Clearly I have not written in a long while. I've been a busy beaver. In fact, this month I am teaching an extra class called "winter intensive reading." This means that I work five days a week instead of four, and for of those days I'm teaching for 8 hours with one 20 minute break. It has been and will be exhausting. So I've decided to update you on what has happened the last month or so by a few short stories/updates.
Christmas:
Although Christmas is celebrated, it is not nearly as crazy as the U.S. Therefore, we worked Christmas Eve and day.On Christmas day we went to Bon V (the foreigner bar by our house) and celebrated with some friends. One of the Korean girls who works there, Lucy (as we named her), got 'krunk.' We danced the night away and now hang out with Lucy about once a week. Yeah, Korean friend!
New Years:
The traditional New Years Eve is celebrated in Korea by doing the count-down to midnight then watching the gong in Seoul. Then Koreans drink ALL night then make their way to the beach to watch the long-honored tradition of watching the sunrise. This was also our plan. We went to WaBar for the midnight count-down; taking the drinking slow as to stay up all night. Then we headed downtown to a foreigner bar called Rush. EVERYONE was so drunk and acting like highschoolers who have never seen the opposite gender. I continued to drink slowly; which made the atmosphere pretty awful. Around 4 am we went to McDonalds with the others from the bar. At that point I was WAY too tired and annoyed by the wasted people I was with. I guess not binge drinking was my downfall and I had to go home and go to sleep. I missed the sunrise. It was really sad. The others met up with some of our Korean friends at the beach and had a blast. Oh well, next time, right?
Coffee and Obscure Songs:
Went to one of the many local cafes (I live in the coffee capital of Korea) for a coffee and to read. My ears started burning when I heard a song playing over the speakers in English. It was a song by the Plain White Ts. One from their first album before they became popular. I happen to have that album from seeing them as an opening band when I was in middle school. The only time I have ever heard that song was in my CD player, and here it was, belting over the speakers in Korea.
Set fire, to the Soup:
After a night of bar hopping, the other teachers and I decided to get Shabu Shabu the next morning for lunch. Being that none of us were on our best things went wrong rather quickly. The bowl of soup on the communal open grill at our table started to tilt from one of us bumping the table. Naturally Matt went to fix it before the soup started to boil over. The bowl was HOT. He grabbed a handful of paper napkins and grabbed the bowl's handle. The handle was so hot that the wad of napkins instantly burst into flames. There we were, in a quite, Korean restaurant at noon with a decent-sized fire at our table. We lunged for the pitch of water and poured it all over our table. The Koreans next to us quickly left.
A Real Nori Bong:
This past weekend some Koreans took us to a nori bong (Karaoke). It was extremely fun and everything you would expect. This led me to think about the nori bong Aaron and I tried to figure out a few weeks ago. The first one was really sketchy, had blacked-out door windows on each singing room, and there were not microphones. Turns out that we went to a prostitution ring that was covered by 'nori bong.' Oops.
Walking on Water and Saying Hello:
This isn't really a story, but some random things. First, the huge lake by our house/the beach has started to freeze. Naturally Koreans were walking on the water. We joined them, and a dog, and walked on this lake. It was a good time. Also, I would say at least once a day a random person will say "hello!" to us. It's only because we're white. Koreans do not do this to each other. It's kind of nice though, it makes everything feel a bit less lonely.
I'll try and write more often. I'm not promising anything though, time is going to be restricted this month. I'm also hooked on the show Sons of Anarchy; so that addiction my out-weigh blogging. Just a heads up.
Nice blogging with you!
<3 Stine
