Forgive me father for I have been slack. It's been a few weeks since my last blog and for this I am sorry....
Yes, my slackness in blogging of late has been duly noted... by many (I honestly didn't think anyone outside of my immediate family actually read this, but the numerous crabby emails I've received about my lack of posting suggests that perhaps I was wrong). It's just that the weather has been fantastic lately (sunny and around 25 degrees most days) and staying indoors to write my blog has been a far less attractive option than the abundant park-life that has been taking place. Anyway, point is that I'll try and get my act together on a slightly more regular basis.
Two (or so) weeks in review...
Items on the agenda: trivia night, fajita/jenga night, hookah night, hedgehogs and a covert helipad adventure. See below for details.
Item #1: Trivia night
Location: "The Magnet" (aka. Now Bar)
Rationale: Mid-week public holiday, an excuse to drink (like we needed another one) and a chance to put our collective trivial knowledge to good use... oh, and raising money for charity.
The Team: Amy, Kit, Darryn and Phil
We thought we had the trivia night in the bag... we thought wrong. Although, we did put in a cracking effort for the karma sutra - pictionary round...
Well we weren't entirely wrong- we did have something in the bag... A Chihuahua. After the quiz we were left babysitting said chihuahua in the bar while we drowned our sorrows over our tragic defeat... this photo highlights just one reason why dogs should not be allowed in bars.
Item #2: Fajita/Jenga night
Location: My apartment.
Rationale: Mexican food is hard to come by here... Jenga has so much potential in the 'seemingly innocent games turn drinking games' realm.
A recent trip to an American wholesale supermarket left me with an excessively large amount of fajita seasoning in my possession. Given that a lot of decent foreign foods can be quite hard to track down over here, this is acquisition was big news amongst my friends. In addition to this, my former co-workers left me as the guardian of a jenga set that they had previously used as a drinking game... basically (and it is a very basic concept), there are instructions on each jenga block, so each time you extract one from the pile you must do what it says. For example; finish your drink, do 2 shots of soju, ask the neighbour for an apple (keep in mind all our neighbours are Korean), attempt an acrobatic feat, sing your national anthem... etc etc etc. So, last Friday, I invited a few buddies around for fajitas and jenga (if you didn't already gather that from the title of "fajitas/jenga night"). Unfortunately my role as hostess-with-the-mostest left me with little time to photograph the evening (actually, there were a few hilarious videos, but I promised they'd never see the light of internet), so instead I've opted for a photo from significantly later in the night after we'd migrated back down to now bar...
Fajita'd, jenga'd,maekju'd, soju'd and mandu'd out... Item #3: Hookah night
Location: My apartment (apparently this weeks social hub of Yongtong)
Rationale: There is a hookah amongst us... and it keeps us away from the bar.
'Round here, we like to hookah (or shisha - depending on what you like to call it) and although there are a few cool hookah bars in Seoul, they aren't exactly convenient for an impromptu mid-week get-together. However, as I mentioned before, we like to hookah , so my friends Kit and Joe came up with the brilliant idea of co-purchasing a hookah of their very own... and thus bringing the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak. Over the last few months we have had a growing number of people partaking in hookah nights at Kit and Joes apartments. Last Wednesday, however, due to extenuating circumstances, we were left without a venue at the last minute, so I volunteered my place. Thinking that the 6 people who came for fajita/jenga night was probably at the higher-end of my apartment's comfortable catering limits, I was surprised to find we were able to squeeze 12 people and a hookah onto my lovely lino floor without too much trouble (in fact, I dare say that there was a tiny bit of room between Joe and my fridge for one more)
Yes, I realise it looks like something of a boys night... un/fortunately (depending on which way you look at it), most of my buddies here are boys - aside from a few of the boys girlfriends (who sadly don't live in Youngtong), a lot of the girls I know here don't go out all that much. As a consequence, I've been made an honorary boy - which I'm not sure is a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm taking the glass-half-full approach.
In Korea, everyone leaves their shoes at the door... this was my doorway after about half of the group showed up.
Item #4: Hedgehogs
Location: The park
Rationale: I don't think there needs to be a rationale behind hedgehogs as a species... but my rationale for putting them on the items agenda is that they're pretty damn cool!
Not too much to be said about this item of the agenda - aside from that this is Blackberry the pygmy hedgehog - 1 of 5 that friends of mine own. I want a hedgehog, but they are spiky and I discovered that I'm a little scared of touching them... but they're so cool, I want one!
Item #5: Covert helipad adventure
Location: New towers in Youngtong
Rationale: Keeping in mind I said 'rationale' and not 'rational': (a) we wanted to and (b) no one stopped us.
Late one Sunday evening, after a day of hanging about in the sunshiney park, a bunch of foreigners got talking about the new apartment towers that had recently been completed in their town. It was noted that although between them they had seen a combined total of approximately 3 helicopters during their time in Korea, the vast majority of high-rise buildings (of which there are many), have a helipad on the top. Their conversation naturally progressed to speculation about the nature of the views one may encounter atop the aforementioned 40 story buildings... and soon enough these inquisitive and adventure-hungry foreigners decided that they would like to see the views for themselves....
The triumphant delinquents - moments after reaching the summit of the high-rise.
(with the lifts currently servicing only the first 10 of 40 floors, it really did feel as if we had just climbed a mountain.)
Speculation no longer required. The views were pretty sweet...
Holding my camera still enough to get good shots of them proved to be quite difficult.
So that's been the last 2 weeks for me - more or less... I went to the zoo last week with the kids at school and this week we had a mini-olympics - but that's another post all together. I also started volunteering at an orphanage near my house this week. I've been trying to organise it with one of my Korean co-workers for about a month now, but finally on Tuesday we were able to get it sorted to go down to meet the kids and assess their English levels... The orphanage is not at all what I expected (but given that my imagery of orphanages is entirely based on the movie 'Annie' and a terribly depressing kids home I visited in Vietnam, I'm not surprised my expectations were a little off). It's run by nuns and it's a really warm, clean and comfortable place. There are just 9 kids there at the moment and they all go to a local elementary school and have piano lessons and math tutoring like everyone else... they've just never had the option to learn English before, so Bunny (my Korean co-worker) and I will take them for a 45 minute beginners English class once a week and just hang about and play some games with them. So yeah, I'm looking forward to going again next week 'cos the kids there are sweethearts... and it's just really nice to be able to do something good while I'm here too.
Well, that's all my news for now - oh, except that a kid threw a banana at me today which reminded me of the Groucho Marx quote I used for the title of this post... anyway, I hope everyone back home has a nice ANZAC weekend. Eat some ANZAC biscuits for me!!!
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