"The Semitol Leeching" --The first leeching performed at the capitol by Seminole indians. Key chain.
"Dino Divinchi Outlet" --All the dinosaurs and oil paintings at the rock-bottom prices you demand. Storefront.
"Hamster Club" --With new, circular treadmills and fun plastic tubes to crawl through. Jacket.
"Toz Toz Toast Shop" --Are there really lucid, fully-ambulatory people out there who can’t operate a toaster? Storefront.
"Yogurt Kiss Garden" --Sounds like mushy stuff. Baskin Robbins storefront.
"Dual Incredible Park" --Believe it or not, this is a flavor of icecream cake. Same Baskin Robbins.
"Manufactured and made Authentic" ...By adding someone else’s logo to ordinary jeans... Sweatshirt.
"A beautiful coast town with dream and romance" --But no articles and everything is singular. Young-do beach front.
I have quite a bit to say, but I’ll save that for the REALLY dedicated SoKoNotes readers. For all you who just want to see all the ‘pickies,’ here they are, all fifteen of them, with commentary.
In-hye skipped out on our weekly English/Korean co-lesson, so I took a long walk along the waterfront on the southern side of Young-do island. The sun was near its zenith and the light was steeply angled, creating cold inky shadows. All available commercial space was crowded with machine shops, welding shops and other stores dedicated to the construction and repair of oceangoing ships. Weathered men in grease-streaked blue coveralls fussed over all manner of boat parts with TIG welders, drills and hammers. Their endless, friendly chatter filled mixed with the sharp sounds of metal striking metal and the steady hiss and crack of welding torches. Most of these worker bees didn't care to have their picture made, still, I persisted and got a few nice frames.
Facing the shops were ships of all shapes and sizes in various states of disrepair resting high and dry on giant rubber blocks. Most of these vessels appeared to be very old. The rusty steel skin on one of the barges was so old and thin that it had bent around the ship's ribs, giving the vessel the appearence of a mangy, starving dog. My inner ten-year-old gawked at the giant brass propellers, drive shafts and diesel blocks basking in the hard sunlight. Point. Click. Walk.
Other guys fished. With so many people fishing in Busan, I'm surprised there are any fish left in the harbor whatsoever. Every coast I visit is usually lined with people drinking window cleaner, er...Soju, and luring sea creatures with bits of shrimp.
There is a huge seawall that protects the nearby apartment buildings from the sea.
I like to joke with Gavin that one or both of us is going to meet the right girl here and in ten years that'll be us sitting on that rock with a pole in our hand teaching our son or daughter how to skin an eel. It does happen, you know. Just ask Noel.
Gavin and I met Noel, a native of Australia, while attending Hangul Seodang. Easily six feet tall or taller and built like a rugby player, Noel has been in Busan four years. He met and married a Korean a year or so back.
Noel invited us out to a Dong Dong Ju Friday night, and we accepted the invitation. He and almost a half-dozen of his friends joined us at the creepy Beomil-dong station for the long walk to the bar.
A Dong Dong Ju is a traditional Korean bar specializing in Makali, a form of rice wine. Like all places in Busan where foreigners take me, it's usually full of - surprise!- other foreigners. The bar itself appeared to have been hewn from the bare rock of the mountainside on which it was located. It was dank, dark and eerily lit with Christmas lights and low-wattage Chinese lamps. Every surface, from the tables to the chairs, was made of solid rock, and every surface save the tables and chairs was covered in a slick layer of water. My general impression was of descending into a castle in Mordor from The Lord of The Rings. Through the fog of Makali, I somehow popped a few frames.
When it rains, it pours, and sometimes it outright snows. On Monday we got three inches of snow. It wasn't enough to cancel classes, but it made for a decent photo.
People bundled up against the wet, cold weather. The windows of the bus fogged up and filtered the crystalline light streaming off of the snow, effectively turning the 88-1 into a perfect softbox.
I enjoy shooting on the bus, anyway. The light coming from the near daylight-balanced florescent lights is very dramatic, and when combined with the colored light from outside the bus, makes for good photos.
There was a march or protest concerning the police in Nampo-dong on Saturday. People with black clothes and red stop signs walked from Busan Station through Nampo-dong. They didn't seem to mind me taking photos, which is about all the documenting that I can do because of the language barrier.
It amazes me how young their police officers appear. Long lines of the fresh-faced youth protected the marchers from traffic.
