Now, what’s ultimately Crasian about all of these shinanigans is not the acts themselves, but the reactions (or lack thereof) of the Koreans.  We can play badminton on the sidewalk, and they don’t seem to think that it’s particularly weird.  We can sit outside of the corner store and make balloon animals, and maybe a third of the people that walk by will even give it a second look.  They are so used to amazingly weird stuff that our pathetic attempts don’t even faze them.  It’s sort of incredible.  Anyway, that’s also part of the reason that I haven’t posted in a while, busy busy busy.  I’ll search through my pictures soon and try to get some of them up sometime in the near future.

Anyway, the point of this all is Tokyo, not making excuses. Tokyo was ridiculous. I didn’t think that it would be so drastically different from Seoul, but it was. Immediately when we exited the subway station, there were some major contrasts. First of all, there were cars that were other colours than grey, black or white. The taxi doors open automatically. The people were also more heterogeneous. In Korea, it seems that people have about 7 or 8 different looks to choose from, and it’s only the really odd person who steps outside of those boundaries. It just seemed like there was far less social conformity there.  As you can see…

We stayed in a hostel near Shinjuku station, which is the busiest train station in the world (3.6 million people use it per day). The hostel was pretty nice for $70 per night. We each got our own room, all of which we proceeded to barf in at one point or another throughout the week. Some incidents were worse than others, mostly people hit the toilets with their half digested expulsions. Not me. We’ll leave it at that.

So things in Japan are expensive. We went out for dinner on our first night to a “Korean style” restaurant, being the adventurous fellas that we are. What would have cost $30 – $35 in Korea cost us $95 in Japan. That was quite a wake up call. From that point on, we decided that we would try to find the crappiest looking dives we could and eat there. Still, even noodles with a couple pieces of pork would cost an average of $8. None the less, we managed to keep the trip at a reasonable cost. This was mostly accomplished by drinking liquor purchased at convenience stores before going to the bars. We didn’t go to any bars that charged cover either, so we could go in and out at our leisure without needing to repay to get back in. But don’t worry, I won’t spend the entire time talking about my financial prowess.

The largest fish head I’ve ever seen, and for the low low price of $24.80.

Below, we can see Gary enjoying some Wendy’s after a long night at some of the aforementioned bars.

There were many cool places to visit in Tokyo. We went to both the Sony and Panasonic buildings. Unfortunately for us, both of them were closed when we went there. I suppose we should have looked into the times that they were open. Oh well. They were still pretty cool to see. The Sony building was on one of the biggest intersections in Tokyo. Also, it had a huge aquarium outside of the front doors with sharks and stingrays. Pretty badass.

The world’s biggest digital watch.

This building may or may not a spaceship.

We also spent a day in Harajuku. This area is awesome. It’s all weird and hip, and there’s about a million cool shops. It’s sort of like Commercial Drive, but 100 times better. There’s also a park in that area. In the middle of the park, there’s a big temple. That was cool, but not even close to as cool as the walkway that went around the park. For about 200m, there were like 15 random rock/punk bands set up on the sidewalk, one after the other. It was so cool. They were just playing and selling their CD’s. I’ve definitely never seen that before.

That’s pretty much the story of the trip, actually. Just nine days of saying “Holy crap, I’ve never seen that before.” We bought dinner out of a vending machine. I wish I had taken a picture of it. It’s not quite what you would think, though. It’s not like you put money in and food comes out. You pay the money, and the push the button, and then a ticket comes out. You then walk into the restaurant and give the ticket to the cook and he makes your food. It’s pretty cool actually, everything’s prepaid, no waiters, no tipping. Just pay, eat, and leave.

Another part of the Tokyo experience that would be hard to not mention would be the sex culture. It was ridiculous. You can’t walk half a block without being harassed by some Nigerian to go with him to his bar. He always has, “many beautiful girls, from many countries. They will dance, and whatever else you like. Just come with me, my man.” It was ferociously annoying. At first we just said “no thanks”, but that started to get really irritating really fast. So by the second or third day we started thinking of more creative ways to get rid of them. The conversations would go like this. “How are you gentlemen doing tonight?” – “Good” – “What would you like to do tonight?” – “Nothing” – “Do you like girls?” – “I hate girls” – “You hate girls?” – “Yeah” – “You don’t like titties?” – “Hate titties, they’re stupid.” Most of them would get lost after that, but then they started trying to pimp dudes on us, so that strategy stopped working. In the end, I just started telling them that I’d go to their bar with them, but only if they came and had a few drinks at my bar first. I told them that I had many beautiful ladies for them to choose from, and that the first drink would be free. That worked pretty well.

