I made one of these too (more than one, actually, but anyway)

Geez, this is kind of addictive. A bit like oekaki but much less skill required to have fun.



For some reason, the legs don't show... (I did draw them.)

Subway Riding

I have to say, it's pretty easy to get around using public transportation in Seoul. They seriously have to do something about the TTC if they want to make Toronto a "World Class City" like they're always talking about. The subway lines look pretty complicated:


I have to commute a bit over an hour to get to work. If you want to know which lines you should take to get to your destination, you can use the online path-finding whatchamacallit. Below is how I get to work (start from yellow line; the fare for this distance is 1400 won, which is a little less than $2 CDN):


Since most Korean streets aren't named, the exits are numbered to make things easier. When you're meeting somebody at a subway station, for example, you can say, "Meet me at exit number 5." You can give directions this way too. Some stations are quite large, and have many exits.


The most number of exits I've seen so far at a station is 15:


There's not much to say about the platforms, but I found these cross-legged people amusing for some reason, and took a picture (this is at Apgujung Station, which is the station I get off to go to work).

A bajillion in Korea: Unattractive Churches

One thing I noticed in Korea is that there are churches everywhere. And by churches, I don't really mean grand old structures with gothic arches and stained-glass windows and the steeples. Smaller Korean churches often only have the steeples, and these of the most makeshift kind.


(You can click on the pictures to look at the bigger version.) These are all churches found near where I'm currently residing. They take up the top floor(s?) of a plaza building. See how in the third one, after the church service, you have the option of going to the "Beer King" on the second floor. Above it is a Karaoke bar and another (non-bar) Karaoke place. And these churches all have names written on their little symbolic steeple. From left to right, they say "Return" (as in "Return to the fold, ye sinners"?), "Church of Happiness", and "The Open Church".

The church may also be this square gray building, with few identifying marks other than the huge cross on them. Non-Christian Korean people often have a bad impression of churches; maybe if the church buildings look nicer they'd feel more kindly towards them? Finally, look yonder, a distant light beckoning, the ligh of... a burning cross? I'm not too fond of crosses that light up, and maybe the ones that do light up shouldn't be red.

I'm kind of craving a beautiful old church right now...

Spring is bright yellow

Well, now I have been in Korea a full 3 weeks. I hadn't expected the weather to be as cool as it has been, but my sister says they've had a strange winter (as did Canadians) and the temperature has been unseasonably low so far. One good thing is the yellow sand from the Gobi desert hasn't been so bad (I'd worried a little). Still, the spring flowers have all bloomed, which caused me much delight. I hadn't realized how little flowering happens in spring in Canada. In Korea, I see flowering trees everywhere I go! At first, I was so surprised to see trees covered with only flowers - no green buds or leaves, just flowers all over:
But now, I feel a bit disappointed to see the trees are starting to bud, since it must mean the spring flowering season is passing.

In Canada, the colour of "Spring" (i.e. the two weeks between winter and summer) is the green of new leaves; nevertheless, it was bright yellow that always made me think of spring. This is because when I was growing up in Korea, the surest and most distinct sign of the retreat of winter was the appearance of the yellow flowers cascading down in this photo: I always thought it strange that you don't see these in Canada. I don't even know what they're called in English (in Korean they're called "genari" - that's a hard "g" at the beginning). They're not the prettiest flowers, but I always liked them; they look so happy and...yellow. They make me think of stars. And who doesn't like something that marks the coming of spring?

MiniCheesecake

Wouldn't that have been an awesome ministry to be included into the world of "1984"? I'm sure Big Brother loves cheesecake. Who doesn't? Anyway, this was my first attempt at making a cheesecake of any kind, and I had no idea what I was doing. I just got this recipe off of allrecipes.com, and went at it. I didn't want to buy any extra pans or anything, and these looked easy to eat also.


They're supposed to be tiny-cupcake sized, but I didn't have the right pan or tiny-cupcake cups. And that'd be too small anyway; you'd have to eat like 3 at once, then feel all guilty about eating so many. But made three times bigger, you'd be able to savour the cheesecake-y goodness with little guilt or fuss.

I also tried to make the crust come all the way around, so that you wouldn't really need the cup to hold it:


It looks interesting but the cheese taste didn't really come out as much in this one. I also kind of failed with the crust; it tasted blah and the texture was kinda nasty. When it was fresh out of the oven, it was pretty greasy looking too. Better luck next time.

