The new address is www.icebergkorea.com.  Please come check it out.

This is the cherry blossom season in Korea, one of my favorite times of the year.  Make time to find a nice place for a walk or drive and do it fast - the blossoms only last for a couple of weeks before falling to the ground.

Actress Choi Ja-hye (24), a good Christian girl.  Her credits include Daejanggeum (대장금) and Spring Waltz (봄의 왈츠) among others.

You can see more of Miss Choi at her CyWorld page.

First Hyori and now Hankook Tire.

A few days ago I posted a story about Hankook Tire's clever ad that stretched the bounds of Korea's sexual mores.  It turns out that it was a "worn" idea.  (Badabing!)

The company has pulled the ad under threat of plagiarism.  Goodyear Canada had already used the "tire as condom" concept in 2004 for it's Dunlop brand and in fact won an award for it.  According to the story in the Chosun Ilbo, an insider with the company said Hankook was "unable to ascertain whether the ad was plagiarized."

I'm not sure what to think about this.  On the one hand, I'm sure that insiders at tire companies keep tabs on what their competitors are doing, so therefore this seems to be a blatant rip-off.  Damn you Hankook!  Why did you do this to me?  And I loved your racing girls so much!  On the other hand, no doubt the ad was created by an advertising agency, which would be less likely to have come across the Goodyear ad.  Okay, I'll cut you some slack.  But I'm so confused.

One good thing to come from the Hankook/Hyori mess: I've learned how to spell plagiarism.

The "MT" is one of the most common events in Korean culture.  For the few of you who have never heard of it, an MT (membership training) is basically a weekend retreat for university students or company employees.  Participants usually leave on a Friday night for a resort or campground outside of town and return home late Saturday or early Sunday.  I have often heard about MTs and when I ask what takes place the common response is “lots of drinking”.  Surprise, surprise!

A couple of years ago an ex-girlfriend told me she had to attend an MT with her co-workers.  I gave it very little thought and simply told her to have a good time.  That weekend, when I mentioned to some Korean acquaintances that my girlfriend was on an MT, you would have thought that I had told them I had cancer.  In a very concerned tone they asked me why I allowed her to go.  I answered that she would only be gone a couple of days, I trusted her, and besides, I had no right to tell her she couldn’t go.  To which they responded, “A Korean man would NEVER allow his girlfriend to go on an MT.”  Naturally, I came away from this conversation feeling a bit unnerved and, sure enough, within a couple of weeks of the MT we broke up.  (I must mention though, that this could have been purely coincidence.)  Since then I have always had a strong curiosity to experience firsthand the atmosphere of an MT.

Last weekend, I finally had a chance to quell that curiosity.  I was invited to participate in a retreat for English majors from a local university.  I couldn’t refuse.  The mysteries of the MT were soon to be revealed before my very eyes.  What follows is an account of the weekend's activities.

I met a small group of foreigners in front of the university early Saturday morning.  We boarded a chartered bus and headed for the Muju Ski Resort.  The students had left the night before, so there were actually more foreigners on the bus than Koreans.  Three hours and two rest stops later, we pulled into the resort.

(Note: Muju Resort is a beautiful place.  I intended to take photos and write a separate post on it, but it rained the entire weekend and I wasn’t able to get out and explore.  I’ll just tell you that there are a large number of Swiss-style chalets and mini villages strewn along the mountainside, lending a sort of "Disneyland meets the Shining" feel to the resort.)

The bus stopped outside of a cafeteria.  Our group got off the bus and went inside.  I expected to see students swilling soju and hurling kimchi at one another, but I was disappointed to find that the cafeteria was empty.  The head of the English department instructed us to grab a tray and get our food.  We ate our bulgogi and kimchi chigae, quietly wondering what shenanigans the students were up to.

After lunch we were taken to our quarters.  We stayed three to a “room”, but the rooms were more like small apartments.  Each consisted of a decent-sized kitchen, a large living room, two bedrooms and two separate bathrooms - more than enough space for three.  I later learned that the students were separated into teams of eight or nine and two teams stayed in one apartment.  Young men and women!  Together!  Egads!!

We learned that many of the students were sleeping off a Friday night full of activities and so we had some time to kill before events got started.  I asked the veterans in the group what they did on these retreats in previous years.  Their answer?  You guessed it: drinking.  Someone fetched a few beers from the mini-mart and we sat around drinking Hite and watching Spiderman on OCN.

Late in the afternoon the department head put each of us in charge of a team of students and instructed us to help them put together an English skit and a song and dance routine for a show to be held in the evening.  Though some groups mixed in a little alcohol consumption with their rehearsal, my group was particularly diligent and worked until dinner to perfect their routines (we took first prize in the song and dance - largely due to my singing; I’m sure of it).   Finally we wrapped up our preparations and feasted on more bulgogi.  Foreigners like bulgogi, you know.

