Internet Famous
If you haven’t watched his video by now, you either lead a busy, respectable life or you live under a rock.
For those of you who fall in either category, Matt Harding is just a regular American guy who took clips of himself dancing in random places all throughout the world. He put it in a video and set it to music and it became a hit. It caught the attention of the media; from the news, NPR and of course the venerable Ellen Degeneres Show. To make a long story short, he is traveling to make a third video, this time with the sponsorship of Stride gum and the time and energy of dorky volunteers from the Matt Harding fanbase.
Matt was scheduled to be in Seoul and film in front of Namdehmoon (south gate) on the 29th at 6PM but he was at Dongdehmoon instead. (East gate) So there were a bunch of us waiting for him on Tuesday. After a half hour, we decided to film without him. It was a lot of fun actually; it must have been posted on youtube somewhere by now. It was nice to meet and chat with all these different people and talk about what they were doing in Seoul. I met a really nice German woman who taught German at a university and her gregarious friend who is teaching music and has been in Seoul for 5 1/2 years. As I said many times before, it is easy to make a lot of interesting friends here.
here’s a bunch of us wondering WHERETHEHELLISMATT?
Apparently Matt sent an apologetic email the next day, explaining that when he realized he was at the wrong place, he ran over to Namdehmoon but found very few people left. He arranged to try to shoot the video again on Thursday the 31st at 10.
This time Matt was there. We took a few shots dancing, took some pics, talked some, and went home. It was nice to meet him; he’s really personable and courteous. It felt like there were more people the first time around on Tuesday and as I was talking to someone I met then, we thought that Tuesday actually seemed more fun. I guess its because this time around we were taking instruction from someone but when Matt wasn’t there, it was completely spontaneous and we didn’t know what the heck we were doing but it was ok.
Just another night in Seoul.
Here’s an unflattering pic of Matt with harsh flash
He looks more like ‘Matt’ here but it is blurry
oh and this is a tribute to my student (but my older ‘brother’) Inkyu who pointed out that I had no pictures of him on my blog:
My cousin introduced me to Inkyu, who is a professional pool player and he’s really eager to learn English as he plans to compete internationally. He is also a very ambitious businessman who owns a couple pool halls and plans to open more. Â I hope he does well in everything he pursues. ^^