flickering pictures

As I write this, I’m sitting in one of Pusan’s Internet cafes — or “pishi bangs” — surrounded by twenty-something guys laughing and smoking and blasting the hell out of each other online. We got in this afternoon on the KTX, a blazing fast train something like France’s TGV that can hit 350 km/h. Safety [...]

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So it’s been a couple of days since my last post — sorry for that — but all is well and we’re gearing up to head to the port city of Pusan tomorrow morning. I live in a pretty cosmopolitan city, and as such there are large ethnic and linguistic communities there, but it was [...]

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Kinda neat to think that someone at CNN actually reads my little site. Yesterday I posted about the Korean president’s near-legendary unpopularity, and today a CNN article on Korea’s beef riots linked to FP in its “From the Blogs” section. I know it’s silly, but it’s really cool every time. : )

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South Korea’s president is not a popular man. He’s not so much George W. Bush unpopular — more like the bastard love child of Joseph Stalin and Richard Nixon unpopular. People here hate him like they hate Mondays, mortgage payments and bumper-to-bumper traffic. And no one seems to know why. Nevertheless, they’re mad as hell [...]

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It was a long, long haul, but it was so worth it. It took one short flight from Montreal, one busted airplane hydraulics system, a six-hour wait in Detroit, a looong trans-Pacific flight over Manitoba, Yellowknife and Alaska to Tokyo, and a mad scramble through Japanese security to catch a delayed (for our benefit — [...]

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