Korean Commercials

I've been seeing some especially good commercials around here lately, so I looked some up on youtube so I could share them with you.

I don't know what this ad is for, even though it's subtitled on youtube (the subtitles are kind of funny, bonus). My favorite one is the first one because of the baby lying so nonchalantly on the pillow watching tv. That's one cute kid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygLL5XeaCEA

This commercial I can actually figure out. CYON is making some crazy cell phones right now. One is called Ice Cream 2. I see this ad every time I go to the movie theater; it hasn't made it to tv yet. It stars some chick named Kim Tae Hee, who must be a singer or actor or someone else popular enough to get a lot of commercial air time. The guys in the Ice Cream commercial are a reeeaaaally popular boy band called Big Bang. I like the one with the mohawk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K-7Z69utOM

Here's another CYON phone called Lollipop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj-ISR21LtI

By the way, Koreans really dress like that. In real life, the colors are more muted, but the style is basically the same. This is why I have trouble buying clothing here.

I see this one a lot lately for Seoul Milk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sos5pm0wXg

And this Kia commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQrOJdGsEps

And for the boys:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obktGlsUprE

Hauzen "Ayuh Con":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QVqZTpagkU

This is an ad for a touch phone called Haptic Pop. It's funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViHlNvVkrPQ

Anyway, this is what I'm inundated with on a daily basis. I might throw some other ones up if I find any good ones later. Isn't youtube great?

Seoul Again

Well, I made another trip to Seoul. This time it was to go on a tour of the Demilitarized Zone. My friend Ashleigh suggested it, and Leon and three of Ashleigh's friends went, as well. We spent Saturday in Seoul and Sunday was the tour. The whole thing was pretty exhausting, and frankly, I regret going. But whatever.

We took the bus to Daegu, a city a bit inland, then took the high-speed rail, the KTX, to Seoul. Ashleigh and her friends were told a couple outrageous things about the train, like the cars have norae-bangs (karaoke rooms) in them, but it was nothing as exciting as that. The train did break 300 kph at times, though. It didn't seem all that fast, but doing it that way saved us about an hour and a half.

We stayed for cheap in a six-bed dorm room at the Golden Pond Guesthouse (nice name). Quarters were cramped, but we got a bed, a bathroom, use of the kitchen, living room, and computer with internet. Here's our tiny room, or as much of it as I could get in the frame:


Outside in the neighborhood was a small strip of shops, restaurants, bars, and theatres. Gandalf was stationed outside the CGV theatre:


There was also this guy wandering around:



After substandard Italian food for lunch, we all went shopping at Insadong, an area to buy traditional Korean stuff. I had a few final gifts to pick up, and I think none of the girls had been to Seoul yet, so that's a good place to hit on a first trip. Leon and I went to a tea house after I did my twenty minutes of shopping and the others were still looking around. The setup was pretty schnazzy:


You get your own teapot, heated with a tealight (now I know why they're called that), plus a thermos of extra water and a little vial with more tea for refills. Also some rice-cakey snacks that taste like air.

On the way back to the guesthouse to put on warmer (and for the girls, nicer) clothes for the evening, we saw these big piles of colorful shit:

It's possible they're supposed to be ice cream, but the execution seems a bit off.

We went to TGI Friday's for supper because no one wanted Korean food (we can get that anywhere) and it was sadly overpriced. Then the others went out to some bars in a couple foreigner-popular places while I retired to the guesthouse to rest my broken body (knees, neck, back) and my brain from all the physical and social activity. We had to get up at o'dark thirty to get to the meeting point for the tour at 9:30 the next morning and make sure everyone was up and showered and fed. Leon and one of the girls got home at like 2:30, and the rest got home at maybe 4:00, and everyone was planning to get up at 7:30 or so. Jeez. Ironically, they all probably got more sleep than I did, being able to pass out on the bed in their respective drunken stupors, while I, who can't sleep off my own turf, tossed and turned for eight hours. Booooo-urns.

I'll continue with details of the DMZ tour in my next post.

Countdown

Well, folks, I've now been in Korea for 14 months, and I gotta tell ya, I'm just about out of posting ideas. I know you got used to me posting at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, for quite a while there, but that's just not going to be happening anymore, I don't think.

I have ten more weeks left here, and right now I'm concentrating on figuring out what I need to get done before I go, how I'm either going to get all my junk home or who I'm going to leave some of it with, and which agency I'm going to choose to get me my next job. I actually really like the agency I went through, but there's another agency called Footprints that sends you to Korea, Taiwan, China, or Thailand (working in Thailand is shit, I read) the first year, then you have options all over the world for places to teach after that. That sounds cool. I also saw this ad on daveseslcafe.com for jobs in Gangwon, the northeasternmost province, that pay well, give you settlement bonues, give you only 22 classes a week (I teach 34), AND give you 5-7 weeks of paid vacation, plus all the normal flight, rent, severance payment, and insurance benefits. What a dream. Those jobs were through an agency called JejuESL or something, so I'll have to check that out when it gets closer to me actually coming back here.

I'm also concentrating on saving money for my four months of unemployment and traveling coming up, so I won't have many more adventures to write about before I go. I will be going to Seoul and on a tour of the Demilitarized Zone in the north next weekend, though, as well as to Gyeongju to see the cherry blossoms the weekend after that, so look for pictures and words about those to come. Beyond that, I may just be posting info about the whole leaving process for those who are teaching in Korea, or thinking about it. There are a couple things to take care of that might be of interest to those people for the future.

Anyway, thanks for reading and keep checking in periodically. I may be losing steam, but I'm still chugging along as best I can.

Silly Engrish Notebooks

The kids buy special "English notebooks" for English class, and they're usually pretty ridiculous. They have silly characters or photographs and a lot of nonsensical motivational or cutesy bullshit in Engrish. There's one notebook that even talks about the wonders of English and has a picture of Paris on it.

Sometimes the notebooks have something particularly inadvertantly funny on them, like this one: