This past Wednesday, Mike participated in the singer-songwriter event "The Round" in Paddington, near the city center. Unlike most shows that take place in bars, this event was all about listening and learning about the craft of songwriting. The audience remained quiet during the songs and didn't talk until the break. Mike said it was one of the coolest gigs he's ever played ... plus we got a free pizza and beers!
During the Q&A session Mike made America proud by being the only one of the singers who knew who the Muppets were. Come on, Australia!
I guess it was only a matter of time before Nissa and I started getting Australian pop songs into our heads. The scene of the crime was the Caxton Street Food and Wine Festival, which sounds like a very formal and refined affair but reminded me a lot of the street fests that go on in Chicago -- warm, sunny and a bit crowded. The food was all right (I had my first ever canned whisky and soda), but it was the bands that were a real treat.
With the help of a couple friends from here who guided us along, we took a trip back in time to re-experience the best of 80's Australian rock. Don Walker, of the famed Aussie band Cold Chisel, was the first act we saw, and was fantastic. He had a great grizzled voice, his band was solid, and he told this one captivating story about a "bad bugger" named Harry. It gave me chills. Walker was clearly a guy with a lot of experience.
Don Walker (photo by Rhianna Patrick)
Next up was 1927, who had a much poppier sound and songs everyone seemed to know the words to. Songs like this one:
The biggest difference between the video and now is that now the lead singer is bald. Oh, the ravages of time. But our friend Rhianna insisted he was as good looking as ever. The lead singer for the next band, Boom Crash Opera, also turned out to be bald. Noticing a trend here? He was a true showman to the end, though, and they really got me with this tune:
The last band we saw that day was called The Jungle Giants. I really dug their energy and upbeat style. They were clearly the youngest band of the four we saw and it was really refreshing to see them after spending most of the afternoon reminiscing about the 80s. This was obviously a band from today. Being as they're from Brisbane, I'm looking forward to checking them out again:
Head to Seoul's Hongdae neighborhood on Saturday night and you're bound to see college kids lining up for blocks to get into northern Seoul's most popular -- and pricey -- dance clubs. For people on a budget, though, the entertainment's on the streets. In the alleyways and on the sidewalks bands set up a few chairs and play through the night, turning up their amps to compete over the din.
The most well-established buskers head to the more spacious children's playground across the street from Hongik University. This is where the art fair Free Market is held during the summer and where Mike has frequently played acoustic sets during daylight hours.
We went there on a recent Saturday night when we were trying to kill some time before an indoor concert. Beside the usual cover band and rap groups fighting for attention, we were surprised to see a crowd of people in headphones dancing by themselves. They were participating in a "silent disco party" sponsored by the World DJ Festival. Music was being transmitted to wireless headphones so that only the dancers could hear the DJ performance.
The silent dance party didn't last for long, however. A Brazilian percussion band marched into the park and almost immediately everyone's headphones came off. No matter how gimmicky technology gets, nothing beats live music.
On Saturday, I ran the Nike Women's Race Seoul 7K with one of my friends here. It was a tough race complete with hills and balmy weather, but I had a great time running it. I am a newbie when it comes to running, only having trained seriously for the last few months, so it was really satisfying to see all my hard work pay off. I made my target time and came in 681st out of 6,000 -- not too shabby for my first race.
Say what you will about Nike, they know how to throw a party. The race kicked off at 6:30 pm with fireworks and a pep talk from a popular TV show host. During the race, DJs blasted music at the water stations and a group of young male cheerleaders high-fived the runners and shouted "Fighting!" (the Korean version of "You can do it!") when the course started going uphill.
As I ran through the finish line, I met my own cheerleader, Mike, who had bag-holding and photo-taking duty during the race. I caught my breath and then headed toward the reception line where men in white tracksuits and bow ties clapped demurely while the ladies picked up their complementary necklace designed by none other than the queen of Korean female athletes, Kim Yu-na.
But the race was just the beginning of the evening's events. Most of the 6,000 women who participated in the race stuck around for the After Party featuring unlimited glasses of (cheap) white wine and performances by some of Korea's biggest musicians. I was excited to see Drunken Tiger and Kim Tae-woo since I actually knew some of their songs, but I have to say the best performance by far came from the pop orchestra that kicked off the show. Only in Korea will you see thousands of people sing at the top of their lungs and dance along to an orchestra.
Move over boy and girl bands -- the Korean indie scene is alive and well in Seoul. Last night we went to see our friend's band play a gig as part of Hongdae's monthly "Club Day," where you can get into 21 clubs for the equivalent of $18.
After trying out a couple other clubs, we spent most of the night at Club FF, where our friend's band TV Yellow was playing. Later in the night we saw 도원경 (Do Won Kyung), a famous female rocker in Korea. Do has been on the scene (and Korean TVs) for over 15 years, and the club was packed. She reminded me a little of Garbage's Shirley Manson -- a complete breath of fresh air after hearing Girls' Generation for the last 9 months straight.
