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5 May 2012 FC Seoul vs Pohang Steelers It turned out it was Children's Day, so the stadium was packed. FC Seoul won 2-1. |
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5 May 2012 Bbeongtwigi-ing the Cat I tried getting the cats again, and for some reason it's very easy to get a rice cake over Millie's head, but not Buster's. They both love eating it though, far more than they hate my attempts to torment them. |
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1 May 2012 Roots Time In Roots Time, I pulled out my prime lens and took pictures in the dark. |
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1 May 2012 May Day For the day off, we drove around Seoul visiting a few sites we wanted to learn more about. |
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28 April 2012 Find the Hardcore Spot Another practice room show in another practice room hall. |
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28 April 2012 Bbeongtwigi-ing the Cat In the same day I went to an animal rescue event, I attempted to fit a rice cake over Buster's head. |
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28 April 2012 Vegan Bake Sale To do an article on the Seoul Veggie Club, we went to this vegan bake sale, only to discover it's completely unaffiliated with the club. We might do an article on the actual group instead, an animal rescue group. |
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27 April 2012 Ipobo Weir For work, we went on an afternoon outing to the Ipobo Weir in Yeoju. It's part of the newly opened cycling route spanning the country, alongside the Four Rivers Restoration Project. |
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26 April 2012 Sunny Day We had a bit of un-un-seasonabll good weather, so I went out to take photographs of the scenery. Later in the afternoon, we had an emergency drill. I assumed it was the Civil Defence Drill, even though it wasn't on the 15th, but it turned out to be an earthquake drill. That would make sense, then, why we didn't hide in the basement but instead wandered into the grounds of Gyeongbokgung. |
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21 April 2012 Sandra's Ferrets After the Spring Beer Fest, I visited Sandra's ferrets. They're long and skinny and they shiver when they wake up, but I have a feeling they could probably beat my cats in a fight. |
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21 April 2012 Spring Beer Fest This is the sort of thing I do at work. |
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4 April 2012 Gyeongui Line Paul left Korea last month. He'd spent his final couple weeks in a hostel in Hongdae. On the way to the AREX station, he was loaded with luggage, so he took the elevator normally reserved for old people with a handicap or a sense of entitlement. On the way down, he got a quick glimpse of what appeared to be an entirely unused level of the station. Back in 2010, before the extension of the AREX line through Hongdae to Seoul Station, I'd gotten into the station. I found an open door and went down a few levels, squeezed through a door, and found myself in a very unfinished subway station. Next time I came back the station was more finished, and I went a different way, eventually finding my way down to the AREX tracks, now covered by suicide doors and electrified. It turns out, I'd visited two different lines. Both Gyeongui and AREX connect to Hongdae, and while AREX was completed, Gyeongui has been sitting there in the same condition for about two years. Presumably they've been finishing the rest of the tunnel before laying down tracks. Anyway, I managed to get a replacement Australian and headed down. I've made a few trips so far, each time going farther than the last and searching for new exit points. |
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31 March 2012 Billy Carter's Final Show Billy Carter are moving to the UK for a while, so they advertised this show at Danginri as their final Korean show of 2012. Opening for them were Skasucks doing an acoustic set and Forget-me-nots, a new Attacking Forces acoustic side project. It was a great show with an intimate atmosphere, with the bands taking risks they wouldn't normally in regular shows. Yeongsoon singing "Folsom Prison Blues?" Sure, why not? |
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31 March 2012 Hanok Village There's been a lot of positive attention on the cultural value of the Hanok, a traditional style of Korean house that has a lot of interesting features. Now that Bukchon Hanok Village has been saved from the bulldozer, it's a popular destination for photographers. Places like this are slowly getting recognised for their cultural value. Then a bunch more slip through the cracks. |
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30 March 2012 Chanter's Alley EP Release I showed up at Spot for the release of Chanter's Alley's new EP. I'd heard a pre-mastered version of "Olde Jamestowne Halle" and knew it was going to be worth it. |
