Korean Television

Two posts tonight. I'm in a blog mood. 

I have cable TV: 86 channels of movies, sports, other stuff and game shows. Lots of game shows. Actually, about 78 of the 86 channels air game shows.

I think they're game shows. Really, who knows?

Here's a snapshot of what's on on a weeknight . I really have no idea what I'm watching for the most part. If anyone reading this wants to point out any glaring inaccuracies, please feel free.

Channel 3 - Korean tourists in Japan, looks a bit like Wish You Were Here. They're looking at koi carp and posing for photographs with a bronze bust of man near a ship. Just what I plan to do next week.

Channel 7 - Shopping channel. Disappointly they're only flogging rice cookers tonight. Last week they were promoting something you eat that causes some kind of biblical enema, at least that what I gathered from the computer simulation of someone's intestines.

Channel 8 - Soap opera. These are always worth a watch for the often bafflingly amusing scenes that crop up. Currently there's an old dude staring dejectedly at a pharmacy. Not so good tonight.

Channel 10 - Ajuma Idol (?)

Channel 14 - Game show...? A woman appears to be making herself cry for the entertainment of a studio audience. What? To achieve this she's twisting the hairs on her temples? OK, now she's snapping chopsticks with her buttocks and picking up a fat man like a baby. I'm flicking channels.

Channel 18 - Super Action. Often shows watchable movies. Steven Seagal's Exit Wounds tonight though. Ow.

Channel 19 - What? Piers Morgan! Euugh, that was unexpected. It appears to be the Royal Variety Show. How odd. Off.

Channel 25 - Discovery Channel. Wait, it gets worse. Bear Fucking Grylls. I don't want to get started on him. He deserves his own post. His own blog.

Channels 34-37 are sports. One is showing a collection of own goals from English football from the last thirty years, another has international billiards. This stuff's hypnotic.

Channel 38 - Game show (?). This show appears to be on every day. All day every day. On multiple channels. It consists of perhaps five main guys, one of whom has peroxide blonde hair and is therefore instantly recognisable on this and countless other shows, performing arbitrary tasks. Tonight they're in a field, at night, taking hats, scarves gloves and boots from a box and putting them on. A man resembling a Korean Jesus is photgraphing them. What I can never fathom is how there's never a winner (though there's occasionally a loser). Watching it makes my head hurt because it's so confusing. Oh, now I think they're homeless men. Next.

Channel 42 - Man in a bakery, buying a cake.

Channel 43 - Monk, with a blackboard, doing maths.

Channel 51 - People playing computer games on TV. Like Gamesmaster with Patrick Moore, but a whole channel. Now it's the Sudden Attack master league.

Channel 63 - Golf channel. Golf, 24-7. Predominantly women's golf.

Finally, channel 86. This is a black screen with a white graph on it, labelled Cable TV Analyser, showing the MHz and the dBnV, whatever those are, along with the time, date and various other useless pieces of information. This is more hypnotic than the billiards.

Olympic fever

Korea loves Olympics. Maybe it's a consequence of the 1988 games, which if you don't know were held here in 1988, but they are hard to avoid. For me this is a good thing: I love Olympics. I love watching sports I've never heard of, I love flags. Everything... I ignore the politics. People watch the games on the subway on their TV phones, shops have portable TVs behind the counter or outside on a pile of crates, which allows a crowd to form during a really tense point in the ping pong or something. You can watch weightlifting while you eat your galbi or go for a drink and watch some badminton. In fact badminton won out over the Premier League in the local sports bar. Given how popular English football is here I was quite surprised.

Interesting thing is though, every single one of my kids, boys and girls, age 5-11, are transfixed by the games. They can name pretty much all the Korean medal winners, from swimming to archery to women's weightlifting. All of them can. I have to repeatedly stop them from talking about Park Tae Hwan and Chang Mi Ran and get back on topic. I can remember the Barcelona Olympics when I was seven, and maybe watching Linford Christie and Sally Gunnell, but doubt I was aware of what was going on elsewhere. I'm impressed anyway - I think it's good that these guys are aware of what's going on in the world. I made a bet with a kid last Thursday that GB would end up above Korea in the medals table. I was starting to get a bit scared before the weekend, but it's looking better now. Mmmmm.

