I have more (modern) Korean art for you.

There's a Chagall exhibition in town which I thought I might like to take in until I arrived at the museum and discovered admission was 13,000 won, a revelation which caused me suddenly to realize I don't know who Chagall was and don't want to find out at the going rate.  Happily, said museum offers a free exhibition of work by contemporary Korean artists, much of which is strange and reproduced below for you in photographs.

Korean Food: Kimbap

After reading my post about Styela clava you may have gotten the impression Korean food and I don't get along.  That nasty business certainly wasn't pleasing to my mouth.  But in general Korean food and I are like this.  To dispel misconceptions and perhaps also satisfy your natural curiosity about what people on the other side of the planet eat every day, I'll be posting a series of ... posts about the Korean stuff I eat.  I'll start with kimbap because I'm enthusiastic about it, it's ubiquitous in Korea, and most foreigners can see its appeal.

Why I Won't Learn Korean

I've met a couple of Koreans who want free English lessons from me.  In both cases they've offered a language exchange:  my English for their Korean.  Sadly for them, their Korean has no value to me because I've decided not to learn the language.  And I don't mean I'm taking a stance of passive disinterest towards Korean, say by not enrolling in classes or not buying a phrasebook; I mean I'm actively not learning Korean.  I'll go out of my way to avoid learning it.  I consider the entrance of a new Korean word into my understanding a loss, not a gain.

I have some great reasons for not learning Korean.

New Facebook profile pic!

This sign used to just read WILL in blazing red letters on a segment of spikey wrought iron fence.  I thought it was a Nazi cafe because the sign gave me a triumph of the WILL or WILL to power sort of vibe.  Now, with the festive trim, I get a Jimmy Buffet sort of vibe.

I'm certain I've mentioned Hongdae in previous posts.  I recall a specific one in which I described an evening I spent there all suited up with nowhere to go, hungry for kebab, an evening which found me at its close intoxicated in public after a run-in with Makgeolli Man, a local character who arbitrages convenience store makgeolli from a peasant cart he pulls around the neighborhood and who praised my sartorial excellence and enthusiastically professed his love for me.  Well it happened again last Friday!  Except I wasn't wearing a suit and was already intoxicated when my path crossed Makgeolli Man's.

I visited Yeouido, home of the world's largest Christian church.

Yoi Island (Yeouido) is an island in the Han Wikipedia can explain to you.  I visited it because "see the world's largest Christian church" was on my list of things to do before leaving Korea.  While I'm at it, let me refer you to Wikipedia for the answer to any question you may have about the church itself.  All the background is covered more than adequately by the internet; why should I bother to type anything beyond my personal experience, as yet unrecorded?  (I shouldn't.)  So let's get on with it.