Still alive!

Yes, yes. Blog entry is late, I know.

It doesn't help that, last weekend, I was pretty boring. Y'see, somewhere along the line, the weather realized 'oh, right, it's June, isn't it?' and we got a fairly hot weekend. And so, I wasn't exactly in the mood to go out and about- mostly because I didn't feel like being all sweaty and grimy after a subway trip into Seoul, y'know?

Though it's worth noting I did head into Hongdae on Sunday- mostly to get out of the house, visit some places a friend of mine had told me about. I will say Hongdae looks a lot different in the daylight!

Oh, and on the subway ride home on Sunday, I saw this guy wearing crazy springy-stilt thingies. Unfortunately, some subway official guy made him take them off not too long after I snapped this picture. Shame.

Back to the weather, the good news is that it's not damn hot anymore...though this is because we're getting rain now. Lots of rain. As in, it started raining on Wednesday, and hasn't really stopped since. The weather reports say it's supposed to keep going straight 'til Monday. Go fig. It's not a violent rain- no thunder, no lightning, no torrents...just a steady, steady fall. I've been through worse!

In other day to day stuff, a friend of mine introduced me to these ice-cream packet things...think like a Capri Sun thing, only full of ice cream/milkshake concoction. Astronaut ice cream, maybe? Regardless, they're delicious, and cheap, and quite convenient as they don't make much of a mess. Brilliant!

Work continues to go well- I'm keeping fairly busy, and I've gotten into the groove of things. Vacation is approaching quickly (woo!) and after I return from that, they're doing some sort of summer school program for the rest of August. I have...no idea how that is actually supposed to work, but we'll see.

In other work-related stuff, we went on a field trip yesterday. Woo. We went to a little children's theater (one that happened to be several floors above a grocery store I frequent) and saw...well, I don't want to call it a play so much as 'children's entertainment.' Not that there's anything wrong with that!

It was a play-thing based on Pororo- which is a very popular kids cartoon over here. Pororo's the little penguin in the goggles and aviator cap you see below, and his beaky little face is emblazoned on EVERYTHING over here. At least, a lot of stuff the kids bring to school: backpacks, chopsticks, T-shirts, whatever. They're talking about importing the show to the US, but apparently, there are 19 or so episodes that they won't be able to broadcast, as they were animated in North Korea. Oops.

So the play was about 45 minutes or so of puppets and people in big animal costumes dancing around while they played pre-recorded dialogue and music to go with the gestures. And, of course, the dialogue was all in Korean. Still, I sort of managed to get a slightly skewed idea of what's going on.

So, the characters all played hide and seek or something...and then that little fox/dog-thing you see on the right of the picture got sad because he felt left out...or something.

As a result, the fox/dog-thing made a mad-science invention (it had a switch!) that apparently made all of his friends fight and argue and be jerks to each other. But then the fox/dog-thing felt bad about it, and turned the machine off, and then everyone was nice to each other again. I suppose this teaches children the very important lesson of 'don't conduct mad science experiments on your friends.'

Oh, and the polar bear only showed up three times. But whenever he did, he couldn't stop farting.

Anyway! I'm going to head over to hang out with some friends of mine later this afternoon, so yay for being social!

I'm making plans for next weekend already, though- I think I'm gonna go out and about, maybe hit up some more shows in Hongdae, as I haven't done that in awhile. So stay tuned, things will get more interesting soon! I promise. I've been making a list of blogworthy stuff to do: attend a Korean baseball game, visit the makkoli brewery that's a few subway stops off, see more rock & roll shows, maybe attend a 'real' theater performance, visit some of my friends who don't live in Seoul, drink a North Korean beer, visit more palaces/other historical sights...anything else you guys would like to see?