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Friday, as well as being World TB day, was also My birthday and I was treated to a few surprises at work. The first was lair organising her 5 o’clock class to pitch in for a cake and dragging me out of my own class to sing happy birthday and make me blow out some candles. They are such good kids! (Of course I had to get back to my class so They had most of the gorgeous chocolate cake - but very sweet of them never the less). After work we all went up the road to have dinner and so ‘The Boss’, His Wife, Jane, Clair and New Teacher Lucy had our fill of rice and vegetables.
Then Clair suggested that we go and have a few drinks…A Martini, a B-52, a Layered Sex on the Beach and several Caronas later in the company of Clair and Lucy at 하늘보기 I stumpled home at about 2am. Luckily the bar is literally next door to the apartment so it wasn’t too difficult to stumble navigate down to the GS25 and then back home.
Dreading the final leg of the ongoing chronicles of my dealings with immigration I set my alarm for 7am, quickly checked my email and headed off to bed.
Waking up at 9am I was feeling just a wee bit seedy. Nevertheless after a quick shower I headed off to the Bus Terminal and Daejeon to go to immigration to pay my W10000 and hand over my passport to get a new registration card. Thankfully this was a simple and painless exercise (much more so than the first time I had to do it) and these days Immigration will courier the card and passport back to you for a nominal W6000 saving me another early Saturday morning trip into Daejeon. Earlier in the week I had organised to meet (The now unemployed) Sophia and so hooked up with her at about 12pm in Daejeon. We had a lunch of Kimchi Bokumbab (Fried rice) and after a quick cigarette where Sophia commented that smokers were the leading cause of forrest fires in Korea, and still feeling a trite ill I reluctantly agreed to climb one of the local hills, which in doing so only confirmed how terribly out of shape I am - Hangover or no hangover.
The start of the trek up the mountain
Pagoda Thingie
Something about not seeing the forrest for the trees
With Sophia after being marched to the top of the hill, but prior to being marched down again
Sophia has decided to go to Seoul for a couple of months to study for TOEIC exams in an effort to improve her employment prospects - a fairly common situation amongst Koreans who are teaching English. A high TOEIC score secures good pay in a reasonably good school, more options etc etc, and while she is finding it hard to bring her marks up to her desired level she will no doubt do well. Bloody typical though - just as you get to know someone and can be a bit more relaxed because you don’t have to work with them anymore they up and bugger off to the city…
Driving back to Nonsan I made Sophia stop on a bridge so I could take some pictures of a helicopter sucking up water from a lake - in what was I thought a bush fire drill. It turned out to be the real thing and all the way home the sky was filled with Helicopters, including a number of Black Hawks with big buckets underneath that could or could not have been Cpt. Park.
Helicopter sucking up water
Fire! Fire!
The Helicopter goes off to shoot dump it’s load of water
We stopped for some Red Bean Paste Steamed Buns - somehow I managed to power through 2 of them before feeling quite sick and I found myself home again after a day that went altogether too fast.
In other news:
Danny celebrates my latest tower building success
And Ken is back in the country after almost two months moving his family to Shanghai and traveling for work. No doubt I will catch up with him sometime next week.
