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4月27日 TrendspottingI've been taking a couple of trendspotters from a company called Pophouse Australia around Seoul the past few days. Pophouse does market surveys of different cities and writes up informative reports for businesses looking to innovate. They contracted me via seoulstyle and asked me to be their guide while here. (Great! another paying job!) My job was basically to show them the different ways in which people do business specifically in Korea.
First, I took them up to Namsan tower to show them how the city is going through a renaissance and trying to modernize and up it's hip factor in the eyes of the rest world. I also introduced them to the gift shop there where they sell millimeter milligram products. Instead of tacky kitschy stuff, they actually sell really cool "design-oriented" souveniers that you would be proud to wear of display around the house. Then we rode the cable car down and descended to Myong Dong where I showed them the norebang, PC bang and the DVD bang. The whole "room" concept is very uniquely Korean. Afterwards, we proceeded onto Salvation Paradiso, the "fashion category" shop. I wanted to show them how there were all these different kinds of themed fitting rooms. There's the punk dressing room, the boho dressing room, the disco dressing room etc.. Depending on what kind of outfit you try on, there's a different fitting room environment to inspire the look. They scored some really cute clothes at the shop. For lunch we had a spicy chicken dish called tak kalbi at Andong Jim Tak. The chicken was divine, but the kimchee almost made one of the girls puke. I guess kimchee will not be marked down as a world trend anytime soon!!! Onto namdaemun where we saw veggie trucks, quick service delivery guys and pojangmachas. Then I tried to find them a love hotel with a parking lot that had big rubber curtains hiding the license plates, but we couldn't find one. We did see some love motels and we deliberated outside of one of them for at least 15 minutes in order to work up the courage to ask to see the inside of a room. After all the posturizing and discussing and planning we finally we in to see a room. It was so basic and looked and smelled like a stinky yogwan. Anticlimactic! The receptionist probably thought we were Russian hookers. The girls concluded that the place smelled of bodily fluids because there were particles of it floating in the air......... We went to insadong, samcheong dong, Ewha women's university and finally we ended up in Hongdae. They loved Hongdae, as I do. We stumbled into a cute new cafe called Catchlight and I asked what I thought was one of the hosts if 3 people could have a seat. The guy didn't even work there and he turned out to be some famous drama actor who happened to be there filming an episode of the drama called 'Seoul Mate'.
Oops, duhhh! Could I not tell by the pancake make-up that the guy was an actor and not a waiter? After that we visited Bau Haus dog cafe where dog lovers can take their dogs or play with the resident ones. Man were those doggies cute!!! They rushed at us as soon as we walked in and one of the trend-spotters jumped back and refused to come in. Apparently she was attacked by a dog when she was 4 years old and couldn't get over the trauma of it. Anyway the whole tour was very exciting and it was interesting to see Seoul through the eyes of trend-spotters vs. just regular travellers.
4月25日 Skype me!Technology never ceases to amaze me. We've had SKYPE (it's a program whcih enables you to make free phonecalls on the internet) for quite some time now and we just installed video capability. Our friend living in Vietnam SKYPED us the other day and he showed us his house, his swimming pool and new mortorbike with his webcam. We also got to e-meet his cute girlfriend. He then pointed the webcam at the pool and showed us his impersonation of an ajuma doing the butterfly. It was all at once hilarious and pixellated. Nevertheless it was truly amazing! I just think it's so star trek to be able to see your friend in Vietnam do his impersonation of a butterfly-ing ajuma over the internet!
Sunday the rain was pouring down in a scary way. There's not much outdoor activity available on a rainy day so we went to the Yongsan electronics market to buy a big screen for my computer. I was designing my website on a 17 inch screen and now that I'm practically a professional, I outgrew the 17 inch and needed something BIGGER (who says size doesn't matter?) However, I still haven't turned into a MAC snob just yet. I'm still on a PC for the time being.
