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May 22 Apkujong vs. HongdaeIt was just last summer when people could say I was the quintessential "Apku" girl and they would not have been entirely wrong. My best friend at the time was, after all, a model and we did spend a fair bit of time shoe shopping and drinking coffee by Dosan Park. We did usually end up having dinner at different friend's places in Cheongdam dong and we went to all the trendy parties at Club Garden. Somehow we were always at some brand launching event or other. While I enjoyed all this glam fluff, I always preferred the creative vibe of Hongdae. No apku friends ever wanted to go there with me. Now that they've all left town, I've been making a more concerted effort to go to Hongdae, just for graphic design inspiration alone!
Some people don't know this about me but I spent my formative years in the East Village of Manhattan in the late 80's early 90's. It was dangerous, raw and extremely artistic. All my friends were artists, musicians, poets, filmakers, and fashionistas. I even got to rub elbows a few times with Andy Warhol!
Back then I'd sometimes partake in performance art pieces, I only dated muzos with long hair and I worked in a vintage clothing shop.
Back to Hongdae- The spirit there is similar to the spirit of the East Village back in the day (without the drugs and crime of course). I was sitting on the terrace of an Apku cafe a day after one of my exploration tours of Hongdae and I realized while both places have their merits, I would really rather be at the beginning of a creative idea or concept rather than at the sold-out, unjustifiably-expensive, saturated end of it. I realized I wanted to be doing something good for the state of the world instead of idly drinking coffee with pretty people. (I've got nothing against pretty people mind you, to each his own.) I looked back on last year and the things I liked to do and I realized I had evolved. Had I evolved? or had I just come back to a place where I always knew I needed to belong?
I finally found someone openminded and curious enough to accompany me to gatherings in Hongdae. The other night, we went to a benefit Poetry Slam for PB&J, the party promoters with a social conscience. The benefit was to raise money for a teen sex education center. Talented poets made spoken word performances turning words into lyrical music. It was a cross between watching a stand-up comic and an acoustic singer. Most of the poems were about the struggles of people who were different from others.
Ed Bok Lee, a kyopo who was the star of the show, wowed everyone with his amazing performance. Go see him at Seoul selection bookstore this Saturday. After having been inspired by the depth of the poetry, our next stop was BricXX where all female DJs were spinning and a female drum band was going to play. There was a guy sitting outside the club who said he needed a "breath of fresh air". No Doubt! As soon as we walked in, a cloud of damp sweaty air and cigarette smoke engulfed us. The place was packed with an unidentifiable crowd. The I put my finger on it. It was the Kscene crowd.
Luckily we got there just in time for the drum show and we didn't have to stay too long. The drumming was fast, frenzied and vaguely ethnic. It reminded me of Nanta or Tokebi Storm, if they happened to be touring in Mongolia, for example. Truthfully, it was so smoky and packed in there, it was going to be too hard to socialize, specially since we weren't drunk. Still, it was a good night. It was different. We passed by Route 66 bar and my friend said " Oh that place is so sketch. It's a good place to go if you want to get sloshed on, ogled and chatted up by some foreign guy with an over-inflated ego just becuase he's been in Korea too long. And they can't even find anything better to do than teach English!"
Well like I said, to each his own.......
