shoulder to cry on. Lol. Crying with a bunch of guys seemed pretty gay.

~~Womb Raider~~. I had to head to Chinatown to squeeze with a group of ah peks in a rundown theatre. Furthermore, I have yet to reach the legal age."

With much woeful reluctance, I mentally struck out the movie from my list.
That leaves Fearless, Huo Yuan Jia..

And it didn't disappoint.

Fearless reveals how Huo Yuan Jia restored the pride and glory of the Chinese during the early 1900's from the intrusion and invasion of the Western powers and the growing Japanese power, where they have been calling the Chinese 'the sick men of Asia.'

The punches, kicks, blows exchanged were so well choreographed and beautifully executed by Jet Li. That just left me gasping and gaping in awe. His fluid movements and flawless executions make Jackie Chan look old and ready for his retirement. Tony Jaa's stunts seem uncouth and kiddy in comparison to the traditional and refined moves delivered by Jet Li.

I love the opening scene. A British boxer, a Spanish swordsman, a Prussian soldier - three formidable fighters step into the ring, and one after another, Huo Yuanjia defeats them all. Chinese martial arts style. Definitely kick-ass and feeds the Asian ego when you see the ang moh exponents get clobbered by Huo Yuan Jia. The fighting scenes in his swan song are going to go down in the annals as one of the greatest Chinese Martial Arts film. So impressive are the
scenes that I now rank them ahead of Zhang Wu Ji thrashing the various menpais
with their own menpai skills in Yi Tian Tu Long Ji ,and Yang Guo and Xiao Long Nv practicing Yu Nv Xing Jing in the bushes in Legend of the Condor heroes.

The movie also showcase the past of Huo, who was then a proud and arrogant fighter who wanted to make himself the one and only invincible fighter of TianJin. His arrogance and past victory from the competition indirectly led to the death of his mother and daughter who were killed in brutal revenge. If I'm not wrong, I think Jet Li also incorporated some elements of Buddhism into the movie.

Huo Yuan Jia - A fighter, who represents Chinese martial arts to a nation; A man, who fought his way out of darkness and into history. And so has Jet Li.

2006-02-10T16:50:00.000+08:00

2006-02-09T19:26:00.000+08:00

2006-02-03T19:49:00.000+08:00

Mahjong Craze

I used to think that mahjong was a leaden, insipid game designed for stodgy old folks and the wealthy tai tais to occupy their vapid time while waiting for their deaths. Its more irksome when coupled with the shuffling of the ivory pieces every time people 'wash' their tiles after games and the constant silly shouting of pong , gang and hu. I dismissed mahjong because of the fatuous, clownish and uncouth behaviour that's characteristic of mahjong playing. Therefore, I never bother to pay attention to the gameplay until I was introduced to the game at my grandaunt's house during Chinese New Year visiting.

It was only then that I realized how wrong I was. The rules and objective were briefly explained and basic gameplay was taught to me. After a few games, I managed to have an inkling of how the game was played. My uncle told me that one can tell a person's personality by how he plays his tiles in a game of mahjong. Whether the player is a conniving, sly bastard son of a Pinocchio, or whether he is square and predictable.

Expressions are extremely important. One must learn how to conceal one's joy or disappointment. I can picture Michelle Yeow telling Sayuri her protégé aka Zhang Zi yi, " A true mahjong plrayer can makte a man peee in his tracks with a single look. "

Armed with the little experience and inflated confidence, I decided to look for people to challenge. I went online to chat with some of my friends who were mahjong enthusiasts to fix a game with them. Soon enough, the trio were ready. I logged out and went to join the game.

I told them not to give me chance and go soft on me just because I was a newbie. I was eager to test out my new found knowledge. They sniggered at me.

"No problem, bunch of arrogant people. Lets see whose intellect and brains are more powerful."

They stacked and distributed the tiles with lightning speed like how they do in those Hong kong gambling shows. I stacked my tiles gingerly and pressed the sides of the snake shaped tiles clumsily in a weak attempt to get them up in vertical fashion.

Having set my tiles in place, I examined my tiles with the intensity akin to a pervert staring at the tiled wall separating his room from the shower-room of his pornstar neighbour.

"Wahahaha, 清一色 all numbers series, in ascending some more. Not bad for a beginner. You guys are all going to die. Wait till I get my tile, then good game already."

Adrenaline was pumping in me as I waited in eager anticipation for my final tile. Several rounds went by. Evidently luck wasn't with me. I still saw no signs of the tile which was the final key to the riches. Worry began creeping at me. I felt my perspiration trickling down my neck, my chest and into my navel. I was contemplating whether I should stop waiting and play other patterns instead. By pattern, I mean the bamboo or the tong.

