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The title could just as well read Emart: Korean Walmart but since I’ve been living in the UK for over five years now Asda is more familiar to me than Walmart.  Of course, they are the same company in the end but that’s neither here nor there.  Emart is a department store that seems to have retained some of the ownership of where to place clothing.  These days you are forced to shop for clothes by brand instead of the infinitely more useful shopping by clothing style or by the type of event you plan on wearing it to.

Emart also has free samples.  I thought it would be quite rude not to sample local fare so we graciously accepted all the food that was offered to us.  This turned out to be quite a lot in variety and quantity!  We had soup and kimchi and drinks and even dessert!  In the end all I could say was “Bepola. Kaja.”  This translates into “I’m full. Let’s go.”

So we did.

Staying up to watch a football match that ended at 06:00 doesn’t do much for settling your mind and body from the effects of jetlag. We didn’t wake up until 15:15 which I guess you could call sleeping in since it was just over 9 hours of rest! We went to Myungdon to do some shopping. I couldn’t help but think that my mom would love to shop here because of the variety of brands and clothing. I had a rough time adhering to my no-logo mantra while shopping in Korea. It took me the whole trip to find an unbranded shirt and when I did I bought four of them in different colours!

We bought a traditional sugar cookie with a shape etched into it. The game is that if you can break off the outer pieces of the cookie and keep the internal shape intact then you take it back and you get another one for free. I only clipped two edges from my star but those small mistakes were enough to keep me from my free cookie. This wasn’t really a problem since the overwhelming taste of sugar from the first one was lingering in my mouth even after a couple bottles of water. Maybe I’m too old to enjoy pure sugar treats anymore!

For lunch we met Jooyoung again for Myoung Don, a spicy chicken with noodles.  It was quite tasty.  We once again had the waitress ask whether or not I, as a non-Korean, could handle spicy food and had to explain to her that I could probably eat spicier food than she could.  Not that she believed that of course but it probably is true.  I’ll sweat like mad while I’m doing it but I’ll enjoy it all the time and I’ll pour on more hot sauce.

I’ve installed an image gallery and put up some photos. They include a visit from my friend Helen and her sisters, a visit from my parents and Jo’s birthday party. And what fun I’ve had! I saw giant sand sculptures in Brighton played rounders in Reading and all of it with the best of friends and family! There’s even a video of me riding a horse! Happy Viewing!

We went to a Twenty 20 match at the Oval last year and it didn’t quite live up to our expectations. This year however, we had a much better time. We were in line with the wicket so we could see what was going on and we were not sitting in the sun! Come to think of it, not frying in the sun might have had a lot to do with our satisfaction. Now for the bad news: Surrey lost to Sussex (counties in England, btw). Some pictures of our day out.

Ryan

The short answer: Use Quicktime Pro and export it to a DV Stream.

My Sony DSC-T1 camera is fantastic and I cannot recommend one enough. It starts up almost instantly, takes great quality pictures and movies and is so slim that you usually forget it’s in your pocket. However, I ran into my first problem last week. I had taken a trip to Korea and wanted to make a DVD of it. The pictures were effortless and the slideshows made in less than an hour but I couldn’t figure out how to get the videos on the DVD with sound. Every format I tried either wouldn’t import into iDVD or it would import but without sound. I finally stumbled upon Jim Heid’s answer for solving the same problem in iMovie. He recommends a free tool called MPEG StreamClip which works quite well if you don’t have a QuickTime Pro key. So on to the details.

1. Open the MPEG video in QuickTime Pro. I’ll assume that you can handle this step on your own!
2. Select the File->Export menu
3. Choose “Movie to DV Stream” from the Export section of the new window
4. Click on the “Options…” button
5. Set the video and audio options to match the format of the DVD you are making

The video and audio options were quite new to me. I found that 48KHz locked audio worked quite well. I’m not sure exactly what locked audio is so if anybody can let me know I would appreciate it!

