South Korea and High Society

It have been some time since I wrote about my life. Things have been rather routine the past month. I'll start with my visit to South Korea in December. I really did enjoy the whole trip from 24th till 31st December with my family. Every year, my family would keep it in mind to travel to at least one destination we have not been to. There was Beijing, China, the Middle East (UAE, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia), Thailand, Indonesia and of course, Malaysia. This year my family plans to head to Turkey and Saudi Arabia if I am not mistaken.

South Korea is a strange culture. Strange as in it is awesome and surreal to an average study oriented Singaporean like me. Maybe it is because I only saw a certain side of Korea but even then I am really amazed. Out in the streets, young couples walk on the pavements visiting cafes and heading off to shops, huddled together in the wintry cold. Couples. Many of them. I rarely did saw children or families. And these lovelies were having fun. Our tour guide and translator, Mr Hong, told us that South Korea is very materialistic and social. Everyone must have connections and friends. They join all kinds of clubs; volleyball, basketball or squash. They want to do something and they want to have fun. But I  do wonder what happens if you do not have connections or don't join clubs. A culture in South Korea is that a person have to meet up with their friends at the end of the year as a sign that we are friends for the next year and forever. "He never invite me. I am not his friend anymore. When you get married, you want many people to come to your wedding. The more people, the more friends. People will say wow he have connections," Mr Hong gave a description of the elitism, can I call that?, in the country. Which is why there is the widely popular Hallyu culture. K Pop, Korean Dramas. Every Korean envisioned they want to be a Korean star. They undergo plastic surgery. Cosmetics. Dance schools. They want to live the dream. I think it is similar as to how we see Hollywood stars and how we want to live their High Life. Koreans are beautiful people, in my opinion. They are really pretty, how their skin glows and their facial features are just mesmerizing to behold. When Koreans come to our land we nudge our friend, "Eh, Koreans..." They really do reflect their society which I found so superficial, thus strange. It is so socially competitive. Their society is so focused on the value of this world I wonder if moral values such as compassion and family ties can be preserved. Afterall, most Koreans are freethinkers. Youth dominates their beliefs. I guess that made Korea such an alluring and magical place.

I went to Seoul, Nami Island, Mt Seorak and Pyeongchang-gun. Gosh, it is beautiful. The air is clean. The weather being winter is extremely cold. To compare, it is colder than the winter in Israel. The temperature ranges from -5 to 5 degrees. On my last day in Seoul, it snowed. Such soft and beautiful snow! Away from the capital, Korea have many beautiful spots. Mount Seorak for example. Korean wives and girlfriends would drag their husbands and boyfriends to one of the natural getaways during the weekends resulting in full bookings up Mt, Seorak. The view there is breathtaking. We took a cable car up to the mountain and watched the sun go down before taking a cable car ride down. Another place I have to mention is Nami Island, the filming site of Winter Sonata. The walking roads lined with straight pine trees... The expansive and simply beautiful sea around the island. The tranquility and beauty of the snow covered island is the definition of a romantic getaway. With soft music playing in the background of the main roads... I managed to watch the whole of Winter Sonata and I am thankful I did. I remember the filming sites and I could imagine how Joon Sang and Yujin had their playful and magical moments there. This was where they stood or lay down in the snow or made a snowman. Also, on one of the days, we went to Yongpyang Ski resort which would host the 2018 Winter Olympics. Instead of opting to ski, because we skied in Beijing before and it was not too fond a memory, we went on a gondola ride up the ski mountain at Pyeongchang-gun. And it turns out the peak was THE CABLE CAR place in the story Winter Sonata.

In the story a ski resort was being built by Joon Sang and Yujins companies and one day they went to inspect the restaurant located at the top of the mountain. Well, this is the place we were at. Very nostalgic. Other unforgettable memories includes exploring Seoul on our own on the 2nd last day. We took the underground railway system. Went to a hot spring bath with my brother Aliff on our own. After checking in, I heard Mr Hong mentioning to check the hot spring baths here. But it was late then and everyone was tired. At 9pm I asked my roomie, my brother, to lets head down to the underground hotsprings. At only 6000 won, about $8, we entered the hotspring. It was huge! 6 pools of varying mixtures and temperature. Everyone was naked. Of course the females and male were separated. But the male pools were huge. There was a Pine bath, an Alkaline bath, a cold carbonated bath, a cold waterfall bath, a normal hot bath, 2 sauna rooms one at 54 degrees the other at 72 degrees. and a purple bath which we do not know what is in it but nobody seems to go into it. It was a fun experience. I should have taken pictures but I think it would look perverted seeming as everyone's private parts were hanging out freely. Shopping at Dongdaemun and Hajadoe, visit to the Trickeye and Ice museum, catching an amazing drama, Cookin Nanta at the Nanta theatre, a stopover at a lighthouse, went to the base of the Seoul Tower. It is indeed a fun experience and I would gladly do all of it over again and without a tour group this time. I would gladly experience these with my friends and my future girlfriend/wife.

