Yesterday one of my fellow teachers stopped by to chat. Most of the teachers live in the same apartment as me, just on different floors. Anyway, her name is Megan and she kind of gave me a run through of how everything works. I found out that all the money I spent on buying nice clothes because I thought I would have to wear them to work was not necessary, apparently I can wear jeans and a sweatshirt to work if I want! So Megan took me down to the local department store. The reason I didn't come across it earlier is because I was walking in the wrong direction! She showed me a few other places I'll try to hit up tomorrow, to get more stuff for the apartment. I hooked myself up with an awesome pillow. I still need sheets though, which aren't very popular here since most Koreans don't have proper beds.

After that she invited me to go out to dinner with some of the other teachers. There's Ruth and Walker from Scotland, Alex from Canada, Megan is from New York, and Tim who is from Michigan. He doesn't work at the school anymore though, now he's working in China. So we went to a place to eat galbi, which is basically barbecued meat. They put down a bowl of coals in from of you, and you place the grill thing on top of it and put the meat on it. I learned that you can NEVER burn the meat, or the Koreans will get all mad at you and cook your food for you.

I tried Soju and Kimchi last night. The kimchi was spicy as all hell, so I guess I'm just going to have to burn off my taste buds while I'm here. Soju, that's a whole 'nother story. Soju is the drink of choice for Koreans, because it's cheap and it hits you hard. You can either take straight shots with your meal, or some people mix it with their beer. I would say that it's closest relative is vodka, but when you drink it you don't really taste it until it's in your stomach. And unlike other drinks that miraculously get better as the night progresses, it actually gets worse.

So after dinner we went to a bar. There are two types of bars here, a proper bar and a HOF, I'm still not sure what the difference is, but at one of them you have to order food, you can't just get drinks. I have no idea what we went to last night, but it was a place called Beer Plus. They served us our pitcher of beer in a giant beer bong of sorts, the kind of thing you would see at a fancy kegger. It was a huge tube of beer, with a column of ice down the middle, and a spicket at the bottom to pour the beer from. It was pretty cool. So we got more beer and more soju, we found up staying until closing. Then, I was introduced to noraebang...

I was informed earlier that most neon signs I see on the streets are either going to read 약국 (yak-kuk=pharmacy) or 노래방 (no-rae-bang=karoke). So these no-rae-bangs are karaoke places, where you go into individual rooms with your friends and sing karaoke. Pretty straight forward. The one we went to last night however, must be the craziest one around, because even the others were amazed by it. It was themed in, I shit you not, Alien vs Predator style. It was seriously crazy, I wish I hadn't left my camera on my table. It was a blast though.

As fun of a night as it was, the morning certainly was not. I was warned in advance that Soju would give you a mighty hangover, but of course I've never met a clear liquid that gave me trouble, so I didn't really believe it. Believe it. I mean, it certainly wasn't the worst hangover I've ever had, probably didn't even make the top ten, but it was still quite unpleasant. But, a few Aleve (which I am not EXTREMELY thankful that I decided to bring along), some water and some of those cute little oranges and I'm pretty much back to normal.

Today I'm going to see my friend Tim who I've known since basically the first day of college. I'm super excited! It's a holiday though, so I guess a lot of places are going to be closed. And I just got here myself, so it's not like I'm going to be able to show him around or anything. But I'm sure we'll have fun!