David Carradine Dead in Thailand

Strange and sad.

Police said the 72-year-old actor's body was discovered Thursday in the closet of his hotel room at the luxury Swissotel Nai Lert Park Hotel. Police were investigating and suspected suicide, though one of Carradine's managers questioned that theory.
"All we can say is, we know David would never have committed suicide," said Tiffany Smith, of Binder & Associates, his management company. "We're just waiting for them to finish the investigation and find out what really happened. He really appreciated everything life has to give ... and that's not something David would ever do to himself."
Dr. Nanthana Sirisap, director of Chulalongkorn Hospital's Autopsy Center, told reporters that the autopsy was being conducted because of "unusual circumstances surrounding Carradine's death." He did not elaborate on the circumstances, and could not say when results would be released.

I think that suicide at this stage of his life/career is a little strange. He was a great B movie actor and one of the most recognizable celebrities to my generation. He had a long career and was just getting to where he wanted to be, in the limelight of mainstream films. If I have a life half as interesting as his was I'd count myself as blessed.

More Hotpot!

Here are a few more photos from the hotpot dinner. Tae-jeong took these, she's the smiling girl across the table in my own (terribly blurry) photo in the previous post.

I'm not sure where she was when we took the other 'people pictures' at the beach. Maybe trying to put on one of those wetsuits that made us all "look like starship captains", as Se-yeong put it. :D

I really like these people, as I said before, and I'm sure we'll have some more adventures in the future!

My rib muscles are still torn up and I haven't been getting much sleep because I wake up whenever I roll onto my side. They're starting to settle down though. I'll take this as a lesson in stopping an activity when I know I've injured something. I was just having too damn much fun to want to stop though. Bah! It'll be all healed up and forgotten by next week anyway.

Dak: my new favourite chicken restaurant

Here's a picture of the chicken restaurant Dak (dak, is Korean for chicken) which I mentioned a few posts ago. It's not much to look at inside but the chicken is divine and the place has a lot of character. There's a thirty-something chick who runs it. (at right in the photo) I think she's really damned sexy. She's always outside chopping wood and keeping the rotisserie fire going. A woman who smells like wood smoke and roast chicken all the time sounds like the kind of girl I'd wanna marry!

Their chicken is stuffed with steamed rice, roast chestnuts and chinese dates and then roasted over a pine fire in a big smoky oven out front. The chicken is really fragrant and super moist and the skin is crisp and smoky. It's really worth going out of the way to go to this place if you haven't been there before. Even if it takes a twelve hour flight to get there.

They also make an awesome dakdoritang (extremely spicy chicken and potato stew) that has cured a couple of colds I've had in the past.

Gaming, Drinking and Surfing

It's been a busy, busy weekend. I find that since I started this new job and I'm in a more central neighbourhood, my weekends are pretty full. Almost to the point where going back to work on Monday is a sort of a rest for the next weekend. It makes me happy to be this busy, my health has been improving, I'm gaining back some weight, and I'm getting a lot of fresh air and exercise.
This weekend satisfied both mind and body. Some gaming, some drinking and random nighttime weirdness, and some strenuous physical activity to tear the hell out of me. On Saturday my buddy Frank came down from Pohang, a city up the coast an hour or so by bus. In case I haven't mentioned it before I met Frank via a board game website/forum that I frequent. They have thousands (hundreds of thousands actually) of members and people can contact other gamers in their area to meet and play games. He sent me a "Howdy Neighbour" message when he got to Korea and we arranged to get together for an afternoon of gaming when he was down from Pohang last year. We've gotten together a few times now when he comes down and it's always a good time.

I've been fascinated by all kinds of games since I was a little kid. The artwork, the mental gymnastics and the social interaction involved combine to make gaming one of the most worthwhile hobbies I can think of. If you want to find out more about a game then BoardGameGeek has the information you need. They also have alternative rules, printable rulebooks (for many, not all, games) and other goodies.

Frank and I checked out a neighbourhood board game cafe called Chess. There was a board game craze here a few years ago and there are still a few board game cafes around. You pay an hourly fee of about 1500 won at Chess (which includes a free beverage) and you can play any game in their assortment of games. We played a few that we could easily find English instructions for. Some of the games were European and only had instructions in languages we didn't know. The boxes all have Korean rulebooks (printed from the web) in them. One of the girls working there offered to show us how to play something despite being unable to speak English, which I thought was really sweet but likely to be ultimately frustrating for both groups. So, we stuck to games for which they had English rulebooks. My new co-worker Greg came by after his lunch and played a couple of games with us, it's hard to find many board game nuts in Korea, so it's always nice to get someone new in on the fun.

