Your own personal Jesus
너희들의 인격적인 예수는
Someone to hear your prayers
네 기도를 들어줄 어떤이겠지
Someone who cares
널 돌봐줄 사람
Your own personal Jesus
너희들의 인격적인 예수란 건
Someone to hear your prayers
네 기도를 들어줄 어떤 이겠지
Someone who’s there
누군가 있다면 말야

Feeling unknown
And you’re all alone
알수 없는 것을 느낌과 함께 넌 정말 혼자야
Flesh and bone
By the telephone
뼈와 살로 이뤄진 전화기
Lift up the receiver
수화기를 들어
I’ll make you a believer
내가 너희를 신자로 만들어줄께

Take second best
2위가 되어봐
Put me to the test
나를 시험에 들게 해봐
Things on your chest
You need to confess
너희는 가슴깊은곳에 있는 것들을 자백해야 해
I will deliver
내가 구해줄께(자유롭게 해줄께)
You know I’m a forgiver
너희가 알다시피 난 면제자(용서해주는 이)야

Reach out and touch faith
손을 뻗어 진실을 잡아
Reach out and touch faith
손을 뻗어 진실을 잡아

Your own personal Jesus…
너희들의 인격적인 예수…

Feeling unknown
And you’re all alone
알수 없는 것을 느낌과 함께 넌 정말 혼자야
Flesh and bone
By the telephone
뼈와 살로 이뤄진 전화기
Lift up the receiver
수화기를 들어
I’ll make you a believer
내가 너희를 신자로 만들어줄께

I will deliver
내가 구해줄게 (자유롭게 해줄게)
You know I’m a forgiver
너희들이 알다시피 난 면제자(용서해주는이)야.
Reach out and touch faith
손을 뻗어 진실을 잡아.
Your own personal Jesus
너희들의 인격적인 예수.
Reach out and touch faith
손을 뻗어 진실을 잡아.

Source: kukuzul2

Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt will not race in South Korea.

The Korea Athletic Federation (KAF) said Saturday that it had tried to invite the Olympic triple gold medalist to the Daegu Pre-championships Meeting next month, but the offer was turned down.

The annual event, which started in 2005 to promote Daegu’s bid for the 2011 World Championships, will take place on Sept. 25 at Daegu Stadium.

Bolt, who set world records of 9.69 seconds in the 100 meters and 19.30 in the 200 at the Beijing Olympics last month, won gold with a time of 9.83 at the Zurich Golden League meet Saturday.

The 22-year-old is likely to wrap up the season after running at the Super Grand Prix in Lausanne, Switzerland Tuesday and the Golden League in Brussels, Belgium Friday.

“Bolt’s side has informed us that he will not be able to compete in Daegu because of his busy schedule,” the KAF said.

Instead of Bolt, hurdler Dayron Robles of Cuba will show off his top-tier skills in front of local fans.

The 21-year-old won a gold medal in the men’s 110-meter hurdles in Beijing and holds the world record of 12.87 seconds, set at the Golden Spike Ostrava meet in June.

The athletics governing body is also negotiating with star pole-vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva of Russia.

The defending two-time Olympic champion has attended the last two competitions in Daegu.

The KAF will announce the final roster of the competition Monday.

Source:Korea Times

The Kapoun family is moving past struggles no one is ever prepared to take on.

In March, Bill Kapoun, a teacher in South Korea, died from injuries in an apartment fire. His parents, Dan and Judy Kapoun, quickly flew to Seoul, where they struggled through an intense language barrier to fully comprehend their son’s condition.

Since then, the Kapouns have undergone health concerns and changes inside their household.

Judy’s mother, who lived with the family, died in July after battling cancer.

Their son, Kevin, left home for school, but Rickie, a foreign exchange student from Germany, returned home this summer. That’s all on top of the joy that comes in planning a college graduation and wedding for their daughter, Laura.

“It’s just such an unbelievable amount of transition,” Judy said.

The stress has had a toll. Since her son died, Judy has lost 35 pounds because, as she said, she still often doesn’t feel like eating.

Members of the Kapouns’ church, St. Mary’s of Alexandria, have offered support throughout the family’s troubles, Judy said. When she recently underwent surgery, friends from the church prepared meals for the family, just as they did after Bill died.

And women from the church rallied together and prepared a full table of desserts without even being asked.

The recent struggles of this family began in February.

Bill, one of Dan and Judy’s five children, had been teaching English in Seoul, South Korea, for 14 months when his apartment caught fire. Bill was hospitalized with third-degree burns over most of his body. His Korean fiancée died in the blaze.

Within weeks of his death, the family noted that the medical bill had topped $55,000, which did not include anticipated skin grafts or, later, transportation costs for Bill’s body.

Bill’s teaching job did not provide insurance, so the family was immediately faced with mounting medical costs.

Friends sprang to action. People who knew Bill and his family wrote e-mails and blog posts getting the word out that sister Laura, then a college student in Bloomington, had set up a fund to raise money for the hospital bills.

More than $100,000 was collected in honor of Bill.

Donations and words of support streamed in from Germany. The Kapouns have hosted 15 foreign exchange students, 14 of them German, and the exchange program has continued to collect donations for the family to use in whatever way it needs.

Laura, 23, was working through her final semester at Indiana University and preparing for a May wedding while her parents sat by her brother’s hospital bed.

After two weeks of what Judy described as small steps forward followed by major steps back, Bill died in the hospital. Donations, many coming from strangers, surpassed the amount needed to pay the medical bills.

“People have been amazingly generous,” Laura said. She and her husband, Jake Lundorf, are temporarily living in Alexandria and preparing to teach English in Poland.

Korean authorities believe the fire that killed Bill was accidental, but the investigation was called before an exact cause could be determined when Bill’s body returned to the United States.

“It would be nice to have some closure, but it was important to get his remains home and move on,” Laura said. The investigation “could have stretched on for years.”

Now family members are focused on remembering Bill and his passion for world travel. They are working with the Madison County Community Foundation on applying the remaining donations to establish a scholarship fund for high school students wanting to study abroad.

“It was his goal in life to see the world, experience new cultures and meet new people,” Laura said. “Traveling was just kind of his way of living.”

The Kapouns lived in Germany when Bill was young, but after returning to the United States, Bill didn’t seem content to stay there.

He spent a semester of college studying in Ireland. He graduated from Indiana University in 2004 with a degree in history and economics.

Handsome enough to land some modeling jobs, Bill returned to Germany after college and the spent time in Romania and Portugal before taking the teaching job in South Korea.

Jane Reed, Bill’s world history and government teacher at Alexandria-Monroe High School, spoke with Bill during his visit home the summer before he died. He told her his goal was to continue teaching, maybe try and get a job in another country.

“It all involved the world,” she said.

In Reed’s classroom, Bill was an inquisitive student, always trying to apply lessons to the broader world and always eager to bounce ideas around with his teacher.

During their last conversation, Bill talked with Reed about supporting presidential candidate Ron Paul, and a growing interest he had in Abraham Lincoln, especially the president’s views on human rights.

“He knew how to think,” Reed said. “It must come from the family, the idea that the world is wider than the town in which we live. I’m not putting that kind of thinking down, but there are people who must see the world in the big picture in order to understand it to their satisfaction.”

Bill wrote his own thoughts on his worldwide travels. Some of his words were published by his sister, Laura, at savebillkapoun.blogspot.com.

In one piece, he wrote the following:

“People say that once you lose hope, everything is gone. I’m not sure you can lose hope, as a human. Maybe my relatively stable and happy white working class upbringing makes me naive but I believe hope is a fundamental aspect of humanity; perhaps to lose hope is to lose one’s humanity. But when I walk down the street, and see a gypsy with her child, or a kid jingling a McDonald’s cup with a few coins in it, I have to think, the thought running through their heads is the same thought as in mine. It’s the same as in the beautiful blonde across the street, and the fat rich business man rushing to a thirty dollar business lunch, where decisions will be made that make the lives of many of those poor people I’ve just passed even more precarious than they already are. …

“The things we do, the attainment of goals we spend so much time striving for, all mean little beyond the here and now. That is why, when I die, all I hope people to say of me is he lived life. The good, the bad, he took it all in, and relished it.”

Source:

Written by Dann Gaymer

Downtown Daegu. A myriad of designer boutiques fraternized by young Korean girls in hot pants and high heels, noraebang karaoke bars, pulsing neon signs. Amongst all of this lies the Playstation Café, an altar to video game entertainment systems where patrons can revel in the fluorescent glow of pixelated sub realities.

Stalled somewhere between an arcade and a cyber café, it sits somewhere near to a “PC Room”: a subculture of Korean youths whiling away their free time in rooms filled with hi-spec PC’s, playing online games like World of Warcraft, chain smoking and consuming copious quantities of soft drinks. The PC Room subculture is so prevalent that foreigners working as English Teachers in the numerous hagwons soon learn that asking their male teenage pupils what they did on the weekend is pointless, as the answer is invariably:

“Study, sleep, PC Room.”

As the name suggests, the Playstation Café is a little different in that there are no PC’s for public use inside, only Playstation 2 consoles. Behind the front desk sits a wall of titles and a bored looking attendant. Descending down the stairs, you emerge into a long room where cool air washes around, spilling down from the mammoth AC units humming overhead. On either side, enormous flat screen televisions sag on the walls, caged in by boardroom style desks and ultra padded reclining chairs. Each screen, desk and associated set of chairs is partitioned off from the next by a few silver pipes and dangling cables and while one wall follows this pseudo-futurist theme, the opposing wall takes an almost Classical Greek aesthetic, complete with plaster columns and earthenware pots. Little attention is paid to the décor, however, as the teenage clientele almost always have their eyes glued to the screens. Like their fathers may well do in the skyscrapers owned by companies such LG and Samsung, they sit around big tables in deluxe padded chairs. Yet they do not discuss the company’s stock value, the strength of the Won or the annual report they are due to deliver. In fact, they discuss nothing at all, as most of the outward expressions they make are through the actions they command on the screens above. Despite the wall of games behind the front desk have more than enough selections to choose from, (shoot em’ ups, beat em’ ups, etc) on every screen it is the same story: simulations of Wayne Rooney and Thierry Henry belting goals into the back of nets to rapturous computer generated applause.

Strangely enough, there is not a Playstation 3 in sight, instead, the consoles are exclusively Playstation 2’s, black slabs of plastic turned on their sides, quietly humming away, processing data and generating the images sent out of the screens. The graphics the console produces could be considered obsolete, if only for the cardboard cut out spectators that line the radioactive-green pitch. On the other hand, I suppose the graphics give an almost ‘cult’ value to the games and as the enduring popularity of the Street Fighter series (until recently an entirely 2D animated affair), game play easily wins over graphics, time and time again.

Here on a humid Sunday night, every screen is being used while smoke wafts upwards into the vents between the buzzing AC units, faces cast in a strange green hue by the light flooding out from the on-screen action. Ashtrays fill up rapidly, can after can of Dr. Pepper is sucked dry, twitching eyeballs pinned to the glow. Most of the screens are muted, all the commentary that is needed is given by the teenage boys grouped around, whilst cheers or cries of anguish erupt with every goal. Much like in real life minor league football, especially five-a-side, the audience are the participants in the performance; direct interaction, no division between watchers and watched. All the excitement and cold rushes of adrenaline are there, the verbal responses, gasps of joy or bitter criticism of the virtual referee. Anybody with their eyes closed may actually believe they are at an actual football match, if it were not for the lack of smells and tastes. There is no poignant smell of wet grass or split larger, only stale cigarette smoke and spilt soft drinks.

