I have some bad news. BWB has to renovate their space and will likely move the studio elsewhere, which means I will not be dancing for a while.

Fear not. I will be trying out a new area I have been digging for a while. In fact, it is kind of surprising that I did not start with this at first since it’s the dance form Korean is most popular for: b-boying.

Although it would awesome to start immediately, things like the Christmas holiday and New Year’s will probably delay the start so I likely will not be talking about dance for a while. However, the week was a really nice set of practices and our last class was just 90 minutes of straight freestyling and feeling the music, what really got me into dance in the first place. Followed by an awesome meal courtesy of my instructor, Double-D. Yeah, he’s 정말 훌륭하다.

Festivities actually got started early this week as my lab had dinner and drinks with another lab group. This was the first time I actually got to interact with other lab personnel in an intimate setting. It was also the first time I would drink with my lab P.I. In fact, it’s the first I ever had a drink with a professor and his drink of choice was Black Label. Talk about a heavyweight. Here we were enjoying 한우 소고기 (Hanwoo beef) and scotch in one of the finest Korean 맛집 I have ever been in and it was all in the company of some of the smartest folks I have met in my academic career. Koreans are also very well known for their drinking habits and I have no idea who’s idea it was to wash our palettes with more drinks and desserts at a bar, but we did.

Pretty much a good way to start off 연말 (the end of the year). As the year comes to a close and the weather continues to get colder (insert rage here), I guess I should hit a topic that I should have talked about way earlier: fashion. Koreans are pretty big on it and I say they really set off the trends in the East Asia region. (I say this in particular after having been to Japan and Taiwan and meeting many other folk from East Asia within Korea; Koreans just tend to fashion better even if it makes everyone appear not unique in their choices.)

Let’s talk about winter wear in particular. Korea is pretty darn cold country and the wind chill makes the wind bite. My faces stings within the few moments that I step outside. So I often wear a beanie. BUT NO KOREANS WEAR BEANIES. Okay, that is a bit of an exaggeration but if you want to keep up with what’s “in” here, you never ever wear winter headgear, but you must always rock some fur (whether faux or not) as part of your outer. Oversized ski jackets are quite popular as shown below, like even the kids are doing it!

As always sporty/outdoorsy clothing seem to be quite popular year round here. However, the other extreme of super chic is also the norm here, and regardless of gender, everyone takes part.

This is by no means an expert analysis but I think with those few photos alone, we covered a lot of ground. Blogging is quite popular in Korea and a good number of them are into fashion. Two of my favorite ones in particular are Tumblr-based and relatively hipsters but I can assure you their choices are often very much tasteful: http://www.streetper.com/ and http://iamalexfinch.net/

Since we are in the topic of fashion, I think many see that word and see it as a gendered term and particularly feminine. Now, the gender debate is something I feel I don’t have enough knowledge to absolutely enter. I prefer people call themselves whatever they please and other people respect those wishes, but I also think keeping a record of one’s biological sex (whether XX, XY, XXY, XXX, X-Y, and so on and so forth) is kept on record for medical reasons. However, the gendering of ideas and behaviors is socially inappropriate. People often joke only women and gay men know high fashion. I feel that stereotype ties in well with why we need feminism to dismantle gender stereotypes. Korea has huge gender problem. I will not get to much further into it but I highly recommend the following blog if you want to get an idea on the evolution of feminism in Korea and frankly, on Korea in general because this blog is damn good: http://thegrandnarrative.com/