Hallyu Camaraderie

This is SOOO funny!

I logged into MSN at half past mid-night, after a long dinner with the boss and the Trends department. Someone buzzed me - it's Harry, from way back. He used to help us with technical issues regarding video production, AV setup and DVD authoring. Gosh, I couldn't imagine why he'd wanted to buzz me, if he still remembered who I was. It turned out that it was his wife, mistaking me for one of her cousins who is a K-drama fan based on the MSN picture of Kim Sam Soon that I had.

We spent several moments chatting, exchanging tips on the latest and best dramas to catch... why everyone is so into Goong, I cannot comprehend. My sister bought the VCD (technically I was the buyer because I paid for it in a moment's folly!) and it's now making its rounds in our circle of friends. Sis watched it, but with the remote control close by. She was forwarding the discs more often than actually sitting through a scene. Myself? I caught some parts, but hmm... let's just say they did not justify my sitting still in front of the tv for a full 5 minutes. See, I am not so immersed in the Hallyu yet - I practise selective viewing. Only Kim Sam Soon works for me, or most shows with Hyun Bin in it, I guess.

Currently, I am tuned in to The Snow Queen, an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, which some say, is also inspired by the suicide of the youngest daughter of Samsung's chief last year. There is only Chinese subtitles, so it's really testing my skills in comprehending the dialogue and making sense of the story. So far, I'm following it fine. It seems interesting enough to have me want to keep watching, and actually piques me as to how a genius with everything going for him could spin out of control and spiral downwards in life.

Even though the ending is predictively tragic (since the heroine is terminally-ill and the hero seems to have lost his fighting spirit - coincidentally, he is a boxer), it may not necessarily be so. It could turn out to be a story about love, loss and the courage to pick up the broken pieces and put them back together again, to once again realise its true potential. That would be a good twist, for everyone is predicting a tragic ending, as Andersen would have liked it.

Speaking of Andersen, my colleague and I were so goofy, scouring the streets of Copenhagen for the Hans Christian Andersen store that we spotted on the city map when we were there for a presentation in Lund (Sweden) in September. We later found it tucked into a corner on the 4th level of a departmental store, much to our disappointment. We had imagined it to be housed in a grand 16th century cottage-style building made of stones with a roaring fireplace while mobils and clay models adorn the mantelpiece. Alas, what we found was quite a departure from what we had in mind. Nevertheless, we bought a mobil each, just to commemorate that little escapade into the cobble-stoned streets of Copenhagen on our first business trip to Europe :)