"HU LE 胡了" Oh shit. Someone got his tiles before me. 十三么 WTF!!!!!!!!! -$8000! Great now my account has just entered into deficit. I think my face became whiter than a geisha for a moment.

The winner began laughing awfully loud. His screeching laughter sounded awfully familiar like 曾志伟...Phew, lucky thing I'm only playing Celebrity mahjong明星三缺一. If not.. I cant imagine the damage it would have done to my almost non existent savings. Looks like I have practice more. Oh, 洗牌啊 Next game!

2006-01-28T15:56:00.000+08:00

Dog Ear!
Time to hit the books again!

2006-01-23T13:34:00.000+08:00

Some bull

I was flipping through the chinese horoscope of the cow for the Year of the Dog for 2006 when i came across the disposition of the people who are born in the year of the cow.

"The character of the Cow is steady, conservative with strong inner self and has a sense of responsibility. He has a good creditability and honors his word. He is loyal and worships one principle. " Hmm, I like to think that I possess those traits.

"He enjoys being in a serene environment and has the temperament of the Cow. " I dun need a serene environment. I just enjoy idling around.

"Sometimes, it is hard to get along with them.He will be able to listen when he has calm down. "
Cow People like me are rather obstinate. They just refuse to acknowledge that they are wrong even when the facts are presented. Maybe we are even worse than mules.

"He is diligent at work, but will only be able to finish his task only under instructions. He does not have the courage to try out new venture. They do not have the patience and courage to earn too much money. Hence, the Cow works hard and silently. "

Heres my interpretation of the Cow:
A thickheaded, servile and bovine creature which only knows how to slog. He derives masochistic pleasures from the throes of constant flagging and dragging plough across the fields, chained to the cumbersome yoke, which he has gradually grown accustomed to. He knows that he is not like the hens n cocks who just mate and lay eggs. Nor is he like the gregarious parrot who knows how to carry the farmer's balls and talk himself out of situations. Hence, he has to work.

Sometimes, he dreams briefly about lovely pastures and sexy cows with milk-dripping nipples but often dimisses his dreams quickly with guilt for harbouring those lazy and filthy thoughts. He thinks the dreams he have are akin to the pile of manure that he just defecated. Full of bullshit. Hastily, he shakes his head to jolt himself back to reality. He lifts his eyelids desultorily to glimpse at the afternoon sky.

The sun continues to blaze at the field.

Fucking hot weather, he thought to himself. Cant wait for nite to cum.
Sure and steadfast, he continues to thread through the fields, hoping that every step he takes will draw him closer to dusk.
He mumbles and grumbles but never voices his complaints. The woes of the moo goes unheard because he is afraid of incurring the wrath of the farmer and disrupting the harmony.

Suffering in silence, quietly beneath the scorching sun.

2006-01-21T16:57:00.000+08:00

Was clearing my cabinet during my room spring cleaning session today. Its amazing when you look at the paraphernalia of junk goods and useless stuff that i keep- scrap paper, half written letters, printouts of song lyrics, several outdated copies of I-magazines, Newman (which I tot featured not-too-bad photos), broken stationery which still exhibited some aesthetic value, smelted mentos covered with ants, Econs handouts which I forgot to distribute to my class because I misplaced them (zzz).

I discovered some buried 'treasures' amid all the junk. Dug up my sec 1 chinese file. Lucky thing it hasnt been devoured by silverfishes. 1998. 8 yrs...wad have I done during this 8 yrs?!

My file's content page. With my assessment and test papers that I'm proud of. Probably the only subject that I truly loved during my school days but the O lvl results disappointed me.

Used to spend inordinate amout of time decorating and writing those journals/ random musings for my Chinese teacher to grade. A pity most of the pieces have been "kidnapped" from my file. Up till now, I still do not know the whereabouts of the pieces that were originally meant to be sent to publishers.

One of the remaing inferior products.

Found a tabloid newspaper which we did as part of our English assignment. Enjoyed doing groupwork during those years, especially during brainstorming sessions where people churn out all sort of wacky and wicked ideas.

I've noticed that the older I get, the more cluttered my cabinets and drawers become. I become more reluctant to discard useless items that just take up space even though they serve no practical purpose. Its like these objects still retain some soul, a part of me, within them. I dunno. Maybe the sentimental self just wants to retain a part of history that I've experienced.

Time seems to flow in a different dimension after you pass 18. The gigantic clock seems to tick faster. You get the feeling that you have to clutch onto these little pieces of mementos before your memory of the past starts to fade out of existence as you draw towards adulthood.

