• I’ve decided against competing in the Kumite.  I decided that there’d be bunches of people there in much better shape than I am at the moment.  Give me 6 months though, I’ll be there in a second.
• In 5 days I will have been in Korea for 10 months.
• There are lots of new faces ’round Gumi.  Just 3 months ago there was a large of group of people that you could see all at the same place having a good time.  Now that half those people are gone, especially people who organized outings (I’m looking your way Roisin), it’s real different all of a sudden.  Now I’m the guy that’s been here a long time giving advice to new people.
• I haven’t told many people back home, but I have pretty concrete plans to come back to Korea again next year.  This means I’ll only be home for a month or two or three.
• I’ve started a new temporary band.  Craig’s been so busy with work lately, I’ve taken my good buddy Steven under my wing.  We played last weekend, with him on guitar, and myself on drums and vocals.  Drums are hella fun.  We’ll playing 2 more shows later this month in Gumi (which happen to be likely our 2 last shows, since he’s going back to Canada).

September 12th, 2006 | Life, Life in Korea | 3 comments

My cousin Tanya came around to Korea a few weeks ago. She just came from visiting our other cousin Kim in Japan. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, but we’ve grown up seeing eachother every Christmas.She landed at my aunt’s place in Seoul, but I decided to take her in for the weekend and try to show her Busan, which I haven’t seen either. We hit Haeundae Beach which was pretty bitchin, lots of waves, inner tubes, parasols, and sand.

I thought the beach would be a lot more crowded, especially from the stories I’ve heard from other people. But we got ourselves a parasol for 5 bucks from a grandma who apparently runs that portion of the beach. Theres also a lot of jellyfish. I’m pretty sure I felt a bunch on my feet but I heard they don’t sting you here for some reason. After running in and out of the water, and then back in, and then back out again, and then finally getting bored of it, we headed back to our hotel to clean up.

After an incredible dinner of curried chicken and rice and naan at Ganga, an Indian chain of restaurants in Korea, we hit a bar called U2. We sat down and everyone started deciding what they wanted to drink when Mimi came back with a full bottle of Jose Cuervo. We played a deadly drinking that I’ve come to call ‘Ding, Ding’.

How Ding, Ding works is, everyone says DING, DING, and then the first person who is ‘it’, says a number between 1 and twenty. At the same time he or she shouts the number, everyone points to someone else at the table. Then you start to count, from person to person, following where people are pointing. The person it ends on, chooses a shot from the middle which have varying sizes of tequila shots. It’s fast, dirty, and gets you tanked, especially when you play host to the game.

Afterwards we headed to a club called Mary Jane. All I remember is having a bitchin time with everyone as we all danced our respective faces off.

Boys and Girls, this is how a heavy night of drinking ends up.

Pretty sweet, eh?

September 1st, 2006 | Life, Life in Korea, Photos | 5 comments