You spin me right round, baby.

beltspinner @ 2009-04-14T13:14:00

2009-04-14T04:14:52Z

It was another ridiculous week in this magical wonderland we call Korea. All in all, not terribly eventful, but a good week nonetheless.
We were still feeling the emotional sting of our unpleasant night with our bartender’s girlfriend, and so we spent the week avoiding the bar. We did not want to get poor Seung Je in trouble with his crazy girlfriend just for us being there, and so we took the week off. Chris and Kelly didn’t mind too much, but my raging alcohlism sure did.
Monday I passed up the gym. I just was not feeling it that day. I headed off to work and enjoyed my Monday class. Monday is not my favorite day of teaching. The kids are younger, and not interested in me at all, and so it is just crowd control and teaching, not a lot of fun. I had a new kid in there, a boy, who insisted his English name be “Joyce”. We tried to explain that it was not a good boy name, but he wanted it that way. A little weird…
After work Kelly, Chris and I grabbed dinner, then came back to my house to watch “The Protector.” Kelly had never seen it, and Chris and I love that movie. Afterwards they went hoem and I went to bed.
One of my favorite days in Korea was definitely Tuesday, since that night I got to do something epic. I started the day with a trip to the gym, enjoyed a nice workout, then headed over to work. Tuesdays have become my favorite day of teaching, since first I get my very fun writing class, and then I get my class with Noah, who is one of my favorite students. So work was a good day.
We left work and headed over to Itaewon, where we went to Rocky Mountain restaurant and bar, and ate wings. They were DELICIOUS. Absolutely delicious. We may go back tonight and eat some more, since they are about 19 cents each (250 won) on Tuesdays. Afterwards, we convinced our new friends there to join us at Spy. We went to the Red room, where I hung out with one of the owners, Bomi. We talked for a while, and I told her I wanted to learn how to bartend. She then took me behind the bar, and taught me how to make a long island, correctly. I’ve never been able to make one before. Every time, they’ve always turned out disgusting. But this time, it was delicious. I made three of them for my friends, and we all enjoyed their deliciousness. The bar was very quiet, and we hung out with one of the bartenders and his girlfriend for a while, who is not psycho. It was a very chill night, and Kelly and I took the taxi back at 6am. Good thing we don’t work on Wednesday!
I took it easy on Wednesday, waking up at noon, grabbing lunch at COEX with Chris and Kelly, then went back home and took it easy. I ended up taking a nap, and around 8pm I headed back to Spy for our pool game. We played against a super serious team, who just did not mix well with our “just have fun” attitude. I almost won my game, getting down to the 8 ball, with the other guy with two balls left. Unfortunately, I was left having to bounce the cue off the bumper to get around his ball to the 8, I missed, he got ball in hand, and beat me. It sucked, because I was so excited to win a game. I stayed for a little while longer, but was not having a lot of fun, and so I left and went home.
Thursday I went to the gym, then headed to work. I always like my Thursday classes. The kids are a lot of fun, even if they are not always the best behaved. It’s a fun group of students to teach, and I always have a good day there. After work we grabbed dinner, then went home and I watched House.
Friday was moderately uneventful. I went to the gym, and went to work. My one Friday class, which I hate because the one girl is painfully shy, was cancelled. I did other things all day. After work, we went to get dinner at our usual barbeque place, and it was delicious. Afterwards, we had to skip our usual tradition of going to Siena. Stupid bartender’s crazy girlfriend ruined it for us. Instead, we decided to take it easy on the drinking. Chris had a rough day, and needed to take it easy. We did run into a bunch of foreigners near my house, and we hung out with them for a few minutes in the street. After exchanging numbers, we bought some soju and snakes, then went back to my house, where we watched Kill Bill vol. 1. It was a peaceful night, and I found out two bottles of soju easily does me in. They left, and I went to bed.
Saturday I rested in the morning, went to work, and had an exceptionally boring day at work. Working on Saturday is never my favorite thing, since the day is mostly doing curriculum work. I teach two short vocabulary workshops. The first one is always painful, since its one kid whose English is not very advanced. The other class is a lot more fun, though.
After work Kelly and I had not decided what to do yet. We went to the Mexican place for dinner, and called Chris, telling her we would decide what to do. I personally wanted to hang out with the people we had met the night before, but they sounded like they were going to have a quiet night, so we ended up going to Itaewon. We went to the bar on top of Hooker Hill called Old Stompers. Hooker Hill is lined with “bars” with scantily clad women. Since prostitution is technically illegal here, they cover it up with these bars, where the girl entices you in, and for a fee you can do whatever you want to her. One of the hookers grabbed my arm while I was going up the hill, and I pryed her off. Sorry, cupcake, I’m here for the drinks.
Old Stompers was awesome. All you can drink for 20k Won, and we had a blast. It was very much like the Beer Garden at BUllwinkles, only it was inside. Live band, everything was wood, nice times. We met Chris’ friends there, who we had wings with on Tuesday night. They were all very cool. One girl got there just before midnight, and at midnight we all did a tequila shot to commemorate her finishing her 40 of no alcohol for lent. I was impressed, couldn’t do that!
Afterwards, we went to Spy for a while, don’t remember much, talked to a cool Russian girl for a while, who was not a cocky model, but a teacher. I really want to see her again. Sadly, no phone number. Hopefully she’ll come back to Spy.
Sunday I woke up around noon feeling like death. I noticed that I had made a phone call at 4:13am, so I went to bed some time after that. Not feeling well, I lay in bed for a while deciding if I should throw up or not. I passed back out, and woke up at 4:30. Impressed by my sleeping abilities, I called my friends, and we agreed to meet at my house at 5:30 to go get food. I did not get out of bed until 5:15, a new record for me. When they got there, we went to COEX and I ate Sbarro, wanting something starchy and heavy. Afterwards, we went back to my house and watched Old Boy. It’s a Korean movie, and it is absolutely disturbing. This one guy gets locked into a room for 15 years, and finally gets out, searching for who locked him up and why they did it. Very violent and graphic, but if disturbing movies is your thing, you’ll probably like it.
They left, I watched some episodes of House, then went to bed.
Monday. It makes me laugh. Went to the gym, then work. Work was work. Nothing eventful. For our dinner break we went and grabbed Chinese, which was delicious. I don’t know why American Chinese has not embraced the black bean sauce. It is so amazing. We ate and went abckt to work.
At 10 I left and went to meet up with Michelle. She and her friend went to eat tak-galbi, which is kind of like chicken stir-fry. I don’t personally like it, but whatever. Her friend was really cool, but ahd to take the Subway home, and so she left. Michelle and I decided to see if I was allowed back at Siena. I was extremely nervous going in there. I went in, and Soon welcomed me. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back, Seung Je was standing at the door. He welcomed me, which made me happy. I went upstairs, where he shortly thereafter joined us, making some nice LITs. We drank them very slow and reasonably. Michelle is a trip. Absolutely hilarious. We joked around for a long time, and when she came back from the bathroom, she told me these Korean people wanted to hang out with us. They came over twice to get us, and so we joined them. All of them were about 40-45, drunk, and there with their husbands and wives. All except one. I was thoroughly confused about what was going on, since a lot of discussion was in Korean, and Michelle knows a lot more Korean than I do.
We hung out for a while, managing to get them to pay our bill, and buy us another round. We left from there, I gave Seung Je a big hug, and we went to Noraybong. This is like Karaoke, but in small private rooms. It was a lot of fun, and the guy we were with agreed to pay for everything. We stayed there for a long time, and around 4 Michelle and I ran out. I think that I was under the impression that we owed this guy something, but we ran out and got away from the guy. It was a lot of fun. We hid at this house, and a dog started barking at us. I told Michelle that “We must hide from dog and man”, and so we hid there for a while. Eventually, we left, went to her house, had an AMAZING margarita. She used to be a bartender, and it was so delicious. Afterwards, I went home, getting there around 5.
It was a very fun night, with only mild drinking. Definitely not a night of getting trashed, but it was ridiculous amounts of fun, and I was especially glad to know that I’m allowed back at Siena.
So that was this week, not super eventful, but a lot of fun. Next weekend I am going on a hiking trip, which I am super excited about, since it will be my first time getting out of Seoul. Time for some nice country sightseeing!

beltspinner @ 2009-04-06T12:18:00

2009-04-06T03:19:29Z

April 5, 2009

North Korea launched their missile and managed to not wipe out Seoul, so just given that I think it is fair to say it was a good week. Kelly was caught a cold, which put a damper on Drinkins’ social life, but we somehow survived.

I woke up late on Monday morning, and have to bypass the gym. I made plans to meet this guy and buy a phone off of him, since I absolutely hated my current one. This took longer than expected, and I was nearly late to work. Work was its normal little self. After work Kelly, Chris, and I headed down to the Spicy Chicken Place and had dinner. Kelly was seriously not feeling well, and so after dinner he headed home. I managed to convince Chris to join me at Siena for one drink, and then we headed home.

Tuesday morning I got up, headed to the gym, and did a little shopping at E-Mart for groceries. I took my food home, ate lunch at home, and headed off to work. I taught my first class, which is a fun but troublesome bunch. Afterwards, I taught a second class, a new one added to my schedule. It was just one boy, probably 13 or 14. He’s really smart, and freaking adorable. I can tell I’m going to really enjoy that class.
After work, we got dinner, and Kelly was still feeling yucky, so he and Chris went home. Michelle and I met up at Siena for a drink, and we had a good time. Failed to get exceptionally wasted, but that was no problem.

Wednesday, the wonderous day off. I had no plans to do anything, nor any desire. I just wanted a nice day of chilling out at home. I played some video games, and got a lot of rest. I met up with Jinhee around 1:30 and went to COEX. I was finally able to ditch that old em effer and activate one that isn’t completely counterintuitive. I went home, took a nap, played some video games, and called Kelly to see if he was up for getting Chinese for dinner. We had the sweet and sour pork, served with black bean sauce and fried rice. So delicious! After dinner I went back home.

Thursday I was again too lazy to go to the gym. Dammit was acting strange, like he had no energy. I could tell he hadn’t eaten the night before, and he was whining a lot. I was really scared for him. I could tell he didn’t feel good. I decided that if he was still looking this bad Friday morning, I would take him to the vet. Regretfully leaving him, I headed off to work. My first class was completely out of control. My boys were being awful, and I for the first time got mad in class. I didn’t yell, but I was fuming mad. They could definitely tell. That class ended, and I shoved kimbap down my throat for dinner. I taught my second class, and they were very good. It saved the day.
I came home and called Jackie for a few minutes, then Kelly and Chris came over with wine. We drank this absolutely awful wine, two bottles of it, and watched Clone High….the last three episodes. It’s tragic to know that it is over. But we watched it, and ate lots of unhealthy snack foods. Squid chips aren’t too bad!

Things happened Friday that were just terrible. We’re still very upset about the events of the evening.
I woke up that morning and had no desire for the gym. Yeah, not a good week for me! I ate lunch and went to work. Friday I do not teach the first class, and so I did boring work until my second one. In this one, I had one kid. She is the absolutely most shy thing that has ever lived. I had her last semester, and she was always annoyingly quiet. But in this class, it was a nightmare. It took this girl 10 minutes to work up the courage to give her presentation—that she clearly worked hard on. It was thoroughly frustrating. I just can’t comprehend how someone can be that shy.
After work we headed off for our weekly tradition—twaeji galbi and Siena. We were super excited and starving. We went to our place and ate a delicious meal. The energy was a bit low, since Chris had a headache. We finished our food and headed to Siena. We convinced Chris to join, and she agreed. We got there, and had our drinks. Seung Je was acting strange. I could tell something was bothering him. His girlfriend came in, and started talking to us. Mostly, she was talking to Chris. It was clear that she did not like Chris. Chris played nice, and complimented her, but the girlfriend just started throwing the insults. Poor Seung Je was thoroughly embarrassed and awkward. Finally, the girlfriend says that she doesn’t want us to come back there, and if we do, she’s going to break up with Seung Je. Well this pissed us off, and Chris goes into bitch mode. They had a nice heated conversation, and Chris grabs her jacket and leaves. I try to reason with the girlfriend, but she keeps on being a total bitch. Finally, Kelly and I left. I felt really bad for Seung Je, because he didn’t do anything wrong, and I could tell he hated the situation. We left the bar. It was about 1am at this point. Chris and Kelly were ready to go home, but I needed a drink after that episode. Our good friend JK joined me within minutes. He used the bathroom inside Siena, and then we headed to another restaurant. We got a beer, and he wanted to know what was going on. He told me he saw the girlfriend crying inside the restaurant, with Seung Je trying to console her. I filled him in on everything, and he called Seung Je. JK told me that he was going to quit working there, for his girlfriend. JK said he would talk to Seung Je and try to persuade him otherwise.
This was the first time I’ve ever remembered hanging out with JK. He’s actually a hell of a lot of fun. I love this guy! He wants to come to America with me when I go back, and see my city—especially BULLWINKLES! Around 4:00 AM we part ways, and I fell fast asleep.

Again, I missed the gym Saturday morning. I went to work and had a long and boring day. At 9 Kelly and I went home, and got a bit of rest. Around 9:30 we meet back up, meet up with Chris, who was thoroughly drunk, and head to Itaewon. I had made plans to join my friend, Erica, to go Salsa dancing there at Club Caliente. We went to Spy first for a real drink, then I went to Caliente. It was packed and blazing hot, but we had a really good time. I went back to Spy for another real drink, since the ones at Caliente were just too weak. I went back, danced a little bit more, and then decided that I had enough. I bid Erica farewell, and went to Spy for some more drinks. Chris left shortly thereafter, approaching hour number 10 of being drunk. Kelly and I hung out for a while, talking to people we’ve met there. According to Kelly, around 3:30 I told him that I was ready to go home, and so we left and went home. I guess I wasn’t having a very good time, or I was very sleepy. Regardless, we left and headed home.

I woke up this morning around 11, and met Chris at 12:15 at Daechi Intersection. We waited for Kelly, then went to COEX for lunch. The plan was to go to Seoul Grand Park, and see what was there. It was very crowded, and we weren’t sure what exactly we were going to find. We walked along a pedestrian road, and passed many street vendors. Many of them were selling the same thing, two large steaming pots. One had little tiny shells in it. I think they were snails or something like that, which people sucked out of the shells. The other one, was disgusting. For some unknown reason, the Koreans like to eat these silk worms. They smell like death, that’s for sure. It just was not going to happen. I’m not eating that.
We stopped over at the Family Mart and got some water. A young guy in there said hi to us, and started to talk, but his rude ass girlfriend stopped him. These damn Korean girlfriends keeping the nice guys away! It’s ridiculous. We decided to follow them for as long as we could, just to piss her off. We walked over to the sky lift, and got a ride. We had no idea where it went, but it sounded fun. The line was long, but it went by relatively quickly. Once we were on the thing, Chris got kind of freaked out. Not sure why, since there as a net to catch people if they were to fall off. Along the ride, we passed over the children’s petting zoo, and saw pigs, sheep, and monkeys. Anyway, we got to the end and found that we were at the entrnce to the zoo. It seemed like the logical thing to do, so we got in and got in line for the second skylift. This one stayed inside the zoo, and the sign clearly, with poor English, said “Take lift to back of park and walk back to enjoy park in most comfortably way.” Yeah, most comfortably way. Nice.
We stood in line for a long time, but the children in front of us were absolutely adorable. Two girls and a very young boy. One thing about Koreans, all of the boys are freaking adorable. They’re so funny. They provided quality entertainment the whole line, and we took our ride to the back of the zoo. We couldn’t see much from the ride, but we did see the hippos and the lions. That was impressive. The lions were very cool.
We landed and went to the very back of the park. There were a couple of smaller animals, most of which I had never heard of. I laughed when I saw the North American raccoon, since I had never seen an animal in a zoo that I had hit with my car before.
Next to the smaller animals we found a leopard, a jaguar, then a white tiger. The tiger was impressive, but it just laid there. I with it would have moved around a bit, but it just sat still.
Moving alone, we found the Siberian tigers. Those were impressive. Several of them were walking around. It was awesome. Unlike the white tiger, these had an open air area to wander around in. There were two sections of them, and then we moved on.
In the next area, I saw a cute kid with an awesome mullet. We then found the lesser pandas. If you’ve never seen on of these, you’re missing out. These guys are ridiculously cute. They are red, and have the most adorable faces imaginable. So cute.
Next we found the bears, and they had 4 different kinds. One was a little bit ugly, and about the size of a large dog. It was a Malasian something bear. He was fun, though, very playful, in hopes that people would throw him food. I liked him. We found the three other kinds of bears, then moved to the peafowl village. There we were able to get very close up to peacocks, ducks, and their relatives. The peacocks never opened their tails, sadly, but they were still so beautiful.
There were tons of other animals we saw, like bison, deer, that sort of thing, and then we moved to the South American themed area. Here we were able to find capabaras, giant ant eaters, monkeys, crocodiles, turtles, lemurs, and more.
Next we found the African area, with elephants, camels, rams, cool stuff like that. I was very excited when we found the rhinoceroses, since I had never seen one before. They are impressive animals.
Chris and Kelly dragged me into the insect area, where I spent the entire time creeped out. They had some sea-life things that I was excited to see, like axolotls. I’ve seen pictures, but never one in person. Very cool things these are.
After that we found the kangaroos, then the giraffes, and had pretty much done the park. There were a few things we didn’t see, but we headed out, since the sun was setting and the temperature was dropping. We hopped on the subway and went home.
We parted ways, since we were all exhausted. I spent the rest of the night at home, resting, videogames, watching House. Just relaxing and getting ready for another week. Found out that North Korea launched their rocket, and we’re still alive, so I guess that’s good. We’re not sure what do to about our bartender situation, since I haven’t heard from JK about it. But we’ll see what happens this week.

Korea Log 12

2009-03-29T16:08:28Z

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Since I was so lazy in writing my last post, this one shall be significantly shorter. Last Wednesday Chris, Kelly, and I met up for some delicious cheap Korean food. We went back to my house and ate it, while watching the absolute best episode of Clone High, the Ponce de Leon episode. After we finished our lunch, and watched the episode, we headed to COEX. Chris and I were displeased by the postcards that we had purchased previously, and so we went to the bookstore to find new ones. I picked some up, and then decided that I was simply too tired to keep going. Being quite hungover, I needed sleep, so I left my friends and went home for a nice nap.
I got up and went to Itaewon to join Kelly for our weekly pool game. I get there, and find that the other team did not show up. So there we were in Spy, just our team. One guy from Kazakhstan, three from Mongolia, and a couple of others. We had a great time, and continued to get more and more shitty. It was mostly just us in the bar, and so we had full run of the place. One of the Mongolians, Tak, went behind the bar and bartended while Bomi, one of the owners, was too busy to work. He danced around behind the bar, and the rest of us kept drinking. Eventually Ryan, the bartender, got there, and the Mongolians and I kept horsing around and drinking. The team did a couple of shots in celebration of the automatic win, and we did shots of tequila, jager, all that fun stuff. We had a grand ol’ time. The Mongolians were probably some of the most fun people I’ve ever met. They were just people who love enjoying the night. We hung out for a nice long time. We were trying to get Chris to come and join us, since Chris was, as Kelly put it, “randy as hell”, and her little boy-crush Josh the model from last week. Josh had come with Emily, the girl Kelly made out with last week, also known as Less-Hot-Keira-Knightly. They also had a girl who was half Japanese, half Italian girl. It is rare that you meet a girl who is a 10, but damn. Unfortunately, Chris refused to come out, and this kept the 10 busy talking with her friend Josh. Knowing it wasn’t going to happen, I hung out with the Mongolians until I eventually left the club and went home.

Thursday morning I got up, but decided not to go to the gym. I messed around until I finally went to work. Normal day at work, and I decided to spend the evening at home. I had finally gotten season three from Chris, and I went home to watch some of it. I had a restful night at home.

The next morning I went to the gym, and headed to work. I was very excited, since our Friday tradition of galbi and Seung Je Mania always puts me in a good mood. I spent the day doing curriculum, and learned great news—I would have two classes added to my schedule next week. This good news got me through the day. After work Kelly, Graham, Chris, and I, went to our twaeji galbi restaurant. This is where we love to go and cook our own pork. The sides are fantastic here, and the meat is quite good too. We ate, drank a couple bottles of soju, and then headed to Siena. Our good buddy Seung Je smiled warmly as we walked in, greeted me with a hug, and we grabbed seats at the bar. We were forced to sit at another side of the bar, which was fine. Graham had to stop by his house, so he said he would join us later. While we were waiting for him, our good buddy JK from a couple of weeks ago came. He hung out with us for a minute or so, then hung out with his friends. Graham came, and we had several more drinks. Seung Je gave me a cocktail I had never tried before. I part Jack Daniels, 1 part Jim Beam, 1 part Ballintines, 1 part some Italian whiskey I had never heard of before. It comes in a very tall, slender bottle, weighing in at 43.5% alcohol. It was damn strong, but it was quite tasty. The best part of Seung Je is that he often times doesn’t charge me for drinks, as was the case with this cocktail. We closed down the bar, and went with JK to some other bar/restaurant. My three long islands and Seung-Je-Whisky was hitting pretty hard, so I don’t remember much of this bar. I know we ate some kind of bread thing, and ate a weird salad thing, but it’s a bit hazy. I know Kelly was messed up thoroughly, and Chris was taking him home. I stayed with JK for a few minutes, but ended up going home and to bed shortly after.

