Events

SEOUL, South Korea -- Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, visited the National Assembly Monday and asked lawmakers to step up aid to developing countries, putting to use South Korea's experience of becoming the first recipient of foreign aid to become a donor country. 

BUSAN, South Korea -- The 'Masan Gagopa Festival' will raise its curtain in Masan Port ONE and Masan Music Hall on the first of May. This festival is to celebrate the one-hundred-fourteenth anniversary of the opening of Masan Port and to achieve civil unity and will be held for five days. 

On the first day of the festival, thirty kinds of cultural and art events will be held in Masan Port ONE starting from the ancestor ritual and the opening ceremony. 

In Masan Music Hall, various performance events including a Gukak concert, Masan Okwangdae performance and teenager dance festival will be held during the festival period.

Source: Busan eFM News

BUSAN, South Korea -- The landmark Nongshim Hotel, even after all these years, is a gem still surprises and captivates its guests. Case in point: Ristorante Geumjeong. Ristorante was designed by world renowned HBA/Hirsch Bedner Associates that have designed five star hotels from Aruba to Zanzibar in the most alluring destinations across the globe.

BUSAN, South Korea -- The free summer night movies at the Busan Cinema Center last year provided a special opportunity for movie lovers to enjoy a movie in the pleasant summer breeze. The free outdoor screenings will be presented again this year, every Tuesday at 8 pm from July through the second week of September, at the Busan Cinema Center, where Busan International Film Festival's opening and closing ceremonies are held every year. 

In addition, as a special event for the 2013 Spring Festival, free movies will also be presented on the third Tuesdays of April, May and June at 8 pm at the Center.  The films will be shown on a giant screen measuring 24 by 13 meters using state-of-the-art projection equipment.  

For more information, please contact the Busan Cinema Center at (051) 780-6000 or visit their website at www.dureraum.org . 

Film schedule:

BUSAN, South Korea -- A government survey showed that South Korean adults want to work until the age of sixty-four on average, but only fourteen percent of them are actively preparing to re-orient themselves in the job market after retirement. 

The survey of two-thousand adults, conducted by the state-run Korea Employment Information Service between October and November last year, said they hope to work until the age of sixty-three-point-nine on average. 

The survey found that only 14 percent of them are actively managing their career to help them transfer to new jobs after retiring from their primary careers. 

In South Korea, the average retirement age stands at fifty-eight.

Source: Busan eFM News

KAMKAM Design, Seoul

As their website states: We are in the dark, made of millions of colors, KAMKAM is the realized dream of Seoul designers Hyun-jin Seo and Jae-kyoung Kim who have seen their creations featured everywhere from Milan to London. Much of what they do is fabric-based (yes, even in tweed), stuff for kids' rooms and highly-stylized, though questionably functional, woodwork and metal pieces. www.kam-kam.org

BUSAN, South Korea -- TIES THAT BIND Asia - Europe Producers Workshop (TTB) announces ten participants for its 2013 program. Organised by Busan International Film Festival, the Udine Far East Film Festival, the Friuli Venezia Giulia Audiovisual Fund, and EAVE (European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs), the program brings together five producers with feature fiction projects from Asia and five from Europe to participate in two workshops.

BUSAN, South Korea -- Jay and Keum-won Kronish were looking for flights out of Korea when the Israeli ambassador called. There was a problem, he told them. Keum-won knew immediately what was wrong—the ambassador had asked her, a Korean native and American resident who'd retired in Israel, to find someone in Busan to lead the city's first Israeli cultural center. And she had done this—two years ago. Unfortunately, the person she recruited for the position had backed out, leaving the ambassador with a headless operation and many gears already in motion. So he asked her, flat-out, over the phone: Why don't you and your husband do it?

BUSAN, South Korea -- Hi! My name is Rishi Srinivasan and I am a seventh grader at the Busan International Foreign School (BIFS). I was born in Houston, Texas and completed my elementary school in nearby Katy, Texas and I am currently in Ulsan, South Korea, where I have studied since June, 2011. I love it here!

This year was a special one for me because I won the Korean National Spelling Bee, so the editor of Haps asked me to share my experience about how I did it.

BUSAN, South Korea -- Have you ever wondered if Bruce Lee's outfits really fit that that tight, how Elvis got his fans all shook up with his blue eyes and what Madonna's muscular legs would look like from up close?

Why not see for yourself as the famed Madame Tussauds wax figure exhibition, currently on display at Shinsegae in Centum City since last year, wraps up its run on the peninsula this month.