The main question that sprung to my mind is, why come downtown to play Playstation 2 games? I am willing to bet these kids all own PS2’s and if they do not they could easily pick one up for dirt cheap in this part of the world, what with it being an outmoded console and all. Yet this is assuming that the only reason they are coming to the PS Café is for the consoles and the games. This would overlook the other vital ingredient of the clientele, the other teenage Koreans. There is, after all, limited fun to be had competing against a computer (and essentially against yourself). Here, somewhat of a competitive aspect arises; groups of teenagers can come together and flex their muscles in this public arena (the muscles in their fingers, of course, but more than anything, flexing their brains and reflexes). There is a complete engagement with the simulation, after all, if you cannot actually be five thousand miles away playing for Real Madrid, then you can do the next best thing and prove yourself as a formidable presence on the pitch, in the comfort of a padded office chair in an air conditioned room.

Who knows? In certain circles, this reality may even be considered superior.

Culture Tips: Koreans refer to Playstation cafes as ‘플스방’ (pron. ‘puhl-suh bahng’), which is short form pronunciation for ‘Playstation Bang (room)’. Often you can find PCs and Playstations co-existing in one PC bang or sometimes you can find a 플스방 dedicated only to Playstations. The below map shows two locations, where both playstations and PCs are under the same roof. Please note that Megaweb is directly below Burger King, so best way to get there is to go the ATMs to the right of the stairwell that leads up to Bennigan’s, and then once by the ATMs, look for the stairwell or elevator to the right leading down to the PC bang.

Decided to start a new series profiling Korean movies that can be rented at DVD bangs and watched with English subs:

Director Yoon Jong-bin created a favorable buzz in 2006 when he unveiled his thought-provoking debut feature “The Unforgiven,” highlighting the hidden talent of actor Ha Jung-woo. Yoon`s casting choice turned out to be prescient. Ha is now the most sought-after film star following the runaway success of “The Chaser,” a thriller that further showcases the actor’s passionate acting spirit.

But it seems questionable whether Yoon has made a right casting choice for “The Moonlight of Seoul” (Korean title: “Beastie Boys”), a drama in which Ha is recruited to play a central character for the second time with the same director.

The film, to be released on April 30, loosely reflects filmmaker Yoon`s continued interest in the painful social trap that puts a stifling screw upon the life of Korean men. Previously, Yoon brought to life the suffocating pain in his award-winning “The Unforgiven” in a way that impressed critics at film festivals. The trouble is that, unlike Yoon`s first feature, “The Moonlight of Seoul” is a commercial project which can be easily tossed out at the cutthroat box office unless it`s armed with some mainstream appeal.

Desperate, cash-strapped men who serve drinks and dance with female clients at what is called a “host bar” is not fantastic subject matter for such mass appeal, to begin with. Petty struggles, emotional tug-of-war, and a hunger for genuine love are juxtaposed with the exotic night life of male hosts, but the plot falters helplessly as if the intoxicated main characters try to remain sober after ceaseless drinking night after night.

In the film, Yoon Kye-sang plays Seung-woo, who has recently joined the peculiar nighttime business to stay afloat. His life, as far as he remembers in his dreams, was not always like this. He used to enjoy an affluent life and he knew every corner of Cheongdam-dong where he had lived with his family.

For some reason, which is not explained explicitly, his life plunged into poverty, and he is now forced to sell his handsome appearance and refined manners at the bar where dozens of similarly good-looking men await their female clients, most of whom are professional hostesses venting their frustrations with the money they have earned serving men at sleazy bars.

Ha Jung-woo`s character, Jae-hyeon, is slightly different. He is the so-called PD, or partner director, a host bar equivalent to the madam at a men`s club. Jae-hyeon is constantly testing his luck: gambling, lying and cheating on his girlfriend to squeeze out easy money. His world is steadily disintegrating; undaunted, he keeps rolling the dice to get away from an immediate crisis, only to confront another.

The host bar is portrayed as a sort of underground sex trade venue where female clients buy the attention and care of young, well-groomed host boys, but the film does not pay due focus to the shady details. Instead, Seung-woo`s encounter with Ji-won (Yoon Jin-seo), one of his clients, takes center stage in the plot, bringing to the background the real travails supposedly embedded in the host business.

