Bauhaus

Amy and I had heard about the Bauhaus Dog Cafe in Hongdae (홍대) quite a long time ago, but had never actually gotten around to going until this weekend. We wandered in to what would be a fairly typical Seoul cafe (chairs, tables and hot and cold drinks) if not for the presence of fifteen dogs and one cat (who had made herself scarce). Dog owners were free to bring their pets along for some socialising with other animals, and I estimated that there were three staff on drinks-serving duty compared to four on accident-cleaning and hair-sweeping details.

All the animals had the run of the cafe, which meant that they were perpetually underfoot, overhead (on the broad windowsills), on the seats or just scampering from person to person in search of treats. It is an immensely fun concept that we doubt would work in the hygiene-regulated Western world.

 

Yellow dust monitor for Firefox

Anyone who’s visited Korea (or, indeed, any place in north-east Asia) in the spring will be familiar with the hideous Asian dust (also called yellow dust or yellow sand). Every year, fine dust from the Gobi Desert gets whipped up by storms, is carried by the prevailing winds over some of China’s pollutant-spewing heavy industries and then migrates across the seas to Korea and Japan where we breathe the stuff in. It can cause eye irritation, breathing problems, possible long-term effects from all the heavy metal pollution and leaves a vile taste in your mouth.

Both the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) and the U.S. Army 65th Medical Brigade monitor dust levels, but I don’t always remember to check the websites before leaving the house. I therefore decided to write a simple add-on for Firefox that would display the current dust levels and give me real-time information.

The add-on appears as a small icon in the Firefox status bar, with the current dust level (in μg m^-3) as a number and the level of health concern as the background colour. The colours are taken from the U.S. Army 65th Medical Brigade information card:

μg m-3	Concern	Advice
—-	No data	No data
0-99	Good	None
100-199	Moderate	At-risk personnel reduce prolonged / heavy exertion
200-399	Unhealthy	Reduce prolonged / heavy exertion; at-risk personnel limit outdoor activity to bare essentials
400-799	Very unhealthy	Limit outdoor physical activity to bare essentials; at-risk personnel avoid all outdoor activity
≥800	Hazardous	Remain indoors

The dust data is taken from the KMA website, which has the local levels for 28 stations around South Korea. Users can choose their closest station in the preferences window, and can also alter the pop-up images. Hovering the mouse over the dust level icon will either show the 5-day trend in dust levels at the local station, or a satellite image of the regional dust concentration (current conditions, or 12- 24- or 48-hour forecast).

Firefox 3.5.4, Windows XP

You can install this add-on from its entry at the Add-ons for Firefox website. It is classed as “experimental” as it has not yet accumulated enough user feedback to show up on public searches (and, since it is only useful to a small subset of the online community, may never do so).

Please add a comment if you have any feedback or suggestions (I would especially like to get a Korean translation finished), either here or on the add-on page.

 

Autumn in Yongin

With a window of only a few weeks to catch the full splendour of Korea’s autumn foliage, I took a short walk around the hills of Yongin on Sunday. Networks of sometimes-maintained trails criss-cross just about every wooded area, and I puffed around enjoying the slightly unseasonal warmth and the friendly multitude of small dogs chained outside peoples’ houses. I heard rather than saw a deer (bounding off into the thick undergrowth), and spent several minutes facing off with a squirrel who (against all reason) wanted to get past me without climbing a tree.

 

Busan Fireworks Festival 2009

The Seoul International Fireworks Festival would have taken place last month, had it not been cancelled due to swine flu. Amy and I therefore braved the tedious journey down to Busan (부산) for the fifth annual Busan Fireworks Festival, which is not “international” and therefore not a flu transmission risk. I was quite eager to have a go at photographing fireworks, and it was with no small sense of acquisitiveness that I raided my local Canon store for a tripod and remote control (Amy and her family had very kindly sponsored my shopping trip as a birthday present), essential equipment to take longer exposures and avoid blur.

We arrived in good time, a fresh breeze blowing off the land out into the bay at Gwangalli (광안리), and checked in to our hotel (the price of which reflected a 225 % markup on normal rates). When making reservations, we had tried to get the price reduced to something more reasonable and were rebuffed with a curt, “We’ve been waiting for this weekend all year” – we were also told that check-in was 7 pm, and had to fight to be allowed in at 3. As we went in and out over the course of the evening, we noted that the room prices were being increased by W10,000 every hour.