Alright, time to wrap up. Sorry again for the time between posts. I’ll try to be better with that now that my schedule is back to normal. Until next time…

It’s about 2.5 hours out of Seoul, to the South-West.  We took an express bus out there, for the very reasonable price of $9.30. 

Soju on the bus.

It was a little warm…

We got a 10 person accomodation, which was pretty spacious since there were only 5 of us.  That said, if there were 10, it would not have been so spacious.  I think they are basing their measurement on an average height of 5ft.  Also, there were no beds.  On the bright side though, it cost us less than $50 each, so that was pretty cheap, and it was pretty close to the festivities.

Here’s our place.  Clearly it’s the morning.  If you look to the area above Thompson’s head, you’ll see the awesome pink sheets that I got to sleep in.

Anyway, on to the party.  There was a live band playing at most times.  There were, of course, many different bands that played over the course of the weekend, some of which were good, others were not.  I unfortunately have no pictures of any of this as we were all muddy and I didn’t really want to touch my camera.  Here’s one before I got muddy though, it’ll give you an idea of what we all looked like.

This is Thompson and Jay, two of the guys that I’m going to Tokyo with.

The really nice part of the whole location, though, was the beach.  It was really nice sand, and the water was pretty warm.  Also, it provided a very necessary place to rinse off when you were tired of looking like an African pygmy tribesman.

Dean, me, Jaimi and Jay.

There was also lots of hilarious Korean stuff there.  The t-shirts that some people wear (as seen in the latest Crasian of the Week) are spectacular.  But it doesn’t end with t-shirts…  Here’s a tent where they sell novelty mudfest stuff.

Merchandises?  A little spellcheck never hurt anyone.  Anyway, enough grammar bitching.  This is getting pretty long, so I’ll stop now.  A la prochaine.

Apparrently the big thing at Lotte World is clip on ears of various stuffed toys. Although this is only marginally gayer than Mickey Mouse ears, the kicker is that it’s not so much kids who wear them as it is teenagers and college students. At least 2 out of every 3 girls there are wearing bunny ears, and many of them managed to convince their closet case boyfriends (who did not appear to be hating it one bit) to wear them too. Please see below.

The next truly ridiculous thing that you occasionally see in Korea is couple’s shirts. Now I say occasionally when referring to Korea in general, but the term loses it’s applicablity upon entering the gates of Lotte World. During the 5 hours that we were there, we saw at least 25 couples wearing various different couple’s shirts. These shirts can work in two different ways. Either they can be exactly the same, only one is cut for a guy and the other for a girl (as seen below), or they can be different, but when put together, the make up two halfs of one phrase or picture. I unfortunately have no pictures of the latter, but I assure you, they exist in no short supply.

Anyway, enough about the Koreans, on to us. I went there with Lauren, Dean and Jaimi. Lauren and Dean I work with, and Jaimi works at another school in the same general area.

Probably the best thing that any of us saw there was the “Boner Knight”. They say his ‘sword’ was feared across the land. This is one of those things that you just can’t believe unless you see it. And keep in mind, that this is an amusement park, and thus is predominantly geared toward children.

This was actually one of the first things that we saw upon setting out to explore the outside area of the park. Wow. These Koreans and their phalli. On a side note, there’s a park/forest a little south-east of Seoul in which hundreds of giant wooden penis statues are carved out all over the place, it’s supposed to be good for one’s verility to walk through it.

