Piano Concert

A few months ago, our Korean town was lucky enough to gain a world class pianist. His name is Philip Thomson, who studied at Julliard and is on sabbatical from the Univeristy of Ohio in Akron. Philip played a show at a local church in Seosan, and many of us foreigners were lucky enough to see him preform a lot of Franz Liszt pieces.

I thought it was cool just to be able to see a guy play who has a picture like this:

He played his Liszt songs, which were really amazing. His hands flew all over the keyboard. Unfortunately, the video quality of what I took is not very good, so I won't put it on here. There is one video at the end, so keep reading!

The only problem during the show was that these Korean people would not shut off their cell phones, despite being reminded to at the beginning. At least four different songs were interrupted by ringtones. I have a message for the people of Seosan, Korea:

Grow up you freaking idiots. You are listening to a world class musician who is nice enough to play a free show for you and you can't put your phone on vibrate? Not even after a warning? Not even after one, two, three other phones go off? How are you dense enough to not just hold down one button on your phone for three seconds to enable vibrate? Get a clue and pull your heads out of your asses because you people disgust me.

Anyway, nobody from Seosan will probably read that so I might as well move on with more pleasant topics. At the end he took a group photo with the other performers; a pianist on the left, two singers, and then on the right was the MC. I think he is a pastor there or something:

Many of the foreigners got to take a photo with them as well:

And I took this one while he was playing a short song:

He did end up playing an encore for the people standing around after the show, which I taped. I don't know the name of the song, or the composer, but I do know it's by a Brazilian. Anyway, enjoy:

Souvenirs and Christmas Gifts

So now that the amazing Packer Super Bowl victory is out of the way, I'll have some more time to blog. This post is about all of the souvenirs that I brought back from the trip to Vietnam. Knowing that goods from Vietnam would be relatively cheap, I did nearly all of my Christmas shopping there.

First, a few gifts for me. This is a three-stringed musical instrument that sounds a lot like a banjo and has snake skin on the body. I have done a little research to try to figure out what it is called and what frequencies to tune it to, but so far have had no luck. It's still pretty awesome:

I picked this up in the same music shop, it's a bamboo xylophone:

These are a few lanterns I picked up for myself:

For my dad I got every episode of Seinfeld in a DVD box set. I wasn't sure of how good the quality would be for a few reasons. First, the box claims the complete season 1-10 although there were only 9 seasons. Also, who thinks Seinfeld is "A good-hearted tween comedy"? Apparently the people who made this box:

It did end up being good quality, so it made a nice gift. I also picked up Mad Men seasons 1-4 for my mother among other things. Here is a nice action shot of her opening a lantern:

And the lantern in expanded mode:

For my sister Amber I got a few things including a lantern. Here is a picture of her opening a nice vace with crushed egg shells on the outside and a nice lacquer finish:

By far, though, my favorite gift that I got for anybody was this finely embroidered silk Japanese samurai kimono for my brother-in-law Dave. The second I saw it I knew it was perfect for him, and he said that he will use it as a lounging jacket when he has friends over. That made me feel good.

Well that's most of the Christmas gifts I gave, next I'm going to write a few posts of the time that I spent with my family in Korea.

I'm Still Painting

I want to take a break from the vacation posts and put a few of my paintings on here. I have completed these recently, within the past few months. Actually I'm going to have to do another post with lanterns I have painted recently because there's about a half a dozen of those as well.

Here is 'Sunrise, Sunset':

'Yellow Elephant':

'Bar Snacks':
This last one is an orange monochromatic painting I made after a picture taken of my friend Joe and I while pretending to smoke some bar snacks in a bar in Seoul. Anyway, keep reading and I'll post about my families trip to Korea soon.