Korean television

I was blessed with 78 channels of cable TV programming in my apartment. That's probably not a good thing though, since I could be doing better things with my time, like studying Korean and reading worthwhile books. But who has time for that?! As far as I can tell, Korean television consists mostly of terrible talk shows where people laugh at the most inane things. I'm sure if I knew what they were saying, I would find it mildly amusing. I'm sure foreigners in the US probably would think the same thing about the shows we watch. (Except "The Jersey Shore," which I hear is equally awesome and awful. I'm so jealous of everyone that gets to watch those dudes fist-pump like champs). The Korean shows usually have guys like these two pictured below who mug for the camera.

I've seen one show quite a few times where two Korean comics walk around NYC asking people in broken English if they know about Korean food, such as kim chi. I'm not sure what the point of the show really is. Another interesting thing is the home shopping networks in Korea, which are on multiple channels. They often advertise exercise equipment, and always show the actual sweat that is coming off of the models. They make a point of continuously showing close-ups of the beads of sweat on these people, almost as if to say, "This is really working. They're sweating!" Also, a lot of the shows have panel-style seating, such as the one shown below. According to the blog I got this picture from, the theme of this particular episode was allergies, such as peanuts and seafood. They also discussed sports and fruit. Riveting TV.

Besides all this regular TV that I see, I get somewhere between 4-8 channels of English-language programming, depending on the time of day. There is a fashion channel that I hardly watch (no really, you have to believe me, I don't watch it. I swear!), a Discovery channel, a National Geographic channel, a channel dedicated to men's volleyball and soccer, and an awesome channel that only shows American action movies and Ultimate Fighting. It's like Spike TV, only if Spike TV didn't show "Bloodsport" and "Kickboxer" 5 times a day. My testosterone level raises just watching this channel for a split-second.

Anyways, on my second day at school, I was sitting at lunch with the other teachers, and they are talking about me again in Korean. I can tell because they are gesturing at me and giving me a generally positive look. Then one guy, who is going off on something at lightning speed, all of a sudden says, "He looks like Bruce Willis!!!" I'll take any compliment I can, I guess. So I go home that night, flip on the super macho action movie channel, and what is on, but a movie with Bruce Willis. I don't even know what it was called, but I thought it was a fitting end to my day.