The following day, I set out to close my first "paying" web design job. Up until recently, I did not feel skilled enough to offer a "product" per se, but so many people have been asking me if they could advertise and if I could to do design stuff for them lately that I finally realized that perhaps I do have a knack for the design/internet biz. I managed to close the deal and I will announce the new website when it goes online. 4月21日 Hyperactive BrainMy brain woke up early today, around 6AM. I had no choice but to wake up, open the fridge and have a slice of cold leftover pizza for breakfast.Sometimes creative ideas come to me in the middle of the night and I just can't wait to wake up in the morning and make them happen. Actually I don't like chatboards that much. People are forever flaming each other just because they don't have face to face contact, but I believe in the power of public opinion and there's alot of things that people out there know that I don't. So please register and post your info on my forums and Please! be nice!! (I'm so glad I know how to delete and moderate posts now; unlike a few months ago!) 4月18日 Yellow Dust ruins cherry blossom seasonI walked outside to a blustery wind today and immediately my eyes began
to itch and I started to sneeze. All I wanted to do was turn around and
go back inside my house. The sky was a ominous shade of grey (it almost
looks like judgement day) and all the windows and cars were covered
with a blanket of 'yellow dust'. This phenomenon happens every spring
when strong winds blow germs, pollution and sand from China and the
Gobe desert as far as the Korean peninsula. Unfortunately, "yellow dust" coincides with the cherry blossom season, so as the flowers begin to bloom, the sickening wind makes it simultaneously fall off the trees. Fortunately, we were blessed with an amazing day on Sunday and the skies were clear blue. On Sunday, my husband pried me off the computer and demanded that we go on a photo expedition of Namsan Park. I reluctantly unstuck my hands from the computer keyboard and got out my infrequently used Canon SLR. We meandered through the park shooting photos of the pretty pink trees and I was so glad to be able to take a break from my seoulstyle updates to enjoy a beautiful nature walk with my beloved. We hiked all the way up the trail with one brief stop for some jajangmyon (noodles in a black sauce). Around sunset, we reached the Seoul Tower where we stumbled upon the most happening rave party! There was a DJ pumping out the most jamming set of house, Korean rap and popular dance music. We had just been to see Stephane Pompougnac spin at W hotel the night before and it was so lame compared to the rave party going on at Namsan. The funniest thing was that the people who were emphatically dancing around were not trendy youngsters, but ajumas and ajosshis and some halmonis and harabojis too (grandmas and grandpas)! It was the most hilarious photo opportunity and we ended up taking hundreds of photos of the old folks doing their funky chicken dance moves! They were having so much fun, that on the walk back were heard a few of them singing at the top of their lungs in the forest. We also saw one very drunk visor-wearing ajuma being escorted out of the park with the help of two other ajumas. See some of the photos on this link: http://www.seoulstyle.com/pics_namsan_rave.htm 4月15日 Diamonds and Kimchee??? I'm finally back on my beloved computer. I bought all these training softwares and design books from Bangkok, so I've literally been staring, blurry-eyed, in front of the computer for the past week. I had a bunch of articles to format from the writing contest I had for seoulstyle. The contest yielded some brilliant entries, but these are the top three. Vote for your favorite story here! http://www.seoulstyle.com/vote.htm Scroll over the titles to read the articles. I was so busy this week I barely had time to take a dump, but one of my bridesmaids flew into Seoul for a surprise visit, so I had to take her out. One night, we went for Korean BB-Q at my favorite local dive joint in Itaewon and for some reason incomprehensible to me, she was dripping in diamonds! She had on 6 carat diamond drop earrings, a ten-carat diamond necklace (which almost blinded me) and a 10 carat diamond braclet which had a lacy pattern. On top of that, she had these sexy high-heeled Louis Vuitton wooden clogs on AND (this is the clincher) she's seven months pregnant! Good on her. I guess you're allowed to be an empress when you're preggos. She actually said she liked being pregnant because people are so nice to you and you can get away with anything, even wearing diamonds to a stinky, divey BB-Q joint. This same friend was just in Bombay visiting another ajuma/empress and apparently in Bombay, all those diamonds are considered casual lunch wear. In fact, the ladies in Bombay supposedly wear much more jewelry. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Personally, I think the Bombay ladies should sell some of their jewelry to feed the all the starving people over there. Activities down underEver since the demise of my old blog, I've been incredibly remiss with my entries. Sorry about that. Well I was on holiday, far far away from my beloved computer.... I had such a fab time down under with the Aussies and their lovely blue skies temperate weather and awesome beaches! However, I wouldn't want to live there because it really feels like the end of the world. You can distinctly feel the isolation. People are taught to be friendly, just like Americans, but you can tell there's an slight undercurrent of protectionism and dare I say- ignorance?, probably just due to the fact that they are so isolated. Having said that, I only had wonderful experiences with the Aussies I met. And I had plenty of time to get the know the shops on Oxford street quite intimately. In fact, I swiped my credit card so many times, it got demagnetized! I thought I spent an obscene of money, but every girl I spoke to said it was nothing. Whew, That's a relief. I had a Korean girlfriend getting married to an