I just realised I forgot to post this blog despite having written it about 6 weeks ago or something. Oops. No wonder we've had complaints at our failure to update for a while. There's more coming I promise. Anyway. Until very recently, we hadn't really left Gwangju or done much in the way of seeing exciting new things since our trip to Busan, which is probably our longest stretch without travelling since we got here. Instead we have been filling our time with all manner of other thrilling pursuits. A couple of weeks ago we invited two students over for dinner. Becky and I both teach one of the girls, Bora, while our colleague Jocelyn teaches Haeyoung. Becky cooked two big curries and we liberated a big table from an apartment upstairs where our friend Mel used to live - she conveniently left her door unlocked when she returned to Canada. We also bought Jenga, just in case conversation ran a little dry. The girls turned up bringing a nice bottle of wine, a big tub of Baskin Robbins ice cream and chocolates for me (the meal was on Valentines Day, and in Korea it is tradition that girls give chocolate to boys. They then have to wait until White day on March 14th to get a gift back), as well a big dish of Korean noodles and some kimchi. Perfect dinner guests! It was a really fun night in the end and, although our Korean is still non-existent, we had some very funny chats about all kinds of things that I won't attempt to go into here (you never know who might read the blog...). Plus some Jenga fun. It was a good night, definitely to be be repeated, hopefully before Bora moves to New York in a couple of months.
One regular activity has been joining a quiz team with our colleagues Robb and Jimmy, plus one of Jimmy's friends. It takes place at Speakeasy after work every other Thursday, and normally ends up with us staying out to 2 or 3 am drinking more beer than is sensible on a school night. So far we've placed second once, third twice and for one glorious night... first. We've also won a free pitcher of beer for having the best team name 3 out of 4 times and a round of shots for getting 10/10 on a round. Last night was our second third placement, much to our disappointment. We also failed to get the free pitcher of beer. Boo! I blame this entirely on my enforced week of being alcohol free, which brings me nicely to the next of the exciting activities which has been consuming our time lately.
Rather less enjoyable than drinking and socialising, a depressing amount of time has been spent in the company of the dentist a couple of floors below our school. Both of us have had to have an alarming amount of fillings, as well as me needing a wisdom tooth extracted and a somewhat vigorous all round cleaning. This has been made worse by the fact that our wonderful dentist apparently prefers not to use any kind of anaesthetic while doing fillings, and is seemingly able to ignore his patients cries of pain. To be honest, he was such a quick worker that we managed to convince ourselves he was right, as it meant we didn't have to shuffle about post-treatment with our mouths all numb, trying not to drool everywhere. So as soon as he'd finished drilling away, it was all over and we could go on about our normal business. The extraction of the wisdom tooth was mercifully done with some variety of numbing injection and took less than 5 minutes. Sadly I can't say the same of the clean. It was truly excruciating and took a considerable amount of time, although it has left me with a nice Hollywood smile. The best thing about all of this was all the filling and the extraction were covered by our health insurance, so cost about £3 each. Ace!
Hopefully we'll have some more exciting things to be reported soon, as my cousin Mark will be joining us here in less than two weeks for a while. Also we have a rather stressful sounding work event coming up towards the end of March. We're all going out into the country for a weekend, and our bosses announced yesterday they've decided to make it a bit of a competition, based on the reality TV show 'Survivor' (I've only seen the English version, which is little more than an excuse to get loads of young people into swim wear. Apparently there's a little more to the US version), which a large cash prize plus two days of paid holiday for the winner. Hopefully this isn't going to lead to everyone in the office falling out!
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