July 2004 Archives

so jiyun asked me to take a picture of her with some flowers her boyfriend sent her all the way from the states, and as a thank you she gave me a single pink rose. well, as girly as i can be, i decided that walking around the samsung campus with a pink rose simply would not do... so i decided to give it to a random lucky lady (unfortunately, it ended up being joyce, who, believe me, is _not_ deserving of it with all her punches she throws at me)

a rose for the un-lady

well, since doeun is pretty much right behind joyce, i didn't want her to feel left out... so i also got her a gift, but a more practical one :p

this is for all the time's you've hit your head, doeun! 조심 조심!! (btw, the sign says "watch your head")

so last friday, all the interns went to that s1 camp, and it turned out that one of the training instructors there somehow found the e-mail address of one of my friends (a girl) and wrote this (the instructor's name was robin, a guy):

Hi!
MY NAME IS ROBIN...
DO YOU REMEMBER ME?
ZZZ
TODAY IS YOU ARE VERY EXCELLENT...
I'M SORRY...I'M LITTLE A BIT ENGLISH ...SORRY

I WANT TO E-MAIL friend
your ok?

it's actually kind of sweet, in a funny sort of way... but i best say only good things about it as this guy can bench press 150 kilos without breakign a sweat...

friday was internship camp day, where all of us got off work to go to the samsung s1 training facility to try out their challenge courses... the day started off with "end of the internship program" type stuff like "rolling paper," which is something similar to year-book signing i guess. i've never heard of that term before, so it must be one of those fobby korean words. anyway, we then took a two hour bus ride to the training grounds, and spent four hours out in the sun climbing up walls and jumping down nine meter poles... here are some random photos (the first picture is the one i took; the rest i grabbed from other folks):

rolling paper! one person's name is on each paper, and you're supposed to write a message for everyone else. don't we look like construction workers?? wall climbing: 17 people in 7 minutes... haha, that's seunghoon at the top trying to get up :p more wall climbing - keun's the last one to climb over dunno what to really call this one... your supposed to climb way up on these poles (which wobbles like hell) and jump to grab the swing whilst trying to avoid death.

there are a lot more pictures, but i haven't yet consolidated them from everyone's cameras... hrmm.. perhaps i should sign up for one of those online photo album thingies...

i went on a short trip yesterday with soojin, joyce, hyun-sook, hae-ri, and seung-hoon to the bookstore to pick up (at long last) some books in korean to read... it was a painful, nauseating ride all the way up to kyo-dae (교대), and i nearly threw up getting off the bus anyway, here are some pics (again, shot with my pda, but photoshopped for your viewing pleasure)...

soojin, a pretty swell dude, who'll be a senior next year in MIT. joyce, also another MITean, but also a poor-korean-speaker gyopo like me (actually she's a lot better than i am ) one of many wings at kangnam's kyobo bookstore so what did i end up buying? a translation of steinback's "of mice and men" from a publisher that writes english on the left side of the page and korean on the right side... perhaps this is a better way to get my reading comprehension speed up (for both korean AND english ^^). soojin also ended up buying me a copy of an old manga, 짱구, since the concensus among the interns is that i look/act like him ^^ 닮았지?

흔들흔들 ^^

anyway, not much else going here... i imagine i'll be reading jjang-gu all day instead of pretending to do work haha

i'm not sure how much i can write at this time, so i think i'll just leave it at this... i think most of you know what's been going on, and all i can say is "arggg!" i hate these restless periods of uncertainty... it makes feel like i'm in high school all over again! (don't even go there sooj... )

mtv party in apgujung

a bunch of friends an i were invited to a private club hosted by MTV in apgujung in what ended up being an amazing night ... we got our name on the list through some connections, which is always a nice thing to have. it was a new york style lounge/club, and some would be glad to hear that there was nothing but techno spinning (despite requests for hip-hop). there were quite a few important looking americans who were there, clean cut and dressed in armani suits. among the few that i talked to, the first one ended up being the man who organized the whole thing (a casting director named terry for mtv's true life series), which i only found out later when he got up to get the party started. another one was a professional tennis coach, and actually trained the girls' tennis team at duke for a while last spring. small world, huh?

there were apparently some famous korean actors who were there as well, but i couldn't recognize any of them, and in the room adjacent to it several free "makeover" stations for the girls to get redone by professional stylist.

i dunno what it is, but events like these are always slow to start, and one thing that was immediately noticeable is that koreans can't dance :p so naturally, they didn't, in the beginning. but all went well, once i got involved (i'll explain later...)

anyway, i'll save the details for another day, as i'm quite pooped. hope things are hunky-dory in the states...

p.s. dave... i think it's safe to say that the party-monster found its way to seoul!