However, now I am back in Singapore. Straight back to work actually on 1st January. Something which I am not sure I am allowed to talk about occurred at work recently and it have left me partly scared, partly angry. It involves innocent parties and an uncontrolled irrational moment which tore relationships apart. It drove me to write the article on Law and Punishment... Frankly I spent a lot of my time at home. Reading a lot. Currently I am reading 36 Arguments to the existence of God, which is actually a fiction. I find it intriguing and complex. The words used by the author is so "atas". I had to refer to Google to find its definitions. I am also reading "Introducing Linguistics" and Singapore Business Law. Also I am watching Arrow, currently at the 2nd season. It is an addictive and great series, where the ending of one episode compels you to want to find out what is next, so you watch the next one. Something like reading a Dan Brown novel. But it is a great series, truly.

Music Hunters. Dope.

 Last Saturday night I went to Altimate at OneRafflesPlace with Sean and his friend Ben. They somehow managed to get all of us into the guestlist of the club, which means we went in for free. One phrase. High Class Society. It is so posh and high class! The bar/restaurant/club is located at the 61st floor overlooking the city. I can see the Esplanade and the Singapore Flyer. The people there are the high society. When we were queuing to get into the lift that would take us into the club, Mediacorp artiste Zhang Zhenhuan was queuing behind us. Standing right behind me in fact. The people who flock there are expats, English-accented females, office workers, bankers, SPGs and rich youths. Upon seeing two extremely handsome half angmoh half chinese boys flocked with beautiful girls in the queue, we told each other we are way out of their leagues over here. NSFs. Pah. Dj Andrew from Butter Factory was playing and the music was good. That was what we are that night. Music hunters. I had fun that night. There was a group of girls, 3, which is just nice, who were interested in us. We were enjoying ourselves. But one thing I admit, I really suck at approaching girls. Earlier on, I approached two Koreans asking for a dance. They politely rejected. These 3 girls, 1 in a black dress whom I find particularly attractive were rejecting other guys when they approached and kept eyeballing us trio. I didn't know what I should do! They clearly wanted to join us. One of the girl, in white, later on that night was grinding me, not the other way round. But I was not interested in her. I excused myself to the toilet. When none of us made a move, because for one we were enjoying the music ourselves and were distracted with ourselves anyway, the girls rejected other men advances and they left. 5 times. They left 5 times and they came back 5 times to dance with us. Wow. And we didn't make a move. Eventually found out only some things from the girl in white. The girl in white is Annabelle and they were all 20 years old. I don;t know why I couldn't bring myself to freaking let them in. Was it because of the earlier rejection, the fact that we are in a place out of our league or that I have some psychological barrier which didn't want me to let them in. I fear its the last... Something is holding me back.

Anyway, this will not let me down. This high society, one day I will achieve this and stand normally among their ranks. A person of respect but yet with humility. As Ben later on said, not as a Music Hunter here, but a Pussy Slayer. Hahaha. Until next time.

We perceive patterns in life

We do. Every single decision, every single time. But the patterns do not come from us. We derive it from what is around us. Our world is made up of algorithms. Of structure, of routines. There are calculations and physical quantities to be defined all around us. We only extract some of it which we felt is important and we use it. It really is not perceiving patterns in life, but rather perceiving patterns of life.

When something new and random appeared or is formulated, we catagorise them, dissect them and give it a pattern which is acceptable to what we believe is possible. We make the unexplained explained by giving it a rule which our brains tell us is possible to occur.

