Friday was warmish. Sure, by the time we wandered over to the Orange Galbi place for the amusingly named Polygone party, which was complete with properly shaped invites and cards and such, it was chilly. But, I was wearing my Taipei 101 sweatshirt and not my winter coat - not even my kickass wool/fleece sweater because I accidentally knocked it down the back of the couch last weekend and convinced myself I had left it somewhere (my ability to loose things will become even more amusing later in this post.)
Dave's party was fun. First off, almost everyone was there - KTs, foreign staff, even our director. Secondly, after some meat and some standing around on the street in the cold, I finally made it to the infamous Ocean Palace. It was an interesting place - the dancing was odd, with slow bits separating dance sets where everyone was shooed to sit down, and people mainly standing around admiring the three dudes dancing on stage and copying their routines. We had a private room with karaoke (sang What's Up and thought of Laura and YJ) and crates of beer and it was all very random. Dave is an amusing MC.
We peaced out to Dave's place, where we got to play with the wad of cash he is taking back to Canada, and then I came home and got drunkenly excited about eating dill pickles. You may well have gotten a Facebook message. Or an email. In fact, it's a good thing I didn't have an international calling card, because people might have gotten a gushing call all about the wonderfulness of pickles. It might have gone on for hours.
Saturday was Samarra's leaving party, as this seems to be prime-leaving-time. We had Indian buffet, with me dragging Brian along for his first ever Indian food (how is this possible???), and from there went to Bricx and Tin Pan 1. The dancing was fanastic. Woke up, hit up Outback and then realised that I had a teensy problem...
My keys were AWOL. Since I had gotten into the apartment, I had to have lost them inside. Or possibly left them in the door, I guess, but that seems somewhat unlikely. I have torn apart my place, moved all the furniture (side benefit - I have done some hard core dusting/sweeping), looked in totally random places like the freezer, and nothing. They just aren't here. I jokingly said it was starting to feel like I had managed to flush them down the toilet or something when it dawned on me that maybe that was a possiblity. After all, only a couple of months ago I paid $60 to have my toilet taken off so someone could remove a plastic cap that I had accidentally flushed down the toilet. And I once flushed an entire bar of soap down my toilet, which forced me to pour boiling water in it to get it to unclog. In my defense, Korean bathrooms are (in my mind) rather small and oddly laid out, such that it is easier to accidentally knock things into your toilet while it is simultaneously flushing...
Anyway. I decided, fuck it. I never lock my door when I'm here and no one has ever tried to open it. I'm going to go out anyway, I have plans dammit and no Sunday-friendly solution to my problem. Trying to mime that I wanted to know if the security guard had a spare to my apartment resulted in nothing more than him thinking that I am the oddest foreign chick alive and me flashing back to all those games of Charades I always ended up losing back in highschool...
To make it all more amusing, on my keys is a sticker with an apartment number that is actually one floor below me, because during the toilet-removing incident
("You can use the toilet, just not sit on it until tomorrow morning..." Korean man checks out foreign girl with frown on his face,"or... tomorrow night." Korean man considers telling girl that kimchi is good for dieting.)the toilet-fixing man wrote the wrong apartment number on my keys when he dropped them off at security for me to pick up later. Naturally, this caused a highly amusing scene, whereby I tried to mine that indeed, those where my keys, for all that they did not match the number I just said, and then had to go back to work and get a Korean staff member to come over and vouch that I was sure those really, really were my keys, promise, in order to get them back.
So, there I was, on a Sunday afternoon, wildly miming that I live in one place, though I'm looking for a set of keys that says another number, and no, I don't think someone has left the keys on purpose, maybe they were turned in because I lost them... That's when I went, fuck it, I'm off to Itaewon. Which turned out to be me being off to the bar, though that wasn't the plan. Really. Honest. I swear.
So, I headed to Itaewon with three goals: get my hair trimmed, buy a book that a friend recommended, and have dinner with Annie. What did I do? Stopped by the Wolfhound to say a quick hello to Vanessa, chatted with Anita, went and bought many books but couldn't get the one I wanted, went back to Wolfhound to now chat with Vanessa, Sheila, Pam, Jennifer, and Brian, Annie and Amanda showed up for the dinner portion (first goal met!), and ended up in Bricx at 2a.m. with a half hour cab ride home in front of me and an 8a.m. alarm to set.
I have to go get another key cut tomorrow. That will ensure I find the last set, after all!
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