I found out today that my trip to LA scheduled for this Saturday has been postponed until June or maybe July. If it'll be in June, I am going to be exhausted since I'm already scheduled to be making two flying visits to the UK in June (leave Seoul at 2pm on Friday and arrive in Seoul at 5am on Monday, time on the ground approximately 32 hours including two nights).
On the one hand this means that I will be able to attend the World Cup Qualifier with Jordan on 31-May (I'll book tickets tomorrow) but on the other hand puts my attendance at the North Korean one in June in doubt....
Last day of the Premier League season today and I've got two matches playing simultaneously on my computer. I shall be watching Chelsea v Bolton and Wigan V Man Ure to determine who wins the title and I shall be keeping up with other scores to see which two of Reading, Fulham and Birmingham will be relegated.
While the season is winding down in the UK, it's in full-swing here in Korea and today I took the kids to the Seoul World Cup Stadium to see FC Seoul v Incheon United.
There were around 29,000 fans there (probably a lot more since the number of fans is presumably based on tickets sold and they were letting in juniors for free if they had a special voucher and also all under-6s go for free without any ticket at all) so the atmosphere was quite good.
Before the match started the fans rolled out the ubiquitous giant banner... Then some chanting and fireworks to get us underway...
The match was very open with opportunities for both sides (although the strikers for both teams were decidedly average so not as many goals as there might have been). The main striker for FC Seoul is Ju-Young Park (박주영), who I think is extremely over-rated. In some ways he is like Christiano Ronaldo (think the posing and the arrogance), while in others he is not (think talent). Nevertheless, he is very popular with the FC Seoul fans judging by the number of people who have his name and number on their shirts. The great thing about watching these games, as I've mentioned before, is that the kids go in for free and my ticket is just 8,000won and therefore it doesn't stress me out if they're not foucssing on the game all the time, or if they're even distracting me from watching the game. In actual fact they quite enjoyed today and watched most of the match. They clapped along to the chants at some points and danced a little when there was music...
Tickets for the World Cup Qualifier with Jordan are now on sale. It's be held at Seoul World Cup Stadium at 8:00pm on 31st May. I'd like to go, but I might be in LA at that time so I can't buy tickets yet....I'm guessing tickets for the big game with North Korea will go on sale in a week or two as well.
After skiving off work and having my wife skive off work so we could go out to Mokdong togetehr and renew my visa it turns out that they didn't care about her guarantee. They still only gave me a one year extension so I'll have to repeat it all again next year. On the plus side, the visa extension and the new re-entry permit were both free...
I was just channel-surfing while waiting for something to download on the computer and I came across a show called "Coming Out" whereby gay Korean guys come out to their mums.
I only saw one episode but this seems to be the premise:
An extremely camp Korean chap (think any number of Korean "talents") takes his mother to a coffee shop and confesses that he is gay. Cue ten minutes of the mum crying and saying things like "You can change. If you try hard you can fix it. Please promise me you'll try hard to fix it." or "Live that way for a while and then get married so I'm not embarrassed."
They then go back to the studio and have well-known (and only?) Korean gay celebrity Hong Sok-chon analyse the reaction and give some advice.
Regular readers and those that know me will know that my Korean is pretty good. I could hold my own against those foreign lasses that are on tv on a Monday night. However, today I got humiliated...
Those of you who can speak even a few words of Korean have probably experienced the situation where the person you're talking to will do a double-take when you speak to them in Korean and then compliment you on how well you speak Korean even though all you've said is two words in a terrible accent.
Well today the opposite happened to me. I was in Subway to grab a sandwich and they asked me what salad I wanted. I replied that I only wanted lettuce and tomato and for lettuce I used the word 상추. The lady who was making my sandwich corrected me and said "Actually, that's not 상추, that's 양상추*". Boy she put me in my place.
* I assume the '양' is the ubiquitous prefix to designate something as being western or foreign.
I've seen a video by the Tourist Authroity of Australia on Korea tv a lot in the past week or so. This was quite controversial when it first came out in the UK cos it spends a minute or so extolling the virtues of various attractions in Oz and finishes up by asking the tagline "So where the bloody hell are you?" In the UK this was considered to be swearing that might be offensive whereas the Aussies said it was not considered to be swearing down under.
In Korea, they're letting it run with the original soundtrack and they've conveyed the meaning of "bloody hell" with the Korean word "도대체", which the Naver dictionary tells me means "in the world;on earth;under the sun;in the name of God;the dickens;the heck;the hell, for the love of Pete". Mind you I suspect that it is probably milder than most of those translations and probably equivalent to saying "-ever" as in "Whatever are you doing?" or "Wherever have you gotten to?"
