This week I thought I’d try something a little different. It’s time to pull out the report card and grade Korea on some its finer points. I present to you: Aspects of Korea
Ajumas: Holy hell, Ajumas. An ajuma, for those who aren’t aware, is basically a middle-aged Korean woman who wears garish clothing, does lots of power walking and will KICK. YOUR. ASS. In a male-dominated society, ajumas are like a power-bloc with dreams of revolution. In fact, the boss at my school refers to them as a “third gender”. I think he’s scared of them. Honestly, though, a little bit of fear is in order here. Ajumas take no prisoners. When you see them power walking at you on the bike path, sweat all thick on their brows, orange sweaters and green pants temporarily stunning and confusing you, faces stern with purpose, be sure to leap out of the way. You may need to dive. Do what you have to do. Get to safety.
B+
Restaurants: This is it. This is why we’re here. When it comes to eating out, Koreans have found the way. Here’s the wa y it works: Everyone shares everything, there’s a call button on the table that summons the waiters, there is no tipping, there are numerous side dishes and you can eat as much of them as you want without increasing the bill, and you cook the meat right at your table on a big burner in the middle of everyone. You get all this for about 6 bucks, as long as you don’t order anything to drink. And if you do order a beer, say, it’ll come in a very large plastic bottle and with as many glasses as there are people drinking. It’s customary not to pour your own drink, but to rely on your fellow diners to fill you up when you’re empty. The side dishes and the meat are also shared among everyone, rather than each person getting an individual order. The communal aspect of it is really nice, and the price is impossible to beat. It’s no surprise that eating out at restaurants with others is the centerpiece of the average Korean’s social life. It’s much the same for foreigners living here as well. Simply put, there’s no reason not to go out to eat with others at every opportunity.
A+
Not having a dryer:
Here’s how it goes.
“Ah FUCK! Forgot to hang up my wet clothes… Guess I’ll just run back and forth between the balcony and the laundry room 8 times with loads of clothes, and… SHIT! I totally dropped that shirt on the floor. Ah, man it’s so not clean anymore… I mean, it’s not so bad… I guess I could use it as a mop head or something… “
24 hours later
“Well, I guess I’ll just take a shower and put on some of my new clean clothes. Doo dee da doo… Which shirt should I wear today? Oh wait, none of them are dry yet! And none of my jeans will be dry for another full day! And everything will be as wrinkly as a damn golgi apparatus anyway.”
Fuck not having a dryer.
D-
Pepero Day: Pepero Day is November 11th. 11/11. Pepero is a kind of candy that has many different varieties, but basically, the thing that makes it pepero is that it’s a cookie stick with stuff on it. Just a long, thin, round and crunchy candy snack that can be covered in chocolate or something. It’s similar (maybe the same?) to the Japanese snack, pocky. In Korea it’s called pepero and it’s usually manufactured by Lotte, the shadowy overlords who rule Korea with an iron fist. (No fooling. In addition to dominating the candy market, Lotte has a chain of department stores, major real estate holdings and even a giant indoor amusement park called “LotteWorld”. They remind me of BnL, the megacorporation from Wall*E.)
So anyway, pepero is okay but not exactly amazing, so Lotte came up with the genius idea of making up a fake holiday where people would just buy a shit ton of pepero and spend all day giving it away and receiving it. It’s on November 11th because the ones are supposed to look like pepero sticks.
You can imagine how the kids at school feel about pepero day. If they have pants, they poop them. If they don’t have pants, they poop something else. Pooping happens.
It works out great for the teachers because some of the kids will come in and their moms have loaded them up with huge bags full of boxes of pepero so they can give the teachers and staff mounds of the stuff. When I finished work on pepero day, I had more than ten boxes of the stuff on my desk, and spent about two weeks eating through it.
What’s hilarious is that Lotte tries to deny that they invented this holiday. They claim that they noticed sales of pepero went up around that day anyway and they just started to capitalize on it. Like people were writing the date and saying “My God! That’s it! Pepero!” It’s a delightfully feeble lie. I bet at this moment Lotte goons are dreaming up new kinds of candy that look like numbers. “We just noticed that a lot of people were eating our ‘3’ shaped cookies at 3:33 everyday! What? Stop looking at us like that!”
B-
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Only the finest ingredients
The lights are still up as the last of the audience make their way to their seats. A large projection screen is presenting a series of facts and instructions to help us pass the time. “’Nanta’ was selected a top tourist attraction in Korea.” “Everybody clap! Now only the ladies! Great job!” It’s a very well-mannered screen. Only minutes to go now. The crowd seems energetic, and the theater is at capacity. Another sold-out performance for the most successful show in Korea.
“Nanta: Cookin’” has been running for 13 years. It’s a drum performance, it’s a slapstick comedy, and it’s a family show with lots of audience interaction. It’s been almost absurdly successful. It now plays at four theaters in Korea, each doing several performances every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, all of them selling out or coming very near to it. It’s been exported around the globe and has played in over 200 cities. Now, you’re probably wondering, “Well what the hell is it? I’ve never even heard of it.” Good question, reader!
Basically, Nanta is kind of like STOMP with kitchen utensils. There is a threadbare plot about some chefs who have to prepare a wedding feast by six o’clock. None of the characters have names and there is very little dialogue. None of that really matters. That’s not what the people come to see. They came to see actors doing flips and dropping mad beats with butcher knives. And that’s what you get!
Where they find these actors, I don’t know. I’m guessing they grow them in vats made of pure power, and produce them by the dozen. It’s the only explanation. Where else are you going to find people who have perfect rhythm, excellent comedic timing, advanced gymnastics skills, juggling ability, knowledge of magic tricks, and easy rapport with audiences? The number of skills required of the actors to be a part of this show is just unbelievable. And if it’s that’s not asking enough, they have to have the stamina to do three performances in a row, a true marathon on stage. It’s ridiculous.
So anyway, the show has about ten “scenes” with fairly generic (and basically irrelevant) conflicts that a group of chefs might face. In this one they need to make a great mass of friend rice, and whattyaknow, it sounds great when they cut up all the ingredients. In this one they need to clean up, as the floor has gotten very messy and the cool guy chef and the goofball chef get in a Jackie Chan-inspired duel with brooms, the rhythm supplied by the tapping of the broomsticks. There was one scene that didn’t have any music where one of the characters got stuck in a trashcan and tried increasingly drastic measures to free himself. Watching it live, I get the impression that the creators of this show must have been big Buster Keaton fans. Slapstick might be one of the lower rungs on the comedy ladder, but when it’s executed really well you can see the devotion to the craft the performers must have, and it is admirable. These folks are fearless and tireless and their energy becomes contagious.
Oh, and oh yeah, I almost forgot. THEY BROUGHT ME UP ON STAGE AND HAD ME PROVIDE THE BEAT FOR SOMETHING!! In your FACE, rest-of-the-crowd. I knew it, too. I saw the actor get off the stage to hunt through the audience for people to recruit, and I was like, oh man, this is mine. I caught his eye like a bear trap catches a lazy rabbit. Pick me, dude. Pick me.
The show has a good deal of audience participation towards the end. For the part I got to participate in, they brought up four people, and divided us into two teams. I was the drummer for my team, and my poor teammate had to make mandu. Mandu is the Korean word for “dumpling”. She really got the raw end of the deal. The competition consisted of the two teams trying to be the first to make ten plates of mandu, but only one of the two teammates had to actually make the mandu. The other one (and that would be me, in the case of team blue) was the drummer and announcer. I kept the beat with a giant pestle in a pot in my left hand, which made a big “BOOM” sound, and in my right was a rolling pin that I smack against a cutting board and made a piercing “CRACK”. When my partner finished a plate of mandu, it was to be put on a conveyor belt, where I would retrieve, hold it up, and announce what number we were on to the audience. “OOOOOOOOOOONE!”, “TWOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” I said as loud as possible. You might think it would be nerve-racking, but I really wasn’t nervous at all. I have UF improv to thank for that, I think. Compared to making up comedy on the spot in front of a hundred people, keeping a simple beat and counting plates of mandu in front of three hundred people is a walk in the park. And you know what? We won! My teammate was the fastest mandu master in the east, and we got little prizes. Hooray!
The best part is, one of my students might have been there. On Fridays, I usually ask my kids what they’re doing for the weekend, to get them talking about different topics in English. One of them said she was going to see Nanta on Saturday! She didn’t seem to believe me at first when I said I had the same plan. I can’t wait to see how she reacts when I tell her what happened at the show I went to. I don’t think she was at the same one as me, because, knowing this girl’s personality, as soon as she saw me on the stage she probably would have shouted “RAAAAAAAAAANDY TEAAAACHERRRRR!” loud enough for the whole place to hear. But we shall see!
Well, that’s it for now. Ah-nyung-ha-se-yo!
Randy
“Nanta: Cookin’” has been running for 13 years. It’s a drum performance, it’s a slapstick comedy, and it’s a family show with lots of audience interaction. It’s been almost absurdly successful. It now plays at four theaters in Korea, each doing several performances every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, all of them selling out or coming very near to it. It’s been exported around the globe and has played in over 200 cities. Now, you’re probably wondering, “Well what the hell is it? I’ve never even heard of it.” Good question, reader!
Basically, Nanta is kind of like STOMP with kitchen utensils. There is a threadbare plot about some chefs who have to prepare a wedding feast by six o’clock. None of the characters have names and there is very little dialogue. None of that really matters. That’s not what the people come to see. They came to see actors doing flips and dropping mad beats with butcher knives. And that’s what you get!
Where they find these actors, I don’t know. I’m guessing they grow them in vats made of pure power, and produce them by the dozen. It’s the only explanation. Where else are you going to find people who have perfect rhythm, excellent comedic timing, advanced gymnastics skills, juggling ability, knowledge of magic tricks, and easy rapport with audiences? The number of skills required of the actors to be a part of this show is just unbelievable. And if it’s that’s not asking enough, they have to have the stamina to do three performances in a row, a true marathon on stage. It’s ridiculous.
So anyway, the show has about ten “scenes” with fairly generic (and basically irrelevant) conflicts that a group of chefs might face. In this one they need to make a great mass of friend rice, and whattyaknow, it sounds great when they cut up all the ingredients. In this one they need to clean up, as the floor has gotten very messy and the cool guy chef and the goofball chef get in a Jackie Chan-inspired duel with brooms, the rhythm supplied by the tapping of the broomsticks. There was one scene that didn’t have any music where one of the characters got stuck in a trashcan and tried increasingly drastic measures to free himself. Watching it live, I get the impression that the creators of this show must have been big Buster Keaton fans. Slapstick might be one of the lower rungs on the comedy ladder, but when it’s executed really well you can see the devotion to the craft the performers must have, and it is admirable. These folks are fearless and tireless and their energy becomes contagious.
Oh, and oh yeah, I almost forgot. THEY BROUGHT ME UP ON STAGE AND HAD ME PROVIDE THE BEAT FOR SOMETHING!! In your FACE, rest-of-the-crowd. I knew it, too. I saw the actor get off the stage to hunt through the audience for people to recruit, and I was like, oh man, this is mine. I caught his eye like a bear trap catches a lazy rabbit. Pick me, dude. Pick me.
The show has a good deal of audience participation towards the end. For the part I got to participate in, they brought up four people, and divided us into two teams. I was the drummer for my team, and my poor teammate had to make mandu. Mandu is the Korean word for “dumpling”. She really got the raw end of the deal. The competition consisted of the two teams trying to be the first to make ten plates of mandu, but only one of the two teammates had to actually make the mandu. The other one (and that would be me, in the case of team blue) was the drummer and announcer. I kept the beat with a giant pestle in a pot in my left hand, which made a big “BOOM” sound, and in my right was a rolling pin that I smack against a cutting board and made a piercing “CRACK”. When my partner finished a plate of mandu, it was to be put on a conveyor belt, where I would retrieve, hold it up, and announce what number we were on to the audience. “OOOOOOOOOOONE!”, “TWOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” I said as loud as possible. You might think it would be nerve-racking, but I really wasn’t nervous at all. I have UF improv to thank for that, I think. Compared to making up comedy on the spot in front of a hundred people, keeping a simple beat and counting plates of mandu in front of three hundred people is a walk in the park. And you know what? We won! My teammate was the fastest mandu master in the east, and we got little prizes. Hooray!
The best part is, one of my students might have been there. On Fridays, I usually ask my kids what they’re doing for the weekend, to get them talking about different topics in English. One of them said she was going to see Nanta on Saturday! She didn’t seem to believe me at first when I said I had the same plan. I can’t wait to see how she reacts when I tell her what happened at the show I went to. I don’t think she was at the same one as me, because, knowing this girl’s personality, as soon as she saw me on the stage she probably would have shouted “RAAAAAAAAAANDY TEAAAACHERRRRR!” loud enough for the whole place to hear. But we shall see!
Well, that’s it for now. Ah-nyung-ha-se-yo!
Randy
Saturday, February 13, 2010
The Tape Delayed Super Bowl
Few things can bring people together like sports. Crisp Christmas mornings opening presents at Grandma’s house, with most of Mom’s family there (4 uncles, 7 aunts, teeming masses of cousins) would give way to the family football game, played every year when the sun was high and there wasn’t a cloud in sight. Almost every male in the family would join in at some point. With such a big cast of rotating participants, and only a small area to play (the yard being half covered with cars), there wasn’t much structure to the “game”. There was just enough room to fit in all the thrills of football. We’ll throw. We’ll catch. We’ll hit each other. Merry Christmas to all. Beautiful.
Worldwide, the ultimate in sports unity is soccer’s World Cup. Entire nations will come to a stop when their team has a big match. People will stay up all hours of the night to see if their homeland will advance. Surprisingly, another World Cup is nearly upon us. It’s hard to believe it’s been 4 years since the last one. In fact, it seems like just yesterday I was ignoring this event. I kid, I kid. Soccer is a wonderful sport—if you shrink the field by about a hundred yards. And widen those goals a bit, too. I’m tired of seeing all those nice open shots fly into the stands. The goal is about 800 times bigger than the ball! What do they pay you people for!?
Okay, so Americans have a hard time enjoying soccer. Too many ties, not enough blood. Soccer is a sport where there is incentive for a player who is not hurt at all to roll around on the ground screaming like a sissy trying to draw a red card on his opponent. Football is a sport where players whose tendons are pathetically hanging by a thread will shoot themselves up with cortisone, then play as though nothing has happened. They won’t be able to walk when they’re fifty, but that’s OK. They never intended to live that long anyway! Hoo-ah!
Therefore, the ultimate in American sports togetherness is the Super Bowl. Super Bowl Sunday is the 2nd biggest food day of the year in America. That’s a fact. Someone crunched the numbers and determined that more food is consumed on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day except Thanksgiving.
It’s not such a big day in Korea, it turns out. In fact, I saw no sign at all that anyone was aware what day it was. That’s not too surprising. In Korean time, kick-off was at 8:30 AM on a Monday. And also, there’s the small matter that no one knows what the hell a football is. Furthermore, the game was going to be broadcast while I was at work reminding six year olds to speak in complete sentences. It looked like I’d be high and dry for what promised to be one of the most exciting Super Bowl match-ups in years.
Then I got the facebook message. Brandon (who is Canadian, actually, so I dunno why he cares) found a place that would be replaying the game that night at 9. Excellent! I spent my Monday in media blackout. No internet at all. I was rooting for the Saints, but I didn’t think they would win. But who knows? Football is one of the least predictable sports. Just two years ago the Giants beat the Patriots, and that was ten times more David and Goliath than Saints over Colts would be. By the way, I just noticed that calling that Giants-Pats Super Bowl a David and Goliath story is funny because Goliath himself was a giant. Can’t believe that took me two years to notice.
There were four of us traveling out to Sinchon, where the bar was located. Sinchon is a busy place with tons of bars, so it wasn’t easy to find. Luckily, it was obvious what we were looking for. A foreigner, who turned out to work for the bar, walked up to us and said “Are you guys looking for Beer O’Clock? It’s this way.” He saw some Westerners and said to himself, ah, here are some of my customers. Smart plan. Trolling the streets for foreigners on the night of the Super Bowl replay.
About the game itself, what is left to say? It was an epic game. I think the page has been irrevocably turned on the reputation of the Super Bowl in terms of game quality. When I was a little kid, everyone always talked about how the Super Bowl was always a terrible game. And, in those days, that was true more often than not. Usually one team would dominate and the other would be ruthlessly humiliated in the most watched TV program of the year. It was ugly.
But somewhere along the line that changed. I think the transition was the Rams-Titans game. That was a great, close game with a highly memorable finish. That Titan player extending his arm as far as he could and coming up a yard short of the end zone as time expired is one of the best photos in NFL history. Since then, good games have clearly outnumbered bad ones at the Super Bowl. The only 2 stinkers were Ravens-Giants and Bucs-Raiders.
Even in a decade of good Super Bowls, however, this year’s stands out. Simply put, this was one of the most exciting football games I’ve ever seen. There were goal line stands, a two-point conversion complete with the drama of a successful replay challenge, A FUCKING ON-SIDE KICK TO START THE SECOND HALF!!, hardly any penalties, and of course, the game-clinching pick-six.
I may be a suspicious character in Brandon’s eyes because of that interception. I swear, I saw nothing and heard nothing about the game. But somehow, after more than a full half with no turnovers, I got this strange feeling that any turnover would be taken back for a touchdown immediately. I think I based this on a few things. 1. It was a pass-happy game so any turnover would likely be an interception, which are more likely to be turned than fumbles. 2. The defenses of both teams are kind of middle of the road, overall, but both have a mean opportunistic streak. They capitalize on the opportunities given to them. 3. The game was just so damn dramatic by this point that a turnover not leading to an immediate touchdown would have been anticlimactic somehow.
That third point isn’t really based in logic, but I’m sure it motivated me anyway.
So, during the 3rd quarter I declared, “I will bet 5,000 won” (about $5) “that the first turnover will be returned for a touchdown”. There wasn’t an immediate response. People are thinking about the fact that this game was recorded. It already happened 12 hours ago. But I’ve been whooping like a madman every time the Saints do something good and I’m obviously way into the game. I must have seemed trustworthy enough to Brandon, because he took me up on it.
You know the rest. There was a single turnover. It was an interception returned for a touchdown. It was the game-clincher, and it was clear after that the Saints had pulled off the upset. Brandon paid up immediately, but he did ask me directly if I knew what would happen. He was wondering if he’d been cheated. I can’t blame him. It’s a crazy bet. Jason remains convinced that I did know the outcome. I feel kind of weird about it, actually. I mean, I’m honest to a fault. I won’t even tell someone I like their new haircut when I actually don’t. It’s almost pathological. But of course, no one here has known me for longer than 4 months, and how can they know?
In any case, it was an awesome game. Truly one for the ages. Considering that I hadn’t seen a football game in months before this one, I was just in ecstasy. It had everything, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer team or a cooler city. Long live the Saints!
See you next week!
-Randy
Worldwide, the ultimate in sports unity is soccer’s World Cup. Entire nations will come to a stop when their team has a big match. People will stay up all hours of the night to see if their homeland will advance. Surprisingly, another World Cup is nearly upon us. It’s hard to believe it’s been 4 years since the last one. In fact, it seems like just yesterday I was ignoring this event. I kid, I kid. Soccer is a wonderful sport—if you shrink the field by about a hundred yards. And widen those goals a bit, too. I’m tired of seeing all those nice open shots fly into the stands. The goal is about 800 times bigger than the ball! What do they pay you people for!?
Okay, so Americans have a hard time enjoying soccer. Too many ties, not enough blood. Soccer is a sport where there is incentive for a player who is not hurt at all to roll around on the ground screaming like a sissy trying to draw a red card on his opponent. Football is a sport where players whose tendons are pathetically hanging by a thread will shoot themselves up with cortisone, then play as though nothing has happened. They won’t be able to walk when they’re fifty, but that’s OK. They never intended to live that long anyway! Hoo-ah!
Therefore, the ultimate in American sports togetherness is the Super Bowl. Super Bowl Sunday is the 2nd biggest food day of the year in America. That’s a fact. Someone crunched the numbers and determined that more food is consumed on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day except Thanksgiving.
It’s not such a big day in Korea, it turns out. In fact, I saw no sign at all that anyone was aware what day it was. That’s not too surprising. In Korean time, kick-off was at 8:30 AM on a Monday. And also, there’s the small matter that no one knows what the hell a football is. Furthermore, the game was going to be broadcast while I was at work reminding six year olds to speak in complete sentences. It looked like I’d be high and dry for what promised to be one of the most exciting Super Bowl match-ups in years.
Then I got the facebook message. Brandon (who is Canadian, actually, so I dunno why he cares) found a place that would be replaying the game that night at 9. Excellent! I spent my Monday in media blackout. No internet at all. I was rooting for the Saints, but I didn’t think they would win. But who knows? Football is one of the least predictable sports. Just two years ago the Giants beat the Patriots, and that was ten times more David and Goliath than Saints over Colts would be. By the way, I just noticed that calling that Giants-Pats Super Bowl a David and Goliath story is funny because Goliath himself was a giant. Can’t believe that took me two years to notice.
There were four of us traveling out to Sinchon, where the bar was located. Sinchon is a busy place with tons of bars, so it wasn’t easy to find. Luckily, it was obvious what we were looking for. A foreigner, who turned out to work for the bar, walked up to us and said “Are you guys looking for Beer O’Clock? It’s this way.” He saw some Westerners and said to himself, ah, here are some of my customers. Smart plan. Trolling the streets for foreigners on the night of the Super Bowl replay.
About the game itself, what is left to say? It was an epic game. I think the page has been irrevocably turned on the reputation of the Super Bowl in terms of game quality. When I was a little kid, everyone always talked about how the Super Bowl was always a terrible game. And, in those days, that was true more often than not. Usually one team would dominate and the other would be ruthlessly humiliated in the most watched TV program of the year. It was ugly.