2006-01-13T10:25:00.000+08:00

First blood

Anyone who plays DOTA loves first blood. When a player's hero executes the 1st hero kill of the game, he/she will get extra 200 gold and also the "First blood" verbal acknowledgement. They are some players who go to all costs just to gain that first blood satisfaction. It feels damn good when you get the first kill, especially when you blast your audio speakers and listen to the sound of 'First blood' reverberating throughout your room.

Everyone loves coming in first or being first. First to spear the joystick into the altar at the break of dawn of Chinese New Year , first to board the bus. First in the queue to be served the lousy food in the camp canteen. Sometimes, I wonder what's the obsession with being first? Is it due to the 'kiasu' nature of Singaporean? Perhaps the winning mentality has been deeply entrenched and infused to us since young, given the competitive society that we are in, that it has become a subconscious part of us.

Some people enjoy setting records by doing crazy things like downing 50 bottles of Guinness stouts just to get into the Guinness record or becoming the first Asian to scale 7 greatest peaks in the world. They brand their acts of temerity as a form of challenge and purports with loads of silly reasons. Just ask Annabelle Chong why she wanted to do the feat of having sex with 251 men in 10 hours. Alas, I've heard two women have broken her record. Its standing at 500 men now. Records will always be shattered because there will always be crazier people than you.

I saw a piece of depressing news in Today yesterday. It reported that vaginal reconstruction is now widely embraced and the most sought after plastic surgery. They can even tighten the muscles there and reconstruct the entire hymen from scratch (not that scratch) with hymenoplasty aka revirgination. No flaws. Just like a squeaky clean virgin even though you have seen more than a thousand visitors to your abode. I reckon the word chastity will be removed from the dictionary in no time. Hymens no longer = authentic virgins. :(

Maybe being first is not so necessary after all.

Fixing the pieces

2006-01-11T20:13:00.000+08:00

Spent the day trying to assemble the thousand pieces jigsaw. Its supposed to be a Bleach family picture of the 13 shinigamis. There are only six of them in this puzzle. Theres still another seven of them in another 1000 puzzle waiting for us to fix them up after the great fall.
Hopefully we can finish this by tonight and move on to the next. Then we have to find a way to get this up onto the wall..still need to shop for a decent frame...and also pump in money to get the frames.... sigh. ..Hobbies like these are real costly.

2006-01-06T10:54:00.000+08:00

Dun fuck around with Std

I should have heeded advice and not taken the risk. There's a threshold to the amount of deterrence that protection can provide. Now, I'm afflicted with this terrible, chancrous, itching rash that's all over my body.

I cant pinpoint the source which triggered the rash to swarm my entire body. However, I suspect its an allergy either to the medicine I took or the excessive wine/ alcohol which I consumed during Christmas. I believe it's the latter because my body has a low tolerance level towards alcoholic drinks. This disgusting rash is depriving me of my sleep and causing my body to twitch wildly in the office.

I used to have a rather severe case of eczema. For those who dunno what is eczema, it's a skin condition due to excessive reaction by the immune system producing inflamed, irritated and sore skin. I'm sure you've seen people with flaky, raw, bleeding skin. I call it the crocodile skin. That's why I liked reptiles when I was young because I thought I resembled them. Trust me, it's a mentally and psychologically troubling disease. You have to cope with the stares, your torn self esteem, your own anger/frustration, the 100s and 1000s of weird concoctions and remedies 'guaranteed' to cure your condition (but always fail to work) and the worst part, the itch. Luckily for me I managed to grow out of my condition when I hit puberty.

The itch is infectious. It begins with a minor prickling sensation. Your hand slide down to assuage the itch., by generating some friction on the skin. That little action is enough to spark off a disaster to your poor skin and bring about a severe case of dermatitis. The more your rub and scratch, the redder the patch starts to become and you start to derive a sick form of pleasure from the scratching of your skin. You start to intensify and accelerate your clawing strokes but you are oblivious to these because you are experiencing a semi-orgasmic-scratching pleasure. The blood starts to flow and stain your nails. You don't care. Not even the flowing blood can stop you from prolonging your pleasure. In fact, the pleasure is heightened with the addition of fluid since it serves to lubricate the friction. However, just like every wonderful moment must come to an end, your end comes when your hands get too wet and the metallic iron smell of your blood hits your nose. The aftermath is enough to make your feel a little guilty and giddy. When you raise your hands and you notice that it's all bloody. You dun even want to bother examining your wound. All thanks to that little itchy bitch.

Misaki Itoh!!

2006-01-04T21:41:00.000+08:00

If beauty could be described any other way, it would be Misaki Itoh.

2005-12-29T19:41:00.000+08:00

Japan is a living testament of age-old tradition, co-existing rather awkwardly with all the trappings of a rapidly developed modern society.

