Dining with the Teachers, and Haggling like an Arab Trader

Last night I went to the welcome dinner for all of the new teachers at my school. What an interesting experience. It was a very good traditional Korean food restaurant with a long dining hall. All of the teachers showed up and started eating. There must have been 16 courses or more. I remember distinctly red bean paste soup, kimchi oysters and bean sprouts, rice noodles with soy glaze, pickled radish roots, fried chicken breast pieces topped with Korean red pepper sauce and lettuce frisee, a salad with mango dressing, freshwater fish caked with red pepper, marinated salmon, seafood jigae with crabs and prawns, bulgogi, ddok boki, and more. After a while an announcement was made that all the new teachers were to get up and introduce themselves. All the teachers talked for a bit and the other native English speaker said "what do you think we should say?" I replied "I'm not sure." Finally the mic was in my hands and the crowd cheered (led by my awesome co-teacher, of course.) I said "Hello! (cheers) Charlie im-mi da, mi-guk eso im-mida. That's all the Korean I know for this type of situation, so I'll just say I'm very happy to be here and excited to work with you all." As soon as I started speaking in Korean all of the teachers said "oooOOOOOOoooooo." They sounded a bit like the kids do if I mention the fact that I have a girlfriend. It was fun. After we sat down the P.E. teacher came over and started pouring beer for us and then ANOTHER course of food came out. This time it was a whole grilled fish with about 4 different bahn-jahns, a bowl of rice, and sheets of kim (nori) to wrap the rice in. At this point I could hardly eat or drink anything more, so I was quite thankful when the party ended and we all headed home. What a night!

Today was a nice day off. We were both pretty tired last night. I fell asleep while we were watching the most recent episode of America's Next Top Model last night and woke up this morning at about 8:30am when Babehoney's phone was ringing like crazy because someone had the wrong number. Boy were they puzzled when she said "ani-yeyo hangugo" which means "no Korean no Korean." It's the best we could come up with for the situation.

At any rate, the big adventure for the day was to go to Gyodong Electronics Market, a pretty vast area of downtown, to find a new power converter. On the way we stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts because Babehoney loves their coffee to no end and wanted a little taste of home. The donut flavors were interesting. Spinach, vegetable, and olive flavored donuts were all over the place. I had a banana filled donut (it was okay) and a peanut crunch donut (which was omg[ood]), while babehoney enjoyed her honey fritter. It was quite enjoyable, and gave us just enough energy to make it to Gyodong Market where I tried to haggle in Korean. It went pretty well even though the guy wouldn't move off of his super low price of 15,000W for a huge converter box. With dreams of an evening playing video games in my head we walked downtown from Gyodong Market and stopped in at the Kyobo bookstore. This is a massive bookstore that covers many floors of a huge high rise building and has a large English selection. Underneath the store in the Jungangno station shopping plaza was a huge stationery store where we spent a while picking out some stuff we needed for work and around the house. I found some sweet Domo-kun paper to write letters with to the nieces and nephews but decided to save that purchase for another day.

We were hungry again, so as luck would have it I sniffed our way to the Irish Potato, a french-fry restaurant where you get fries and toppings. It was okay, but the corn dogs we found on the street afterwards were awesome and way cheap. We looked around the HomePlus a bit at chairs and pillows and such before stopping in on the floor with the groceries to pick something up for dinner and head home.

Sadly the component cable I picked up for the PS3 doesn't fit the humongous TV, so the only video games I played were on my laptop. Sigh. I will have playstation soon. Oh yes. It will be mine. Now it's the end of a long day, I'm worn out, and my damn iPod needs a software update that is taking a really long time to download. This is particularly troubling because we have an amazingly fast internet connection. I guess I'll leave the computer on overnight and hope that it finishes. Or maybe it's best to just stop it and restart in the morning. Yeah. That I think.