white day

so today is march 14th, aka white day. "what exactly is white day?" you may be asking. believe it or not, it has absolutely nothing to do with korean white supremacy.

there are three "romantic" days over here in the span of three months: valentine's day, white day, and black day. our idea of "valentine's day" isn't the same as korea's... we get 'er dun on one day, while korea (and from what i hear, japan) must milk these days for all their commercial worth. as a result, valentine's day here is a day where girls give boys gifts and white day is just the reverse- boys give girls gifts (apparently the reasoning behind this is that the boy has a month to decide whether or not to accept the girl's valentine aka confession o' love). and of course, there's black day, which falls on april 14th... the opportunity for singles of the country to unite and celebrate a day of misery. legend has it that singles must wear black clothes and drink black coffee and eat jajang noodles (black noodles) with their single friends. oh, and the holidays don't stop there. for your commercial enjoyment, the 14th of every month is devoted to love in one form or another. from silver day- a time to meet the parents and receive gifts- to green day, in which singles of the world are encouraged to drink alcohol with a green theme (in soju-ville there's only one choice for this), korea, inc. is sure to be raking in the dough.

at the moment, i am enjoying some candy presented to me by my male students. life is good for a teacher on these holidays.

of course, not all of my days here are fun-filled holidays. so what have i been doing in my moments when i'm not blogging my heart away? well, last weekend i went to seoul with al and salsa to see grease. we were pretty damn excited, until the show started and it was more reminiscent of a high school production... nothing close to broadway-quality. kind of ruins it when the actress who plays sandy is originally from estonia. forget conquering the australian accent, let's just pick one accent and stick with it. after that we went to a mexican restaurant. did you read that? MEXICAN! not only was it not bad, it was actually really good. we also got mojitos and they too were awesome. after that we went to a drag club in itaewon.

the good part of going to a drag club in itaewon? getting out of the insanity that is itaewon- military guys and westerners all over who seem to think "hey!" is the best line to get girls into bed. oh wait, we did get a slightly more inventive "so are you gonna sleep with us?" at one point. al's response was to give him the finger and keep walking.

the bad part of going to a drag club in itaewon? you're surrounded by korean men who are prettier than you can ever strive to be. how depressing is that? we didn't stay long, just enough to say we've been to a drag club in seoul. after that we checked the sicky salsa into a yeogwan while al and i did some champagne and norae. the next morning we tried to do some shopping, but the temperature had dropped DRASTICALLY. we're talking spring-like "don't need a jacket weather" one day, to bitter cold the next day. we surrendered to the bus back to daejeon and parked ourselves with pizza in front of my computer with the latest american idol and top model episodes downloaded. weather got worse from there- monday (yesterday) it was snowing pretty much all day. how much does that suck?

it's ok, i've got more chocolate i can handle to keep me warm.