Weekend Round-Up Part One

Well silly old Hairy-Armpits (Mrs Sung) is a bit miffed that I didn’t get home until midnight on Monday. I tried to explain that I couldn’t exactly say no when the President of the Korean Kumdo Association invited me for tea, but she doesn’t understand. *sigh* I think I’m having my rebellious-teenager era now. I’m so misunderstood! *revs up motor-cycle*

I’ll write about the kendo stuff later, first we’ll have a weekend round up:

On Saturday, I was invited by Mun-Jung to go and watch some traditional Korean archery. Yaaaaay! Mrs Sung and Sohee decided to come along too. Hmmm….oh well, at least I didn’t have to pay for stuff that way. And I was still in a great mood from the kumdo so I thought, ok – what harm can it do?

As it turned out, it almost did quite a lot of harm. Hairy Armpits was her usual air-headed self and spent the whole day panting and moaning about the heat and humidity. For God’s sake, it doesn’t bother me anymore and I’ve only been here three weeks! She nearly collapsed after we walked 80 meters up a gentle slope! Sohee definitely didn’t want to be there. She was tired and clearly dragged along to be an interpreter (which isn’t really necessary at this stage) and to absorb as much English as possible (which is pointless as she clams up when she’s in a bad mood). So with this merry band in tow, I made my return to Yonsei University.

Yet again, I wasn’t there for long. The archery involved a pretty miserable (given the humidity and sour pusses on the other pair) busride out to the suburbs. I wanted to talk kendo with Mun-Jung but Mrs. Sung kept jabbering away at her. Grrr. Anyway, when we got off the bus we started the trek to the archery field which was in a part on a hill. Because Hairy Armpits was half-dead from the heat we stopped at Mun-Jung’s manicurist’s for a sit-down and some water.

When we recommenced this Odyssey of Doom we were briefly distracted by a kamikaze bird flying into some plexiglass. RIP in peace. Just in case it was still alive, Mun-Jung instructed various passers-by to go and look for it. So we had several strapping young men and one fat school girl searching for the corpse. Spookily…no-one could find it! Eeeeek!

Finally we arrived at the park and the walk up was absolutely beautiful. Lush and green, it reminded me of Ganghwado. I was thinking that it seemed a bit like a rain forest…when it began lashing rain! Ho ho ho, that impish weather. Whatever will it do next?!?!

When we arrived at the archery spot, it was a bit of a surprise. The targets are about 150m away, across a huge ditch. Rather than shoot straight, you shoot up in the air, allowing the arrow to travel farther as it goes down. The rain was torrential so there was a short break which was used to teach me the basics. I used to be pretty handy at Olympic-style archery so I was feeling confident. I was, however, completely out of my depth.

My infamous puny arms were yet again the cause of my downfall. As you may have seen in Beijing, Olympic archery requires you to pull the string back to your chin and sort of rest it on your nose. Traditional archery, on the other hand, means bringing the string back past your right ear. The first I can manage, the latter was ridiculously impossible. I was annoyed that I couldn’t do it so I spent about 2 hours practicing. I had improved considerably by the end but there was no escaping the fact that physically I was too weak. I was  dripping with sweat due to the exertion and they forced a cardigan on me  because the place was full of old men. Curse them!

<- Sohee, an even bigger FAIL than me!

All in all, it was fun…but not REALLY fun. I wanted to be better than I actually was. I feel the itch. I need to either find some Olympic archery quickly or build up some muscles in my arms (how long have I been saying that for….).

We left Mun-Jung at the archery and went back to Incheon. On the subway we ate something filled with custard with the texture of a sort of sweet breadroll in the shape of a fish. Strange, but tasty enough. When we got back to town we went for a dinner that was crap by Korean cuisine standards, but blood fantastic by Siobhán standards. It was loads of pig-meat fried on the table – basically rashers. Lots and lots of rashers! There was some nice onion-juice to dip it in and ooooooh boy was it good! Have a look -

 :)

After this we went to the cinema. Fearing another “The Mummy 3″ debacle, my heart sank at the prospect. Instead of American rubbish though, we saw Korean rubbish. Which was actually rather good. The film was called “Gosa” or “Death Bell”. Here’s the trailer:

It’s another Asian film about high school kids getting slaughtered. It’s well made though and some of the deaths were brilliant! There were no subtitles but was easy enough to follow. It looked like there were some interesting puzzles and stuff that required you to follow the dialogue but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The weirdest thing about it was that I wasn’t scared at all. I’m usually bad at horror films but Koreans make me look like Bruce Willis in Die Hard. I haven’t actually seen any Die Hard films, but I suspect they’re jam-packed with all kinds of brave. The Koreans, on the otherhand, were reduced to quivering wrecks – which was fairly hilarious. So if you have nothing better to do, have a look at Gosa.

This, however, was not the highlight of the trip to the cinema. Neither was the small karaoke booth I found in the games room (A.Ra.Shi, of course). The best part of the cinema was this:

 :)

If you’re anything like me, you’re now screaming “MAKINO-CHAN, MAKINO-CHAN!!!!” and have lots of Koreans staring at you. And you don’t care because it’s the HANA YORI DANGO FINAL trailer! And it’s the best thing ever!!!!

I’ll be in Ireland when it’s released in Korea but to see even just the trailer on the big screen was amazing. It looks brilliant! This is the only online version of the Korean trailer that I could find, it’s not great but…actually is is though isn’t it?

In fact, it’s probably the best film since Moonchild:

Ooohhh…..I want my Tsu x Tsu fix now!

L -> エルはラブです　:)