Cool Korea, Part Three: Stargate and Gorillas

I found the extra pictures that I was going to use for this blog, so here I am writing it as the class I was supposed to teach got cancelled because of Sports Day preliminaries.

Starting off with a mug. No, it's not a picture of myself... It's a mug that I was given in a restaurant months ago that I thought was, and still is, hilarious. I took 4 pictures of the mug from different angles.. Can you spot the odd one out?

They aren't hiring thousands of native English teachers for nothing you know... I wouldn't be surprised if this mug was designed by a native English guy for his own amusement actually.

Coolness rating: 8/10 - I cracked up.

Koreans love their manga (Japanese comic books). I took this photo in a manga rental shop (that also hired out some DVDs). Here they didn't just have the standard shelving to house their massive collection, oh no, they had two extra layers of shelving behind the normal shelves that you could slide away to get to the hidden manga behind it.

Also, it's mostly quiet at lunchtime here at Myeonghyun middle school because there are about 200 kids in the library reading manga... To be honest, I'd be reading it too if it wasn't all in Korean :'(

Coolness rating: 9/10 - there's nothing uncool about a shop full of manga :P

In Korea there are many frilly little, girly places dotted around that you stroll into when your on a date and have some cake, papingsu, and/or coffee. They are essentially desert places where you sit in relative comfort in your own little booth and have a chat with your woman about whatever over desert. This is one we went to in Bucheon. It was larger than most we've been to, looked as girly as ever, cheesecake was nice... Wait a minute... is that a f-ing Stargate?

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Yes. Yes, it was a Stargate. I was sitting there eating cheesecake and sipping at coffee for 20 minutes without realising this pansy-ass place had a bloody Stargate as the entrance. The glass door was even frosted to make it look like the event horizon... I don't know why or how, but it's there.

Coolness rating: 10/10 - Bit of Stargate while I'm having a cheeky coffee never hurts :P

This is my desk at work. I'd like to say that it isn't usually this messy but that would be lying (as I'm writing this blog I have a half eaten ddeok just sitting there in it's packet sitting on top of a pile of lesson plans, my headphones strewn across the desk, and an old newpaper from last week...). Anyway, this picture shows how much they've been plugging Starcraft II over here. I've seen ads everywhere from the side of Lotteria (the Korean equivalent of McDonalds) drinks cups (pictured) to on the side of buses. I've been suckered in and bought the game.. I'm really bad at it :/

Coolness rating: 6/10 - Everytime I ask a student what he did on the weekend 9/10 times the conversation goes like this:

Lee: What did you do on the weekend?

Student: Computer game.

Lee: Which computer game did you play?

Student: Starcraft? (In that 'you probably don't know what game I'm talking about' kind of way)

Lee: Of course you did.

It's starting to get annoying.

Finally, here is a picture of a drunk/crazy guy on the subway. Notice no one is helping him or even looking at him (except us, of course). He was staggering around trying to sit down next to that poor girl in pink but kept falling over. He was shouting at people and ended up emptying out most of carriage :P

Coolness rating: 7/10 - I see it all too often...

And that concludes my lame little series on what I've called 'Cool Korea' :)

Posted in: EPIK,esl,gorilla,manga,south korea,sports day,starcraft,stargate,teaching