The Fish Ate My Feet

Warning, this post contains several explicit photos of my, and others feet. If you have a disliking or repulsion to feet, I recommend skipping this post.

Anyway, this post is about last Sunday, the last day of the Buddha's Birthday 3 day weekend, which was awesome. On Sunday I made the trip to Seoul to meet with Megan and her sister, Becky, to do something called Dr. Fish. There aren't really any doctors involved, but there are definitely fish. You basically put your feet in a fish tank for 15 minutes to allow a bunch of little fish to eat the dead skin off of your feet. The same fish that have eaten dead skin from countless other's feet. But it's best to not think about that.

So this thing was actually really cheap, it only cost 2000 won for the 15 minutes, although you have to buy a coffee or tea along with that. The first thing that happens is shoe and sock removal, and then a girl washes your feet in a sink. Who would want to have her job? Anybody?

Here is what the fish tank looks like:

So we started the clock and dunked our feet. One of the best parts of the experience is just seeing peoples faces and reactions to the fish. Here's Megan, surprisingly restrained:

Becky was a little bit more uneasy about it:

And me:

Let's just say that it really tickles and is super off-putting at first. It took me about 8 minutes to get used to it, but then the last 7 minutes I was able to sit back and enjoy the experience. Now here's some pictures of my feet:

The fish found a nice spot on the inside of my right ankle:

Why not, one more picture of my feet:
Afterward, my feet did actually feel really good and I was happy that I did it. Who knows, maybe I'll go back.

Korean Toothpaste

After all of these sweet posts, it's time to clean things up around here. Luckily I have some of this excellent Korean toothpaste, 2080.

I was taking a look at the packaging, and noticed that they have a slogan translated to English on the label:

"Keep the 20 healthy teeth till 80 years old." Ahhh, that's nice. W....wait a second here. Isn't there something wrong with this? 20 teeth? 80 years old? I took the time to count my teeth, and theres definitely 28. And do I want teeth if I make it past 80? Maybe, you know. I don't want to rule it out.

Anyway, I think this slogan may just be way outdated, but it's one of those hilarious things you notice while living in Korea.

Happy Birthday to Bu(ddha)

Last weekend was a really eventful one. It actually felt like about 2 weekends within one. Well, actually it was a long weekend of three days, so it was more like 2 weekends in a weekend and a half. Still, an eventful weekend.

It started Thursday night when the band was supposed to play a show. We unfortunately found out an hour before we were supposed to play that they weren't expecting us to play a show that night. Some kind of gap in communications. We were pretty upset and ended up drinking kind of a lot.

This becomes important because our singer Jake ended up setting up a show for us just down the street. So we called all of our friends over there and played a set with the three of us in the band being pretty hammered, and it didn't go extremely well. There were definitely a lot of missed notes, words, and some timing issues. It could have been worse, but we got a lot of sympathy comments which stung a little.

So with that over with, the next day, Friday, was a holiday in Korea because it's Buddha's birthday. I don't really know a lot about this holiday, but I still headed to Seoul to meet my friend Megan and her sister to go to a lantern lighting in honor of Buddha's birthday.

Our plan was to go on the bus tour, so we met around that area and there were a lot of fountains. I ran through one.

There was also this giant silhouette of a woman hammering something, which was cool.

And some strange giant shoe made out of a bunch of regular sized shoes:

The bus tour was booked for the rest of the day, so we decided to just play some frisbee and then walk along the river to where the temple is. Here's a picture of Megan and her sister Becky along the river walk.

So we walked over to Insadong where the Jogyesa Temple is for the lighting ceremony. They have a whole bunch of lanterns kind of like being under a tent or something. Next to the temple there were some monks and some women all bowing in front and then a man who did a chant for about an hour. There were even little boy monks who were super cute. One fell asleep and had to be carried away.

At the temple was this cutesy looking Buddha statue with happy anime eyes.

People were filing into the temple for something, but I'm not sure what it was.

We had gotten there a little after seven, and the lantern lighting happened after sunset. So we were waiting there until after 8 o'clock listening to a man doing chanting and a lot of people were singing with, but we didn't know what they were singing about. Finally, the lanterns were lit and and everyone was happy.