Saturday I woke up, hung around the house, grabbed lunch, and went to work. Work was slow and boring, I taught my two mini-classes, and was feeling exceptionally tired. My friend Erica had bailed for Salsa dancing, which was fine, considering how exhausted I was. I instead decided to go home, while Chris and Kelly headed to Itaewon. I wasn’t feeling a late night of drinking, but my liver was craving the booze, so I went to Siena alone. I cannot describe how confused Seung Je and Soon were when I walked in alone. They both wanted to know immediately why my friends weren’t with me. There was one exceptionally wasted man in there, and he kept trying to speak English to me, but it was so broken, it was hard to understand. I just ignored him. Seung Je was mostly busy, but I did get to hang out with him a little bit. I had my drink, and met these two cool Korean dudes. One guy spoke broken English, but the other, Andrew, went to high school in America, and had basically grown up there. He was in the military, and would be getting out in May. We had a fun time hanging out with them, and shortly after they left, I went home, called Summer for like an hour, then went to bed.

This morning, I got up, grabbed lunch at the Mexican place, and met this girl named Michelle. I randomly found her travel blog by doing a Google search about going spelunking in Korea. I emailed her, asking if she wanted to hang out some time. She wrote me back, and we agreed that Sunday we would meet. She ended up being really cool. We went down to this nice little river stream, and we walked around, joking, telling stories of our drunken antics, and what not. Turns out she’s a raging alcoholic too, and we have a lotin common. Her friends sound like a bunch of fun, and we agreed to meet up again. We grabbed a snack at Subway, and took it to the little park next door to Siena. We ate our sandwiches, and sat at the park, watching the children play. We were disappointed to find that none of the kids got hurt, and we couldn’t enjoy even a single temper tantrum. Sadly, these kids were all well mannered and playing nice.
I spent the rest of the evening at home, except for a quick run to COEX. Now I’m just watching a movie and getting ready for bed, to start a new work week.

beltspinner @ 2009-03-25T13:04:00

2009-03-25T04:05:07Z

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

It’s that time again, friends. Time for the weekly review. It has been 8 solid weeks that I’ve been in Korea. This Saturday will make for 2 full months. I am glad to say, things are still going strong. This week has been a good one, though nothing groundbreaking.

Monday morning I finally did something I had been planning to do for qyite some time. I headed over to iGym, and I finally signed up. I did my first work out there, and it felt quite good. I’m glad I did it, now I just have to keep going!
Work on Monday was uneventful. We are in full swing at this point, being three weeks into the term. The kids are used to the routine, and nothing exceptional happened on this day to be worth relating. After work we grabbed some delicious Korean food at “The Spicy Chicken Place”, this wonderful little cheap Korean restaurant that serves a spicy chicken dish that Kelly thinks reigns supreme. After we ate, it was time for some drinks! We headed over to our good ol’ favorite neighborhood place, Siena. There was a lady in our seats at the bar, and we were most upset. We got seats next to us, and Seung Je made us our usual—LITs!! After a couple of those, we made friends with this younger couple down the bar, who introduced themselves as JK and MJ. JK and I had a long talk about God knows what, while MJ repeatedly asked Chris if she thought she was “lovely”. Everyone was sufficiently toasted as we left the bar, of course, when it closed. Sleep immediately followed.

Tuesday morning I was feeling a little too puny to head to the gym. I got ready for work, got dressed, and my liver was keenly aware that I was wearing green. St. Patrick’s Day had come, and all us Americans were dressed in our green. The kids, of course, had never heard of the day, and it was hard to explain the importance of it, without mentioning the whole “drinking” part of the holiday.
After work Chris, Kelly, and I went to this new little Korean place that Kelly knew of. I got Ton-ka-su, or fried pork. It was yummy. We weren’t feeling much like hauling across town to Itaewon, since we had gotten so trashed the night before, so we went back to Siena and had our obligatory St. Patty’s Day drink. After one round, we headed home.

Wednesday, our wonderful day off. Chris and I had agreed to meet at noon and go shopping. I was needing some tennis shoes for the gym. See, the gym has a rule, as most do here in Korea, that you have to leave a pair of shoes there, and those are used exclusively at the gym. That way, the gym stays cleaner. So it was my mission to find a pair of shoes. Having size 13 feet, or 310 Korean, it would be a serious struggle. We went all over Itaewon, and couldn’t find anything under 100000 Won. I wanted something more reasonable. We met this guy named Tim, who invited us to this party Saturday night. We agreed to go, and he recommended going to Dongdaemun to find shoes for me. We departed, and headed to Dongdaemun. Chris and I separated in the subway, where she would be going to join her friend. I went alone, and eventually, after about 8 more shops, finally found a pair of shoes that would fit. For 48000, I agreed. They weren’t especially nice, and they were a little small, but it had been 5.5 hours of shopping, and I had little faith that it would get any better than this. I came home and took a nap, and woke a little while later. Sunjoo had called me, and asked if I was busy that night.
We met up in COEX, and we went to get some food. We ended up going to TGIFridays, where we had a margarita and some delicious food. Very reminiscent of the States. After we ate, we parted for the night.

Thursday morning I woke up, took my new shoes to the gym, and had a nice work out. It feels good to finally be getting active again, after like…..6 months? After the gym, I grabbed lunch, went home and got ready, then went to work. Thursday is my favorite day of teaching. I have my fun 4:00 class, followed by my awesome 7:00 class. I had a new kid this day, and that brought the class number to 3 students, which is nicer. After work, Graham, Kelly, and I went to Gangnam station and ate dak-galbi, or Korean Barbeque Chicken. Graham was giddy over it, Kelly said it was really good, so I was interested. Personally, I found it to be too spicy. I’m still a wuss for spicy food, though I wish I could learn to manage it better. Most Korean food is very spicy. It was ok, not unbearably hot. We left from there, and Kelly came over for some hardcore Clone High action. We watched 4 episodes, stopping one shy of the Ponce de Leon episode. As my favorite, I insisted we wait until Chris joins us to go on.

Friday I went back to the gym, had a nice work out, focused on my legs. Work was moderately boring, this is my planning day. I brought my iPod, which made the day go by quite quickly. After work, we grabbed dinner and felt like it had been days since we last drank. It was time to go visit Seung Je, our wonderful Siena bartender. He, as usual, was happy to see us come in. It was also one of the employees’ birthday, so we got him a Midori/Vodka. 3 LITs later, we left and headed home. It was, as usual, tons of fun.

Saturday I passed on the gym, and slept in. Went to work I did, and did another long day. I went in early and got off early, and at 9 Chris and I met to go to the party Tim invited us to. We had several back up plans, just in case that this party sucked. We might meet Chris’ New Zealand friend in the area we were in anyway, or we could go to Itaewon and meet up with Nigel, her friend with whom she studied in Switzerland. On the subway, we were talking about how sick we were of foreigners ignoring eachother in public. We approached these two white people and started talking to them. It turns out they were living in the exact same part of town we were, and that they work about 5 minutes from my apartment. Very surprising. We decided we would definitely hang out with them.
We got to the party about 10:40, and the guys at the door wouldn’t let us in. He said they were about to shut down, and that it only went from 8-11. We were like…WHAT?! What the hell kind of party ends at 11? LAME. A little pissed, especially since we just traved an hour and a half to get there. Plus, it was raining. Pretty pissed off, we decided that Itaewon would be the best place to unwind. We head there and join up with Nigel at Metro, and we meet his friends. Brian and Mike both speak Korean fluently, and these guys are all absolutely hilarious. They’re so sick of trying to carry Western edaquitte into a culture where it just doesn’t exist. Instead, they intentionally do the same shit the Koreas unapologetically, though accidently, do. For example, when getting off the subway, they pick their man “That’s my Guy”, and they sholder the hell out of him as they walk by. Their stories were hilarious.
After a while there, Kelly informs us that he is at Spy. We head over there, and meet up with Ryan the Bartender and Kelly. We do a few drinks, and decide to continue our campaign of meeting foreigners aggressively. This one couple looked friendly enough. We start talking to them, and they are both models. The guy’s name is Josh, and he’s really nice. The girl, Emily, was from Atlanta, and so we had a good talk going to a while. Nice to meet another Southerner. She was really cute and nice, and I was thinking maybe this would be going somewhere, when Dasha walked in. When I saw her, I raced over and started talking to her. She is, you may recall, the very nice and hot Ukrainian chick. We talked for a while, played a game of pool, and then, suddenly, her friends took her home. Did I mention that she was leaving the country the following day? Sad Josh.
Well, I go back to my friends, and Kelly is macking on the Atlanta girl, Chis is going at it hardcore with other Josh, passionately making out by the bar. The models left, and the bar had become a sausage fest. I thought Chris and other Josh were making out on top of my jacket, so I just left it and went home.

The next morning, Sunday, I got up around 1, and Chris, Kelly, and I met up for lunch. Chris and I had decided we needed to buy post cards. We head down to COEX and buy them, then we had to figure out what to do. We decided going to Olympic Park would be nice, and it was a beautiful day. We walked over the canal bridge and went to the park. We then decided to figure out how to get to the river. We continued around Olympic Park, and found some kids on a rollerblading rink. We found an underpass to get to the other side of the huge highway, where we came out in this nice park by the river.
This park was AWESOME. There were people flying these huge and sophisticated kites, people playing basketball, windsurfing on the river, boating around the river. People were riding bikes and walking their dogs, rollerblading, jogging, or just enjoying the nice weather with a walk. We walked around, trying to find the place to rent a swan boat to ride on the river. We grabbed ice cream at this convenient store on the river, and kept wandering about. Eventually, we went back to our side of the canal, where we found this sweet go-carts track. These m’fers were hauling ass. These weren’t the FunStation kiddy go-carts, but hardcore manly ones. It looked like hella fun.

We wandered around some more, and found a nice little exercise park with fun and exciting free exercise equipment. We played on that for a bit, then went into the Technocolor Corridor of Doom (Kelly calls it the Trippy Tunnel of Awesomeness). This multicolored tunnel was lined with mirrors, and after passing through it, we found ourselves in another little park. This had kids playing soccer, and a huge white rabbit walking around. The temperature was quickly dropping, and I was cold. We retreated to a cab, getting out at Gangnam station, to have dinner at Dos Tacos. It was awesome Mexican food, and something we needed badly. After a delicious meal, we parted ways. I went to Itaewon to fetch my jacket. I think the other two just went home.
I get to Spy, and luckily my jacket was there. I get it and head home. Completely worn out, I decide to get of at Jamwon station and get a taxi the rest of the way home. I get out, and found that I was in the middle of no where. One tiny little 2 lane road. No taxis. All the buildings were just large apartment buildings. I finally find a cab, and take it home. I got home, and had a long, sleepless night. Maybe just too tired to sleep. It sucked. Around 4 I finally fell asleep.

Monday morning I get up, and decide I’m too tired for the gym. Work was nice, and afterwards Kelly, Chris and I grabbed a pizza and beer. After eating it, we parted ways, and I went home.

Tuesday was another normal day. I went to the gym. Had a great work out. Felt really good afterwards. Then I headed to work. The kids were especially bad today, and it was frustrating. After work, the three of us went to Spicy Chicken Place and ate, then went to see our good buddy Seung Je at Siena.
Seung Je was walking out the door when we got there, and we were most upset! The other bartender made our drinks, and eventually Seung Je came back. He really wants to practice his English with us, so he was hanging out with us for a while. His friends came in, and one was fluent in English, so she helped translate. Seung Je taught me a new shot, which was awesome.
He hands me two shot glasses, one filled with water, another with triple sec. He tells me to wet my palm with the water. He then lights the triple sec on fire, and tells me to cover the flaming shot glass with my wet palm. The fire went out, making the shot glass stick to my palm. I then took the shot, and he told me to breathe deeply. It felt really cool, but I’m still a little confused on the purpose of the breathing. Not sure what it did.
We closed the place down, and then went home. I called AGLAW, then went to bed.

Woke up this morning and now we’re waiting on Chris to hurry up and get ready so we can grab lunch.

summary: wasted, market, company dinner, wasted, palace

2009-03-15T15:15:33Z

Korea Log 10
Sunday, March 15, 2009

I’m doing my best to get back on a normal schedule. Sunday really needs to be my day of giving all my subscribers the week in review! So I last wrote on Tuesday morning, let’s go from there.

Tuesday I get to have one of my favorite classes. It’s a class of four—two boys, two girls. The two boys are awesome. They are loads of fun. The girls…..well, one is great. She’s active, funny, a smart. The other one is very smart, but SUPER shy. Talks in whispers, not fun.

I only teach one class on Tuesdays, so I spent the next three hours grading essays. No big deal, I like grading essays. I took my sweet time getting them done, trying to give as many comments as possible and make as many corrections as I can. Parents like to see that when they look at their kid’s work, so I’ll do it.

After work, Kelly, Chris and I went to grab dinner. We went to this little fast food place called “Lotteria”, basically the McDonald’s of Korea. It was terrible. Never going there again.

Afterwards, we went to our good ol’ favorite neighborhood standard—Siena. It was about midnight, and we go in there, grab some drinks. We had the bartender all to ourselves, so we bought him a drink. Afterwards, he offered us some Lemon Drop shots. Now, I’ve had these before, totally lame drinks. They aren’t strong, all sugar. So when he asked if we wanted 151 or normal rum in it, I perked up. Kelly and I went with the 151, Chris got the regular rum. Bartender put the three shots on the counter, poured the rum, then laid flat a lemon slice on each glass. He placed sugar on top of each lemon slice, and spooned a bit of 151 onto the sugar. Each lemon slice was lit on fire, and we watched in amazement. It was very, very cool. After the sugar had burned away and the syrup was in the shot, we downed them. Add two long islands, and we were all feeling very good. We headed back to Chris’ place after Siena closed at 2, and we hung out there for a while. Apparently, I invited myself and Kelly inside. Damn Josh Drinkins! Always causing problems. We hung out there for a while, talking, laughing, telling jokes, the usual. We eventually decided we were tired and needed to go to bed. I got home, and was shocked to see it was already 4:30am. Oops!

Wednesday I met up with Chris and we decided to go to Namdaemun market. Frist, however, we enjoyed a delicious lunch at Bennigan’s. I enjoyed my delicious Monte Cristo, and afterwards it was market time. I’ve been wondering where we had to go to buy the really nice knock-off purses and shit. Found out! Namdaemun! It was crazy. You can buy absolutely anything there….I bought butter!! I’ve been freaking out, for the past month without any butter in my life, and I finally found some. I bought a huge tub of it, and carried it proudly all day. I was on a mission to find proper hiking boots, Chris wanted clothes, and Kelly wanted T-shirts. We got separated from Kelly, and we just went on a walk for a while, exploring places. I found a room where I was too tall to stand up in. Surprisingly, that’s not happening very often. Eventually, we found Kelly, and it was getting late, so he had to go to his pool game. I hadn’t found my boots, and Chris was still looking for clothes, so I told him I was going to pass on pool for the night. Chris and I found the hiking stores, and I went from one to the next, trying to find the one that has size 300 shoes, or close to it. 305 would be ideal, 300 would be comfortable. 290, as we found several times over, was just too small. Well, after 5 stores, I found a pair that were 295, but felt comfortable. 127000 won. I went for it. We then found a place that sold clothes for people our age, and I got a pair of jeans for 25000 won. I found a shirt I liked for 15000, and got it too. We were pretty beat by this point, so we headed home. I had a pretty lame night that night, just stayed in.

Thursday was work as usual. It’s my only day of teaching two classes. I went in early to talk to Jinhee. I was pretty upset about the schedule. I mean, I’m only teaching 4 classes a week, whereas other people are doing 7 or 8. I had to talk to her about it, since I had my proformance review say I was doing a great job, and had no negative comments, so clearly it wasn’t because I’m a bad teacher. Jinhee explained that she just needed someone to help her with the curriculum development, and she felt that I would be the best for it, since I could work independently and monitor myself. She said she didn’t feel like she would need to be constantly looking over my shoulder, making sure I’m doing my work, so she picked me. She said she was really happy with the stuff I am producing. I felt a lot better after talking to her. I mean, the stuff has to get done, and now I don’t mind doing it as much. They know I want to teach more classes, and hopefully next term I’ll pick some new ones up.

Friday was to be an exciting day. Work was development day, so I just did boring stuff all day. After work, however, things would be fun.

After work, we jumped in Jinhee’s car and headed down to the restaurant, where we would be having our company dinner. We went to a Korean Barbecue place, and it was GOOOOOD. I ate things I hadn’t ever planned on eating, namely raw beef and coagulated cow blood. The cow blood I could have done without. It was in a soup, and…meh. Nothing great about it. Not really worth eating. But the raw beef was fantastic. It was prepared in some sweet sauce with vegetables, and we couldn’t get enough of it! I wish I had a plate of it right now. It’s amazing. We did the usual other cuts of meat, and drank multiple bottles of liquor. Seung Hyun, one of our guys, was so red in the face, it was adorable. He apparently doesn’t drink too much. It was funny. Afterwards, Graham, Chris, Kelly, Hyuntae, Daniel, and I all went down to Gangnam. I had heard Gangnam was a fun area, but others told me it was all Koreans, so not much fun for foreigners. We stepped out of the taxi, and two drunk college students greeted me and told me to have a nice time. I was like “Shit! I love this place!” The streets were littered with street food and drunk people. Everyone was young, and yeah, Korean. No foreigners, which made me feel really safe to be there. Foreigners are the ones you have to look out for, not the Koreans.
So we went to this bar, and started the drinking. Two long islands, and I wasn’t feeling anything. This bartender clearly did not have the skill of Ryan or the Siena guy. These things were WEAK. Daniel then ordered a traffic light. The waitress brings three glasses—one red, one yellow, one green. We played Kai-bai-bok—or rock, paper, scissors—and I came out on top. That means I get to drink them. Start with red—basically vodka cranberry. Ok, fine. Now, quickly move to yellow—I think mango rum and juice, a little stronger than red. Finally, finish it off with green—Midori and Vodka. Green was a little rough. We ordered several more of those, and, if you see the pictures, you’ll know it was a damn good time. I don’t remember molesting Chris, but apparently she tried to climb over my lap, which is a bad thing to do around Josh Drinkins. After having a food fight, we left this bar.
And we moved to a Japanese restaurant! We apparently ordered food, I don’t remember exactly what we ate. Sushi rolls were involved, and some kind of pizza thing. Whatever it was, it was good. Then came the hot sake. We killed a bottle or two, and then headed out of there. Afterall, it was like 4:30. We had work in the morning. We took a cab and went home.

Saturday I went to work, with a nice sized hangover. The headache was there, for sure, and I was fighting bouts of nausea. Work was slow and long, and afterwards I went home. I grabbed dinner at Burger King, since I did not feel like dealing with Korean food. Just wanted something quick and easy. I got it and went home, where I watched some House and a movie.

I got up this morning at 11 to meet Chris at noon. We had agreed to have some Mexican for lunch, and so we went to COEX to eat at On The Border. It was ridiculously overpriced, but pretty good. Not great, but it was good, considering how far away we are from Mexico. We left there and went to Anguk station, where we found the Changdeokgung Palace. Technically, -gung means palace, so that was redundant, but we can’t expect you guys to know that!
We got our tickets for the English tour at 3:30, which gave us an hour to kill. We wandered around, and found this cool little Korean Folk Village Center. This nice guy gave us a bit of history about the traditional folk architecture, and told us where to go to find a neighborhood where all the houses are just like the old days, in true Asian style. We got lost, and found some castle looking building. We went up to it, and around it, and found a soccer game going on with middle aged people. Looked like fun, except that number 7 on the red team was blowing the game. We explored until it was time to get back to the palace. We joined our tour, and it was beautiful. The whole palace was far superior to the one we went to a while ago. We agreed to come back in May, when everything is in bloom. We took a bunch of pictures, even after my damn camera died. It’s new camera time, that’s for sure. After the tour we headed back, and grabbed dinner at this awesome little place. My meal was 3000 won. Dirt cheap! Current exchange rates sets that at $1.50!! And it was delicious. I also found a bakery, where I got some bread to go with my butter.

After Chris and I ate, she left to join her friend in Sinchon to play some card game. Kelly came over a bit later and we went to see Dragonball Evolution. We met this girl I had been talking to online there, and went in. She was pretty cool, and student majoring in Business and Spanish. The movie was pretty good. Definitely an adaption of anime, but it was pretty good. Too short, I think, but Sunju hadn’t ever heard to DBZ, so I think she was glad it wasn’t too long.

After the movie we parted ways, and I came on home, posted pictures online and wrote this.

So that brings us up to date on the week in review. Just curious, who all reads this? Leave me a comment if you read these either periodically or religiously, I am just curious. I mostly write this for my own future uses, but I certainly don’t mind keeping everyone up to date. Alright, take care!

beltspinner @ 2009-03-10T12:40:00

2009-03-10T03:40:26Z

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

The past week was a lot of fun. Had quite a bit of exciting experiences, including some very fun adventures.

