Teeheheheh. Good times.
As for school updates, there really are none. This is the last week of school before camps and there are almost no classes to be taught. The first two classes of the day are taken up with the students participating in some special math camps, so no classes for me. They haven't been rescheduling the classes either, which rocks. Today I have zero classes as the 2 classes I was supposed to teach have been knocked out in favor of standardized testing for the 6th graders. Major wins all around. Camps start next week, but I'm working all of them with co-teachers, which is wonderful for discipline issues during the camps as well as planning. The next few weekends should be interesting though, as I take a school trip to some resort location with the school. Don't really know what to expect, but I hear these things usually devolve (or perhaps they were always intended to be such) into huge drunkfests, which can be interesting or horrible. Don't really know which way it will go. The next weekend after that will be our little group's final goodbye trip, which most definitely will be a major drunkfest, but on the beach. Then the weekend after that my parents arrive, which will obviously require major amounts of alcohol for all 3 of us. 1.5 weeks alone, just the three of us? Yikes.
Now to the recapping. We are up to the last weekend in May, which is still a long, long ways back (I'm not really catching up here am I?). On this particular weekend, Carrie, Jenna and I decided to grab dinner at the same little bistro-thingy down near Jamsil that Jenna and I found the previous weekend. Naturally, we discussed Korea and life after Korea (given our ever dwindling time here), which combined with alchol got ever more silly and entertaining as the night progressed. Shocking, I know. With Carrie in her last 2 months, and Jenna and I with just half a year left, the end is fast approaching, but the consensus between the 3 of us seemed to be that it couldn't come fast enough. We've seen it, done it and are now ready to move on. Plus, over time we've just gotten fed up with some of the various BS that Korea has to offer. We miss the US's Grade A "BS". Well, not really, but we are excited to get back.
After downing 2 bottles between the 3 of us at the restaurant, we decided it would be a good idea to move to different environs to continue drinking. We chose the man-made lake across the street. So with our super classy and super expensive ($10) convenience store bottle of wine, we headed down to the pond. Despite it being 10pm on a Friday night, the walking track was full of locals walking up a storm, which we found incredibly amusing. Maybe it wasn't actually funny, but we had been drinking, so that changes stuff. After seeing all the joggers, one of our group decided it would be fun to go for a run around the track, despite being dressed in regular street clothes and being full of food and alcohol. I won't say who it was, but I'll give you a hint: it wasn't Carrie or I. Around the second bottle of convenience store wine (ohhhh yeah, we went back for seconds), the ladies started debating about the our school experiences. One claimed that every time we say hi or interact with our students (which, if you you teach in elementary school, happens several hundred times a day) we are having an impact on them, we are making a difference. The other believed this viewpoint was overly idealistic and that we are basically a novelty to them, thus all the attention, and our impact is much less than believed. I, as is typical when I drink, didn't really care a lick about the conversation/argument going on around me and just wanted to sit (hahah, I accidentally typed "shit" the first time...freudian slip) in silence and enjoy the pretty lake. To keep myself from talking, I filled my mouth with the wine, thus consuming damn near the whole second bottle.
From there, we decided to head to a hookah bar in Gangnam for a bit before riding home for the night. Despite our different final destinations, we all shared the consequences for our drinking: sickness. According to sources that may have been Carrie herself, the only thing she remembered after getting in the cab to go home was "losing her dinner". Jenna lost hers as soon as she got off the bus back in Suwon, and I managed to survive the taxi ride home, despite major tummy rumblings, and got back to the apt before I had to have my heart to heart chat with my toilet. Let that be a lesson kids, alcohol is bad.
Now for another Robben ball break. Enjoy.
The next weekend (the first in June) didn't have quite as much excitement as the previous weekend, or as much drinking, but was amusing nonetheless. On Saturday, I met up with Anna and Amy for a tea fair at one of the big expo halls inside the COEX Mall. Not much to say about the fair itself, as it only really featured green tea. I was hoping for a little bit more variety, but then I remembered I was in Korea, where "variety" is a unknown word. They do things one way and one way only, end of story. They did have some nice tea sets for sale, as well as lots of Buddha garb, but what use did I have for either? Would have loved to listen to the Buddhists talk, but they were obviously speaking only in Korean and probably talking only about tea, which isn't all that interesting.
That's not to say we didn't meet any interesting people. Take this guy for instance.
Who is he, you might ask. Well, from what I gathered from his business/trading card, he is the protector of traditional tea culture. Cool costume and cool idea to spice up a kinda dull tea fair. I believe the fella might have actually been Japanese, since I think his handlers were as well. Why am I laughing in the pic? Well, about two seconds before the shot was snapped, while moving in for a sweet pose, the superhero had rubbed up on my thigh with his utility belt and his cod piece. My resulting laugh was certainly one of those awkward and uncomfortable type ones. Also unfortunate for him was the fact that I was about a foot taller than him. A bit emasculating for a superhero, but what can you do?