I hope this helps anybody making their first jump into DVD authoring. Now, take a look at one of my videos of what real sushi is like:

Can you believe the nerve of some drug runners? They found crack (Note: the title of the story was ‘Crack Found in Space Shuttle Foam’ before - honestly!!) stashed on the space shuttle. I’m curious to know how they got the crack into the foam. I found out that this isn’t the first smuggling operation with big plans. Drugs have also been found:

• In Shuttle Fuel Lines
• In an Airplane’s Wing
• In Antarctic Ice
• In a Russian Nuclear Reactor
• On the Deck of a Tanker

How do they find these? Are there drug sniffing dogs that patrol the space shuttle? What about the one on the ocean floor? Do they train dolphins to find drugs or was it just blind luck that they stumbled across it during a routine submarine patrol? Also, how much demand for drugs is there in space?

There are twenty four hours in a day and we used almost all of them. Ignoring the jetlag, we set out for a full Sunday with the final activity of the day known: watch Korea versus France at 4am. We met 추영(Jooyoung in Latin characters) and after a warm exchange of greetings we proceeded to 경복궁 or Kyung Bok Palace.

One of four surviving palaces in Seoul, it was in active use by the Royal Family until 1897. Sadly, successive fires (a by-product of under floor, fire-based heating in wooden buildings I’m sure) and purposeful destruction by Japanese invaders in the early 1900s left a small fraction of the buildings intact. What is here has either been restored or re-built.

The tour took about thirty-five minutes and gave absolutely no more information than was available by reading the signs posted by every place our guide stopped. I would recommend a self-tour to anyone. The changing of the guard was dull, as any changing of the guard is, but lightenned up by the American-English tranlator’s insistence on saying duty with two D’s. This resulted in hilarious comments such as “The new guards are now ready for doody.”

We had lunch at 치아야기 (Chee-ah-yah-gee) which specialises in rice cooked in bamboo. Another bamboo treat was a bamboo alcohol served in a bamboo jug. It was here that 청현 (Helen is her English name) joined us.

Let’s pause to catch up on our new characters. Yooyoung used to work with YuKyoung at Rexo. He came back to Korea while his work permit was being applied for by Rexo. Unfortunately, through no fault of his own, he was turned down so Rexo lost a good employee and we lost a good friend. Well, lost is the wrong phrase - maybe ‘were separated from’ is a better one.

Helen knows us through Royal Holloway. We met through friends of friends and after that she ended up staying at our house for a while before she returned to Korea to continue with her Master’s degree.

Our fourstrong party finished lunch and debated where to go next. In the end we settled on a traditional tea house. It was hot and stuffy when we got there so we opted to do a swift tour of their tea museum and then head for somewhere else. Our next stop ended up being 찬단궁 (Changdeokgong Palace).

When you visit Seoul, just see one palace. This was just like the last one but with a nice forbidden garden. So, I guess I’m recommending it over Kyung Bok Palace. the guide was just as useless (more useless actually) and we didn’t learn much more as teven the basic history of Korea was repeated verbatim from the other tour.
Helen bought a red Korean football shirt to get in the spirit of the night as we left the palace. An extremely short taxi ride took us to the Nanta theatre. We were able to buy reduced price tickets because we were supporting the Korean team by wearing red shirts (Helen’s motivation wasn’t entirely in the spirit of the night after all!). Nanta is good for a non-Korean speaking visitor to Korea. It was written by a Korean and it has very little speaking because it is mostly expressed through gestures and body language. Lots of activity, little talking and a great percussion soundtrack - what else could you ask for?

We were quite hungry after the show so we went to 논두렁 (Noondorung) for some bibimbap. Once again, Korea comes through for a tasty and healthy meal.
Here is where most people’s days would have ended but we were just getting started. Your storyteller needs a break from writing though so the day will be split into two posts. Coming up: batting cages, a hard to find tavern and large screens broadcasting the football to the streets crammed with Korean supporters.

Until then…