After dinner we gathered in a large conference room for the evening competition and sat through three hours of quizzes, singing, dancing, and incoherent skits.  I asked the students on my team if this was normal for an MT.  They told me that it wasn’t.  This was more like an English camp.  Drat!  I suspected I would never get to the heart of the MT culture.  Hiding my disappointment, I found pleasure in watching the teams who had been drinking before dinner stumble through their dance routines.

At around 11:30 the competition mercifully came to an end.  Now it was back to our rooms for the main event.  Younger students sat on the floors of their rooms while the older students retrieved boxes and boxes of soju and beer.  The amount of alcohol carried into the rooms was staggering.  I got the impression they thought they were catering a Las Vegas convention.  For about an hour people remained with the other members of their teams, sitting in circles and playing drinking games in rapid fire succession.  After a sufficient amount of fuel had been consumed, the floor of the hotel where we stayed turned into one massive all-night party.

I wandered from room to room witnessing young men and women playing drinking games everywhere.  In each case I noticed a common theme: certain members seemed to be specifically targeted to drink.  One girl informed me that she was trying to “kill” a guy (with soju) because she hated him.  With her friends she challenged him to a drinking contest.  The catch: the girls were drinking water from soju bottles.  Fortunately, the object of her hatred was still alive in the morning and seemed to be on good terms with his would-be assassin.  In fact, there seemed to be quite a few more couples in the morning than the previous night.  A few of them severely hung over.

While riding back to Yeosu on the foreigner bus, I had time to ponder what I had learned.  On the surface, MTs are set up to bring “the group” closer together through a shared experience.  Anyone familiar with Korean culture would not be surprised by that.  There are plenty of activities that members are "encouraged" to take part in.  But on an individual level, these weekend getaways are seen as an opportunity to bond with that someone that you’ve been eyeing at school or work.  And what better way to do it than a couple of days (and nights) in a room together with a truckload of alcohol?  There really is no mystery in that.

I found this information on the KBS Global website:

Manseongni Beach, the only black sand beach in South Korea
Manseongni Beach, five kilometers off from the Yeosu station, is the only black sand beach in South Korea. Taking a sand bath in this beach is said to be particularly effective to alleviate neuralgia and a variety of gynecologic diseases. In particular, on April 20 in the lunar calendar, so-called "the day when the black sand open its eyes," a tremendous number of people flock to the place because the effect of the sand bath is said to be the maximum at the moment. 

Black sand, huh?  Sounded cool, so I decided to check it out.  I never took any art classes in university so I hardly qualify as an expert in these matters, but the sand didn't look black to me.

Okay, so the beach is a very light shade of black.  Still, it looks like it'll be a lot of fun to hang out there in the summer.  Swim, suntan, barbeque sam gyup sal, drink soju, and eat fish.  Every locale in Korea has some food that it is famous for.  Yeosu's specialty is "hoi" (sashimi).  The sign below displays the variety of fish in the waters near Yeosu and the best time of year to eat them.

If you travel up the road just a bit you can get some fantastic views of the beach and sea from an overlooking hillside.

Manseongni Beach was devoid of life on this day, presumably because the black sand's eyes were closed.  I'll return on April 20 (lunar calendar), when it awakes and the masses are alleviating their neuralgia and gynecologic diseases.  That should be somethin'.  Hope I don't encounter any crabs.

I'm officially a bad-ass (in my own mind).

I bought myself a scooter the other day.  Yeosu, being a relatively small city, doesn't provide much in the way of public transportation.  There is no subway and you usually find yourself waiting 15 or 20 minutes for a bus.  Sure, there are taxis (and the meter starts at 1500 won), but it adds up when you take a taxi everywhere.  So I did what most of the foreign community does down here and got myself a "hog".

Okay, okay.  It's more like a piglet, but it gets me around.  It has a 50cc engine, which means I don't need to license it.  The government considers anything that small a "toy".  This baby accelerates from 0-100 in, umm, in, well, check back with me later.  Anyway, traffic in Yeosu is pretty reasonable, so I'm not too worried about being run over by a taxi or bus.  I am a little worried about the wind though.  God, the wind is strong here.  Nearly blew me over this morning.  So, if someday there are no further updates to this blog, you'll know that I am either lying dead on the street somewhere in Yeosu - or I have taken a job delivering Chinese food.

Here are some more photos of the beast.

Following up on yesterday's post, I present to you - Hankook Tire's Racing Girls.  If someone has posted these before, my sincerest apologies.

Automotive parts companies are once again taking the lead in stretching the sexual mores of Korean culture.  This clever new Hankook Tire ad campaign takes the double-entendre approach to selling its tires.  Safe driving, everyone!  (And enjoy the ride.) 

"Elephant, penguin, wolf, dog, duck, frog, fish: any one of these animals has something to teach those suffering from terminal confusion in today’s world — and aren’t we all?"

Inspired by these wise words from the Chosun-Ilbo, this woman takes time out from the article to observe lesson one.