Tuesday, March 28, 2006
The highlight for the kids—the one strictly “fun day” for the kids turned out to be a bit of a let down. We arrived at Lotte World around noon (We could not seem to do much of anything in the morning during this trip), only to find much of the place closed down. I can’t think of any company in the U.S. to compare with the behemoth that is Lotte. Lotte has its hands in just about everything in Korea. There is the Lotte Department store. The Lotte Hotels. The Lotte snack foods. The Lotteria burger chain. And there is Lotte World where it all comes together—all the elements of the Lotte kingdom in one place plus Korea’s largest indoor amusement park, and outdoor park complete with Lotty and Lorry character costumes—a kind of Korean Disney World.
Unfortunately for us, we arrived to find that there wasn’t a whole “Lotte” going on. The indoor amusement park and the outdoor “Magic Island” amusement park were both closed, despite their being advertised as open 365 days a year. I suspect it had to do with someone who died in the park in an accident in the park about a month or so ago. We were told that the park would reopen on Sunday, which was too late for us.
So we made do the best we could. The Vice President had to sit in a Lotteria for an hour with me as punishment for her rude and disrespectful behavior towards us the day before but after that the fun, such as there was to be had, began. The girls played in the video arcade for awhile. The Vice President and the Secretary went ice skating, and though they weren’t very good and it took them half the time just to learn to inch along without having to hang onto the railing the whole time, they had a lot of fun.
While I watched the girls ice skate, I recorded these random observations in my pen and paper journal:
“Black youth culture is THE arbiter of cool in the world today.” We blacks are so cool (I don’t know what gives me the right to include myself in this “coolness”. I might be black but I’m a bit of a dork. And I talk like a white person. But oh well. . .). “Yeah there are subsets of other types of “cool”, like the rockers. But essentially it is hip-hop, R & B, and soul that everyone is imitating. It’s all evident in this Korean hip-hop video. The posturing, the clothes, the scantily clad flygirls grinding seductively in the background. It’d be so much more interesting if the mainstream were shared and you could have totally new and fresh versions of cool besides Western pop culture. I can’t really imagine what that would be like.”
“An image of the East rising and the West, well, stumbling. These two little white boys, maybe seven or eight stumbling and falling on the ice while Korean boys their age and younger whiz by in aerodynamic skate suits, helmets, one hand behind their backs in the curves, bent low in imitation of the speed skating stance.”
“Why are no Asian bands on the ‘cutting edge.’” Bands come from America, from Britain, and to a degree from other European countries and Australia. Even Iceland has Bjiork. But you don’t find anyone coming out of Asia and rocking the world, gaining international fame and Western pop cultural respect. “Do they just not make fresh new music or is it just that Asian pop artists are ignored by Western tastemakers?”
We ate at T.G.I. Fridays. I ordered Korean bolgagi (beef) barbeque.
We briefly debated going to the Seoul Tower, but in the end decided to go back to the guesthouse and watch Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
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