After our brief political interlude (rant), back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Haven't taken many pictures lately, so here's one from the paper festival in October.

A couple weekends ago we headed to Seoul to meet with a girl C and i used to work with. She arrived a few months ago and let us crash on her extra single bed (ouch my friggin' back) so we could go out for a few drinks. We met her and some of her friends also from Regina who had just arrived a couple weeks earlier. We went out for actual Mexican food in Itaewon and then to a small hole-in-the-wall bar called Bar Nana for some drinks. Throughout the night we met six people from Saskatchewan and at least ten from Canada. I swear that of the 12,000 foreigners teaching English in Korea, at least 6,000 must be from Saskatchewan. C and were really surprised at the reactions we got from people when we told them we were from a small town outside Seoul. We got quite a few people that asked "Why?" and even one who asked if we had a movie theatre. They sounded like people from Toronto or Vancouver when you tell them you're from Regina. We're in a town bigger than Regina and they haven't been outside of Seoul yet and they're acting like it was the center of the universe. Whatever. After we got tired of the Reggae at Bar Nana we looked for a cab to Hongdae (the university area) for the six of us. As we waited a guy in an unmarked minivan yelled to ask us where we were going. He wanted 20,000 for a ride to Hongdae, but the New Zealander with us tried to talk him down to 15,000. My Korean is horrible so even though i thought the number he said sounded odd i just ignored it. It turns out he talked us up to paying 105,000 for the ride. The cab driver was alright though, and just laughed and took the piss out of the guy for his flub. Our stay in Hongdae was brief and the three of us left looked for a cab to our friend's apartment. She said the guy wanted 30,000 but i told her what 20,000 was and he agreed. As we passed through Itaewon the guy must of heard us talking about the Burger King there and suddenly started turning up what's called Hooker Hill. We weren't sure what he was doing at first but the guy swung around the block and ended up knocking on the door of the locked and barred BK trying to get us some. He was pretty cool. Even though he didn't speak any English we were sure he understood most of what we said. After our attempted BK it was off home at 100 km/h through red lights. I swear there are no traffic laws in this country. Every taxi ride is an adventure. The next day was spent shopping and we managed to find some North American food in Dongdaemun and a late birthday gift for C. We had a good weekend that i hope to repeat soon. That may not be the case though, since something came up at work that i'll have to get to another time. Damn i'm long winded.
Photos