The last I left you I was headed off to work. Tuesday I only taught one class, a small class of three fun students. All three kids were very actively involved in class and very fun. That definitely makes classes go by better. I only work one class on Tuesday. After work Chris, Kelly, and I went and grabbed dinner and some drinks, then headed home. Nothing too exciting.

Wednesday is always an exciting day, since it is our day off! We decided to meet at Samseung station in order to get some ice cream from Cold Stone. Yeah, it was freezing outside, but whatever! Afterwards, we hopped on the subway and took it to City Hall station. From there, we began our tour of the Deoksugung Palace. It was really cool, and we are definitely going to go back when the winter has passed and everything is coming back to life. I’ll bet it is absolutely beautiful. It was really cool to see anyway. As we were leaving, we happened to catch the changing of the guards ceremony, which was freaking AWESOME (see youtube vids and Facebook vids/albums). We were massively impressed.
We went back to Daechi, ate, and went home to rest for a few minutes. We only had about 45 minutes before Kelly and I had to leave for pool. Kelly is on a pool team in Itaewon, and they compete every Wednesday. When we got there, I met the rest of the team, and was put on the list. Since I was new, I was only playing one game. When it was my turn to go, I was put up against an older man from the other team. They seemed to be quite the international group. My guy, I think, was Canadian, in his 40s. We went, and he was absolutely kicking my ass. I was never good at pool, and it has been a long time since I’ve played, so I was getting creamed. He was down to like 2 balls and I still had 6. Well, I got a really lucky turn, and landed all of mine but two. As he was going after the 8 ball, I still had two balls on the table. I sank one, and missed my next one. He sank the 8, beating me, but not as handedly as I had feared. I had a really good time.
For the rest of the evening, we hung out at Spy, getting shitty and playing pool. Some people get better at pool as they drink, I can’t even hit the ball. It was pretty sad. This one guy was trying to teach me some things, but my motor skills were just way too broken to do anything useful.
I spent most of the evening with this very nice Ukrainian girl named Dasha. She was hot and nice, a great combination. We talked for the longest time. I also spent a little bit of time with the bartender, my best friend Ryan, who came later. He’s awesome, and the nicest freakin’ guy. Around 3, I headed home.

Thursday I got up, grabbed lunch, and went to work. I taught my two classes, both of them good. The first one is more fun, but the kids are younger, so that’s expected. I don’t remember if we did anything after work on Thursday…..probably grabbed dinner, then drinks at Sienna, if anything.

Friday is my boring day at work. I don’t teach, and I do curriculum building all day. It’s pretty much miserable. Boring as hell, but gotta earn that pay check somehow. Not much to tell about it, just boring stuff.
After work on Friday, we decided to go have some fun. Graham had other plans, so Kelly, Chris, and I headed off to find some dinner. We wanted to splurge, and so we found a great little galbi place, where we cook our own food. They brought out tons of side dishes (see pictures) and we ate them up. We had a bottle of bamboo wine, and some soju, then headed to Sienna, where we had more drinks until they closed. We walked home, grabbed some bricks, and called it a night.

Saturday I had to be at work at noon, so that was my morning. Another day of no teaching, doing boring planning work.

We had planned for Chris and Kelly to come over on Saturday night, but they both bitched out, and so I spent Saturday night at home. It was fine, because we had to get up early on Sunday to go…..

MOUNTAIN CLIMBING!
Sunday morning we met at 9am at Joes Sandwich and Coffee for breakfast, then headed out to Bulgwang station. When we got there, we joined all the older people who were sporting their hiking gear. It’s apparently an old people sport, but screw that, I’m not from the land of the mountains, so I was super excited. Chris bought some hiking boots, I got a small backpack, and we went up the mountain. It was a lot harder than I was expecting. Not sure exactly what I had thought it would be like, but it was much steeper than the Appalachians. We went up and up, and the view was just gorgeous. Everything we saw was fantastic. The city to the south, and all of the mountains in every other direction. We saw other towns cradled between the mountains.
Up and up we went, until we came to a part which looked frighteningly exciting. It was just slick rock, where you had to find tiny grooves to climb up. Not like rock gym climbing, but like walking up a really steep rock. Well, we quickly learned that my shoes did not have the grip for me to go up this way, so I had to find another route. Kelly and Chris’ shoes could do it, so we got separated. I found another path up, and kept going up. I got to the peak and called Kelly (amazing cell phone reception on the top of a mountain!), and they were a little behind me. I met them at the top. We sat down and ate some of the kimbap (basically Korean sushi rolls) that we had packed. Took several pictures, made a few phone calls from the top of the mountain, and then headed down. Climbing down was a work out in itself. We finally reached the bottom, grabbed a late lunch, then headed home. Completely exhausted, we all went to our houses and slept for a while.
I got up later, grabbed dinner, then went to the other side of town to meet a girl and buy her DVD player. I got home and realized I was missing the video cable. SHIT. It was way to far to go back, and I needed to go to Yongsan Electronics market anyway, so I just let it go.

Monday morning I went to Yongsan, and bought everything I have been wanting: larger memory card for my digital camera, cables, a mouse for my computer. I came back, got ready for work, and headed off.

Monday we got our first performance reviews. Jinhee said that I was doing “great, no negative comments at all” and to “Just keep going just like you are”. That made me very happy.

I taught my Monday class, grabbed dinner with Graham and Kelly, then went back for more work. At 10, Kelly Chris and I headed over to COEX to watch “The Watchers”. It was pretty good. I wasn’t crazy about it, but the whole graphic novel genre isn’t usually my thing anyway. Regardless, it was a fun movie.
We went home from there and went to bed.

So it’s noon on Tuesday, now, and I figure I should be getting out of bed soon.

korea log!

2009-03-03T04:39:11Z

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Sorry I’m a little late on the week in review. I hope you haven’t all been sitting at your computers waiting for an update.

It hasn’t been a particularly exciting week, but a rather the normal run of the mill fun that my life consists of these days.

Monday was a normal Monday. Stayed home in the morning after sleeping in ridiculously late, worked in the day. It was the last week of the winter term, and so work was structured a little bit differently. I had to do a lot more improvising then I usually do, but everything worked out just fine. Nothing especially excting to announce about Monday work.
After work on Monday, however, was a pretty fun. Kelly and I went to meet some friends of his at COEX. We met Jin (I think that was his name) and some girl whose name I totally don’t remember (Kelly, help me out on this one). Jin is in the Korean Army, and so it was pretty cool to talk about the whole North Korean threat from the South Korean military’s point of view. The girl is a debate teacher, like Kelly, and we briefly talked and helped her organize her arguments for a lesson she has to teach. All of this was over dinner at COEX, and a couple of pitchers of beer. The girl left us, it was about midnight, and so Jin, Kelly and I went to K-Texas, a bar down the street from my house. I guess it was supposed to be Texas themed, but it wasn’t really. Sure, there was a longhorn rack on the wall, but most of the décor was just anything the people could get their hands on. We had a couple of beers, although overpriced, my Corona was a delightful respite from the nasty Korean beer. We talked and joked, and went home around 2am.

Tuesday was very much the same as usual. Kelly and I grabbed a quick dinner after work, and I went home.

Wednesday was different. I was given a “half day off”. I’m still a little confused about why, but I think it is because we had training planned for Saturday. It’s hectic right now because of the beginning of a new term, and I know it won’t be a typical thing, so although inconvenient, it wasn’t a big deal. Kelly and I met around 1:00 to go to Yongsan in search of the cables I needed to hook my Gamecube up to my TV, along with what I needed to hook my computer up to my TV. I foolishly left my Gamecube cables in America, and so we went in search of replacements. I found some, and although I probably paid more than I should have for the power cable, he did take it out of a new Gamecube’s packaging, so that was nice of him. Our search continued for a DVI Mini to DVI adaptor, so I could hook my laptop to my TV. This was more work than intended, since all the cord stores in Yongsan, which have every cord imaginable, had never heard of a DVI Mini. Well shit. Finally, Kelly and I found an Apple Store, and there I was able to buy the proper adaptor. I had my adaptor, I was good to go.
I then went to work for 4 hours, where I graded papers and did my class reading. Afterwards, I went to Itaewon to meet up with Kelly for some drinks. We met at a crowded but cool place called “bOne”. I met a couple of his friends, and from there we went to Spy. Spy seems to be increasingly our common hang out. I met my favorite bartender, Ryan, there, and had some drinks. One of Kelly’s friends got a round of shots for everyone, a secret recipe between him and the bartender. Definitely jager in it, but not sure what else. Oh, and it was flaming. Pretty fun and delicious shot, though.
I started talking to a girl there who I swore was Russian. She looked Russian, she had a Russian accent, but she swore she was from Brazil. Right. But she says she doesn’t speak Russian. We’ll see about that.
«Когда я тебя вижу, я думаю что ты русская.» (When I look at you, I think that you're Russian)
«Really?»
HA! Caught you. She denied and denied. I was at this point annoyed with her lies, so I went over to her friend, also Eastern European, but she went with Czech as her lie. Much more believeable. After a while, I wasn't terribly interested in either of them. Even though they were models, they weren't that interesting, and their boytoys were hanging around a bit too much.
Drunk, we went to get some food. We went to a Korean barbeque place, and ate delicious food. Afterwards, we headed to another bar. This one was totally dead, and I'm still not entirely sure why we were there in the first place, but we were. We had a couple more drinks, ordered some light food, Kelly passed out, we threw crap into his gaping mouth, and I noticed one of the guys playing pool had a USSR shirt, only it said CCCP, the Russian name for the Soviet Union. I went up to him. He was pretty cool, just he and his friend, a Korean dude, playing pool. He was from St. Petersburg. I had no idea this city was crawling with as many Russians as it seems to be. They worked for a modeling agency, and they wanted my contact info in case I wanted to do any modeling for their company. I gave it to them.
Around 5am, Kelly had woken up, and he was ready to leave. Our drunk asses went on homeward in a cab, and after getting home, we parted ways for bed. I got home around 5:30am, talked to Summer online for a bit, then went to bed.

Thursday I woke up feeling fine, grabbed lunch at Burger King, and went to work. Well, Burger King did not set well on the stomach, and I felt kind of shitty for the rest of the day. I did my usual teaching. I love teaching the writing and speaking classes much more than the reading and listening ones. The kids get to be more creative, and it makes the class go by faster, and the gets are more actively involved. After work Thursday I went home, played my gamecube, and went to bed.

Friday was work as usual. Classes were great, especially since the kid in my one-kid-class, or OKC as we call in around the kids so we can complain how much we hate teaching them, never showed up. I graded papers and eventually went home. I didn't end up going out or anything, just watched some House and went to bed.

Saturday I slept in, then went to Yongsan to get more cords. The ones I ahd didn't connect, and I needed a DVI to HDMI cable. I got one cheap, and took it home. Jinhee, my supervisor, asked if I could work on Sunday instead, so I had a lazy Saturday. I decided to do some exploring in a part of town I haven't been to yet. I went very far north, starting at City Hall (see the video on my page) then moving farther north. I noticed an increasing number of police in riot gear. I probably passed 30 busses, where police were suiting up in their riot gear, carrying their sword-sized batons. I just acted naïve, because I just wanted to go north and get pictures of the mountains. I walked past them, and eventually got away from the main grouping of police, but still there were many scattered about. I texted Kelly, asking if I should be concerned. He said probably not, it's probably just a demonstration about to take place, but in case it's anti-American, to stay away from it. I heeded his advice, hopped on the subway, and headed home. I got home and chilled for the evening, watching episodes of House on my big TV. It was pretty exciting.

Sunday was a normal Sunday, except the fact that I had to work. I grabbed lunch, then went in at 2. I did grading and prep stuff for the Spring term. We had a little bit of training to help us get organized for the week. I did my 4 hour half day, went home, and chilled out.

Monday was a fine day. I only taught one class, with 4 good girls, one ok boy, and one pain in the ass boy. The class went well, and after we taught Graham (UK Guy), Kelly, and I went to grab dinner at the Mexican place. Delicious. Well, it's good for Korea. I miss Morelia's and San Miguel. After dinner we went back and worked for a bit more, and at 10 we left. We grabbed some drinks at Sienna, a place that used to be famous, but has lost its popularity. Drinks were pretty cheap, 7000 won for cocktails, and the long islands were nice and strong. I got nice and tore up, and we headed home. I slept really well.

Today I woke up feeling great. I'm tellin' ya, alcohol makes me feel better the next day, now that my body is used to it again! I was feeling especially lazy, and didn't want to do any laundry. This new term we have to dress up, at least for the first week or so, so I took all my clothes to a dry cleaner for them to deal with. Kind of expensive, but whatever. Worth it. It's raining out, and I'm glad to use my new umbrella.

Alright, time for work. That concludes this edition of week in review!

beltspinner @ 2009-02-22T22:04:00

2009-02-22T13:05:05Z

Sunday, February 22, 2009.

Time for another week in review.

Last we heard, it was 32 degrees outside on Sunday afternoon. I walked outside my door and see a crowd of about 15 people gathered at the mechanic’s place. As I walked by, I was watching them. I noticed one man looking at me, and with his hand extended to me, palm down, moving his hand up and down. Clearly, the guy was telling me to mind my own damned business and keep walking. A little insulted, I turned my head and kept walking. Then two or three more people started doing it, until one man came over and grabbed my hand. It was then I realized the American hand gesture for “go away” means “come here” in Korea. Weird. The man grabbed me and brought me over to their barbeque. They were cooking bulgogi (thin slices of beef served by wrapping in lettuce), had clams on a grill, and several different sides. Two women were gathered by the grill, eating the clams with a couple of guys. One of the ladies fed me a couple of clams, and the men kept pouring shots of soju and beer and passing them around. Koreans like to feed each other, so I was eating right out of their hands. Kind of weird, but I got used to it pretty quick. We drank, laughed, and ate. I ate kimchi, a boiled egg, bulgogi, clams, several different thing. I drank shot after shot of soju, several cups of beer, a shot of whiskey, and got nice and wasteyfaced. It was a hell of a lot of fun. They are a group of runners, and they all live in the Daechi area, which is where I live. Every fourth Sunday of the month they go and climb a mountain. It was hella fun, and I made some friends. It was great. I went home and took a nap after about 3 hours of freezing my ass off.

The rest of the night was lame, especially since I couldn’t sleep. Every month or so I go a night where I just cannot sleep. It sucks. I probably went to sleep around five or so.

I had to wake up early and be at work at 11, when my boss Ms. Moon would take Kelly and I to the immigration office. Kelly needed a new Alien Registration Card, and I was getting mine. We spent about an hour and a half there, and then headed back to work. Mondays I teach only one class, my fifth graders. I really like that class. It’s a lot of fun, and the kids are great. There are 9 kids in there, which is fun. After that class, I do planning work. This week the kids took their end of term achievement test, so work was pretty boring all week.

We had a new guy get to Korea on Monday. His name is Graham, from Manchester, England. He seemed pretty cool upon first meeting.

Tuesday was work as usual, teaching two 7th grade classes. I like these classes a lot. The first one is 10 kids, and the kids are younger than than the second class. Our “grades” are based on achievement level, not on school grades. We just care about making sure kids are in the levels they need to be.

Tuesday night I did what I’ve been doing every night—coming home and watching episodes of House. I’m completely hooked on the show. I’ve got season one and I’m just watching all the way through the show.
Wednesday I do not teach, so I spent the whole time working on things for Jinhee-my supervisor—and grading essays from the week before. After work, we all went out and had dinner, compliments of Ms. Moon. We went to a restaurant and ordered some drinks. Our little high school part-timer got pretty drunk, which was funny. They brought out kimchi and a couple of other sides, then two big bowls of soup. The soup was set on the table still boiling. We spooned some out and put it on our little bowls. It was mushrooms, spinach, pig intestines, and a few other things. Overall it was good, except that it was unbearably spicy. I broke a sweat.
They then brought out the second course—a large tray with all kinds of mixed things on it. Vegetables, stuff pig intestines, mushrooms. Again, it was spicy as hell. I really liked the stuff pig intestines, it was tasty. We went home after that.

Thursday morning I took the subway to go check out a TV from a guy who was leaving the country. It was in a small town outside of Seoul, but on a satellite they look like the cities are connected. I decided I wanted tg et his TV, TV stand, bookshelf, some DVDs, desk, blender, several “Learn Korean” books, a fan, and some dishes, all for 400,000 won. The TV is an LG 32inch flat screen HDTV. We decided to see if we could figure out transportation. I thought my mechanic would be able to help me. If not, we’d find someone with a truck.
Thursday was work as usual. Graham was in the office all day, getting prepared and learning about our hogwon. My classes were good, 7th graders. During my last break, I went to the bathroom. The urninal is right in front of the window, which was open. As I peed, I noticed something was hitting my face. I was like “WTF?” Then it hit me, it was SNOWING!
Our last new coworker arrived on Thursday as well, Christina (Christine?) from Arizona, born in the Phillipines. Met her very briefly.
I finished work, and was excited to go walk in the snow. The thrill went away quickly, as I realized snow was cold and wet. I went on home.

Friday morning I went over to my mechanic’s shop, and he called and ordered a truck. While I waited, I played in the snow. Not any on the ground, but there was some on the cars and in the bushes. The driver came, and I gave him the directions of where to go, written out in Korean, and we were off. The snow was everywhere. It was very exciting. Soft, powdery snow everywhere. Very fun. We loaded everything in the truck, and brought it back. The driver helped me carry the stuff inside, and I set everything up how I wanted. I would have to get the proper cords to be able to watch TV, but at least I have a TV now.

Friday I teach my 5th graders again, and that’s always fun. Good, fun kids. My second class is a 6th grader. Just one kid. He’s extremely shy, very quiet, and doesn’t have a creative bone in his body. It’s a horrible way to end the week. Can’t wait until next term!
After work I went home and fucked around online for a while, then went to bed.

Saturday morning I slept in until noon, then went to Yongsan Electronics Market, in search of the cables I needed to watch TV, and the cords necessary to hook my computer up to my TV, so I can watch my downloads. Possibly porn too. ☺

I went to Yongsan, and could not find the computer to TV cords. I then headed to meet a guy to buy a humidifier for my apartment. I decided to take a cab, since 1. The Yongsan subway station is confusing and 2. I figured it would be faster. This was the weirdest cab experience I’ve yet had. We passed a store called “Cosby”, which had little cartoon apes on either side of it. I found it pretty funny, especially since it said “ape” on either side of the word “Cosby”, so I took a picture of it on my phone. Well, this gave the cab driver an idea. He said something to me, then handed me his cell phone, with it in camera mode. Well, I guess he wanted me to take a picture of himself, so I took it. He didn’t seem to like it, so he kept taking more and more pictures of himself, using the mirror, or holding it backwards, whatever. He kept saying things to me, which I had no idea what he was saying. The cab ride ended up taking 30 minutes, and he didn’t get me where I needed to go. I called the guy I was meeting, and he spoke to the driver in Korean, and tried to get me to the right place. In the end, we just decided to stop at the nearest subway station, and the guy would meet me there. Needless to say, I took the subway home.

I went to COEX to see if I could find the cables I needed, and I hear this guy “excuse me”. An older man stopped me, and asked me for money. He said he was homeless, spoke pretty good English, not particularly poorly dressed. Brown dress jacket, khaki pants, chucks. I told him I’d buy him food, but I wouldn’t give him money. We went to Sbarro, and I told him to tell the lady what he wanted.
“I will just have whatever you have.”
”No, I’m not getting anything, just order whatever you’d like,” I respond.
“I cannot. I have a phsychological problem, I cannot talk to her.”
Things were now weird. I didn’t like any part of this situation, especially since I had my laptop with me. I was being really careful, but just in case the guy really was homeless, I wanted to help him. Still, I was firm.
“I’m not ordering for you. Just tell her what you want. If you can’t order, I’m not buying anything for you.”
He shuffled up to the lady, ordered his food, and then went down the row to pay. When they gave him his food, I sent him away to find a table. I did not want him near me when I took my wallet out. I paid the guy and walked away.

Saturday night I met Graham and Chris at CUBE at 10, and we headed to Itaewon for some drinking. Graham was excited because there was some kind of “football” (Soccer) game he wanted to watch. We went to some American style bar, filled with foreigners, and we hung out, drinking several beers. Kelly came and joined us around 11:30. It was a good time. We then went downstairs to this other club and hung out there. We downed some Long Islands, got nice and shitty, met some Russian girls, who were not particularly attractive, but no biggy. We had a really good time there, though.

Next thing I knew it was 1pm and I was in my bed. I made sure I had my wallet, cell phone, camera, and everything. Instead of fighting off my massive hangover, I went back to sleep. I woke up at 4:30, went to COEX for dinner and a search for the cables necessary for my TV. I saw the homeless guy again, but this time I just kept on walking. He tried to stop me, but I ignored him. I helped you yesterday, buddy, pick someone else.

beltspinner @ 2009-02-15T13:47:00

2009-02-15T04:48:23Z

Sunday, January 15th, 2009

It’s about time for an update, and I’ve got some free time on my hands, so let’s review the past week.
I’ve become obsessed with watching episodes of House.It’s fantastic. I can’t believe I never got in to this show. So I’m starting at season 1 and going all the way through, or until I get tired of it.