* * *

Saturday night my friend Lynn and I went out for a night on the town. We ended up in a "Chinese Bar" and drank the better part of a 3 liter pitcher of beer. We were joined by a trio of Korean girls who said they were taking part in some kind of contest. Apparently the contest was "drink the foreigner's beer" because they drank what was left of our pitcher and descended on our hors d'oeuvres like a flock of seagulls. Then they told us they were in high school (students here are in high school 'til they're 19 or so, but it's still illegal for them to drink) and held us hostage for an exhausting hour of "Who Do You Think is Prettiest?". After they left we ran to a little cocktail bar down the road that Lynn liked because it had nice-looking chairs. It was an alright place, I guess, and at least there were no high-school seagull girls to drink our beer and eat our snacks. Had a beer and a few snacky bit and we called it a night.

* * *

Sunday, bloody Sunday. I was hung over a bit from the late night of drinking and hadn't had much sleep. Se-yeong had signed me up for a 'surfing for beginners' thing that the Korea Surfing Federation was sponsoring at Haeundae Beach. Learning to surf is something I've wanted to try for many, many years. I've never bothered to try it before, it just hadn't come up, even though people do surf here.

We hopped on the bus to Haeundae and met up with some of her friends from a college tourism club. I had met some of these folks before, last year when I volunteered to be a Guinea pig for their club trials, although I didn't remember all of them at first. They were probably some of the most laid back, friendly people I've ever met. I hope that I get the chance to hang out with them again soon.

The lesson registration included the wetsuit and board rental: total cost for 2 hours was 5000 won (~ $4CDN). When I get paid again I'm planning to go take a full two day course (100 000 won.) We were given a brief method lesson on the beach and then sent out into the water to paddle around on our boards. I think that I tore a bunch of abdominal muscles during the first half-hour of paddling the board around in the surf, I could actually feel them crunching and popping (I've gotta start going to a gym or something.) but I'm just kinda sore today, nothing too bad, and I won't be doing any surfing for a couple of weeks.

After the first half-hour, one of the instructors called me over to a part of the beach where there was heavier surf, gave me a few instructions, yelled "PADDLE!!" and set me towards the beach on a small wave. After a few runs of this he got me to attempt to stand up, which was moderately successful. I managed to get as far as standing before imstantly wiping out. I asked him a few questions about how long he'd been surfing and stuff. He said it only took him a day or two to learn the basics, which are pretty simple. Balance on a floating thing the size of a big ironing board as it slides ahead of a wave. Easy. Not. I asked him if he had any tips or how I should learn more after having some lessons, he just pointed at the waves said "The ocean will teach you how to surf." I know it sounds corny, like a master to student moment out of a martial arts movie, but he was completely serious and I believe him.

What a hoot it was! I think I probably swallowed a few liters of the Pacific but I haven't done anything that's made me feel quite so alive (and sore) in a while now. Se-yeong took me snowboarding a year and a half ago, which I also found to be quite a rush, but falling on my ass wasn't as much fun as nearly drowning. So, I'm going to go take some more lessons and see how it goes. My instructor told my friends that I was good, and they told me what he said. I didn't really get why but I also realized that they'd only picked a couple of us out for the "paddling down a wave" part. Maybe it's because I was paddling way out into the waves while the others stuck closer to the beach, maybe 'cause I looked like I was having the time of my life (I was, torn rib muscles and all). Some guys like golf, but golf seems more like a really big, really dull board game to me. Now surfing, that's something physical to make you know you're alive (unless you actually drown, I guess.)

After surfing, one of the guys treated us to a hotpot dinner at a Chinese place. Great stuff! They all went drinking after that but I bailed and headed up to my neighbourhood on the bus with Se-yeong, who was headed up there to meet a blind date. I think that if I had gone out I would have had a lot of fun but would have been more busted up today than I am. As it was I fell in bed really early and, aside from waking up from time to time with aching ribs, slept sound as a baby.

Update: Frank said in his last e-mail that he's interested in taking the surfing class, too. I'll keep you posted as to our progress from English teachers to professional beach bums.

Ong Bak 2

Yesterday Keith and I went to see Ong Bak 2 the Thai martial arts film. I had seen the first one a few years ago and it had so much frantic action that I almost felt tired when I left the cinema. Great fun!

We decided to go see it here in Korea even though the film was in Thai with Korean subtitles. After all, how much story do you need to understand to watch a movie that's 98% action with crazy stunts and fights. If there was a story I'm not really sure what it was. The protagonist got captured as a child when some dude killed his father and then he was put into some kind of slave outfit. Then some guys showed up and made away with the slavers and the youngster was trained in martial arts.

The movie was fine, lots of exciting action and decent stunts, but we couldn't follow the story. On top of the obvious language barrier, the bad guys all looked very similar in their wacky Thai hats and earrings. The bad guys also looked like some of the good guys. The best part of the movie was the sound, the cinema we watched it in had Dolby Surround turned up with so much bass that every time someone got hit you felt like you'd been punched in the chest.

In short, it was a confusing but fun movie. I'll have to go read up on it so I can figure out what the guys with the hats and earrings were up to.

