I know it's been about three months or so, BUT! that's still less than three years, so 'posting more frequently' still stands! :D
If you know BTS, you surely know BT21.
If you know BT21, you surely know SHOOKY.
If you know SHOOKY, do you also know the other 362 members of the Crunchy Squad?
No? Neither do I! (Yet, that is.)
Earlier this month, ARMY were asked to come up with their very own Crunchy Squad members to join SHOOKY on his adventures.
362 members of the Crunchy Squad, brought to life alongside SHOOKY inside a bakery.
How do they look like? What are their names? Candy, fruits, pencils, flour..(?) Anything is possible!
The Crunchy Squad needs you and your creative juice
to complete the squad as they go on an amazing adventure with SHOOKY :)
Of course I had to participate! :D
(And of course I left it to the very last day, an hour or so before the deadline)
[STEP 01] Draw & Name your Crunchy Squad!
- Sketch, photo, etc. Any form of expression is possible! - From 1 to 362. The number of Crunchy Squad characters you can submit is infinite!- Please name your character(s) only in English and in numbers.
I immediately thought of Linzer Augen (or Jammy Dodgers, as they might be called in your corner of the world), with the 'Augen' (German for 'eyes') as either the...well, eyes, or as their chubby, blushing cheeks.
I made a little sketch with three different cookies (all rather cute, if you ask me), but instead of submitting a pencil drawing, I decided on actually baking them! :D
The names I came up with were rather unoriginal (JAMMY, DODGER and LINZY), but I thought they were cute and fit well, so who cares.
The numbers I gave them were #43, #44 and #45, simply because 4 is my favourite number :D (and because I think Jammy Dodgers are rather basic cookies which would be some of the first cookies so be baked, while the later cookies may be a bit more unusual)
On the day I decided to bake my cookies...the lower floor of our house had no electricity.
Awesome.
Although, no, I lied, the fridge and the oven both DID have electricity. A sign maybe~~~~~~~?
Well, I ignored that sign until 1AM, when I grabbed a flashlight, went to the kitchen and made some dough in the dark.
[I didn't have enough flour to make a large batch, and I technically only needed 6 cookies anyway, so I made a third of the recipe (1/3 of an egg yolk and all)]
The next day, I baked and filled them (still in the dark) and then tried decorating them.
Yeah, chocolate won't really hold on a sugar dusted surface, who knew.
So I took a picture and added the faces and limbs in paint. (Yes, paint. The king of all art programs.)
Sadly, the cookie who was supposed to be DODGER looked absolutely terrifying! No matter what I did with the eyes, he looked both murderous and creepy. So LINZY became DODGER, and my dad ate the evil cookie (before it tried eating one of us)
[STEP 02] Upload your work on Twitter!
- To prevent plagiarism, please write your Twitter ID (e.g: @BT21_) on your work. - Please include the following hashtags on your Twitter: #Draw_BT21 #CrunchySquad #BT21_UNIVERSE
[STEP 03] Watch your ideas come to life through the official BT21 account.
- LINE FRIENDS Creators who design and illustrate BT21 will build on, develop, and expand upon your ideas which will be reflected on the final Crunchy Squad. - The Crunchy Squad, built upon your ideas, will be unveiled through the official BT21 Account.
I hope my two cuties (or a variation of them) will make it into the Crunchy Squad! :D
Wish me luck!
Yes!
And it's even about the same concert! Although this time from Seoul! Now you're probably wondering if I made a quick trip to South Korea.
Sadly, the answer to that is no :( BUT the Love Yourself concert in Seoul was released in cinemas, so my sister and I went, of course (and maybe regretted it a tiny bit).
This was actually our second time watching something Bangtan related in a cinema (the other one being Burn The Stage), which I'm really not used to, because usually we never get anything in Austria!
Now to the 'regret' part: I have never had to sit in the middle of such an absolutely annoying audience before. I don't mind the occasional screaming. You want to do the fanchants? Fine by me! It's a concert, after all. But people constantly screaming, convulsing in their seats while wildly pointing at the screen, shouting the boys' names every.single.time they appeared on screen, insulting K-ARMY simply for being at the concert (what the actual fudge?), etc.
The girl in front of me filmed the whole thing and took pictures, which she then sent to her friends, the girl left to me had apparently been forced to come, complaining that she was bored, checking her phone the entire time, and then trying to go to sleep sometime in the middle.
All in all, I once again got a confirmation for my dislike of people :/
And silly me had even taken my ARMY Bomb with me, because I had read of other people's experiences, where they'd pretty much had turned their screenings into little concerts, Bombs and fanchants and all. But those people didn't deserve to bask in the beautiful light of my ARMY Bomb.
