Jon goes to Korea: Caught up like Usher

Sorry about it being over a month since I last posted. I seem to be running out of interest when it comes to keeping this thing up-to-the-minute and entertaining. Let's try harder!

First, the headlines:

Jessica is here!!!

Yes, she made it, alive and in one piece despite having her flight rerouted to China. She managed to touch down at ICN just in time for a beautiful reunion in arrivals. I was worried I would miss her so I took a cab from Seoul all the way to the Incheon Airport, then had the guy wait and take us both back to the apartment in Seoul again. A $120 tab was the result, but Jessica was treated to a silver, sandalwood-scented ride to her new home, which I'm sure she would agree was worth it.

She milled about the apartment the first few days getting her bearings and I made sure to show her around the neighbourhood. She reunited with Gord and Charlotte and was introduced to wonders of Korean BBQ. She likes the 2% peach drink here and even watched a Korean movie start to finish on TV. I'd say she's doing pretty well so far. Jet lag had her zonking out by around 7 every night at first, but she still mustered up enough energy to completely reorganize almost my entire apartment on day 2. However, she didn't really get a chance to settle before we headed out on...

The Massive Roadtrip!

Yep, YBM gives us a whopping 6 days for summer vacation so our newly realized foursome decided to rent a car and drive all over the place. We got a Daewoo Tosca and headed out on what would be an epic trek around the entire country. This really warrants an entire entry and I'll save the details for that (and maybe throw in some pictures and an interactive map). I'll just briefly mention that it was an exhausting, yet breathtaking trip and I could not have thought of a better way to spend the summer break.

Back to Work!

My job is going on and on and on. Nothing much changes there except a few new people here and there. I've had my current kindy classes for about just as long as I'd had my other kindy classes when they got yanked from my schedule. As a result, they have once again wormed their way into my heart, little bastards and all. I took my camera into work one day and got a few good videos, but I kind of realize how boring videos of a bunch of unknown kids can be to anyone that doesn't know them, so I'll relent somewhat. Some kids from one of my former classes make it a point to kiss me on the hand every time they see me, a trend started by my little bud Eric. No doubt my stern yet fun method of teaching commanded some serious Vito Corleone-like respect from them.

Weekends!

Weekends are weekends. Especially hard weeks bring about especially fun weekends. Going out for an all-nighter usually entails my companions and I winding up in some pretty interesting locales for some fun and hi jinx. I've been to dirty south hip hop clubs, noraebangs with light up pressure-sensitive floor panels (a la the Billie Jean music video), old cabarets strewn with shredded newspaper, bars that doubled as full on water parks and bars decorated completely with ice. The last great night out was at a small bar called Woodstock in Suyu that streamed all of their music off the net and thus played every single song we requested. It was like we had our own personal DJ. I drew some guy's portrait and he payed for my beer. We were all dancing by the end of it.

I'll cap this entry off with some photos. I haven't been that much of a shutterbug lately, but Jess brought her Nikon D60 and I've been loving it, so I'll definitely have more up as soon as I can get the pics off of her memory card. Funny story, she's not actually staying with me entirely. Through sheer fortune, she wound up with an apartment of her own in Dongdaemun that she sometimes makes use off...

But I won't get into the details just yet. Here's those pics. Enjoy!