Drama Reviews, Pt. 1

Remember these? 

The first Korean dramas that I can ever remember watching were Star In My Heart and Autumn Fairy Tale. Those were truly the olden days, so in order to watch them, my parents would have to go to the local Korean supermarket and rent home-recorded VHS tapes, still in their generic off-white covers. I think there was one obscure cable channel that occasionally relayed Korean network TV all the way to North America.

Now, all I have to do is go to a website like Viki to have easy access to HD quality of every Korean show out there. And after watching it, I can go to Dramabeans for a recap in case there were some things that I missed, and see how others felt about this and that.

What a different world it is now.

Answer Me 1997

Answer Me 1997 is about a boy band-obsessed teenage girl named Shi Won. She lives in Busan with her parents. She and her father constantly fight, especially because he thinks her beloved pop stars are ridiculous. The show follows the lives of her and her friends through their high school years before jumping to depict them as a adults in their 20s.

Shi Won and Yoon Jae: Childhood friends and... future lovers?

What makes this show work is that it stays as grounded as possible and pays very close attention to its time period. While it may be a little silly to refer to a 90s-centered show as a period piece, there were very distinct and unique elements of that era, especially in a rapidly-changing society like Korea's. Of course, I didn't grow up there so most of the attentions to detail were lost on me.

But even so, it was easy to tell that this show was dedicated to telling an honest story. There are no gimmicky plot points or high-concept ideas that could easily be converted to an elevator pitch. This is "just" a show about a pretty normal teenage girl who's obsessed with pop idols and finds school to be a struggle, both in terms of academics and personal relationships. Her story isn't particularly exceptional or different from those of others like her, but a story doesn't need the bizarre or the extreme to be interesting.

It's the characters who make stories, and this drama has plenty of good ones. You can tell if a show has solid characters if you can envision each one being the protagonist of his or her own show. That's evidence that the characters, even the supporting ones, have enough depth and motivation to not simply be plot devices for the leads around whom everything in the universe revolves. Every character here is well-defined, so much so that viewers become emotionally invested in the little life events that are familiar to us all.

Shi Won and her friends making good use of school time by perusing
through celebrity magazines

Answer Me 1997 is beautifully shot in warm cinematic tones, and it deftly moves from funny to sad to bittersweet to funny again. It deals with issues like homosexuality in a sensitive and fairly realistic manner, and the story is paced well so that it doesn't drag on towards the end as a lot of dramas do. The only flaws that I can think of is that the story becomes a bit less interesting once it shifts to their adulthood. Plus, they don't even change the kids' hairstyles. Come on, who keeps the same hairdo at 27 as they did at 17. Also, this is just due to my lack of Korean fluency, but the Busan accents made it difficult to understand what they were saying sometimes. It almost sounded like Japanese when I couldn't understand.

Very highly recommended.

School 2013

I was never educated in the Korean system, and I'm quite grateful for that fact because the stories of unbearable pressure and anxiety are rife and infamous. So I'm very curious as to what the actual experience is like.

School 2013 tries to examine the issues that contemporary Korean high school students face. The show revolves around 2 teachers of very different types. There's Teacher Jung In Jae, who believes that it's her job to instill a love of learning (especially her subject, literature) in her students, and that she should become emotionally invested in their personal development. On the other hand, Teacher Kang Sae Chan believes that his job is to maximize his students' test scores so that they can enter the university of their choice. He sees himself as working in a kind of service industry, and he is loath to get attached to any of his students.

Teacher Jung In Jae (left) and Teacher Kang Sae Chan (right)

Perhaps the dichotomy is a little heavy-handed and obvious here, but it does give us a chance to see the clashing of two diametrically opposed philosophies. And this isn't some fairy tale in which the effortlessly idealistic Teacher Jung magically inspires her demoralized and stressed out students with a few poem readings, thus vanquishing her cynical counterpart. The harsh realities of public education and the competition they engender in not only the students but also the administration are made apparent at every turn.

Two things made this drama particularly compelling. First, the give-and-take relationship between the two teachers provided the show with a strong heart. Teacher Jung isn't a totally naive, and Teacher Kang isn't completely heartless. They exasperate one another, but they also yield as well because they're not perfect people who have nothing to learn themselves.

Long-time friends Park Heung Soo (front) and Go Nam Soon (back)
have to deal with troubled home lives and constant run-ins with
the law

Second, I loved the show's panoramic treatment of the students. Almost every type of student is given a fair and rounded treatment, from the try-hard to the overachiever-with-the-crazy-mom to the bully to the joker to the drifter... The show even pauses to pay attention to the "nobody" students, the ones who lack any sort of distinguishing characteristic, whether good or bad, at that stage in their lives. I thought that that was a very insightful touch because high school stories tend to solely focus on the extreme personalities as if they're the only ones that matter.