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30 March 2012 Institute of Traditional Korean Food The Institute of Traditional Korean Food ran an exhibition of some of the traditional Korean liquors its members had made. You can be sure I went there to cover it for an article. Pictured here is Ehwaju, a yogurt-based liquor that's eaten with a spoon, dating back to the Goguryeo Kingdom (918-1392). Many of the liquors here have been out of production for decades if not centuries, and have been revived through Joseon cookbooks. |
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29 March 2012 Miru Kim - The Pig that Therefore I am Miru is back in Korea again for her latest exhibition. I haven't seen her in almost three years, and in that time she's been getting to know pigs a lot more. She's been visiting factory farms where she...well, you really have to watch the video to really understand the whole undertaking. We went on the opening night to find the place filled with video cameras, putting her on the air live at 6:40. Presumably it's usually much more empty. |
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28 March 2012 Daju Shopping If you're familiar with Sinchon, you've probably been aware of Daju. It's a long arcade-style building behind the Grand Mart that has a fantastic market on the main floor selling a good deal of grey-market goods, including foreign products that are hard to find in Korea. Wait, did I say has a fantastic market? I mean had. Though in all fairness, judging by the banners and the state of the building itself upon eviction, it seems to be an amicable move. I think they're going to renovate and reopen the place. |
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28 March 2012 Gyeongbokgung I went to Gyeongbokgung to see a performance of Yeonhyang, a reenactment of a royal banquet. It was in all honesty a little less exciting than the Changdeokgung Moonlight Tour, mainly because it was less personal and intimate. It was simply a big performance at Gyeonghoeru, watching the performers from across the water. The performances were definitely bigger in scale and this night's pansori was more elegant, sung by An Sook-seon from a moving boat. You can read the original article here. |
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27 March 2012 Changdeokgung Moonlight Tour Work sent me on a series of night tours to Korean palaces offering special night programs in the wake of the Nuclear Security Summit. The first one was Changdeokgung, where we went on a tour of the grounds followed by a small performance. It was my first time seeing actual live pansori, and I was pretty surprised by the sounds the audience was making. I'm going to start encouraging this at punk shows. |
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24 March 2012 Jeonja Salon After we emerged from the underworld, we were fairly close to Jeonja Salon, which just happened to have a show with a bunch of bands I like. It ended up just being Chris and I, and we nerded out with our cameras all night. |
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24 March 2012 Return to the Host Nik has returned to Korea, and the exact day that he came back we went on a 1.5-kilometer underground walk. The purpose of the trip was to show around Curtis, who's writing an article about Korean urban renewal informed by our experiences. We also went with Chris and Laura. |
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23 March 2012 National Museum of Korea I keep this site mostly separate from my work activities, other than the occasional link from here to there. But otherwise if someone at work asks me what my website is, I'll tell them Korea.net. Obviously I don't want anyone in the government reading too much into the name of this site (which just started as an homage to Indecline where it was originally hosted [holy crap, it's still online?]). Anyway, because I'm the editor for the site, I also got automatically grouped in with this team of bloggers who competed to get chosen. I had the chance to go with the newly selected bloggers on a trip to the National Museum, which I'd never been to before. You can see the stuff I'm writing over there all on one page. The format is quite a lot different to what I do here. |
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18 March 2012 Gwangjang Market I headed to Gwangjang Market alone to take pictures for an article. I went in mostly blind, other than a few food recommendations, and learned quite a lot. You can see the original article here. |
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17 March 2012 Farewell Mike Mike left Korea for sunnier pastures (the middle of nowhere, Utah). Here are some pictures from his last weekend in Korea. He'll be back, I'm sure. |
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17 March 2012 Lowrise My first time going to an actual show in Mullae. Lowrise is basically an unfinished concrete room. I only got pictures of Find the Spot, Dokkaebi Assault, Christfuck, and Scumraid. |
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17 March 2012 Church Right across the street from me, there was a church that shut down, along with a motel. I only had a small window to go in and have a look. It's already all been demolished. |
