Late. Again. Entirely my fault. I suppose the initial novelty of a blog is wearing thin- that, and I'm not exactly sure what to post! I'm kiiiiind of getting into a kind of routine, I guess. It's comfortable...but doesn't make for the best of blogging.

And so, I'll ask you guys- what kind of stuff would you like to see? More day to day 'living in Korea' stuff? Touristy things? Explorations of the underground Korean music scene? I'm at least planning on seeing the RockTigers on the 30th, so that should be a highlight.

But yeah- post comments! Tell me what you'd like to see. I love comments. Means somebody's paying attention. Blogging is proving to be kind of hard, to tell the truth. Right now, I'm going for a conversational, informative tone...but I'm also afraid such a tone might be kinda boring. I just need to find the right spin on things. Maybe make it funnier- but as the saying goes, "dying is easy, comedy is hard."

Regardless! Last Friday, we got to go on a field trip. Woo! We go on field trips once a month, so that's fun. Easy way to get out and about (and don't have to worry about teaching classes that day, either). Originally, we were supposed to go to the zoo- but it was kind of grey and sprinkly that day. To which the principal told me that they didn't want to expose the kids to the rain, yellow dust, or radiation from Japan. So, uh, I guess that's a very thorough excuse.

So that morning, in the span of about 15 minutes, I was told:

1) We're not going to the zoo, so the kids are just going to watch movies all day.

2) We're going to watch a movie, THEN go to the zoo. It's not so bad outside!

3) What're you waiting for? We're leaving right now!

4) We're not going to the zoo- but rather, to...uh, this insect museum place.

It was a lot more interesting on the inside. Promise.

The place was basically a mini science-center that had a bunch of plants and bugs and lizards and things. Basically, the kind of stuff I've seen countless times in various boy scout activities (both as a kid and an adult), but pretty fun nonetheless. And since we were in Asia, a lot of the critters were different: they had some enormous rhino beetles, scorpions, and the kids got to dig for...whatever the heck this thing is.

Funny thing is, I've been playing FF6 on the Nintendo DS, where you run into monsters that look like those pretty regularly. Thankfully, I didn't try to kill it for experience points. Also of interest was a little exhibit on silkworms, complete with a silkworm-spinning wheel. I have no idea if this thing was to scale.

Still, it was pretty neat! The kids had a good time. Had some lunch, complete with elf-endorsed Lipton tea. 

We soon headed back to the school- whereupon the kids watched a bootleg DVD of the first Narnia movie. Some of them kept saying it was 'too scary,'- even when it was in the boring first part. Go fig! Of course, that's looking at it from an adult's perspective, and not that of some little Korean kid.

Saturday night was a friend of mine's birthday, so I took it pretty easy up until then. We went to this place called Monkey Beach, which is a Thai-style dance bar that's popular with GI's.

To be honest, the joint was not exactly my scene. Too...well, I dunno if trendy is the right word, but eh. It was also a bit scuzzy- but not in the charming, dive sort of way. More as in...sticky floors. Ew.

It was THAT kind of joint. Though as intimidating as that sign makes it seem, I would hardly say it's a 'rough' joint at all. Really, my biggest complaint would be about the music; I'm just not a fan of dance-y hip hop (especially since most of the bars pretty much have the same playlist, it seems). I will admit there's one super-crunk Li'l John song that's kind of growing on me, but still.

The place did serve liquor by the bucket, so there's a silver lining, I guess? Regardless, we didn't spend the whole night there- we wound up stopping by a punk rock bar instead, and that was FAR more entertaining. We honestly didn't spend that long there, but it was ridiculously refreshing to hear some Rage Against the Machine after a night of hip hoppy dance music. I'm such a music nerd.

In any case, it was a fun night, even if I wound up staying out waaaaaaay too late. But again, I don't intend to make this a habit- or at least I plan on finding more interesting things to blog about.

Either way, stay tuned!