I immensely enjoyed this drama because of its diverse portrayal of characters, and its realistic treatment of a complex problem. Some drawbacks are that a few of the young actors who play the supporting student characters aren't that great at acting, but they're not distractingly so. Besides, the drama is carried well by the two actors who play the teachers, as well as the two young actors who play the two main students. The actor who plays the bully is also very engaging as well.

Song Ha Kyung (left) is too much of an academic gunner, and
Lee Kang Joo (right) is always trying to help others, even
at her own expense

Another highly recommended drama.

Flower Boy Next Door

I was excited about this one because it's a TVN show (the same cable channel that made Answer Me 1997), and it stars Park Shin Hye. The story revolves around a reclusive girl named Dok Mi who rarely ever ventures out of her apartment and lives a frugal life as an underpaid copywriter. She has a crush on a man who lives in the building across from hers, and she likes to spy on him. Her neighbors are two struggling web-comic artists, one of whom starts a comic based on her because he's been secretly in love with her from afar.

Park Shin Hye: So cute! Even when she's
supposed to be a Howard Hughes-esque
creeper...

I stopped watching it because I didn't feel that the show had a sense of direction. It seemed to be mainly about this group of zany characters who existed in this claustrophobic little universe that revolved around them. It was hard to get a sense of who Dok Mi was because she was always hiding away or running away, and just being passive and quiet. If that's her character, then that's all well and good, but I needed more of an explanation as to why she was like that in order to care.

I really want to give this another chance, so I'll start from episode 1 again soon.

Queen In-Hyun's Man

I was drawn to this one after seeing how gorgeously shot it was (I guess I'm just a superficial jerk), and hearing how the chemistry between the female and male leads was great. In fact, they're dating in real life now, I believe. I also saw the lead actress Yoo In Na in the TV series High Kick 2 and the drama Secret Garden, and I liked her in both.

The plot is pure fantasy: a Korean warrior-scholar from centuries ago somehow time travels to modern Seoul and just so happens to run into the actress who is playing the TV show version of the very queen that he served. This time travel conceit was all the rage last year in Korean dramas, and while I usually despise time travel as a premise, reliable reviews praised the show as being the most consistent and realistic in adhering to its own time travel rules.

The problem with the show is that I'm still not a fan of historical Korean dramas, and significant parts of the early episodes are set in old timey Korea where everybody speaks in very affected ways and act in manners that seem very theatrical to my gyopo eyes and ears. I liked the show when it stayed in the modern era, but whenever it went back to the time of swords and horses, I found my interest flagging and eventually, I stopped watching.

But the drama as a whole looked promising, so I will probably revisit it soon.

The Blog is Back!

Since I'm back in Korea for my summer internship, I figured that I'd start up this blog that's been dormant for a year. Not too much to write about yet since I just arrived a couple of days ago. I did have my first day of work today, but I don't want to talk about any of that because they made me sign a confidentiality agreement, and I don't want any future employers to stumble onto this site and blacklist me for life.

So just some observations...

1) Is it weird that I sort of like airplane food? I don't like it because it tastes all that great, but when you're up 30 000 feet in the air in a fuselage with nothing but potential death around you, you'll take what you can get. Food has become such an It proxy for social status that it's kind of refreshing to be so devoid of options that microwavable pasta, a couple of grapes, and a bag of peanuts are things that you really look forward to.

2) I almost never get jet lagged. I think it's because I can sleep pretty much anywhere if I'm tired or bored enough, even on a noisy airplane in a seat that I'd like to incline more but am prevented from doing so due to an irritating sense of social conscience.

3) I love Seoul's metro system so much. It's clean (with air conditioning too), efficient (a long wait is maybe about 5 min), big (you could probably fit a cow inside if you really wanted to for some reason), and cheap (about $1). A lot of it is above ground too, so you get a bit of a tour of the city depending on which line you take. It's really cool when you get to cross the Han River.

4) I'm very thankful to be far far far away from the spawning of Brood II. I don't think they're gonna hit Philadelphia, but I'd rather not take my chances. Though there are a lot of cicadas in Seoul and while they can get very noisy, you usually don't see them because they're always hiding in trees.

5) Korean liquor is ridiculously marked up in the U.S. However, the thing is that if marketed properly, why shouldn't a bottle of makgeolli cost $20 instead of $2? Is Grey Goose really worth $30 more than, say, Smirnoff, especially when most people end up mixing it anyway?

So you love "Gangnam Style"...

The unprecedented and unexpected success of comedic Korean rapper Psy has certainly been a pleasant shock for fans of Korean music, and we are glad that the rest of the world has had a chance to enjoy this singular artist and performer as we have.

But lest you think that all Korean music is bizarre, self-parodying, and satirical, here are some musical artists that you should check out if Psy's made you (try to) sing along in phoneticized Korean for the first time in your life.

