Kimchi, Children, and Chicken, so much chicken.

I still have a broken computer, which is making full updates difficult. Ive got a couple minutes though, so I thought I'd give as full a description of the last week as possible.

Last weekend I had my first taste of the Seoul night life. It's quite promising. First we went to diner at a "Sit down" Korean restaurant. And by sit down I mean on the floor. It was one of those places where theres a fire pit on the table and the meat cooks in front of you and all the things that make a place over priced in the states. Here's its just normal, and we had a slice of pork called Koibi(Cow-B), along with Korean beer(Cass). Im really getting to like some of the Korean food. The Kimchi-which is served with every meal-was different at first, but now I quite enjoy it. The meats here are excellent, and most of the other dishes are good. Lunches at the school are always an adventure. They tell me the school I work at has some of the best lunches in Nowon, they do seem to be quite nice. However, it seems every lunch there's at least one dish I have to talk myself into eating. Today it was these itty bitty fish that looked more like rice-they ended up tasting like leaves and I didnt eat them. Yesterday it was "soy root" which actually turned out quite nice. Also, the squid in almost every meal is a bit different, especially when its the minuture ones that are just put whole in the dishes. Oh, and the seaweed soup takes getting used to. The foods of this place could be a blog of their own, I swear.

Anyway, back to the weekend. After dinner we went to a bar called "Oldies", the more veteran teachers introduced us to Kim-Gi, who owns the place, the beer is expensive there(about $6), but it's more about the atmosphere. He plays old LPs on request. I, of course, requested Hotel California-which he obliged me in. It didn't seem like too bad of a spot, if only it were cheaper.

After that we went to what seemed to be a relatively sheek little jazz bar on the third floor of Yankiss plaza. Nowon is actually a rather hip section of Seoul(theres a lot of 20 somethings in the area) and right near the sub line by our office is the "cool" section of Nowon. Yankiss is in the center of that. Anyway, we played pool there and had a couple of drinks, but the mood was a bit too laid back so we only stayed for a game or two.(They were playing ColdPlay and Christmas music-it was killing us).

After that Alex and I went to a bar called BarSky right next to our office. It's got a very crisp and upscale look, but the beer is cheap($2 for a pint) and the owner loves to have westerners there.(It makes the bar look cooler Im told). We liked that place a lot.

We headed home after that. Sunday was a day of rest, except for the Chicken fiasco. Oh, the chicken fiasco.
Alex and I both wanted a nice simple cheap dinner sunday night. There was a fried chicken stand in our little enclave of the neighborhood. So we went there. Of course the woman at the counter spoke no English, but we were used to that. We each held up two fingers and pointed at two chicken breasts. She nodded in agreement. Then. Then she proceeded to put on all the chicken she had out. It was at least 4 pounds of chicken each. We were shocked, we hoped maybe she was just cooking extra to get ahead or something. Nope. 8 pounds of chicken out of the friar and into our baskets. THEN she chargers us $12 each. Ugh. I guess thats bound to happen, but non the less it sucked. It's a running joke now. When we're worried about a language barrier we say if we screw up we might be stuck with 4 pounds of chicken. Needless to say, Im sick of chicken at this point.

Monday was a difficult day. We went to immigration-and sat there for 4 hours. It's nice to know some things are universal-inept government offices for example.

I also started teaching on Monday. It's not nearly as hard as I had feared. The first day was a little rough, we were just thrown into the fire, but now that I'm a grizzled veteran of 4 days I feel much better about it. Kids aren't nearly as scary as I had thought.

The rest of this week has been filled mostly with long hours between working at the elementary school and night classes at the office. I'm going to be looking forward to relaxing weekends. I can tell.

This weekend I think Im going to be heading back to downtown on Saturday and hopefully figuring something out on my computer. Perhaps, perhaps some time next week Ill be up and running for full updates again. Until then, Annyong kheseyo.

Bret