While at the tea fest, we also made a new Korean friend. Well, I didn't obviously, but Amy and Anna did. Or I should say he made new foreign friends, as the guy in question, approached both the girls and just started talking up a storm. Super peppy, lively guy that we weren't surprised to learn was only 19. Damn kids and all their running around with all that spunk of theirs! Hahah, I just said "spunk". Ewwwwwww.
The next day, Carrie, Jenna and I reunited, properly recovered from the previous weekend, for a picnic with some of Carrie's best students. The story goes that some of Carrie's 2nd grade (juniors in High school) conversation class students (all of whom are really cool kids, supposedly) wanted to have a picnic as a end of the semester reward, and they wanted Carrie to invite some of us, her foreign friends. She did, and we showed up. 5 of Carrie's students showed up too and they were cool enough to bring lots of food, meaning we had way more than we needed. Which is the best problem to have. I brought some crackers and the watermelon I had won earlier in the week, Carrie brought her veggies, and Jenna brought other snacks. But the students? They outdid us all. Sandwiches, burgers, sodas, a cake, assorted other baked goods. Wow. We all assembled at Ilsan's Lake Park, located right in the middle of Anna and Carrie's town of Ilsan. As you might expect, the park features a large lake in the middle, probably man-made, but I really don't care. We found some shade and got to eating and chatting. This girls really impressed with their English ability, especially the ones that hadn't studied abroad. One girl had fluent English, but she lived in Belgium for 3 years, and given how well Europeans can speak English, her ability doesn't shock me at all. We chatted about how much high school sucks in Korea, with all the testing and testing and testing and classes 20 hours a day and never sleeping and all other kinds of good stuff. Since all the students were females, the conversation eventually shifted to talking about how much boys suck, which meant it was time for Eric to quietly eat his food and ignore all the gendered hate being tossed around. What's a guy to do in that situation? Fellas do seem to suck, alot. Not much I can do......(sad). I know what can cheer me up! More Robben Ball pics! Yes!!
Anyways, the excitement wasn't over when I headed home, as Jamie was bored and decided to stop by my apt to waste a few hours. While walking to my apartment though, he ran into several friends he had met on a previous weekend, so he called me out to drink with all of them in front of the local convenience store. Now, generally you would think drinking outside a convenience store, unless your names are "Jay" or "Silent Bob", is a bit weird, but here its one of the best places, as they actually have outdoor seating, unlike 98% of all other restaurants. Sure its only cheap ass plastic lawn furniture, but really who is complaining? The new people certainly were entertaining. Many of the group were U.S. Army servicemen and women here at GyungHee University (just down the street from my house) doing a 10 week intensive Korean program as part of their training as military translators. I most enjoyed that 2 of the members of the intensive Korean program were actually Korean-Americans or half Korean, meaning they already spoke Korean. Which means the whole program was a 10 week vacation, on the US govt's dime. Gotta respect that. They are stationed in Hawaii, so they had plenty of interesting stories about how native Hawaiians hate outsiders. Lovely.
Most interesting to me was how much the Koreans in the group seemed to dislike Korea. One of the guys was 100% Korean, but had moved to Texas when he was 8 or 9 and had nothing in common with the pretty boy dandies that make up most of Korea's young male population. The guy said he also isn't interested in Korean women cuz they are crazy and super high maintenance and prefers white women. The poor bastard. Trust me man, if that is your preference then there is nothing for you here. One of the girls was half Korean and she had some lovely stories about growing up with full Korean grandparents. She said growing up her Korean grandmother used to come up to her, pinch her "fat" and say to her, "You need to lose this". Thanks grandma. Luckily this girl didn't grow up with a incredibly fucked up perception of herself or terrible self-worth issues because, as she put it, "I ignored everything she said, cuz she is crazy." In the end, I feel much better about my issues with Korea, as these people hate Korea so much more than me and they can actually communicate/interact with people here. So I'm not crazy. Of course, no interaction with military folk would be complete without one stereotypical creeper. This guy, after drinking...a bit, decided he was gonna turn his chair around to people watch and try and say hi to every attractive woman that walked by. Maybe he wasn't being creepy, but judging from most of the women's reactions, they thought he was too, so I can't have been too far off in my judgement. Course, the ladies didn't hear all the stuff he was saying about them under his breath. Ohhh, and he's married. Classy. Ohhh, I'm sad again. Time for more Robben Balls to cheer me up! Apologies if everybody else doesn't find these as amusing as I do. I just couldn't settle for my favorite one or two. So I grabbed almost all of them.
Lake Park:
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