Just passing through week 10 and I still haven't washed my floor. Starting to look pretty gnarly though, so I think today might be the day.
I haven't had any hot water all week. I told my boss about it but also told her not to bother phoning the building manger yet. I like the fact that it forces me to go to the gym everyday. It shames me into working out cause I think it would look too pathetic to come in and just use the shower...who needs discipline when you have shame.
Last weekend, my cell-phone got a whole lot easier to use when a guy I met, showed me how to turn the display into English. It turns out that it does have a lot of really cool features. I thanked him profusely and we ended up doing a duet to "New York, New York" with the band...Yes, a band and Yes, I did embarass myself...thanks for asking.
Another week of the same old thing at work. This isn't to say that I don't enjoy myself though I just don't think the details are really noteworthy. I am thoroughly enjoying teaching though.
I've been picking up more and more Korean day by day. I know I said 3 months but I'm now hoping to be able to speak Korean with some degree of fluency by July. I've found that it's pretty friggin difficult to learn a language when the letters, sentence structure, and grammer are all very different.
Last Sunday I met my Korean tutor, Soo-Yeon, for another lesson and yes, this time I was on-time. She had an interview this week at an American company so she figured that they would interview her in Engish so she wanted to practice her interviewing skills. Funny how even a fake interview can get pretty uncomfortable when I threw her a few curve balls.
Yesterday, Saturday, was pretty interesting. I met Soo down at CoEx mall (a huge mall in south-eastern Seoul). We had planned on seeing a movie, but when we saw, what looked like, an hour wait to buy a ticket, we scrapped those plans and went and played pool instead. I had some very mediocre Japanese food and then we went to Lotte World (kind of a theme park) but didn't stay long and then to Sincheon (which is different from Sinchon even though it sounds the same to me) for a few pints of the pale ale. After a few hours we got on the subway to meet a couple of his friends in Hongdae. This is when the fun began.
We got to this bar where his friend was with a couple of girls. Turns out, they were all 'three sheets to the wind' by the time we got there. None of them really spoke English very well but two of them were able to understand me fairly well. We tried to find a decent bar where it wasn't too loud and after about 4 tries, finally settled on a place.
We were in the bar for about 15 minutes when suddenly one of the girls literally passed out onto the table...out cold! We carried her outside, it literally seemed like she was dead. We got her into a cab and Soo's friend and the other girl got in with her, promising to return. He had actually been kind of a dink to me up to that point so I wasn't too sorry to see him leave. Not to mention he left his $140 bottle of scotch at the table two-thirds full. About an hour and a half (and most of the rest of the scotch) later they returned minus the girl. He had sobered up and stopped being a dink so we got along well after that. We hit a few more bars including Beaver-Wings where there were about 30 people in the place and they were the only Koreans. Interesting to not feel like a foreigner for a change.
To make a long story short we ended up singing Karaoke until 5am when Soo's friend passed out. So once again I got to help carry someone out. I took a cab into Sinchon and then made the bus ride home. Although once again, I fell asleep on the bus and woke up just after we had passed my stop. I figured I'd wait for the bus to go back past my stop but when the bus got to the last stop the driver came to me and asked me where I was going (or so I assume because he was speaking Korean). We were reasonably close to my apartment so rather than try to communicate with him I just got off.
I knew we were in Tanhyun-dong, which is the area that I live in, but I haven't really explored it much so I wasn't exactly sure which way was my apartment. After looking at street signs and finding a couple landmarks I managed to find my way home in about 20 minutes. This is one of the things I love about Korea, every weekend, the simple act of going home turns into an adventure.