1) Kim Bum Soo

Clear and powerful are good adjectives to describe Kim Bum Soo's voice. An interesting fact is that before Psy and before girl groups like Girls' Generation and the Wonder Girls, it was actually Kim Bum Soo who charted on Billboard, totally out of the blue. This dude's got talent.

The song, "I Miss You", or Bogoshipda in Korean, is from the soundtrack of the drama "Stairway to Heaven"

This song is "I Have A Lover". It's a cover, but Kim Bum Soo makes it all his own.

2) IU

Some people may make fun of me for liking IU because she's so cutesy, but I firmly believe that behind that image, she's got some remarkably substantive talent. She's an able guitarist, writes some of her own songs, and has a good voice.

This is an example of cutesy IU, the version of herself that catapulted her to stardom. I like this song ("You and I") a lot though, especially since it's so different from what we see in American pop music.

I suppose this is an example of a more serious and mature IU. Here, on the music program Sketchbook, she covers Sung Si Kyung's "It Would Be Good".

And here she is on one of her earlier apperances on Sketchbook, doing acoustic covers of K-pop songs. It's pretty amazing how she infuses "Gee", a song that even its biggest fans would concede as pretty mindless, with such musicality. Skip to 1:28 for the music to start.

I loved this song, "Hold My Hand", when I first heard it. I loved it even more when I found out that IU wrote it herself.

3) Ha Dong Kyun

I don't know much about this singer, but I love this song, "Please Love Her". It's about a guy who realizes that his love (who appears to be in a bad relationship) will never love him back, so he's imploring her boyfriend to treat her better.

"Please Love Her"

4) Big Bang

Out of all the major music labels, YG (Psy's label) definitely makes the most accessible pop music that reaches beyond just the fangirl demographic. Even guys like me can un-self-consciously enjoy the music of YG's premier boy band, Big Bang.

This song is "Blue", and it showcases the melancholic, acoustic side of the group, which often dabbles in a host of genres like dance, hip-hop, and rock.

This is "Fantastic Baby", their WTF dance track.

Showing off their rock ballad skills in "Love Song".

Frontman and rapper G-Dragon is the most multi-talented of the group and has had a strong solo career while being in the group. Here is one of his latest hits, "That XX" (the bleeped-out word is "bastard", or "f*cker"). With his songwriting skills, he has a potential after-career as a producer.

5) 2NE1

While other girl groups are guilty pleasures, I feel no embarrassment in declaring that I'm a fan of 2NE1. Like their labelmates Big Bang, 2NE1 dabbles in a lot of different genres, though I like their melodic dance tracks the most.

One of their biggest early hits, "I Don't Care".

"Go Away" always makes me want to get up and dance around in a self-empowering way.

A really cool live-ish version of "Ugly", their rocker song.

6) Taeyeon

Though the fact that she is the main vocalist for Girls' Generation may diminish her musical credentials in the eyes of some, Taeyeon is nevertheless a very good singer and seems to now be the go-to power balladeer for soundtracks.

A very pretty ballad called "If".

7) Yim Jae Bum

In a Korean male musical landscape that sometimes seems to be dominated by well-coiffed pretty boys, Yim Jae Bum brings some raw manly emotion to pop music.

His classic hit, "For You", which is about a self-destructive man who decides to leave his lover for her own good.

His song, "Love", for the big hit drama "City Hunter".

8) Exhibition 

I have no idea who this group is, but after watching the film "Architecture 101", I've been listening to their song, "Etude of Memories", song nonstop.

"Etude of Memories"

9) Park Hyo Shin

One of Korea's most well-known voices, Park Hyo Shin is perhaps most famous for his cover of Japanese artist Mika Nakashima's "Yuki No Hana". His version of the song was the first Korean song that I truly fell in love with.

"Snowflower": 

While it's a cover, Park Hyo Shin's uniquely deep voice practically creates a totally new song, one that is a stark contrast to the delicate femininity of the Japanese original.

10) Leessang

I got to know of Leessang by watching "Running Man", a show that the duo's rapper Gary is a part of. Leessang is an interesting group that mixes hip-hop, pop, and rock.

"Someday", featuring Korean rock legend Yoon Do Hyun.

"Turned Off The TV", a more hip-hop oriented song.

Why I sometimes have a teensy little problem with American media...

How Asian guys are portrayed in America:

How Asian guys are portrayed in Korea:

To commemorate the happiest sporting memory of my life thus far

London 2012 Football - Korea Wins Bronze by jesuinthesky88

Took me a while to make, but it was a labour of love. 

T-Minus 8 hours...

My two-ish years in Korea are almost up, and in about eight hours, I'll be jetting off back to the US.

Being able to live in Korea has been an eye-opening experience, and I wish that every gyopo could have the opportunity to do what I've been able to do these past couple of years.