One conclusion I did come to is that "edgy" doesn't equate to "trashy". You can be perfectly creative and interesting without getting wasted, being dysfuntional and without all the trashy dramatics. Maybe I'm just getting old, but if that's the case, then I'm happy to have evolved. It's getting hot in here!!From 2000-2003 I was on a really serious female dragonboat team. It's a popular sport in Hong Kong where twenty people (ten on either side) row a long teak boat. It was challenging to say the least. After sprinting for 250 meters and feeling all this lactic acid coursing through your muscles you feel like you just can't go on. But then you bust through the wall of pain and this amazing adrenaline just keeps you pulling that water. It's a killer. There was a fair share of screaming going on inside that boat. I've never really been that fit, but at that time, I really got into it. I had muscles in parts of my body where I never even knew muscles could exist. All the team members on my diet and workout regime and we were kicking ass and taking names. They used to call me "Commando Liza". I was pretty scary. Girls shouldn't have veins on their arms from working out, but I did. Anyway, my husband pulled out some old photos of me 'back in the day' and he said to me "Should I post these onto your computer screen somewhere so you remember to get off the computer sometimes and do something active?" So yesterday my girlfriend insisted that we go to Bikram Yoga and in the spirit of 'Commando Liza' I could not refuse. Bikram Yoga is a type of yoga that takes place in a very hot sauna-like room. The idea is to sweat and get deeper stretches. She wasn't feeling 100 percent due to the yellow dust and she wanted to get rid of the toxins in her body. I had done Bikram 3 times before. Ther first time, I felt like I was going to suffocate, the 2nd time was great, the third time, I was just bored. There's something odd about an excecise that makes you feel dizzy or nauseous. I was both during the class. I admit my fitness level isn't very good these days. The only thing that gets a workout is my fingers tapping on the computer keyboard. Anyway, my friend liked it and her skin looked really nice afterwards. As for me, I've decided Bikram yoga is definetly not my thing. Later on the same night I ran into this guy at an opening party for a new Cheongdam restaurant. His usually pale face was beet red and he was sweating profusely. Did he have malaria? No. The diagnosis: Bikram Yoga. He had done the yoga about an hour before and his body wasstill releasing toxins and burning calories and hour later! May 14 A few weeks in the life of seoulstyleTwo weeks have flown by and I haven't had one second to blog. Seoulstyle activities have gone on overdrive since I got back from Vietnam. I was asked to give a speech at the Working Women's Network which is special interest group for women who have jobs or who want to find something to do with their time. Good thing I used to be part of the toastmasters club. The public speaking skills I learned there helped me keep the audience's attention. My topic was "How to use your resources to enrich your life in abroad" I also essentially told the whole story about how seoulstyle came into existence and how it ended up going from being a crappy personal blog to the site that it is today. It was a great chance to network and quite a few of the ladies were interested in working together with seoulstyle. I ended up having all these follow-up meetings with each individual during the rest of the week. I also drew up some contracts and business plan ideas as well as having a few brainstorm sessions with different potential contributors or affiliates.
Last weekend, the Hi Seoul festival was going on and I got to catch the parade and watch some indie bands perform in Kwanghwamun. Here's the article I wrote about that with photos:
http://www.seoulstyle.com/hi_seoul_festival.htm That Saturday a bunch of us went to Bar Nana which is easily the funkiest watering hole in Itaewon. It reminds me of a bar that would be in Hongdae. They had a bunch of bands playing and we got to catch this really good SKA band called Bombtori. If you ever hear about any of their gigs, go see them! They sound a little like the Mighty Mighty Bostones. Who knew there were SKA bands in Seoul? They had really groovy style as well. The singer was wearing a leather belt as a tie. At the Hi SEoul festival there was another good Rock band called PAINARK. The guitarist had all these groupies. He had the make-up and the bleached hair and the aloof attitude. Rock Star stuff. Another night I ended up dragging one of my friends to Hongdae to do some research about the underground bars in that area. I wrote down all the word of mouth info, printed out all the maps I could get off the Korean sites, plus brought some other articles I had been compiling from different publications and off we went on a quest to find the funkiest boho bars in Hongdae. Though I already had info on places to go, we also stumbled accidentally onto some other gems that I will be writing about very soon for seoulstyle. You really need to literally pound the pavement to get the latest info. It was this friend's first time down parking lot street and she was freaking out about all the interesting things for sale. We both decided nerdy reading glasses were fun, so we bought a pair and wore them all around Hongdae. We visited tons of places: retro 60's places, smooth Jazz bars, dark candle-lit underground places, places with tons of LP's lining the walls, hole in the wall hip hop joints etc... I also rejected some of the recommendations which I originally had written down on the list. Last night, I went out to Chi Miggi's Spring in Session party at the Woo Bar to take photos. Usually W parties aren't that much fun, but this one was really good for some reason. The music was latin-ish and there was a guy with dreads playing live drums. It really got the bootie shaking. It wasn't super packed but the crowd that was there was great. Because it wasn't too packed, it was much easier to mingle. I met up with many of my social contacts and I even found myself having real conversations with people I hadn't really spoken to before. Then we danced. I think there's a trend going on for micromini-skirts and shorts. I practically saw one girl's behind. I'm going to post the photos in the next few days.  May 02 Check out cool pics from VietnamPeople always tell me that I never should have gotten rid of my old