Tuesday was work as usual, just another normal day teaching. After work Kelly and I went down the street and grabbed some dinner. We went to this little Mexican restaurant. It was kinda like a Mexican fast food, so you got your food to go and went on your merry way. We went from there to the convenient store and bought a couple of beers, and afterwards sat in this little playground, drinking our beer, eating our Mexican and hangning out. It was pretty fun. After about an hour, we parted ways and I came home.

Wednesday is my work day of no teaching, so I spent 5 hours grading and correcting essays. Daniel took me out to dinner as a treat from the school. We went to this great little Korean barbeque place. Basically, you order your cut of meat, and they bring it to you. You then cook it on the grill in the middle of the table. All the sides are free, like most Korean places. We had some steak, then some very thinly sliced meat, followed with a weird soup. It was made with those noodles I think I wrote about previously, which cannot be bitten through. But overall the soup was pretty good. After dinner, I went back to work and did some prep for Thursday and Friday’s classes. At ten, I was supposed to go join Kelly at a pool hall, but I decided to go home and start pirating music, since it’s totally ok here.
After a few hours of that, I went to bed.

Thursday was another normal day. I came to deeply regret my decision the night before, however. Kelly said at their pool hall, there was a group of Russian models there. They kept to themselves, since they couldn’t really speak to anyone there. WHAT HAVE I DONE?!!? DAMN IT! The rest of the day went as usual. I’m loving teaching, it’s great. Some of the kids could use a chair in the face, but that’s what teaching is all about!

Friday was work as usual, except for my second class. The class is a rivoting one, with one whole kid in it. I can handle a class of 10 unruly kids any day. Hell, I used to handle a room of 35 unruly ones. But one? It was completely exhausting.
Well, I wasn’t going to let a little thing like being tired get in the way of my fun! I had plans to meet up with Erica, an internet friend of my cousin Haley. She met me in Itaewon, the clubbing area where a shit ton of foreigners spend their evenings. Her husband is Mexican, and as a part of the Hispanic stereotype, we went Salsa dancing! I had only done it once before, so I needed to be given lessons all over again. We did Meringue, Salsa, drank beer, and had a grand ol’ time. I danced with some Canadian girl named Angela, who lives in another city here in Korea….Daegu, I think? Anyway, we had a pretty good time. Soon, it was time for us to head somewhere else. So we pile into a taxi and headed to….Hongdae, I think. We stopped at a KFC for some reason….but we ended up eating there. We made new friends. I think Drinkins had something to do with that. But next thing I knew we were going to some underground bar to do some more Salsa dancing, and we had three new people with us. They spoke English….well, I remember one of them speaking English perfectly. Regardless, we danced the night away there, and after several hours, we went home.
I got home around 5:30, and talked online to Summer. I remember it being extremely hard to type. Soon afterwards, I passed out.

I woke up at 1 on Saturday, not feeling so hot. I laid in bed for most of the day. Around four, I decided to start my day. I then realized that I had completely forgotten about my Korean class, which started at 4. Damn it!
So I ventured out, and went to COEX, then to Yongsan, which is where you can buy lots of electronics. There’s also a nice mall there, where I got a jacket for the equivalent of $7.12. The sleeves are long enough, I guess, but I like very long sleeves. It’s damn warm, though! I walked around Yongsan, got nice and lost, and wound up taking a taxi back to Itaewon, where I rode the taxi home. I was going to go to Kangnam’s clubbing area, but at the last minute decided against it. My feet were really hurting, so I stayed home. I went in search of food, and after a failed attempt, I ended up getting something to go from this little place. He cooked it in front of me, and it literally, not exaggerating at all, literally smelled like poop. It smelled like a big, nasty poop. I’m assuming it was intestines. Well, I took it home and tried it. It didn’t taste that bad, but I couldn’t get the smell of poop out of my head, so I decided not to eat it. I went to bed shortly afterwards.

I’m sleeping later in the day now, which is nice. Got up at 11:45am today. I think I’m going to go explore. The weather is 32 right now, which is the high today, so I think I’ll need my new jacket.

beltspinner @ 2009-02-10T23:21:00

2009-02-10T14:22:08Z

Tuesday, February 10, 2009.
It has been a pretty eventful week. Last I wrote to you I was preparing for my first class. My coworker, Kelly, took the week off to work as a judge at some competition at a high school in Seoul, so I spent the week substituting for his classes.
Monday I had a 6th grade class and an 8th grade class. It’s amazing to see how different those two ages are. The level of maturity between them is astounding.
The sixth graders are loud, energetic, and fun. They are busting with excitement, and we were able to enjoy the class quite well. The eighth graders are a completely different story. Awkward, quiet, and shy, that class can be a bit more of a struggle.

A quick review of how our school works—each class is three hours long, with a five minute break at the conclusion of each hour. I am teaching two types of classes—on Mondays and Tuesdays class focuses on reading and listening class, and Wednesday and Thursday we have writing and speaking class. The reading class is much more structured, with every minute detailed on what activity we are to be doing. We read passages, and the kids to exercises making sure they understood what we read, plus adding to their vocabulary.
The writing class has significantly less structure, and more lies on us teachers in the way of discussion and lecture. We do more work in grammar, this clas more specific on different parts of speech.
Now that I’ve had classes teaching both types of class, I’m not sure which style I like more. They’re both quite different.

So I spent the week at work teaching Kelly’s classes. The majority of them were very good. I especially like the 6th grade classes. There is one that was just three boys, and it very much reminded me of my job working at the afterschool. The middle school classes later in the week were a lot better than the earlier part, I think in part because the students got more comfortable with me and were much more talkative. The middle school classes were all boys, something I’m assuming is structured as such on purpose.

My mornings were as I have spent them since I got here—picking out a random station on the subway and going to check it out. I’ve been doing research about where cool things are, and I found that there is a Russian district in the Dongdaemun Stadium area. Dongdaemun Stadium, I’m assuming, was a large part of the 1988 Olympics, judging by the huge stain glass ceiling bearing the five rings in the subway station. It has since been torn down to make room for the Dongdaemun Design Plaza and Park. I only had a few minutes before I had to make my way to work, so I decided to come back the next day.

Friday night I got off work and decided to check out the famous foreigners hangout of Itaewon. It’s an area of town that is a little sketchy, with people from all over the world coming together to get shitty. Bars, clubs, prostitutes, street food, and homeless people characterize this pretty well. I was a little uncomfortable there, but I wound up being pulled into this one bar by some chick. The bar was tiny, and there was a woman sitting at the bar, a much older woman behind the bar, and the young girl who invited me in. I bought her and myself a drink, and we sat drinking them and talking. It was a pretty good time. After a while, and through our discussion, I came to realize that she worked there, and was using me to buy her overpriced drinks. Luckily, I had come to Itaewon without the intention of getting drunk, but mearly to check it out, so I hadn’t brought much cash with me. After one round, I left, and headed back to Kangnam, my district. The subway closes ridiculously early in Seoul, so I had to recruit a taxi. It would have been smarter for me to walk out of the bars area to hail one, but I wasn’t thinking ahead. We sat in the traffic of drunk people trying to grab taxis for a few minutes, and I watched my meter go up.
This taxi driver nearly killed me. He rushed through the city at ridiculous speeds, and as we approached red lights, he glanced quickly to each side and proceeded right along. True, there was very little traffic, but it was still pretty scary. In hindsight, I guess he does this all the time, and that’s not much different from how the taxi drivers do during the day, so this late night period of less traffic was safer, but at the time, it was pretty scary. I got home safely, and went to bed shortly thereafter.

Saturday morning I made it my goal to find this certain Russian restaurant. I headed back to Dongdaemun Stadium Station, and exited through the wrong exit. I wound up in a totally different area. I wandered around for a while and found all sorts of cool stuff. Apparently on Saturdays, this area becomes a huge market, with street venders and small stores selling everything. It was pretty cool, I’ll have to come back when I’m not jonesing for some Russian food. They were setting up for a couple of small concerts. One of the stages, I noticed, was definitely playing a song I recognized, but in Korean. I then realized that I was being Rick Rolled, in Korean.

I found the Russian area, filled with angry older Russian men walking around in fur hats, but it took a while to find the restaurant. I found a couple places that seemed tolerable, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted. This was one of the few places I have felt unsafe in the city. I kept a close watch on my wallet in this area. We all know that Koreans don’t steal, it’s just not a habit they have yet picked up. But pickpocketing is a pretty big problem in Russia, and as I was in the Russian part of town, I was a little less comfortable. I eventually found the restaurant without event, and walk inside.
There was an older man sitting at one of the table, who started to greet me in Russian, but halfway through the Russian word for “hello” (it’s a pretty long word, for those who don’t know), he hesitated after looking at me. I responded with the Russian greeting back, and he offered me a table. They did not have a menu, and the owner lady, about whom I read online, came out and talked to me about what I wanted to have. My choices were quite limited, but of course I ordered the borsch. I also got something else I had never heard of before, some kind of meat and rice wrapped in cabbage. This was, of course, like we characterized all Russian food—food, inside other food, covered in sour cream—however, it was missing the sour cream. It was fine, though, because it was utterly fantastic. It being a restaurant in Korea, it was served with kimchi and a couple of other sides.
After I finished lunch, with plenty of awesome conversation in Russian, I left and headed to Korean class. Some volunteers have been doing free Korean classes on Saturdays for the past 9 years, for people of all levels. I, of course, went to the absolute beginner class, where we practiced the alphabet, pronunciation, and a few useful phrases, such as what to say to our taxi drivers. I met a couple of pretty cool people, and am looking forward to next class.
I don’t really remember what I did after class on Saturday, but it was uneventful. I probably wandered around.

Sunday morning I got up and headed to Itaewon, where I would be meeting a woman to buy a couple of things from her. I met her husband in a cab, a man from Ivory Coast, Africa. He took me to their house, and from her I got a microwave, bedside table, radio, and a garment steamer. I loaded it into a cab and went home. I spend Sunday having a very lazy day. Most of it I either slept, went grocery shopping, and watched a movie. Really wasn’t in the mood to do anything.

Monday I woke up, spent the whole morning at home, getting stuff ready for class. I went to work, where I taught my first class that was completely mine. It was a really well behaved class, and it went pretty well. I only teach one class on Mondays and Fridays. After work, Kelly and I went to a Mexican place and got some food, then a store and got some beer, then hung out on a playground and ate, drank, and hung out. I got home around midnight, and went to bed soon after.
Updated 11 hours ago - Comment -

beltspinner @ 2009-02-04T22:44:00

2009-02-04T13:45:11Z

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

The Steelers just won the Superbowl. I do not have a TV nor Internet in my house, so I had to go to an internet café to find out. 1500 Won for an hour of internet. I guess that’s a little over a dollar, which is much better than it cost in Russia! The Superbowl was not something I wanted to spend my Monday morning doing anyway!

The weekend has been pretty busy, or at least I’ve kept it so. I woke up Saturday morning relatively early. This lack of a decent schedule is pissing me off! I woke up and after getting ready, I decided to go for a walk. I know how to get to the COEX Mall, and I know the Olympic Park is just beyond that, so I grabbed my camera and went for a nice long walk. I grabbed shots of cool and significant buildings as I walked by. Daechi is the corporate part of Seoul, from what I can tell, and so the culture in my part of the city is lacking, but the things to do are supposedly great. I walked down to the COEX/World Trade Center and took many a photo. I kept walking until I found the site of the 1988 Summer Olympics. It was pretty cool to see. There was almost no activity there at the time. I did find a small team who was doing a little warming up, but I did not want to be that creeper watching through the bushes. I was getting really hungry, and it was about 10:00am, and so I walked back to the COEX mall.

There I decided to give myself a run at the Korean McDonalds. It was quite consistant with the rest of the world. They may have things on the menu that I can’t yet read, but it was overall what one would expect. They were still serving breakfast. The only weird thing was that the drink was served in a plastic cup. Other than that, everything was completely normal.

I wandered around the COEX mall for a while. I found stores called “Evan” and “Jackie’s Kitchen”. I found them relatively amusing. It’s like my favorite people are here! Oh, the and food court is divided into four sections, each representing a season. Should have taken pictures in there. Oh well, plenty of opportunities for that.

I went home for a few minutes, where I researched my maps to try to figure out where the hell I live in Daechi. I noticed that the Russian Embassy was nearby, so I went on a walk to try to find it. Instead of taking the main roads, I decided to explore a little bit in the backroads. See, the city, at least my area, is set up like this: the main roads are lined with large businesses, restaurants, offices, hogwangs (English Language Academies), and convenience stores. On the middle parts of each major block there are small roads that go through. It is on these small roads that most Koreans, along with myself, live. There are also many restaurants, stores, businesses, and parks in these back roads. So I took a walk through the back of my block to find the Russian Embassy. Along the way, I found quite a few different things—hardware store, Chicken and Beer (their tagline needs to be “What else could you want?”), a park, massage parlor (might be a prostitution front), and several other neat places. Unfortunately, I failed to find the Russian Embassy, but I did find a restaurant with a famous Russian poem written on the wall in English.

I started walking home, with finding a restaurant being on the forefront of my mind. I found a small restaurant. I opened the door, and saw that this was a floor-sittin’ kind of place. Sounds pretty cool. The man came up to me, and I said “Photo Menu?”. He walked me outside, and we looked at pictures, and he would point to the prices on the menu—written in Korean. He spoke a few words of English, so I picked something and sat down. They did the usual Korean thing—brought out six different sides—kimchi, tofu with nasty sauce on it, some really sweet and yummy chewy something, another tasty something, some cabbage in broth, and some onion and cabbage soup. I ate about half of the kimchi—Jerry Bryan was right, the shit tastes like gasoline. I’ll like it eventually. While I snacked on the sides, they brought out some mushrooms and porkchops, which they cooked on the grill in the middle of the table. Eventually, it was ready, and the lady used hand gestures to show me to take the piece of lettuce, put the garlic cloves, pork, mushrooms, and sauce on it and eat it like a wrap. I definitely enjoyed eating it. Plus, it only cost 8000 won!

After lunch I went to the school to pick up Dammit’s supplies which had arrived at the school. I came home and took a nice long nap.

Around five I woke up and met up with Daniel. He took me to E-Mart, which is basically the Wal-Mart of Korea. My school was giving me an allowance to buy things for my apartment. I got all the necessities—kitchen supplies, iron and ironing board, litterbox for Dammit, a small bookshelf, and a few other things. That evening, I spent the night getting stuff settled.

Sunday morning I slept in for a while, then went for another walk. I was in search of a certain large park with isn’t too far from my house. I failed to find it, and so I went back to E-Mart for a few minutes and then headed home. I ate lunch then headed to the school, where I would begin my training. I met with Daniel for about two hours, going through how to teach these classes. After we were done, we ate dinner—ordered pizza. We had three different types. One was “Garlic Pizza”, which had pepperoni, a garlic white sauce, and tomatoes. Then there was another one that was kind of like a beef pizza. It had green peppers or something like that on it. Third was just a normal pepperoni pizza. Four pizzas and two drinks for 42000 won, not bad! Too bad I have no idea how to order it!

After dinner I went back to studying, and then had my “Mock Teaching” with Daniel and Jinhee. They showed me what I needed to improve on, and how they would do this particular lesson. After that, I got somethings together and went home. Home, I did some reading and preparing for teaching my first class the following day. I went to bed soon after reading “Frankenstein.”

I woke up this morning and went do the little grocery market down the street. I grabbed a few things that I felt I would be able to make in my house—rice, ramen, frozen dumplings, etc. The lady in there was very nice, though we did not speak each other’s languages. She brought me a basket as she watched me struggle to hold everything. As I check out, she threw in a roll of paper towels and some strawberry milk for free. She was so sweet, I’ll definitely have to go back there!

I came home and ate a pack of ramen, then went to an Internet café to prepare for class today, check email and Facebook, watch the end of the Superbowl, and see if anyone I wanted to talk to was online. After my hour was up, I came home and wrote this. It’s 1:18pm now, and I’m going to study for class today, then head on to teach my first class!

beltspinner @ 2009-01-30T22:55:00

2009-01-30T14:10:51Z

Friday wound up being an exceptionally busy day. At Noon Daniel picked me up and checked me out of my hotel. We then loaded my stuff into the school, while my room was being finished. I would move in later today.

We grabbed lunch, then went back to the school. Andy, or..Hunjee might be his real name...took me to the hospital, where I had to get my medical evaluation to get my Alien Registration Card. First, however, we went to the convenient store next door, and in the back of it I had my picture taken...I guess he's half convenient store, half Glamour Shots. Anyway, we went to the hospital, and I stood in the lobby until I was finally sent upstairs to take a bunch of odd tests. The whole experience was just...weird.
1. Height and weight
2. Hearing
3. Vision
4. Chest circumference....
I was then sent to have my chest X-rayed. That weird in itself. I was sent into a room and told to remove my shirt. Then I got X-rayed, and was told to redress then follow the red line on the flood. I followed it, grabbed a number, and waited in line to get my blood drawn and do a urine sample. Afterwards, I was done, so I headed down to the lobby and met Andy, who took me back to the school.
I was then taken to COEX to get my cell phone. I was told to expect to pay about $100 for it. My school went ahead and covered it, and told me they would deduct it from my flight-reimbursement. It's a pretty cool phone. Nothing too special, but it does have the Seoul subway map on it and a Korean English Dictionary.
I got back to the school and sat in on another class. These kids were younger, and more receptive to me than yesterday's class.
After class I was taken to dinner by Andy, and then we went and grabbed Dammit. Afterwards, we took Dammit to the school, loaded my bags into Harry's car (Harry is another administrator of the school), and we went to my new house. It's beautiful.

It is much larger than I was expecting. The kitchen is a separate room with fridge and gas stove. Then you enter my main room, where all i have so far is a bed. There are two rooms on either side of the main room, that are only 4 feet wide but run the whole length of the walls. In one is my washing machine. The second just has a wardrobe in it but is longer than the other one. Both have windows that open up to the outside, and are separated from my bedroom by sliding glass doors. The bathroom is slightly larger than my last one, or about the same size. My bed is between a twin and a double, and yes, it's long enough.

So I've been getting settled in. I have to buy some furniture--my bed is the only thing in there. But that will be exciting too.

I will most likely get a card reader tomorrow, so at that point I will be able to start uploading pictures.

