MBC Marathon

Marathons always sound like a good idea when they're scheduled to happen a few months later. A typical plan would consist of slowly getting back into shape over the generous amount of weeks beforehand, before blitzing the track and setting a few local records at the same time.

But reality always has more realistic ways of doing things. A week before the MBC marathon was scheduled to happen, I finally decided it might be a good idea to go for a practice jog. 

On the morning of the event, we woke up at an inappropriate hour and went to a subway station that was a lengthy distance from our comfortable dwellings in Gwanak-gu. While waiting in the freezing air for the shuttle bus to arrive, I wondered why so many people would willingly sign up for such an ordeal.

I concluded that it was because the act of monetary payment and boasting to friends of involvement is a subconscious way for us to trick ourselves into having to do something that we'd normally make excuses to avoid.

At the venue were a large amount of people who had found themselves a victim of such self-trickery. The ones who really did want to be there were identifiable because they wore specialized running singlets, rather than the complimentary 'Run Yourself Better' shirt.

In the end our times weren't too bad. I only stopped to walk once, and that was because of a hill. And the good thing about the MBC Marathon is that everyone who crosses the finish line gets a medal.

With three sponsor's logos on it.

There were a few thousand participants at the event, and they had booked over a hundred coach buses to transport us from the subway to the location, which was around 5 kilometres away. Next year I'll just run from the subway station to the course and back, thereby saving time and money.

That is, if I choose to endure three days of post-traumatic thigh disorder.

A week passed between the marathon and the time this photo was taken, which was when this particular baby was one day old. It's Heather's newest niece, and technically my niece-in-law. In Korea, they often don't give names to babies until some time after they're born.

Heather has a slightly worrying, endless fascination with babies. I don't mind the things.

Especially when they're sleeping.

I think it would be a very rewarding job to work in a maternity ward. But you would have to like babies a lot, and put up with an unnatural number of halmonis trying to communicate in baby language while tapping on the glass.

It was Heather's second sister's first child and she seemed pretty relaxed about the whole ordeal. We hung around in the recovery ward for a while, and Heather administered one of her famous temple massages.

Heather's parents were happy to have another grandchild. They took us out for barbecue pork and encouraged us to drink copious amounts of soju. After that we went to the noraebang together, which would have been a little odd if I wasn't so tipsy.

Another odd thing that happens when I go to Busan is that I always borrow Heather's dad's old clothes to sleep in.

Heather's mother can speak Japanese. I studied it for a few years in middle school, but I can only remember how to say "I understand a little bit of Japanese."

Heather's parents have planted the lettuce seeds that my dad brought from Australia for them. Dad calls this kind of lettuce 'fancy lettuce'.

What a lovely wife I have. She used to try and hide from the camera when I first started blogging, but these days I think she's beginning to enjoy the publicity. Occasionally we'll be walking somewhere and she'll say "Hey, take a photo of me over here."

We went back to Busan on the Sunday without having time to catch up with friends. I don't mind the odd trip down there, but it's pretty exhausting. Typically we sleep little, drink lots and are enthusiastically fed too much apple, melon and obscure banchan* that only Heather's mother makes. Of particular note is her salt crab dish, which is so salty that raw crabs are perfectly preserved at room temperature for months on end.

*preserved traditional Korean side dishes, the family recipes of which are passed down the generations.

But the good thing is that we often get to choose which homemade banchan we take back to Seoul with us. A treasure chest like this will last us for quite some time. In some ways, banchan is the perfect gift, because it's cheap to buy the ingredients, but takes a lot of care and experience to make. 

Hmm, now there's some food for thought.

Shinsegae Centum City, Busan

When I first came to Korea, I was eating Korean barbecue at least three times a week. Contrary to my initial hasty assumptions, one cannot predominantly subsist on meat and leafy vegetables without some degree of inevitable toilet trouble. Since then I've dropped my barbecue intake to about once a month, which has worked a lot better.


Heather used to complain whenever I posted up a funny looking photo of herself here, but I think she's gradually gotten used to it. One thing we did for the first time on this occasion was to take the excess uncooked meat that we ordered back home with us. The waiter wrapped it up in a bag for us without any fuss.


Although we originally planned to visit Busan every month or so, we're only managing to make it a few times per year. Since I was there last, Shinsegae have built the world's largest department store at Centum City, so we went along to have a look.
The claim reminded me of the World's Largest Things that South Australia has. Back home we have the World's Largest Orange, the World's Largest Rocking Horse and the World's Largest Lobster, all of which I have been to and are either inedible or non-functional.

Maybe in the lab one day I can make the World's Largest Plasmid Extraction. But that would only be exciting to a very small number of people.



Well, the place is nice, and big. There isn't really a central area that showcases its scale, but you get an idea after you walk around in the different sections. In terms of shopping, I think it's only arbitrarily more convenient than your average department store because there's so much walking to do.
You could buy just about anything here, but how often are you going to need to buy a laptop and a kitchen sink on the same day anyway?


It was fairly crowded that day and even though it was in the middle of winter, the ice cream outlets were packed. You can see Heather and her brother on the right of this photo, waiting patiently. But we eventually gave up and took our ice-cream patronage elsewhere.


So we found an ice-cream place that didn't have much of a lineup and ordered the 'Grande' size cup to share. With a name like Grande, I was expecting something a little more awe-inspiring than the little scoop we ended up getting. But in the end, we comforted ourselves just knowing that Grande or not, we were still sitting in the World's Largest Department Store.

Yippee.


And what better place to enjoy an ice-cream in the middle of winter in the World's Largest Department store, but next to an ice rink? Korean kiddies have to wear swimming caps at every swimming pool and safety helmets at every ice rink.

At least they're not Stackhats.


One business concept they're promoting at Shinsegae is called Cine' de Chef. The idea is that you sit in your own private booth and order food like in a restaurant, but there's also a flatscreen TV. If you pay a combined price, you can watch the latest cinema-release movies while you eat.

To me, it seems like they're making the dinner-and-movies idea a little too easy.


There wasn't anything particularly unique about the whole complex, but the interior design was nice. For people who are sightseeing around Busan, I think you can give it a miss unless you really like shopping. We spent about four hours there and then went back to Heather's place to wind down from all the eye-shopping*.

*Eye-shopping is Konglish for 'window shopping'.


And here's Heather's little niece, Ji-Woo, who somehow learned to walk since I saw her last. Babies grow so quickly, and I still remember her facial expression on the day she was born. It was all wrinkled up and then she gave her first-ever yawn to the world.
Probably a lot more of them to come when she gets older and starts reading Lee's Korea Blog.

Ha!

See you soon.

Dad and Chris arrive in Korea

Dad and Chris arrived from Australia last Monday for the wedding. It's nice having them here, although it seemed a bit surreal at first. Thoughts of Dad and Chris are usually a part of the 'distant memories of Australia' part of my brain, while life in Korea resides in my 'recent documents' folder.

Worlds are colliding!

Here's Dad on the left and Chris on the right, in the busy Seoul subway. It's funny to watch them deal with the oddities of Korea, such as jostling on the metro, with typical Farrand Nonchalance™.
Dad in particular is an unsurprisable type of person. If you showed him a pink llama juggling chainsaws, he would just say "Right, okay. That's interesting."

I took them down to Busan on Friday where they met Heather for the first time. They said that she is 'a very good choice'.

Heather's family took us out to eat at a traditional Korean restaurant which was nice. Although her parents don't speak English, we got by well enough. In Korea, the meeting of the in-laws is regarded as a monumental event. I explained this to Dad and Chris and they were very well behaved. For example, Dad refrained from licking the sauce off the plates.

We went for a walk around Nurimaru, which is the site of the APEC building. It's one of the most popular attractions in Busan and there are good views of the ocean.

This weekend we're getting married in Busan, and the location is right on top of that little hill on the distant right. I hope to squeeze in one more blog post before going on hiatus, but will no doubt be back with plenty of news to share with you all.

A Summer Weekend in Busan

In a month and 5 days we'll be having our wedding. Last weekend I went down to Busan to try on a suit and meet up with Heather. She'll be finishing her job soon at Geoje April English and has always been a valuable worker to the company. The CEO, Mr Kang, will be giving a speech at our wedding ceremony.

Our good man Ants prepared a home cooked dinner for us on Saturday night. He recently learned a curry recipe from his Pakistani friends and also baked rotisserie chicken. When someone puts so much time into a meal like this, the only correct culinary criticism to give is positive. But actually it was surprisingly good, anyway.
The chicken was lightly seasoned and fairly decent, but the curry was quite advanced. As a veteran curry consumer, Ants new that he was up against a fairly picky eater. This was a lamb curry, brewed over the course of a day and all the flavours were in the right places. He used fenugreek leaves, which are more common in central Asian recipes and impart the same sort of flavour you get in the Greek vine leaf rolls. The base was more Indian than the coconut styles that I make, and was better than what you get in most of the Indian restaurants here. A good curry is like a good wine, it should go down easily, but there should also be a few complex flavours upon deeper reflection. This curry was good enough for Manmohan Singh.

After we gorged ourselves on Ant-curry, we went for a stroll. On Gwangan beach, there was a large Starcraft tournament being broadcast live around the nation. We watched the finals, which were up on a big screen, between a Terran and a Protoss player. The Terran player won through a defensive siege tank strategy and more spider mines than you could poke a psi blade at. I've been so busy lately that I haven't played anything in months.

Here's our good man Ants enjoying a beer while watching the event. Ants is more into surfing than Starcraft, while I'm the reverse.

Busan is probably the best place in Korea to spend the summer. There is a big beach culture here at night and no alcohol zoning laws to keep you from drinking out in public.

Here's Heather, Sang-a (Daniel's girlfriend) and Dan on the beach. Daniel has a new motorcycle now which looks like it has two miniature jet engines on the back. I asked if they shoot out flames, but alas, it is not the case.

This is Song-Jun's new motorcycle which reminds me of those flying vehicles in Halo 3. Large motorcycles in Korea like this one come with powerful built-in stereo systems which automatically promote the rider to normally unreachable levels of uber-cool.

And here's the engagement ring that I bought Heather. I ordered the stone through Blue Nile, which is an American diamond company who gave excellent service. Diamonds for sale in Korea tend to be overpriced and not of a high quality. While I normally think of jewellery as being outdated tokens of the bourgeoisie, even this logic-hardened blogger needs to bend personal stigma every once in a while for a lady as special as Heather.

It's a 0.32 carat, G-colour, VVS2 clarity diamond with a white gold band.

And it's worth a lot of cafeteria lunches.

Birthdays, Babies, Brunch and Busan

I turned 27 late last month. I remember when I was around 8 years old, I couldn't wait to be a year older. Back then it always seemed that birthdays were an eternity away. Then as you get older you wish they'd stop coming so often. My personal theory is that although time is constant, our comprehension of it changes as we get older. When we're young, our brains are constantly processing so much brand new information that the experience of living seems to drag on forever. But after we've been around for a while, we get used to the same old stuff so our brain ignores a lot of things and time speeds up.

One of the customs we have in the lab is for everyone to pitch in for a cake when it's somebody's birthday. For some reason, I don't really like the taste of cake and haven't been eating it for the past few years. Cake is okay, I guess, but I'd much rather eat fruit. So I made a request for fruit instead of cake.

Here's the fruit-cake we created. Now that's what I call dee-licious.

We also had cherry tomatoes to put on it but we ate them the night before.

Heather booked me a ticket on the KTX for Busan. She always ends up paying for my tickets because my excuse is that I don't understand how to use the KTX website. It's true, but I also like it when she pays for my tickets.

Heather's mother made a traditional Korean birthday breakfast for me in the morning. Koreans eat mi-yok-guk on birthdays, which is a green seaweed soup. Other foods you can see in the photo are fish, eggplant, spinach and that yellow thing is called a cha-me, which is a kind of Korean melon. It was nice to get such an elaborate breakfast.
Posing for the camera is Ji-Ye. I told Heather that I needed summer shirts, so Ji-Ye chose a red one for me, and also a shirt with a big green apple on it.

Heather's parents are always nice to me. Although we can't communicate very effectively, they're always cutting up fruit and making tea when I come over. On the bottom right of this photo is little Ji-Woo who still has baby food all over her mouth because she just ate. For some reason, she likes to stare at me. It's probably because I speak a funny language.


Here's a video of Ji-Woo eating. Ji-ye is also asking me some questions in Korean, as she always likes to do.

