Due to Children's Day last Thursday, and then a company-wide day off on Friday, I had a four day weekend. I had to go to work yesterday, Monday, but then due to Buddha's birthday today, I have another day off! So five out of six ain't bad right?!
I opted not to join my coworkers on their vacation down south for a few days Thursday through Saturday. They went two hours by train to a nice, sort of old and traditional touristy town. I joke with them that I didn't go because I would have been the 7th wheel with three other couples, but I decided to stay home and relax and save some money at the same time instead.
Instantly on Thursday I knew that I had made the right choice. It was 72 degrees and sunny on Thursday, and when my friends had to wake up at 7am to catch the train, I slept in a bit, watched some baseball and after a while went and played basketball at the local high school which was nice and relaxing. My rib is doing fine, except for when I jump up and come down hard (so sadly I couldn't do my patented tomahawk jam move (not really)). So after basketball I went home and showered and picked up some lunch and took it to a place I found out about in our building up on the 17th floor:
I'm not saying the view was remarkable but nice enough to enjoy a quick bite. I spent the rest of the day hanging out, relaxing. Went out for a bit that night but came home early and went to bed early too.
Friday was pretty fun, I went to Insadong in the morning. People had been saying that I should go there for a while. It's like a little section of town that has a lot of trinkets and touristy stuff. There's also fancy restaurants and art galleries. Well here's something I had forgotten about myself was that I have no interest in trinkets and I have not the money for fancy restaurants. I thought I might go to a baseball game later, which didn't end up happening because it was also raining sorta hard on Friday. So I wondered for a bit, probably didn't quite absorb the situation as well as I should have, and headed home.
On Friday night I went out and American-ed out at various foreigner spots, met some cool people and found some pretty cool bars (good music, cheap-ish drinks, pool, people hanging out, 's all I need).
Saturday was pretty minimal. During the day it was raining again off and on so I cleaned my apartment pretty thoroughly and re-arranged some furniture. My co-workers came back and I think they needed a break from each other just as a generality when you spend three days traveling with 6 people. So just one co-worker and I went to hang out at Family Mart. That's a convience store that's on every block, but when the weather's nice they set up tables and people can enjoy a beer or two outside and take in the 'Rodeo' of the neighborhood.
That night we met 'J.J', a Korean solider who was lost, and a litte intoxicated. He spent a year of high school in a small town in Indiana so his English was pretty good. What we gathered from his story was that he was on his one-day-off a year from the military, and if he didn't find his hotel in the next half an hour to check in with the staff he would spend a day or two in military jail. He said it pretty casually, so maybe there was more to the story but either waythat gave us something to do and we wondered around and tried to find this mystery hotel, eventually finding it with 2 min to spare.
Sunday I headed into the city to see another baseball game with a friend of mine. It was the Doosan Bears vs. the Lotte Giants. Doosan isn't the team I root for, because they are like the Yankees of Korea, but it was against the team I root against, the Lotte Giants.
At first we bought $10 tix from a scalper in the crowd outside the stadium (pictured below), which is a pretty common practice, but I knew that something was fishy because tickets for the Bears (a very popular team) were usually $20, in addition the scalper dug in some side pocket to get our tickets.
The tickets were for this 'general seating' sections in the outfield. Although we were there around an hour early, all the seats in all the sections were being 'saved' by people since there were no assigned seats.
I realized almost instantly that there were a couple dozen other people looking for any openings and that there weren't any so I made the call to consider the situation a $10 mistake and to just go back out and get normal seats from a (different) scalper.
We ended up getting seats in the same general area that I had last time - about dead center of the yellow seats behind home plate. So with little hassle we got some good seats and enjoyed a 5-0 Doosan win. My friend is British and he hadn't seen a homerun yet, so there was one of those as well as a few doubles and some exciting plays at the plate. So it was a good time all around.
Today is another day off, but I am taking it easy again. Only news from today should be that I went 36 for 36 at the batting cages, not missing one ball. My previous record was 15 so that got a smile on me while it continues to rain and be dreary outside.
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