winding it up...

By this time, Steve & Betsy's week-long New Year's vacation was over. They returned to their English-teaching, and I was on my own. I was happy to have this opportunity; I was beginning to feel like the three of us had become attached at the hip! My first day out on my own, I decided to travel back to Itaewon and finish up my shopping (I wasn't brave enough to attempt shopping in a non-English-speaking area yet!). I was, however, adventurous enough to try a new mode of transportation: the city bus. Much different from the luxury bus I rode from Kimpo airport, this bus was an exercise in minimalism. It had *very* few seats, and only slightly more rails to hold on to. Quite frankly, I thought I was going to die. I'd seen the crazy drivers on the streets before, but I hadn't really thought that bus drivers would employ the same life-threatening techniques. It was the cheapest form of transportation that I took (W300), and I can see why. If you manage to disembark without any bruises, you've really accomplished something....

I spent most of this shopping-day investigating CD-stores. I'd figured out previously that Koreans don't have the best taste in music, but even their taste in *American* music is poor. :) (They're still listening to the bad faux-metal that was popular here in the 1980s...) And even though I was in Itaewon, the salespeople still didn't always understand my English questions fully, and couldn't understand that I wanted to listen to the CDs before I bought them. So I ended up buying the wackiest-looking items I could find. I ended up with a Korean duo that looked like the Everly Brothers meet Roy Orbison, and a Korean reggae artist. I also brought home a cassette single of the pop song that was most popular at the time; I heard it everywhere we went...

Steve, Betsy & I celebrated my 'independence' that night by drinking many bottles of soju (the sweet-potato liquor...). It is a clear liquor that comes in 360 ml bottles (not knowing my metric system, I'll wager that approximates a pint), and it is incredibly cheap -- a bottle that size costs around W650 (less that $1.00). It smooth -- it doesn't even taste like it's alcohol at all, really -- and Koreans drink a *lot* of it. (When the bars close at midnight every night, you can see a lot of woozy people walking home...) We had a fun night, drinking soju and watching videos on their new VCR. (Opening a membership at the local video store was quite the ordeal...) There are many American films in Korea...all are shown in English, with Korean subtitles. And quite a bit of censoring, too.