There were some pretty awesome rides there though, of which I unfortunately don’t really have any pictures. The scariest one was a 70m freefall, which is a lot higher than it sounds. One other thing that also added to the fun of it all was that there was beer for sale everywhere. You would think that drinking at an amusement park would be disatrous, but it was acutally pretty fun. Anyway, back to the Crasians. I’ll preface this next part by saying that I would ultimately have liked to use these pictures in various Crasian of the Week posts, but I feel that I would be doing them an injustice by not including them here to give a complete understanding of the ridiculousness of this place. Here’s Jaimi outside of a store that sells… well… I don’t really know what it sells, but it does have an interesting name.

??? Who knows… Also, I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t post a picture of this guy, who is pretty much the poster boy for Korean youth fashion.

Again, I’m speechless. How does one even begin to comment on that?

Another interesting thing about this place was the vendors. Now, I’m aware that we have some pretty audacious vendors at North American amusement parks, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen one who has decided to wear EVERYTHING that he sells at the same time. Check this guy out,

Nothing scarier than the killer from Scream wearing bunny ears and a plastic inflatable hook. Anyway, I’ll wrap this up, but I figured it was about time for another post, and I am finally taking an evening off, so what better time than now? Talk to you all later, until next time…

The other picture is of a sidewalk shoe sale. I don’t really know what to even say about this, except that I’m kind of pissed off that I somehow missed getting the shoe salesman and his shiny silver suit in the picture. Oh well, next time (it’s not like this is a rare occurrence here.

And finally, I will be going to Lotte World today. This is a huge Korean amusement park. It’s about half indoors, and half on a man made island. I don’t even know what to begin to expect, but I can assure you that there will be pictures and possibly videos posted soon.

Also, 7-11 in Korea does not sell Slurpees. WTF!!!??!??!

Anyway, so that’s how it looks. Coincidentally, Dean actually holed that shot.

As for the “more” promised in the title of this post, I have to tell you about the dollar store, shown below.

If the gods had a dollar, this is where they would shop. This place does not in any way resemble Canadian dollar stores. There’s no cheap toys or makeshift halloween costumes. They have good stuff here. I have likely spent $150 here in the past couple of months, which is shocking as nothing here costs more than 3 dollars. They have tools, glasses, plates (nice ones), air fresheners, any kitchen utensil imaginable, laundry hampers, plants, stationary, cleaning supplies, and countless other absolutely essential goods. I bought 8X10 picture frames here for $2 each, and then went to costco to get 8X10 pictures developed for $0.70 each. Pretty cheap wall decor (by which I mean ways in which to cover rips in wallpaper).

The last thing I’ll discuss is our excursion to Insidon. This is a sort of artsy community, where you can get all kinds of traditional ‘Asiany’ stuff. I bought pottery soju cups. If I’m going to drink a $1 bottle of liquor, at least it should be from a nice cup. Anyway, my faggy shopping stories aside, the cool parts of the trip were, a) the river that runs up the middle of the main road, and b) the ridiculous political protest agianst the FTA with the U.S.. First up, the river: I don’t really know how best to describe it, so here are some pictures.

Nature amidst the concrete. Now obviously this river is man made, but not entirely. It used to be a natural stream, and there are still parts of the natural stream remaning. They just made it bigger and put a huge fountain at the end. Still, it’s a pretty nice place to walk around.

And now, the protest. We got caught a little off guard by this whole thing. One minute we were walking down a seemingly normal street, then we saw cops dressed in riot gear, and then we were in the middle of a sea of people. There must have been 200 000 people there. It was absolute insanity. They were all singing and waving candles around (apparently political protests in Korea take the form of candle light vigils). Who knew? Anyway, it took about 40 minutes to get out of the croud. Here’s a picture that I managed to take, this is about 5% of the people there.

Well, I guess that’s all for now. Sorry it took so long, but I keep remembering at work that I should post things, and then by the time I get home I forget. Oh well, until next time…

This is Yongsan.  It’s a really famous electronics outlet in Seoul.  This picutre captures about 10% of one of the 7 floors.  This floor is cameras, there’s probably about 100 000 cameras, which are sold by a variety of independent vendors.  Other floors include computers, TV’s, musical instruments, car audio, household appliances, and various other stuff.  It was amazing to see.  Also, outside of the building itself, you can buy tons of pirated stuff like movies, video games, and computer software.  What a place…