Now, I have a very upset cat to go console.

beltspinner @ 2009-01-30T22:54:00

2009-01-30T13:55:06Z

Friday, January 30, 2009.
Yesterday was my first full day in Korea, and it was an interesting one. Nothing ridiculous has happened yet—I’m still working on getting things into place.
I woke up at 6:00am, most likely because my body cannot figure out what the hell has been going on lately. I spent the morning getting up and laying down, trying to get back to sleep. The majority of the morning, however, was spent on the internet. I talked to a few people online, gave a few updates, and watched the morning happen through my window.
About 9:00am I went down to the hotel’s restaurant for breakfast. They served an interesting collection of Korean and Western foods. Most of it was quite good—I went ahead and ate a few pieces of kimchi—it is my goal to enjoy that crap as soon as possible!
At 11:45 Daniel showed up to take me to lunch. He told me the unfortunate news that my room would not be ready for another day, so I had to stay in the hotel for another night. I didn’t mind, exactly, but poor Dammit! He had to spend another day in his travel box.
We went to a small Chinese restaurant. The menu was completely in either Korean or Chinese, so he ordered. We ate black bean noodles, sweet and sour pork, and a few other vegetables.
After lunch we stopped by work and picked up some cat supplies that Jinhee had brought for Dammit. We took them over the Dammit, who was obviously completely stressed out. He relaxed when he saw me, and I was able to get him to eat something. He did not use the makeshift litterbox I got him. I just know I’ll be happy once we get him into his actual room. Just one more day.
I was taken back to the office, where I received my orientation about the different programs that we have here at the CUBE Academy. Jinhee and I spoke for a while, and at 4pm I went to Daniels 8th grade class to sit in. It was quite interesting. The class consisted of four girls, all of whom were smart. Daniel was able to be sarcastic and moderately joking with the girls, which made me glad. It was exciting to watch what I will be doing.
Here is how classes work—my workday is from 2pm until 10pm. My workweek will generally consist of Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I will get Wednesdays and Saturdays off. On Monday, I will teach my first class, after a day of training on Sunday.
After I observed the class, I spoke to Ms. Moon, who said she would take me to get my health inspection for my Alien Registration Card. I was taken to go check on Dammit again, who seems to relax more every time I go to see him. He was happy to see me, and I cleaned out his cage, got him to eat a little bit, then went to my hotel. I took a quick shower, then passed out. Sure, it was 8pm, but I was worn out.
I woke up at 10pm, and forced myself to get up and find something to eat. I put on my jacket and gloves and braved the 29 degrees outside. For about an hour I wandered around the streets. The great thing about this city is that I do not feel remotely unsafe walking the streets alone. There are women walking completely alone down these dark alleys. After a long walk, I found out that most of the restaurants are kept on the back roads. This is also where one can find the bars.
Eventually, I found a comforting sight. On top of one restaurant, there was a stuffed moose head. I knew this place was for me, so I went in there. I had a couple of beers, and ate……something. No idea what it was, I just pointed to something on the menu, and had it brought to me. It was brought on a small butane fueled heating box. It resembled a coleman camping stove. The food was brought shortly after. It was served in a rectangular box filled with soup. In this soup were about fifteen different wooden skewers, each with a different food on the end of it. There is no way I could tell you what I ate, but it was pretty good. Most of them tasted same, just with a variety of flavors.
After dinner, I came back to my room, and went to sleep.
I woke up at 7am this morning, and am still laying in bed. I’ll soon go grab breakfast and probably go for a walk, trying to catch the sunrise.

beltspinner @ 2009-01-29T08:22:00

2009-01-28T23:24:42Z

Opportunity is too often skipped over. There are many reasons that people decide to walk pass open windows. None can look down upon those who see one, but decide not to crawl through it. There is a great deal of bending, trusting that there is solid ground on the other side to step down upon. These windows can be small, hard to fit through. I have decided that what ever is on the other side of this window, I will be able to find a way for it to support me.
This is the foundation of my next adventure. After graduating college, it was time for me to find something else to do. I had been working for a few weeks trying to see if I could get this job teaching English is South Korea. Many emails, phone interviews, and weeks later, I’ve gotten it.
At 4:45pm on Thursday, January 22, 2009, I learned that the USDA office had not received my documentation for Dammit to join me on my move to Korea. I was completely devastated. My mom, stepdad, and I went to Marie Livingston’s for a nice dinner out. They were supposed to take me to Rodiggios, but I was so upset that it would be a complete waste. I was barely able to stomach my steak dinner. I went back home, and cried a little more. Dammit was to be my foundation. I’m moving to the complete opposite side of the planet, without knowing anyone. As long as I had Dammit with me, I would be fine. It was looking now more and more like he was not going to be able to get his papaers in time for us to go to Atlanta on the following Monday.
After dinner, I went home. I knew the following:
I was given the wrong address for the USDA Veterinarian in Charge office.
I was told by UPS that someone had signed for it
It was my job to find out who. After a while of trying to figure out where my package was, I concluded that it was at Shands Hospital. I knew my best bet would be to be at Shands at 8:00am. I got on the road, and start calling everyone I know in search of a friend of a friend in Gainesville who could put me up for the night. After several leads fell through, Amy Levenson gets me in contact with a guy named Derek, and RA in one of the UF dorms, who has an extra futon. Excellent.
I arrive at UF, meet Derek, and spend the night in some random guy’s dorm. Friday morning I got up at 6:45am, and was at Shands at 7:50am. I went to the main receptionist woman. She took a look at my papers, and told me that the address I went the package to was not Shands, but rather about 1.5 miles down Archer St.. Since I did not yet have enough money to get my car out of the garage, and the area with the ATM would not open until 9am, I walked in 40 degree weather down to the actual address. I met with a woman who had held my package in her hand on Wednesday. She called the address it had been sent to, and they had not received it yet. I have the real address my phone number, and they would call me when their mail came in. If the package was in today, they would be able to get the paperwork done.
At 11:20am, after two hours of wandering aimlessly around UF, trying to not vomit from the hideous colors everyone was sporting, my phone rang. All of the paperwork was done, and I was cleared to come and pick up the papers. A DAMN happy boy, though completely exhausted, I drove home. Dammit was cleared to leave the country and move to Korea with me.
That was a wonderful night at Bullwinkle’s—my one last big night out. A bunch of people came out and joined me, we had dinner at Mr. Roboto, got nice and shitty. It was fantastic. I spent Saturday with my family, said goodbye to Mema, Haley, Aunt Sharon, Uncle Donnie, Heather, Bubba, Sidekick, Chayton, and the rest of the farm. At church the next morning, I was brought to the front and recognized. The church prayed over me and wished me the best. Sunday I bid my kids farewell, and headed for my last time in Bullwinkle’s.
Monday morning, I finished the last of my errands, said a few goodbyes, and around 5:00 we were on the road to Altanta. Dammit was very quiet the whole way. We arrived at our hotel, and after about 30 minutes, he was fine. We just aren’t telling the hotel we had a cat, and I’m not telling you what hotel we stayed at.
The next morning, we had breakfast, waited for Dammit to poop, loaded the car, and set forth on the last time I would drive a car for quiet some time. We parked, checked in my luggage. I had a great first impression of Korean Air Lines. They said my bags were a few pounds over the limit, but they would let it slide. Jackie was sobbing, Greg was holding her up, and Dammit was terrified. I got everything done, paid Dammit’s fee. They said to come back before 10:30am to check Dammit in.
After he was taken away from me, I had to say goodbye to Jackie. That was pretty rough. She cried, I cried. Greg may have even gotten a little misty eyed. They watched me go through Security, and stayed until I was completely out of sight. I grabbed a slice of pizza, and waited until I got onto my flight. I met another lady who was going to teach. She was older, probably in her 40s. She said the job market in America is just so bad, that she decided to go elsewhere for work.
I boarded my plane, glaring at all the first class customers. Bastards. I found my seat. Luckily for me, no one is seated in either of the seats next to me—so I get my whole set of seats to myself. Every seat has its own TV, which is touch screen with movies, games, TV shows, radio, maps, everything. It’s all free. People were telling me to be mindful of the chickens that are going to be running around the plane. Instead, I’m sitting here flying over the Northwest Territories of Canada, checking the sunset every few minutes, and watching an episode of House.
For lunch, I ate my first taste of Korean Food. Seaweed Soup, white rice, ground beef, squid, mushrooms, bean sprouts, spinach, and some sort of distant cousin of the potato. Kind of like…..yucca, sort of? No idea. But I ate this hot spicy paste to eat with it. I think it was called….Chogujang? Something like that. It was ridiculously hot, but it added a great flavor to the rest of the food. The pickles were the worst part. I was not a big fan of that.
So that’s the travel log thus so far. It’s 4:51pm Eastern time. In case you were ever wondering, the Northwest Territories are all flat and covered in snow. It looks like it would suck to walk across. I keep hoping to see the Idigerod or something.

Break.

It is now 7:30 Eastern time. I have decided to stay on Tallahassee time until I land in Korea. Then, I’ll be switching over 14 hours into the future.
I’m right now North of Alaska. I already waved at Gov. Palin. Everything below me is just frozen. It is absolutely beautiful. I keep taking a few pictures, but through the multi-layered windows, it is exceptionally hard to get a decent picture.
Our route thus so far has been straight north from Atlanta, over the Great Lakes. We then turned a North Northwesterly direction and cut across the Hudson Bay. That was amazing. After getting to the other side of the Great Canadian Shield, We took a more west-northwesterly course, north of Canada’s mainland. The map just shows ice below us now, exactly North of the center of Alaska. I think I can see some land over there, since my window is currently facing south. Our course from here is to go over the East Siberian Sea, over Russia, just west of the Sea of Okhotsk, over the northeastern horn of China, across North Korea and down into South Korea. I’ll post more details as we do different things and I get to see some stuff.
So far, no sleep. I’m about to try to read myself to sleep. Hopefully that’ll work.
Ok, write more later.

It is now Thursday morning. I’ll bring everyone up to speed on the events of the past several hours.
Last we saw, I was flying over the arctic shelf. Every time I looked out of my window, I saw ice as far as I could see. After several more hours, we passed onto the borders of Russia. The northern shore looked very much like the arctic sea. Flat, ice, snow, with the exception of a collection of frozen rivers. After about an hour, we were flying over the mountains of Siberia. These mountains were absolutely gorgeous. Snow, rivers, trees. Alll I could think of was how few people would ever step foot there. There was no sign of any sort of life down there. Just cold. Still, it was beautiful.
I turned on Eagle Eye and watched it, periodically looking down on the mountains. The further south we went, there more trees and fluid rivers I saw. I ended up falling asleep shortly after the movie. It was the first wink of sleep I had gotten on my flight.
Two hours later, I woke up to quite a shock. Suddenly, sitting in my row, was a small child. I have no idea where this boy came from, but he was sitting in the isle seat, minding his own business. I looked at the travel map, and saw that I was now over Northeast China. There were scattered tiny villages, each about twelve buildings large. They were scattered all over the land. This definitely reminded me of Mulan.
I turned on The Dark Knight and waiting for the last leg of my flight. Within two hours, we were over Korea. The mountains were beautiful, with tiny islands jutting out of the ocean. Finally, we landed at Incheon Seoul International Airport. I was ready to get off the plane, and find out how my cat was doing.
I passed through passport control without any trouble, and went to fetch my bags. I was not sure where exactly I would go to pick up Dammit, but I figured I would find out as soon as I got my bags. I grabbed a cart and loaded it up, then headed around the corner. Sitting on a cart was a tan carrying case, bearing much resemblance to the one Dammit was in. I walked up, and found my boy staring back out at me. I was overjoyed! He and I then headed over to the quarantine office. I was ready to turn him in, simply glad that he had survived his flight just fine. The lady came out, and looked at Dammit’s papers. She signed them, took her copy, then sent me off….with Dammit! He skipped the quarantine period! I was so excited!
So Dammit and I went in search of a phone. I quickly found a payphone, and called Jackie. She was glad to hear from me, but it was 4:00 in the morning, so I let her sleep. I called my recruiter, and he gave me directions on where to go. I boarded my bus, and Dammit and I began our next travel to COEX Center. COEX stands for Convention and Exhibition Center. It’s a huge place with a massive underground mall. In this mall, there is everything I couple possibly need from America. All the big name brands are in that mall. I was most excited about the idea of having an On The Border—I’ve already found a Mexican Restaurant!!
There I met Jimmy, my recruiter. He loaded me into his car, and we went to my hotel. The previous tenant of my room had moved out the same day I arrived, so while the room was being cleaned, I was put up in a rather nice hotel—Hotel Ibis. I went to my room, shot off an email, and one of my coworkers, David, who met me at the hotel, then took me to my school. Before we could go there, however, we had to drop Dammit off at his home for the night. The hotel wouldn’t allow him to stay in the hotel, so my coworker said he could spend the night there.
At the CUBE Academy, I met my new boss, Moon, along with several other coworkers. One of them is a fellow cat owner, and she is going to get me some cat supplies to get me started, along with show me where to buy his necessities.
Afterwards, David and I went to get some dinner. We went to COEX, and ate at a traditional Korean food restaurant. The food was very good. The main course was a stone bowl filled with rice, beef, spinach, mushrooms, bean sprouts, and several other vegetables. Along with it was served garlic greens and kimchi. My first try of kimchi was surprising. It was not nearly as bad as everyone had tried to make it sound. They were a little bit too hot for me, but my taste buds will adjust. Korean food has a lot of spiciness to it, so I figure within a few months of eating it, I will be able to eat it all just fine.
After dinner, we ran down to the 7eleven down the street, where I grabbed a couple of bottles of water, then went back to the hotel. I came in, got online for a few minutes, then passed out. It was pretty much all I could handle for the day. It had been a quite exhausting several days, but sure am glad to be here finally!

It is now -5C, 23F outside, with a high of 9C, 48F. Sorry, I'm trying to learn the Metric System! Can't wait until a kilometer means something to me.

Musings of an exciting year

2008-12-31T22:43:43Z

The most common phrase muttered this time of year involves how quickly the year has gone by. Working at the center of the office, my desk tends to be the congregation place for all of my coworkers. "This year has gone by so fast!" I am not sure if I can count how many times this phrase has been uttered near my desk. Every time I hear it, I just roll my eyes, thinking about how stereotypical of a conversation it is. I mean, why don't we discuss the weather while we're at it?

But I have to admit, that I've fallen prey to the same line of thought. Discussing this experience with my coworkers resulted in the moderately demeaning feeling that I was too young to really understand how fast the year flies by. Of course, I'm only 22 years old, "wait until you're my age!!"

When I think about it at length I find that it was a very long year. I've done a lot. A whole lot. More than most people do, at least. 6 countries, a complete life transition, legal battle, two semesters of being a leader in my fraternity, graduating college, finding direction in my life. How can I even start to think that this has been another humdrum year? Just because I spent every night for the past year in the same bar should not imply that my year has been in any way repetitive or boring.

Let's go back to January. I had just been appointed to the Pledge Coordinator of LAE, and I was going to be forced to figure out how to do my job well. I ran for the position because I hated the job that the people did before me. It was my goal to outshine them with a larger and more involved pledge class than ever before. At the end of my recruitment phase, I had collected over thirty pledges. Now, my pledge class ended with eleven new members. I was starting the semester with over thirty. Obviously, many of these would drop, but I just wanted to double the size of my class. We got everyone started and people were involved—going to socials, meetings, IM events. LAE was off to a great start.

I knew this semester would be taxing on me. I was taking sixteen hours, only working sixteen hours a week, had to plan my Russia and Japan trip, had to plan my fraternity's pledge retreat and the banquet. I had a lot on my plate. I was not expecting the next thing to be thrown at me.

On January 30th, I was standing on the sidelines of the soccer field for an LAE IM game. My phone rang, and I hear one of my kids voices on the other end. Howell asks me "Have you seen this letter from Melanie Callaway?" I responded in the negative, and he reads the letter to me. I was blown away that my former employer would say these things about me. This letter had strong implications that I had been having inappropriate relationships with the kids I used to take care of. This was a disgusting and outrageous lie—the kids knew it, the parents knew it, I knew it, and Melanie Callaway knew it.

Thus began my month long adventure of meeting with my boss, lawyers, my pastor, and eventually, the pastor of the church that sent out the letter. We demanded that they retract the letter and send out a new letter, publicly apologizing for their implied statements. I also demanded that there be no record of this incident in my personnel file.

This whole incident was devastating to me. I've known the woman who wrote that letter for 11 years. She went to my dad's funeral. How dare her write that letter? Politics. The staff and that afterschool program had gone down in quality significantly since I left, and it was a constant reminder to their inadequacy whenever I would come back to visit my kids. They sought to make sure I didn't come back to see the kids, and they did so in a disgusting method. I hope she remembers what she did every day of her life.

It was not until the end of February that I was finally able to put that behind me. I came out with a serious apology from the church, a letter of recommendation for my free use, the support of every parent who received that letter, and a complete loss of respect for Melanie Callaway. Regardless, I got everything I needed, and I didn't need them anymore.

February was a busy month aside from the aforementioned event. I had to plan my fraternity's pledge retreat, which took place on February 16th. We set it up on my family's property, on the outskirts of our hunting land. I had to do all the planning for it—setting up the shooting lanes, ordering food, ordering the port-o-potty, getting everything together. That was a pain in the ass, but it went off without a hitch. We had a really great time, and everyone seemed to have a great time. The event officially ended around sundown, and we all went to Applebees for dinner. Afterwards, it was time to party. We set up out tents, fetched a couple of 40s, tapped the keg, and let the drinking begin. There was streaking and making out and hooking up and passing out and vomiting—lots of vomiting. Then again, keg-stands will do that. The next morning, we all packed up, cleaned up, and headed home to Tallahassee.

In February it was time to figure out how the hell I was going to get to Russia. I contacted a travel agent, gave her all my details, and had her figure it out. She ended up getting me a great deal on my trip, so I booked it. Good, one more thing I don't have to worry about.

March ended up being a great month, mostly because of Spring Break. Kasey, Kelly and I were more excited than a June bride on satin sheets. Our vacation was going to be epic. Plus, my travel agent threw in three free tickets to Universal Studios—Park Hopper passes!! SWEET!! So we did Orlando up, then headed to Tampa to board our ship.

Highlights of our cruise are below.

· Meeting our Connecticut guys—Nate, GT, Greg, and Adam.

· Getting wasted every night

· YMCA

· Meeting Guy Harvey in Grand Caymon

· "Justin looks up to you so much, you're drunk all the time!"

· Floating trampolines suck ass

· Driving the boat while totally trashed

· Drunken old man and his daughter

· Hemorrhoids on my white robe

· Putu!!!!

· Getting made fun of at the stand up comedy show

· "You can either show me your boobies, or you can do the pee pee dance."

· Zip-lining in Roatan

All in all, it was the most fun I've ever had. Eight amazing days of ridiculous amounts of fun. We had the greatest group imaginable. All seven of us were tight knit and never tired of each other.

I came back to America begrudgingly, and got settled back into every day life. The rest of March was uneventful—frequent trips to Bullwinkles, hanging out with friends.

April too was uneventful. There was the KKG formal, where I went as Havely's date. Afterwards, we went to Bullwinkles—still in our suits and dresses. After too many drinks, I drove over to a party I knew about, and met Sarah there. We met a guy there named Chad, who I, in my wonderfully drunken stupor, renamed "Austin". One of my TAs was hosting said party, and Sarah and I stayed until it shut down around 3:30. We headed to my house, where we changed and hung out for a while. Afterwards, it was time for breakfast—she had to be at work at 7, and I had to be at a LAE event at 7. We both went to our different events, and slugged through them. I think that's the day that Sarah's bank got robbed. I spent the morning with a TPD detective, as we directed traffic for the 5K run, and I tried my best to act sober.

At the end of the semester, only one of my pledges did not get in. He threw a big stink about it, threatened to sue, and all that jazz. It was a huge pain in the ass. He sucked. Stephen Herr—that kid sucks.

LAE had its banquet on April 18th. I had arranged the whole thing, and was completely responsible for its success or failure. I was nervous about it, since I had never organized something like this, but the hotel we did it at did a great job accommodating us. It turned out great, everyone got inducted, and

April 25th was my last day at work before my Russia trip. We had a big lunch thing that day and we celebrated. After work, we all met at La Fiesta for dinner. Friends, family coworkers, everyone. It was a duel birthday party for Summer and I. I think everyone had a great time.

On May 1st Jackie drove me to Jacksonville, where I would fly to Connecticut to spend 4 days with my cruise buddies before I leave for Russia. I arrived in New York and Greg drove me to Hamden, Connecticut. We did not end up receiving our visas on time, so I spent a total of 8 days in Connecticut, until my passport finally arrived to me in Connecticut. I then bid my friend farewell and boarded a train to NYC.

In NYC, I would spend 2 nights with some guy I had never met before. The days were spent walking around sightseeing, and the evenings going to comedy clubs, getting to this random guy's house at around midnight.

Finally, Sunday May 12th, I boarded my plane to Russia, to begin the best experience of my life. See my massive 40 page travel log for details.

Highlights of Russia trip:

* Russia.
* Moscow
* Club Propaganda
* MIKE!
* Ryan doesn't live here anymore, I promise
* Clefty
* Gypsy cabs
* The Prophet, The Linguist, and the Green Beret

The largest downside to my trip was that I was forced to cancel my trip to Japan due to a death in the Helms family. However, my last week in Russia, where I was left completely on my own. There was a total disregard for my safety or wellbeing on the part of FSU. But I had a good time. I wonder if I could sue FSU for negligence. Probably not, not harm, no foul, I suppose. Thanks to their complete lack of concern for me and willingness to let me stay in the dorms at Moscow University, I got to meet Will, Andre, Daniel, and Edwardo. Those were two of the best nights of my life. Awesome guys. Awesome.

Eventually I make my way back to America, and have to get used to life. It took a long time, because I was just in love with Moscow. Absolutely in love. But eventually things settled down. The rest of Summer was uneventful—a trip to Destin with Katie Cake-face, trip to Orlando and Tampa to see Ben and Alyssa. Eventually, though, school would start back up. One last class before I graduate!!

Over the summer, we all became aquainted with a guy named Curtis. He and I became instant best friends. We began to hang out all the time. Every time we could, he and I would meet up. It was always known that if a large group went to dinner or something, that Josh and Curtis were going to be sitting next to each other. It was the first time since middle school that I had a best friend like that—who liked to do everything I liked to do, and we got along as well as we did. We had a really great relationship.

We started another semester of LAE, and I was in the same position. I did all the recruiting, but this time we were running about 49 pledges at the beginning. If I could get them all to stay, it would be incredible!!

I was only taking one class. Well, after about three weeks of one class, I decided that I had to drop it. I dreaded going to this class every day. I knew I wouldn't fail it, but it would be a true struggle to get through, and would damage my GPA. I eventually decided to move on, and jump into another class. Even though Dr. Efimov told me that I was a failure of a student, would never get anywhere in life, and was severely disappointed in me, I didn't care. I wanted to enjoy my last semester, not have any part of it that I would loathe. Now that its over, I affirm that decision.

On October 11th, LAE had its second pledge retreat at my farm. This time, we had it in the Muleshoe cow pasture. It rained most of the day. After about 20 minutes of waiting to see if the rain would stop, I decided that people were just going to have to get the hell over it. We did our activities in the rain. This time, we did not have any shooting. Still, it was a good time. We were sitting at about 34 pledges at this point. There was a large turnout, and after everyone was done with their official event, people were free to stay the night or go home. All the black people (save one) peaced out, but most of us stayed the night. We did the same as last year—got drunk, naked, danced, partied. It was great. I ended up making up with 5 girls that night! It was great fun. One of them was one of the girls Curtis was talking to. Hahaha, oops!

Football season was incredible. I had some of the best times of my life this season. There were HUGE amounts of drinking, partying, hanging out, cheering, screaming, and loving my Seminoles. We did not win every game, no, but I love my team, and I support them to the very end of every game. The rules—never miss a home game, never leave before the clock says 0:00. Those are my rules of FSU football, and I obeyed them.