Do played this song from 1997 last night:
Compare that song with Girls' Generation's biggest hit, "Gee," which topped the charts in Korea for nine-weeks straight:
Ugh, I could write a thesis just on how much those two videos say about gender in Korea.
I didn't get a chance to write about our trip down to my cousins' hometown a few weeks ago until now, so here goes... We met Haekgyung and Hyunjun on Friday at the bus station and embarked on a two-and-a-half hour ride southeast, to the town where their mother works as a principal (though I can't remember the name of the town). She picked us up at a small bus station and we swung by the local equivalent of Wal-Mart to pick up some groceries for the weekend. I believe it was an E-Mart, which actually bought up a bunch of Wal-Mart's stores when the American retail giant gave up on its dreams of conquering Korea a few years ago. Take that, Wal-Mart.
My aunt then drove the four of us down toward Seokpo, where my uncle works as a manager at a zinc refinery. But on the way there we made a few stops -- first, at a traditional Korean village where only people with the same family name had resided for generations. The houses had beautiful architecture, and the village sat in a shallow valley, surrounded by lush green hills and rice fields.
We winded our way through the hills some more and stopped in a small village that my aunt said was known for its smoked pork. We had two kinds, one that was lightly seasoned and scented with some pine and another that was thickly marinated in a dark red sauce. Both were amazing. I thought about that pork all the way to my uncle's apartment.
My uncle moved back to Seokpo a few years ago, when the company he worked for ran into some kind of trouble and asked for him to come back to supervise. As we came up to the town after dusk, my cousins started sitting up in their seats and pointing things out through the window. This was the town they had grown up in, and they hadn't been back in over ten years. Compared to Seoul, the streets were very dim -- pale yellow lights illuminated some run down-looking houses and stores to our left, and you could make out the faint reflections of the moonlight sparkling off the river to our right. A slight, metallic odor filled the air. As we drove along, the brightly lit factory came into view, with all its large metal silos and colored walkways standing in clear contrast to the dark hills behind. Soon, the car's headlights beamed upon my uncle, who was standing in the entrance to his apartment's parking lot waiting for us.
Hyunjun was thrilled to see the old place again. It wasn't the exact apartment he had grown up in, but since all the units followed the same layout, it was close enough to the home he once knew. The space was small -- two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom, and study, all crammed into about four to five-hundred square feet. It was older, too, with the wallpaper rippling off the wall in some places and the rusted plumbing clearly on display in the bathroom. Hyunjun kept saying he remembered it being bigger (the study had once been his bedroom) and he couldn't believe the four of them had at one point lived there together. Nissa and I wouldn't be sleeping here tonight, though. My uncle had rented the modestly furnished apartment upstairs for us to stay in over the weekend, in which a set of towels and toothbrushes were laid out neatly on the refrigerator for us upon arrival. After watching a little TV in my uncle's room, we headed upstairs to turn in for the night.
The next morning we set off for the seaside in a large company van my uncle had borrowed for the weekend. We wound through rolling hills for a couple hours, stopping once or twice to take some pictures. At one point we drove alongside acres and acres of cabbage that looked close to harvest. Apparently this area was known for its cabbage, which all eventually went into kimchi. My relatives said the owners were millionaires -- cabbage millionaires.
Soon the hills cleared and we arrived at Hosan, a beach area along the east coast of Korea, in Gangwon Province. The air was cool, a little humid, and just a little salty. My uncle rented a room for all of us at a motel along the shore, as a sort of base camp for the afternoon, and after changing into our bathing suits we headed out for the water. The waves were incredibly strong, so much so that they could knock you off your feet if you weren't careful. We didn't venture out far, for fear of the undertow, but it was fun battling against the waves nonetheless. We even got a little sunburned.
That evening, on the way back to Seokpo, we stopped in a town called Taebaek. This was a much larger town than Seokpo, we could tell just from the traffic heading in. Even though it only had a population of about 50,000, all the cars and lights from the restaurants and stores made it feel like we were in a metropolis again. As we got out of the car, we could hear a woman's powerful singing echoing down the street. Nissa recognized the song was from Les Miserables. A musical troupe was performing in the town's park -- songs from Grease, Fame...
We closed out the night in Taebaek with a traditional Korean dinner, where you are served about 20 side dishes along with rice that is cooked in a stone pot. On the way back to Seokpo, we could see the stars clearly in the night sky. The air was cool and the hills were quiet. It was going to be hard to go back to Seoul.
Mike played his first show in Seoul yesterday at the "Free Market" near Hongik University. The market is a place where artists (mostly students) sell their handmade crafts and musicians play on an outdoor stage.
Vertigokidd had a good-sized crowd during his set and managed to earn a few thousand won from some fans (see suitcase in third photo).
