Mark James Russell

Books, blog and other blather

Category: Random Korea stuff (Page 1 of 4)

From 2018 to 2019, still going…

December 25, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Hard to believe it has been over a year since I updated this blog. Sorry for the silence, but—what can I say?—the family and work thing really eat up a lot of time. And when I do find some time, I prefer to use it to write.

And I am still writing. On several different things, actually, but nothing that I can talk about yet. Hopefully there’s one in particular that I will be able to talk about soon.

As for the year that was … Well, I guess it was a huge year for K-pop. BTS absolutely blew up in the West, which was pretty cool to see. And that led to a bunch of journalists asking to talk to me — which is quite flattering, but I decided that I’m just not in the loop enough anymore to be commenting, so told everyone to talk to other experts.

Korean movies have had an off year, at least in commercial terms — with a week left, it looks like they’ll have the lowest box office in five or six years, and the lowest percentage for local movies in four or five years (although it could be the biggest grossing year overall, thanks to rising prices). But there was one big of really fun news – the success of Lee Chang-dong’s BURNING, which has been shortlisted for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy of Motion Pictures Awards. It would be pretty awesome if it was the first Korean movie to get nominated for a foreign-language-film Oscar.

Oh, and the Raptors look to be having their best season ever. That’s pretty exciting.

Apropro of nothing, here’s a photo from Jakarta, from a recent trip I took there. Quite a place. And I hope to have some fun updates coming here before too long.

20181210_232103~2

Pedro Pelo Marco (Me!) — Brazil Comes to Seoul

May 31, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Here is a fun project I participated in last year, but it only recently hit the airwaves—one of Brazil’s most popular travel programs, Pedro Pelo Mundo (Pedro Around the World).

Pedro Korea

Host Pedro Andrade and his wonderful team came to Korea last summer, where they met with a whole bunch of experts in food, fashion, tattoos, and more, to talk about what makes Korea so fascinating. And they were nice enough to ask me to be one of their guests, too.

Pedro Mark Hongdae

So we walked around Hongdae and talked about music (K-pop and other genres), and plenty of other things about Korea. It was a lot of fun.

Mark Pedro 2

Unfortunately, the full show is not online, so you can’t enjoy it all. But you can get a taste of it here, with a segment on the Cheonggyecheon.

Not a bad weekend …

August 28, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Friday, the brutal month-long heatwave finally broke, as temperatures dropped into the 20s and nearly all the pollution just disappeared. The result was some of the best weather I can recall in Seoul in ages. Just great for sitting outside or having a picnic or whatever. And Sunday night—bonus—a rainbow.

Misari - Saturday morning

 

Gangdong Sunset

 

Gangdong Rainbow

 

What country am I living in anyway?

April 16, 2016 / / 0 Comments

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks at my local supermarket. Even though I live way at the edge of Seoul in a fairly desolate area, my GS Mart now has:

  • Shallots
  • IPA
  • Pale ale
  • Ricotta cheese
  • Kettle chips

It really reminds of just how much Korea has changed since I first arrived, back in the 1990s. Back then, foreign goods usually required a trip to a black market, in Namdaemun or Itaewon or Shinchon. Very few beers or non-Korean vegetables were around.

But now, even the most plain supermarkets offer brussel sprouts, a selection of cheeses and some decent beers, not to mention Vietnamese and Thai sauces. The options are really pretty wide-ranging.

Korean food has really improved, too. There are a whole bunch of good sauces and soup stocks that Korean companies offer.

But for the moment, I’m just really excited about pale ale and shallots.

Trudeau and Korea, part deux

November 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Given that Canada has just elected another Trudeau to be Prime Minister, I thought it would be fun to revisit this blog entry I wrote a couple of years ago on Chun Doo-hwan’s visit to Canada in 1982.

I re-watched the video a couple of times and, sadly, there’s no signs of a young Justin Trudeau. But I hope you might enjoy it nonetheless…

* * *
ORIGINAL FROM HERE:

I just came across this Daehan News feature about South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan visiting Canada in 1982 and thought some people might get a kick out of it.

Chun, of course, came to power in 1980 (officially), following the assassination of Park Chung Hee in 1979 and the short-lived presidency of Choi Kyu-ha. It was a pretty dicey time for North-South relations, so Chun probably needed all the legitimacy he could find.

There’s a short New York Times article on his visit here.

