christmas in corea (oooo i just pissed off about 48 million koreans)

what a weekend it has been. to bring you quickly through the series of events:

~friday night was spent downtown at watermelon sugar
~we had a very outback christmas eve dinner followed by a night at everyone's favorite korean night club, booby booby
~it was a lazy christmas day consisting of a super-good brunch at my place and a special screening of napoleon dynamite, followed by an outing at friend bar, dinner at kimbap nara, and a trip to hunter bar (a tiny bar around the corner from my apartment)

and now i'll break it down a little bit for you: the funny thing about this weekend is that it turned out exactly how i hoped it would. why is that funny? because i wasn't hoping it would be like anything in particular, i just wanted to do random things and have fun, which i did. i wasn't even expecting to do the christmas brunch, but i'm so glad that's how the day turned out. any special things to remember? let's see... i'm slowly building up my clothing collection via trips to booby booby. since this is the place that i lost my camera at, i've taken it upon myself to make up for what was lost... i still have a long way to go, but thus far, from past visits i've acquired a scarf, a pink hat, a bright red soccer tshirt that says "be the reds," and the latest addition is a santa claus hat wtih blinking lights. of course most of you would consider this "stealing," but i assure you that most of these items were abandoned at tables or entrances with their owners somewhere far away in the city of daejeon.

here is chris, alisun's friend from home who's visiting for 3 weeks, after our dinner at outback, hanging out with korean guys in a hot tub:



and who knew kimchi was a champion jenga player? we were all quite impressed when, after the game was set up, kimchi ran up to it, started sniffing, and plucked a piece right out.



and here he is with his winning piece



alisun tried the same thing after, but it ended up toppling over. must suck to know that a chihuahua has better strategy than you do.



because we wanted to keep the streak of going out and were denying the fact that we had to work the day after christmas and had no days off, melissa, tom, and i decided to check out friend bar, a bar fairly close to my place that's on the top floor of a fairly tall building. it was really nice inside with an awesome view. after that we went to kimbap nara and shared bibimbap, kimchi mandu, and chamchi kimbap and the bottle of wine we shamelessly brought in to drink there. and we weren't ready to end the night there, so we went to one of the tiny hole-in-the-wall bars right around the corner from me to have a beer. it wasn't at all a crazy night out, but it was definitely a nice way to wind down from the weekend.

all in all, a very fun weekend- i got a little bit of the christmas feeling, but also did some things to make it feel very korean too, and it was nice to have no expectations that the weekend would have to measure up to in my mind. i'm hoping for the same "no expectations let's have fun" weekend next weekend, which happens to be my birthday AND new year's eve. assaaaa!