The New Guy

My new co-worker, Greg, arrived this week. A fresh-faced lad of 22 from Colorado. He's on the ball and a decent sorta guy. There are lots of real arseholes in Korea teaching English. The majority of foreigners teaching here are pretty decent but the asshole and idiot population is disproportionately large compared to back in the west. Or maybe it's just that they stand out more here. Anyway, the new dude is pretty cool, which is a huge relief.

I took him on a 'random bus tour' to the southern end of the city. I sometimes get on a bus at random (even if I don't know where it goes) when I'm in the mood to see something different. It's usually amusing and, unlike the subway, you can watch the city roll by; an excellent way to have a really cheap adventure. I figured it would be an entertaining way for him to see how the transit systems work in Busan and get some entertainment out of it myself.

The south end of the city has a huge unspoiled beach, as an added bonus it was practically deserted. Haeundae, the main beach in Busan, is really touristy and built-up. The beach has almost become a kind of sandbox for hundreds of hotels. Dadaepo Beach, on the other hand, is practically unaltered. They say that it's full of pollution because the city's main industrial sector used to be in that area. But the city's water supply comes partly from the Nakdong River, right next to the beach, whereas the river nearest Haeundae practically releases raw sewage into the ocean. I'm willing to give Dadaepo Beach the benefit of the doubt.

It was a pretty windy day, so we just walked around a bit and caught the bus back to our end of town. We were pretty beat and we'd been on the go all day, home was a good idea.

Next time I'm down there I'll bring my camera and get some photos. As this adventure was totally off-the-cuff, I went out without my usual adventure accoutrements.

Jangsan, Galbi, and Tasty Lemon Tarts

Last weekend was relatively tame compared to the overly-active four day weekend before it. I managed to get in some of the usual things again:

On Saturday Keith(whiskeynexhaust), his girlfriend Karen, Paul (another drinking buddy) and I decided to climb Jang Mountain (Jangsan, 632m), out in the east end of the city where all of them live. It's close to an hour by subway for me to get out there, but I find that it's worth the trip to hang out with people who are as dark and crazy as myself.

Jangsan (634m) is shorter than Geumjeongsan (842m) but it's steeper and a little less travelled. It was kinda hot that day and by the time we got to the top I was thoroughly drenched with sweat. There's supposed to be a temple next to a waterfall on the back of the mountain, so we set off down the back of the mountain hoping that it would be a fantasy-type waterfall where sweaty, sun baked hikers could refresh themselves under a cold, crystalline shower with a beer can filled pond at its base. Alas, it was not to be.

The path 'round the back of the mountain seemed to keep going in a direction we didn't like, so we decided to find a shortcut. How bad can it be? We can always see the city from the mountainside. We ended up half-lost in the woods after we tried to descend the mountain by following a rock wash (dried up spring melt stream) of huge boulders (above right, Paul is in the distance). The going got dangerously ankle-busting, so it was decided that we'd try to cut across the mountain face through the brush. It took a while but we managed to get down with no broken ankles and only a few scratches and scrapes to show for our misadventure. Post-hike, we sat at tables outside a convenience store drinking beer and doing crossword puzzles until everyone was ready for soup and dumplings at one of the neighbourhood Korean diners.

Later that evening I met up with Lynn and we hit a super cheap galbi restaurant; we both ate like kings (or king and queen) for less than 12000 won, including beer. I eat way more meat here than I ever did in Canada. It's kinda weird because it's cheaper to eat at a restaurant than it is to eat at home, if you want anything with a bit of variety, that is. If you're eating just rice and a simple soup or something it probably costs the same as eating at a diner

Later we went to see One Drop East, a local funk band made up of expats (teachers), they aren't bad and I've seen them a few times. They play a small repertoire of funk, reggae and R&B tunes with one or two of their own songs. It's all right but they usually play at Moe's, a crowded second-floor jazz and blues (mostly) bar, and after a while the crowding starts to get tiresome. So we cut out and went for drinks at Soul Trane (at left), a basement bar that used to play funk and house music, but they moved to a new place and turned into a pubby type place, which is fine with us. Relaxingly dark and only a little dank, it's my bar of choice in the neighbourhood. My favourite watering hole of all isn't a bar, it's actually the plastic tables outside the convenience store across the street. You can sit outside literally in the street and see and talk to everyone without any noise or crowd. Kinda like a cafe but more low-rent. Keith and I can often be found there having a brew, we think it's the best bar in Busan.

On Sunday Se-yeong and I went for Vietnamese noodle soup (pho) and she gave me some homemade lemon tarts. Absolutely delicious! I gave some to Paul one night and he said that I'd be an idiot if I didn't ask her to marry me. She bakes when she gets stressed out and she calls it her 'angry bread', which always cracks me up, but it's appropriate. Who knew angry could be so tasty when properly handled? She's a great baker, really some of the best baking I've ever had. Pound cake, cookies and quite a few other treats. The lemon tarts were made with real lemons and topped with real whipped cream. And they're always packaged in really nice boxes and bows.