Another Day of Work

Week 7

Night Blossoms

The Other Night (Down In Itaewon)

The weekend for me started right after work on Friday. Countess and I had planned a night of good food and I was doing a lot of the cooking: homemade pita bread, hummus, roast veggies, and baba ghanoush. This time, in a proper oven at her house. It still took ages to cook though, and I was well into the wine by the time everyone arrived and we ate. We then launched a horrible drinking game where you have to come up with an associated word as the person before you that doesn't start with S or P. To make it worse, if you failed, you had to swig from a bottle of cheap Thai liquor that claimed to be made from gravefruit. It was grave indeed. Due to my having already consumed about 2 bottles of red wine on an empty stomach, it went very badly for me. At one point, I tripped over absolutely nothing coming out of the bathroom and only just stopped myself from falling over. Thankfully, Jefe was there to carry everything home at the end. I was so drunk I couldn't even remember if Booty made it to the party or not. Yes, April was a drinking month.

The next morning Jefe went to the hash and I stayed home - to nap. That didn't happen as a series of Korean men in suits turned out to ask if I was a Russian speaker. This would have been odd even if Russian wasn't code for hooker in Korea. Then I had the bacon cravings, but no bacon. Finally, in a epically hilarious hungover move, I decided that I had left my phone at Countess' - the last thing I recalled was having it on the shelf in the kitchen when I was cooking. I kept thinking things like: "I'll just text her and see when she's going to be home, so I can go pick up my phone..." or, "Maybe my phone is here, I'll just call it and listen to see if it rings." Yeah, I'm not too bright when I'm hungover - happily, I'm never pukey or anything either, as a rule. Turns out the phone was about two feet away from me the entire morning.

Anyway, Jefe showed up and we went for burgers at Jacoby's, to watch some beer pong at Orange Tree, and then drank some Jeremiah Weed as he ruined my life by introducing me to Sporcle. Finally, we headed over to Bless U, everyone's favourite hashing pub, for a mismanagement meeting. That was hilarious - I can only assume the YKers were boggled by my presence - to say my record for getting up early on a Saturday to hash is bad would be putting it mildly. I don't believe I've even hit 15 hashes yet! Obviously I couldn't be put on mismanagment unless they can come up with a task that only needs to be performed about every six months on a randomly sober Saturday morning. Once everyone else started arriving, the planning stoppped and the drinking began. My, did it ever. There were many shots, and then kettles at Polys, and then Samantha (my new favourite hasher), Jefe and I had donair kebabs on our way home. We got in early - 3:30ish, I'd say - because I was going to go to Southside, come hell or high water, and get my damn 10 patch.

Yes, okay, I've been hashing for a year and a half and I've only actually made it to Southside 10 times. What do you want from me? It's in the morning! It was a lovely hash - through the cherry blossoms (naturally I didn't have a camera), Booty claimed to have seen a stork, the walkers stopped for coffee at a Starbucks with a sign for parking for Disabled & Women (!!!), and a spelling-challenged hare claimed that there was BEAR NEAR (rather than beer near). Good times, good weather, good people. After, we headed over to Wolfhound for food and drinks, and then everyone separated. Since Jefe was about to spend the week at my place, I wandered off home to clean while he went up to fetch work stuff from the 'bu.

Ready or Not, Here I Come!

Korean style.

Seoul Forest

I don't know if it was the sun, the fact that we were on a field trip, or what, but this is the closest I've gotten to having a day off when being at work. Perhaps I am more suited to teaching kindie than I thought, because like the kids I felt like I'd been let out of prison to run around in the sun. It was a great day. We did some slightly boring looking at flowers, which could have been cool had more been out. After that though, the fun began. First there was the picnic. Now, at Poly School, picnics consisted only of school provided kimbap. Our kids bring their own food though and then they share - liberally. I'm pretty sure I ate a piece of every mom's homemade kimbap or ubu chobap and a ton of fruit too. Plus, some moms bring in food made for the teachers - we needed about 20 more people to do justice to that spread. Then we ran around and played - tag, monster, hide and seek. Finally, we wandered over to a playground with a big, fast slide, some climbing bits and a cool large wire person thingy. I took a lot of photos, as the combo of the fact that I have the best camera and it gives me something to do when everyone else is speaking Korean has made me the school photographer. I'm pretty sure it's a legal requirement that schools take 80 million pictures of each child in Korea. Good times. I was exhausted and a bit pinkish in the face by the end, but it was a lovely, lovely Friday. Here's hoping the field trips stay this good.