Some faces of the people (and other creatures) I encountered on my travels through Myanmar in February 2011.
Showing posts with label videos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label videos. Show all posts
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Friday, January 07, 2011
Pohang Polar Plunge 2011
To celebrate the beginning of a new calendar year, I convinced a group of 9 intrepid English teachers in Pohang to jump in the ocean on January 2nd. It was a blast, and not as torturous as you might expect swimming in freezing water to be. After we got out, we were all quite exhilarated and happy, and only mildly cold.
Pohang Polar Plunge 2011 from jonnyontheroad on Vimeo.
Pohang Polar Plunge 2011 from jonnyontheroad on Vimeo.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
A Big Fat Korean Wedding
(Laos updates still a-comin')
On Saturday Lisa and I attended a co-teacher's wedding at Pohang's swankiest hotel. That should give you some idea what a big deal this wedding was - most Korean these days get married at wedding chapels, where wedding parties churn through ceremonies on a conveyor belt.
It was the biggest wedding I've ever attended. There were a good 400 people there, including the mayor of Pohang himself, who greeted us outside of the hotel on our way in. It was a sign, in part, of the bride's father's success in business. In Korea, yellow garbage bins sit outside of every residential complex and restaurant, for the sole purpose of discarding food scraps. Everyone stores their food waste in their home, along with their trash and recycling, before taking it to the curb to be recycled into animal feed products. (You can actually be fined for throwing your food into the regular trash.) The recycling company comes along a couple of times a week to collect it. The bride's father started, and still runs, that business which serves all of Pohang and Gyeongju.
Inside the upstairs lobby, between a cascade of flower boquets, guests were met by a large donation table, with the bride and grooms' parents on either side, mothers in traditional hanbok, greeting the attendees. The groom stood with his parents on a small red carpet, and when we approached him he stepped off the carpet and shook my hand warmly. He thanked us for coming and suggested that we say hi to Sung Mi, the bride and my co-teacher. I hadn't seen her yet, though, so I asked him where to find her. He pointed us to an adjacent room. We entered to find Sung Mi, alone and glowing in the center of the room, her gigantic wedding dress laying like a small snow drift on a crimson chaise lounge on a small platform. We filtered into a small line of people waiting to greet her and have their picture taken with her. If any bride has ever felt more like a princess than she did at that moment, I don't know who she would be.
We took our seats in the expansive auditorium set with tables for the ceremony and reception rolled into one. Drinks - soda and beer - were already on the tables along with some rolls and rice cakes. We took our seats, the only ones still available, at the table farthest from the runway and stage (yeah, there was a runway) under the giant projection screen (there were actually TWO projection screens for the service).
The ceremony began quickly, without much ado - the groom entered, followed by the bride, who were met at the podium by some old man (apparently a professional public speaker) who proceeded to drone on for 30 minutes on some drivel about successful marriages. It wasn't just boring because it was in Korean and we didn't understand anything - my co-teacher also remarked that he wasn't a very good speaker. Probably expensive, though.
When he finally finished, no one really noticed because everyone was eating or drinking or having their own conversations, having stopped listening 29 minutes ago. Sung Mi and her new husband turned to face the guests, and a couple of groups of high school students came up to perform some poorly rehearsed, but quite entertaining, song and dance numbers.
Food was served - soup, salad, and a main course - and the bride and groom cut the cake. After that I heard my name called amidst a stream of Korean, and everyone at my table turned to look at me. Speech time. (Back in November, Sung Mi had asked if I would give a short address in English at the wedding, and I agreed.) I wandered through the mess of tables, crossing the approximately 3.5 miles from the back of the room, and was finally handed a microphone and pushed onstage next to the new bride and groom. I gave the crowd a little "nice to meet you" in Korean, which received some applause and which lubricated the next 5 minutes nicely, since my speech was all in English and only a handful of people in the crowd would have understood it.
