Comments (1)

By Marty, September 5, 2011 11:26 am

I posted a a small blurb earlier last week on facebook, but I know not everyone reads that junk. It’s getting less and less interesting and more full of crap than is sometimes worth it. But anyway, I digress. On to the reason for this posting.

I posted a video on my other website, Ulsanonline.com, that is a how-to video for driving in Korea. Having driven in this land for several years (wow, time flies – years, he says!) I’ve seen it all. I thought driving in Mexico was crazy, but the people in this land are certifiably insane when they get behind the wheel of a car.  Wearing body armor while on the motorcycle is not a terrible idea as it’s just plain dangerous.

I started the video with all the intentions of making it an “angry-man-blusters-at-the-Koreans” sort of theme. But half way through editing, I took another tack and decided that satire would be better. Since that website is very popular with the foreigners, I worked in the satire with the new comers in mind. Every summer and spring we get a new crop of teachers coming over for a year of teaching English and this year we seem to have a bumper crop. Some of my partners have been writing along the theme of “getting acquainted with Korea” and thought I’d structure my outrage in the same way.  However, my humor apparently works for newcomers and old-timers alike. It’s gotten quite a few plays and several people have commented on how much they laughed.

There are a half-dozen or so theories on why Koreans are such shitty drivers, and I could pontificate on a few on them. Probably not worth it, though, unless you’ve been bere, are here or are coming here. The Korean mindset is a curious thing that defies translation and sometimes description and must be experienced first hand to thoroughly enjoy – or despise – your choice, as foreigners tend to fall into either category.  Just check out the video and get a glimpse of the motoring madness that I deal with daily here.

More later. Hope everyone is well.

Comments (1)

By Marty, August 29, 2011 11:59 am

Well, sort of. At least that’s what Koreans like. But coming from the land of a billion singing rooms where people go to sing and drink every night, this is no great surprise.

This is MyeongHee’s son, DongHyun, performing with a group from his health club in an “original indoor jacky spinning performance.”  That literally what it says in Korean behind the performers. I have no idea what jacky spinning is, but I’m guessing that loud music and exercise is part of it. It was so loud, in fact, that the audio simply crushed the microphone in my camera. Just about all you hear is the bass and I edited it heavily with my movie tools to make it a bit less like torture to listen to. To be fair, it sounded much better live than on camera. The performance, done in the middle of a large shopping plaza, drew quite a crowd. The people watching was almost as much fun as the performance.

Jacky Spinning!

DongHyun is the one with the ball cap and Angry Birds shirt

Dance, dance machine!

DongHyun has been home all summer and has been hitting the health club twice a day. Part of that was practicing for this performance and partly because next year he’ll do his two years in the military and needs to transform himself from stick boy to something a little more rugged.  He’s put on a little muscle in two months, although I have few pictures of the before era to prove it.

The entire performance was almost an hour of dance-cum-cycling. Interesting, danceable and even enjoyable. But nothing I’d go out of my way to see again. More likely, an extended advertisement for the health club. DongHyun had fun doing it and practicing with the other members, most of which were older women. After the performance, MyeongHee and I went to a birthday party with some friends while DongHyun went out to party with his dance troupe. I hope the older women jumped his bones.

Anyway, it’s almost September and now he’s off to university again. MyeongHee are once again empty-nesters for a while.

Hope everyone else is doing well.

Marty

Comments (1)

By Marty, August 17, 2011 10:59 am

Monday, August 15th was a holiday here in Korea celebrating independence day from the Japanese in 1945. I took to the roads with some good friends and we made a motorcycle trip around the area.

Usually, Korea is a sexually repressed society. You won’t see skimpily dressed women – even on the beach they wear a t-shirt over their bikinis (mostly). TV is tame and is either blurred out for the naughty bits or perhaps just some breasts shown on late nights.  But when they have a passion to display things of a sexual nature, they let it out with both barrels of the shotgun.

Two places we went to were sexual in nature. The first was the Penis Cafe, a coffee shop way out in the boondocks where they can’t be seen by the little ones.  I wrote an article for the UlsanOnline restaurant guide. Click on the link to read about this crazy place. I think the owner has an obsession with the penis, or maybe just sex in general.