The Jacksonville game was particularly memorable, since it was the first time that I had gone to an FSU game outside of Doak. I started drinking at 5pm on Friday and drank all night. I passed out drunk as hell at about 1am. I woke up at 8am, and fixed myself my three Gatorade bottles with vodka in them. I may or may not have drank them the entire way to Jacksonville, but by the time I was in Jacksonville I was even more trashed. I was apparently quite obnoxious to ride with. We got to our tailgate, and I took an nap for about an hour. When I woke up, I was ready. We scalped tickets for about two hours, and finally I got a ticket—but Summer and Travis did not. I went in and found my seats, and had a really good time, even though I was by myself. I was still totally trashed, and I ran into one of my kids. That was pretty cool, but I felt bad since I was so drunk and I hadn't seen him in a long time. After the game I met up with everyone, we went back to our hotel to drink for a while, then it was bed time. The night was filled with a blind trip to Walgreens, Travis vomiting violently, and little sleep. The next morning we had Sticky Fingers and drove home. I finally sobered up.

October 20th began hunting season, which was great fun. Curtis had found out about me making out with his little girl-thing, so this began his official hatred of me. Hunting season was a peaceful respite from dealing with the drama. On my third time in the woods, I managed to kill two hogs. Alfredo and I skinned and butchered them, and a few weeks later we ate them. They were delicious. It was awesome.

October and November consisted of lots of daily drinking, football, hunting on the weekends, and a few parties thrown in there. On November 4th, I received a phone call from a strange number, it was eleven digits. I answered it, and it was Ryan with the company in Korea I was trying to get a job with. He talked to me about different jobs and my expectations. He said he was pretty sure they can get me a job, and I would be looking at January to March in leaving. I decided to keep this a secret from most people. Only my closest friends found out. I did not even tell my mom until it was basically a sure thing.

Thanksgiving was a lot of fun. We had it at Sharon's house. Mema and Bubba skipped out, so we did our own thing. It was great fun, and I spent a lot of time with Chayton. I love that kid.

I came back the next week for finals week. I only had the one final. That Saturday, December 6th, was our fraternity's banquet. I had worked really hard to get it all set up, and I was ready to be done with the fraternity. Not that I disliked all the people in there—quite contrary, there are awesome people in there. It's just that I was tired of the shit, tired of babysitting, and ready to move on. If there were less drama, I would probably have not burned out so fast, but it happened, and that's that. The banquet went really well, even though I was COMPLETELY TRASHED. My boss, our guest speaker, said I did a really good job talking up there. I don't think he knew how drunk I was. The catering manager told the bartender not to charge me for my drinks, so four long islands later, I was fucked up. This was in addition to the bottle of wine I drank before coming. There was dancing and partying and drinking.

I woke up the next morning with a Bullwinkles stamp on my hand. I guess I went to Bullwinkles that night. I had no memory of it.

I finished my final the following week, and kept wondering what exactly was going to happen with Korea. I had my interview, and was getting ready for my graduation ceremony. December 13th I walked across the stage, shook hands with the President of FSU and my Dean. I was officially an alumnus. I was officially an alcoholic.

We all kept our caps and gowns, and went out on Monday afternoon to take pictures around campus. Alicia, her friend Travis, and I went. We ended our day going in Doak Campbell stadium. After a few pictures, some football players came out on the field. They invited us down on the field with them. Graham Gano and Zach Hobby dressed me up in Gano's jersey and pads, I held a helmet and a football. It was amazing. I stood on Bobby Bowden Field in Doak Campbell Stadium, wearing Lou Groza Award winner Graham Gano's jersey and cleats. It was one of the best moments of my life.

One week later, December 19th, I learned that I had been hired by the CUBE academy in Seoul, Korea. I would be departing in January for Korea. I was so happy it was hard to contain myself.

Christmas cames and went. It was not something I really had my head in. With graduating, and moving to Korea, I just did not have the Christmas spirit. But it went well.

Now it's New Years Eve, and I am waiting to leave work. It's been a hell of a year. So many things have happened this year that are directing my life. I've stepped on a few toes, but this year has been the best of my life. I wouldn't change anything that has happened, and I certainly do not have a single regret. I think all things happen for a reason. I am extraordinarily blessed to have this life, these friends, this family, this job I currently have, and this job I will be moving on to next year. So thank you to everyone who helped be a part of my life, and helped me get here. It's been a taxing year, but I have absolutely loved it.

Final Travel Log

2008-07-02T00:36:14Z

Friday, June 20th
So Sunday's thunderstorm wasn't very exciting. I ended up just sleeping through it. I think it just thundered a few times, then rained long enough to get the ground wet. I don't really remember what we did Sunday night, but it was probably just hanging out with the Canadians in their room.
It has also been a pretty quiet week. We had a final exams, which were in class for Russian class, and take home for culture and civilization. Every night we went and hung out with the Canadians. Monday night, Amy and I went down to the lookout with Dawny, Lena, and Corey. We got a beer, watched the fire dancer, poked around a bit, ate a crapdog, then headed back.
Tuesday was another slow day. Nothing really happened. I was trying to figure out my housing situation, since I am getting kicked out of the dorm. The program officially ended on Thursday—yesterday—and we were allowed to stay in the dorms until Saturday. If we had spoken to the university before we came, like Brian and Lindsay did, we could arrange a room to stay longer in the dorms. I, however, am supposed to be in Japan right now, but since that trip got canceled, I had to figure out a new place to stay, and quick. We were trying to see if there were any dorm rooms available for me to move into, but it ended up that it couldn't be done. So I've spent this week trying to figure out where I'm going to stay. For the sake of my mom's sanity, I kept this little secret between the people here, no need for my States friends and family to know. Well, except Haley, she knows. Anyway, it's all figured out now, so I'm happy.
Tuesday night I called my friend Aleksey, the student, and he came to my room. We hung out for a while, and I got him to translate something for us. When we were in St. Petersburg, Kim stole a bag from the bar that contained a jacket and a bunch of pieces of paper. I needed to know what exactly these papers were, since there were about 40 or 45 of them. Amy had joined us as we walked through the uncomfortable atmosphere of the common room with the assholes. Aleksey read the papers, and gave a good laugh. These papers were the cheat notes for someone. The jacket that was in the bag had two makeshift pockets on the inside of it, which is where the papers were. Someone was preparing for their final examination, which in Russia are HUGE deals for graduating seniors. These tests are much like our graduate exams for students pursuing their MA. They are given a list of about 40 to 45 topics, and they have to be able to answer whichever one question they are asked. So, in short, we totally fucked over some person in St. Petersburg!! Aleksey and I headed up to his room and got a he gave me the address of a club he likes—The Real McCoy, plus an address where UPS and FedEx were located, for the people on my program who needed to ship stuff home.
Wednesday was slow as well, just class, and in the afternoon I slept a bunch. In class we had a little test, which we were totally not expecting. It wasn't too hard, so no big deal. Wednesday night we hung out in the Canadians' room, drank a little, and just had a lot of laughs. The best part of Wednesday, by far, was Aida.
Walking from the main building to Sector Ж at around 8pm, I see this girl giving this guy a lap dance on the little sitting area outside of our sector. I get almost to the door, and I hear a voice yell
«Hello! Are you American?»
«Yeah.»
«Come here and sit with me!!»
Andy, Kim, and I decide what the hell?, and so we joined her. Her name was Aida, an 18 year old student from Kazakhstan, and this was her friend, Vova, from the Caucuses. The two of them had gotten up at 3:30 and drank a bottle of vodka, and she repeatedly told us how drunk she was. She was one of the cheeriest drunks I have ever met. We sat there for about an hour and a half, just listening to her talk, and we all just laughed and joked the whole time. Highlights of the conversation were
«I am so drunk!»
«No, you're not drunk, you're happy!»
«I am so happy!!»

«My boyfriend is going to be so mad at me!»
«Why?»
«Because I am so drunk! I mean, I am so happy!»
The only bad part was when the assholes all came up, and Aida stopped them. Aida was collecting American friends this day, and so she talked to them for a minute, stole 2 cigarettes off of James, and after about 10 minutes they went on inside. Aida wanted to dance, and we didn't have any music for her, so she kept using her phone, which had a song, that she kept replaying so she could dance to it. The fun part was how delightful she was, she put the music right into all of us, and we all had a little dancing going on. Eventually, we convinced Aida to join us up in the Canadians' room. Vova said he would wait for Aida's boyfriend to arrive, and until then, she would go with us.
When walking up to the Охрана, we asked Aida if she had her пропуск, and said no. We figured, since she was fluent in Russian, she could get past the guards. We all pulled out our IDs, and Aida walked right up the guard, looked at him, gave a big, corny shrug, and she headed, right past him. He looked shocked, and started to follow her, then just decided fuck it and we went on in. Laughing our asses off, we asked how she did it, and she was like «I don't know!»
We drank in the room for a while, and Aida's boyfriend called her, so she had to go see him. She left, and after about a minute we see her RUN past our room down the hall, so we go to follow her and make sure she's ok. She runs down the stairs, and Andy goes to follow her. In the stairs, he yells «AIDA!» She responds, and immediately the guard starts yelling something at Andy and running up the stairs. We haul ass back to our room, shut the door, and hide for a minute. Sharing another good laugh, we hung out for a while, and Aida came back to join us about an hour later. She said she put her boyfriend to bed, and he sleeps now. We hung out for a while longer, and it was pushing 1am by this point, so we parted ways for the night, after agreeing that we would check out The Real McCoy the following night.
Our last day of classes was Thursday, and we only had our morning class. At noon, we quickly were off to continue a Russian tradition—students must buy their teachers flowers at the end of the class. Aida told me that Киевская was the best place to buy flowers, and despite Tristan's ridiculous whining, we went, and for damn sure, it was the place to buy them. There were the very pushy salesmen, homeless women, everyone selling flowers of all kinds and prices. We picked out what we wanted, and went back to the university. Everyone got dressed for our banquet, and we gathered. Brian and I had to practice our poems a few times on the way. We got there, and in this tiny little room we stuffed about 30 people. They served us a pretty nice lunch, several bottles of wine, ice cream. Brian and I recited our poems, and it was toast time. We all toasted to everything: Nina Aleksandrevna, the students, our teachers, the university, the program directors, everything. After the toasts, we gave the teachers their flowers, and parted ways.
In the afternoon, Brian and I went to the train station. It was about 8 that we got to the train station, and we had quite a time trying to figure out where to buy our tickets for St. Petersburg. We asked around, and we figured out what line we wanted to be in. We stood in line for about an hour, and then realized that we couldn't do this without our passports, and also that the window was going to close before we got to the front of the line. So we abandoned, and decided to get up at around noon the next day and try again. We headed back, but not before I purchased a little suitcase to be a better carry-on that my other one, and a man-purse. That's right, I gave into the European style and bought a man-purse—mostly because I wanted to carry my camera around St. Petersburg, and it's too big to fit in my pocket. I don't care how Euro-Trash I look, I like it.
That evening, we had all planned to go to the Candians' room, pregame, then go to The Real McCoy. We did many shots of vodka, and had gathered about 20 people to go check it out. In the end, the 20 dwindled down to Andy, Amy, and I. We ended up missing the Metro, because we were waiting on Kim and Ryan. They ended up ditching us completely, not telling us anything. In an attempt to save the night, we ended up just going to Propaganda for my last night on the town with the Americans. Like I said, we got to the metro right after it closed, so we had to take a gypsy taxi. I waved my arm in the street and got a car to stop for us. I told the guy where I wanted to go, and we negotiated 400 rubles for him to take us. We agreed, and all hopped in his car. We got to Propaganda, and it was pretty cool. It was full of people, and we were excited to get right through face control. We get our drinks and managed to find a table. Well, we were all a little upset with everyone, and the mood just wasn't good for going out. We only ended up staying about 2 hours, then decided to just grab another gypsy taxi and head back. Andy was more sober than I was, and got the guy to 300 rubles to get us back to the university. We got home around 4:30, and went to bed.
Friday would be my last day in the dorm. I had to pack up all of my stuff, pack my clothes, and check out of my room. It was really sad. As shitty as the Russian dorm was, it was my home, and it meant the beginning of the last leg of my Russian journey. It took about an hour and a half to get everything together, and I stored my stuff in Brian's room. Around 4 we finally got to the train station, equipped with our passports, Russian-English dictionary, and a little wariness about making the transaction. We stood in line for two hours, and managed to get to the front of the line just in time for the lady to go on break. When she finally came back, we were moderately successful getting what we wanted. The lady behind us spoke a little English, and she helped out some, but the most helpful lady was this elderly lady who spoke no English, but was able to talk to us in Russian so that we could understand. 6500 rubles later, Brian and I had our train tickets to and from St. Petersburg.
We returned to the university, and got the last of our things together. We had dinner with Andy, Amy, Dan, and Jeff, and we had a good laugh about headbutting Amanda again. I don't care that she'll never forgive me, I still think it is funny as hell. Who gets headbutted? Honestly!
We had a farewells to everyone on our trip, the people going to Baikal, and Brian and I left around 9:30 to catch our 11:20 train.
Upon arriving at the train station, we boarded and got to our cabin. It was exactly what we wanted—four beds and a private door. These three Russians were in there, young people with a little bit of English, and they were pretty nice. Unfortunately, they had a mistake on their tickets, and had to leave. Instead of them, we had a young lady, her 4 or 5 year old son, and his grandmother in our cabin. It was actually a lot of fun. He was pretty cute, and he spoke a simplified Russian, so we could understand everything he was saying. Brian and I played cards for a while, and decided to go ahead and go to bed instead of keeping them up. During the 9 hour train ride, I slept about an hour and a half. It was truly miserable. I had nothing to read, nothing to do, no where to go, nothing to drink but water, no food. I laid there staring at the ceiling, and occasionally out the window, for about 6 hours. By the end of it, I basically wanted to kill myself. Around 8am, the kid woke up, and for some reason, I was finally able to doze off.
Nothing will wake you up like a Russian man grabbing your ankle and demanding something from you. I was so confused, but I perked right up and figured out what he wanted. We stripped our beds and waited to disembark.
We got off the train, and immediately realized that we were not at the right train station. Last time, we arrived at Московский Вокзал, which was just down the street from the hostel we were staying in. This time, we were somewhere completely different, in what seemed like an industrial section of town, rather than Невский Проспект. We had to get a taxi to take us to the right place, which ended up costing us 900 rubles. We arrived at the hostel, and met Olga, Brian's friend, who was one of the people in charge of the hostel. Completely exhausted, we passed out for a couple of hours. It was amazing. It was the second bed in Russia I've been in that was actually long enough for me. I also had an excessive amount of pillows. What else could you ask for?
Brian and I wandered around for a bit, got dinner, went around the city, and returned to the hostel. We took another nap, and got ready to go out to Жопа Бар. It was Brian and I, Olga, Marshall from New York, Kent from Malaysia, Chris and his girlfriend from California, Nikki and her friend from New Zealand, Bernard from Austria, Alex from Manchester, and Katya from St. Petersburg. Before we could leave, we had to watch Russia defeat the Netherlands in soccer. We were all excited, and the streets were wild with people celebrating. We headed out, yelling and cheering all down the street. I gave three guys high fives as they drove by in a car. We got to the bar, and everyone got their drinks. My stomach was bothering me, so I just got a vodka tonic, which I nursed all night. I didn't want to dance or anything, so I just sat around, talked to Kent, and occasionally the soft-core porn playing on the projector screen would catch my attention. Around 3 or 4, Kent, the New Zealand girls, and I headed back to the hostel. I crashed pretty hard, very fast.
I woke up around 1 the following afternoon, and chilled out for a while until Brian got up. He and I walked around for a while, up and down Невский. Olga then took us on a little tour of the artistic region of the city, which was pretty damn sketchy. One room in this building was filled with about 12 people openly smoking weed. Another was a movie theater. We sat down in a café and had tea and beer. We went to Теремок, the blini place, and had awesome borscht and a blini.
After dinner we headed back to the hostel. We met up with Tanya, Olga's sister. The four of us ended up going to a bar to meet up with Alex. It was pretty fun, but super packed. I wasn't drunk enough to dance, so we just sat around with our beers. We then went to a second club, which was too crowded to merit staying. We went to the third bar, which was next door to the other two. This one was very quiet, with only about 10 people in it. I was telling Olga we needed to get Brian drunk, because he's so funny when he's smashed. Tanya bought us a round of sambuca shots. This was my first time doing a sambuca shot. The way it works is they put three coffee beans in a glass, and put about 2 ounces of sambuca in with the beans. They then light the sambuca on fire, and pour it into another glass. Immediately, they cover the glass with a coaster, and they hold the glass to you while you breathe in the fumes. The sambuca is returned to the original glass, and you drink the shot. Afterwards, the glass is turned upside down on the table, they give you a straw, and you breathe in the fumes again. It gives you such a great boost of energy, it's awesome. I was pretty impressed by the whole thing.
We left the bar moderately early, waved a gypsy taxi down, and we headed back to the hostel.
I woke up the next morning around eleven, and decided I wanted to go to St. Isaac's Cathedral. This massive church has a top deck that you can go out on, and see the whole city. I hopped on the metro and went down to the church. I got in the line to go up, and saw the prices being 150 rubles to go up, plus 30 to take pictures. If you're a student, it's only 100 rubles. I heard the people in front of me, 4 college age students, were speaking American, so I made some quick friends. They were from Chicago, and were spending a week in St. Petersburg. We went up the 288 steps to the top and walked around. I took a lot of pictures, especially since I had already been to pretty much everything in the city. I got to see everything from afar. It was cool. St. Petersburg isn't a tall city—few buildings are more than 3 stories. My new friends and I descended and went to the little park across the square to get some souvenirs. I finally found what I wanted to buy Chayton—a Cheburashka Doll. He's got a bunch of little phrases he says. I'm proud of it.
I had a bottle of water with the Chicago kids, and then left them to join Brian at the little souvenir market. I didn't like the market—way overpriced. Even more expensive than Moscow. I didn't buy anything from them, the bastards! Brian and I walked around a little bit, went to a bookstore, and eventually headed back to the hostel.
We started playing rummy, teaching Kent how to play it. He caught on pretty well. Then we started playing Monopoly, since Olga had just learned how to play it, and really likes it. We played until around 12:45, at which point Brian and I had to head to the train station. We bid everyone farewell, and Olga walked us to the station. She saw us off, and we boarded the train. This time Brian and I were with this middle aged couple. We were extremely uncomfortable. We asked if we could have one side, and them the other, so that we could safely store our stuff under the bottom bed, but they refused. We had to sleep on the top beds, with both of us stiffly hanging onto our passports and wallets. Brian had about 3 ounces of vodka left in his bag, so I took that away from him. After drinking it, I went on to sleep, and was out for the whole night, until we arrived in Moscow.
Tuesday morning, June 24th, We got off the train, went to the metro, and I got off at Библиотека имени Ленина to switch to Арбатъская, where my hostel is. I eventually found my hostel, and checked in. I wish I had taken pictures, because the place was beautiful. It was by far the nicest place I had been in Russia. Especially the bathroom. It was all so nice. When I was there, there really weren't many people there. But I didn't really care, I knew plenty of people in the city, so it wasn't a problem for me. I headed to do the thing I needed to the most--I had to go see the body of Vladimir Lenin.
Lenin's mausoleum is a prominent building in Red Square, but I had never had the opportunity to see his body. It is only open from 10am until 1pm, Tuesday through Thursday, and on the weekends. It was hard for us to get the opportunity to see it, but I was determined to see his body before I left Russia. So as soon as I checked into my hostel in Moscow, I ran down. It was already noon, so I was thinking there was minimal chance of getting in, since the line was exceptionally long. Walking toward the line, this lady stopped me and asked "Excuse me, do you speak English?"
"yeah, English and Russian"
"Do you want to see Lenin? I can get you in without waiting in line. You will not get in if you get in line now."
"Ok, how much" -me
"6 Euros" -lady
"In rubles. I don't do euros or dollars."
"400 rubles" -lady
"No. Too much. I'm a student."
"Ok, 300 rubles."
"Done."
So she walks me away from the line, we do the money exchange, then she walks me to the front of the line, pushes me in front of everyone, and she walks me past the guard. I figured out that she bribes the guard with a cut of her profits to skip people past the line. Anyway, I went in, checked my camera with security, and went into the mausoleum.
Entering the building was terrifying. I was walking ahead of the next person behind me, so I walked into the building, and before me stood three royal guards, standing at perfect attention. As I approached, one gives a small hand gesture to proceed to the left. I turned and headed down an extremely dark stairway. I could barely see the black marble stairs, but I could clearly see the three Royal Guards at the bottom of this stairway. I turned to the right, and headed down another stairway, which also had three perfectly still Royal Guards lit at the bottom of the dark room. I turned to the right, and entered the room where Lenin's body lay. The Russians had done a great job of making this the kind of place where you do not mess around. I knew the rules-no talking, you must keep walking, no hats, NO PICTURES, no phones, nothing. It is such a reverent atmosphere. There are four guards in this room making sure no bullshit occurs. The other guy in the room got yelled at for standing still. I walked very slowly, looking closely at his body. He looks fake. For a man who died in 1924, he looks pretty good. But he looks very fake--all wax. They use wax to preserve his appearance. His left hand lay flat on his lap, while his right is curved into a first. This is because one of his fingers fell off a few years, and they had to make a fake one out of wax. They hide this by having it in a fist. I wanted to find out where I could tell he was seriously decaying, and if you look at the back of his head, against the pillow, his skin is all green and black. Pretty gross! So I left, passed the graves of many soviet leaders, including Stalin, whose grave is literally covered with flowers.
I headed back to the University to grab some lunch, and then tried to figure out how to get my suitcase out of Brian's room. Since Dawny would be going to the airport on Thursday morning in the same taxi as I would be, she said she would hold my big suitcase, so I didn't have to tote it down to the hostel across town. I went and talked to the дeжёрная, where I got all the paperwork I needed to move my suitcase out of the dorm. They are very strict about who moves stuff when. I was hoping it was going to be Clefty, my adorable little guard who looks like he's about 13 years old, cleft lip, and takes his job so seriously it's awesome. Unfortunately, it was another guy, but I knew this one wasn't bad. I passed on through, and stored my stuff in Dawny's room. We hung out for a while, and
I wnet and joined my friend, Dmitri, to go see The Incredible Hulk.....in Russian! It was pretty damn cool. I understood the movie relatively well. Dmitri said to me afterwards: "There was not a lot of dialogue, so I think you could understand most of it." I agreed.
So Dmitri headed up to his room, and it was getting late, so I headed back to the hostel. I was hoping to meet some of my roommates who wanted to go out.
I got to the hostel, and met Will, a New Yorker, who was having a bunch of trouble with his train ticket to Irkutsk. Apparently the people he paid to get the ticket didn't get it, so he was pretty pissed. It was pretty late, and a little too late to do anything about it, but he was very frustrated. I also met these three guys from Brazil, Andre, Daniel, and Eduardo. They wanted to go around, as they had just got into town. They liked that I spoke Russian, since they didn't know a word. We left, and headed toward Red Square. They got some pictures, walked around, I gave them history lessons, and then we headed toward Propaganda. We headed down to Propaganda, and walked toward these five drunk Russian guys. I could smell trouble, and as we passed, one started talking shit to one of the Brazilians. The Russian was getting all in his face, and I moved in between them and told the Russians that my friend doesn't speak any Russian, and the guy then tried to pick a fight with me. I played dumber than I am, and the guy's friends stepped in a pulled him away. We got away from them and went to the door.
Well, it turned out that Propaganda wasn't setting up the club tonight, and was just going to be a bar/restaurant. So we left and went to find another bar. I asked a young guy on the street where a good place was, and he offered to walk us there. We were taken to a place called "Che", named after Che Guevara. Well, face control wouldn't let us in, and so we headed off to find something else. Feeling disheartened, we wound up at this VERY nice little restaurant. It was expensive as hell, but we were desperate, so we stayed. I taught them to drink like Russians, doing the natural Russian toasts first, then any toast you desire. We also smoked a hookah, delicious mint. I spent WAY more money than we needed to, but it was fun, and I'm on vacation, so I was okay with it. We headed to get some food, and went to McDonald's. After eating, we went back to the hostel and crashed around 5:30.
I woke up at 9:30 since I had plans to go to the market one last time with Dawny and Marty. I knew the Brazilians were interested in going to the market and getting some souvenirs, so I wrote out directions for them to get there. I left, and we had lunch at the university. It would be my last lunch there. So sad.
I met up with the ladies, and we headed toward the market. I knew I still had to buy something for my brother, I needed my Moscow flag, a Russia flag for Amy, and some malachite. We spent a couple of hours there, and I ran into my Brazillians and Will there--they were very happy with my directions. I told them I would meet up with them later at the hostel. We finished at the market, and then headed down to Old Arbat, since I hadn't been there yet. Old Arbat is a very historical street, which used to be an old market street. We shopped there, and I was able to buy my flag there. I also picked up a small Russian flag. Dawny picked up a U2 matroshka. From there, we parted ways, and I headed back to my hostel. Dawny and Marty went home to the university, and I bade them farewell for the evening, until we meet again at 7am the next morning for our taxi to the airport.
I went back to the hostel, and met up with the Brazilians, Will, and two new girls, I think from Canada. I am relatively sure they were waiting on me to arrive, to take them out. As soon as I was there, we killed the second bottle of vodka we had purchased the night before, then talked about where we wanted to go. I wanted to go to The Real McCoy, the American 1920s prohibition themed Speakeasy. The girls wanted to go somewhere more Russian, so we decided to try and get into "Che" again. We went, and the girls were kinda bitchy most of the way. I wasn't too crazy about them. When we got to the bar, the bouncer did the same thing he did the previous night--said they were reservation only. The bitchy girls were ready to go home, and so they decided to walk back. I wasn't going to send them into a gypsy taxi by themselves, so we, being the gentlemanly types we are, told them we would walk them back, then head to another club. Well, our livers got the best of us, and they went off alone, and we headed toward the next club--one not too far away that allowed foreigners in for free. We walk a good ways, probably 20 to 30 minutes. We head down a deserted and sketchy street. I guess the Brazilians are from a nice town, because they weren't too comfortable with the quiet, dark street. I've been in Moscow long enough to know that tends to be where the good clubs are. So we get there, and they are closed. Finally, the guys agree to try The Real McCoy. They ask how far it is, and I know it is a LONG walk. I didn't know exactly how far, but I knew it would be quite a long way. I wave a taxi down, and he prices us 300 rubles, but he won't take all five of us, only four. I tell him no, and my friends were wary about a gypsy taxi. They didn't think it would be safe at all. They were discussing it in Portuguese, and finally Eduardo looks at me and asks "Would you get in a car with some guy right now?" I told him as long as one other person gets in there with me, "definitely." That sold the deal for them, and the third car I talked to agreed to let all 5 of us squeeze in for 400 rubles. Sounded good to us, and we were on our way. It ended up taking about 10 to 15 minutes to drive there, which would have SUCKED on foot. It was clear across the city.
We arrive at the bar, and paid the guy off, and we went inside. It wasn't a club, like I was expecting, but rather a totally laid back bar. I walked in and saw two Canadians I knew--Lisa and Charles. We joined them, and started pounding the vodka and beer. It wasn't the good vodka we like, but rather some shitty vodka, so the shots were a little rough. Charles was SUPER wasted by the time we got there, and so that was thoroughly entertaining. Around 4:00, they ended up leaving for the university, and it was just the five of us. We talked and joked around, promising to all see each other again, reunite some time, maybe in Brazil. 5:15 came around, and it was time for the metro to open, and time for Josh to hurry his ass up.
My situation--I had to go back to the hostel, grab my suitcase, and get back on the metro and to the university by 7am to catch my taxi to the airport. Otherwise, I was going to have to find a way of getting there, and pay for it myself.
Well, I was very drunk. I don't remember the metro ride at all.
What I do remember is this: on the escalator down to the train, Eduardo decided to slide down the metal part next to the handrail. As he approached the bottom, he fell off, banged himself up, and busted his head a little bit. He was bleeding from the head a little bit, and I tried to get down to him as quick as possible--by sliding down the handrail. Instead of going down feet first, like Eduardo, I went down sideways, so I could hold on to the rubber handrail and monitor my speed. On the way down, I kept bashing my shoulder on things sticking out of the wall. So we take the train and get to the metro station. Well, I guess I'm not the drunk tour guide I thought I was, because we came out at the wrong station. I knew where we were, but it wasn't close to where we needed to be, and it was already after 6. Eduardo and Daniel went to pee, and I talked to the taxi driver about how much it would cost to run us to the hostel, and then me to the university. He wanted WAY too much money, so I told him no. Meanwhile, Andre and trying to tell me to go on, take a cab, they'll be fine, but I just couldn't leave them like that with no idea how to get home. Finally, we agreed that I would take bleeding Eduardo and Daniel back to the hostel with me in a gypsy, and Andre and Will would have to try and get home on the metro. I wished them the best of luck, and waved a car down. The guy offered 500 rubles for the whole ride--to go the hostel, wait for me to grab my suitcase, then take me to the university. We agreed, and the three of us jumped in and hauled ass to the hostel. We arrive at about 6:45am. I'm getting nervous, and I RUN upstairs to get my stuff. I grab everything I can coherently see, then rush to back to the car. He's still there, and we jump in and go. We talk the whole way, all in Russian, and he is really nice. He felt bad that my friend was hurt, and he knew I had only about 10 minutes to do a 15 minute drive.
Well, the best gypsy cab driver ever got me to the university at 7:01, and I see my friends out front waiting for me. I paid the taxi driver twice what he asked since he saved my ass, and he tried to refuse it, but I forced him to take it. I grab my big suitcase, and we get in the car. I'm so drunk, the ride seemed like about 10 minutes, but was apparently an hour and a half. Dawny said I talked the ENTIRE way, and I had to apologize for that. We got to the airport, and just kinda chilled out for a while. I used this opportunity to store the rest of my souvenirs, and we hung out until Marty had to leave for her flight. We all said bye, and she left. It was just Dawny and I. We grabbed a bite to eat, and waited until it was my time to go. I was called, and we said a quick goodbye, though we were quite sure we'd see each other on the other side of customs---waiting for the actual plane. So I go and face the customs agents, have no problems checking into my flight, and get in line for Passport Control. Dawny comes in a few minutes after me, and I let her skip into my line and stand with me. As soon as she does, I look into the diplomat line. I then saw someone I had totally forgotten about--the 35 year old lady I hooked up with at Karma Bar during my second week in Moscow. I turned immediately away and told Dawny I was NOT turning around! She laughed, we joked about that for a while, then we both passed through security with no problems. We hung around the airport until it was time to pass through security, then into the plane. We both went through, and I could tell I was still a little drunk, but definitely very tired. On the other side, it was time for Dawny and I to say farewell, and we gave our goodbyes, and I boarded the plane.
On the plane, I agreed to change my seat twice so some girls could sit with their friends. I ended up with a window seat next to a young Russian girl, so it was fine. I passed out before the plane left the gate, and woke up at some point during the flight. The flight was, for the most part, fine. I was very tired, slept a few times, woke up for a while, wrote a little of this, slept again, watched some movie, slept some more, and eventually arrived in JFK.
I experienced a strange feeling when I was landing. I had such a feeling of utter contempt for America. I looked out my window, and all I could think of was how much American bullshit I was going to have to deal with--bad drivers, rude selfish people, fat people, laziness, self-centered populace. Everything. I just didn't want to be there at all. It was the most unpatriotic I had ever felt. It was very strange. Never had I felt that before. Sure, I loved Russia, truly loved Russia, but I didn't realize how much until I got back to America.
JFK was JFK. We had to park in a remote location, so we had to take a shuttle to the terminal. Passport control was a breeze, and I grabbed my bag and went to the JetBlue terminal. Well, I was 2 hours too early to check my bag, so I went upstairs and went to the bar. They were playing the Russia Spain futbol game, so I ordered a Bud Light and watched it. Of course, as is my luck, my card was declined, but the French guy next to me was nice enough to pay for it. I watched Russia get its ass handed to them, then went to check in. Afterwards, I went to the JetBlue gate area, found that my card worked in an ATM, grabbed dinner, tried to get online, and fucked around for about 4 hours. The burger I got was delicious, and so was the milkshake, even if it was 13 bucks. What really threw me off was the sales tax. That was mind boggling. I had forgotten all about it.
So board my plane at 9pm, and we had to wait for like 30 minutes for our co-pilot to arrive, then we were off. This consisted of a crying baby in front of me, and a little bastard behind me kicking me chair. It was so bad I had to move over a chair eventually. Luckily, I had all three of my seats to myself. I slept a little on the plane, and waited and waited to get to Jacksonville.
I arrived right on time, grabbed my bags, and about 5 minutes later heard "JOSHIE!" Immediately recognizing Kasey's voice, I was welcomed back by Kasey, Kelly, and Layne. We hopped in the car and Kelly drove us back. I told stories, they updated me on thiings I've missed, and we chatted until we finally got home at 3am. I immediately crashed.

