Wednesday through chicken eating Friday

After buying bikes on Wednesday morning, I met up with LeeAnna (the girl who lives in my building who I went with to strawberry festival) because she was showing me how to get to the tailor so I could have some jeans fixed. She speaks a little bit of Korean (at least she knows mubers) so she was able to understand some of what happened. Basically I had 2 pairs of jeans with holes in the inner thighs. He was able to patch them so you couldn't tell there was a hole at all for about $15 in one day. Things like that are why people say Korea is cheaper than the States.

After I dropped off my pants, I went home and took a nap (out of context, that sentence looks really odd). When I woke up, I felt like doodoo - I was achy, my throat hurt and I was pretty sure I had a fever. But I went to work anyways. After work, I walked in the door, didn't even turn on the light, and crawled into bed at 10pm. I woke up at 12 and was freezing, still had a fever and coughing up a storm. I took an Advil, went back to bed and woke up again around 3 drenched in sweat - fever broken! I still felt bad, but a little better than on Wednesday. On Thursday I stayed in bed all day sleeping and reading "Water for Elephants".

On Friday it rained all morning. It stopped around 2, but was still yucky outside. Friday is my super short day and after work I went home to have a quick read before going to the Good Friday service at church. They had been having Korean/English services all week at 5:30, but I didn't go to any of those. The service was nice - the had video clips of hymns instead of having us sing (except we were invited to sing Amazing Grace/My Chains have been Broken at the end), and had readers read excerpts.

After service, I met up with Cindy, Liezle and Ally at Ally's apartment and we headed out to meet another group of people for dinner. One girl, Taleisha, doesn't eat pork or beef, so we had dakgalbi - chicken. I hadn't eaten that here yet and it was really good. Before they start the main dish, they give you side bits. We got shredded cabbage with thousand island dressing, kimchi and something else I can't remember. They also gave everyone soup...sort of. It's cold radish soup. And by cold, I mean it has ice chunks floating in it. The flavor would have been ok, but I couldn't do the cold. Neither could about 9/10 of us. I felt a little bad about it, because it seemed like such as waste, but oh well.

Left is cabbage salad, right is ice radish soup

Then he made the chicken. First, they dump basically cooked chicken pieces, cabbage, rice noodles, and bits of potato in a big dish in the middle of your table. Then they add hot water with a tea kettle (I tried to get a good picture of that, but I couldn't). Then they mix it around with wooden spatulas for a bit and add chili paste (we didn't get ours very hot, but the other table did). After you eat most of the dish, they will come back and add rice, cabbage or spinach, and mroe chili paste to the dish and form a rice patty type thing. Then you eat that too. We also had drinks - many drinks (I actually didn't drink all that much at dinner because I don't like some of the stuff that we ordered).

Dakgalbi - chicken, cabbage, onions, rice noodles etc.

Tea pot

Rob, Ally, Matt watching rice

I also took a video of the rice being mixed around. The benefit of not telling people you are videoing something means you can sometimes get a good clip. Other times, it means you have people talking about being transgendered while you are watching rice being cooked. Enjoy!

After dinner, we went to a bar called JuJimis. I had been there before - it's the place with sojo slushies. We had a bit of a language barrier when we asked for "peach" (which Koreans speaking English say as "peachy") and ended up with a pitcher of beer. We got it worked out though and had kiwi and peach slushies. We also played a fairly tame (read lame) version of Never Have I Ever (although I don't know these people well enough to play the good version). Most of the people left around 12-1, but I stayed out with Liezle, Ally and a girl named Emily (who I really like and is from England) until almost 3 am. Ally fell asleep in the bar and I took a video of it. He had threatened to beat me with a large stick if I post it on facebook and it's almost 2 minutes long, so I won't post it here either, but it was pretty funny. When he woke up he wanted us to go for chicken wings - I said no.