After that, we drove up to GyeongJu, about 40km away and visited the Love Castle. This place was a real museum with artwork dating back thousands of years all the way up to contemporary art – all of a sexual nature.  I wrote another article for that website and put it in the travel section.  Fun times.

I like writing for that website and being the famous “ulsanonline guy.” when meeting new people in town. New teachers come every fall and spring and they’ve all read the site before they get here (do a search for Ulsan on google and the site comes up pretty high on the list) and I get my 15 minutes of fame.  I do have a number of other people that write on the site and I pay them for their efforts.  And sometimes, I like to leave things anonymous, although looking through it’s not hard to put two and two together and see who wrote it.

Friend Dee - on a cock swing

After those two places, we decided a little mountain serenity would be good. Cruising through Korea’s mountainous countryside is really a joy. Once outside the city it’s a beautiful place.  We visited an ancient temple with one of the best (they say) Buddhas in all of east Asia. No pictures allowed, so you’ll have to take my word for it. But the winding roads through the mountains is a real treat on a motorcycle.

Then we went down to the coast at caught the sunset at the twin pagodas.

Monstrous things, it’s hard to imagine how the Koreans put these together without cranes as they are over 1000 years old.

It’s days like that that I really wish some folks from back home would come visit so I could share this place other than through pictures. The daily grind in the city is ok, and fun just because it’s so very different in so many ways from home, but the countryside is truly magnificent.  You should save your bottle caps and make a trip out east to come visit before the days comes that I decide to come home and stay back in the US.  You’ve got a place to stay while you’re hear, so all you need concern yourself with is a plane ticket. Come on over! I’d love to show you more of the place than just a few pictures.

Comments (1)

By Marty, August 16, 2011 9:52 am

I got a new scooter this past weekend. Same size engine but much bigger body and way more confortable.

Nothing wrong with the old one other than the size…And its old. It has 20k km, which for a small 125cc engine is a lot. And I’ve been working long hours in July and August and decided to reward myself.

Here she is:

Comments (0)

By Marty, August 8, 2011 4:45 pm

And while it’s not quite a torrent or a flood, it’s become a stream.

A small stream, but a stream nonetheless. Every day there are more and more.

What am I talking about?  My smart phone application, of course, and the revenue stream it is now producing. It’s only been one week, but we’ve already made several sales in several countries including the US, Australia and South Korea.  I added an upgrade late last week so the application can be run in English or in Korean, so teachers here, both English and Korean, might find the product useful.

The really cool thing about the internet is that there are no borders. And no brick-and-mortar stores to increase overhead. I can create in my living room and sell in any country (almost) in the world.  With my business partner moving to Egypt in a few short weeks, I’m hoping he can get things translated to Arabic and open a whole new market for us.  Find me a friend who can translate French, German or Spanish and there are millions more teachers available to purchase.

So, keep ‘em coming folks. Keep buying that app!  Make Marty and Fin rich boys. Or least bring us enough money to buy a new suit. We’re not greedy. At a whopping $3.99US for the application, it’s pretty cheap. But throw enough teachers at it – say a million, worldwide – and we’re buying a yacht!

And if that doesn’t pan out, well, it was good experience to design and write the application. That should be worth something to a tech company back home when I decide to leave this place.

Ta ta for now.

Comments (0)

By Marty, August 1, 2011 1:07 pm

I wrote the following for my other website, UlsanOnline.com this Monday. I haven’t had time to rewrite it to make it sound less like a city-wide article and more like a personal blog.  Sorry – you get newscaster/newsmaker Marty and not son,brother, friend or father Marty.

——

At this past weekend’s Shipbuilding Festival in Bangeojin it was land of the bizarre and strange. The highlight of the event was the boat building contest which was to make the best boat possible out of recycled materials.

Nearly two dozen teams competed in categories such as aesthetics, harmoniousness (whatever that is), strength, creativity, speed and amount of recycled materials. Some teams, whose members included professionals or students majoring in naval architecture, were quite skilled. Others, well, not so much.

UlsanOnline.com formed a team and our boat was made of empty makeoli bottles formed into pontoon covered with polystyrene foam. The Phillipino team created what looked to be a “Flintstone” mobile. A number of boats were plain failures and never made it beyond putting it in the water. Others failed under the pressure of weight, lack of structural soundness and hard racing. In all, though, it was a successful event that brought hundreds of people to Ilsan beach to play and watch.

Both the UlsanOnline team and the Phillipino teams won 500k won prizes. Although neither team built a spectacular boat, our prizes were more consolation and encouragement than because of our skills, most likely because we were the only foreigner teams at the festival. Our boat took water quickly as our makeoli bottle pontoons were far from waterproof. Our paddle quickly disintegrated under the fierce paddling Dave put forth. The Phillipino team only thought of motion after it was built, so although quite stylish was very sluggish in the water. Regardless, we had an excellent time hanging out with friends and building something out of nothing.

Throughout the festival the organizers were very helpful and kind and brought us water several times to stave off the heat and humidity on the beach. They also helped direct our chicken delivery man to our table when lunch time arrived. The other participants were great and had many colorful, fanciful ideas for their boats. I was surprised by the amount of English spoken, particular by the engineering student teams.

After the shipbuilding, we moved over to the “We are 1 in Ulsan” festival and listened to live music from the Phillipino band while we ate galbi and quaffed beer. It was a full day and we had a great time. I would encourage others to participate in next year’s Shipbuilding festival. Having built one (semi-failure) boat and watched several other failures, I believe next year we could manage a true prize winner.

Bonus : Lots of TV cameras were present and our team was interviewed by MBC. We made the 8:00pm news and there were action shots of Ryan, Scott and Dave with a 10-second interview with Dave aired on the local channel. There was also UBC that got in our faces for pictures, but I didn’t see any thing on their news.

Comments (0)

By Marty, July 29, 2011 2:11 pm

It’s been a while since I wrote any significant computer code but I finally have an application finished to show off. Long time friend and business partner Fin Madden talked me into developing an app for his new job in Egypt – he’ll be an athletic director for an international school in Cairo. He had been searching for an mobile technology application that would let him manage his students, classes and grades in his new job and was unable to find anything suitable.  Knowing all the programming I had done on UlsanOnline.com, he asked for my help.

Check our  UlsanOnline, where  I pimped it off to my fellow teachers in Ulsan. You can also go directly to the android site and see it. Buy it if you like – I’ll gladly take your money – but it’s a teacher specific tool.

At first I didn’t know diddly about about writing mobile phone apps. I could barely spell Android. But after a little research and some programming I’ve finished with it and placed it on Google’s Android Market for sale. Fin did all the artwork on the app and I did all the programming. He’s paid me a nice fee up front and then we’ll split the profits 60/40 of whatever we sell. At $3.99 per copy, we aren’t likely to get rich but we might make a little beer money and gain a little fortune for ourselves. We’re already famous in Ulsan for the website we do – it’s the most popular English site in the city – but now we hope to get a little more traction with the teaching community.

I”m kind of proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish in less than two months. It’s given me the incentive to try and get back into technology when I return home to the USA. In the meantime, I might develop another app or two. Our Ulsan website has a lot of reviews in English of restaurants that otyherwise would be hard to find for those who don’t speak Korean, so I might have a map-based too that shows nearby places to eat with links to the reviews we’ve done. We also have all the bus routes in English on the website and that might becaomse a mobile app as well.

Anyway, enough geekiness. Summer has finally arrived and it’s hot. Nothing like Texas, but hot is still hot.

This weekend I’m going to the Shipbuilding festival on the coast. A small group of friends and I have entered into a contest to build a boat out of recycled material. The prize is $5000 so we’re hoping we can take a little cash back. If not, we’re very likely to have fun trying.

Comments (1)

By Marty, July 24, 2011 9:53 pm

Summer is 2/3rds over and we haven’t been out much. Of course, it hasn’t been much of a summer so far. We’ve only had the air-conditioning on one weekend this summer. Today wasn’t much different. It was actually cloudy and overcast with occassional very light sprinkles. We decided we’d brace the weather and head out to our favorite river picnic area in the mountains.

This is near Seoknamsa, a temple for nuns way up in the mountains. We’ve had a decent amount of rain this summer so the river was still flowing well.

Both the dogs followed me around the stream, mostly on the rocks. SaTang really doesn’t like water so she’d go way around to cross over a 2 foot jump. Sparky is a little more brave, and although she doesn’t like the water much either she was having fun jumping from rock to rock and didn’t care to go around.