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14 March 2012 Korea vs Qatar We were a bit relieved this game wasn't a national World Cup qualifier. Turns out it was a U23 qualifier for the Olympics, which Korea is already in. |
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11 March 2012 Dong Cult Park We went out to the Uzbek restaurant on Sunday. |
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11 March 2012 Cats More pictures of cats, in which they climb a tower I made for them. |
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11 March 2012 Around Hongdae I decided to play with my prime lens in the bars. The difference in the resulting image is very striking. The first shot is with a regular lens, and then the following images are all on the prime lens. I cropped the first one to make it less wide, but otherwise all are as they came out of the camera. |
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10 March 2012 Abandoned Amusement Park We went back to the abandoned amusement park. This was my first trip, and on the previous two trips there was no real threat of being caught. We had climbed over a back fence near a junkyard. The owner of the junkyard ran after us and kicked us out. Apparently she'd gotten in trouble recently because of other people who snuck in. We actually didn't go through her property at all, but we easily could have due to a "dog hole" in the fence. So, we waited around until dark and jumped the front gate. |
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8 March 2012 Soup Cats I was sick, so I skipped one day of work and stocked up on Campbell's soup. This just happens to be one of the greatest things in the world if you're a cat. Millie and Buster did their best to take turns licking the inside of the can. |
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4 March 2012 Abandoned Mental Hospital Paul, Jim, and Ana were all counting away their final days in Korea, so I offered to take them to the abandoned mental hospital. Unfortunately, the property owner decided he'd had enough of Korean teenage ghost-hunters, so he sealed up every door and window with metal mesh, both outside and in. There's pretty well no point in trying to get inside now. |
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3 March 2012 Supercat I was woken up in the middle of the night by the noise of plastic bags. Buster had been licking a bag to make noise to wake me up, and he somehow got trapped inside of it. Usually they just get one of the handles around their necks, but this time he somehow got his whole body inside the bag. Even weirder, as he walked around, I discovered he was purring. I've heard cats sometimes purr when they're in distress, which could've been what was happening here. |
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1 March 2012 Iranian Restaurant We met up with Verv and his girlfriend Zeinab, who just returned from Iran last weekend. We took her and some of her Iranian friends to the Iranian restaurant, which is run by an Iranian but specialises more in Indian food. |
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1 March 2012 Temple I discovered photos that a couple soldiers had taken of an abandoned temple in Korea. I got in contact with them and they were happy to privide me with the coordinates. Paul and I headed off on March 1 to pay it a visit. It was pretty amazing, and I'm seriously considering contacting a Buddhist organisation about the state of this temple; it seems wrong to just leave it here like this. |
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29 February 2012 Korea vs Kuwait Ryan invited us all to see the Korea vs Kuwait World Cup qualifier game. It was possible that Korea wouldn't make it to the next round of qualifications, provided that Korea lost and Saudi Arabia won, neither of which happened. I provided a couple pictures for a quick article on the game, and bought one action shot from Yonhap I don't have the capability to take. |
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28 February 2012 Rooftop Paul and Greg are both leaving Korea very soon (Greg's already gone). I met up with Paul on a rooftop, and I was surprised by Greg above me. |
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26 February 2012 Amusement Park Reshoots I went back to the amusement park for reshoots, along with Paul and Laura. Not too long after we got there, Laura realised she'd been there in 2006. |
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25 February 2012 Galaxy Express I interviewed members of Galaxy Express and Crying Nut for an article about their upcoming trips to North America. Also available in the following languages:
At this moment the French and Arabic translations aren't finished. |
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24 February 2012 Roadrunner CD Release I was getting ready for the Galaxy Express show, and I decided to bring my camera to Spot to try it out in live photography before the big event.
