Reverting to a Feral State of Being
The last two weeks have seen many changes. This is my first week living alone now that K is gone. A friend visited the apartment last week and remarked on how the toilet seat had been left up. A sure sign of feminine absence.
Just before K left, I bought a new camera, a Canon G9 as a gift to myself for the completion of a successful year. K bought herself a digital SLR. Here’s a good photo of us and our new toys in the 63 building (Korea’s tallest building).
I am now working at the adult hagwon again, so I must bid welcome to my old 4am-ish mornings once again. This past week I’ve been mostly re-organizing and cleaning the apartment in my off-time. The place is almost finished now and looks livable. All week I was operating on 4 hours sleep because of my schedule (or more specifically, my report cards) so I was getting pretty scatterbrained for a while. The low point was Thursday when I left the keys at school and found myself in a pc room renting a pc for $1/per hour and sleeping in a chair.
This Saturday I went to Seoul for what was supposed to be a sendoff for a friend who is leaving Monday night. The plan was checking out a fireworks festival on the banks of the Han River and drinks afterward. But his friday local sendoff was so wild that he actually didn’t make it to Seoul! So me, and some other teachers ended up at the festival with him in absence. Getting to the festival itself was insane, never before had I seen so many people in the subway, imagine being at a rock concert where the subway is the band. Here’s some snapshots.
I used my camera to take this video of me getting onto the subway.
It took about an hour and a half to get through the subways and to the actual festival outside. I wish I had brought my tripod because I could have gotten a lot more shots of the fireworks with it. But I did manage to get some nice ones. Here’s the best shot.
Getting out after the fireworks were over turned out to also be adventurous. We decided not to fight with the crowds for subway space again so we had a meal and walked to a different stop. Even the the fireworks were done at 9pm, we didn’t get to Seoul Station until 11:30. We missed the last train out, turned down a cabbie offer to drive us to Daejeon for $120 (proudly bartered down from $150 on my part), went looking for a motel and ran into some seediness down the street. We turned around and went back for our cabbie, but decided at the last moment to just crash in a DVD room until the first train next morning which was leaving Seoul at 5:30. So I got back to my beloved Chowon at 7am and slept until 3:18 pm, making up for days upon days of deprivation. This week is very funny.