life. isn't it worth a bottle of great water?

that's what the label on my gaya mineral water says. i would like to think my life is worth more than a bottle of water, even if it is "great" water. but maybe they're right and 2liters of hydration is all i amount to.

my head hurts. my brain is telling me not to drink any more cheap beer, but my wallet says i should go for it! i think i'll listen to the brain pain for a couple of days. i know i write too much about drinking, no need to remind me...
despite my aching brain today, yesterday was another good day of discovery. me, jules and rory's intention was to find some elusive pagoda monument thingy or something. i obviously don't know what we were looking for, but rory had the map and i saw some sort of landmark on it, so that's what in theory we were setting out to find. instead we found dakgalbi alley in myung dong (huge shopping area). apparently each province in south korea has a dish for which they're famous. we're in dakgalbi province. it's this spicy chicken dish that they cook at the table for you(i guess most restaraunts here do that if they're authentic and bbq). so we find dakgalbi alley after getting sort of sidetracked and it was unreal. you walk down this street lined on both sides with restaraunts selling the exact same thing. because of the competition, the women who work at these places spy you walking down the street and hang out the doors of the restaraunts yelling crap at you in korean to try to convince you to come in. you'll have to see rory and jules' video blog when it's up and running. it's insane. all these middle aged women wildly gesticulating and saying stuff that none of us understand, and all about chicken. we finally decided on a place and it was great. the amount of food they cooked before our eyes was unlike anything i've ever seen. it was just bbq chicken, little rice finger looking things, cabbage, some onions and garlic. then they give you lettuce and the chili paste that makes korean food taste korean. you wrap the cooked stuff in the lettuce and eat it like a taco. a korean taco.

after lunch we decided to go to the newly-opened converse store. i happened to have money and figured i'd blow some of it on a new pair of shoes i don't really need. en route to converse, there was another soju giveaway--the same girls that were at the last one dressed like flight attendants. so we each got a bottle of soju and a free shot out of the deal. at the converse store i bought some sweet black leather high tops that have a blue x-ray image of the bones in your feet on them. plus i got a free converse hat--i'm sure that will come in handy when i go back to work at shakespeare's. ha ha ha. we wandered around for a while after that and never did find the cultural monument we were sposed to, but it was still cool to be in a new, albeit decrepit, part of town. we ended up over by the old u.s. military base that closed down last year, camp page. it was this sprawling ghost town that looked like some sort of prison. it actually reminded me a lot of the prison in jefferson city that is now a dnr parking lot. you could tell that the district we were in was hit pretty hard when camp page closed. all these restaraunts and store fronts that looked like hell with broken windows and trash everywhere. that was also a very real reminder of the political climate and how close we are to freaking north korea. it's easy to feel safe, but i forget how small korea is, and just how close the north is. weird.

post nap, met up with jules and rory again for my second night in a row of pho bay vietnamese food. when i went on friday night, i'm convinced i ate the hottest food i've ever had in my life. my insides felt like they were on fire all night. but it was good. the second night i didn't just dump every sauce they gave me into my food and it was a lot better.

after dinner went out drinking with jules and rory. here's where all the cheap beer comes into the picture. i guess i'd been drinking pretty much all day too, but it continued on into the night. we went to the kang de hu moon area (university area) and went on our own sort of pub crawl. first stop was johnny's bar. they seem to always have hip hop or pop music videos on the tvs there. despite the soundtrack, it's got a relatively classy feel and you get to lounge on nice chairs. the table next to us could not stop staring at rory and julie. most people stare, no big deal, but this guy took it past the acceptable point. after johnny's bar we went to a bar called lucifer. there wasn't really anything hellish about the place, besides me getting hiccups, i guess that sucked a little bit. had some more beers there, then we went to this place that had a giant dinosaur on it's sign. drank more beer there and the bar staff did not seem amused by us. called shakes for the fun of it, and out of all the people working who could possibly answer the phone, we got leonard. go figure. last stop was lava. jules and rory only stayed for a little bit and i left shortly after they did. last call or not, 4 am is still a really really late night.

today, i would have done absolutely nothing, but i had an appointment to go meet more friends of the korean guy i tutored in como. so i went back to the same area that we partied last night to meet the guy and his two kids. hu moon looks a lot different during the day. seems a little dirtier, like they didn't have time to clean up the filth of the night before. the father i met wants to take me and julie and rory out to dinner sometime together with his whole family. which is fantastic. it's weird but good to be held in such high regard by people who hadn't even met me yet. so i hope i didn't let the family down.

the daughter of the bunch is perhaps the tallest korean female i've seen. i think she was even taller than me. she's in high school and her little brother is in middle school. we went back to their apartment just to chat and drink coffee and eat apples. it was weird to be in an apartment that 4 people live in. it was a decent-sized apartment, but i just don't think that would be enough separation. everything here is so compact--the housing, the people, everything. anyhoo, i now have 2 groups of people looking out for me while i'm here, and that's comforting. they made a list of all the korean foods i like so the mother knows what to cook for me when they have me over. hopefully i'll learn some korean while i'm at it.

riding in the car with the korean father and his korean daughter, i was again struck by how little culture shock i've had. it really only hits me when i'm a little intoxicated and sentimental, or when i eat food that i don't know what the hell it is (i accidentally ordered octopus last week. whoops.). even on the radio they played tom waits, norah jones, then barbara streisand. and i was struck by how normal that seemed (despite the fact that in como you probably would only hear tom waits on kcou). the daughter, eun hye, asked me if i liked any pop music in korea, so i started singing the one song i always get stuck in my head ("boy boy you makey me move"). to my surprise, the very pretty lead singer of the group that sings that was one of korea's first transgender peeps. to my surprise, eun hye also knew how to say "transgender" in english. when i got home, i looked up "korean transgender" on google, and sure enough, there's this she-man's mug everywhere. apparently there's a she-man group. all these trannies auditioned to be in this girl group, and only 3 made it, including my favorite chick. and one of the other chicks is going to be the spokesperson for a new line of maxipads. so there you go.