Friday, January 30, 2009

Seoul Food

I’m still working through the many photos we took in Seoul and I figured, since I’m uploading while lunching, I’ll just share the Food and Restaurant photos and see how far that takes us.  Not too far, probably.  I don’t expect a snack on this flight, anyway. 

SO: Koreans love their food, and here is some foodness they were loving for me:

The delicious Hershey’s kisses that J’s foster-sister (?) hand-wrapped for us in a beautiful box covered with arcane pronouncements:

The delicious breaded pork cutlet waffle we enjoyed at the euphoneously-named “Donkas in the Waffle” shop down behind our hotel:

The delicious breakfast we had on the day that we insisted on something “western” and thought we could do better than pretzels - these are two offerings from Mr Donut, including a sweet-potato sesame old-fashioned that was pretty dang tasty!

The extremely delicious predicate to our lunch with the foster-sis and her daughter at the bulgoki place out in the gallery district near the big palace - this plate was fried on a gas grill till everything turned into a caramelized delight that none of us could stop eating:

The also extremely delicious dumplings that got hand-made for us no sooner than I’d ordered them at the Chinese place I had doubts about till I went inside just down the street from our hotel:

The cheerful lads who were working the honey-thread candy stand in Insadong, the arts and crafts street in Seoul - the honey is frozen in a disk and then spun out by hand into 16,000 thread-like filiments, coated with corn flour and wrapped around a sweet center.  This stuff is royally good and these guys put on a fun show when they make it for you. 

Out on the main drag, whatever that was called, here’s a lady shopping for her cabbages.  I tell ya, nobody shops for, cooks up, or appreciates the cabbage like your Korean folk. 

We didn’t dine here, but I guess if I wanted a Good Grief plate or some Concussive Football Injury nachos, this would have been the place for them:

Here’s one that was better before my flash card choked on it and lost the bottom of the image: a restaurant specializing in tentacled foodstuffs.  Outside, the cheerful squid and octo wave you on in with “thumbs” up and (now lost) foot-entacles curled around beneath them:

Just to prove we were there, here’s Kel, Zach and me (Z is waving his fan) with the Insadong Robot.  He’s a traditional Korean crafts robot, and he is here to party!

Finally, let it not be said that I failed to post any photos of Jesse.  Part of the package that came home with him was a pair of “Classic Pretty Shoes” (I swear I am not making this up) with a pokemon-like character inscribed inside.  These shoes are little plastic dealies and I’m not sure how comfortable or practical they would be for a child who could fit into them.  However, we never crossed that threshold.  Jesse’s pods are just to damn big for these shoes.

Well, let’s call that enough for now.  I’ve still got a handful of “weirdness” photos to share but I don’t want to wear you all out.  Seoul has been around for 1500 years or so; there’s no reason for me to feel compelled to blogpost all my photos of it within a six-week window.  Catch you next time then, good buddies!

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Memeing with the Oldies

I was once a meme whore but I am significantly recovered.  I rarely now, if ever, respond to email- or blog-borne proposals that I engage in some activity that everybody else is doing too for no other reason than that they are doing it.  But now I find myself getting four requests that I enmeme myself in a 48 hour period, and that drives me to do the deed myself.  With no better justification than that, here’s my twenty-five random things:

I can eat cereal for any meal.
I prefer odd-numbered lists.
I like, when visiting a new town, to sample their cheeseburgers.
I have accessory scaffoid bones in my feet.
I have been in two productions of Woody Allen’s God, and two productions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. 
I don’t twit.
I cherish my public transit commute.
I read signs, directions and labels.  For fun.
I love meringue pies but don’t love meringue cookies.
I mutter to myself.
I can make an extensive repertoire of funny noises.
I get a lot out of doing yoga but I eat meat anyway.
I prefer a firm bed.
I use nasal steroids.
I have never met some of my closest friends in person.
I value the spiritual life but don’t do enough to foster it.
I am hypersensitive to the feelings of inanimate objects.
For one afternoon in 1980, I worked for the presidential campaign of John Anderson.
I used to have warts on my hands but I lost the last one while I was in high school.
I have a scar on my right wrist.
I have a tattoo on my left calf.
I passed out while watching Reservoir Dogs, but not at the part you’d probably expect.
My first movie was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
In my heart I know I’m not good enough, even if you don’t believe me.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, I will still totally kick your ass.

There you go.  I hope you feel edified.  I have met my on-line obligation and that had better be good enough.  (and for extra excitement, you can compare those to my 100 things list on my About page!  Man, this internet thing might really be taking off!)