I talked about how everyone's definition of love is different, but how it usually contains the idea that love is something that happens to you, rather than something you have power and control over, and we need to rewrite the definition to reflect that love is simply how you treat other people. Using that ceremonially ubiquitous bible verse from corinthians, i re-wrote it (yeah, i re-wrote the bible) to say "i am patient, i am kind..." blah blah. i felt silly and sappy but this was the kind of wedding that afforded me the luxury.
I made my way back to our table, we ate the 3 courses brought out to us, and left, leaving a wedding donation at the money table on our way out. We also grabbed some fresh flowers from the lobby, since everyone else was doing it.
I took some basic video, which I compiled into a short synopsis here:
On Saturday Lisa and I attended a co-teacher's wedding at Pohang's swankiest hotel. That should give you some idea what a big deal this wedding was - most Korean these days get married at wedding chapels, where wedding parties churn through ceremonies on a conveyor belt.
It was the biggest wedding I've ever attended. There were a good 400 people there, including the mayor of Pohang himself, who greeted us outside of the hotel on our way in. It was a sign, in part, of the bride's father's success in business. In Korea, yellow garbage bins sit outside of every residential complex and restaurant, for the sole purpose of discarding food scraps. Everyone stores their food waste in their home, along with their trash and recycling, before taking it to the curb to be recycled into animal feed products. (You can actually be fined for throwing your food into the regular trash.) The recycling company comes along a couple of times a week to collect it. The bride's father started, and still runs, that business which serves all of Pohang and Gyeongju.
Inside the upstairs lobby, between a cascade of flower boquets, guests were met by a large donation table, with the bride and grooms' parents on either side, mothers in traditional hanbok, greeting the attendees. The groom stood with his parents on a small red carpet, and when we approached him he stepped off the carpet and shook my hand warmly. He thanked us for coming and suggested that we say hi to Sung Mi, the bride and my co-teacher. I hadn't seen her yet, though, so I asked him where to find her. He pointed us to an adjacent room. We entered to find Sung Mi, alone and glowing in the center of the room, her gigantic wedding dress laying like a small snow drift on a crimson chaise lounge on a small platform. We filtered into a small line of people waiting to greet her and have their picture taken with her. If any bride has ever felt more like a princess than she did at that moment, I don't know who she would be.
We took our seats in the expansive auditorium set with tables for the ceremony and reception rolled into one. Drinks - soda and beer - were already on the tables along with some rolls and rice cakes. We took our seats, the only ones still available, at the table farthest from the runway and stage (yeah, there was a runway) under the giant projection screen (there were actually TWO projection screens for the service).
The ceremony began quickly, without much ado - the groom entered, followed by the bride, who were met at the podium by some old man (apparently a professional public speaker) who proceeded to drone on for 30 minutes on some drivel about successful marriages. It wasn't just boring because it was in Korean and we didn't understand anything - my co-teacher also remarked that he wasn't a very good speaker. Probably expensive, though.
When he finally finished, no one really noticed because everyone was eating or drinking or having their own conversations, having stopped listening 29 minutes ago. Sung Mi and her new husband turned to face the guests, and a couple of groups of high school students came up to perform some poorly rehearsed, but quite entertaining, song and dance numbers.
Food was served - soup, salad, and a main course - and the bride and groom cut the cake. After that I heard my name called amidst a stream of Korean, and everyone at my table turned to look at me. Speech time. (Back in November, Sung Mi had asked if I would give a short address in English at the wedding, and I agreed.) I wandered through the mess of tables, crossing the approximately 3.5 miles from the back of the room, and was finally handed a microphone and pushed onstage next to the new bride and groom. I gave the crowd a little "nice to meet you" in Korean, which received some applause and which lubricated the next 5 minutes nicely, since my speech was all in English and only a handful of people in the crowd would have understood it.
I talked about how everyone's definition of love is different, but how it usually contains the idea that love is something that happens to you, rather than something you have power and control over, and we need to rewrite the definition to reflect that love is simply how you treat other people. Using that ceremonially ubiquitous bible verse from corinthians, i re-wrote it (yeah, i re-wrote the bible) to say "i am patient, i am kind..." blah blah. i felt silly and sappy but this was the kind of wedding that afforded me the luxury.
I made my way back to our table, we ate the 3 courses brought out to us, and left, leaving a wedding donation at the money table on our way out. We also grabbed some fresh flowers from the lobby, since everyone else was doing it.
I took some basic video, which I compiled into a short synopsis here:
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Cribs
Our new Korean apartment:
As small as it may be, I don't think we'd choose to have it any other way. Having a bigger apartment would just require having more stuff to fill the space. With less room we're forced to evaluate the necessity of our possessions and keep only what we truly value.
So far, anyway, the space hasn't been an issue. We get a lot of sunlight and "fresh" air, which is as much as we could ask for. In the end, though, we don't plan on spending a lot of time in the apartment - too many adventures await.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Jukdo Market
As places go, Jukdo market is one of Pohang's most colorful. Its largest market, Jukdo is a popular destination for Koreans in search of some of the country's freshest seafood. It's all freshly caught - after 6pm each day the fishmongers start discounting their stock. But they have much more than fish to offer. Clothes, kimchi, side dishes, linens, plants: you name it, you can probably get it here. It's a colorful place, where vendors gut their catch under rainbow umbrellas and old women jostle for dried shrimp in crowded alleys as motorbikes zip by.
Sitting catycorner to each other, two women compete for business selling whale and dolphin meat. But competition isn't fierce; they are the only two vendors of their goods in Pohang. One woman is slicing a large hunk of black meat encased in a strip of lard as thick as the meat itself. She offers us a slice - whale, we're told - and we eat it with some salt. It has a unique, very rich flavor, like dark coffee or chocolate.
Afterwards she changes her tune - it's dolphin. I feel uneasy knowing what I ate, but I can't decide why. Dolphins are intelligent, supposedly compassionate, and playful. If they were smaller or drier they'd make great pets. They're innocent - but so are whales, and every other animal we eat, for that matter. For some reason it seems more plausible to me that a dolphin could possess a soul, I suppose. They're the most human of sea creatures. Maybe it's a classic case of anthropomorphic attachment. It's irrational and doesn't make sense. Still, I feel uneasy.
My coteacher later tells me that whaling is illegal in Korea - they're only allowed to sell whale or dolphin if it is caught in their nets inadvertently and is already dead, or if they import it. I can only speculate as to the laxity of enforcement.
Unfortunately, at times Jukdo market can be so colorful that it hurts to look. More uneasiness, this time not out of an affinity for anthropomorphism but general sense of inhumanity.
Afterwards, while I try to calm my mind and my suddenly-queasy stomach, my coteacher brings me a large bag of boiled, dried octopus chips. I thank her politely and put them in my bag.
Sitting catycorner to each other, two women compete for business selling whale and dolphin meat. But competition isn't fierce; they are the only two vendors of their goods in Pohang. One woman is slicing a large hunk of black meat encased in a strip of lard as thick as the meat itself. She offers us a slice - whale, we're told - and we eat it with some salt. It has a unique, very rich flavor, like dark coffee or chocolate.
Afterwards she changes her tune - it's dolphin. I feel uneasy knowing what I ate, but I can't decide why. Dolphins are intelligent, supposedly compassionate, and playful. If they were smaller or drier they'd make great pets. They're innocent - but so are whales, and every other animal we eat, for that matter. For some reason it seems more plausible to me that a dolphin could possess a soul, I suppose. They're the most human of sea creatures. Maybe it's a classic case of anthropomorphic attachment. It's irrational and doesn't make sense. Still, I feel uneasy.My coteacher later tells me that whaling is illegal in Korea - they're only allowed to sell whale or dolphin if it is caught in their nets inadvertently and is already dead, or if they import it. I can only speculate as to the laxity of enforcement.
Unfortunately, at times Jukdo market can be so colorful that it hurts to look. More uneasiness, this time not out of an affinity for anthropomorphism but general sense of inhumanity.
Afterwards, while I try to calm my mind and my suddenly-queasy stomach, my coteacher brings me a large bag of boiled, dried octopus chips. I thank her politely and put them in my bag.
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