So I bought a plant

And it looked like this. I had no idea what it was, but it was cheap and it looked hardy. I saw that it was a perennial so after it blooms, I thought I could just let it be for a while (which is what I did with the CNIB crocus).

It eventually grew into something that looked like this:

Tulips! I hadn't expected that at all.
When the flowers began to wilt, I clipped them,following the same instructions as the crocus, thinking they're both grown from bulbs, so they're pretty much the same, right? (<-faulty logic). I also wanted to take photos of just the flowers.

They didn't look very interesting until they began to dry and gain interesting shapes and textures. I took photos against a background of plain white printer paper.


It's fun to take pictures from different angles!

The plant itself grew a bit more, then began to wilt. I think you're supposed to leave it be as it stores nutrients in the bulb, and when it has wilted and can no longer photosynthesize, you clip it down. It needs a period of cold followed by "spring" to start growing again, I think. I hope I can get it to grow again.

In Memory

Queen's Park, 2006

In memory of the people killed in the attacks on September 11, 2001.

No time like the present

When I first started my blog, I had planned to do short reviews of books I read, to motivate myself to read more, and to crystallize my impressions of the book. Of course, when I first started my blog, I'd also intended to, um, post.
Well, now I'm using the book reviewing as motivation to write a blog post - and I'll start with the books I have to return to the library the soonest.


No Present Like Time, by Steph Swainston
This book is actually a sequel to Swainston's previous (and I believe first) novel, titled "The Year of Our War", which I picked up because I liked the cover, and actually quite enjoyed. Although the books have the same setting and main characters, the stories aren't really connected.

The Fourlands have been waging a long war against these giant insects invading their world, which are actually pretty scary, from the very vivid description of how the insects maul and kill (this was mostly covered in the first book). In order to fight the Insect Horde, the Emperor San -his name is San, not that he's Japanese and they address him as Emperor-san, although wasn't San the name of Mononoke Hime? Maybe he is Japanese after all- anyway, the Emperor has gathered men and women who excel over all others in one ability that will be useful for protecting the Fourlands - such as the Archer, the Swordsman, the Sailor, etc. These people are called the Eszai and, along with their marriage partner, are bestowed immortality by the Emperor.

Our decidedly unheroic protagonist is Jant, a.k.a. Comet (which is how the Eszai holding the position of the Messenger is addressed). He's a hybrid of two peoples who hate each other, so he's the only one of his kind - even he doesn't know how it happened. Because of this, he's also the only person in the known world who can fly. He's frivolous, undisciplined, profane, a coward and (his biggest problem) a junkie. The other Eszai don't think much of him. And yet, I like him so much, because he tries so hard when it really counts. He's loyal to his friends and more ethical than a good number of the other Eszai. I don't really want to write about the plot of the novel because who really cares? I read the book because of Jant. The story's not what you'd call deep, the book is not for kids (for violence, coarse language and sexual content), and the writing style isn't so beautiful. It's a fluffy sort of book. But, well, there is Jant.

Wait, one more thing. This drug that Jant does, called Scolopendium, or Cat, has this strange property that if you take a bit more of it than is safe, it lets you "Shift" to this other place where beings from different worlds can mingle and take on forms different from their own... which makes me think that this is actually a cyberpunk novel. It's definitely not traditional fantasy - for example, Jant usually wears T-shirts; no doublet and hose for the denizens of this fantasy world.

I also suddenly realized that alot of the things in this novel has 2 or 3 names for it - maybe the writer is an anatomist.

I have nothing to say

Today is National Nothing Day. Of what nation, I do not know. It's National Nothing day. And so what, you ask? So nothing.

I must write a real blog post soon.

Remembrance Day

This photo was taken on Remembrance Day at Queen's Park a couple years ago. It was slightly drizzly. When the guns fired, flame would shoot out from the end and the guns jerked back from the recoil of the shot. The area would be white with smoke afterwards. It was really cool. If only "looking cool" was the real function of those things.

NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month. Your objective, should you choose to participate, is to infiltrate the enemy base write a full novel, at least 175-pages long (or 50,000 words) starting November 1 and ending at Midnight, Nov. 30. If you manage to do it, your name gets put on the list of "winners" at the website, you pat yourself on the back and treat yourself to a cookie. Yay.