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24 February 2012 Cats As soon as I got my new D7000, I brought it hope to try out on the cats. They seem to approve. |
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19 February 2012 Abandoned Amusement Park Thanks to Paul, we've finally found another abandoned amusement park. This one is close to Seoul but awkward to get to. I actually drove by it last year while en route to the Bible Expo, but only stopped briefly to try to get a shot of the ferris wheel in the distance. Pretty sure it was still active then, and I didn't care for any of my pictures because there were trees in the way. This trip went fairly well. Unlike Okpo Land where you had to climb to the top of a hill, and Woncheon Lakeland where you had to trek through Mordor, this park was just on the other side of a construction fence. A mildly daunting climb, but on the other side I ran into other photographers who must have gotten in by some other means. The park itself is a loose collection of rides, probably bigger than Okpo Land, and less clustered together like Woncheon. The rides themselves are also in better shape, and probably any of them would be in perfect working order after a good hosing-down. I'm not too happy with these pictures mainly due to the condition of my camera. I'm planning to upgrade to a newer camera and head back again very soon. |
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13 February 2012 Breaded Cats So apparently this is the latest thing. I gave it a light try and managed to meet with some success. It doesn't hurt that my cats enjoy eating bread--not sure about other cats. |
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11 February 2012 Whoops Saturday night there was nothing else to do, so we drank in Whoops and ended up making friends with an unconscious Korean guy. Well, after he woke up. |
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11 February 2012 Gajwa Another trip back to Gajwa-dong, this time in daylight and with Paul. |
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4 February 2012 Morene Market I was bored so I rode my scooter around Morene Market and found a few longstanding buildings now gutted and on the eve of demolition, one a motel and the other a church. |
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3 February 2012 Breaking the Law Judas Priest was playing in Seoul this night, but I wasn't in the mood for a show. Not counting Attacking Forces, Seoul City Suicides, and Midnight Smoking Drive of course. To sweeten the deal, Attacking Forces did an awesome cover of "Breaking the Law." |
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4 February 2012 Rooftopping in Sinchon I'd been meaning to meet up with Joseph for a while, but he lives down in Taean. He came up north for a job interview in Yangju, which is considerably closer but still kind of out there. Anyway, we met up in Sinchon and tried a couple roofs, then headed to Sangsu. |
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3 February 2012 Sammy's visit I got in touch with a skinhead girl from Singapore who was coming to Korea for a half-week vacation. Apparently her coworkers are all victims of Hallyu and wanted to come to Korea in the winter. She had no interest in K-pop and the usual stuff so I took her around Hongdae for a quick tour of whatever was worth seeing on a Friday night in the coldest week of the year. |
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28 January 2012 Spot Show I was showing around a guy from my hometown, and I was only here for part of the show. A lot of the bands I did see impressed me more than I was expecting; I remember thinking Coin Rocker Boys was better than I'd anticipated. |
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23 January 2012 Army Base I heard recently that an old army base in Geumcheon-gu has been converted into some kind of art center. It's going to be demolished next year, but for this year it's been given to a few groups of artists to do whatever they want. One group has already started an interesting program. I stopped by with Phil on New Year's Day to have a look around. There were still guards in the front gate, but the back gate was unlocked and blowing in the wind. We just walked in and had a quick look around. |
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22 January 2012 Lunar New Year In the Korean War, Seoul had to be evacuated twice. At the time, it was a much smaller city of course, so that was probably not even a million people. These days, over 30 million Koreans (out of a total 50 million) hit the road every Lunar New Year to visit their families in their hometowns. This causes traffic problems. Although Lunar New Year is only one day, we get a traffic jam day before and after the holiday to allow everyone the time to get back to their regular lives. Anyway, Seoul is always a ghost town around this time. And I take advantage of it. I didn't do anything that special on New Year's Eve, just wandered around my area aimlessly. |
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2012 Tsoi Lives! Here's an article I'm fairly proud of about Viktor Tsoi, the half-Korean who became one of the USSR's most influential rock musicians. The article presents a pretty decent timeline of his career, although some of the live recordings are obviously newer than the albums they were on, and I placed his "Boiler Room Commander" song out of order for narrative purposes. |
