10 Second Toast

Admittedly this is the greatest and most well-written blog you have ever laid eyes upon; despite this fact today's entry will be kept shorter than the members of the lollipop guild, for our champion of the English language is still feeling kind of sick. Sick still after several days, he cannot help but sing the praises of sudafed and must find out if they sell it here in the Orient or if our fearless author will succumb to the use of elk horn shavings mixed with ginger and other meticulously weighed and chosen ingredients to heal his sinuses. We now continue our epic along this yellow brick road, better known as South Korea...

Today, Sunday, I did absolutely nothing except sleep in, nap, and eat and drink things that are good for me. So we should look at the rest of the week for something slightly more entertaining.

Other than going to the gym once and trying a bowl of absolutely terrible Vietnamese pho soup this week flew by. Taking Korean classes means that I have even less time to myself but slowly I am starting to understand Hanguk-mal, literally translated: Korean talking. I really enjoy the classes and it should become pretty helpful when taking taxis, ordering food or when I get invited to go hang out with Kim Jong Il and he gives me his favorite pair of sun glasses and it's totally cool and we have mojitos. Enough about my fantasies of sugary rum-drinks with narcissistic dictators-- I have much more interesting things to talk about.

Friday night I went out for a little with some coworkers, exacerbating my symptoms slightly, and during the taxi ride over and in the midst of our trying to communicate which bar we were headed to the taxi driver randomly asked if we spoke Spanish. I was more eager than one of my students, I was like: I do! I do! You've got to be kidding a Korean taxi driver who speak Spanish?! Better question, why not English? It turns out he has been listening to Korean--Spanish language lessons on tape while he drives around all day and spoke Spanish fairly well. Using Español I was able to get us to the right place much more efficiently than if we had used very broken Korean and hand gestures.

Saturday was the wedding of one of the receptionists of the school and it was held at a Catholic church and was not dissimilar to a Catholic wedding anywhere else in the world. We arrived a little late but snuck in and sat next to our other coworkers and sat through an hour mass that culminated in the part where they say they do and they kiss and all that stuff. I take it you understand the concept of wedding and I don't need to go into too many details. 100% in Korean so we only knew what was going on due to the rythm of the chants or through certain motions carried out by the priest. Colm and Rosie were both raised Catholic and took communion while I just watched from the ubiquitous hard, wooden pews.

Shuffling outside we were part of some photo ops before going down to a banquet hall to have some delicious foods. I'm sorry that I didn't take more pictures but I think I would have gotten a LOT of weird looks for taking pictures of their food. Options included prawns, sashimi, jellyfish noodles in a mustard sauce, chestnut noodles, small baby octopi that may have been boiled but they tasted pretty fresh as well as the less exotic like spaghetti, salads and egg salad sandwiches.

After we had sat down with our food we were treated to the first toast and strangely the only toast of the wedding which lasted for all of 10 seconds. It was not your standard toast after toast after toast and you're not sure if you can be eating or what. Great! More time to socialize and eat with my coworkers. Wrong. The whole lunch hour lasted maybe 45 minutes and most people sat, ate, and got the hell out of dodge. No dancing, no drinking bottles and bottles of champagne, no awkward speeches, a lot of things which I guess I kind of liked about the American style weddings I'm used to. It just seemed so anti-climactic. After, we had coffee then hopped back on the subway back home.

I'm not sure if this was all that short but compared to some other posts I think it was.

Anyang hi ka seo!
Photos on the right------------>