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Tunnel Vision

The NoHo/Stud City of my youth was obviously imperfect, but in many ways we all managed to overlook some things so that we could envision others.  Here’s something precious I think I mostly overlooked at the time:

My walk to school was only about a third of a mile.  I’d start up my block of stucco bungalows and cross a quiet residential intersection, then head up another block of bungalows - outrageously, with no sidewalks for my delicate footgear… and then cross again, walk one short block west, and finally make a right turn into the stub.  The houses all along the way were single-story, sited on roomy lawns, with detached garages and semi-detached perspectives.  Porches were swept and unused; front laws, manicured and vacant.  The wide quiet street fronting up to wide quiet lawns leading to sterile little porches; it all made me feel rather disconnected.  I was okay with that, I knew I had things really good compared with the rest of the world. 

But those houses - it was as if they were watching me with rolled-back eyes or something.  There was nothing wrong with them.  To the contrary, they exhibited pride of ownership, were well-maintained - it was a classic neighborhood for any child.  I’d sometimes actually meet with actual neighbor kids from my own actual block to throw a frisbee or a baseball up and down the street.  My block felt like something I could belong to.  But along the way to school, those few interceding blocks felt like a journey into very different territory - someone else’s.  Maybe someone creepy. 

But then I’d hit the stub and what do you know: my old friend was always waiting for me to give me a fresh take on things. 

The 134 cut through my quadrant, which in L.A. is to say, a major freeway bisected my neighborhood.  We were a grid of ten narrow blocks across and four tall blocks up and down, penned in by four larger boulevards.  When they put in the big freeway, they just ran it through the middle of the uppermost row of blocks and installed double dead ends on every north-south street between Kling and Riverside Drive.  A tunnel ran beneath the freeway and my walk to Riverside Drive Elementary School led me under the wide swath of concrete that impassively, perpetually withstood untold tons of automotive inventory at speeds of dead zero to better than eighty.  Those massive trucks, those reckless coupes on steroids, gomers and dozers vying for ten traffic lanes plus four shoulders, and I was in the third grade and had to take the tunnel beneath it all to the other side every day.  The tunnel - my old friend. 

The tunnel punched through from the truncated stub of Mary Ellen Street, one of the middle north-south streets in the quadrant and a logical place to put the only tunnel under the freeway.  There were just two or three houses and then a short flat rise of twenty vertical feet or so behind sturdy hurricane fencing, very steep and covered with dense brush.  Right in the middle was a rough concrete aperture - the entrance to a crude plain tunnel.  About six feet wide and eight tall, its roughened walls of nubbly sprayed cement rose straight up to a flat roughened ceiling.  The floor, also concrete, was in poor repair, and water would gather on it in small stagnant puddles, having dripped down from occasional dark leaky patches overhead.  Lighting was provided by dim bulbs hanging down in little metal cages every ten feet or so, and the tunnel was easily 80 feet long.  A four-foot metal post blocked the center of each entrance - even bikes had to be walked into this cloistered space.

It was a pedestrian tunnel, but to me it certainly didn’t feel ordinary.

Some people vandalized the tunnel with graffiti and broken bottles and the occasional personal offloading - that was to be expected.  In many ways it was a profoundly creepy place, an after-school special’s stage set for Bad Events, where the bully or the mean storekeeper has you pinned down, but for me it really wasn’t so much like that.  The tunnel felt like an okay place.  The thick pocky walls felt intensely sheltering and protective; their unfinished breadth baffled all sound till even the massive freeway immediately overhead was inaudible save for at the very ends.  The air inside felt like cave air to me, somehow nourishing and ancient.  Upon walking into that tunnel, even the small landscape of the little cul de sac collapsed to an identity, the walls constricting it and the light growing smaller and dimmmer the further in I walked; from within, the world outside was pared down to almost nothing.  It was out there, behind you and before you, bright dots against the darkness of the tunnel walls, details indistinguishable. 

As I’d approach the other side of the tunnel, the world would slowly grow, incrementally, more and more of it becoming visible as I approached the debouchement, coming slowly back to recognizability.  And when I’d emerge outside again, blinking, a mini-block away from the crosswalk at Riverside Drive and my school on the other side, I would come back out into that same old sunbaked flatness of the Valley air ineffably refreshed, a little restored, and focused on my goal, my day, the task at hand.  I’d come out of that tunnel just a bit different than I’d been when I went in, even if only momentarily and illusorially.  I’d find myself to be a little more straightforward for the experience.  As the time I appreciated it.  I’m pretty sure I’d appreciate it now.