Happy Halloween

Yep last night there were halloween celebrations at some bars and clubs in the city.

I spent the day getting aclimatized to my area abit, went to a local dollar store and bought some essentials for my place. I went to a street market and had an old lady fleece me on some veggies. I paid almost ten bucks for some apples, yams and brocolli. I was convinced that produce must be super-expensive here. Walking back to my place I bought some bananas from a guy on the street, seeing that they were only a buck and thought that at least I could get a not too horrible deal on that. I gave the dude the money and he filled a bag with a bunch of bananas. I mean a freaking tonne. There must have been well over a dozen on the bunch and then he threw like 5 more loose ones in the bag. Holy Schnikies!
So if anyone is in the busan area anytime soon swing by my place andI'll hook you up with a frozen banana, I've got a few to spare.
I had picked up some dish soap and some scrub pads so I could do dishes and ended up using those two things to clean my entire apartment. Started with just wiping down the counter and it snowballed. So now my place is actaully clean (ish) and smelling faintly of pomegranate. The place actually doesn't look too bad now, I'm considering staying there.
I joined a gym in a building that is about one minute from my front door, which was an adventure in communications. My Korean needs a lot of work, but in the end I got a membership. Or agreed to marry the owner's daughter. I'm not sure which. Gym looks decent enough for my uses, and there's a sauna included in membership that takes up the entire top floor of the building that is supposed to be sweet. fountains and stuff.
I ran into Patrick on the street, easy enough bloke to find. Long haired, white and six foot something. We caught a cultural festival in the city hall park. Not sure what it was about, maybe halloween, there were some people dressed like spiderman and batman entertaining the kids. but there was also traditional dance and music. Patrick bought me a local drink. Some kind of sweet beverage sweetened with rice, it was very sweet, and had sugary rice floating in it. Koreans seem to like any non-alcholic beverage to be instantly cavity inducing. Right now in the internet cafe I'm having the first black coffee I've had here in busan. With crap like this I understand why they fill it with milk and sugar. Of course at ten cents a cup I'm getting ready for my third.
I had very vague plans to meet up with Julian at a western bar called Ol' 55, for halloween. But of course neither of us having phones made it very easy for me to miss him; which I did. The bar was in a different part of town, Patrick had given me directions. I got lost. His directions were great, but much like exceptioinally dull children I sometimes confuse my left and rights. Luckily by making two lefts instead of two rights i still ended up in the proper place. Somebody up there likes me. Not enough to give me basic navigatoinal skills, but enough.
My costume consisted of a pair of groucho glasses I picked up that afternoon. I usually break out all the stops with halloween but I didn't have my f/x makeup kit on me from university- and in any case only pockets of the population celebrate the night and I didn't want to ride the subway looking too odd. The bar was filled with mostly white people, it was my first real western bar experience here. Well mostly western, the Konglish version of a kinda divey music bar. There was a Korean band playing nirvana and sublime covers, with only a loose phonetic grasp on the lyrics. The costumes there were decent enough, but much like haloween nights back home in bars that aren't absolutely wild it wasn't all that exciting. I stayed for a bit, shared a few pints with a finnish engineer named Tom and headed home. the subways stop running early so I took a cab home but couldn't get the driver to understand whereI wanted to go, despite knowing the word in korean and pointing at it on a map. i settled for getting dropped off at my hagwon (english school) and hoofing it back.
Today is my first sunday here and my last day before starting teaching. I'm gonna prep some stuff for class, try to buy a foreman grill and a toaster oven but just lie low for the most part tonight. I think a quiet night in might be good before my first week of work.

So anyway until next time; keep your stick on the ice.