But somewhere along the line that changed. I think the transition was the Rams-Titans game. That was a great, close game with a highly memorable finish. That Titan player extending his arm as far as he could and coming up a yard short of the end zone as time expired is one of the best photos in NFL history. Since then, good games have clearly outnumbered bad ones at the Super Bowl. The only 2 stinkers were Ravens-Giants and Bucs-Raiders.
Even in a decade of good Super Bowls, however, this year’s stands out. Simply put, this was one of the most exciting football games I’ve ever seen. There were goal line stands, a two-point conversion complete with the drama of a successful replay challenge, A FUCKING ON-SIDE KICK TO START THE SECOND HALF!!, hardly any penalties, and of course, the game-clinching pick-six.
I may be a suspicious character in Brandon’s eyes because of that interception. I swear, I saw nothing and heard nothing about the game. But somehow, after more than a full half with no turnovers, I got this strange feeling that any turnover would be taken back for a touchdown immediately. I think I based this on a few things. 1. It was a pass-happy game so any turnover would likely be an interception, which are more likely to be turned than fumbles. 2. The defenses of both teams are kind of middle of the road, overall, but both have a mean opportunistic streak. They capitalize on the opportunities given to them. 3. The game was just so damn dramatic by this point that a turnover not leading to an immediate touchdown would have been anticlimactic somehow.
That third point isn’t really based in logic, but I’m sure it motivated me anyway.
So, during the 3rd quarter I declared, “I will bet 5,000 won” (about $5) “that the first turnover will be returned for a touchdown”. There wasn’t an immediate response. People are thinking about the fact that this game was recorded. It already happened 12 hours ago. But I’ve been whooping like a madman every time the Saints do something good and I’m obviously way into the game. I must have seemed trustworthy enough to Brandon, because he took me up on it.
You know the rest. There was a single turnover. It was an interception returned for a touchdown. It was the game-clincher, and it was clear after that the Saints had pulled off the upset. Brandon paid up immediately, but he did ask me directly if I knew what would happen. He was wondering if he’d been cheated. I can’t blame him. It’s a crazy bet. Jason remains convinced that I did know the outcome. I feel kind of weird about it, actually. I mean, I’m honest to a fault. I won’t even tell someone I like their new haircut when I actually don’t. It’s almost pathological. But of course, no one here has known me for longer than 4 months, and how can they know?
In any case, it was an awesome game. Truly one for the ages. Considering that I hadn’t seen a football game in months before this one, I was just in ecstasy. It had everything, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer team or a cooler city. Long live the Saints!
See you next week!
-Randy
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Hell If I Know!
As promised, this week I'm writing about going to church last weekend. It took me a long time to get started on this post. It turns out that I have a lot to say, and at the same time, very little to say. I guess I'll start with Phil.
I met Phil a month after I got here. I was in Seoul for a meet-up of foreigners and Koreans who want to meet foreigners. Basically, some guy just rents out a bar and serves refreshments, and people meet people. It's nice.
So I met some folks, had some drinks, ate some snacks and then 11 o'clock rolled around and it was time for the party to come to an end. Sadly, the bar had other plans for the late evening, and they were kicking us out. That suited me fine. I was really tired that weekend and ready to go home anyway.
I got on the subway and settled in for my long ride back. I was just spacing out staring at the empty seats across from me, nothing on my mind, when the train became the second place that night to evict me on account of lateness. Going from Deokso to Seoul takes anywhere from 40 to 90 minutes, depending on where you're going. This little gathering was a little more than an hour away from my place. And if you know your subway systems, you know this: They hate to be out late. Even in Tokyo, the most populous damn city in the world, the trains stop running at midnight. Get a cab, you lout! the city planners seem to be saying.
Here's where Phil comes in. Being evicted from a train along with a couple dozen others seemed like the perfect opportunity to strike up a conversation with a random foreigner. He was the only other foreigner around, so why not play the spy game with him? The spy game is where you talk in English with another native speaker in a country where hardly anyone speaks English. It's like a secret code! We could be talking about stamps, or football, or Whitney Houston singles, or whatever. They'll never break our code!
I saw some major super experts at the spy game a few weeks ago. On the way back from this snowboard jump competition thing they did in Seoul, there were 5 deaf (or maybe just hard of hearing) guys having what appeared to be a really involving and fast-flowing conversation in sign language. It was IMPOSSIBLE not to stare. An animated conversation conducted in silence. It was so fucking cool. I will never look that cool playing the spy game. The most interesting part about sign language conversation with many participants: they're always scanning around the circle of people to make sure they aren't missing what anyone is "saying".
Back to Phil. We started talking and we found out we were both headed in the same direction, so we should split the cab fare. He was getting off before me, in Guri, about 7 or 8 minutes cab ride from Deokso, but right along the way. We found a cab as soon as we left the train station, as they were all lined up outside to take advantage of the trains stopping. A cab driver looked at us and revealed himself to have psychic powers by asking "Deokso yuhk?" meaning "Deokso station?" Yes, indeed, Mr. Cab Driver.
During the cab ride I'm asking Phil a lot of questions. I'm intrigued because, although he is a teacher here (like almost all foreigners living here) he is around 40 years old. It's kind of novel to meet someone as old as 30. 40 is downright mysterious.
He tells me that he found out about teaching Korea because of his church in England. It seems his church of choice back home was a Korean church. The pastor was Korean, and so were most of the congregants. Phil volunteered to help some of them out by giving them English lessons. He enjoyed it, and they thought he was good at it, so when he hurt his back and had to quit his previous job, coming to Korea to teach English seemed like a natural fit.
I was intrigued. For a while I was describing myself as agnostic in the sense of "I really don't think there's a God, but I know I can't be sure". But about four months before coming to Korea that changed. At this point, I have almost no idea what I believe. It's all very ambiguous for me, and I can't say I feel certain about anything at all. But I definitely lean towards believing that there is such a thing as a greater purpose to our lives, and I'm also pretty sure that strict materialism (meaning the idea that only what is physical is "real") is wrong. I like the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. I don't know if I really believe in them, but you should check 'em out.
I wanted to talk to Phil about church. I thought it would be interesting to go and see how I felt. I can't see myself coming to be an adherent of any organized religion, or any sort of religion that has some book they point to and say "There it is. It's all in there." Just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. On the other hand, it could be very moving to go to a place that serves as a center of both faith and community in the lives of many people. I figured I'd get something out of it.
Phil told me he'd love to have me along one day. Talked about how he just feels like something is missing when he hasn't been going to church. It seemed very important to him. I gave him my phone number. Why not?
Well, it turned out he would need that phone number right away. When we got to Guri, he got out of the cab and we had driven off before he remembered to pay his part of the fare. He called me up immediately, sounding very embarrassed and told me he'd pay me back when he saw me again. I said not to worry about it.
Flash forward a couple of months and I've just never felt like calling Phil up. It's still in the back of my mind, but I'm not really thinking about it. I'm on the subway one day, heading home after buying an SNES (hell yes!) when some foreigner across the aisle seems to want to play the spy game with me. I don't want to play, and I'm listening to music, so I just nod at him. At the next stop, the person next to me gets up and the foreigner comes over to me with a 10,000 won note in hand (that's about $10). It's Phil! I didn't recognize him! He hands me the bill and says he never paid me back for the cab. What a man!
Well after that there was just no excuse. The next weekend I could just go ahead and pencil in "going to church" on my daily planner that I don't actually have. Unless you mean my BRAIN!
I met Phil at the subway platform in Guri at about 9 AM the next Sunday. Immediately I had a rush of church nostalgia. Phil was drinking coffee and the smell suddenly transported me back to my childhood. It reminded me instantly of the smell at the tables where all the ladies would gather after the service to chat and drink coffee. Church coffee smells different somehow. Even if it's not church coffee. Even if it's Guri subway platform convenience store coffee, if it's being drunk by someone early Sunday morning it is church coffee, and it smells different.
And unfortunately, that's where the magic ended that day. Well, that might be going a bit far. But it is true that that sudden flooding of an old memory was the most vivid emotional experience of the trip. The sermon was about tithing.
Tithing, for those not familiar with the term, is giving 10% of what you earn to God. That means giving it to the church. This is explicitly stated in the Bible that you are to do this. The pastor made it quite clear (the sermon was in Korean but Phil and I had little radio receivers with earbuds so we could listen to a translation being done by one of the congregants) that the rule about tithing applies to absolutely everyone, and that a man who makes $100 a month has as much obligation to give $10 a month as a man who makes $10,000 a month has to give $1000. This was the topic of the entire sermon. Poor Phil. He apologized to me about our luck after the service. Then he told me this tidbit which was just tragic. He recently convinced another friend of his who is skeptical, or even antagonistic about religion, to come with him to a service at a totally separate church. The sermon that day? It was about tithing. Phil's skeptical friend felt completely validated. The church just wants your money, he said.
Now, I know some of you who are reading are faithful Christians yourselves. I have a sincere question for you (and anyone else who cares to comment, too). When I met Phil the second time, I wondered if that coincidence held meaning. As a person who has no idea what he believes, apparent coincidences are wide-open to interpretation. Maybe there are no coincidences. Maybe coincidences are all that there is, and everything, including the universe is just one big coincidence. I had renewed vigor about the idea of going to church after that second meeting because, hey, maybe it meant something. Maybe it didn't, but maybe it did.
That was a coincidence that seemed to point in one direction, and then I had one that seemed to point in the other. Or rather, Phil had one. Both of his God-curious friends get a sermon on tithing? I went to church plenty of times as a kid and I don't ever remember a sermon about tithing. It's not exactly the first topic pastors want to go to. It's not a very popular one. It doesn't do much to get people excited about going to church, and really, that's what all pastors want. Even if a pastor is just looking to take people's money (which I think is probably a rare pastor indeed. a person with a fraudulent nature and an ability to lie convincingly and con people could make more money with far less effort in lots of other jobs.) their first priority will still be packing those pews. Tithing is, at most, a twice a year type topic. For both of Phil's tag-alongs to pick a day where they'd get this not-at-all-friendly-to-newcomers type message is quite a coincidence itself.
Acknowledging, of course, that it might mean nothing at all, and that all coincidences are just noise, what could it mean if it's more than that? What does a devout Christian make of this? My thought is, if it does have some meaning, or carries some message from the Universe to me, it's that organized religion is probably not where I'm supposed to be looking for answers. I feel like organized religion, with its "here are the answers" appeal, are lacking in mysticism.
But what on Earth could it mean for Phil? I dunno. In any case, I don't think that a coincidence that seems to lead away from church is some kind of effective evidence against the Christian God. Taking the longview, feeling unengaged by a sermon about tithing could be one step on a long roundabout path towards salvation. But it seems strange.
I don't know how to end this post anymore than I knew how to begin it, so I'll just leave you with something I wrote in my notebook a few months ago.
"If there is purpose, I don't know it. If God is trying to tell me something, I haven't been able to make out the words. It's time to make it up."