The world is actually made up of theories. Many people have noticed this. And many more have made contributions to this. Reality is made up of laws and rules conceived by human thought and subjected to human classification. Economics is full of theories to explain how things are in the world but they do get wrong several times. Physics is a more better and philosophical example. The way we can touch , bend and push objects around us is considered classical physics. We understand the world and we invented rules which made sense to us because we "proved" it possible. The mind believes that the rule is concrete. We invented measurements, the King's Measurement, the metric system, and we believed in it to tell us about something. Measurement is a theory. A useful one. We explained how the table we study on is made up of tightly bonded atoms closely packed together making it solid. We explained how water is not as solid and we are able to pass through it because its molecules are not as tightly bonded. Then we look into the subatomic level in quantum mechanics and we discover that the world acts in a whole different way in the minuscule level. Probability confuses us and infuriates us. How electrons cannot be ascertained where they are at any one point. We want to know how. Even "probability" is invented by a person to define what is "uncertain" yet certain to occur. The man being Blaise Pascal who founded mathematical game theory when a gambler asked him for some rules to govern rational game tabling. We try to make sense of our world.

How do we learn to speak when we are young? Linguists have studied this topic for years. The first theory - then again we are dwelling on theories- put out by B. F. Skinner in his book Verbal behavior in 1957 is that we derive speech from mimicking the people around us. A mother said, "mummy... mumm... meee" and the infant miraculously replied, "mummy!". If this was right, then children should produce random approximations of adult speech and should make more or less random errors. But this is not true. Studies have shown children acquired language in a very orderly way. Consider English past tenses. {Love/loved, wash/washed, smile/smiled}. But English past tenses have irregularities. {see/saw, take/took, give/gave}. At first, children learn the irregular forms like saw, took and gave. But then they learn the other regular forms and something clicked. They begin saying taked and seed instead of took and saw. They found a rule to govern past tense naturally which is adding the -ed at the back of verbs and only after learning the irregularity rule, they learn the correct form again. Another example is the acquisition of negation in language. Ultimately, most linguists have concluded that we are born with a biological language faculty. We are born to create and perceive patterns.

An everyday example. How do we grade examinations or mark test papers? We have a "model answer". One in which we compare with and mark against based on what have been written on the sampled script. An easy way to mark is by referencing key points or key phrases between the student's work and the model script. A key point found, a mark given. The approach to answering long Economics essay questions is also similar. When I was new to Economics, I used to answer my questions by simply answering the question directly without any structure. I didn't know they had one. And obviously I scored pretty badly. I was given "sample essays" to read and I noticed a structure to write my answer. It brought me to remember how I was taught in primary school to write a composition with "A Beginning, A Body and an End." In Chemistry or Physics, even if we understood something, to explain something, we must write key words to earn that point. In some ways, a system is required for clarification or all our thoughts and answers would be "all over the place" and misunderstood by other observers. Some see this would result in conformity and a restriction on creation and innovation. But actually, the answer as we know it is already concrete. The 'model answer' or "proven theory" are understood by these key phrases as it projects a clear image of the theorised truth. If we confuse them, we are just confusing and mixing up the patterns in the "proven world". The pattern we conceive with our self understood ideas could either be a different and still correct pattern in this world or it could be a jumbled up wrong mess unworthy of being a "correct pattern".

So what about then if something new is created? Is it possible? We hate the unknown. We make sense of it. Yes, it is possible to create something "new". "New" because it was never thought and never heard of but it have existed. Or at least it have the potential to exist all this while. The newest language formed in today's world is the Nicaraguan Sign Language(NSL) formed in 1979 when the then new Nicaraguan government brought hundreds of isolated deaf children from the old regime together in a special school. In the same way any languages are created, a rudimentary and crude language is first created. A pidgin as it is called. It is limited and poor for communication but the people managed to utilise it and develop it. Then they have children and the children learn the language thus becoming its first native speakers. Soon, like NSL, it becomes sophisticated enough to be used up till this day. Similarly when Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone which revolutionised the mobile phone industry. Did we create these? Phones, languages, buildings... In my opinion, we didn't. What we did was to piece together things which have already existed and create a pattern which is conceivable and useful to us. We aligned the patterns in these world to suit and help us. We take a rudimentary algorithm already from the world and we made it more and more sophisticated. The better of us search for nicer and better patterns to a same problem. Example lifts instead of stairs. In a perspective, the world is a pre-created solution which we are just using to make newer better solutions.

