Tag: vacation

Realized freedom

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t hidden the fact that things have been kind of really rough for me lately.  Between working on my house in preparation for departure, on top of a change in work organization led to some pretty intense weeks of working non-stop at work, followed by working non-stop while not at my job, reducing me to a physically and emotionally drained shell of a human being that was incapable of thinking of anything but dark and negative things for a minute.

Things have loosened up lately, and things have definitely taken a turn for the better, fortunately.  Assignments at work have been completing and falling off my already-full plate, leading me to see the light in the tunnel that the busy period of the year are weeks closer to becoming a seasonal thing of the past.  Everything pertaining to the house, physically, are completed and the matters of listing, selling and moving it are out of my hands and are not so much my concern anymore.

Within the span of two weeks, I went from needing every single minute and hour of the day in order to work, to realizing that I now have occasional minutes and hours of the day to suddenly burn.

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The obligatory 2016 year in review post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Frankly, I don’t much feel like writing lately.  I’ve been leaning on the crutch of trying to find an intriguing story to me with hopes of sparking some motivation to write, and opting to not force the issue and not writing anything if nothing emerges.  Otherwise, I haven’t felt particularly driven to write, and it’s safe to assume that when I’m not busy, have plans or something to do, I’ve kind of been in this depressed state of being, where my life simply kind of feels like it’s on hold and I’m not particularly happy with my life.

But as far as I can observe, that seems to be a general sentiment felt by many, as 2016 comes to a merciful close – not particularly happy.  Make no mistake, whether you believe a narrative can be conveniently encapsulated within a calendar year, or if it’s coincidental to be insulated within twelve particular months, 2016 was a pretty rough year.  Maybe it was because of the litany of celebrity deaths, from Prince, David Bowie to the seemingly endless coverage of Carrie Fisher.  Maybe it’s because of the election of a president that is a known bigot, sexist and racist and the dread of knowing that he will be in charge of the country for at least the next four years.  Maybe it’s the ever-growing dredge and pessimism and ‘if it bleeds it leads’ mentality of the media and the social shitstorm it brews over social media, leading to this endless cycle of negatively connoted news we’re incessantly exposed to.  Maybe it’s because in our own personal lives, we’ve dealt with loss, bad news, or diminished feelings of hope for the future at the home front.

Or maybe it’s a little bit of all of the above, or any combination of such.  Who really knows, but it goes without saying that for most of the people in my own little world, the negative outweighed the good by a tremendous margin, and that notion in itself is why I’m one of the many that is looking forward to 2016 ending, and hoping that 2017 might just be a little bit better.

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This is me lately

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Minus the caffeine pill addiction, but it’s how I feel way more often than naught.

I have a lot of things that I feel I need to do: edit down nearly 2,000 pictures from Europe and Korea.  Write about experiences in Korea.  Build a prop.  Take care of household chores, like replacing the kitchen light and paring down the shrubs.  Write some more, about random, inane things for a brog that’s been down since fucking April, that nobody will see until I migrate my site.  Clean my house, so that I can someday sell my house.  I need a haircut.

So what do I do?  Write about how I feel like I don’t have enough time, or any time, instead.

In my defense, I am currently not in a place where I can do much of my self-imposed workload, although I could write about Korea but I was there for two weeks how can i parse it all down to a few words???

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Korea Stories: Random Observations

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The following is more or less going to be a list of random observations I made while in Korea that didn’t really fit into the mold of any one chunk of posts.  That being said, it’s also indicative that I’m pretty much at the end of the rope when it comes to writing about my experiences in Korea.

Internet is as good as you’ve probably heard: When you use the internet in Korea, coming back to America and using my Comcast “high-speed” service that I pay a premium penny for on a monthly basis feels like going from a jet to a Ford Festiva.  Wi-fi, at a public hotel, with many users concurrently connected, was still pulling 60 down and 60 up, speeds that rival my own private connection, hard-wired.  And it was like that everywhere I went; I know, because out of curiosity, I was running the SpeedTest app just to see how good Korean internet speeds were.

Cabs are dirt cheap.  I was often doing math in my head while in Korea in regards to trying to find the USD equivalent of everything I was spending.  It’s easiest to round up or down, to where it’s a 1 to 1,000 when converting a dollar to Korean Won, so basically chopping off the last three digits was the easiest to rationalize the dollar amount of things.  I rode in a lot of cabs, because after the amount I was walking, sometimes I just didn’t want to hoof it for more miles to get to the nearest train station.  But whereas in the States, a cab ride for just a few blocks easily ticks its way to $10 and up, I was baffled to see how often times a cab ride for a considerable distance, often started at roughly $3, and only once did I spend more than $10 on a cab ride, and that was a good distance.

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Photos: Korea Trip 2016, batch 4

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note] These are unposted photos from 2016, the fourth of four galleries of my first-ever trip to the Motherland, that I took with my mother.

The tour group concluded with a trip to Seoraksan (Mount Seorak) before it was back to Seoul, where my mom and I settled into another AirBnB for the last few days of our trip.

Admittedly, as much as I loved my time in Seoul, I really was feeling like I had begun to see a lot of the city and having done countless hours wandering and seeing shopping center after shopping center, I was ready to go home.

Hilariously, my mom reached out to some other old friends in the area, and extended her own stay for another two weeks, but I was most definitely ready to head back to the states.  It was an unforgettable first-time in Korea, and I have nothing but great memories and appreciation for seeing my culture in its native land.

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Photos: Korea Trip 2016, batch 3

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note] These are unposted photos from 2016, the third of four galleries of my first-ever trip to the Motherland, that I took with my mother.

After a few more days on Jeju Island, the tour brought us back to the mainland where I thought we would just go back to Seoul, but instead we landed in Busan, where we would begin a road trip up the Korean peninsula visiting various towns and cities on the way.

After capitalizing in Busan, finding the League of Legends pop-up store, I caught up with the rest of the tour group and from there it was Geongju, Pohang and Pyeongchang, seeing all sorts of sights from seas of country, to even a brief stop inside a cavern.

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Korea Stories: League of Legends

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of in to League of Legends.

And as much as I’m typically opposed to doing stuff like playing the same game I could play back at home, there was a part of me that was really curious to find out what League would be like in Korea, the region of the world in which the talent is undisputedly the greatest and where the competitive scene is respected and regarded as a legitimate, money-making spectator sport.

I wanted to try playing League of Legends on the Korean server and see what the differences were.  And surely, in the part of the world where League is so highly regarded, I should be able to find some cool League merch, or some professional League gaming team swag, right?

It started out pretty amusingly, when I got to Korea.  Through international roaming, my phone piggybacked onto whatever provider would allow it, and in the case of being in Korea, my phone immediately latched onto an SK Telecom signal.  Now this might seem like no big deal to the vast majority of people, since SK is one of South Korea’s corporate giants that have their fingers in just about every possible business venture from petroleum to telecommunications, but to a League fan, SK is primarily known as the company that owns SKT T1, basically the Chicago Bulls or New York Yankees of the League competitive scene.  SKT has won two of the five world championships (and Korea didn’t play at all in year 1) and are in position to compete for a third, but they are undoubtedly the most prominent team in the entire world, when it comes to League.

Yeah, just connecting to SK Telecom cellular service elicits that much of a response.

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