It seems sort of fun to try, just to see if you can do it. Of course, you can do it any month, but will you ever really without signing up to some event to make you feel guilty whenever you remember it during your usual lazy-time?

Maybe I can manage a short story in November? Or maybe that's even harder than writing a novel, i.e. "I didn't have time to write a short story, so I wrote a long one instead"?

By the way, according to my google search, that 'short letter' quote, sometimes varying slightly in its wording, is most often attributed to Mark Twain, but also sometimes to Blaise Pascal. A similar quote ("I'm sorry to have written such a long letter, but I didn't have time for a short one.") is attributed to George Bernard Shaw, and to Rudyard Kipling. One site says that the quote "may go back as far as Cicero". So Mr. Sam Clemens, stop taking all the credit for being witty.

Another writing advice from Mark Twain (or is it?): "Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." Hmm. That's damn good advice.

Welcome

See how differently they treat the first years from the upper years! With kid gloves, I tell you!

Happy Hallowe'en, by the way.

Green Children

I read an article about the curious case of two green children, a boy and a girl, found in the 12th century, wearing strange clothing, speaking in an unknown tongue and would only eat beans at first. The boy sickened and died, but the girl thrived and soon lost her green colour. When later asked where she came from, she said "she and her brother had come from a country that was entirely green that was inhabited by green-skinned people. Even their sun, which was very feeble, glowed green". Interesting. Though the cause of her green-ness is probably not genetic, since she later lost the colour.

Anyway, what amused me particularly about this story was when, after offering an endocrine disorder as a scientific explanation of the green children, the writer states that "the chances of such diseases and disorders occurring in two youngsters simultaneously however, are highly unlikely. The only credible possibilities seem to be the extraterrestrial or parallel world hypotheses."

Hahahahaha. Yes. The disease being carried by siblings is highly unlikely, so obviously the only other explanation is that they're from another world.

Well, the account being from so long ago, I suspect there's a great deal of exaggeration, some fabrication and a few things not mentioned because they seem too mundane. Fun story, though.

News

A few days ago, I read in the newspaper that Rosa Parks had passed away on Monday. And I thought, she only recently passed away?

It came a bit of a shock to realize that racial segregation in the US is still recent history, only about 50 years or so, within living memory. I mean, I guess I knew it in my head, but still felt it was a thing long past; but actually, there are people living today who remember those days. Wow.

I know racism is far from gone - it disturbs me when I become aware of how not gone it is - but let's hope things will continue to get better. What will the world be like 50 years later?

Speaking of racism, I read an article about the 'head tax' on Chinese immigrants to Canada, between 1885 to 1923 in response to anti-Chinese sentiment. I hadn't known about this (perhaps it was mentioned in passing in grade 7/8 Canadian history class, when we learned about how Chinese immigrants worked on the Canadian Pacific railway). Anyway, I didn't really feel its nastiness until I read that this Chinese man had kept the head tax certificate in his wallet for 50 years until his death in 1970. Just imagine with what thoughts he must have kept it.

Another thing that struck me was my own reaction to the article. An organization is seeking redress for the family of the men who had to pay the head tax, and for a moment I thought, "What for?" Then I blinked, thinking, isn't this the attitude taken by the Japanese toward Koreans to whom wrongs have been done in the past (what an awkward sentence!), like the comfort women and so on. So I hung my head in shame.

On the other hand, if compensation was sought by a First Nations organization, I don't think I would have wondered why. Perhaps I just think that a country owes little to immigrants? Hrm.

Anyway, the moral of the story is 'apathy with ignorance, sympathy with identification' (silly, but tired of writing full sentences). Must try to be informed.

Making friends

Before my first class in the morning, I was sitting listening to music, the earbuds cutting me off from the world. Just started to put the MD player away when this girl sitting next to me says hi. Apparently, she's in three of the four courses I'm taking this term. And we were both in this one class last term also, which had something like 20 people in it. I had no idea.

No wonder I can't make friends. (And I think this is the first time in months that I socialized with a 'stranger'. Sigh.)

So I started a blog...

However, it seems doubtful even to me that I'll really keep it up (or that anyone will read it).
But here goes anyway.