The world is a pre-created entity. We form rules to understand and prove it. And we use the rules and algorithm to better our lives. There are still some things which we cannot put a law or rule to. Things which are inconceivable to our mind and esoteric to our beliefs. Miracles. Religion. God. Our Soul. One question I am curious is "Does our destiny or the future have a law to it, like a pattern or a script, complex yet solid?" If it is true, it agrees to the notion that we are where we are because we are meant to be here.  My life and what is happening is real. A person named Wan is typing this on a computer and he have a past and a present. Living. Thinking. Here. We are learning how we think. but can we find the solution why we can think in the first place? Is there an algorithm to a thought? I don't know. And maybe we will never know. But it is interesting to keep finding for the real Truth. Until then, we just continue formulating and creating more patterns and rules and hypothesis to understand and "create" this world.

Law and Punishment

People make mistakes. It happens. And because it is a mistake, it was, until later on, unforeseeable and unintentional. Once they know they have made a mistake (pleaded guilty in formal cases), the next definitive step is punishment.

Punishment. It does have a nasty ring to it. It is two sides of a coin to argue if punishment is necessary. Recently, the past few months at least, I had encountered with this sticky argument about punishment, its effects and its desired outcome. Punishment is meant to first, make a person realise their mistake and second, to deter them from making that mistake again. So, as long as these two criteria is cleared, then punishment have served its purpose. But punishment have been proven to not work on some, if not many, people. These includes repeat offenders and those that confess that they were in the right.

I always thought punishment have to be done, but it have to be to the minimal. What is important is the heart and the way of thinking. One reason a repeat offender would continually do crime is not due to punishment being too light, but that they have a baggage somewhere, elsewhere, outside most likely. It could be a grudge, an insatiable addiction or in some cases, I've heard from first hand experience, fear of the outside world more than the fear of the four enclosed but safe walls they currently hole in. Punishment, in these cases, could either fuel their grudge, vendetta or create a worsening of their bad addiction as it is prolonged. The problem lies in the thinking; of remorse, understanding and what is just in their mindset. A sentence my paracounselor told some of us which I find it strikingly, beautifully true, he said, "I know that whatever you are, a gangster or what, everyone really do have a good heart" Sounds like what Anne Frank had said. Take away the corruption of the heart and people are really, naturally good. The solution is to change the heart by touching the soul and affect the way of believing. Talk to them, understand them and then the most crucial and hard step. Convince them. "You are right, understandable. But what you did is wrong." Contradictory statement. But ultimately true.

Another scenario is when a person knows he is in the wrong and on hindsight, they know they should not have done what they had done. That person is extremely apologetic. It was careless. Unreasonable on their part. They want to make amends, any way possible. Should punishment be served? Yes, by law and also to satisfy the victim and those related. But the person is almost certain not to do the crime again. It is not fear that is preventing him back. It is conscious conscience. These cases are heart-wrenching. It ruins lives and it is not worth the crime nor the punishment. A long time ago, Courts of Chancery, often presided by churchmen were established during the years when common law tradition was beginning to take shape and root in the European background. They were guided more by principles of conscience and fairness rather than technical legal rules. These laws of equity are used today, infused in the common law courts of UK and Singapore to name a few. Equity overrules law. The wrongdoer have to be treated justly.

Satisfy the victim and not do lasting and undeserving damage to the aggressor. If a decision by court is not equitable in any way to opposition or defendant, there is the Court of Appeal to review the punishment. There are even clauses whereby with "good behaviour" your sentencing is reduced. The law is what we make them to be. It have to be strict to be taken seriously by those with baggage, and yet reasonable to allow remorse and allow the good in people to shine. The Yellow Ribbon Project is one way to produce hope and allow the good in people's heart be shown and felt. Afterall, the way we treat people will be the way people treat us back. If someone is harsh to you and you treat them nicely, you somehow hold a leverage that you treated him nicely. Because it is right to do so. Recently, the Singapore Government granted $2 million to be used for pro bono cases in court. This is admirable as it helps portray, even if a little, that the society is trying to do good and that you can trust the society.

Religion, arguably works along the same line of human made laws. Religion in some ways try to publish a law in which people are treated the right way. Initially there are no laws as it is, unless you believe that there is a predesigned law in the universe or similar to that matter. Hence, there are no right nor wrong. What is right or wrong have been a debated opinion for centuries. But essentially, a law must be in place in order for people to coexist and survive. Strength through community. The better people can coexist, the stronger they are. Now there are international laws which some disagree, hence they do not work so well together. If there is a universal set of law which everyone agrees on, religion is the closest example, the world would agree and not be so divided.