Thus ended my travels. This experience was priceless, and I acquired more from this journey than I had ever done before. I can't wait for the opportunity to arise in which I can return to Russia. I am forever in debt to the people who got me this opportunity. It was, in a word, incredible. Best experience of my life.

Travel Log 11

2008-06-15T17:33:41Z

Sunday, June 15, 2008
Friday’s trip to Tolsoy’s estate absolutely wore us out. We got back to the university about 11:30. Everyone was completely worn out, since it was nearly impossible to sleep on that terrible bus ride. Andy, Kim, Amy, and I ended up calling Mike from Titusville, who had been SMS-ing me the way home, wanting to hang out. When we got home, I called him and told him to come on over. He joined us in our sector, and we hung out in my room for a while. Amy was falling asleep all over herself, so about 1am everyone left. I went right to sleep, and had one of the best night’s sleeps I’ve had in Russia.
Saturday, I woke up at 8:15 to go to the market. Because girls are slow, we didn’t end up leaving until about 9:15. We arrived just after 10, and I had to meet with a certain vendor, Ivan, before he sold what I ordered. Ivan is overpriced, but he’s probably the best salesman I’ve ever met. I would buy anything from this guy if he told me to buy it. He is in his early 20s, has a great sense of humor, and knows his shit. I would tell what I bought, but it would ruin the surprise for the people I bought them for. He recognized me immediately, and pulled out my order. I was really happy with them, so I took them and we wandered around the market for the next 5 hours. I bought all the gifts for people I needed to buy. If I go back next weekend, which I probably will, it is shopping for me time! Amy got something pretty cool. She found a Baritone, which is what she plays in the Marching Chiefs. I talked the guy down from 1500 rubles to 1300, and she took it. That girl is in love with it, but will have fun getting it home! I think she’s going to find the UPS place and ship it. I found one thing I had to buy. It was a book from the 1970s of bunch of Disney stories translated into Russian—Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Snow White, etc. I got my reading material for the ride home!
We left around 3:00 and went to Ёлки Палки, this awesome restaurant with excellent prices. Last time there I ate the best ribs I have ever eaten. Yes, better than Sticky Fingers. They're amazing. This time, I wasn't very hungry since I ate this thing at the market, so I got something a lot cheaper. It wasn't good at all. It tasted like bland ground beef. The potatos were good, though. After that, we, in utter exhaustion, stumbled back to the dorm. It's about a 20 minute walk from the Metro station Университет to the dorm, and as tired as we all were, it was a rough walk. I had to do laundry, or else I was freeballing it the next day, so I grabbed my clothes and computer, went down to the internet café downstairs after dropping off my clothes, and got online for a while. When my laundry was done, I packed it all up, and went to my room, where I crashed.
I slept from 6:30 until 9:30. It was, without a doubt, the best nap I have ever taken. I woke up completely refreshed, and ready for some club action!!
We went up to Mike and Ryan's room in Sector B (pronounced like V) for a while for some pregaming. There were a bunch of Canadians in there, and we had a great time. We left about 11:30 for Propganda. We really like that club, as you may can tell! It's like my Bullwinkles! Cheap drinks, fun people, good dancing, hot girls, and Mike was enjoying the boys too!
We got there, and we had 4 guys and only 2 girls. We devised a plan—this was a gay friendly bar. So Mike and I went in together, and the bouncers just let us right through. No problems at all. We told them we were together, and walked right in. The other 4 had gone to McDonalds, and when they got there, they had a little trouble with Face Control. Mike talked to the bouncer for a minute, while I stood outside watching. Eventually they made it in, and off we went. I decided I didn't want to spend a bunch of money, so I was drinking vodka tonics nice and slow. We talked to these two girls who didn't really speak English. Well, Ryan was talking to them, and he needed my help a few times. They were pretty fun, and wanted to go to another club. I was up for it, and Ryan was too, but Amy and Andy said Ryan was way too drunk to leave. He was pretty fucked up. So we told the girls we would leave in an hour, depending on what state Ryan was in. Since we had so many people, I had to sit on the end of the booth of the next table over. Eventually, I ended up talking to Aleksei and his girlfriend……never caught her name, but she was GORGEOUS. We took a few pictures with them. Aleksei's friend was with him, who is training to be the Arm Wrestling Champion of Russia. He was really nice too, but spent the whole night making out with one of the girls I was supposed to go to another club with—the ugly one, so it was ok.
Aleksei bought me and him shots, and we hung out for a long time. My friends and I had decided, just once, we wanted to shut down a club. That meant we were there until 6:00. I danced with Aleksei's girlfriend for a while, and we all talked and joked around until the club eventually closed. Just like America, they just kill the music and turn all the lights on.
We left, and headed toward McDonald's. We love us some McDonald's breakfast! Well, McDonald's was closed, so we stopped at this little diner. I only bought tea, since it was pretty expensive there. One of the girls, the Canadian chick, was passing out, so Andy, Amy, and whoever else was left headed home, with the exception of Mike and I. I drank my tea and we talked to these two girls who were at our club for a while. Most of the conversation was in Russian, with a little English in there. They left, and Mike and I followed after a couple of minutes.
We decided we wanted McDonald's, damn it, so we got off at a Metro station where we knew there was one. It was delicious.
I got back to my dorm at 9:15 this morning, and saw the douchebags in the lobby. They were gathering for class (on Sunday, that sucks). I got to my room and passed out. I woke up at 1:30, grabbed lunch with Jeff, and talked to him for a while.
Now it is about to storm, which I'm pretty excited about. I haven't seen a Russian thunderstorm before, so hopefully it is going to be cool!

Travel log 10

2008-06-14T13:30:51Z

Friday, June 13, 2008
Wedneday's trip to the gay club, Propaganda, ended up being a lot of fun. It wasn't technically a gay club, just a gay friendly bar. Russia isn't the most tolerant nation in that respect, but certain clubs are fine with it. So we got ready went to out to the club. It took a litte bit of time for us to get there, but we got there about 11ish. We grabbed a table and some vodka shots. I went with Jenn, Kim, Amy L, Andy, and Mark. We met up with the douchebags from Pennsyvania from our sector, Kelsey, and Lindsey.
I guess I haven't really talked about the douchebags. They are from several schools in and around Pennsylvania. I only know the names of a few, and I only like one of them. His name is Chris, and he's pretty cool. The others just have an air about them, that just reeks of douchebaggery.
So we met them there, but since we aren't fans of the douche, we just went off on our own. We grabbed a table and started hitting the vodka shots. I did a few, got a long island, and had every intention of being inebriated by 1am. About 12:45 I called the office with an international drunk dial, and got to speak to Summer and Niffer. It was a pretty expensive phone call, so it wasn't too long. Afterwards, I drunk dialed my mom, and I just remembered telling her «I'm in Russia and I'm drunk! In a gay bar!» I remember her laughing a lot. It was pretty sweet.
I kept ordering a vodka tonic and a second shot of vodka all night. I hung out with Jenn, Andy, Kim, and Amy most of the night. I met this Russian couple who were pretty cool. The guy wasn't drinking, but his girlfriend was, so Andy named him Mr. Sober. Mr. Sober, drunk girlfriend, and I talked for a while. He spoke excellent English, and she spoke some, so the discussion was switching between the two languages. It was pretty fun. At one point, while Mr. Sober was down at the bar and it was just Drunk Girlfriend and I, Andy came up to give me a lapdance, and I proceeded to try to throw him down the stairs.
As the night wore on, people from our group were filtering out and getting taxis home. I stayed the whole night through, made some conversation with some random people, and ended up leaving with Amy, the douchebags, and Kelsey. We stumbled to the metro, and someone had the brilliant idea—let's go to Red Square and get McDonald's breakfast!
I don't remember much of the metro ride, but I know I slept on Amy. We got to McDonalds, and had some of the best breakfast food I've ever had. Amy got a sweet picture of me sleeping on the sidewalk. We ate our delicious food, then headed back to the metro. After sleeping some more metro ride away, I decided I wanted more food from the street vendor. The douchebags left Amy and I at the stand. Jerks. I was pretty conscious by this point, but since I was as tired as I was, the stumbling was extremely difficult and probably hilarious. 7:30am was a delightful bedtime!

