Just under 2 weeks ago, our friends Nat and Nick from home moved out to Korea to work for a year. Becky and I have known them for a long time now (we met through Nat in fact!) so it's really nice to have them here. They're living in the same province as us, but on the northern side, near the coast. On the first weekend after they arrived, Becky and I drove up to visit them. Their town is bigger than Buyeo, a few more familiar shops and restaurants around, but seems to be in the only flat part of Korea we've found! We took a walk around town with them, went to a kimbab restaurant and translated as much of the menu as possible so they won't have to do too much risky guess work (the horror of the hotdog kimchi soup still lingers in my mind. Ick ick ick). After a tasty dak-galbi dinner, we introduced them to the wonder of Korean bars, soju and noraebang. Unfortunately Nick and Nat both decided it would be a good idea to video some our epic singing performances - most of which will hopefully never see the light of day. They certainly won't be featured on this blog!
When we awoke and recovered from the worst of the hangovers, we went to the bus station to figure out where they could visit using public transport - sadly not direct to Buyeo - then went for a bit of a drive up to the sea wall and posed for a lot of foolish jumping in the air pictures. The exertion used up what little energy we'd managed to muster, so after taking Nick and Nat to a supermarket to pick up some food and supplies, we drove back home.
After a somewhat dull final week of supposed winter vacation (we had to go into school! I had to teach! What kind of vacation involves working? Not my kind of vacation), we were in need of some more fun before starting back for a new school year. This conveniently coincided with a long weekend, so we dragged Nick and Nat down to Buyeo for a night, then drove to Muju for our second ski trip of the year. Lokhee and Anthony met us at the resort after I managed to send us the wrong way on a highway and add an extra 2 hours to our trip. Yay me! Once we'd got all our gear together, we headed slope-wards. The temperature has finally turned away from cold and snow (at least for the moment!) so the slopes were a little patchy and slushy, but still a lot of fun. Becky, consumate pro that she is, managed to finish her day without a fall. Unfortunately, the rest of us weren't so lucky, particularly the boys. Anthony and Nick crashed into each other, leaving Nick with a swollen knee. I was cruelly accosted by 2 seperate snowboarders, the first twisting my right knee, and the second knocking me into the air so I landed on top of the edge of his board, breaking my ski pole and twisting my left knee. Fun times! After I managed to drag myself up and ski slowly to the bottom, Nick and I decided we'd better not push our luck and sat out the last hour or so of our session. We'd convinced Anthony and Lokhee to stay the night with us at the resort, so all 6 of us piled into the car and headed off to find some suitable accomodation, alcohol and food. Many hours later, following many poor decisions concerning quantities of soju, we awoke and made the drive back up to Buyeo, this time taking extra care over navigation and taking in a tasty buffet lunch in Daejeon, where Nick and Nat got on their bus back to Dangjin.Hopefully we'll continue to see a lot of them, as the last 2 weekends have been great. It's nice to have more English people to hang out with for a change, and especially English people as odd and excited about Korea as Nat and Nick. In fact, we will be seeing them again in 2 weeks, for my birthday celebration in Seoul. But hopefully at some point we'll have some stories that don't revolve around alcohol and hangovers. As soon as the weather gets a little more reliably warm, we'll be dragging out the tent and and hitting the beaches and national parks again. Can't wait!