I hope this post was entertaining or interesting. I can usually assess what I write through other people's eyes pretty well, but I'm totally in the dark this time. My own feelings are too ambiguous. I'd love to see all kinds of comments or questions, on the blog, or e-mail or on skype, in person, or whatever. As always, I love you all.
Randy
I met Phil a month after I got here. I was in Seoul for a meet-up of foreigners and Koreans who want to meet foreigners. Basically, some guy just rents out a bar and serves refreshments, and people meet people. It's nice.
So I met some folks, had some drinks, ate some snacks and then 11 o'clock rolled around and it was time for the party to come to an end. Sadly, the bar had other plans for the late evening, and they were kicking us out. That suited me fine. I was really tired that weekend and ready to go home anyway.
I got on the subway and settled in for my long ride back. I was just spacing out staring at the empty seats across from me, nothing on my mind, when the train became the second place that night to evict me on account of lateness. Going from Deokso to Seoul takes anywhere from 40 to 90 minutes, depending on where you're going. This little gathering was a little more than an hour away from my place. And if you know your subway systems, you know this: They hate to be out late. Even in Tokyo, the most populous damn city in the world, the trains stop running at midnight. Get a cab, you lout! the city planners seem to be saying.
Here's where Phil comes in. Being evicted from a train along with a couple dozen others seemed like the perfect opportunity to strike up a conversation with a random foreigner. He was the only other foreigner around, so why not play the spy game with him? The spy game is where you talk in English with another native speaker in a country where hardly anyone speaks English. It's like a secret code! We could be talking about stamps, or football, or Whitney Houston singles, or whatever. They'll never break our code!
I saw some major super experts at the spy game a few weeks ago. On the way back from this snowboard jump competition thing they did in Seoul, there were 5 deaf (or maybe just hard of hearing) guys having what appeared to be a really involving and fast-flowing conversation in sign language. It was IMPOSSIBLE not to stare. An animated conversation conducted in silence. It was so fucking cool. I will never look that cool playing the spy game. The most interesting part about sign language conversation with many participants: they're always scanning around the circle of people to make sure they aren't missing what anyone is "saying".
Back to Phil. We started talking and we found out we were both headed in the same direction, so we should split the cab fare. He was getting off before me, in Guri, about 7 or 8 minutes cab ride from Deokso, but right along the way. We found a cab as soon as we left the train station, as they were all lined up outside to take advantage of the trains stopping. A cab driver looked at us and revealed himself to have psychic powers by asking "Deokso yuhk?" meaning "Deokso station?" Yes, indeed, Mr. Cab Driver.
During the cab ride I'm asking Phil a lot of questions. I'm intrigued because, although he is a teacher here (like almost all foreigners living here) he is around 40 years old. It's kind of novel to meet someone as old as 30. 40 is downright mysterious.
He tells me that he found out about teaching Korea because of his church in England. It seems his church of choice back home was a Korean church. The pastor was Korean, and so were most of the congregants. Phil volunteered to help some of them out by giving them English lessons. He enjoyed it, and they thought he was good at it, so when he hurt his back and had to quit his previous job, coming to Korea to teach English seemed like a natural fit.
I was intrigued. For a while I was describing myself as agnostic in the sense of "I really don't think there's a God, but I know I can't be sure". But about four months before coming to Korea that changed. At this point, I have almost no idea what I believe. It's all very ambiguous for me, and I can't say I feel certain about anything at all. But I definitely lean towards believing that there is such a thing as a greater purpose to our lives, and I'm also pretty sure that strict materialism (meaning the idea that only what is physical is "real") is wrong. I like the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin. I don't know if I really believe in them, but you should check 'em out.
I wanted to talk to Phil about church. I thought it would be interesting to go and see how I felt. I can't see myself coming to be an adherent of any organized religion, or any sort of religion that has some book they point to and say "There it is. It's all in there." Just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. On the other hand, it could be very moving to go to a place that serves as a center of both faith and community in the lives of many people. I figured I'd get something out of it.
Phil told me he'd love to have me along one day. Talked about how he just feels like something is missing when he hasn't been going to church. It seemed very important to him. I gave him my phone number. Why not?
Well, it turned out he would need that phone number right away. When we got to Guri, he got out of the cab and we had driven off before he remembered to pay his part of the fare. He called me up immediately, sounding very embarrassed and told me he'd pay me back when he saw me again. I said not to worry about it.
Flash forward a couple of months and I've just never felt like calling Phil up. It's still in the back of my mind, but I'm not really thinking about it. I'm on the subway one day, heading home after buying an SNES (hell yes!) when some foreigner across the aisle seems to want to play the spy game with me. I don't want to play, and I'm listening to music, so I just nod at him. At the next stop, the person next to me gets up and the foreigner comes over to me with a 10,000 won note in hand (that's about $10). It's Phil! I didn't recognize him! He hands me the bill and says he never paid me back for the cab. What a man!
Well after that there was just no excuse. The next weekend I could just go ahead and pencil in "going to church" on my daily planner that I don't actually have. Unless you mean my BRAIN!
I met Phil at the subway platform in Guri at about 9 AM the next Sunday. Immediately I had a rush of church nostalgia. Phil was drinking coffee and the smell suddenly transported me back to my childhood. It reminded me instantly of the smell at the tables where all the ladies would gather after the service to chat and drink coffee. Church coffee smells different somehow. Even if it's not church coffee. Even if it's Guri subway platform convenience store coffee, if it's being drunk by someone early Sunday morning it is church coffee, and it smells different.
And unfortunately, that's where the magic ended that day. Well, that might be going a bit far. But it is true that that sudden flooding of an old memory was the most vivid emotional experience of the trip. The sermon was about tithing.
Tithing, for those not familiar with the term, is giving 10% of what you earn to God. That means giving it to the church. This is explicitly stated in the Bible that you are to do this. The pastor made it quite clear (the sermon was in Korean but Phil and I had little radio receivers with earbuds so we could listen to a translation being done by one of the congregants) that the rule about tithing applies to absolutely everyone, and that a man who makes $100 a month has as much obligation to give $10 a month as a man who makes $10,000 a month has to give $1000. This was the topic of the entire sermon. Poor Phil. He apologized to me about our luck after the service. Then he told me this tidbit which was just tragic. He recently convinced another friend of his who is skeptical, or even antagonistic about religion, to come with him to a service at a totally separate church. The sermon that day? It was about tithing. Phil's skeptical friend felt completely validated. The church just wants your money, he said.
Now, I know some of you who are reading are faithful Christians yourselves. I have a sincere question for you (and anyone else who cares to comment, too). When I met Phil the second time, I wondered if that coincidence held meaning. As a person who has no idea what he believes, apparent coincidences are wide-open to interpretation. Maybe there are no coincidences. Maybe coincidences are all that there is, and everything, including the universe is just one big coincidence. I had renewed vigor about the idea of going to church after that second meeting because, hey, maybe it meant something. Maybe it didn't, but maybe it did.
That was a coincidence that seemed to point in one direction, and then I had one that seemed to point in the other. Or rather, Phil had one. Both of his God-curious friends get a sermon on tithing? I went to church plenty of times as a kid and I don't ever remember a sermon about tithing. It's not exactly the first topic pastors want to go to. It's not a very popular one. It doesn't do much to get people excited about going to church, and really, that's what all pastors want. Even if a pastor is just looking to take people's money (which I think is probably a rare pastor indeed. a person with a fraudulent nature and an ability to lie convincingly and con people could make more money with far less effort in lots of other jobs.) their first priority will still be packing those pews. Tithing is, at most, a twice a year type topic. For both of Phil's tag-alongs to pick a day where they'd get this not-at-all-friendly-to-newcomers type message is quite a coincidence itself.
Acknowledging, of course, that it might mean nothing at all, and that all coincidences are just noise, what could it mean if it's more than that? What does a devout Christian make of this? My thought is, if it does have some meaning, or carries some message from the Universe to me, it's that organized religion is probably not where I'm supposed to be looking for answers. I feel like organized religion, with its "here are the answers" appeal, are lacking in mysticism.
But what on Earth could it mean for Phil? I dunno. In any case, I don't think that a coincidence that seems to lead away from church is some kind of effective evidence against the Christian God. Taking the longview, feeling unengaged by a sermon about tithing could be one step on a long roundabout path towards salvation. But it seems strange.
I don't know how to end this post anymore than I knew how to begin it, so I'll just leave you with something I wrote in my notebook a few months ago.
"If there is purpose, I don't know it. If God is trying to tell me something, I haven't been able to make out the words. It's time to make it up."
I hope this post was entertaining or interesting. I can usually assess what I write through other people's eyes pretty well, but I'm totally in the dark this time. My own feelings are too ambiguous. I'd love to see all kinds of comments or questions, on the blog, or e-mail or on skype, in person, or whatever. As always, I love you all.
Randy
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy
Alrighty, friends and neighbors. It’s that time again. Lately, I’ve been chronicling weekend adventures. This weekend’s adventure was going to church! Going to church is an adventure? you ask incredulously. Well, yes. It’s an adventure when you’re in Korea and not religious, only vaguely spiritual, and you’re going with some 37 year old English guy you met when the trains stopped running one night and you caught the same cab because you were going in the same direction.
…However, that’s a story for next week. I’m not sure exactly how I felt about the church adventure, so I’ll need some time to process that one. Rather, this week, I’ll be talking about my brand spankin’ new SNES! Y’see, last weekend I went and bought myself a Super Nintendo. During the hike, I decided it was too cold to do things outside and I promised myself I would stay inside more for the next month or so. So, I went to the electronics market in Yongsan and bought my favorite video game console of all time. It’s a little tough finding games, but I’ve got a couple, and I’ve already logged like 10 hours on the sucker. It’s a bit surprising to me to see how passionate I still am about these old games. I try new games sometimes and almost all of them just completely fail to catch my interest. It’s so great to revisit childhood classics and find that they still satisfy in ways most modern games just can’t. It made me want to write something about how awesome they are.
Now then, the game I want to talk about today is Yoshi’s Island. Yoshi’s Island was released in 1995, just a year prior to the debut of the N64. By this time, the PlayStation was the hot new product on the market, ushering in a new generation of games. The new generation of consoles would be significantly more powerful than those that came before, capable of rendering fully 3D environments and delivering cinematic storytelling. In other words, 16-bit games were already anachronisms by this point.
With a 3D revolution rapidly approaching, Nintendo calmly released another new platformer on its aging flagship. But it wasn’t just any platformer, slapped together to make a few more bucks off a solid moneymaker before retiring it. Yoshi’s Island was billed as a sequel to Super Mario World, one of the most acclaimed games of all time, and certainly the most respected platformer of the SNES/Sega Genesis generation. Despite the fact that SNES sales had slowed by this point, it remained essential to create a high quality game. Anything less than brilliance from a Mario game being released shortly before the arrival of a new Nintendo console could be a brand-tarnishing failure. More importantly, stylistically, the game was a huge departure from previous Mario games. Both in look and in feel, it was a completely different experience than its predecessors. On the eve of Nintendo’s own transition to the great unknown of 3D gaming, they decided to rock the boat with their most sacred franchise. Why?