As the fireworks began, I was still frantically searching for a place to put my tripod (there were supposedly 1.5 million people crowding the beach) – people would trip over and walk into it for the next hour, despite a clear path on the road in front of us. I located a patch of sky and started taking photographs, only to realise after a few minutes that the manual focus wasn’t set correctly. Once this had been (mostly) remedied, my camera decided to shut down with the non-specific error 99. With some rapid testing, I was able to determine that I could “reboot” the camera by switching it off, changing to an automatic mode, removing the lens, replacing the lens and switching it back on, and that the error occurred when I tried to take a photograph in manual mode when the exposure meter was off-chart below -2 stops. I’m really hoping that this kind of behaviour doesn’t repeat itself, but was able to take a few shots of the end of the display.

 

ARK Asan Shelter October 2009

A few weeks ago, I was asked to guide English-speaking school groups around my local Natural History Museum. I was of course happy to oblige, but was rather nervous come the day itself – aside from a potential barrage of questions I might not know the answers to, I was expecting an ungovernable mob to scream through the doors and pay no attention to anything except breakable objects. As things turned out, the kids already had scavenger hunts prepared and were extremely attentive as I tried to explain the finer points of gecko foot adhesion (van der Waals forces), water scorpion respiration (they breathe through their tails) and bittern camouflage (they pretend to be a reed).

On Friday evening, we were lucky enough to be invited to a small wine tasting event and spent a couple of enjoyable hours with several notable vintages. We split an order between us, to be drunk at gatherings (possibly with board games) later in the year, and I believe I can now reliably tell a red from a white without looking.

I hadn’t been down to the animal shelter at Asan (아산) in around a month, and so was eager to see how the animals were doing, who had been adopted and how the shelter was shaping up after the summer’s long-overdue staffing change. Most of the larger residents were more or less as I’d left them – as friendly and attention-starved as ever, and perhaps a little heavier due to improvements in the food and winter coats coming in. We set about the usual walking, playing, escape-foiling and fight breaking-up, punctuated with pauses to take part in interviews for an upcoming expat magazine article (and possible photographic fame!).

 

Gyeongpo

With most of Korea’s autumn festivals cancelled due to swine flu, we took a trip out to the east coast to catch the very last of the summer warmth on the beaches of Gangneung (강릉) at Gyeongpo (경포). One of our first visits was the Chamsori Gramophone and Edison Museum, which turned out to be around 33 % gramophones, 33 % household appliances from the 1950s and 34 % photographs of the museum’s owner with various dignitaries. The whole thing was captivating only in its ability to appal, and we left as soon as we reasonably could.

Keen to wash away the feeling of tastelessness, we walked the couple of miles over to Seongyojang (선교장), the Korean equivalent of a stately home, and Ojukheon (오죽헌), the local folk museum. Both were quite quiet, the beaches being largely abandoned until next summer, and we were able to spend a pleasant couple of hours investigating roof end tiles, ancient plum trees, a traditional mask dance and the birthplace of both Shin Saimdang (신사임당) and her son Yi I (이이), currently depicted on the W50,000 and W5000 banknotes respectively.

On our way back to our hotel on afternoon, we happened to walk past a large boarded-up building that looked like it was once a beachfront apartment complex. Urban exploration sense tingling, we backtracked a little later on for further investigation. From the look of the place, it had been abandoned for quite a while as the inside was bare apart from the usual broken furniture and fittings that tend to accumulate with neglect. The upper floor didn’t look quite safe (we could see holes in the concrete) and the cellars were under six feet of water, so we confined ourselves to the ground-floor apartments which unfortunately turned out to be mere shells and not all that interesting.

 

Starry Starry Night

One fine and relaxing weekend, Amy and I finally made the effort to go out to the Drawing Show, a non-verbal live art theatre show out in Seoul’s theatre district at Hyehwa. We weren’t quite sure what to expect (I was leaning towards a kind of live storyboarding), and were marvellously entertained when it turned out to be a series of sketches (both arty and comedic) and highly kid-inclusive. Photography was not allowed (presumably so as not to spoil the surprises), and I only got a few shots of the artists right at the end. Definitely go and see it.

