Friday Night Drinks and Noreabang Oh My!

Today was another boring day at school. I had 5 English classes to teach. Four of the grade 5 classes I had earlier in the week and one new grade 4th class. Lunch in the cafeteria was god today except for the apple juice because I can’t stand apple juice. YUCK! After my last class of the day which is right after lunch, Jiny took me to get my cell phone. Lucky for me, one of the 1st grade teachers husband owns Show (a cell phone company) a block from the school, so I got my phone there. It’s a used phone and it only cost me $10 for the phone and an additional $20 for minutes on the phone. Pretty sweet and cheap deal if you ask me. Jiny also bought me a sparkling butterfly ornament to hang from my cell phone as a present for getting a new phone. Phone danglers are very popular in Korean and I have yet to see a cell phone without one. Anyways, when we got back to school I started to blow my nose a lot and was like, "Oh great, I'm getting a seasonal head cold and I haven't even been here two weeks." Then I didn't seem to notice it much after school. Jiny drove me home from school and I ate dinner and watch Harry Potter in Korean. Why? You ask, well the answer is simple. Jiny lent me the 5th Harry Potter and X-men, so I figured cool they will be in English with Korean subtitles. Wrong. Harry Potter was completely dubbed in Korean with no subtitles of any kind and the funniest part is, I didn’t even notice until 20 minutes into the movie that it was in Korea. How hilarious and stupid is that? I think what might be funnier is that I managed to watch the entire movie even though it was in Korean. I think the only reason I even finished watching it was because I knew what happened, so I didn’t need words. Anyways, tonight I went out with some of the foreign girls that are here teaching English and have been since September. We started off pre-drinking at Karen’s apartment and then we moved to a Westerner bar called Rio. It was a lot of fun. We drank draft beer for 2,500 won ($2.50 Canadian) and rocked out to the jukebox full of good old English songs. Neil Diamonds ‘Sweet Caroline’ got us all in the mood. Once we’d had enough of Rio we moved to a noreabang bar down the street and that is when the karaoke excitement began. Basically, noreabang is when you rent out a private room for you and your friends for about $15-$20 an hour and rock out to tunes. They have a pretty decent song collection, better than some I’ve seen back home. Well, everyone started to ditch out at the first karaoke bar, so by the time our time had run out because they were closing (it was 3 o’clock in the morning) there was only 5 of us left, but we were so full of adrenaline, so we decided to head into a karaoke bar a bit further down the street that still happened to be open and paid for another hour. This is when my head cold turns ugly. I was coughing, sneezing and blowing my nose non-stop. I felt so disgusting, but to top it all off you can smoke in doors any where in Korea pretty much, so I'm pretty sure that is what brought the cold on full strength. Back to the noreabang. The good thing about the noreabang’s is that you can bring in your own alcohol. When were done at the last noreabang we all got hungry, so we ended up eating at this amazing Korean restaurant that was open 24 hours and had a very spicy chicken dish that tasted really good. Of course, spicy food makes my nose run and I had a cold, so it was like double the nose runniness (is that even a word? Oh well, it is now). On the flip side though, spicy food and garlic are really good for colds. While we were inside the restaurant it got light outside. We all got into cabs around 7:00 a.m. and headed home.