Bang to the Bang

There comes a time in every man's life when he has to make a decision. A fork in the road approaches nigh, and a choice must be made as to which way the rest of your journey unfolds. I sometimes feel like I either stopped my journey to take a satisfying dump or lassoed the nearest albatross to take me away to Never Never Land. Alas, neither is true. My life, like yours is on a path through time and space to an ultimate end point. Since coming to Korea, I've considered part of my journey to be blogging. Now, I'm not having the break up talk with you, but I'm just laying it down that I find it more difficult to blog these days when life runs together and I forget to bring my camera almost all the time. Things are not divided into hilarious episodes as they once were. I believe that also is denoted by a decrease in readership?

With that said, let's see. What do I have to tell you? I thought I had something, but I drank those brain cells away. Ah yes...

Ah no...

Ah yes...

So I was finally lucky enough to visit the illustrious Woobang Tower Land last weekend. This was on Sunday with Saturday being the big bull push--er, fight. The only way to describe Woobang Land would be to say that the $20 entrance fee was pushing it. Hey, Woobang, you're pushing your luck there.

I can tell you, in detail, the experience I had on every ride I went on because there were only about six that I could tell (outside of the kiddie rides):

First, we hit that one carnival ride where they strap about twenty of your luckiest friends into one of two caged cars that subsequently swings to build up momentum (like that stupid pirate ship ride) until it eventually flips you upside down. I believed this would be a good litmus test for the rest of the park as to whether the rides could accommodate a person of Western stature (read: fatass), and it generally was. My shoulders are still a little tender from the bar. It wouldn't have been so bad if the shoulder bar actually did anything to keep me in the seat. Instead I had to hold on for dear life with my feet, lest I fall through the cage bars to my, perhaps, timely death.

The second ride consisted of a single "car" (used liberally) that held maybe 40 people and teeter-tottered forward and backward on a central axis while being flung around in a quick circle. This one, instead of focusing on my shoulders as the basis for pain infliction, decided (correctly) that my balls would be a more vulnerable target. The seats inexplicably had a gentle hill where a normal man would rest himself that almost perfectly fit in sync with the shoulder bar that you lowered, creating a vice. They literally had me by the balls. This was surely planned out by the engineers as some kind of forced self-torture. Despite this flaw, I can still say it was more fun than the first in at least during the second ride I didn't hear the carney maniacally laughing as we spun.

The third ride was a roller coaster that I would rate one step above my first one ever, the Scooby Doo. It was called 'The Camel' alluringly enough because it only had one selling point: hills. It had the necessary curves to make its shape a two storied race track. You could tell it was one of the first steel coasters ever built by the Soviet style architecture. Still, those are fun in their own right. Clearly most fun ride thus far. Our fourth ride would be the culmination of Woobang Land. Do you like my use of suspense? I'm a regular Alfred Hitchcock here.

The fourth ride actually had the caliber of a ride above and beyond Woobang's low bar setting. I don't recall if it had a name or not, but it was the kind of roller coaster that brings you up the hill backward with the help of a magical magnet only to launch you forward through the housing you boarded the coaster from. Then it proceeds to go through a few loops and then up a one sided hill. Once to the top of this hill, you are sent back through the same course you just traversed but backwards, doing your best to remember what came next amid the jarring G force hurling you around at a larger object's will.

The fifth ride wasn't even a ride. I include it because it was just as adrenalitous as the other four. It was one of those stupid haunted houses, equally-stupidly named "Ghost Adventure." The reason I hate these things is not because they are lame. They totally are. The reason I hate them so much is because there are always those things that jump out at you and I hate that feeling. So, instead I slowly creep through the whole thing with my fuse at its end because I feel constantly annoyed and I just want to get out. Only...this one didn't have anything pop out at you. So the feeling was for nothing. Which, to me, was probably better than having people and spring action anamatronics scare the crap out of me.

If you tally up those numbers, that comes to just about $4 per ride. That's definitely pushing it, Woobang. Granted, one of the roller coasters was closed and we got a $5 off coupon for it, and most of it was geared toward children, what with the fuzzy Russian actors and the carousel rides. Anyway, good job Daegu. It was a fun Sunday.