From 1985 to 1995 Nintendo almost single-handedly rescued the video game industry from a catastrophic collapse in 1984, and then proceeded to mold it into its own image. Profits became reliable. There was greater quality control. And for the first time, games were connecting with audiences in ways that made them seem like more than just a fad. They were batting .1000 in this era, and it was only when the times changed on them in the late 90s that they showed a costly failure to adapt.
Almost all of this, good and bad, can be laid at the feet of a single person. During this time, and even through today, the dominant creative force at Nintendo was Shigeru Miyamoto. Talk to anyone with any interest in games, and they can talk to you for hours about Shigeru Miyamoto. Outside of that world, however, he is largely unknown. This would be akin to a person who doesn’t care for basketball being unaware of the existence of a man named Michael Jordan. Shigeru Miyamoto was to video game design what Isaac Newton was to physics—at least in the 2D era. He laid down the rules. He replaced chaos with something new, and it worked fantastically.
Miyamoto was an art designer at Nintendo in the 80s. Nintendo was making arcade games, getting by in an industry that was about to hit a wall at about a thousand miles an hour. It’s all but forgotten now, but in 1984, the video game endured a crash of such monumental proportions, that many commenters dismissed the industry entirely as a fad whose time had passed. Atari went under. Mattel ceased to support its Colecovision. Home consoles were dead. Most of the companies making them, or making arcade games, were now bust. The industry was a victim of its own success. Anyone could make a game and put it on the Atari, and everyone did. The market became flooded with garbage that no one wanted to play. Supply was high, but demand was low for horrible games. After a few years of easy success, investors were overreaching to obscene degrees. One story that sums up the whole period: Atari made a video game adaptation of the movie E.T., giving its single programmer just six weeks to design and test it. They manufactured 5 million cartridges, more than there existed Ataris to play it. The game was such an abomination that virtually every copy sold was eventually returned. With mounds and mounds of unwanted games, Atari buried them in a landfill in New Mexico. Here lies Atari. Born 1972. Died 1984.
The destruction of the 1984 crisis was widespread. Even companies that weren’t arrogantly lax about quality suffered greatly. Nintendo was no exception. Nearly wiped out, and with little resources to spare, they pinned their hopes of surviving the crisis on a 25 year old art designer. Shigeru Miyamoto was one of a very small number of employees remaining at the company. He was essentially told “We will die if you don’t make a hit game. Do whatever you want.” He delivered the arcade game Donkey Kong. It was a smash success, and Nintendo was now flush with cash at a time when none of their competitors could afford their bankruptcy attorneys’ fees. They decided to try their hand at the home console market. Known as the Famicom in Japan, the NES would dominate the home console market to a degree that was unprecedented, and very likely can never be seen again. And what game was packaged with it, utterly blowing kids’ minds and hooking them for life? Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros.
It’s difficult to objectively evaluate Super Mario Bros. 25 years after its appearance. (Yes. 25 years. I know, I know. You’re old. So am I. Only a 12 year old could still feel young after reading that.) It completely changed peoples’ expectations of what video games could be. It encouraged exploration. With secrets and warp zones scattered everywhere, it meant that one play-through was just the beginning. It also featured significantly better art design than anything that had come before. It looked like what it was, a game made by a young art designer filled with confidence and enthusiasm. It was cool!
Yet despite all this difference from the standard expectations of the time, it was still very simple. You had two buttons. You could run. You could jump. That’s all you needed. You had three power-ups. A star made you invincible and the music changed to reflect the fact that you were now DER UBERMENCSH. A mushroom made you big. A flower allowed you to shoot fire, and turned your overalls a nifty red and white. Okay. None of that makes any sense, but it’s simple enough. There was a story, which was, hilarious, more involved than most video game plots. This was the story: King Koopa kidnapped the princess and the chubby plumber will get her back. Bam! Kids can relate to that story. There’s a monster. There’s a princess. There’s some dude who could be your dad (he’s the hero). You’re into that story. It wasn’t much, but it was more than Pac-Man had.
And this basically encapsulated the Miyamoto method. He made off-beat decisions that somehow resonated instantly with vast audiences. This game featured flying fish, bullets from nowhere, crazy springs that could vault you over 30 foot gaps, tunnels all over the damn place, spinning wheels of fire, beanstalks to the sky, and God knows what else I’m forgetting. It all worked. None of it seemed out of place. We ate this up as kids. It was the coolest thing ever. And the thing that made it really remarkable was that it was still simple enough for a 4 year old to enjoy. There it is. That was the formula that was often imitated but rarely duplicated. Eccentric art design, a feeling of simplicity, and gameplay that rewards exploration. He just made a game that he’d want to play.
With a picture of Miyamoto in our heads, Yoshi’s Island starts to seem more inevitable than unexpected. The SNES had a great run. The Sega Genesis had given Nintendo a scare by capturing a similar market share, but the fact was, they made a ton of money and more good games than you could shake a stick at. Now, imagine you are Shigeru Miyamoto. You’re now too busy at Nintendo to actually direct many games. You’re mostly a producer now. You basically set the creative philosophy of your company, which has grown massive thanks in large part to the success of your Donkey Kong, Mario, and Zelda franchises. And now there’s time for one more Mario game before the SNES punches its ticket and steps aside to make way for the future. What do you do?
Here’s what you do. You make a game where all the backgrounds look like they were hand-drawn with crayons and colored pencils. You do that in response to your superiors asking you to make the game more high-tech. You take it totally in the other direction and kick so much ass at it that they say, hey, you know what, you’re right. That looks a lot better. You make a game with an “enemy” called Fuzzy that doesn’t actually hurt the player, but rather causes the images on the screen to toss around like waves on the ocean and distorts the music. You’re Shigeru Miyamoto. If you want to make an enemy that causes kids to feel like they’re tripping their shit, you do it! It’s the last Mario game of the 2D era. Go nuts! You make the game a prequel about Mario and Luigi as babies. You know why? I don’t know, probably because you drew it in your sketchbook and thought it was hilarious. Your sketchbook is worth its weight in gold, dammit. You’re Shigeru Miyamoto. You rescued not just a company, but a whole damn industry by designing whatever the fuck you thought was cool.
This game was trippy. Its art style was radical, and I don’t mean that in the 80s sense of the term. I mean it was actually such a significant departure from every single one of its peers as to be radical. Yoshi can’t even die by getting hit by enemies. You only lose by losing baby Mario for too long. This game dispensed with “health”. It was such a ridiculous wellspring of creativity that it still makes games today look stale.
And that’s why games have only regressed for me since the SNES. High-powered 3D graphics can be very immersive, but they’re so technically demanding, and so expensive to create (because of the manpower necessary) that this kind of free-wheeling creativity has to be put aside. In 1995, Shigeru Miyamoto could make the game he wanted and put in the elements he wanted, more or less on a lark. He could wake up and say, “You know what would be fun? An enemy that makes the screen rock back and forth but doesn’t hurt you.” And there it would be in the game.
Nowadays, innovation in games is as dangerous as innovation in heavily promoted Hollywood blockbusters. When your movie costs $200 million, it must make money. Even if that means delivering something utterly formulaic. When your game costs $50 million, it’s the same story.
Yoshi’s Story was the perfect swan song for the SNES. It was an exclamation point ending an era where it was still financially defensible to do crazy things with big franchises. It was weird and funky and proud of it. Its energy continues to make it a blast 15 years later. Those crayon and colored pencil backgrounds still look way too cool. Hats off to Shiggy. Now, excuse me, I have to make a dinosaur spit watermelon seeds at bad guys who are walking around on stilts.
…However, that’s a story for next week. I’m not sure exactly how I felt about the church adventure, so I’ll need some time to process that one. Rather, this week, I’ll be talking about my brand spankin’ new SNES! Y’see, last weekend I went and bought myself a Super Nintendo. During the hike, I decided it was too cold to do things outside and I promised myself I would stay inside more for the next month or so. So, I went to the electronics market in Yongsan and bought my favorite video game console of all time. It’s a little tough finding games, but I’ve got a couple, and I’ve already logged like 10 hours on the sucker. It’s a bit surprising to me to see how passionate I still am about these old games. I try new games sometimes and almost all of them just completely fail to catch my interest. It’s so great to revisit childhood classics and find that they still satisfy in ways most modern games just can’t. It made me want to write something about how awesome they are.
Now then, the game I want to talk about today is Yoshi’s Island. Yoshi’s Island was released in 1995, just a year prior to the debut of the N64. By this time, the PlayStation was the hot new product on the market, ushering in a new generation of games. The new generation of consoles would be significantly more powerful than those that came before, capable of rendering fully 3D environments and delivering cinematic storytelling. In other words, 16-bit games were already anachronisms by this point.
With a 3D revolution rapidly approaching, Nintendo calmly released another new platformer on its aging flagship. But it wasn’t just any platformer, slapped together to make a few more bucks off a solid moneymaker before retiring it. Yoshi’s Island was billed as a sequel to Super Mario World, one of the most acclaimed games of all time, and certainly the most respected platformer of the SNES/Sega Genesis generation. Despite the fact that SNES sales had slowed by this point, it remained essential to create a high quality game. Anything less than brilliance from a Mario game being released shortly before the arrival of a new Nintendo console could be a brand-tarnishing failure. More importantly, stylistically, the game was a huge departure from previous Mario games. Both in look and in feel, it was a completely different experience than its predecessors. On the eve of Nintendo’s own transition to the great unknown of 3D gaming, they decided to rock the boat with their most sacred franchise. Why?
From 1985 to 1995 Nintendo almost single-handedly rescued the video game industry from a catastrophic collapse in 1984, and then proceeded to mold it into its own image. Profits became reliable. There was greater quality control. And for the first time, games were connecting with audiences in ways that made them seem like more than just a fad. They were batting .1000 in this era, and it was only when the times changed on them in the late 90s that they showed a costly failure to adapt.
Almost all of this, good and bad, can be laid at the feet of a single person. During this time, and even through today, the dominant creative force at Nintendo was Shigeru Miyamoto. Talk to anyone with any interest in games, and they can talk to you for hours about Shigeru Miyamoto. Outside of that world, however, he is largely unknown. This would be akin to a person who doesn’t care for basketball being unaware of the existence of a man named Michael Jordan. Shigeru Miyamoto was to video game design what Isaac Newton was to physics—at least in the 2D era. He laid down the rules. He replaced chaos with something new, and it worked fantastically.
Miyamoto was an art designer at Nintendo in the 80s. Nintendo was making arcade games, getting by in an industry that was about to hit a wall at about a thousand miles an hour. It’s all but forgotten now, but in 1984, the video game endured a crash of such monumental proportions, that many commenters dismissed the industry entirely as a fad whose time had passed. Atari went under. Mattel ceased to support its Colecovision. Home consoles were dead. Most of the companies making them, or making arcade games, were now bust. The industry was a victim of its own success. Anyone could make a game and put it on the Atari, and everyone did. The market became flooded with garbage that no one wanted to play. Supply was high, but demand was low for horrible games. After a few years of easy success, investors were overreaching to obscene degrees. One story that sums up the whole period: Atari made a video game adaptation of the movie E.T., giving its single programmer just six weeks to design and test it. They manufactured 5 million cartridges, more than there existed Ataris to play it. The game was such an abomination that virtually every copy sold was eventually returned. With mounds and mounds of unwanted games, Atari buried them in a landfill in New Mexico. Here lies Atari. Born 1972. Died 1984.
