As many of you now know, I now have a shiny new cellphone: the Samsung Galaxy SII. It is a marvel of (now outdated) technology capable of passing many hours in a virtual second! Frankly, it scares the hell out of me! Not only that, but the damn thing is quite a bit bigger than my flip phone (called a "grampa phone" here)!
The point of my phone rant is that I now have a phone with a camera in it FOR THE FIRST TIME EVAR!
The reason why I haven't updated myself in the past two weeks is that I was waiting on some photos from our not-Halloween shindig. Well, I now have some!
On November 2nd Hannah and I went with a couple of friends (Fiona and Julian of Colorado) to a zombie-themed pub crawl. Now, we were under the distinct impression that the zombie crawl was on Saturday and we thought we had time to create our costumes. I was going to go as zombie Abe Lincoln and Hannah as zombie Misty from Pokemon. Well, unfortunately for me I received an email around 2:00PM from Hannah on Friday telling me that the pubcrawl was 7:00 that night! Sadly, I was not honest Abe... I was nothing.
However, as luck would have it, Fiona has experience doing stage makeup and had a good supply of stuff to smear on our faces (Fiona, if you're reading, please forgive the imagery! You have the light touch and care of a butterfly with down feathers for legs.). Between that and some red nail polish applied to my neck by another friend in attendance, I wound up looking like this:
So, while I was no Abe Lincoln, I made for a pretty convincing zombie. Hannah's was also very good; however, I was a LITTLE more into the whole spirit of Halloween than she was, I think:
KISS ME!!! RAWR!!!
Now, as many of you know, and as my students DEFINITELY know, Halloween is my FAVOURITE holiday! More than Christmas and even more than my own birthday, so I was thrilled that I was actually able to do something in Korea! So, with makeup on and zombie identities assumed, we lurched toward the first bar.
The zombie walk was composed of three bars: the Thirsty Moose (Canadian and Turkish-themed, if that makes sense), Paco Taco (Mexican) and "The Basement" (standard-issue night club). All three are owned by the same guy, so we basically got three free drinks that night from whichever place we wanted. We were quite saddened by the fact that so many people there did not wear costumes! Even more sad was the fact that the other people that DID bother looked more like The Joker than a cadaver!
The 1960's Cesar Romero version!
Moreover, once the prizes were announced and whatnot, the musician present started playing depressing hipster music. Seriously. Melancholy, brooding music during the most manic night of the year! WTF?! We were basically driven out of the bar by the atmosphere and by the glares of the other patrons as we tried talking to each other, of all things!
So, determined to save Halloween, I dumped a bucket of blood over my head and we walked (I lurched) to the next place: Paco Taco.
**I should mention at this point that, while many Koreans are aware of the West's weird fascination with Halloween, they do not necessarily share it. So, four foreigner zombies lurching about at night (one COVERED in blood) was definitely a strange sight, to be sure. Most gave us a wide berth, but some were clearly amused. "Don't eat me, zombie man!").**
Like this, but more drippy. It was pretty graphic/awesome. To my left, Hannah gasping in amazement at my raw zombie sexiness!
Anyway, at Paco Taco, zombie-Garrett fed upon the flesh... of two beef tacos. Not bad, actually. Nothing compared to what you would get in North America, but, all things considered, not bad. I even ate the tacos half-zombie style and harassed a bartender pretending to shoot me. I didn't bite him, but I did manage to utter an order, "Beeeeerrrr..... *gargle*". I got Moosehead! Really! Moosehead of all things! And guess what: I was thrilled. The first time I EVER ordered my hometown's beer at a bar was in frigging KOREA: the other side of the planet! Weird, right?! Also, they played MUCH better music! We all danced to Thriller to the delight and confusion of all of the Korean bar patrons.
After a couple of hours there we proceeded to The Basement where we started to wane a bit. It was only around 11:30 at this point, but I had three drinks in me and was exhausted from a week of screaming at kids. I woke up, though, when Fiona and I found the free pool table on the main level. Eventually, I was playing against several Korean patrons, winning most and losing some. One guy actually bought me a beer, which I accepted, but later gave to Hannah (I was tired of drinking and would have KILLED for a Coke!). Bear in mind that I was still covered in gore, but had now shed the whole zombie persona. It just wasn't Halloween anymore :(.
After a while, we were all fairly gassed out of the bar from all of the cigarette smoke and went to a less-busy Korean bar called The Beer Garden. The Korean fellow who bought me the beer (and had bought one each for Fiona, Julian, and Hannah) came with us and tried his best to practice his broken English with us. He took a liking to me since I was the only Canadian (apparently, Koreans especially like Canadians since mostly Canadian soldiers fought and died during the Korean War... as opposed to American troops). So, we stayed there until around 2:00AM and headed out. I felt kind of bad for the Korean man since he wanted to break out the soju (NOOOOOOO!, we all protested) and wanted to go for food later, but we were DONE at this point. Hannah and I scored a taxi home from the other side of the city for only 16,000 KRW (about 15$). We then showered as passed out.
I tell ya, after a long night of scaring Koreans shitless and beating them at pool, fewer things feel better than washing all the blood out of your hair!
Aside from that weekend, life has been pretty quiet. I've been obsessing over my work and Minecraft (and my work IN Minecraft!) and Hannah was sick for the whole next week (poor thing got overly-gassed by cigarettes and got an awful respiratory tract infection). I went on a couple more hikes since then and Hannah and I went to an expat poetry/story reading thing last weekend, but aside from that, pretty quiet. Hannah's been very diligently writing a novel in her spare time, but I will leave her to write about that!
Hannah also already wrote about Peppero day in the previous post, so I won't bother about that. I will say, however, that buying all of my co-teachers Peppero was a VERY good move on my part!
This weekend, we hope to hike to the Beomosa temple, try out a gaming room, and get Hannah a new laptop! Let's see how this goes...
-Garrett
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