Just to give an overview of this video:
0:00 – Leaves African leg of his trip
0:05 – Ottawa and Parliament buildings (“Canada is a peaceful country,” says the narrator)
0:31 – Chun Doo-hwan and his wife Rhee Soon-ja disembark their plane. Greeted by Edward Shreyer
1:13 – Rideau Hall for official reception
1:31 – Prime Minister’s residence for some garden party
2:01 – Choppers to Montreal to meet with Korean War veterans
2:45 – Back to Ottawa for an awkward-looking meeting with Pierre Trudeau

Not mentioned in the video (unsurprisingly) is the assassination plot to kill Chun during his visit. Choi Jung-hwa, a son of the International Taekwondo Federation founder and North Korea-friendly Choi Hong-hi, had been living in Mississauga at the time. The younger Choi allegedly tried hiring a couple of people to kill Chun while the South Korean president was in Canada. But apparently that plot was broken up months before the visit — Choi went into hiding in Europe for years before returning to Canada and spending a year in jail.

There’s more about Choi and his return to Korea in the JoongAng Daily, including the great news that  North Korea disguised its agents as taekwondo masters working for ITF and dispatched them abroad. Given that I studied taekwondo at an ITF gym while in high school, it makes me wonder if I could be a sleeper agent.

Fall fun

October 4, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Is it my imagination or have we had some of the clearest fall skies in years in Seoul this year? Lots of blue — sometimes clear, sometimes great clouds.

Euljiro-office-Sept2015

Han River Gangdong

As happy as great weather makes me, good reviews for Young-Hee & the Pullocho make me even happier (segue!). Jo Ann Hakola, The Book Faerie, gave the book a nice write-up. And Erik over at This Kid Reviews Books said:

This was a good book. Young-hee is a marvelous main character. You can really see how her character changes throughout the book, but it is subtle until the end then you realize the growth of the character. The book is a nice solid story with an interesting plot …  The story was compelling and the world created by Mr. Russell was exciting and described vividly. This was a cool multi-cultural story that many kids would enjoy.

EDIT: Oh, and one more photo, from this evening’s sunset.

Gangdong sunset

Random notes

May 6, 2015 / / 0 Comments
  • The Kyunghyang Shinmun was just nice enough to write an article on Young-Hee and the Pullocho (and me).
  • Hard to believe that I’m just one week away from my novel officially being available. It’s been so long since I came up with the idea, then decided I was going to write a novel (the idea preceded the novelization). But it feels great to finally be getting to the end of the process.
  • Eight episodes in, I’m really liking the Daredevil TV series. It might be my favorite superhero-related movie/TV show.
  • Hey, look, sunset over Hongdae:

Hongdae sunset2

Hongdae sunset

 

Why Korea is up my alley

December 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Close to my home, there is this small, nondescript alley. Or, rather, there was. Just one year ago, the alley had nothing but a super-cheap lunch place and a lot of residences (and stacks of garbage). Here is an image of it taken from Naver from just over a year ago.

Hongdae Alley 2013

Now, however, that alley has been turned almost completely commercial. There’s a “Mongolian” lamb grill, an Izakaya, a croissant shop, a grilled seafood place, a fancy dessert shop, and a pretty good Chinese restaurant.

Hongdae Alley new

Not to mention a Japanese bakery, Aoitori, which is bizarrely one of the trendiest joints in the area for drinks later in the day (it turns into a quasi-pub, with cocktails and wine, in the evening).

Aoitori

And that’s just on this 50 meter stretch. When you go to the end, the cross alley now has a Mexican-Japanese fusion pub, a huge chicken place, a hair shop, plus three of the buildings are now being renovated or completely rebuilt.

Hongdae alley

In short, there’s a real dynamism here, a sense that everything is constantly in flux. And I really like that. Of course, all change also implies a sense of loss and someone inevitably gets hurt, but I like living in a country that is still moving forward.

Imagine this happened in alley after alley, block after block, and you might get a sense of how much energy there is in Hongdae these days. Every time I think this neighborhood has hit a saturation point (for bars, coffee shops, galleries or whatever), it just keeps on growing.

Cold Day

December 24, 2014 / / 2 Comments

A couple of days ago, temperatures in Seoul plunged to around minus-14 or so at night. Not fun. But, on the flipside, that means the streets are much less crowded than usual. And unlike other years, the pollution out of China has not been very bad.

Here are a couple of pictures from the Cheonggyecheon, during my lunchtime walk.

Cheonggye cold

Cheonggye - cold morning

And the DDP looks rather mysterious with a little layer of snow on it.

DDP-cold

And another view of the DDP, from a couple of days earlier.

DDP-1215

Joining Colin Marshall’s Notebook

November 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

The charming and insightful Colin Marshall, host of the website Notebook on Cities and Culture, recently traveled to Korea to turn his analytical eye here.  He wrote several articles about Korea for The Guardian, and he also conducted a whole bunch of interviews with artists, thinkers, trendsetters, and, well, me.

You can listen to me here, going on about a whole bunch of Korea-related things, like pop culture, art, win and Pringles.

Many thanks to Colin for the fun afternoon. Sorry the audio wasn’t clearer, but we were talking at Mudaeruk — a great cafe, but it can be noisy.

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