Aussie boy down there and I had a chance to catch up with my old clan of Korean ajuma girlfriends who moved away from Korea last year. The wedding was breathtakingly lovely, but the hen's night was a bit of a disappointment. I was trying to recruit some male strippers to dance for the bride and I finally found some young hot footie players who were willing to do it, but one of them was injured and he was at the club on crutches. All the girlfriends were complaining that the only stripper I could get was a gimp! Then, they were complaining that the strippers were too young! AJUMAS! Come on! On the other hand, the gimpy stripper thought I was 24 years old, so I personally thought he was really cool. (Tell me more little boy... heheheheee..) Our hen's night was cut short when we acidentally caught up with the Stags. The night was over after that. Other than that, my hubby and I really loved Port Macquarie where he was doing his 6th Ironman triathlon. I was drooling over all the gorgeous and unique beach houses with their incredible vistas of the ocean. My hubby kicked ass in his Ironman Race. He did his personal best: 10 hrs and 7mins. That's 123 out of 1700 competitors. Top 8 percent! Way to go my man! However, it was not quite good enough to get him qualified for the Ironman Championship in Kona, Hawaii. After the race, we stayed at the Park Hyatt in Sydney where we had this amazing room with a view of the harbour and the opera house. It was so slick. I felt really priveledged. We also got to visit our plot of land in Avalon, north of Sydney, where we are building a house for investment purposes. We bought this land two years ago, sight unseen with our friend who is a pilot in Australia. It was sweet! and it had endless views of the sea and some yacht harbor. Apparently some celebrity gardener is building a 4 million dollar house right on our street!!! The property values will be going through the roof when his project is completed. Cool. very cool. 4月1日 Down UnderAfter a few days of massages, shopping and seeing the sights in Bangkok, I flew down to Oz to meet my hubby. I missed him so much, but after taking this mega-sleeping pill on my all night flight to sydney, I could barely manage to lift an eyelid when I met him at the airport.24 hours later, after I recovered from my lorazepam-induced haze, I woke up to a brillant sea view outside my hotel-room here in Port Macaqurie. This sleepy beach retreat is just north of sydney and is the new home of Ironman Australia. I tell you I feel so out of shape after seeing all these mega-fit triathletes training around here. I better get off this computer now and go for a run or something!
There's something amazing about the light in the Southern hemisphere. You really feel like you're at the end of the earth. One night in BangkokActually I'm in Bangkok for a few days of fun. That means SHOPPING! yes, I make no apologies for this, I'm a girl and girls like to shop. It goes as far back as the caveman days when women were gatherers and men were hunters. Funnily enough, I came here to shop for clothes and knick knacks for my house but I found myself instead being drawn to bookshops and computer software stores. Thais have the most amazing design sense. In fact, it almost seems like the government is pushing Thais to become specialists in every field of design. There are big posters at the skytrain, for example, which say "What would life be without design?" Bangkok also just had an intense and highly publicized fashion week which the city spent millions of dollars on. They are trying to give New york, Paris and Milan a run for the money. One of the magazine editorials shamelessly said "What could be better that keeping young, fit and trendy-looking?" Everything from web design, interior design, to clothing, ads and magazines is all so trendy and future forward. I ended up marveling at the immense design section of this one book shop and I was so inspired. After purchasing a bunch of books, I wandered into a section full of furniture shops. I almost hyperventilated at all the cool stuff they were selling in those stores. I was literally trying to find the best way to ship the whole mall back to Korea with me. In another mall, I discovered a design museum where they were showcasing design items from Japan. They had several screens split in threes with artsy footage being projected onto them. Next door was an exhibit for the best designed kitchen utensils for 2006. There were huge cutout boxes covered with blurred kitchen images and somewhere in the middle of it, a window with halogen lighting featured some neeto bowl or some futurisic mortar and pestle. After the air-conditioned mall-hopping, I took the skytrain out to Jatuchak market (also known as the weekend market). This vast behemoth market has everything under the sun! You can find Rubix cubes, live animals, used jeans, furniture, toys, candle holders, fried crickets etc... etc... etc... The problem with this market is the claustrophobia and the heat. People are packed together so tightly in the little alleyways. As you move through, you're always brushing up against someone else's sweaty arm. EWWW.. However, if you're willing to brave the crowds and the heat, you may be rewarded with some really interesting buys. Again Jatuchak is the realm of the Uber-trendy kids of Bangkok. There's an immense section selling DIY (do it yourself) punk and vintage gear. Shaggy haircuts, side burns and 70's Bruce Lee looks seem to be all the rage with the teens. Anyay afer hours of sweating up a storm, I decided to cool my heels and refuel at a vegetarian restaurant on soi 39. I started off with carrot sticks dipped in hummous made from almonds, then I had a fruit soup with mango and coconut water garnished with pineapple and banana. For the main course, I had the most amazing pasta-less lasagna made with eggplant, zucchini and tomato. If i could make veggies taste this good myself, I'd never eat meat again! It was so yummy and refreshing. Exactly what I wanted after a hot day of shopping. |
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