(Yes, I'm sulking, let me)
The actual concert I liked, of course, but my sister and I were both a bit disappointed by the quality of the picture. But at least my sister doesn't feel bad about the quality of the videos she took during the Berlin concert now :D
My sister apparently couldn't remember the clothes Bangtan had worn during the concert, because while watching, she once leaned over to tell me that she'd inherited that exact shirt Jeongguk had on from our grandma. And later she asked me if their outfits had really been that tragic at our concert.
(Sorry, boys, I love you, but those clothes are...something.)
Anyway, next time we'll hopefully get to watch them live again, and not on a screen :) (And I'll even try to post before that!)
IT'S ALIVE~~~~!
Or at least in the middle of being revived.
Hello, I am back and hopefully staying!
Now, seeing how my last post was in...2015, it comes to nobody's surprise that even posts about amazing events will take some time for me to actually write (and post...). So am I two months late with this? Yes. Do I have an excuse? Yes! Laziness :)
The 'amazing event' in question was *drum roll* BTS' Love Yourself World Tour!
Now, you may not know this (yes, you do, because the only person who reads this blog is my sister, but let me pretend I have an audience), but I have been into Kpop for ten years now. First fell in love with Super Junior (let's just...kind of ignore that) and SHINee (my special bbs) and then, at the beginning of 2015 I gave Bangtan a listen and I do not regret it one bit.
I have always regretted not being able to go to one of the (very, very few) European concerts either SHINee or Bangtan appeared at, so when the LY tour in Europe was announced, I decided I'd go, no matter what.
When I first joined the fandom, we were ecstatic when we reached 1 million views on INU. Now Bangtan is the group with the most views on a music video in the first 24 hours on Youtube. So I knew getting tickets to their concert would be nearly impossible, and let me tell you, I do not want to go through it again. (Who am I kidding, as soon as Bangtan announce their next tour, I'll be sitting in front of my laptop, waiting for battle.)
It was actually my sister who kept refreshing and trying to buy the tickets (mostly because my laptop is a descendant of a potato) and because of the stupid ticketing site not working correctly (once you manage to put a ticket into your shopping cart, you're supposed to have three minutes to buy it, our ticket was gone after less than one), my dad actually ended up buying tickets from some third party site. Cue me almost having a mental breakdown because I was suddenly paying the price of the best tickets available...for the cheapest tickets of the venue. (To be fair, as of now, I still haven't actually paid for the ticket, because I have an amazing sister, but I still hope to pay her back in the near future)
Anyway, here we are, with stupidly expensive tickets-- wait. No, we didn't actually have any tickets yet. Do you know when we got them? On the day of the concert, in our hotel room, in Berlin! But I'll come back to that later.
Now, our journey to Berlin started...at a mobile phone shop down the street. Wait, what?
Well, you know how you need a passport to travel between countries? Yes, well, mine had expired in 2013. But hey, I'm just going to Germany, so that's okay, right? Wrong! Five years is actually the limit, and mine was just over. And of course we realized that bit a week before the concert, meaning I had to choose the express option, making everything even more expensive.
So, where does the mobile phone shop come in, you ask? Because I also had to have my picture taken! And for whatever reason, if you don't want to shell out all that money for a professional to take pictures of you, you go to a mobile phone shop.
Now, you may not know this, but my laptop isn't the only potato descendant. I have never seen a more potato-looking passport photo in my life. And not just any potato. A felon potato. Just...the pictures are horrible. Absolutely horrible.
isn't my passport cover the cutest?
The actual journey started in the middle of the night on the 15th of October. A ten (?) hour bus journey from Vienna to Berlin. Now, most people would use this time to sleep, but not me. I tried to master the art of silent-potato-chip-eating. About five hours in came my biggest dilemma: I had to pee.
I have this thing, where I just absolutely hate using public toilets. That's just how it is. Now, a bus toilet doesn't sound all that more appealing to me. I held out to about eight or nine hours in, but it was no use. So I begrudgingly made myway down the stairs (no, the bus did not have a cellar, if you're wondering, it was a double decker)...and promptly turned around because I had no idea where the toilet was. My second time going downstairs, I figured out that, what I'd thought to be a closet, was actually the toilet. Joy. So I squeezed my body into that tiny cubicle, wondering how that giant of a guy who'd used the toilet before me had even fit in there, seeing how my head had almost brushed the ceiling.
Pulling my pants back up was an event. Do you know the scene in The Princess Diaries where Mia tries to put on a pantyhose in the backseat of a moving car? That's what it was like, only with less space, and a toilet behind me.
And then the next challenge: how to flush. There were at least ten different buttons, and the only one labelled was the emergency one. Now, after pushing a few buttons, the bus did not self destruct, and I think I may have heard the sound of flushing, but I can't be sure. But seeing how gross the toilet had been before, I don't think it would have made much of a difference.
