South Korea

Sitting and absorbing, its like 75% of what I do here, because most of the people I work with know slightly more English then I know Korean, and after almost 2 weeks the novelty of communicating with me is starting to wear off. Its exhausting! so I kind of sit around wide-eyed listening to Korean fly by, trying to pick up on words I recognize, and occasionally repeat things that sound cool and ask : what does that mean. eg. Nee-gah means "you"! hahahaha. so yeah, there's that.

Yesterday was my day off and it started out good, I went over to my friend seans house and we had a little lunch, grilled cheese and my specialty: doctored ramen. Then we tackled the subway to find an obscure art store. Lost, we stumbled upon a really fancy mall, with gucci, prada type shops, then I saw it, a glorious shoe store with manolo blahniks and jimmy choo's!!! the kinds of shoes I'd only heard about in movies, magazines and sex in the city!
I picked up a Jimmy choo and looked at the price tag, $1300 OMG> so i asked the shop lady, "what is your most expensive shoe?" she of course didn't understand me, so I tried to re-phrase and use gestures of money and up and shoe. she calmly walked over to her co worker and started speaking ominously like, no smile, not making eye contact, but i was so bedazzled by the shoes that i continued on my mission to find the priciest one. The one lady followed me around as i checked various shoes, like she gave me a foot of space, I started to get a little offended, okay clearly she things im going to steal a shoe, so i hurried up what i was doing and left the shop. $1700 was the priciest shoe I found btw. So standing outside the store, with good distance from the shoes we were trying to figure out where this art store would be on seans iphone, when two security guards came up to us and asked us what we wanted. sean and I were like uh??? and we pointed to the name of the art store we had written down and they in fact knew of it, but quickly and gently guided us to the nearest service elevator, pressed the down button and told us where to get off and where to go. So yeah, Pretty sure they wanted us out of the fancy store.

The Art store was amazing! i found these brush pens that you can't get in north america, i bought 5 of them (should tied me over for a while) and a travel journal too! a hello kitty notebook (for work ;) some korean sketch markers that i'm quickly falling in love with, some husky puppy stickers for Diana and some stationary to write you a letter! Hooray! It was hard to leave that store. so much awesome.

Next stop was the electronics district. Sean wanted to get some blue tooth earphones and I wanted to get a cheap small digital camera.
we found both! but the store was closing so I had to hurry in my camera purchasing decision, as it turns out the camera I got for $120 takes totally crappy pictures. Most of them have turned out blurry and over contrasty. I messed with all the settings to try and sort it out but still always crappy photos and the screen has some strange marks on it. I don't think i can return it because there were so many shops selling camera's in this place that even if I had received a receipt I don't know if I could remember which shop it was. (its kind of set up like a flea market/swap meet)

so thats a bummer, but then the biggest bummer of all happened next! on our way to meet yonnie (our boss) I left my bag on the subway! so all the new art supplies + drawing materials I already owned are gone. about $250 worth of markers, the ones I use the most.
It was like loosing a part of me, like the left heart ventricle or a couple fingers. the good ones, not the baby or ring. so i've been feeling pretty down about that. Yonie's manager Won Young spent a lot of time calling the transit offices and driving to lost and founds, but nothing turned up. between that and the camera rip-off I was feeling pretty defeated. I slept 11 hours.



So now its 2 in the afternoon, I'm at Yonnie's office now, and it seems like I've been ringed into teaching a few classes on my wedding commissions, which freaks the shit out of me because of the language barrier and I've never taught before. I don't know how to explain my "amazing technique" that everyone here wants to learn. I can honestly say, when i'm making a piece, I feel like i have no idea what I'm doing. But if I've got to do it, I'll just have to be positive about it, and besides I need the extra cash to replace my lost markers. The bright side is, it seems she wants me to make one or two new samples for the class, I don't think she understands that these take me a long time to make but Im thinking of doing one for some friends of mine since their wedding photos were so great and at the end of it all I'll have a present for them.