The destruction of the 1984 crisis was widespread. Even companies that weren’t arrogantly lax about quality suffered greatly. Nintendo was no exception. Nearly wiped out, and with little resources to spare, they pinned their hopes of surviving the crisis on a 25 year old art designer. Shigeru Miyamoto was one of a very small number of employees remaining at the company. He was essentially told “We will die if you don’t make a hit game. Do whatever you want.” He delivered the arcade game Donkey Kong. It was a smash success, and Nintendo was now flush with cash at a time when none of their competitors could afford their bankruptcy attorneys’ fees. They decided to try their hand at the home console market. Known as the Famicom in Japan, the NES would dominate the home console market to a degree that was unprecedented, and very likely can never be seen again. And what game was packaged with it, utterly blowing kids’ minds and hooking them for life? Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros.
It’s difficult to objectively evaluate Super Mario Bros. 25 years after its appearance. (Yes. 25 years. I know, I know. You’re old. So am I. Only a 12 year old could still feel young after reading that.) It completely changed peoples’ expectations of what video games could be. It encouraged exploration. With secrets and warp zones scattered everywhere, it meant that one play-through was just the beginning. It also featured significantly better art design than anything that had come before. It looked like what it was, a game made by a young art designer filled with confidence and enthusiasm. It was cool!
Yet despite all this difference from the standard expectations of the time, it was still very simple. You had two buttons. You could run. You could jump. That’s all you needed. You had three power-ups. A star made you invincible and the music changed to reflect the fact that you were now DER UBERMENCSH. A mushroom made you big. A flower allowed you to shoot fire, and turned your overalls a nifty red and white. Okay. None of that makes any sense, but it’s simple enough. There was a story, which was, hilarious, more involved than most video game plots. This was the story: King Koopa kidnapped the princess and the chubby plumber will get her back. Bam! Kids can relate to that story. There’s a monster. There’s a princess. There’s some dude who could be your dad (he’s the hero). You’re into that story. It wasn’t much, but it was more than Pac-Man had.
And this basically encapsulated the Miyamoto method. He made off-beat decisions that somehow resonated instantly with vast audiences. This game featured flying fish, bullets from nowhere, crazy springs that could vault you over 30 foot gaps, tunnels all over the damn place, spinning wheels of fire, beanstalks to the sky, and God knows what else I’m forgetting. It all worked. None of it seemed out of place. We ate this up as kids. It was the coolest thing ever. And the thing that made it really remarkable was that it was still simple enough for a 4 year old to enjoy. There it is. That was the formula that was often imitated but rarely duplicated. Eccentric art design, a feeling of simplicity, and gameplay that rewards exploration. He just made a game that he’d want to play.
With a picture of Miyamoto in our heads, Yoshi’s Island starts to seem more inevitable than unexpected. The SNES had a great run. The Sega Genesis had given Nintendo a scare by capturing a similar market share, but the fact was, they made a ton of money and more good games than you could shake a stick at. Now, imagine you are Shigeru Miyamoto. You’re now too busy at Nintendo to actually direct many games. You’re mostly a producer now. You basically set the creative philosophy of your company, which has grown massive thanks in large part to the success of your Donkey Kong, Mario, and Zelda franchises. And now there’s time for one more Mario game before the SNES punches its ticket and steps aside to make way for the future. What do you do?
Here’s what you do. You make a game where all the backgrounds look like they were hand-drawn with crayons and colored pencils. You do that in response to your superiors asking you to make the game more high-tech. You take it totally in the other direction and kick so much ass at it that they say, hey, you know what, you’re right. That looks a lot better. You make a game with an “enemy” called Fuzzy that doesn’t actually hurt the player, but rather causes the images on the screen to toss around like waves on the ocean and distorts the music. You’re Shigeru Miyamoto. If you want to make an enemy that causes kids to feel like they’re tripping their shit, you do it! It’s the last Mario game of the 2D era. Go nuts! You make the game a prequel about Mario and Luigi as babies. You know why? I don’t know, probably because you drew it in your sketchbook and thought it was hilarious. Your sketchbook is worth its weight in gold, dammit. You’re Shigeru Miyamoto. You rescued not just a company, but a whole damn industry by designing whatever the fuck you thought was cool.
This game was trippy. Its art style was radical, and I don’t mean that in the 80s sense of the term. I mean it was actually such a significant departure from every single one of its peers as to be radical. Yoshi can’t even die by getting hit by enemies. You only lose by losing baby Mario for too long. This game dispensed with “health”. It was such a ridiculous wellspring of creativity that it still makes games today look stale.
And that’s why games have only regressed for me since the SNES. High-powered 3D graphics can be very immersive, but they’re so technically demanding, and so expensive to create (because of the manpower necessary) that this kind of free-wheeling creativity has to be put aside. In 1995, Shigeru Miyamoto could make the game he wanted and put in the elements he wanted, more or less on a lark. He could wake up and say, “You know what would be fun? An enemy that makes the screen rock back and forth but doesn’t hurt you.” And there it would be in the game.
Nowadays, innovation in games is as dangerous as innovation in heavily promoted Hollywood blockbusters. When your movie costs $200 million, it must make money. Even if that means delivering something utterly formulaic. When your game costs $50 million, it’s the same story.
Yoshi’s Story was the perfect swan song for the SNES. It was an exclamation point ending an era where it was still financially defensible to do crazy things with big franchises. It was weird and funky and proud of it. Its energy continues to make it a blast 15 years later. Those crayon and colored pencil backgrounds still look way too cool. Hats off to Shiggy. Now, excuse me, I have to make a dinosaur spit watermelon seeds at bad guys who are walking around on stilts.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Early (early!!) morning hiking and value of foreigner friendly tour groups
When the bus reaches the foot of the mountain at last it is 4 AM. Passengers brace for the cold and stumble out into the night. We are a hundred miles from Seoul, and the stars are out. Away from the light pollution—not to mention the regular pollution—dozens more stars are visible over the skinny bare trees and small snow-covered buildings. It gives the night an eerie feeling to be able to see many stars after so long without seeing any. It’s like walking through a graveyard. We are being watched from above, the only living things in a silent space.
It takes a special sort of person to climb a mountain before sunrise in the coldest month of the year, so most of these people are completely insane. Sitting in ront of me on the bus is Nate, whose body seems to naturally produce methamphetamines by the kilo. He takes six hour walks through the back alleys of Seoul, and has much of the city mapped out in his head. Nate practically scoffs at the notion of sleeping on the bus ride. He tells Anthony and me that he is “always too wired” to sleep on these midnight hike bus trips, preferring to talk to whoever is awake. Nate has the appearance of a young intellectual. He is dressed neatly, but practically, is already almost bald in his mid-20s, and studied Marxism in college. When he’s not relaxing with marthon walks and midnight hikes, he likes to do “lots of writing, drawing, painting, whatever”. I don’t ask him what does when he’s tired. Might as well ask a bonfire what it does when it gets cold.
The passenger with the most enthusiasm of all is Tim from Seattle. He came prepared for a late night/early morning hike. He has a flask of vodka and insists we all share share share. He spends the next three hours getting himself to the just-right level o drunkenness. You can tell he’s an old hand at this. He’s looking out for us, really, by offering liquor, because as he says, “If you go hiking at 4 in the morning and you’re not drunk, there’s something wrong with you.” When we divide into groups to look out for each other on the trails he christens his group “the snow leopards.” Later I found out he assigned them all numbers based on how effective a member of the Snow Leopards they were. SL6 had much to be ashamed of.
And so on in this fashion. There were more crazy characters of course. We were a bag of mixed nuts. The bus was pretty evenly divied between gung-ho crazies like Time and Nate and crazies of a more disbelieving sort. I was one of these. When I told people this was my first real hike, my first winter anywhere cold, and eespecially when they saw my old, busted-up K-Swisses, they could saely file me in the “what in the hell am I doing here?” group of nuts. It was a good fit for me, to be honest. Being born must have been a very confusing process for me, because I always find it very bewildering just to be alive.
Breakfast was at 9 AM, because that’s when we made it all the way back down the mountain and to the ski lodge restaurant. Outside there are maybe 50 snow sculptures of all different sizes and levels of detail. We’re at the grounds for one of Korea’s winter festivals. Festivals are huge here, especially in the warmer months. But even in the dead of winter you can have a good time with weekends of ice fishing, or ice sculptures and open bazaars with handmade goods for your tourism collection.
Shockingly, bottles of soju appear at nearby tables. Koreans are ordering liquor with their breakfast. At our table full of foreigners, we wash our pancakes and noodles down with nothing stronger than Coca-Cola. Caffeine is a drug that may come in handy here, but for us hikers, no alcohol is needed. We’re drunk on warmth. Being inside feels so good.
We’ve all been hiking for 4 hours already today, but not one of us seems the least bit tired. I’m on an hour of sleep. Some people are on less. Nobody seems to care. The bus will be back to take us home at 5 PM. The day is young, and one thing about coming back from the top of a mountain when the wind chill is making it feel like it’s less than 0 degrees Fahrenheit… everything seems very easy. “You can’t hurt me, I’m already dead! My frozen corpse is on top of the mountain. Bring it!”
The hike itself was strenuous but fairly uneventful. People met people and told stories from their lives. That’s really what these events are all about. People can hike on their own, or just organize something with a few friends. The reason people go in these big groups, always organized by one crazy-ambitious Korean social butterfly with a penchant for foreigners, is that they’re a great way to make friends. Maybe 60 people altogether came on the buses. Mostly foreigners, but some Koreans, most of whom spoke very good English. About half of the group stayed behind where the buses stopped, at a little inn that consisted of 4 rooms full of sleeping bags.
One thing about meeting new people here: The first 5 minutes of conversation is somehow even easier than it was in college. You have those standard questions in college about major, and living situation, and where you’re from, and there are similar questions here, but now the answers are more interesting. People are from all over the English speaking world, and hagwon life (private schools, almost all of which have kindergarten classes) is so chaotic and nutty that everyone is having a totally different experience. I always felt like the “getting to know you” basics were something to avoid if you could think of better topics of conversation. You ask me my major when you don’t know what to ask. Now I really am very interested in the answers to all these questions. The responses are so much more diverse. I talked to a handful of people on the way up the mountain and ended up spending quite a bit of time during the day with a few of them.
The main challenge of the hike was not the steepness of the incline, even though that was quite steep. It was the cold. I longed for a scarf, but Anthony told me his was doing him very little good, and that the most noticeable effect it was having was to give his snot a place to freeze right in front of his face. I walked much of the way with one my gloved hands in front of my face, breathing into my palm to warm my cheeks, trying not to fog my glasses over.