So actually the most exciting part of the night was after this ceremony when we went to this little hof (drinking place) called Johannes Brahms, themed after the composer. We ordered a bottle of wine. As the woman was at the bar opening our bottle, Megan says "Oh my god, there's something on her leg!" Megan had watched something run across the floor and up the woman's leg. I looked over, and it was this giant hideous cockroach bigger than my thumb. It continued running all up and down the woman's leg and we decided to let her know about it. So she inspected her leg and the roach ended up running up the woman's shirt. She finally saw it, and freaked out and brushed it off of her. At this point the cockroach ran behind a shelf directly behind my chair.

We all looked at each other, startled at this event, and Megan says "you guys, chug the wine we have to get out of here." I was a little freaked and couldn't drink anything for a few minutes, but eventually was able to down a glass. Another woman in the bar went to the bathroom and on the way back the roach was following her to her seat. It was a super aggressive Korean cockroach.

We stood up as if to leave and the lady just packaged our bottle for us to take it home. We got out of there as quickly as possible, but the lady still charged us for these nuts that we orded and didn't have time to eat. That stung a little bit, but at least we made it out of the bar without being attacked.

A New Piece to the Band

After the first show, our band (still tentatively Iron Kimchi) was picking new songs to play. One song that kept coming up was Toto 'Africa'. I think everyone knows this is a really great song, and we were determined to play it. One small problem is that there are parts of the song that need a keyboard because they are just too difficult to recreate on guitar.

With some searching around and then a trip to Lotte Mart, I decided to pick up this beautiful 61 key piano. It only cost about $90 American, and definitely sounds good enough to get the job done.

All that was left, then was to learn how to play the song. Some Youtube searching uncovered this miraculous video that shows all of the notes to play to completely recreate the song. How easy is that?

Actually, it's not that easy. I did learn most of the song, though, so wish me luck tonight as we play it live for the first time.

Oops

So things have been slow around this blog. I'll go ahead and admit that it's got a lot to do with the fact that the cord that connects my camera to my computer is missing, and I can't upload photos right now.

To satiate readers of my blog, here is a post I have meant to put up about a painting I did a few weeks ago. This painting has gotten some nice comments from my friends, and I'm pretty happy with it, too. I don't want to add a lot of description so that it can be up to the reader's interpretation:

Anyway, enjoy this post and I'll try to get my apartment cleaned up to find the cord.

Open Mic NIght

Good news everyone: I have joined a band. This started when my friend Adrian was trying to set up an open mic night at a local club. We arranged for it and had three people to play. Since we knew that it was probably going to be just us three (Me, Adrian, and this other guy who sings named Jake), and we decided to get together and learn some cover songs to fill some time. We practiced for about two weeks, learned about 8 songs (SERIOUSLY 8 SONGS!), and had our opening mic night last Tuesday.

We got a really great turnout of English teachers and Korean people for the night. It started with fog machines and Adrian playing the opening song "Falling Slowly" at the request of the Korean owners of the club.

I have a few pictures from the night thanks to my friend Megan who came to visit for that night (you may remember her from pillow fight day). This first picture is from the bands first song. We sang this Korean song called "Nobody" which I have actually posted on this blog before. We had the bartenders sing it because Korean is really hard.

The lineup for 'Nobody' (left to right): Jake, Adrian, Hong, Me, Panda

From there the band played a few more songs, and then a solo song or two from the three of us, and then a few more songs to play out the night. The set list looked like this:

Falling Slowly

Nobody

Sweet Child of Mine

No Rain

I'm Yours

Solo Sets:

Flume (Me)

It's the End of the World as We Know It (Jake and Adrian)

Bizarre Love Triangle (Jake and Me)

(Adrian)

And to finish out:

A Little Help from my Friends

Crazy

I Will Survive

Smells Like Teen Spirit

Here's another picture of me from the night; I'm not sure what song it is:

It ended up being a really great night and I'm pretty sure everybody enjoyed the set. We're going to play another show on the 20th. There's only one problem, which is that our band doesn't have an official name yet. We have a few ideas, but aren't set on anything. The ideas are: 96% (an inside joke), and Iron Kimchi. These aren't super great, so if anyone has ideas I'll look forward to reading them in the comments.

This has Nothing to do with Anything

This is totally random, but I want everyone I know to watch this video: