Date Night in Daegu, and a note on perspectives.

Last night Babehoney and I had a bit of a date night in the urban paradise of Daegu. Maybe "paradise" is overstating it a bit, but there's nothing wrong with liking where you're at, eh? Now I will regale you with tales from our night out. We get off of work at 4:30pm. We met back at the apartment building, changed into non-work clothes, and headed down to the subway station. We took the train down to Jungangno station and without even leaving the confines of climate control worked our way to the top of the Lotte Young Plaza where the CGV cinema is. We got tickets for the next showing of Battle: Los Angeles and realized that we had 2 hours to find dinner, do some banking, and shop around a bit.

We had dinner at Mi Buono, an "Italian" restaurant next to the movie theater. They serve spaghetti of various varieties and pizzas. We had a tandoori chicken pizza and a honey gorgonzola pizza. They were both really good, but there wasn't much gorgonzola flavor in the honey-gorg. We were happy to find a pizza place that doesn't suck and isn't too expensive. Yay!

After dinner we headed over to the Korea Exchange Bank because I needed to wire about a thousand bucks back to the US. The amazing thing about KEB is that I can make my international wire cheaply and either from home or the ATM. I didn't have my online bank account set up with them yet, so I did it at the ATM. A few button presses and 1,500,000 wons made their way to the USA. It didn't happen instantly though and I was a bit worried, so I went back to the bank today and double checked everything and set up my online banking. Sweet. I also found out that there was a favorable change in the exchange rate and instead of sending about $1,200 home I sent more like $1,325. That's cool.

We explored the downtown shopping options a bit. Babehoney got some new converse hi-tops, and I mainly watched as there are really no clothes or shoes that would fit me here. Downtown really lights up at night with tons of neon. We stumbled by either a church service or a protest of some sort. Everybody was singing along with someone on a stage and holding candles in front of a banner that was all in Hangul. Interesting site, if nothing else.

We made our way back to the theater and I THOROUGHLY enjoyed Battlefield: Los Angeles. What a great flick. It wasn't the standard formula of build tension, alien attack, amazing comeback by humanity. It started straight in on the action. Yes, it was cheesy. Yes it was cliche. Yes I loved it. I'll definitely be buying the Blu-Ray combo pack for this one when it comes out in the US. Well, when I move back to the US and have a TV that makes it worth buying the Blu-Ray again.

We had a little bit of a rush to get to the subway station (just below the movie theater about 9 floors) before the last train, but we made it on and had an uneventful ride home. What a nice evening.

In unrelated events, I bought my first video game since moving to Korea. I got Bulletstorm for the PS3. I had read a lot about the game and thought it would be fun, and the decision was extra easy to make because it was only 40,000W and the only game in the store in English. Decision made. It's a really fun game filled with profanity, dirty double entendre, and remote controlled dinosaurs complemented by over the top gore. There's not much to not like about it.

Ah, my note about perspectives. Living in Korea has done this amazing thing for me. It made me realize that my own country is kinda cool. Sure, the US is cutting corners on some really important things like education, the economy is horrible, and people who spent big money to get degrees are kinda screwed because there's no jobs in many fields and they're graduating with a fair amount of school debt. But, there's a lot about our country that's good. Special education in schools is a big one. That's not offered in every school here and parents can opt out. I like the inclusivity and diversity of the US too. Korea is not bad by any means, but everyone here is Korean less a few foreigners. This doesn't bother me as I'd usually just watch society pass me by, but sometimes I wish people didn't look at me like I have a giraffe crawling out of one of my ears on the subway :). I know I won't eyeball foreigners in my hometown anymore after my experience here.

It's very interesting as an ex-pat to get the outside view of your own country. You can definitely see things that are embarassing or could possibly make life more difficult for you when you live overseas. You definitely want the government's foreign policy to not be unilateral and offensive on a global scale, and you're definitely proud when your country handles things right, and when they're on the scene immediately to provide aid when something horrible happens in a third country like Japan.

Anyway, that's the note on my perspective, and I told you all about date night in Daegu. I'm sorry that there's no fun pictures for this post, maybe I'll do something more picture worthy this weekend :).