Feeling olympicsy, I wandered down to the Seoul Olympic Park on Saturday. It being Saturday, it rained. Here are some pictures.



I did say my kids are aware of world issues. Well, not in all aspects. Having read a picturebook about how everyone in the world is fundamentally the same and that, I discussed with my advanced kindergarten class different parts of the world. I asked what people were like outside of Korea, and my kids talked about Britain, America, China and um, Guam. When I brought Africa up, little Jenny piped up: "People from Africa are very very very different and they are dark and I don't ever want to meet them because I don't like them." Had to nip that little bit of racism in the bud...

Here are two of Korea's biggest Olympic heroes: Park Tae Hwan (weiring the world's greatest shorts) and Jang Mi-ran (big weightlifting lady).
One way to humiliate a badly behaved boy is to accuse him of being in love with Jang Mi-ran. One way to embarrass a badly behaved girl is to accuse her of having a crush on Park Tae Hwan. :D

Korean swimming commentry

To my delight they just played this again (see post from the 10th of August). I had my camera to hand, so here's the last 150 metres of olympic babo-ness* from the swimming cube. The epic music at the end really completes it, don't you think?

*babo is Korean for 'crazy', taken literally in this country to mean 'mentally retarded', but I still call my kids babo all the time.

Post script: while uploading that I saw an advert for a mobile phone company using that footage. They got that out damn quickly - it only happened yesterday!

Hi Seoul

I'm in Seoul. I'm currently stealing wifi, which is a positive, but - this is the negative - I have no power, so I'm squeezing every drop of energy goodness from the laptop's battery. Quick typing... I'm having trouble finding a Korean-UK conversion plug. I may have to wait until the weekend to get to downtown Seoul where western goods are plenty.

Odd that I should start the blog with such a trite thing, as in the just-over-48 hours that I've been here I've done more than I could have managed into a week anywhere else.

First impressions. Seoul is good. Seoul is humid, very humid. People are many. If you like lights, you will like Seoul. No stars here. First two nights I stayed in a motel in Suyu. Pretty shoddy, but, paradoxically, came with a 42" plasma screen TV. Today I moved into my proper apartment in Junggye, which is also shoddy, but it's mine, and it has everything I could need: toaster, sink, cupboards, shower nozzle, leather chair, hobs, air con, mezzanine floor with bed, 'fridge-freezer, a door, toilet, window, table, smaller table, non-functioning television, and a hammer. Yep. In a month somebody in a better apartment is leaving, so I can move to their place. Quick note on Koren hotel TV. Channel 89 appears to show soft core pornography, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can literally watch jiggling breasts and a hairy bobbing man ass while you eat your breakfast, which, as a novelty is fun, but.. thinking long term it's probably best that I'm out of that place.

Work is fine, so far. I had been observing lessons, but today I was asked to teach my first class alone. I say class, it was in fact one girl, in for her first ever lesson at our hogwon, who'd lived in Surrey for the last few years and was as a result pretty fluent in conversational English. Because I had to do what the book said, we talked abut Harley Davidsons. Mmm. That was fun. When I take my first kindergarten class tomorrow, that, I'm guessing, will be far more challenging. But bring on the hyperactive 5 year olds. I'm ready.

As I type, a cockroach has just scuttled over the floor and under my chair. I got him with a can of HITE, one arm of what appears to be a duopoly of Korean lagers, along with CASS: 'sound of vitality'. That is the tagline. Hite's, 'Clean, crisp and fresh,' is far less quoteable.

My co-workers are all cool. No psychos. I replaced hirsute Floridian Chris. They are mostly American and Canadian, and one girl is from Middlesbrough. Another guy from blighty is arriving in Korea tomorrow. He was supposed to be on the same flight as me. Simiar visa problems apparently.

I have more to say, and photos to post, but two things are hindring me. Battery life and time. It's midnight here and I haven't had the best of sleeps since arriving. Come back to find out how Michaelteacher gets on with the kindies. That is, providing I can find a UK plug adaptor somewhere in this country.