The water was actually pretty cold. Not Rocky-mountain snow-melt cold, but cold enough that neither of us wanted to get more than our feet wet. Consequently, when the dogs did get wet, they shivered and shook and MyeongHee wanted to dry them off.

Sparky gets a toweling off while SaTang watches all the other people in the river

All three of my girls pose for a picture

While we were there, we spent some time wandering around the hills and letting the dogs run in the forest. With a little steam worked off, we sat down for a Korean picnic: grilled pork with garlic and red bean paste wrapped in lettuce leaves.  Yum.  Washed it down with a few beers and then settled back to relax against the rocks. MyeongHee had heard about “Angry Birds” a mobile phone game that has become very popular and she spent an hour or so wearing out the battery in my phone.

It was a pretty lazy day, actually, which is just what the Dr. ordered.  July has been really busy with 11 hour days for me. I just picked up another class for August, so that will be almost as busy – the first week is vacation at one of my three jobs, so I’ll only have a split day starting at 10 and finishing at 8:30pm with the entire afternoon off.

Comments (1)

By Marty, July 8, 2011 8:22 pm

I haven’t written much these days. Not because I haven’t much to say, but because I haven’t time to say it.  I started working 3 jobs this month: a short gig at the university for a couple of hours each day, I spend the afternoon at the any one of several elementary schools and then I spend 3 nights a week at adult conversation classes. Two nights a week I have private lessons.  And if that wasn’t enough, I’m learning Android and Java and writing a program for a smart phone or tablet.

The teaching jobs keep me pretty busy and I make pretty good money doing it. The programming, although won’t pay much (a friend has asked for a custom application for his new teaching position and he’ll pay me $500 for the software) I hope to parlay into experience that will enable me to get back into the software world when I decide to come home. I’ve struggled with what job I might do when I do eventually come back to the USA and I’ve made my mind up that I’ll get back into technology. I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on the website (and even making some decent money on that) that involves some programming and now with the smart phone, the Android app is taking quite a bit of knowledge and experience to make work. For those not technically savvy, Android is the “other” smart phone style and competes heavily with Apple’s iPhone and iPad line of products. The difference is that Android (a Google tool)  is open source, which means lots of phone and tablet manufacturers can use it and anyone can write applications for it.

Anyway, I’ve just been busy. Real busy. Working 10-11 hours a day and programming in between. Seems like a lot, but I haven’t been sleeping well anyway and so I spend lots of late night hours banging on the keyboard.  It’s actually a good thing, as being busy forces me to be efficient and use my time wisely. I had a little too much time before. The only thing I wish I had time for is riding the bike and for that I need daylight and sunshine, which has been in scarce supply anyway.

Hope everyone else is doing well.

Comments (0)

By Marty, June 24, 2011 5:59 pm

No, I’m not on fire. The inferno is the annual motorcycle photo scavenger hunt we do in June.  We had the Inferno last weekend and it was a gas!  Only 22 people this year, smaller than past years, but still just as fun. The idea is to go to as many predetermined points on the map as you can and take a picture of your team there before before time runs out. There are far too many to visit all of them, so planning, navigation and creative pictures count.

Last year, my team won First Place and got a second helmet. This year, I rode with rookies and we took 2nd place and got 75 bucks – way better prize!

Wish I had all the pictures, but the video will have to suffice. My good friend Dee was on the planning committee and she took everyone’s photos and video and turned it into a slick video. Check it out here.

I do have some photos to share. The first is the panorama shot taken at the starting point. Jason has a nice camera and does and automatic, motorized pan so a long line of us can all be in the same shot.

If you look closely, I’m in the photo on both ends. Jason started taking the photo on the left of the line (I’m wearing white shorts) and after he panned his camera past me I ran to the right side and got in for that part, too, on the far right. Who says you can’t be in two places at once? Click the photo to see the details.

This photo is my bike and Andy’s bike. Andy is my teammate and had never driven a car, bike, scooter or motorcycle anywhere in the world and decided to learn in Korea. Our scooters must’ve been separated at birth as the plates are one number transposed. What are the odds.  Ryan’s girlfriend, Rocy, shows a nice smile for the camera.

two bikes, almost one license

Anyway, it was a great day. Looking forward to more rides before the summer rainy season hits.

Love to all,

Marty