Intermission

No bike ride for me this weekend despite the lovely cool temperatures, sunshine, and clear air (which would have made viewing great from the nearby mountain lookout tower if I'd gotten there).  Just too much work to do.  This is the last full week of the first term for us which means that our "Assignment" (mega syllabus on steroids for those of you who may have missed that episode) for term 2 is due on Wednesday along with the summative "Term 2 Exam" (complete with table showing alignment of questions to California Science Standards).  We have 5 terms total, and major exams at the end of Terms 2 and 5, which count for 30% of the grade for those particular sets of terms, which are the important grades, I guess.  So I guess to put it in "terms" (ha ha) that I'm used to it's like a term is a quarter and first semester has 2 terms and 2nd semester has 3 terms for some reason.

Long story short, I've been working most of this weekend (with the occasional non-primarily-bike-riding break).

The first break was Friday eve when I was invited to ride the subway into Intaewon with Eric and a couple other colleagues.  Intaewon is a district of Seoul which has a U.S. military base somewhere nearby and as a result it's crawling (relatively) with Americans and other foreigners and is where you go for all things American.  We went to a southern BBQ joint for dinner and then to a comedy club.  We rode in with Peter (the bagpiper) and his wife Madeleine (who teaches in "first program" aka elementary school) and were joined there by my MS boss and occasional bike-riding companion Ben.

There was about an hour wait, which we'd planned for, at the BBQ joint (Lucas'? - I think that was the name.  Or maybe Lucius'). So we killed the time with some beers and kimchi fries at another place nearby.  Then we had a yummy BBQ dinner and headed to the comedy club.  Eric, if I haven't mentioned, used to do some stand up comedy and he'd been to this place before and knew some of the people there.  Unfortunately I wasn't taking any pictures so can't illustrate any of this.  This was my first time back to Seoul proper, though, since our original team-building trip there before classes began (so about 8 weeks ago).  We had a nice time but had to leave before the show was over because the subway stops running around midnight so we had to catch our train back if we didn't want to end up having to take a cab.

Yesterday I did a load of laundry (first in about 3 weeks) and lots of school work then finally took a break around dusk (6-ish?) and a short-ish bike ride to dinner and to do some grocery shopping in nearby Cheongna.  I was sort of taking the long way to town, on a route I haven't been on before (because that's the way, uh huh, I like it!) and I was going through one of the seemingly identical areas here under construction but this particular area was largely not built-out yet but it had one lonely operational restaurant advertising lamb and it had those hood-like bbq setups I'd looked through the window at many times but hadn't worked up the nerve to try to deal with yet (with my non-existent Korean) but this time I circled past once or twice looking inside and finally decided to give it a go because there was only one other couple in there and it was completely out of the way and removed from all other commercial activity so I figured I wouldn't be killing their business by plunking down with my book.  After a short perusal of the menu I ordered some lamb stuff and made my waiter aware (somehow) that I didn't have any experience with that kind of eatery and would appreciate any assistance he could give me and proceeded to enjoy a delightful meal where you get to cook your own lamb steaks on a nice grill they have where you open the vent at the bottom and draw down the hood on top and they bring in a little basket of wood, on fire but just burning down to coals, to set in the grill area then you cook your meat on top.  You get some tongs to flip the steaks and some scissors to cut them off the bone and into chunks.  I was enjoying a nice Chinese beer which was much larger than I expected and reading my new book: William Gibson's Spook Country (borrowed from Eric).

It doesn't get much better than this!

Kimchi, of course, some salad, some greens, some pickled other stuff (pink: what's that called again?  Usually white and pretty crunchy?)

Plus some dipping sauces and some salt-based mixture on the left

Here's my waiter helping me out by snipping up my lamb for me with the scissors.

After that I went to town, had another drink at a bar called "The Bridge" which is near (yep) a bridge over the canal and is where all the westerners in the area go, I'd heard.  Sure enough I ran into a couple of fellow teachers there but not before I'd spent some time talking to the owner of the bar.  It's always interesting to hear the stories of other westerners who have been here for a long time.  Lot's of those stories came out to some degree in the comedy routines of the previous night as well.  I don't really see myself as likely to end up in that situation but it's interesting to hear others talk about it.

I left The Bridge to do my grocery shopping and head home shortly after the other CDS teachers showed up.  Apparently more were going to gather later but I'd already been out late the night before and needed to get more work done today.

So I did my shopping.  One nice thing about shopping later in the evening (in this case about 9:00 or so, I'm guessing) is that the fish area is trying to get rid of what they've got left so they're offering fabulous deals.  I've noticed that before and now it's something I like to take advantage of.  They have these various-sized platters of prepared sushi and they don't want to have to throw them away at the end of the evening or keep them until the next day (for obvious reasons) so they mark them down more and more as the evening goes on.  In this case I was able to get two nice medium-sized trays of sushi (about 8 pieces each) for a total of 10,000 Won which is less than $10.  So 16 pieces of sushi for less than $10?  Now that's a nice deal.  I just scarfed all that about an hour ago when I realized I hadn't eaten since breakfast.  It was delicious but I didn't think to take pictures.  I did, however, take some pictures of some of the other offerings in the fish department when I was shopping last night.  I would say the selection of fresh fish here (and lack of certain other things I'm used to) is the most noticeable difference for me in the grocery department.

Long skinny fish.  These may be the ones I bought without heads and in a kind of sauce and eventually fried up thinking they might be eels a couple weeks ago.

Same fish?  Different fish?  I don't know.

These are fish.

Those are fish.

These fish apparently swim around the ocean wrapped in plastic.

These fish swim around with their guts missing and lightly barbecued.

And this little fishy has done his shopping, loaded up his backpack, and is ready to head home to Netflix when he notices a mirror and decides to use it for a selfie.

I made myself a nice omelet this morning with garlic, onions, spinach, pepper-jack, and cherry tomatoes and since then I've been in my room working all day except for a short walk out to the guard shack to drop off my recyclables and a brief trip up to the roof to check on the day, which was sunny yet cool and heart-breakingly clear, as I'd mentioned.  I hope to get another day like this soon before it gets too cold when I don't have so much to do so I can climb up to the observation tower on the hills east of here and see what I can sea.  Ciao for now!  -- Chris