I gotta catch some sleep before going to the airport, so I won't write much more right now. I will continue to update this blog because I've got some more material that I haven't been able to write about before my takeoff.

I remember being so happy and eager when I was just about to leave home for the first time to start college. But as I get ready to leave home once again, the feeling's not the same this time. I'm not quite sure if this make me more or less mature. It could mean that I'm more so because I no longer have any delusional fantasies about finding this perfect and wonderful paradise out there that will fix everything I find unsatisfying about my life. On the other hand, it could mean that I'm less so because, well, not wanting to leave home is kind of the stereotypical sign of arrested development.

Eh, gotta sleep now. About 24 hours from now, I'll be in Philly.

Some of my fave restaurants in Seoul

I don't consider myself a food expert, but I do enjoy good restaurants. So here are some restaurants, divided by cuisine type, that I have enjoyed eating at during my time in Seoul.

Korean Barbecue: 칼 ("Kal", meaning "knife"), 새마을식당 (Sae Ma Eul Shik Dang, meaning "New Village Restaurant")

I usually don't go hunting for specific Korean BBQ restaurants because to me, they're all good. You can be walking around with your friends, get a sudden craving for grilled pork, and pop into any corner restaurants and eat a very satisfying meal.

That being said, there's a couple of restaurants that are particularly good. Kal is in Apgujeong, and though it's expensive, it's definitely worth it if the occasion calls for it. Most of the time, I'd rather eat plentifully and inexpensively, but sometimes, I want some high quality curry samgyeopsal. And Kal is the place to go.

Sae Ma Eul Shik Dang is the good old reliable BBQ joint. You can practically find one every 5 blocks, and their prices are extremely reasonable, making this place a great choice for casual get-togethers. Their pork bulgogi is especially good, as is their kimchi stew.

Korean: Myeongdong Gyoja, Noryangjin Fish Market (for spicy fish stew)

I've already raved about Myeongdong Gyoja in this blog, so I'll say no more.

Spicy fish soup

If you want to try Korean spicy fish soup (매운탕: Mae Oun Tang), then go to the Noryangjin Fish Market. They'll have the freshest fish and they'll make you an angry red spicy stew. I normally don't eat a lot of rice, but their soup was so good that I ate two bowls of rice.

I forgot the specific name of the restaurant that I went to... It started with "Busan" something.

Fried Chicken: Han Chu, BBQ, 오븐에빠진닭 (Oh Beun Eh Bbajin Dak, meaning "Oven-Roasted Chicken")

Fried chicken @ Han Chu

Fried peppers @ Han Chu: so greasy but so good!

Fried chicken in Korea is amazing, and it makes you never ever want to go back to a KFC or Popeye's again. The chicken is fried crisply and dryly so that it's not soggy and heavy with grease. Korean fried chicken is so good that it even makes a beer like Cass taste great.

Han Chu in Apgujeong is my favourite fried chicken place, and they have great fried stuffed jalapeno peppers too. They seem to use japapenos in their fried batter, so their chicken has a spicy bite which I love.

BBQ Chicken and 오븐에빠진닭 are two big chain restaurants that I've been to multiple times. Both are good and ubiquitous.

Spanish: Albayzin

There isn't an abundance of Spanish restaurants in Seoul, and I'm not even sure what good authentic Spanish food tastes like. But I've been to Albayzin in Hongdae a couple of times, and it has a great cozy atmosphere where you can get a big pan of paella for 2 for 30 000 won ($28). Their tapas are pretty tasty too.

The ambience at Albayzin is very nice

Their paella is pretty tasty as well

Burgers: Patty & Veggies, Salt & Butter

The Pepperjack Cheeseburger @ Patty & Veggies

Patty & Veggies is a small joint, but there was luckily plenty of room when I went there

Both of these great burger joints are in Apgujeong, and though I love them both, I have to give the edge to Patty & Veggies. Their patties are massive and their fries are mouth-wateringly crispy and thick. Plus, they give you little wax paper "burger holders" so that you can eat your deliciously fat burger without making a mess.

Salt & Butter is quite good though. I like how they give you tartar sauce for your fries. They also have a bibimbap burger, but I've never tried it.

Italian: Casa Nolita, Mad for Garlic

Good vibes at Casa Nolita

I like Italian food and all, but it all kind of tastes the same to me. I really can't tell the difference between decent pasta and great pasta, though it's pretty obvious when it's bad.

I like Casa Nolita in Gangnam because it has a really nice atmosphere and they give you plenty of food.  Their menu seems a bit limited though, with only about 6 pasta choices.

Mad for Garlic has multiple locations throughout Seoul, and I remember enjoying it the couple of times that I went. They have this great "Vampire Killer" appetizer plate that's perfect for garlic lovers like me. But don't get their misleadingly-named Garlic Bread Tower; more like Garlic Bread Stump.