Liza's Virtual World site because the format was really nice and the
photos were really fun. This MSN spaces is pretty crappy becuase
the pics are so pixelated and badly formatted. Anyway, I'm in the
process of resucitating my old blog. In fact, I'm hoping to make the
design even more exciting if I can. Unfortunately due to severe time
constraints, I cannot do this very easily. For now I will be posting
photo links to my new upcoming URL. Here are some super pics from Vietnam. I didn't have a great time there this time around, but we did get some extremely cool snaps. All these photos were taken by me and my hubby. http://www.liza-world.com/lizaGalleries/vietnam/lizacover.htm Beachfront in Vietnam- The flip flop graveyardMy hubby and I flew to Vietnam for the weekend on the advice of a friend of ours who works down there as a pilot for Vietnam ailines. He said the govenment was allowing foreigners to buy beachfront land down there on an island called Phu Quoc, and that Phu Quoc is going to be the next Bali or Phuket since they are building an international airport down there. My husband has been a banker for so long now and the stress of his job makes him have these fantasies of retiring on a nice beach somewhere and becoming a photographer. He insisted I come to Vietnam to see if we could possibly open some kind of dream resort there. I told him the hotel biz is a pain in the ass, but he wanted to dream about a different life, so I humored him. The first time I went to Vietnam in '98, I was a backpacker who was completely comfortable staying in stinky dirty one-dollar-a-night youth hostels. The chaos of third-world countries was fascinating to me at the time and I just wanted to learn what I could about history. Well now that I'm older, I have less tolerance for dirt, or chaos for that matter and I can see firsthand how the outdated governmental system (communism) hinders progress and development. First of all, we missed our trip to Vietnam last weekend because we didn't have visas. We had to postpone the trip by a week to get a visa. (That was a sign. "Do not buy land in a country that you're not sure you can even enter.") Our plane landed at 1AM and bleary-eyed from the all night journey, we were greeted with the thick humid smell of moldy farts. The only other place I know which smells like Vietnam is India. A few short hours later we boarded an small propeller plane to Phu Quoc. The driver brought us to some resort which looked like a concrete box. "They have air-conditioning." he proudly proclaimed. Perhaps Chinese tourists dig this kind of thing, but not us. NEXT!! We got back in the car and bumped down some dirt roads to a decent resort with thatched-roof bungalows. It was no surprise that the resort was being run by a European guy. A man with really bad teeth whose brother was on the govt. council came to take us on a real estate tour. There are no real estate agents in Vietnam. There's only this local guy with a bad accent and bad teeth who knows which plots of land the govt. might allow to be developed. Of course it was going to come 'at a price' since you need a business licence. (In other words, you were going to need to bribe the right person to be allowed to build). Plots which were available yesterday suddenly became unavailable and re-available for the right price. The loose-toothed man showed us a bunch of dirty beaches encompassed by swampland. There was no native architechture like in Bali or Thailand (unless you call wind-torn huts with tarp walls and rusty corrugated aluminum roofs 'architechture'.) It's sad that the general population is so impoverished. When corruption and bribery is so blatantly widespread, it's clear that something isn't right with the way the government is running things. After the swampland tour, we traveled for what seemed like hours on unpaved roads to reach a secluded beach on the southern tip of the island. There was no water, no electricity,no restaurants, no shopping. Nor was there jetskiing, golf-courses, spas or any natural attraction that a tourist might want to visit.There alot of great are places in the world where you can get away from everything and just sit on a great beach and do nothing. This beach was nice, but it just looked so dirty and neglected. The beach was strewn with flip-flops, bottles, driftwood and all manner of washed-up debris. I'm sorry but Phu Quoc has centuries to go before it could even come close to being Ko Samui. At night, our bungalow was crawling with every type of bug imaginable: red ants, sand flies, spiders, millipedes, mosquitos, moths and other unidentifiable creepy critters. I cast the mosquito net and turned off the light. It was pitch, pitch black. I couldn't see anything at all. I could, however, hear the sounds of nocturnal animals in the distance: Dogs howling, cicadas, and OH MY GOD was that a snake hissing??? (We had seen a few snakes earlier on the road.) Well, we survived the night with nary a mosquito bite. We flew back to Ho Chi Min city early the next day and wandered the city. Sunday happened to be a holiday called reunification day. It's a celebration of Ho Chi Min and the truimph of Communism. The South Vietnamese call this holiday "humiliation day" since they lost the war. The rivers had a distinct sewer smell and the streets were choked with motorbikes. Our friend who lives there says he's seen so many horrific accidents. People splayed out under buses, people with their brains oozing out of their ears after a bad crash etc... Nobody wears a helmet or looks where they are going. Consequently, people are constantly blowing their horns. Having said that, I will say that Vietnam has it's charms. Especially for older white men. Foreign money stretches far and wide enough to buy an old wrinkly dude a clan of nubile young Vietnamese girls. Apparently there's even a contingent of expat women whose husbands all left them for Vietnamese girls. They even have their own club (support group). NICE. Sounds like a place I really want to move to tommorrow. NOT!!!!!! |
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