All the Pretty Party While the Petty People Pout

After hopping around so much, I figure I should start at the beginning, or somewhere near there, I suppose.

The first post that I wrote after Trav and Laura arrived. The next night, Friday, December 19, they met me again and we went out on the town, kind of. That day Jaemin was wearing the white pumas again, he had on dark blue jeans, not quite as slim as his other pair of dark jeans, but these also had some factory fading and creasing. He was wearing a yellow sweatshirt and had a blue puff jacket that is so popular here. He has many jackets, many warm jackets, I guess he wears what ever jacket goes best with the outfit. He is so adorable.

During my last class on Friday, a class of middle school boys who are all adorable and always get out of doing actually class work because of it, I was trying to teach them a unit on personality traits. But of course not only do they not understand personality or traits, they don’t understand any of the words in the unit: forgetful, adventurous, short-tempered etc. There is one boy who always kind of tries because he knows he is cute, I think I have mentioned him before. He isn’t seriously trying, just kind of flirting. Obviously, he is one of my favourite students. I am trying to explain the words and he always says teacher draw it and laughs. Suddenly he grabs his book and runs out of the room, saying something about Korean teacher. He is gone for quite a while, when he comes back into the room he has this huge grin on his face. He starts listing his personality traits. I am not forgetful or short-tempered. I am sociable and adventurous. He had gone and found a Korean teacher to translate all the words for him because he didn’t understand what I was saying to him. Nobody in that class actually listens to me and when they are supposed to listening to the cd they just talk or play on their phones, and basically I am powerless to stop them, they just ignore me. And when it comes time to go over the answers they just guess until they get the right answer. But they are all so fucking cute, I can’t even get mad at them. I just laugh. It is actually on of my favourite classes and I am always in a super good mood when I leave school on Fridays.

After school, Trav and Laura were waiting for me at my apartment. We had some soju and rice chips while we waited for Sally. We chatted for a while, sipping the soju and orange juice concoction that I created for them. Sally was running a little late. Once she arrived we hopped in a cab and headed to Nowan for some good times. Justin, the guy in charge of the foreign teachers for all the Kang Tae Woo schools, organized a meet and greet for all the teachers. We were supposed to meet at the subway station in Nowan, he arrived a little late, but were still the first people there. I had never met Justin before, although Sally had mentioned him a few times. I had to email him to let him know that I was bringing Trav and Laura along. We met him, another teacher named Daniel, a Korean American from Miami and a Korean friend of Justin’s that whose name I don’t remember, and there was Brian, a really annoying guy from some where in Ontario. We headed over to a galbi restaurant to wait for the rest of the group. Sarah, Sally’s friend, also joined us although she is not a teacher at a Kang Tae Woo school. At first being at the restaurant was really awkward, we got a floor seating and it turns out that Brian is vegetarian, one of those really vocal vegetarians that feels the need to express it every five seconds and refuses to even touch meat, such as pass the plate down the table. Good god, he was annoying.

Things got a little better when Justin came back with the rest of the group. There more people around and things started to pick up. And once the galbi gets cooking all of us foreigners all like to talk about how deficient we are at BBQ and then attempt to cook the meat ourselves. We drank a bit of soju, which was complicated because some of the people didn’t want soju and weren’t passing the cups down because they assumed that if they were drinking nobody else would want to either. It was all kind of confusing, but things got better.

This was like two weeks ago and I don’t really remember much of what was talked about or the exact details anymore.

After the restaurant, we decided to hit up the Dragon Bar for some drinks. At the bar I deliberately sat in a place where I could meet new people and avoid the annoying guy from Ontario. I was successful in meeting new people; unfortunately the annoying guy got the chair next to me. Fuck. I meet Nicky and Sara, two teachers from a different Kang Tae Woo school. Both have been here for a while and were really nice and cooler than the average uncool English teacher. (Have I mentioned that English teachers are generally not very cool? Of course there are some exceptions, but not many). I would definitely like to try to be real friends with them. Then I talked with Trav while Laura made friends with Daniel and a Korean guy named Josh. She talked with them for hours.

At about 4:30, a bunch of us left the bar for a noraebang. Sally had left already; she wanted to escape a guy. She took a cab home. Sarah left as well because she had to work the next day. That meant that all the people that I actually knew were gone, a thought that didn’t occur to me until we were sitting in the noraebang with a bunch of people who were basically strangers to me. Laura doesn’t sing, although she politely looked through the song list to appease pushy regulars. Trav and I sang a couple of duets, including his usual “The Bitch is Back” and we may have sung some Avril Lavinge. I like singing Avril; she’s easy.

6:30 rolled around and we decided that it was time to go home. The subways were running again. I guess the subways had been running for over an hour already. I rode with Trav and Laura until my stop, but I’m close to Nowan, so it was only two stops. I was pleased that I was able to really take them out, Korean style. There were a few stages, important in a night out, there was some soju and some beer, we definitely heard Big Bang a few times, we went to a noraebang, essential in the stages, and we stayed out until we could get back on the subway. It was perfect, also, I think this was first time I have actually pulled an all nighter here. All the other times I have fallen asleep somewhere, even if it was on Sally’s shoulder on the subway. I got into bed at about 7:30 AM. Perfect.