Amanda Takes Off...

Yesterday, at the tournament, Master gave me very detailed directions to get to his Cyworld page.

I'm actually mostly unsure of what Cyworld is except that it's very poular in Korea along with Nate (Cyworld's parent company), Naver, and Daum. These websites seem to be the Yahoo!, Google, FaceBook, and MySpace pages of Korea from what I can tell. According to this recent article about 30% of Koreans have a Cyworld page. That is 30% of the entire population. Amongst teens and twentysomethingers, it's 90%.

At any rate, one of Korea's weird "We're Really Still The Hermit Kingdom Despite Having One of The Best Economy's in the World" traits is that it's darn near impossible for foreigners—even ones with ARC cards and residency numbers—to register for websites here. That's slowly changing, but I couldn't get to Master's Cyworld page because I wasn't registered.

Oddly enough, I hadn't even gotten a chance to tell him this when he told me to come downstairs to his office with him. He took 40 minutes to try and get me registered with Cyworld, which included having to scan my Korean driver's license. Meanwhile, he browsed my photo albums and showed me some great photos he took this weekend, his wife greeted me and gave us some fruit to snack on, and his daughter took my cell phone and stood in front of the mirror babbling away (she kept saying my name).

It seems that my registration will be cleared in a week or so.

I suppose if I spend any time on Cyworld at all, my Korean will only be helped. At any rate, maybe I'll ask Cocky to take me to a PCBang and teach me how to use it. I have to add Master as an ilchon or something like that because he's expecting it.

Yes, Master, a Cyworld registration. Drag me further into the Korean fold, eh?

In other news, he informed me that I would be tested on my ability to do the splits on the 24th. I laughed and muttered in English, "Oh, that's funny, Master. Oh, straight, huh? Yeah, OK." He just grinned at me and said, "OK? OK?" I just nodded and smiled back.

I can only get my 32" inseam legs 60" apart.

I have some work to do...