Bull Pushing

On Saturday, a large, rowdy group of foreigners made their way to Cheongdo, a town not-really-famous-but-famous-in-the-fact-that-there-is-only-one-thing-coming-out-of-this-town famous for bullfighting. Apparently, it's in the type of town that will let you in to the ticket-only area if you say you need to use the bathroom based on a trust that you will exit again. Don't worry. My mama raised me right and I stayed inside and cheated the system (just kidding). Once inside the people turnstiles, an open forum area awaits you (pictured). Shops line the outsides and various bull statue projects line the center walkway. We were fortunate enough to get there right when the hour long "break" of the day began, so we had plenty of time to stroll the grounds. After about 10 minutes of this, one tends to get bored, so we headed inside to view the panoply of traditional Korean performances awaiting us in the arena area (pictured...the arena, not the performances [unfortunately for you]). After what seemed like three eternities, the main event resumed. Out came one bull followed by another, entering to the sounds of monster truck death metal. Suddenly their owners were pulling their heads together and, like a polar magnetic connection, they clicked together and began pushing each other at the horns. As quickly as it began it was ended and a winner incoherently declared. This happened for the next two hours and we arbitrarily cheered for one bull over another and just as arbitrarily determined one the winner. Although foreign, it was still fun and we deemed it a success, finishing off the evening with a dinner consisting of beef. Ironic? Maybe, but not as ironic as this guy:

The English Festivus: Part 1

Friday was one of those not-entirely-uncommon special days where we do something different. It was English Festival Day at my school and it wasn't that much different...except in each class groups of students performed an English childrens' song, including "Hokey Pokey," "Old MacDonald," and "Bingo." Here are some pictures:

Taekwondo cow!!!!!!!

A green breakdancing teddy bear? Hell yes.

And the award for most adorable goes to? Yeah, exactly. Anyway, if you like fun then this would have been right up your alley. If ya don't like it, then yew can gittout! I think we have to do two of these a semester, so there's something to post about. Keep it real, yo.

Thoughts Frommamind #3: MLK's Legacy

Maybe I should rename this segment "Thoughts Frommalife...in Korea" or something. So, today I was teaching classes in the English classroom, as I do, and I noticed these boxes that were themed on the bookshelf. They're those small, thin boxes that have a book and a CD and a guide in them or whatever to help the kids learn the Engrish. So I parused the titles, reading down the line: Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, Greek Myths, Heungbu and Nolbu, The Happy Prince, and the second to last one, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Um...what? Is MLK now the title character in some sort of tall tale wherein he rides a tidal wave through Alabama that turns all the KKK members into pine trees?

Surfs up, dude!

I'm not quite getting the relevance of Martin Luther King, Jr., a real person who lived not that long ago, to the others in the set, all stories derived from various histories.

Hey, look! It's a black person!

I always wonder, 'what if God smoked cannabis?' and then I get my answer when I look at things like the platypus. That's not the reason I'm here, though. I'm here to inform you, yeah you three people reading this, of a recent experience.

So, I mentioned before about the bigoted and ignorant opinion of some Koreans. Now, I've seen it being implanted into the curious minds of children firsthand. And I had to teach it. So, the third graders are learning "What's this?" and "It's a _______." as their target language. One of the forays into this target language is a short video offered by the textbook CD.

You can guess the dialogue, but the context is what was jaw dropping. Gina and Rahul, the happy-go-lucky stars of our ongoing 3rd grade saga, go to the only black girl's house they've ever seen and start asking about what everything is, because it's all from Africa. First, Gina asks, "what's this?" about a cylinder that looks like a tree branch and Tina (our dark friend) replies, "it's a pen!" She then showcases the prowess of this tree branch by drawing, yes, a lion. It was probably the only animal she was exposed to in her tribe.

They then go on to ask, "what's this?" about this odd giraffe/monkey thing. Tina exclaims, "It's a cup!" and fakes like she's pouring some liquid AIDS into their cup or something. I wish I had a screen shot of how absurd her house looked. There was a tribal doll next to the bookcase, which was full of African junk. All sorts of earthy colors and zebras and the like. Really disappointing, Korea.

The effects of a homogeneous society at work, folks...