Arriving in Berlin, I was already...underwhelmed, to put it nicely, by what I was seeing through the bus window, but my sister told me, it's probably just the part we're in right now, and the rest was going to be nicer.
It wasn't.
Now, if you're reading this, and you're from Berlin, I apologize in advance. Because oh wow, have I never hated a city more than I've hated Berlin. Stuck in the wrong era, filthy, with too much mustard yellow and orange.
We didn't spend all that much time looking around Berlin on our first day, mostly because my sister knew how much I didn't like it. Although I was happy about there being a KΓ€the Wohlfahrt (an all year round Christmas store). Last time I went in one was years ago in Rothenburg. Of course, I can't afford anything from them, but looking at the store's decorations is enough for me anyway.
Finding our hotel was another adventure. I have never seen such weirdly numbered streets. Some numbers suddenly changed directions, some were left out, some didn't fit in anywhere, it was rather strange.
When we got to our hotel, I decided to take a quick nap before the concert, since I hadn't slept on the bus, while my sister went out looking for a pharmacy to get something for her headache. (Where she also once again realized that German german is rather different to our German.)
Now, I was lying in bed, apparently already asleep, when suddenly...the
concierge was standing at the foot of my bed, telling me that our
tickets had arrived. O...kay. Thanks, lady, but could you not just
unlock my room and come inside while I am sleeping? That would be super!
My sister used my version 1 ARMY bomb :)
Do you remember when I talked about the expensive tickets for the cheapest seats? Well, apparently the third party couldn't get those seats. Instead we got *drum roll* Entertainment Suite tickets! Which means we paid the actual price (maybe a few euros more) for our tickets, which was rather great.
Plus, Entertainment Suite tickets meant we could enter through the Premium entrance instead of waiting in line with thousands of other people. I mean, yes, we still had to wait in line, but it really didn't take long. And they sold merchandise right inside the venue, with no people waiting in line, so my sister quickly got me my ARMY bomb while I was still waiting at the metal detectors.
Behold, our suite! (And our toilet! Woohoo!)
We were second (and third :P) to arrive at our suite, so we immediately grabbed two seats in the front row (there were three rows with four seats each). We even had our own bathroom, which, as you now already know, was amazing to me, since I only had to share with 16 or so other people instead of the entire venue.
I couldn't get my ARMY Bomb to work properly, so my sister, nice as she is, went to the designated helpers and voilΓ‘, working lightstick! (Now the only problem is that my phone doesn't actually support the app, meaning I had to use someone else's. No random colour changing at home for me T-T)
When the concert started...I have to be honest, I barely remember anything! I have videos as proof that something happened, but my mind is mostly blank.
I definitely remember Bangtan talking in German though, which was super cute! And Taetae actually had a really great pronunciation!
At first I thought I'd 'save' my battery for the ments, but at one point I simply started filming everything. I only wish I had done so from the beginning, since now I don't have Hobis solo stage, and some other bits.
Most of my videos came out rather...wobbly, because I was filming with my phone in my left hand, while wildly shaking my ARMY Bomb with my right hand. I apologize for that.
At least I remembered not to screech into the microphone! The only time you can hear me is at the end of Outro: Tear, because...come on, they killed it.
ARMY time was also rather interesting, trying to film while also holding the slogan and the lightstick...
Now, like I said, I can't really remember all that much, but judging from my fancams, it was awesome! :D
When the concert was done and we were somewhere in front of the Arena, I'm pretty sure a car with Hobi and somebody else passed us, but I really can't be sure...
Our suite!
Yoongi and the missing A
π
πππ
I would have been fine with going home right then and there, but we had extended our stay by one day beforehand, because we thought we'd go sight seeing in Berlin...I can really understand my grandma's incredulous 'Why?' now, when we told her we'd be going on a short holiday to Berlin.
OUF-pa-sen! Since the trip had already been expensive enough, my sister looked up free museums to visit.
One thing that's really popular in Berlin is Checkpoint Charlie, so we went to the (free) associated museum, which was okay. I'm just really not one for war and military stuff, so it wasn't really my thing. I did enjoy the American pronunciation for German words book though :D
Is my sister tiny or is the lamp giant? Both! :D
The rest of the time we spent simply just walking around and looking at everything (and going to Primark!). At one point I'd had enough, the surroundings made me uncomfortable, my back was killing me, so my sister walked around on her own, while I was waiting on a bench. (And freezing my butt off since it was made of stone.)
We also made a little trip to the Brandenburger Tor (I looked at it from afar, once again from a bench, this time made of wood, while my sister took a closer look at the Tor) where we finally ate the food we had brought as snacks for the bus trip to Germany.
And well...that was it! I know, the part about the actual event is super short, but since my brain decided to apparently have selective amnesia, it can't be helped.
And now, have a playlist of all my wobbly fancams! :D
