With finances reaching the critical disaster zone Matt must forgo his spot in the guesthouse and find a home on the streets of Tokyo to save money.

Okay.  So, it has been a while.  More than three weeks, to be precise, which is exactly two weeks longer than it should have been since this episode was released.  A lot happened this month, from obvious hardware failures, to marauding ex-girlfriends, to rheumatoid arthritis, to hilariously weak immune systems, but the simple fact of the matter is that once upon a time none of this ever would have phased me.

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This past weekend was the annual lantern festival in Seoul.  I am not 100% sure, but I think it is held each year to honor the god of lanterns and ensure a full and robust lantern crop.  The legend is that one year the festival was not held and the entirety of Korea remained dark for a century as a punishment from an angered and vengeful lantern god.

The culmination of the festival is a parade in which over 100 million lanterns stream past the crowded streets, held aloft by the cities children, monks, and wizards.  Also there are two giant neon fire breathing dreams. They represent the eternal struggle of night and day for dominion over the earth.*

*Disclaimer: I was only at the festival for 45 minutes and have no idea why it was held or what really happened before or after I left.  I apologize.

The other day I ate most of big ol’ delicious cheesecake.  It was called “Black Uncle” and was made of both passion and love.

Thanks Korea.

They love octopus in Korea.  Looooove it.

We recently stopped by a swanky department store in Apkujong an upscale district of the city.  As is common with Asian department stores one floor was devoted to various stalls with different kinds of food.  As we wandered past the fresh seafood something caught my eye.  A giant ugly octopus. 

This is by far one of the more hilarious and strange food items I have ever seen for sale. 

The other day I saw some Riot cops in Myeongdong.  It looked pretty cool so I took this video.

We live above a DVD-booth rental shop, so the stairways leading up to the 4th floor are papered with movie posters.  One thing I’ve come to appreciate about movie posters is that the images are so intense – each scene is a powerful emotional message designed to capture and communicate something about the experience of watching the movie.  Walking (or hobbling) through the stairway is like wandering through a gallery of intense emotional moments, and with over 100 posters, there’s a moment for every emotion.  Whether I’m headed off to work or trudging back, I can find a movie to match my mood.One of my favorite movie posters is for “Midnight Meat Train.”  A blurry image of a psychopath with a meat mallet, ready to brutally tenderize every part of your body.  It’s a great movie poster for foul moods, and one can just imagine Seoul readying herself to maul us.  Then there’s “The Wrestler,” for days when we feel beaten down and burned out.  There’s also a movie (top right) with Shia Lebeouf, which really just fills us with rage because we think of Indiana Jones IV.  On the bottom left, a beaming Ashton Couture with his beautiful girlfriend/wife Cameron Diaz…that is not quite a poster I’ve empathized with yet here…Finally, on the top middle, “The Transporter.”  I’m just waiting for that day when I can walk down the stairs and feel like Jason Statholm ready to seriously kick some ass.

So I think mood forecasts are in order, based on those movies whose posters just seem to say, “I feel you man – here, let me show you exactly how you feel, but more so.”  Expect such forecasts to follow…

Well, it’s probably not hard to guess that I didn’t check out the whirling lights of Club Eden or gallivant about with Tom and the Australian showgirls.  I’m still in recovery, and I’m playing it cautious.  One tumble down and my ligament rips free of its fledgling holds within my knee, and I will know pain unimaginable.  No fucking thank you.

However, I have started a new physical therapy regimen…This kind of therapy was mistakenly translated as “radioactive therapy,” which was an unfortunate mistake.  I had a brief fantasy that it was causing my knee to hyper-regenerate, but instead it’s just pulsing sound waves to encourage circulation…and hopefully hyper-regeneration.

Please, oh gods of orthopedic healing, please heal my knee!  Also, it would be great if you could speedily remove the all the hideous bruises before I’m forced to wear shorts.  Go ahead, keep reading, you know you want to see a picture…

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WTF

Friday and Saturday night were the two most surreal of my time on the road. Not only did we wind up at Club Eden, but it came at the tail end of two other clubs — Answer and Monkey Shine– a bar in Sadang, karaoke (a.k.a. noraebang), and dinner and drinks with the most incestuous office on the planet.

At one point, I was the only person in the room aside from my boss who had not slept with anyone else, and even he had been groping the girls all night. But we’ll save sexism in the workplace for 60 Minutes (or another post), and I’ll just tell you how Saturday evolved from a simple trip to buy a t-shirt at the Myeong-dong pedestrian mall into clubbing with Japanese tourists, shouting at strangers with a man in a giant cat-suit, and drinking beers with a dozen Australian showgirls. Read more, I know you want to.

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Eden in a sentence: “One of a sea of 6’3” Korean guys with a 100$ t-shirt and sunglasses will be dancing with the modeltastic girl who’s just turned you down for not having a VIP bracelet on – however you can console yourself with the decent music, interesting venue, and re-entry privileges coupled with a 7-11 across the street.”

This Friday saw us head out with the co-workers to a Korean BBQ dinner, some low grade Karaoke in a dark basement, and then the endless awkwardness of watching our boss try to grope the female staff one by one.

After this we needed a change of pace so we headed out with our friends Sarah and Coco to the “hottest club in Seoul”. Club Eden at the Ritz Carlton.  It was pretty interesting.

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Big surprise: I’m not teaching English.  Hordes of screaming children would have overrun me and my feeble attempts to order them around or herd them with my crutches.  So I had to find a new job that didn’t involve jeopardizing my knee.

A couple weeks ago, a strange opportunity popped up in the classifieds section: an editing job helping rewrite translated text for an MMORPG (like World of Warcraft) being imported to the US from Korea.  Flexing my nerd muscles, I threw together a creative cover letter that landed me an interview.  I got the job on Monday and started Monday evening. 

One of my first tasks was learning the game, so I spent some time playing the Korean version alongside my new boss.  Much less exciting than it sounds – it really just amounted to a lot, “oh what’s this say?” “where should we go now?” “what is that we’re buying?”  But it’s definitely a gaming environment.  On my first day, my officemates challenged me to a Starcraft match over lunch to see who would go buy ice-cream (unfortunately, we had a deadline, so I had to postpone the inevitable ass-kicking that would ensue).  Also, when I left the office on Friday at 7pm, 2 guys were questing together on another MMORPG.  It felt like a caricature of a Korea, in office format.  It should make for an interesting 7 weeks…

Let’s not confuse ourselves.  I would change the soiled underwear of every kindergartner at Brian’s and Rob’s school if it would give me my knee back.  If anything would undo the financial damage, physical pain, and the instability my knee will have for the rest of my life, I would do it.  This job is a small luxury amidst disaster, maybe like winning a poker game during a shipwreck.

And actually, one unacknowledged tragedy of my knee dislocation is that I don’t get to teach alongside Brian and Rob.  I mean, I’m not shedding tears here, given Brian’s horror stories, BUT if there was anyone among us who had a prayer of enjoying that job, it was me.  I LOVE kids, and anyone who has seen me around them would quickly conclude I simply never grew up.  I love to play with them, I love making them laugh, and when they don’t listen, I can just pick 2 or 3 of them up and relocate them, which usually gets all the children’s attention.  Unfortunately, I never even got to try.  So instead of playing roller coaster with kindergarteners, I’m leveling my Korean character…

Note: If you’re in Seoul and have a free bed or couch, let me know.  One of these days, the wrath of Rob or Brian might just spill over…