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16 January 2012 Cats Just cats. |
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15 January 2012 The Death Door I happened to pick up a random magazine that had an article about Sangsu, and it mentioned an abandoned neighbourhood I hadn't known about in the area. Coincidentally, I was in touch with the photographer Rhee Kanghee earlier that day, and it turned out he used to live there. I managed to find where his home used to be, only to discover it had been knocked down only days earlier. |
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14 January 2012 Hongdae After a long day of exploring, we went to Hongdae where we visited a few places and spent quite a lot more money than we should. |
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14 January 2012 North Ahyeon I went back to North Ahyeon, this time with my tripod and with Jaeeun. We ended up finding a ton of new stuff, despite the fact the whole area was crawling with workers. |
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8 January 2012 North Ahyeon It was a surprisingly quick (and downhill) walk to North Ahyeon, which I'd previously given up on, thinking it was too far gone. But actually there's still a lot to see in the area, and we had considerably less trouble than we'd received the previous day. |
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8 January 2012 Class E Apartment We went up the hill by Seodaemoon to visit the jolly green apartment. We also wanted to hit up the nearby abandoned daycare, which has been totally sealed up now, and the ancient house that's been long abandoned and turned into a garden, but there was a woman doing her laundry on a nearby rooftop. |
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8 January 2012 Red-Light District We went back to the red-light district, where all the buildings I knew were gone. On the bright side, we found several new ones instead. |
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7 January 2012 Hongdae After a long day of exploring, we went to Hongdae. The first stop was an old factory that had been turned into a quite good coffee house. The counter was made out of an old conveyor belt machine, and the walls were bare concrete. Something I hope to see a lot more of in Korea in the future. It reminded me kind of of Space Beam but run as a business, and quite successful. Following that we stopped by Sangsang Madang where I gave a tour from top to bottom. Number 1 Korean were putting on a show on the third floor where there was an indie label market, and I found a ton of CDs I wanted. Then we met Jesse at Danginri Theatre, where we played with a dog whose name I'm always forgetting. |
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7 January 2012 Illiteracy Hill After we were finished in the first abandoned neighbourhood, we took a short walk to the next one. This is what I miss not living in Seongdong-gu anymore. The second one is just a ridge between an elevated road and a couple apartment complexes. It's quite attractive when viewed from above. Down into it, most of the homes had doors ripped off and then hammered back in place as makeshift barriers. We had a brief tour of some of Korea's dumbest apartment names, passing a We've complex, and in the picture linked here you can see an iwant complex in the background. |
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7 January 2012 I want to plat with you Two friends were visiting from abroad, so I invited them both on a trip around an abandoned neighbourhood. Vega was visiting from Japan, and Stephanie is most of the way through a trip around the world. Also, Chris was somewhere in the vicinity, trying to find us and hopefully having a good time in the process. We had a few run-ins throughout the visit. The first was an elderly woman who seemed cool with us being there. Next were two guys who may have been hired goons who were displeased with our presence, and the third was a dude carrying a golf club who seemed particularly bothered by our presence. We left quickly and circled around to see a bit more. |
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31 December 2011 New Year's Eve Well it was quite a challenge managing 14 bands in one night, especially when the show didn't start until after 9:30. My original hope was that most of the bands would be playing short sets, but many of the bands with shorter sets took extra long setting up. The original plan was to have Chanter's Alley on stage at midnight, and they had their bagpipes ready for Auld Lang Syne, but we were a little over half an hour behind schedule. Scumraid came on stage at 11:30 and managed to stretch it out until midnight, and it looked like they intended to keep playing through without doing a countdown. I had to jump on stage and do the countdown despite the fact that no one in the room had any kind of clock that counted seconds. We celebrated 2012 about seven seconds too early. Anyway, we had 98 paying guests, which is definitely a record for me. Oh yeah, also I released the Best of Broke in Korea. I still have several copies left, as I really wasn't thinking about handing them out for most of the night. |
LINKS
CONTACT
Jon underscore Dunbar at Hotmail
Please remember that these photos are all copyrighted to me. If you want to use them in any way, there's a 90 per cent chance I'll give you my permission, and be able to give you a copy with a higher DPI.Copyright Daehanmindecline 2004
Photos taken by
Nikon CoolPix 950
digital camera.