Further Farewells

This weekend marked another 'going-away', for one of the teachers due to go back home this week. That meant mandatory-drinking on Saturday-night, which included the bulk of everyone that teacher's been friends with in the last year - it's incredible just how many people that represents. If I had had any doubts about whether teaching overseas was a great way to make friends, I certainly wouldn't after last night.

The rest of my weekend was pretty diverse: On Saturday afternoon, I went and watched a movie (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), at the local cinema. It wasn't a bad movie, but i'm not sure it warranted all of those Oscar nominations. Ah well.

Sunday was even more interesting, though. I went to play some Billiards with my friend (and old student) James, who taught me how to play the non-pocketball version of the game (you'll notice there are no holes in the table). The goal is to manage to hit both red balls, with your ball (either yellow or white), without hitting your opponent's ball. It was pretty challenging at first, since regular pool doesn't usually entail thinking about where the white-ball will go, after you hit it - but I started getting a pretty good feel for it after a few games.

After playing a few games of Warcraft at a local PC-Café, James invited me back to his home for dinner. This was the first time I actually stepped foot inside a genuine-Korean home. His parents and brother were very welcoming, and couldn't complement me enough on my (less-than-stellar) Korean. The dinner itself was an excellent Soup, accompanied by a dish of some sort-of beef and cuttlefish - all very very tasty. As is the Korean-style, a ton of side-dishes were also served (including some home-made Kimchi - mmm). There was also a side-dish of little potatoes, which were very hard to grab with chopsticks; but feeling confident after nearly 7 months of using them daily, I was grabbing them juuust fine. ...

Until I received a compliment, of course - the second James' mom said how surprised she was that I could use them so well, as goes Murphy's Law, I dropped a potato on myself. Smoooooth.

After dinner, we played a traditional Korean game called 'Gostop', which i'm understandably awful at. As much as they kept saying how simple and easy the game was, I had a lot of problems identifying which-cards-did-what.. but they were all good sports, and allowed me to be incredibly slow. All in all, Sunday evening was the highlight of the weekend.

Have a good week!