OK, and now for the ESS report. We have a new Korean teacher named Na-ri. She replaced In-hye a couple of weeks ago. When a new teacher joins ESS, they usually get the lowest level classes: The B's, G's, TE's and E2's. These kids tend to be in a bad way either in terms of linguistics, behavior, or both. I shared a lot of these classes with In-hye, and we struggled to focus the students on learning. Two weeks with Na-ri and it's like I've been teaching different classes. 5P, which had been once been nearly unteachable, is now so calm and collected it's like they're bipolar.
Na-ri has a gentle, no-nonsense attitude, and she seems genuinely interested in teaching the children English. I came into the teacher's office Friday to see her tutoring a boy who knew absolutely no English; and what stood out the most was her small, delicate hand gliding over the sheet of characters to the gentle, patient sound of her voice.
The play rehearsals are getting longer and more complex. Mr. Kim has brought in a dance instructor and two musical directors - a traditional Korean instruments instructor and a coordinator (Mr. Kim's daughter) - to back up Lois, his main director. The simple, second-grade level play is being transformed into a broadway musical. What's worse: Mr. Kim is micromanaging the entire thing down to the way I sweep my hand as I create 'plants,' which brings us to Hong-gi.
Poor Hong-gi. He's tall. He's pudgy. He just recently started learning English, and he got cast as "Dry Land," one of the more difficult parts in the play. The complexity of his part is not due to his lines, which are ludicrously simple. I memorized them during the hour I spent teaching him to speak them today. At one point, Hong-gi leans towards "Water" and remarks, "You're so...So blue!" His hardest line comes after I create the Sun. Hong-gi pretends to put on shades and says, "I think I just invented sunbathing!"
No, the difficulty in any of these parts is wholly due to the haphazard production of the play. When I came into ESS today, Soo-hee told me to spend an hour with Hong-gi. "He needs a lot of help," she said. "How should he deliver his lines?" I asked. Soo-hee shrugged and told me to basically teach him the way I see fit. So for an hour I taught Hong-gi to deliver his lines in the slow, measured, wise intonation that I imagined "Land" would have, like a Buddhist monk. I figured it would balance well against "Water," played by a girl who frolics on stage with a long blue ribbon and speaks her lines in a high-energy, carefree manner.
Hong-gi was very excited as we took the stage today for rehearsal. We had not only worked out his pronunciation and intonation, we had designed a "Dry Land" style of walk. However, Hong-gi hadn't spoken five words before both Mr. Kim and the director all but tackled him and told him to stop. No, they told him, that was NOT how "Dry Land" was to act. Hong-gi turned a confused, helpless look on me that said, "Mr. Jones, what's going on?"
I had no idea. No one had bothered to tell me, Hong-gi or Soo-hee how "Dry Land" should be acted. I had taught him the way I would have acted the part, and this was far from correct. Mr. Kim suddenly began goose-stepping around like a soldier, arms crossed, looking serious. This was the way he wanted it done. The director agreed, and then both Mr. Kim and his director turned and looked at me as if I was in on there plan the whole time.
I then had to spend the next half-hour teaching first myself and then Hong-gi how to walk, talk and act the way Mr. Kim and the director desired. It was a massive waste of time, but that seems to be the rule and not the exception in this play. Despite my accidental betrayal of Hong-gi, the good-natured boy was all smiles and jokes as he, I, and the other players walked to a restaurant for noodles during a break in rehearsal.
After five hours of rehearsal, we had only covered four scenes in the eight-scene play. Compounding our inefficiency is the lack of scripted blocking. Blocking, for all of you who don't know, is how and where an actor relates to both the audience and his fellow players while delivering his or her lines. It includes how you enter the stage, where, how and when you go as well as your body language and coordination with the other actors. Mr. Kim and our director are doing all of their blocking on the fly, and their constant back-and-forth tweaking eats time and distracts the students. I'm not sure if this is how it's done in a professional theater, or if someone 'blocks' a play long before the scripts are handed out, but it sure makes for a slow rehearsal. There isn't time to do much more than wait for your line and take photos.
Well, that about does it for this week. I had plans to talk about all of this personal stuff, but I'm beat and it's probably not wise anyway, so I won't...At least for now. For all of you back in TV Land, thanks for putting down the remote for a few minutes and reading this quality blog. Our TV hasn't worked in months, and that's fine with me. Gavin and I keep trying to rally each other to the cause of acquiring a new TV, but somehow we always find something better to do with our time, like work on building our websites or exploring the city. Peace. --Notes
2 comments:
As always great photos.
Thanks for the update. It snowed here too. I got some pretty good pics of it and they're on my blog if you wanna check them out.
Take care,
Stefanie
Post a Comment