Dave Gilbert’s gamedev blog

I see the most random things sometimes.

I visited some friends in Seoul today – in an area by Hogkik University. After some delicious pork barbeque we wandered around for a bit… only to come across a mime doing some performance art piece. Since I am obsessive with the video function of my camera, I have snapped a few videos of this man in action:

The mime capering around the square.

The mime capering around the square some more, and then climbing up to a stage.

Not satisfied with being on the ground, our friend the mime climbs up a fence.

The mime breaks that whole “not talking” rule and sings… a Louie Armstrong song?

At this point, I stopped taking videos of him. He went on to do some strange mime dance where he hurled himself around the stage and then pretended to hang himself. A very talented mime artist, although I’m not entirely sure I “got” it.

Anyway, I have three days off next week. I was invited to check out this island off the south coast of Korea. I’ve known my fellow teachers for two weeks and I’m already going to be stuck in a car with em for six hours! My knees are cramping in anticipation.

Is that The Little Prince… with an iPod?

Copyright laws stop at the Korean border.

One of the wonderful things about travelling in a foreign country is finding signs written in bizarre or extremely twisted English. It’s not meant to be funny, it just is. Today, I had my first encounter with such a sign:

I honestly don’t want to know.

Pop quiz. When a local korean friend comes up to you and innocently asks, “Can you tell me what these words mean?” before promptly handing you THIS:

How do you react?

…
…

Uhhhhhh….

Yeah, same here.

My natural response was something akin to, “Er… you know those are bad words, right?”

“Yes I know,” came the reply. “I just want to know what they mean.”

Right.

In my twenty-nine years on this planet, trying to explain the word “wank” to an eager-eyed Korean lady ranks extremely high on the “things I’ve never done before” scale.

Suffice to say, she went home disappointed. I gave it a good try, but I couldn’t do it. My mouth would open in an earnest attempt to pass on knowledge, but then I’d turn bright red and start giggling hysterically.

And I call myself a teacher.

I have a problem. I can’t remember to say thank you.

I don’t mean in the ignoring-a-good-deed-and-being-rude sense, I mean actually and literally forgetting how to say it.

I’ve never had this trouble anywhere else. Whenever I travel to a new country, the first words I always learn are the translations to hello, goodbye and thank you. Hungarian? Easy! Kosonom. Arabic? Couldn’t be simpler. Shukran. Chinese? Memorized forever. Xie Xie. French? Pas de problem. Merci! I learnt them once and burned them forever into my memory. This has always been my motis operandi for whenever I visit a new place, and it hasn’t failed me yet.

So how come, after five days of being here, I can’t remember the words… Kamsa hamnida? And before you get all wise – no. I didn’t remember them that time. I had to look them up.

This makes things really awkward for me. It’s something wired into the very core of my being. When anyone does something for me, no matter how small, thanks must be given! The other day a nice coffee shop clerk handed me my coffee and my change, but to my utter horror I didn’ t know what to say. The words got stuck in my throat, my brain seized up, my mouth twisted into a gormless apologetic smile and I scampered off in shame.

Why can’t I remember these two simple words?

I predict many social faux pas ahead.

Being from New York City, I will always do what New Yorkers do best when travelling abroad. And by that, I mean compare everything I see to New York. It’s inevitable, and perhaps annoying. Just before I came to Seoul, I was in London visiting friends. At every opportunity, I would comment on something and how it compared to its NYC equivilent.

“You’ve got cobblestone streets! We certainly don’t have many of those in New York.”

“Your train platforms have signs telling you when the next train is coming? New York SO needs to get that.”

“London’s thing seems to be Indian Food. New York’s is Chinese.”

And so on, ad nasuem. In most every city, this unavoidable comparison instantly occurs. But now I am in Seoul, so here I go again. The first order of business… signs.

Signs are all over. You can’t turn in any direction without being assaulted by signs of every shape, size and color. These buildings are called “office-tels”, each which contain any number of business, restaurants and shops crammed onto the lower floors and affordable housing on the higher ones (yours truly lives in one of these. More on that another day). I suppose competition is fierce, and they are all in a mad mad dash to gain your attention. Hence, the garish signs plastered over every square surface of each building.

But night-time. Oh, the night time. That’s when they truly come to life:

My crap photography can’t do this justice. This picture only shows you one angle from very far away. Believe me when I say that it’s impossible to capture the experience on film. When I stepped off the bus on the first night of my arrival, my eyes exploded and my brain burst into flames.

However, after a few days of being exposed to all this, I am finding it quite lovely. New York is many things (there I go again), but colorful certainly isn’t one of them. This neon smorgasbord has really become a beautiful symphony of color and light. There’s always something to engage your attention, no matter what direction you’re looking in. In NYC, it’s very easy to find yourself staring at the sidewalk while walking around. I’m finding that very difficult to do here.

Perhaps my posture will improve as a result.

Turn on the oven
Stew me in a pot
Korea in the summer
Is @#$%ing hot!

Is it possible to convert your whole body weight into sweat?

Perhaps no, but my pasty white flesh is doing its best to do that very thing.

South Korea is HOT, people. I’m talking fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk, sun-poison-inducing, melt-your-shoes hot. I had a slight dizzy spell the other day after climbing three flights of stairs to my classroom. I was told that it was all part of the initiation, but man. Eastern bodies are made of much sterner stuff.

When I announced to my friends that I was moving to Korea for a year, the typical response was usually something akin to “You’ve totally got to start a blog while you’re there! That would be awesome to read!” This gave me pause, as I admit to being something of a closet narcissist. I like nothing better then to discuss myself for hours upon hours, but I am also well aware that nobody else has this desire but me. So to save myself from being socially ostracized I usually keep these egotistical urges in check.

So I never took this website down the blog route. I mean, look around. The last thing the world needs is another blog. I vowed that this website would never go down that road. I used this space for storing my games and any other little digital diversions I cared to share and nobody needed to know my personal thoughts on the latest Star Wars film or if I was feeling sad that day. There are already enough crappy angst-ridden personal journals frolicing about on the web that I had no desire to add to the muddle.

Yet over the last couple of months, a number of people of my aquantence starting clamouring for me to do just that! My first reaction, naturally, was an immediate negative. But then the thus-far-silent egotist inside my soul clamored for attention. “Dude!” it cried. “Here’s your big chance! Shut up and let me take over.” So, yeah. Here is the newly spruced-up davelgil.com, home to a new blog about a befuddled American with frizzy hair currently living in South Korea trying to teach the English language to little ones. I don’t know if that will be enough to set me apart from most of the tripe out there, but if anything it will give the starving narcissist in me something to do. Who knows what it’ll do if it gets angry?