The same weekend, I went out to Asan (아산) with Animal Rescue Korea to see how the dogs and cats were getting along. The shelter is in a constant state of construction, with new buildings and areas sprouting up at a fantastic rate, and we were constantly stepping around diggers and piles of materials. The dogs were as energetic and attention-hungry as ever, but the cats were quite subdued after a serious outbreak of panleukopenia a few weeks ago.

The following weekend, my parents and brother came over for a visit – I’d spent most of the week frantically reserving hotels and trains, and was relieved to have things start to go exactly as planned. We hit a few of the major tourist areas of Seoul before temporarily parting ways – me to go to work, they to more sights in Jeonju and Gyeongju. We’ll rendezvous in Gangneung this weekend, and I’m quietly confident they’ll be able to navigate the Korean bus and rail systems unaccompanied.

The only full day we had together was Saturday, and we packed enough in to make it count. Our first stop was Gyeongbokgung (경복궁/景福宮; lit. scenery happiness palace), with its innumerable royal buildings and various museums (Royal, Folk and Children’s). We wandered around, wilting a little in the heat, and escaped to nearby Insadong (인사동) for some traditional item window shopping in the shade. After recharging in a coffee shop, we relocated south to Namsan (남산) as the evening approached to see the city at night. Finally, not wasting the hotel’s excellent location, we made a brief foray into Namdaemun Market (남대문 시장) for fruit and oddball clothing.

 

Dragonflies

With the autumn semester already one week over, Amy and I opted for a relatively quiet weekend in Yongin to relax after the stresses of going back to work. There was much cooking, baking, board gaming, film watching and chatting. We also noted that the local dragonflies were getting a lot more sluggish, sitting on stationary objects more often than flying about (probably due to the waning of summer).

 

ARK Asan shelter August 2009

Once again, the weekly Animal Rescue Korea trip to Jane’s Grandpa’s shelter in Asan (아산) involved us administering heartworm medication to the ~250 dogs, quite a few of which did not really want to be caught and fed pills. We got just about all of them done, despite one enterprising individual sneaking into the roof of one of the pens and eating a 10x overdose from the bowl we were using to hold the medicine in. The vet advised us that he’ll probably be OK. We also had to catch a wild cat with some kind of growth that needed looking at – we tried and failed to pull her out of her sleeping box (almost destroying a pair of gloves in the process), but later managed toss a duvet over her, giving us enough time to bundle her into a carrier.

 

No just ones stuck in trees

Last Saturday was KMPL’s regular monthly mountain clean-up operation in Bukhansan (북한산) National Park. We started off on one of the relatively newly-opened trails in the west of the park, joining the usual throngs of hikers enjoying the warm weather. We weren’t expecting to find a lot of litter, and so were dismayed when we reached our carrying capacity of around 80 litres (mostly broken glass bottles) less than a kilometre along our route. We did, however, get the chance to enjoy the serene surroundings of the riverside trail and encountered plenty of wildlife (a black squirrel, and many frogs and butterflies).

On our way back to the main road, we came across a very malnourished and dehydrated white cat. We’d passed it on the way up, but had assumed it was almost dead – now, it was making some noise and paying more attention to its surroundings. I scooped it up, and one of the Korean volunteers got on the phone to find the nearest animal hospital. We had expected to take a taxi, but the hospital said that they would send a vehicle to pick us up. We waited for about ten minutes, the cat wheezing and struggling occasionally, and watched in disbelief as a fire engine pulled up. Apparently the Korean emergency services also deal with animal rescues, and so we clambered in and held on as the driver pulled a quick u-turn with the siren going. We drove to the hospital at a fairly sedate pace, explained as much as we knew to the vet, thanked the firemen profusely and then headed back into the city, hoping for good news. Sadly, the cat’s condition was very poor and it died a few days later.

A quick shower and long subway ride later, we met some friends from Yongin for a baseball game way down in Jamsil (잠실). The Doosan Bears were playing the Samsung Lions, and we sat up in the high seats right behind the shortstop for hours while balls where whacked seemingly everywhere except in play. The Bears got the upper hand in the sixth or seventh inning; the Lions’ imminent defeat written in the suddenly empty seats of their supporters’ section.