maxiewawa

Mum has been wanting a traditional Chinese drum for a while, and the one that I bought her in Shanghai finally arrived. I got Aika to film her reaction.

It’s a kind of drum that is used in dancing. You dance and drum at the same time. I remember every morning as I walked down Nanjing East road there would be hordes of old ladies drumming/dancing up a storm.

Now mum has one of her own!

Aika and I flew home not directly from Seoul, but via Tokyo. It was much cheaper, and we didn’t mind stopping over for one last time in Aika’s native country before coming back to mine.

We sat next to a nice American guy who turned out to be an officer in the National Guard. He told us his story; he was a reservist before 9/11, and has been a full time soldier since then. He travels the world teaching people how to use a certain kind of American artillery. He showed us pictures of him in Kuwait, Iraq (inside the “Green Zone”, and the room where Saddam was tried), France (Normandy), the USA, and a few others I don’t remember.

He said that he flew around the world a lot, and had obviously been to a lot of dangerous places. He said that LA was one of the most scary places that he’d ever been to… he said that “At least in Iraq I had a gun!” in that Southern USA accent he had.

Anyway, at one point Aika asked him what his most scary day was. He didn’t have to think long at all, he told us this story, which I’m paraphrasing to you.

“While we were in Iraq, we’d have to leave the Green Zone, which is the ’safe’ zone every day and go out to the Red Zone, where it’s not so safe.

“One day we were driving down this narrow highway, when there was a loud explosion.

“It shook us up, but everyone was ok. Standard procedure when something like this happens is to wait for the explosives team to arrive on the scene, and verify that there isn’t any unexploded ordinance around the vehicle or vehicles.

“So after confirming that no one was hurt, we had to contact the explosives team and wait for them to show up.

“But our convoy was so big that it blocked traffic in both directions. Since we weren’t going anywhere, neither was anybody else, so the entire convoy, and an increasingly large and angry line of Iraqi civilian vehicles was backing up behind and in front of us.

“As the sun started to set, I started to get worried. At a certain time around dusk, it gets too dark to see what’s happening around you, but too light to use your night vision goggles.

“So someone out there had already attacked us with some kind of improvised explosive. They probably had set the device specifically to attack us. – They would have known that we were travelling down this road, and would have had to manually detonate the bomb.

“So they, without a doubt, knew where we were, and were trying to kill us.

“And the only advantage we had, our night vision goggles, weren’t working.

“After about 4 hours of this, the team finally arrived. Lucky they did too, because they found that there had been not one but two anti tank mines that had been set on the overpass that we had just driven under. Only one had gone off.

“This was lucky for us; one mine was strong enough, but had both mines detonated at the same time, we probably wouldn’t have survived.

“That was a bad day.”

I remember the way he said that last line with a wry grin on his face. He was at pains to say that not all days were “bad days”, but I understood that that was a particularly “bad day”.

I’m not sure if I’ve captured the drama of his story, as I mentioned I’m just paraphrasing. But the next time Aika or I feel scared by sudden turbulence on a flight, I’ll picture myself in an American hum-vee, squinting in the fading light
for someone who’s just tried to kill me and might try again very soon, trying to concentrate through the din of the blasts thousands of gridlocked Iraqis, with my trusty night vision goggles sitting useless on the seat next to me.

Turbulence probably won’t seem so bad when compared with that!

Enjoy! This movie introduces the two people whose biological material each went together to create the author of this blog. Had such fun in Korea too that I thought I’d do it in Korean.

The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fFkYD5PaKs

Here I am on LanguageCast.net introducing myself in Japanese. I’m sure there’s more material that I was involved in to be uploaded soon!

I’d planned to do the entire thing in Japanese, but someone asked me to do it in Korean. I did my best to add some Korean in there.

http://www.languagecast.net/?p=704

If you’re having trouble finding it, here’s the link to my intro:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/languagecast/max_jp1_kr1.mp3

Yes, I’m back in Sydney, probably for good. I’m exhausted, and experiencing some strange kind of culture shock, (I left my home of almost 5 years, spent a week in a country whose language I’ve been studying but where I’d never actually been, to come back to where I spent the first 20 or so years of my life) so this post will be brief. – I’m still working out how everything works here, which is all the more peculiar since everything is entirely familiar.

More to come.

Phew! Just got back from a day, a night and a morning in 江村 (sorry, can’t remember the Korean name) which involved scooter riding, drinking, meat and games. Met a lot of fun people, and took approximately zero photos though (still no battery!). Everyone else had a camera though, some had more than one, some had more than two ［高云안녕!］so there will sure be enough to show later.

Leaving for Sydney tomorrow! Nice to go home, but it’s always sad saying goodbye to everyone.

One of the things I was looking forward to was participating in Sun Hyunwoo’s LanguageCast.net podcast. Here’s the first one I recorded. It’s in Chinese. 请收听罗老师录的。

http://www.languagecast.net/?p=696

EscapePod.org has weekly science fiction podcasts, here’s my review of their latest one.

“Awesome. I know I probably won’t get on the show without anything more constructive to say, but I can’t think of anything else.”

Have a listen to what I’m referring to here:
http://escapepod.org/2009/04/10/ep194-exhalation/

Please have a listen, don’t let my incoherent babbling put you off, it’s really good.

The charger for our camera is in either one of 6 boxes we sent home, or somewhere in the depths of the bag we’ve been dragging around Seoul… suffice it to say we can’t find it, and am unable to take photos of any of the interesting stuff we’ve seen or has happened…

Luckily it seems that everyone in Seoul has a really cool camera and knows how to use it, so check my facebook profile for photos that people have tagged of me and Aika!

I couldn’t work out how to download them, so I’m not able to post any here, but here’s one I took off Picasa.

It was taken in front of what a grassy area in front of what I think was the Korean parliament, on a fine sunny day.

It’s funny how the sky, which has been brown or browny-blue for so much of our stay in Shanghai has been a bright azure for most of our stay in Seoul.