saved by AL!

I woke up this morning to the alarm clock on my cellphone as I have every morning for the last two and a half years. And just like most mornings, I dropped it on the floor, but THIS morning, it actually broke. I mean I literally decapitated my flip phone. It broke off above the hinge, and its innards were all hanging out. sigh. I was really stressed because I'll only be here till June, and Korean cellphones only work in Korea. I didn't want to buy a new one! So I took the phone and all its parts to the shop where I purchased it. Al is the gentle giant that fronts the store, and he is striking both for his good English and his exceptional tallness. So I told Al I broke my phone and mourned that it probably couldn't be fixed, but he asked to look at it anyway. I hand him all the parts and he says, "Oh! This case is old! Do you want it now?" What? You can fix it? Really? "Yeah," he says, "I have another one. :) Okay....How long? "Can you wait about ten minutes?" he says.
I told him it was definitely worth the wait, so I sat down and watched him as he took the electronic guts out of my phone and put them in the donor phone, and presto change-o I have my phone! with my contacts and ring settings! and my phone number! I was ecstatic. And the cost? $35 and in the end, about twenty minutes of my time. I laughed all the way to yoga. I restrained myself from hugging Al, since that's not really appropriate here, but I thanked him profusely because this NEVER would have happened in the states. I would have a new phone or would still be waiting in customer service purgatory, and I would have ended up paying a month's salary for the privilege.
The Koreans are truly more efficient than we are on sooo many levels. I'll miss that about this country.

Korean advertising

Despite the homogeneity of Korea's citizens, I often think of Korea as colorful. I have commented previously on how colorful the campaigning is here, and if you haven't read it, I would recommend this link for an idea of how colorful politics themselves can become here. Most recently I have been thinking about television commercials. The ads here crack me up because I have a very difficult time trying to figure out who the target audience is. Many ads go for either visual or audio overkill, leaving the viewer cringing. Others just don't make any sense.

My favorite visual kill is for Jin-Air. This is a new domestic discount airline who call the flight-attendants (male and female) "jeanies" because they wear jeans. The ad opens with a cartoon monkey whose butt changes colors every time he slaps it, and then a banana peels open at the bottom and starts growing across the screen in an um, phallic manner. This is all occurring on a background of loud neon stripes. What ass-slapping monkeys and giant bananas have to do with flight beats me, but I still crack up when it comes on. Here's the link if you are interested.

The best audio kill is for a fast cash company. These commercials are musicals with the cast singing about the company, but the music is catchy and OBNOXIOUS. So the next add for this company? Starts the same as the rest and ends with a woman who is watching their add on TV and singing it to her husband who is putting pillows over his head. If your commercials are so bad that you lampoon them yourselves, don't you think it would be wise to take the obnoxious part out of the beginning and just have the parody at the end? Are you trying to make people hate your product? The other audio kills are commercials that have men competing over who can yell the longest. woof.

Okay, and the commercial that makes the least sense. It opens with a little boy on the beach watching a storm come in. As the water and the clouds get darker, he gets scared and goes running for his mom. You get a close up as he runs head-first into her boobs and bounces off of them, and then the commercial cuts to deploying airbags. I mean I get the comfort safety theme, but comparing boobs to airbags is hilarious.

Mai!

This is the only word I learned besides thank you (saLAmet) while I was in the Philippines. It is loosely a term of endearment that can also apparently be wielded as a directive. Think of it like changing the term "honey do" directly into the term "dear." Dear! Would come to mean, "hey babe, I need you over here right now!"

Tagalog is designated the lingua franca of the Philippines, and it draws many words from Spanish. English is another official language there, and we found everyone understood us well even if they didn't communicate much in English. This trio of languages killed my brain though, and as many people speak what they call Englog or Taglish, it ends up sounding like a complete pidgin language. I understood maybe a quarter of what was being said as my brain picked out the spanish and English, and I tried futilely to turn the rest of the words into something familiar.

Mai is also a good title for this entry because I went with my Mai to the Philippines. Yes, Dan flew across the world to visit me in Korea. We explored Daegu, where I live first. We did the usual norebong and fire pig adventures, and we opened presents together Christmas morning. It was so much fun celebrating Christmas with a boy. This is my first experience with that, and I have to say it was as much fun having someone special to shop for as it was to open the gifts. We also visited Gyeongju, which was the capital during the Shilla dynasty in the 4th-6th centuries. The coolest thing here was the temple grotto located on the very top of a hill where some incredibly preserved Buddhist carvings are housed. I couldn't take pictures inside, but you can see how pretty the setting was outside in the snow.

After the chill factor of Korean winter, the beach in Cebu was a welcome relief. It is in the 70s-80s pretty much year round in the Phillipines, and while summer is technically the rainy season, it rains pretty much daily all year too. So our first two days were spent walking around my friend Lisa's place, where we stayed, reading books and swimming/shell hunting in the rain. We also took out a paddle boat that looked vaguely like a big insect to me. This was hilarious because the guys that launched it for us were so scared we'd kill ourselves, that they came out to. Little did they know of our paddling prowess! But the waves were pretty choppy..... The third day, we actually got some decent sunshine, so we hired a boat and went to a nearby island to snorkel. I must say that right outside Lisa's place there are some incredible coral and gorgeous, bright blue starfish, but the island was great for the cultural experience. :) We got a great big boat, and most of Lisa's friends and family came with us. They grilled up a feast of fresh fish and pork right on the boat! We had home-made coconut rum, and enjoyed walking the plank, which is literally the only way on and off the boat. Wet but fun. The snorkelling was great too. We saw all kinds of cool fish, and the water on both beaches was perfectly clear.

On our last day we took a water taxi over to Dumagete. This was the closest big city to where we were staying and it was on Negros, an Island across from Cebu. Here I found the equivalent of Tuk-Tuks, the motorized rickshaws I rode in Thailand. We went shopping, had a nice lunch, and got a taste of city life here. I liked the life in the country much better. Lisa lives in Santander, and they call that area of the Island Liloan because that word describes how the water moves there. There are goats next door to her place, it's right on the water, and there are flowers everywhere. There is a little town nearby that we raided in a motorbike convoy for such necessities as flipflops and silly hats. The people that work at her small resort are all friends or family, so they took wonderful care of us. We were sort of embarrassed at times of the bottomless state of our stomachs, but no one seemed to mind feeding us. Philippino food is pretty tasty. We ate lots of fish, squash, and pork...and loads of tomatoes. We also fell in love with Mangoes. These are not to be confused with the crappy, stringy ones we find in the grocery in the states. These were soft, sweet, and absolutely delicious. We ate them every morning, and on our last day had them as shakes. yum.

We returned to Seoul for our last few days together and to celebrate the new year. I took Dan shopping in all my favorite markets, and he took me up in Seoul tower for a view of that crazy big city. For New Years we started to head to the tourist ghetto, but it was way too packed to get a drink or a meal, so after grabbing a bite, we bought some champagne and took it back to the hotel where we just happened to have an incredible view of the fireworks from our room. It could not have been better. Champagne, fireworks, and a New Years kiss from the man I love. Truly a bittersweet ending to our trip. I had to see Dan off to the airport the next day. sigh. I only cried a little bit, and I'm comforting myself with plans for spring break. It's my turn to head that way, and Dan gets to plan this time. I already put a Dan countdown timer on my computer. :)