Near the top, Warren, the Korean guy who put this group together, told us to slow our pace. We all wanted to go quickly to generate some body heat. Much better to feel the pain of exertion than the bite of the cold. One of the first winter lessons I learned here. When it’s extremely cold, take the stairs, not the escalator. It’ll warm you up. Warren was right, though. We needed to slow down so we’d make the top of the mountain just at sunrise, and not earlier. If we made it earlier, we’d have to stay there longer. He warned us “This is nothing. The top is much, much colder, and windier. If you think this is bad, this is nothing.” We had to time it so that our beautiful vista was there waiting for us. We did a pretty good job. We made it about 15 minutes after sunrise, which is just about perfect.
Near the top of the mountain, the path leveled out for about 30 meters, and there were no trees along the side. I could see the whole valley stretching out for miles. It was as high up on a mountain as I’ve been before, and the sky was pink behind the other peaks. There were so many trees, and they were inconsistently green and bare, so there’d be a patch of brown spires and then a patch of heroically green warriors. It was a really wonderful view.
From there, the mountain peak was just another five minutes up, but I can’t recommend those five minutes. Warren was so right about conditions at the top. The cold was absolutely brutal. I’ve never, ever been so cold in my life. I have little memory of the view from the mountaintop. All I remember is cold, cold, cold. The wind was blowing so hard and there were no trees to block it. Winter was attempting to murder us for having the arrogance to scale this mountain. After about two minutes, I’d had enough and decided to start the descent. I was starting to go just as Warren called out “Let’s get a group picture.” I shouted “No!” and that was that. About 10 people followed right away, and Warren’s idea went totally unheeded. This peak was not worth it when there was an infinitely less cold spot just 20 or 30 meters lower. In the immortal words of Socrates, “Fuck that noise.”
The rest of the day was spent in circumstances similar to those at breakfast. I spent about 45 minutes giving all the snow sculptures a close look, and many of them were quite cool. There was an area with a children’s literature theme featuring a rad Dr. Seuss inspired house, and a nice likeness of the Little Prince standing about 15 feet tall (the Very Big Prince?). However, other than that, there wasn’t a whole lot going on at the festival. This same festival is running through next week, and sculptures were under construction during our time there. (Watching the construction is interesting. When they are just starting out they use small cranes to move the snow. Then they use chainsaws, and finally, their hands. It’s a great show of the principle that you have to trade power for precision and vice versa) I imagine most of the major attractions, like the planned attempt at breaking a Guinness record for largest snowball fight, will probably be next week. It was a pretty low-key festival this weekend.
In all honesty, that was fine by me. I spent about an hour in a coffee shop getting acquainted with some very nice folks, and then another hour or so later on with the same group having lunch. After such a rigorous hike it was nice to spend the whole day relaxing in the nice, warm indoors, especially when there were a lot of new faces. I’ll definitely be doing another tour with this group at some point.
Apparently, there are a lot of regulars, and it really seems like this sort of thing is a better way to make friends than going out to bars. For one thing, you get to see different things about Korea at the same time, and for another thing, I’m not very good at shouting, or at hearing people in loud places, so it’s difficult for me to have much of a conversation in many bars. Even with those considerations though, I’ve been satisfied with the pace I’ve been meeting people. So now I’m really excited to discover how superior these tour groups are for that purpose. I think it’s really going to up the quality of life.
Until next time,
Love and toodles,
Randy
It takes a special sort of person to climb a mountain before sunrise in the coldest month of the year, so most of these people are completely insane. Sitting in ront of me on the bus is Nate, whose body seems to naturally produce methamphetamines by the kilo. He takes six hour walks through the back alleys of Seoul, and has much of the city mapped out in his head. Nate practically scoffs at the notion of sleeping on the bus ride. He tells Anthony and me that he is “always too wired” to sleep on these midnight hike bus trips, preferring to talk to whoever is awake. Nate has the appearance of a young intellectual. He is dressed neatly, but practically, is already almost bald in his mid-20s, and studied Marxism in college. When he’s not relaxing with marthon walks and midnight hikes, he likes to do “lots of writing, drawing, painting, whatever”. I don’t ask him what does when he’s tired. Might as well ask a bonfire what it does when it gets cold.
The passenger with the most enthusiasm of all is Tim from Seattle. He came prepared for a late night/early morning hike. He has a flask of vodka and insists we all share share share. He spends the next three hours getting himself to the just-right level o drunkenness. You can tell he’s an old hand at this. He’s looking out for us, really, by offering liquor, because as he says, “If you go hiking at 4 in the morning and you’re not drunk, there’s something wrong with you.” When we divide into groups to look out for each other on the trails he christens his group “the snow leopards.” Later I found out he assigned them all numbers based on how effective a member of the Snow Leopards they were. SL6 had much to be ashamed of.
And so on in this fashion. There were more crazy characters of course. We were a bag of mixed nuts. The bus was pretty evenly divied between gung-ho crazies like Time and Nate and crazies of a more disbelieving sort. I was one of these. When I told people this was my first real hike, my first winter anywhere cold, and eespecially when they saw my old, busted-up K-Swisses, they could saely file me in the “what in the hell am I doing here?” group of nuts. It was a good fit for me, to be honest. Being born must have been a very confusing process for me, because I always find it very bewildering just to be alive.
Breakfast was at 9 AM, because that’s when we made it all the way back down the mountain and to the ski lodge restaurant. Outside there are maybe 50 snow sculptures of all different sizes and levels of detail. We’re at the grounds for one of Korea’s winter festivals. Festivals are huge here, especially in the warmer months. But even in the dead of winter you can have a good time with weekends of ice fishing, or ice sculptures and open bazaars with handmade goods for your tourism collection.
Shockingly, bottles of soju appear at nearby tables. Koreans are ordering liquor with their breakfast. At our table full of foreigners, we wash our pancakes and noodles down with nothing stronger than Coca-Cola. Caffeine is a drug that may come in handy here, but for us hikers, no alcohol is needed. We’re drunk on warmth. Being inside feels so good.
We’ve all been hiking for 4 hours already today, but not one of us seems the least bit tired. I’m on an hour of sleep. Some people are on less. Nobody seems to care. The bus will be back to take us home at 5 PM. The day is young, and one thing about coming back from the top of a mountain when the wind chill is making it feel like it’s less than 0 degrees Fahrenheit… everything seems very easy. “You can’t hurt me, I’m already dead! My frozen corpse is on top of the mountain. Bring it!”
The hike itself was strenuous but fairly uneventful. People met people and told stories from their lives. That’s really what these events are all about. People can hike on their own, or just organize something with a few friends. The reason people go in these big groups, always organized by one crazy-ambitious Korean social butterfly with a penchant for foreigners, is that they’re a great way to make friends. Maybe 60 people altogether came on the buses. Mostly foreigners, but some Koreans, most of whom spoke very good English. About half of the group stayed behind where the buses stopped, at a little inn that consisted of 4 rooms full of sleeping bags.
One thing about meeting new people here: The first 5 minutes of conversation is somehow even easier than it was in college. You have those standard questions in college about major, and living situation, and where you’re from, and there are similar questions here, but now the answers are more interesting. People are from all over the English speaking world, and hagwon life (private schools, almost all of which have kindergarten classes) is so chaotic and nutty that everyone is having a totally different experience. I always felt like the “getting to know you” basics were something to avoid if you could think of better topics of conversation. You ask me my major when you don’t know what to ask. Now I really am very interested in the answers to all these questions. The responses are so much more diverse. I talked to a handful of people on the way up the mountain and ended up spending quite a bit of time during the day with a few of them.
The main challenge of the hike was not the steepness of the incline, even though that was quite steep. It was the cold. I longed for a scarf, but Anthony told me his was doing him very little good, and that the most noticeable effect it was having was to give his snot a place to freeze right in front of his face. I walked much of the way with one my gloved hands in front of my face, breathing into my palm to warm my cheeks, trying not to fog my glasses over.
Near the top, Warren, the Korean guy who put this group together, told us to slow our pace. We all wanted to go quickly to generate some body heat. Much better to feel the pain of exertion than the bite of the cold. One of the first winter lessons I learned here. When it’s extremely cold, take the stairs, not the escalator. It’ll warm you up. Warren was right, though. We needed to slow down so we’d make the top of the mountain just at sunrise, and not earlier. If we made it earlier, we’d have to stay there longer. He warned us “This is nothing. The top is much, much colder, and windier. If you think this is bad, this is nothing.” We had to time it so that our beautiful vista was there waiting for us. We did a pretty good job. We made it about 15 minutes after sunrise, which is just about perfect.
Near the top of the mountain, the path leveled out for about 30 meters, and there were no trees along the side. I could see the whole valley stretching out for miles. It was as high up on a mountain as I’ve been before, and the sky was pink behind the other peaks. There were so many trees, and they were inconsistently green and bare, so there’d be a patch of brown spires and then a patch of heroically green warriors. It was a really wonderful view.
From there, the mountain peak was just another five minutes up, but I can’t recommend those five minutes. Warren was so right about conditions at the top. The cold was absolutely brutal. I’ve never, ever been so cold in my life. I have little memory of the view from the mountaintop. All I remember is cold, cold, cold. The wind was blowing so hard and there were no trees to block it. Winter was attempting to murder us for having the arrogance to scale this mountain. After about two minutes, I’d had enough and decided to start the descent. I was starting to go just as Warren called out “Let’s get a group picture.” I shouted “No!” and that was that. About 10 people followed right away, and Warren’s idea went totally unheeded. This peak was not worth it when there was an infinitely less cold spot just 20 or 30 meters lower. In the immortal words of Socrates, “Fuck that noise.”
The rest of the day was spent in circumstances similar to those at breakfast. I spent about 45 minutes giving all the snow sculptures a close look, and many of them were quite cool. There was an area with a children’s literature theme featuring a rad Dr. Seuss inspired house, and a nice likeness of the Little Prince standing about 15 feet tall (the Very Big Prince?). However, other than that, there wasn’t a whole lot going on at the festival. This same festival is running through next week, and sculptures were under construction during our time there. (Watching the construction is interesting. When they are just starting out they use small cranes to move the snow. Then they use chainsaws, and finally, their hands. It’s a great show of the principle that you have to trade power for precision and vice versa) I imagine most of the major attractions, like the planned attempt at breaking a Guinness record for largest snowball fight, will probably be next week. It was a pretty low-key festival this weekend.
In all honesty, that was fine by me. I spent about an hour in a coffee shop getting acquainted with some very nice folks, and then another hour or so later on with the same group having lunch. After such a rigorous hike it was nice to spend the whole day relaxing in the nice, warm indoors, especially when there were a lot of new faces. I’ll definitely be doing another tour with this group at some point.
Apparently, there are a lot of regulars, and it really seems like this sort of thing is a better way to make friends than going out to bars. For one thing, you get to see different things about Korea at the same time, and for another thing, I’m not very good at shouting, or at hearing people in loud places, so it’s difficult for me to have much of a conversation in many bars. Even with those considerations though, I’ve been satisfied with the pace I’ve been meeting people. So now I’m really excited to discover how superior these tour groups are for that purpose. I think it’s really going to up the quality of life.