The couple, after a brief honeymoon-like period, falls into the depths of mistrust and deception, a development that pummels the soft-hearted Seung-woo – a melodramatic set-up dragging the host bar drama back to the emotionally abrasive shouting game, plus a widely expected revelation that fails to steer the plot in a meaningful direction.

Jae-hyeon comes up with lame excuses around the clock to get by in his debt-laden life, but that`s all there is to see. His life is so boringly predictable that even the last-minute twist does not generate the intended impact. Ha Jung-woo`s nuanced performance occasionally lightens up the otherwise depressingly static storyline – but doesn`t do enough to save the movie.

By Yang Sung-jin

(insight@heraldm.com)

Source:Naver

World Bodypainting Festival finishes up in Daegu, but not without any raised eyebrows and brouhaha over nudity from media and local government. Welcome to Daegu!
Source: Imaeil

Daegu’s high school team, participating at the national high school baseball tournament in Suwon, rejoice with their manager, after winning in the playoffs.
Source: Imaeil

B: He’s a chip off the old block. But in some ways he‘s more old-fashioned than his father. (자기 아버지 판박이에요. 근데 어떤 점에서는 아버님보다도 더 구닥다리예요.)

　A: You mean he doesn’t know to use the net? (남편이 인터넷을 쓸 줄 모른다는 말이야?)

　B: He‘s got an e-mail address and I know he uses it at work. But I guess that’s all he can do on the computer. (전자 우편 주소가 있고 직장에서 그 주소를 쓰는 걸로 알아. 하지만 컴퓨터로 할 수 있는 건 그게 전부인거로 알아.)

　A: Really? How has he survived at work? (정말? 어떻게 직장에서 살아남은 거야?)

　B: That‘s what I wonder, myself. (나 또한 어떻게 그럴 수 있을 까 한다니까.)
　
　남편이 거의 컴맹에 가까운데 직장에서 버틴 것이 놀랄 일이다.
　
　 chip은 조각 chip off ~ 하면 ~에서 떨어져나간 조각. the old block은 아버지를 가리킨다. 그래서 a chip off the old block 하면 아버지를 꼭 빼 닮은 아들을 가리킬 때 쓴다. in some ways는 어떤 점에서는, 어떤 식으로는. old-fashioned 는 구닥다리의. the net은 internet. survive at work 은 직장에서 해고 되지 않고 살아남다. what I wonder는 내가 경이롭게 생각하는 것.

Source: Kwnews

Just realized that you can find Korea’s only Spanish Cultural Center on the 3rd floor of Daegu’s Interburgo Hotel. They offer spanish classes on Saturday mornings, beginning as cheap as 40,000won/mnth. Limited class sizes available, so best to get down there to book quickly or you can call 053-602-7311. Next classes start on Sept.6. (Unsure if beginner classes are conducted in Korean and Spanish or can have a separate class for English speakers, but worth asking, if this applies to you.)

Ddeok-Sam-Sidae (떡삼시대) has a good thing going. I just don’t understand why no one clued in to the concept and did it before. Or the others are certainly not doing it on the franchising scale as they are. What’s the big deal? Same old Korean BBQ environment, with thick-ass slabs of samgyeopsal, moksal, and/or Korean hanwoo beef. But reaching over to your usual basket of leafy greens to wrap in and then–Eeeek! What the hell is that! No ever-present leafy greens, but…but…*sniff*..why, that’s thinly sliced ddeok that we use for wraps, instead. And not just that, but multi-colored ddeok, each with differing flavor hints of coconut or pumpkin. 떡삼시대 in Seoul has actually been around since 1999, but its lone location near Deurangil of Daegu is making good buzz on some of the blogs of Korean Daegu-ites. (Yes, I said Deurangil, which does make it a bit of a pain in the ass to get to, given that that popular restaurant strip is a ways from a subway station. But it’s in the same general area as Ariana Brau, so if you are taking a taxi, show them the map below.) Pohang also has one near the bus station.