Ji-Ye took this photo of me. These days she doesn't wobble the camera so much and is starting to take some half decent photos. Previously, all of her photos were things like a blurry foot, or a sideways door handle. But of course I would always say "Wow, nice photo... very abstract."

I don't want to hurt her photographical self-esteem at such a young age.

That last pose was a direct reference to this photo that I took of Ji-Ye a couple of months ago. But she somehow manages to be impossibly more cute.


We drove out to eat some duck for lunch that day. On the journey there, Ji-Ye started copying what I was saying. So I played that age-old children's trick, where you can use such an opportunity in your favour.

An old friend of Heather's had a son last year and he invited us to the first birthday. While the first birthday in the western system would be one year old, in Korea it's actually two years old. In Korean culture, the moment you are born, you are already one year old. To me, the Western system makes more sense. After all, how much do we learn in the womb?

The birthday party was at a buffet restaurant in Hwamyeong.

Here's Heather with her friend and his son. Heather's friend is the one who helped Anthony and me when we had to move house.

For dinner we went back to The Kitchen on Dalmaji hill to organise the wedding plans. I met the chef and he seemed very much on top of things. That day we ate pasta and these salads. The long salad had char-grilled giant mushrooms in it.

The food is always impressive here.

You never really miss the beach until you move away from it. And then you only realise that you miss it when you see it again after a long time.

Then it's like "Oh yeah, this is what I miss."

Anthony took us out for brunch on the Sunday morning after we spent the night drinking at Guri Bar in Seomyeon. We ate at Breeze Burn's which is apparently a hamburger chain that do good brunches. The breakfast was okay and the sausages were nice, but the tomatoes were a little unripe.

Here's Heather and me after a semi late night out drinking. In around 4 months, we'll be married. The more I think about it, the more I think "Hey, am I ready to get married?" But then I stop and think, why not? A couple of decades ago, it was pretty normal to get married in your early 20s. These days people say that 27 is still young.

I feel kind of young and kind of old at the same time.

After brunch we went for a walk along the beach and ended up at a small amusement park on the east side of Gwangan beach. In the photo is Anthony's new girlfriend, Rebecca. Rebecca is a wonjang (branch manager) at the Wall Street Institute, which is an English school for older students.

At the amusement park they have this 'Bucking Bronco'. The idea is to stay on for as long as you can. Heather stayed on for 60 seconds on easy mode. I stayed on for the full 60 seconds and won a free ride ticket. Anthony came off after 42 seconds, but he was only using one hand. That begs the question: Would he have stayed on for the full 60 seconds if he used two hands?

Of course.


Here's Anthony rounding up the imaginary cattle.

I've been attending the South River Toastmasters every week. In the photo is JP Singh, giving his final farewell speech after 2 years. He's heading back to India and then off to the States. JP has been one of the defining personalities of the club over the past couple of years. He taught me an Indian sentence: "Hindostani lo bohot acha he."

That means "I like Indian people."

Due to my schedule, I can't go out drinking as much as I used to. But I try and stick around for the second and third rounds on Wednesdays when I can. Toastmasters is a good place to meet interesting people.

For the third round that night, we went to the Rainbow bar in Gangnam. This place specialises in floor seating and 'hookahs', which are large bong-like tobacco smoking devices. The tobacco is usually flavoured with a fruity or musk aroma.

Who said life in the lab was boring? I spend my time amusing myself by making things like this creation, which I named Tapey-Man.
Although somewhat frivolous, he does have a purpose. His eyes are made of horizontal tubes containing yeast medium. I needed to get them horizontal to improve aeration in the shaking incubator, but there are no docking ports in the incubator that would hold them steady. So Tapey-Man provides a firm scaffolding so that the small tubes can be shaken at 250rpm overnight.

See, here's tapey man in the incubator. Look how happy he is.

For the record, this experiment was a success.

I went out to Itaewon with Blossom recently and we went for a walk around. There are many foreign restaurants in the area, but nothing says it better than this one. If I had a choice, I'd live in Busan, but otherwise I'd live in Itaewon.

That's all from me this week. Tomorrow I'll be going to the Toastmasters National Conference, so I'll post some of the happenings from there later. Oh and if you're wondering about the 'I like turtles' feedback selection below, it's from a Youtube viral video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y

Check out the link and see you next time!