Korea has started to emerge as a cultural powerhouse in asia, in a trend called Hanlyu (Korean Wave) which threatens to overshadow even Hollywood and American pop culture.  Korean movies, music, and games are increasingly taking the top spots in popularity charts in china, japan, and south eastern asia countries and it's TV programs are starting to sweep TV primetime slots in those countries.  For example, Jewel in the Palace (google), a Korean drama about an apprentice in the royal kitchen who became the nation's first female royal physician, was watched by more than 40% of the TV audiences in Hong Kong last month.

As a Korean-American, all this is amazing because I still find most Korean movies and dramas not very interesting.  My guess is that Korean cultural goods are popular because they:

• are more familiar to eastern countries than western culture.
• are not burdened by animosity against Japan
• are of relatively high quality
• offer more bang for the buck

While greedy copycat producers are still busy churning out trash in Korea, overall quality seems to be improving at a fast pace still so I think the trend will continue for a while.

Marc seems to be having a great time visiting Korea.  Yum, I just love that pickled raw-crab.  It's called gaejang (gae = crab, jang = pickled?).  There are several varieties but I only eat the kind that's pickled in hot red pepper.  Raw-crab pickled in soy sauce (gan-gaejang) is supposed to be as addictive as cigarette though.  Gan means soy sauce…I think.

Marc's picture of the Blue House (equivalent of White House) brings back memories.  I spent most of my childhood living in a house on the mountain (Yinwang-san) to the west of the Blue House.  My father built a row of three houses in the middle of that mountain in such a way that the houses could be seen clearly from the Blue House like as clearly as a middlefinger.

After being jailed so often by the dead dictator of the same last name, it's understandable.  The area behind our house  up the hill was a panja-chon (shabbily built houses) for the poor.  When I visited the place in 1988, that area was bulldozed and walled off.  Apparently the dictator who followed the dead one wanted to improve his view from the Blue House.

Marc, please fix your comment facility.  Typekey is annoying to use and it seems to be broken at the moment.

Dancer of Sunjung (sungung means innocent love in Korean) is a Korean movie currently in production which I am looking very forward to.  It's a story about a young dancer from Yanbian competing in a Korean ballroom dance contest and finding love.  I hope it's as enjoyable as the original version of Shall We Dance was.

Goonyoung Moon, the young leading actress with a thousand cute faces, is one of my favorite Korean actresses.  I think she has the right stuff to become a world famous actress.  Here is one of the thousand that makes me laugh everytime I see it.

Yanbian, fyi, is a Chinese prefecture bordering Russia and North Korea which is heavily populated (~40%) by descendents of Korean origin called Chosun-jok.  Enough Koreans have lived there for long enough to even have evolved their own accent which is faithfully reproduced in the movie.

I would love to learn ballroom dancing but I've had only about 5 ballroom dancing lessons over the past 20 years because I just don't enjoy the way ballroom dancing is taught traditionally: too much focus on steps and not enough on how to weave them together into a dance.

As it is now, it's as bewildering as learning to program in assembly language although I've been known to spin girls confidently (and unfortunately uncontrollably) on the dance floor given enough drinks under the belt.

Here are some links to samples of pansori, traditional Korean music which to me sounds like a wonderful fusion of opera and street rap.  Pansori can be a monologue by a singler or a dialogue between two or more singers.  Interaction with the audience is also not uncommon in informal performances or if the audience is small.  Feedback is usually short affirmative shouts like JOTTAH! (great) or prodding like GOORAESU (Go on!).

• Myeng-Chang Jo, Tong-Dal & Ahn, Sook-Sun (RM) – this performance tells a famous traditional Korean story about two brothers.  Elder is bad and rich.  Younger is good and poor.  It's a story about greed, cruelty, sacrifice, justice, forgiveness, and pity.
• Youngest Pansori Singer – 10 years old pansori singer who made the Guinness record book.
• Starcraft Pansori – pansori about Blizzard's famous game.  Singing starts about 2 minutes into the audio.
• Collection of pansori performances at Pansoree.com

This is only a small subset of varieties of pansori there are.  My favorite kind of pansori sound is very similar in tone to daekoom except it feels as if daekoom was made out of human bone, dipped in tears for years, burnt over fires of war, and speckled with fading spots of blood.  Sorry if I am being too graphical but this is what soul music is to me.

And here is a short sample of the Millenium Crane instrumental (731K MP3) mentioned in my previous post.  Very moving and graceful like an ancient crane in flight.