Avant-garde art and staid flower arrangement. Zen Buddhism and hedonistic lifestyles. Sumo wrestling and baseball. Heavy metal rock bands and the Kabuki theater. Geishas and Av industry. Its really all these complexities that make Japan such an interesting and wonderful place to tour.

More photos-

Day 4 http://www.flickr.com/photos/45619702@N00/sets/1653376/show/

Day 5 http://www.flickr.com/photos/45619702@N00/sets/1669576/show/

Our Japan Hour

2005-12-21T20:25:00.000+08:00

The next few entries are going to be combined entries by my brother and I, chronicling about the sights and fun that we have experienced in Japan.

We'll be uploading the travel photos in segments due to the limited capacity of flickr and the lack of time.

PLs NOTE:
Language May Offend: Contains language that may be offensive to some groups, (i.e. sacrilegious language such as OMG; expletives.)

Coarse Language: Contains profanity, threats, slurs, sexual references or sexual innuendo.

Crude Content: Material or humour that is unrefined or coarse and that may be seen as harsh, rude, or offensive.

Ok With that in mind, you can safely proceed to the album ->

Day 1,2 http://www.flickr.com/photos/35973497@N00/sets/1627489/show/

Day 3 http://www.flickr.com/photos/35973497@N00/sets/1634359/show/

Click on the above link, a slideshow will pop out, pause the slideshow immediately and use the back/forth button to view. Click on the image to minimize the images so that the captions are visible.

2005-12-12T08:07:00.000+08:00

My five days leave is over in a blink of the eye.. Why isit that time always pass so quickly when we are having fun? If only I have the power to control time...
Ok, now I only have 7 days more left to enjoy before I return to my boring and hectic workplace again..several hours before i reach the land of the rising sun!! :)

2005-12-07T10:00:00.000+08:00

SaW II

I just watched Saw 2 with Junwen at Plaza Sing yesterday. A must-watch show this yr (not many good shows this yr though..harry potter, chick little kid flicks sux..heard one more chronicles of gnn coming out :( ).The pace was fast moving and the plot was brilliantly pieced together albeit a few minor flaws. I discovered that watching violent flicks is pretty similar to porn, the more u watch the more u wan to see. You get desensitized by the gore and blood on film. Plain tricks like tomato juice will no longer suffice for the hardcore viewers.

Overall, Saw II' s effects were rather convincing. However, certain scences were toned down (either our Edward Censorship Scissorshand was at work again or the producers wanted a lower rating to have a wider viewership). I particularly enjoyed the twisted/ dark humour that were evident throughout the show, peppered by wicked puns.

The movie opened with a scene of a man with a venus-flytrap like contraption filled with black nails over his head, ready to snap once the 30 minutes is up. He is supposed to look for the key, which has implanted just beneath his eye. Our mastermind utters in his video: ".. So listen carefully. The hint is this: It's right before your eyes. How much blood would you shed to stay alive, Michael? Live or die... Make your choice.
How ironic and yet how true. Isnt it sometimes in life when we are trapped in a shitty quagmire like this, we are forced to carry out desperate measures and actions in order to survive.

"Why is that we're only willing to do that, when a life is at stake? "

"You see, the knowledge of death... changes everything. If I were to tell you the exact date and time of your death... it would shatter everything. "

I give a 7.5 for this show. 2.5 more if it had nudity/sex :P

2005-12-04T08:45:00.000+08:00

Sore.

The aftermath of yesterday was terrible.

I still have the dull ache in my balls and ass. All thanks to my adventurous counterparts who decided to detour from our normal route and head to Changi for a different experience...

It must have been the close and rough contact that did me in. And the lack of proper protection.
The one that I had was small frame but robust and lean. I can still vividly picture him rubbing up against me, harder and harder as we moved together. His body writhing and quivering below my sweaty body. My arms pushing him down as my legs pumped faster and faster. After a while, the lethargy and strain started to gnaw at my muscles but the thirst and drive was far greater. We had to make constant adjustments in our positions to minimise the pain and keep ourselves comfortable.

We made little hisses and gasps and moans as we approached crest after crest. We never stopped even when he got wet and stained my inner thigh as I rode him as rough as I could.
If only I was a girl, I probably would have developed a vaginus (vagina+anus) by now.
The consummation was a surge of ethereal earth shattering euphoria as we stopped and screamed at me as I panted over him.

I was totally burnt out after that. Red skin, sore butt, bloated stomach after a surfeit of coconut juice and a 54 km bike ride (East coast-Kallang-Changi-East) in my personal guinness record to keep-what an exhilirating way to spend a saturday with my uncle, brother and cousin.
Right now, I have to go look for a water bed to rest my sore bottom and abstain myself from any lower body movements in the next few days.