Until next time,
Love and toodles,
Randy
Sunday, January 17, 2010
He's in the zone!!
The bus ride to the DMZ is educational in two ways. First, as you might expect, you learn a few random facts about the area. The tour guide saw to it that we were learning these facts by calling people out when they stopped paying attention to talk. She also quizzed us occasionally to see if we could recall what we’d learned. Here’s what I learned: The last bridge you go over en route to the site was built by the founder of Hyundai. He defected from North Korea 50 years ago after selling his family’s cow. He then built an empire in the South. Years later, he decided to pay his family back for the cow. He gave them 1001 cows, reasoning that he owed a thousand more as “interest”. However, the bridge that was in place would not support a thousand cows, so he built a large and modern bridge. This bridge, I will remember forever, is nicknamed “cow bridge”. I don’t remember its actual name, but I do remember that, because “Laura” the tour guide used it as a quiz question to see who was paying attention about… 500 times? Give or take.
Cow bridge. Very important.
So, I’ve been to the DMZ now and I have returned alive (and non-kidnapped!). Hurray! It’s a surprisingly fun experience. Despite the close proximity of land mines just behind the fences and the poor bored soldiers tasked with preventing unauthorized photographs, the tour has a certain “gee whiz, look at that” feeling. The mood was strangely jocular. I bought a wooden figurine of a smiling pig at a gift shop. There are statues that look like Fisher-Price versions of Korean soldiers. There was even an igloo with the letters DMZ in colored snow over the entranceway. Here you are at the doorstep of a no man’s land, a 4 kilometer wide strip of land where you could be shot for trespassing, and the atmosphere is bizarrely whimsical. Why were there figurines of smiling pigs? Why are there t-shirts with smiling cartoon soldiers? Is this for real?
The funniest part was from the movie. The first area of the tour was tunnel #3. About 50 years ago the North built some secret tunnels into South Korea. The South became aware of the tunnels after an engineer of one of them defected and told the government everything he knew. At the site of the tunnel was a building you go into right after getting off the bus, and pretty much all that’s in there is a movie screening area. You watch a movie that’s about 5 minutes long that first does a quick rundown of the history of the DMZ before switching tones entirely to extol the virtues of the DMZ as a natural reserve. The narrator talks about all the wildlife that now flourishes there and we get to see images of them. Mostly it’s a lot of very impressive looking birds, but right in the middle comes one of the strangest pieces of narration I’ve ever heard. He’s been rattling off a list of animals, “The white heron… The large Chinese sparrow” or whatever, and then he drops this gem: “And the living natural fossil… The goat.”
WHAT??
The living natural fossil?? What the hell does that mean?? Is he implying that a goat is an obscure creature almost lossed to the sands of time and that it is therefore for special and extraordinary that we have the priviledge of seeing them munching on grasses between two sets of soldiers? Goats! Who gives a rat’s ass?
The tunnel was really great. You ride some little mine cart train down 300 meters at about 2 miles per hour. The mine cart is in a tunnel that is smaller and narrower than “the” tunnel, the one that the North Koreans built. It’s so cramped in there and the place is lit by green track lights overhead. It’s an eerie atmosphere that really makes you feel like you’re descending into a whole different world.
The tunnel itself is a bit bigger, but still pretty small and cramped. It must have been horrible making the damn thing. When the project was abandoned, the North Koreans spread a bit of coal on the walls to try to pass it off as a tunnel built for coal excavation purposes. But the rock is nothing but granite, and there is no naturally occurring coal in the area. It was a feeble cover-up of a tunnel that I can’t imagine ever had any chance of amounting to anything strategically worthwhile. It was just too small to imagine that it could be effectively used for the purposes of staging a surprise invasion. Of course, there are several other tunnels, but even if there are as many as ten, it’s still tough to believe they could have been a worthwhile system of delivering troops. North Korea just seems so pathetic to me most of the time. Their whole state is centered around the military but their military doesn’t really seem to do anything right. These tunnels were probably started in the 50s and none were discovered until the 70s, I believe it was. They were never put to any use and they never can be now. The main impression I took from touring the tunnel was not that the North is so devious, as the tour guide seemed to want us to feel, but rather that this whole project had been a ridiculous boondoggle for them. I’m just not that intimidated by an army that tunnels thousands and thousands of meters through granite only to abandon the project after achieving nothing and attempting to cover their tracks with thin little scrapings of coal.
But anyway, that aside, the tunnel was darn cool.
The next stop on the tour was a lookout. This is where the soldiers had to make sure we didn’t take any pictures. I’m not sure why it’s necessary to prevent pictures. The lookout gives a great view of the Zone, and although it was winter, you could still easily see how it’s such a haven for wildlife during the warmer months. It had a look of tranquility. There are a few roads crossing through it, as there is a factory complex in the Zone, which are run by South Korean business and staffed with North Korean workers. They’re paid $70 a month. This is considered a very good wage. Other than that industrial complex, the zone is devoid of people. It’s a sliver of nature that runs from coast to coast.
Finally, we stopped at a train station. Over the last few years, the trans-Eurasian railroad system has made huge strides. It’s now possible to take a train from London, or Lisbon, all the way to Vladivostok on the extreme Eastern end of Russia. Soon, that rail system will connect through North Korea into Seoul and past that down to Busan, on the Southern coast of Korea. This is the last train station in South Korea. There is one train a day that goes into the North, on the way to Pyongyang. It’s now empty, except when a busload of tourists arrives. It’s the most decorative empty train station in the world. There are huge murals on the wall with symbolic depictions of unity. Images of clasped hands and people dancing together are over the rows of empty chairs where no passengers are waiting. When the trans-Eurasian railroad connects to this station, these murals will find a much bigger audience, but for now, it’s as surreal as anything at the DMZ.
That was the tour. It was quite interesting, and I may go again in the summer, this time taking the longer tour. It should really be a sight during months of higher visibility and when all the animals have returned to the site. Going in the winter did have one advantage though. I imagine that touring in the summer makes it all less surreal.
Cow bridge. Very important.
So, I’ve been to the DMZ now and I have returned alive (and non-kidnapped!). Hurray! It’s a surprisingly fun experience. Despite the close proximity of land mines just behind the fences and the poor bored soldiers tasked with preventing unauthorized photographs, the tour has a certain “gee whiz, look at that” feeling. The mood was strangely jocular. I bought a wooden figurine of a smiling pig at a gift shop. There are statues that look like Fisher-Price versions of Korean soldiers. There was even an igloo with the letters DMZ in colored snow over the entranceway. Here you are at the doorstep of a no man’s land, a 4 kilometer wide strip of land where you could be shot for trespassing, and the atmosphere is bizarrely whimsical. Why were there figurines of smiling pigs? Why are there t-shirts with smiling cartoon soldiers? Is this for real?
The funniest part was from the movie. The first area of the tour was tunnel #3. About 50 years ago the North built some secret tunnels into South Korea. The South became aware of the tunnels after an engineer of one of them defected and told the government everything he knew. At the site of the tunnel was a building you go into right after getting off the bus, and pretty much all that’s in there is a movie screening area. You watch a movie that’s about 5 minutes long that first does a quick rundown of the history of the DMZ before switching tones entirely to extol the virtues of the DMZ as a natural reserve. The narrator talks about all the wildlife that now flourishes there and we get to see images of them. Mostly it’s a lot of very impressive looking birds, but right in the middle comes one of the strangest pieces of narration I’ve ever heard. He’s been rattling off a list of animals, “The white heron… The large Chinese sparrow” or whatever, and then he drops this gem: “And the living natural fossil… The goat.”
WHAT??
The living natural fossil?? What the hell does that mean?? Is he implying that a goat is an obscure creature almost lossed to the sands of time and that it is therefore for special and extraordinary that we have the priviledge of seeing them munching on grasses between two sets of soldiers? Goats! Who gives a rat’s ass?
The tunnel was really great. You ride some little mine cart train down 300 meters at about 2 miles per hour. The mine cart is in a tunnel that is smaller and narrower than “the” tunnel, the one that the North Koreans built. It’s so cramped in there and the place is lit by green track lights overhead. It’s an eerie atmosphere that really makes you feel like you’re descending into a whole different world.
The tunnel itself is a bit bigger, but still pretty small and cramped. It must have been horrible making the damn thing. When the project was abandoned, the North Koreans spread a bit of coal on the walls to try to pass it off as a tunnel built for coal excavation purposes. But the rock is nothing but granite, and there is no naturally occurring coal in the area. It was a feeble cover-up of a tunnel that I can’t imagine ever had any chance of amounting to anything strategically worthwhile. It was just too small to imagine that it could be effectively used for the purposes of staging a surprise invasion. Of course, there are several other tunnels, but even if there are as many as ten, it’s still tough to believe they could have been a worthwhile system of delivering troops. North Korea just seems so pathetic to me most of the time. Their whole state is centered around the military but their military doesn’t really seem to do anything right. These tunnels were probably started in the 50s and none were discovered until the 70s, I believe it was. They were never put to any use and they never can be now. The main impression I took from touring the tunnel was not that the North is so devious, as the tour guide seemed to want us to feel, but rather that this whole project had been a ridiculous boondoggle for them. I’m just not that intimidated by an army that tunnels thousands and thousands of meters through granite only to abandon the project after achieving nothing and attempting to cover their tracks with thin little scrapings of coal.
But anyway, that aside, the tunnel was darn cool.
The next stop on the tour was a lookout. This is where the soldiers had to make sure we didn’t take any pictures. I’m not sure why it’s necessary to prevent pictures. The lookout gives a great view of the Zone, and although it was winter, you could still easily see how it’s such a haven for wildlife during the warmer months. It had a look of tranquility. There are a few roads crossing through it, as there is a factory complex in the Zone, which are run by South Korean business and staffed with North Korean workers. They’re paid $70 a month. This is considered a very good wage. Other than that industrial complex, the zone is devoid of people. It’s a sliver of nature that runs from coast to coast.
Finally, we stopped at a train station. Over the last few years, the trans-Eurasian railroad system has made huge strides. It’s now possible to take a train from London, or Lisbon, all the way to Vladivostok on the extreme Eastern end of Russia. Soon, that rail system will connect through North Korea into Seoul and past that down to Busan, on the Southern coast of Korea. This is the last train station in South Korea. There is one train a day that goes into the North, on the way to Pyongyang. It’s now empty, except when a busload of tourists arrives. It’s the most decorative empty train station in the world. There are huge murals on the wall with symbolic depictions of unity. Images of clasped hands and people dancing together are over the rows of empty chairs where no passengers are waiting. When the trans-Eurasian railroad connects to this station, these murals will find a much bigger audience, but for now, it’s as surreal as anything at the DMZ.
That was the tour. It was quite interesting, and I may go again in the summer, this time taking the longer tour. It should really be a sight during months of higher visibility and when all the animals have returned to the site. Going in the winter did have one advantage though. I imagine that touring in the summer makes it all less surreal.
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