Thursday was a holiday! No class! The holiday was originally called «Independence Day», but then the Russians realized that they weren't really independent from anything. So they changed the name to my preferred title of the day: Day of the Adoption of the Sovereignty of the Russian Federation (I will be calling it DASRF). It was later shorted to Russia Day, or День Россия.
I woke up at 12:45 and joined everyone in the Столовная. After lunch, people wanted to go to sleep, but I convinced Amy, Andy, and Kim to go to Red Square. There was supposed to be a Tatu concert, so they agreed to go. We went to the Square, and there were so many people there. Red Square itself was closed off, and the 120000 militsia were standing around guarding it. Everyone was just chilling out, laying out all over the grass, couples making out, children chasing pidgeons, and just generally enjoying DASRF. We found a spot, and since we were all exhausted, spent about 2 hours laying in the grass. Amy threw a rock and hit me in the head. Three Russians were listening to music on their computer, so we were entertained. Eventually, we decided to head back and get some rest before going out again. Propoganda would again be our destination on this fine DASRF.
Back at the dorm, I slept a very hard nap, which only lasted about two hours. I had really hoped to sleep all day, and waking up at 12:45 was rough. I got up and we all had a shot of vodka before going out. We—Andy, Kim, Amy, Mark, and I—hopped on the metro and headed toward Propaganda. On board, about half the car away from us, was an EXTREMELY drunk man in his 40s or 50s. His wife was trying her best to control him but it was no use. He was harassing the guy next to him, a guy about my age who was with his girlfriend. The wife kept trying to pull Drunky off of the young guy, and Drunky knocked her hand away. We were freaked out, trying not to stare, but we wanted to know what was happening. The metro slowed down for a station, and the young guy and his lady got up and went to the door to get off. Drunky got up, followed them to the door, and pulled out a pocketknife. Safe to say, we were officially scared at this point. It was time to switch to another train, and get away from this man. The door opens, and the young guy slipped out and got off. We ran to the next car back, and sat down. The train started moving again, and we notice that Drunky sees us. He starts walking toward the back of his car, front of ours, and begins trying extremely hard to get the door that connects the trains open. He was trying with all his drunken might to open the door, while yelling something at us. The door fails to open, so he angrily bangs on the glass of the window. I made the executive decision that we were getting off this train, letting Drunky ride on ahead, and we'll just wait for the next one. At the next station, we get off and nearly run up the stairs and out of his sight. After the train doors closed, we slipped back slowly to make sure he hadn't gotten off. To our great pleasure, he had not left the train, and we were safe. Altogether, it was a quite sobering experience. I think we can all agree that first shot of vodka was completely wasted!
So we went on to the club, but since it was so early we stopped at McDonalds and ate. At the door, we were subject to face control. Face control is when the bouncers decide if they are going to let you in strictly based on your appearance. It is not about clothes, but your own face. We find that usually if you have equal numbers of guys and girls, or more girls, there is no problem. This time, however, it was 3 guys and 2 girls. The bouncer told me he would let 4 of us in. We decided to wait a little bit, and after 3 or 4 minutes he said we could go in. Personally, I don't think he liked Mark, since I was paired with Amy and Andy with Kim.
We went in, met up with Tristan and Jenn, grabbed some shots, and decided to give a toast to «Not getting stabbed.» The workers were breaking down the tables to make room for the dance floor, so we moved upstairs, then back downstairs to a booth. I decided I wanted to take it easy this night. The night before I had a really good time and didn't get too drunk, but my liver deserves a beer night every once in a while. I've found that I like Fosters quite a bit. Anyway, we went sat watching the dancing for a long while. These Russians love to dance. I think it is a lot more fun than American dancing, because no one gives a damn what people are doing. Me, I don’t dance until I have a couple of drinks in me, so we just watched. Tristan was being a royal pain in the ass, since she didn't want to be at this club in the first place. She wanted to go to this other club that plays American rock, instead of the techno of Propaganda. We told her we were staying here. «But the other club doesn't have fog!» I like fog! Eventually we lost our seats, so we moved upstairs. It was probably about 1:30 or 2:00, but I was feeling good. I figured beer would wear me out, but I was fine.
There aren't a lot of chairs upstairs. We stood around a table, and this guy at a table by himself offered for us to join him. He looked near my age, and he started talking to us. His name is Peter, 25 years old, and he and I ended up talking for about 3 hours about everything. He works for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has met Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Bill Clinton, and a whole slew of other political figures. Peter was with his girlfriend, Caterina, and we hung out just talking.
Tristan had made it her goal to ruin the evening for everyone, and sat at the table sulking. I dealt with this by being very engaged in this conversation. Andy and Kim dealt with it by making out. Jenn had left a while ago, so poor Amy was forced to sit there and deal with Tristan. I felt bad about it later…but I didn't even notice at the time. Around 3:30, Amy, Kim, Andy, Tristan, and Mark decided they wanted to go home. They were drunk and very tired. I felt totally fine and awake, but I told them to go ahead without me, and that I was going to stay with my new friends until the metro opened at 5:30. They grabbed a taxi and went back to the dorms. We kept talking for a while, and Peter convinced me to go out dancing with them somewhere around 4:15. We went down there, and it was pretty fun. I prefer to be a little more intoxicated than I was, but it was fun nonetheless. About 5:15 I told Peter I was going to head out, so we exchanged phone numbers and I was on my way home.
I walked to the metro station, and that one didn't open until 6:30. Damn. So I headed to Red Square, which was only about 500 meters away. Red Square was still blocked off from the events of DASRF, and the militsia wouldn't let me go through to get to the metro. Therefore I had to walk to the only other station I knew of—Tretyakovskaya. It took about 30 minutes to walk there from Red Square. Lucky for me, there was a McDonalds outside the metro station, so I went to order food. I checked out the menu and knew I had just enough money for a sausage, egg, and cheese McMuffin. In line was a very drunk guy of about 27. After thinking about the previous events of when I was around people of that level of sobriety, and considering the fact that I was completely by myself, I bypassed McDonald's and headed onto the metro. The rest of my journey was uneventful, and I got home at 7:30. I stripped down, left my shoes where my roommate would know I am home, and went to bed.
Friday, June 13th, 2008
Kim came to our room at 8:30 to make sure we were awake. My alarm had just gone off, and I was rolling in bed. I hopped up, jumped in the shower, and started getting ready for our 9:30 excursion. I was in mid-shave when Kim came in the room, met Andy on his way out, and said «You guys know we gotta be there in like 10 minutes.» TEN MINUTES?! I should have 40! No, sir! I was under the wrong impression, and we were meeting at 9. I bolted out the door and hauled ass to the bus on the other side of the university. We loaded up and began a very exhausted ride toward Ясная Польяна, the estate of Leo Tolstoy, where he was born, grew up, lived almost all his life, and is buried. This estate is absolutely beautiful and massive. We toured the house, saw Tolstoy's bedroom, dinning room, study—which is also where he was born, and wrote nearly all of his books—and the rest of his house. In his foyer, he has the trophy of this massive deer skull that he killed. Tolstoy was apparently quite the passionate hunter before he became a vegetarian in the 1880s. Everything in the house is exactly as it was when Tolstoy died, and every piece is authentic. The art, the books, his rifles, everything. It wasn't the most impressive house we've been in, but it was very cool to see it exactly as it was in 1910 when he died. We saw the couch he was born on, as well as all 13 of his children. His grave is quite impressive as well. It is located in the middle of the woods, and it is just a small hill. He wanted no headstone, no crosses, no monuments. Just his grave. It was awesome. We went to his favorite bench, the fields he wrote about in War and Peace, the love tree. I have not read a lot of Tolstoy, but it was awesome to see all of this in his home.
We left the estate and am currently heading toward Moscow. It's going to be about a 3 to 4 hour bus ride, and we're about an hour in so far.
Oh, our bus! How could I forget to tell about that? We are on a Mercedes Tour bus. Sounds nice, right? Nope. It is very old, and the whole thing shakes violently. I don't think it has any sort of shock absorbers. It's miserable. Running on an hour of sleep plus the tiny little naps I get in here before being thrown around, I can't wait to get back to my terrible little dorm bed!

Travel Log 9

2008-06-11T13:50:24Z

Friday I woke up a little late. At 10:15 my roommate yells at me to get up, and I jump out of bed and am ready to meet the group and leave at 10:45. We meet up with our two tour guides, two Russian students who take us to the metro. We get off at our station, and we walk to the Novodevichy Convent. I was severely annoyed for multiple reasons, the main being that I hate when our tour guides treat us like we are 4 years old and need someone to hold our hand as we cross the street. Anyway, we get there and see the convent. Nothing too special. Some old graves, churches, icons, nuns, a monk, things we’re extremely used to by this point. After about three hours, we finally leave, and they take us to a cemetery that is next door.
This cemetery was freaking sweet! Everything was really closely packed in, and it was a lot of fun trying to see who all we could find. I saw Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Boris Yeltsin. There are tons of famous people buried in there. Joseph Stalin’s family is in there, but we couldn’t find their graves. After a while, our tour guides came frantically looking for us. They were deeply concerned that we had gotten lost. This was frustrating, since we definitely know how to get around this city by now.
We get back to the metro, and it’s about 3pm at this point. None of us have had lunch, and so Amanda, Amy, Dan, and I decide to stay in this part of town and find a place to have lunch. I told the tour guides to go on without us, and this caused quite a bit of stress to them. Anyway, we stayed, they left, and we went to this awesome little underground restaurant. It was freaking sweet! For 180 rubles, I got a salad (which ended up being chopped beets, which were awful), kidney and pickle soup, which was surprisingly delicious, a sausage, and buckwheat. For under 8 dollars, it was a great lunch!
We headed back to the school, got online, messed around for a while, and eventually got ready to go out.
We decided we wanted to go out to a club, so I went to the liquor store and picked up some vodka. We all met in the park and drank it. Afterwards, we headed to the metro station where the club Свалка is located. The bar translates into «Dump», and it's a wasteland themed club, with junk cars and fake garbage as the décor. We spent about 2 hours searching for the club, and finally gave up. We tried some other bar, but after seeing the prices on the menus, and refusing to pay 10 to 15 dollars a drink, we did the walk of shame out of there.
I was really annoyed with several people with us, one girl in particular. I had the directions, and I had the address. I google mapped it, and so I had a general idea of where it was. However, the directions were very unspecific, and I made sure everyone knew that we were going to try to find the place. So the one girl is in the back, and making comments the whole time about me not knowing where we were doing. I nearly snapped at her, but I kept my calm. I was just annoyed that after making it clear that I wasn't sure about where we were going, I was still being condemned for making her walk around. Go home!
Anyway, eventually we gave up and went back. It was after 1am, and the metro was closing soon. So, defeated, we went back to the dorm.

Saturday was nothing short of an adventure. I had decided I would go to the рынок with Andy, Amy, Jenn, Kim, and Tristan. We ended up meeting a two guys named Ryan and Mike. They are both here with a group from Canada, though Mike is from Titusville, Florida. We hung out for a long while, and Ryan ended up having to leave, so Mike joined us, and we headed to the market. First, we decided to go to Red Square, since I had to try to refund my Aeroflot ticket since I'm not going to Japan anymore. So I left the group on the metro and went to my station. I found the office with relatively little trouble, and stood in line for about an hour and fifteen minutes. Once they called my number, I sat down with the lady, and did a pretty good job of getting my point across. The lady next to our booth spoke English, and she explained that I had to give this paper to my travel agent in America to get my refund. I got everything I needed, and went to join everyone at the market. I found them relatively quickly, and we did some shopping for a couple of hours. I got some gifts and some things for myself, then we all headed back to the school.
We had more plans to find another club, this time starting a little earlier. Well, it was Kelsey's birthday, but she had been sick for a couple of days. We decided, however, that if she is feeling well enough, that we would go celebrate her birthday with her. She was filled with life back in the dorm, and the plan was to go to this club called «Fabrique». It was supposed to be a very nice club, with strict entrance policy, so we all dressed up. It was Amy, Amanda, other Amy, Kelsey, Lindsay, John, Mike, Brian, James, and I. The others decided they didn't have enough nice clothes to go to this club, so they went elsewhere. We get there after a long period of trying to find the place, and we go in.
It was the nicest place I have ever been. The upper floor had tables, and we found the upstairs bar. It was outside, in this little courtyard. The drinks were damn expensive, so I only wanted to do shots of vodka. The mixers in this country make drinks cost too much, since everything is bottled. Nothing on tap, except beer in some places on draught. We did a birthday shot for Kelsey, and we wandered around. There was a staircase with red leather walls that headed down to the dance floor. The dance floor had these bright and shiny things all hanging from the ceiling, and there were lots of people dancing. My favorite was this moderately buff dude who was just out there dancing by himself. It reminded me of the Dane Cook quote «You never hear of guys wanting to just go dancing! : Hey Mike! Fuck girls tonight, I just want to dance!» He was cracking us all up. I was drinking my gin and tonic that Brian topped off with his vodka he snuck in. Amy and I decided to go do another shot together, and things got a little fuzzy at that point. Amy agreed to write out the rest of my travel log from Saturday night, since she remembers everything.

Sunday
So we got back to the dorm around 7am, and I went to bed. I woke up at 3:30 and found out all the events of the night before, including headbutting Amanda, the 1000 ruble drink, and all sorts of other antics. It sounded like a hell of a night to me!
Since we all spent way too much money the night before, our wallets were hurting pretty bad. We stayed in, ate in the cafeteria, went to the internet café, but mostly just hung out around the dorm. It was a pretty fun day, surprisingly. Andy, Kim, and I did take a walk down to Crapdogs for some hotdogs, where we were accosted by homeless people.
The first one was an elderly lady, head all wrapped in a scarf, with black teeth. She came over wanting money, but I told Kim to not speak any Russian. She came over and said «денги, денги, денги!», and I looked at her, shrugged, and said «No Russki!» We let Andy talk to her in Russian, since he just started learning it on this trip. She then said «Money» and we were like «OH». Andy told her we were students, and I told her (in English) that I spent it all. She then said something and was gesturing during the trees, so she and I played charades, where it was my goal to fail.
Trees!
Mustache!
Black! Black! Black!
Armageddon! (Not kidding about this one, she actually said it)
After that she walked off, and we had a good laugh. We decided she must be a prophet, telling us about the end of the world. We decided we didn't feel bad about giving her nothing, since she world was about to end, she had more pressing matters than food.
The next one came when we went to the Blini stand. I wasn't buying one, but Andy and Kim wanted a chocolate one. The second homeless lady came over, this one tiny with a weird eye. She spoke to me in Russian, and I said «No Russki!». This didn't work out so well, since she then started talking to me in English. I was like «SHIT!» She said she was homeeress and needed money. I gave her like 5 rubles to get rid of her. She walked off, and the prophet came back. Andy had just gotten his blini, and the prophet looked at him, and make a guesture that she wanted a bite. He told her НЕТ! And we walked off. We joked the whole way home, and went back to Kim's room to hang out for the rest of the night. It was pretty fun.

Monday I woke up, went to class, and came home and took a nice long nap—like 3 hours. Afterwards, I met up with Andy and we went to the internet café. We made plans to go to a random metro station and try to find food. Well, the whiny ass girl from earlier came, and it was quite annoying. We ended up meeting some older friends who Andy had met earlier that day, and convinced them to join us. They just got in yesterday, and were quite jetlagged, but still wanted to join us. We eventually ended up at a restaurant called Ёлки Палки, which used to be an offensive exclaimation about 200 years ago, but now it's a restaurant chain. For 460 rubles, I got the best, and I mean the BEST, ribs I have ever eaten, french fries, a shot of vodka, and a Pepsi. Not bad, and it was delicious. The place was really cool too, with the waitresses in traditional Russian dresses, everything inside was wood, and the grill is in the center of the resturant.
After dinner, Andy, Kim, and I parted ways with everyone else, and we joined Mike and Ryan. We went for a little walk through Red Square, got rained on, and went to McDonalds. We ate, then headed back to the school.
I went to bed at 2am, but it's quarter until 5 now and I still can't sleep. Too bad the sun is rising and it is completely bright outside. Tomorrow (today) is going to suck!

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
So, I was right, class was a little rough. I went back to my room after my nap and absolutely crashed. Slept a good 3 hours, then my roommate got me up. We headed to Café Max, the internet café. We ended up staying for 1.5 hours, and then headed down for food. We didn't see the prophet, and I was a little saddened by this. We saw the language scholar, but we walked right past her. We had Crapdogs, and then went home. We were meeting everyone at 730 to go to a restaurant called MooMoo. We had heard it was good and cheap, so we went to check it out.
We walked forever and finally got there. It reminded me of Piccadilly's, where you go through a line and get whatever you want, and take it to a table. I got pork ribs and this TERRIBLE salad, consisting mostly of mushrooms. It was horrible. Afterwards, we went to Red Square to take some pictures of St. Basil's. I already had several, so Mike and I went back to the school.
I got home, wrote some postcards, did homework, and went to bed.

Wednesday, June 10, 2008
After class, I went back to my room and took a 45 minute nap, then went to Art class. Immediately afterwards, it was nap time again. When I woke up, we headed to the internet café in the school. I'm here now, drinking hot tea, and I ate this terrible little salad. Tonight, gay club. Should be interesting.

Travel Log 8! Problem and solution!

2008-06-05T10:47:12Z

Wednesday, June 4, 2008
It has been quite a taxing couple of days. I don’t think I have ever experienced anything as damning as being stuck with no access to my money. Monday’s adventures of wandering around, bank to bank, with everyone telling me that I was screwed was horrible. Even Citibank said no, and that lady spoke English and understood my situation completely. When I left there, I knew that I was fucked. I definitely had tears in my eyes walking to the metro. It was such a feeling of complete failure and desolation. I can always immediately handle whatever situation comes my way, in one way or another. I am very capable of finding a solution, no matter what. But in this case, I was completely out of options. There was nothing I could do, and worse, all possibly solutions were entirely out of my control. I was forced to rely completely on other people, no, companies, to get something done.
In the mean time, I have been forced to borrow money from other people. That has been equally horrible. I hate being in debt; I hate the idea of lending friends money, and even more borrowing from friends. It just never ends well. I’ve been trying to do it as minimally as possible, which is why I didn’t eat anything Monday. Tuesday, for dinner, I cleaned up everyone’s plates. I let Amy buy my dinner today, and I had a little left over from what Andy gave me to buy my lunch today.
What really upset me was that I borrowed 100 rubles from one girl. I said I needed it for food, but I spent it on putting it on my phone so I could try and get this taken care of. Today at lunch, she asked me if I had her 100 rubles to pay her back. Of course I didn’t, I wanted to snap at her. She knows my situation and how hard this is for me, and it just make me really upset when she asked that.
Of course, Visa swore my card would be in my hand today. It never showed up. I got the tracking number and phone number for their Moscow office, and I’m calling them at 8:30 tomorrow morning, the minute they open. I’m also skipping class to go get this taken care of, because I think this is slightly more urgent. I also decided I wasn’t borrowing from anyone else until it was done. Hopefully this will all be behind me tomorrow.
I joined the group at the English Pub tonight, just because I needed to get out of the dorm. It sucked being in a bar and not having a drink, but I finished Amy’s beer for her, and it was wonderful.
I can’t wait to be able to buy alcohol.
Sorry this entry wasn’t as much fun as they usually are, but I kind of wanted to get this out.

Thursday, June 5th, 2008
2:42 pm
I FINALLY got my card today! I called UPS this morning and was told the delivery guy would be here between 1 and 2pm. I waited in the lobby of my dorm, where it would be delivered, and at 2:10 it came!!
I’m on cloud 9, and it is time to spend some MONEY!

travel log 7!

2008-06-03T07:44:17Z

Hope you're ready for a long one!!

Friday, May 30, 2008
It’s 8:45 pm, and I’m chilling out on my awesome bed in St. Petersburg. Sounds lame, but this is the best bed I have been in for a month. It’s damn comfortable! Plus, I’m a little tired after a very long night last night ending with me getting robbed. Got your attention! Try not to skip to the end!
Thursday was a little uneventful. Class, lunch, nap, more class. Thursdays are Russian History with Nina Aleksandrevna, our FSU professor. She gave us our schedule for going to St. Petersburg, and we were to all to meet at 9:45pm to head to the train station together. The afternoon consisted of packing my clothes, and Dima and I went to Romstor to go buy some vodka and snacks for the train. After all, it was an 8-hour train ride we were about to go on, and I for one would be needing a sleep aid. Besides, we decided it was going to be a party-ride anyway.
We all met and got on the metro, and got off at our station to walk to the train station. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a train station, but they are the sketchiest place on earth. Nina Aleksandrevna was discouraging us from using the ATM (афтобанк) because people will then know you have cash and they'll rob you. We had to wait at the station for about 45 minutes, then we boarded our train. We were shown to our cabins, which consisted of 4 beds in a room smaller than my bathroom at home in Tallahassee. We decided to start the drinking, and we all joined into John, James, Misha, and Dan's room to hang out. There were 9 of us in that room, and it was pretty warm. Well, Lindsey and Kelsey decided to try and make friends with the Russian Navymen onboard, so they left, and I went for a little exploration of the train. I met up with Aleksey, a Russian guy of about my age who lives in St. Petersburg. We hung out for a good long time, bought some beer from the restaurant on the train, smoked a cigarette, and one of the Navy guys came and joined us. My favorite conversation went like this.
At one point, one asked me
«Why are you not wear shoes?» -them
«Fuck shoes.» -me
«Fuck shoes?»
«Fuck shoes.» -me
«Fuck shoes.»
«Fuck shoes!» -me
«Fuck shoes!»
«FUCK SHOES!» -us
Now, Aleksey spoke very good English, but the Navy guy spoke almost none. So, he and I were struggling to communicate, but I did get that he's a Captain on a Submarine. He introduced me to a couple of his friends, and I hung out with them for a while. Aleksey and I exchanged emails, but when we did, the Captain was shaking his head «No» to me, so I just gave him my junk email address, the one I use whenever some website requires I give them an email address. I check it like 4 times a month, and it's all only ever penis enlargement offers and medication offers. He's welcome to email me there. So, we go stand in a section of the train between cars, and we're talking in there, since it's about 5am now and we've gotten kicked out of every car by the дожёрная, the lady in charge of the car. I walk by my professor while she's out having a smoke, who can tell I'm a little tipsy. She tells me it's time for bed, and so I tell her I'm going soon. We end up in another car, and Aleksey starts trying to get me to go get more beer. Now, it's after 5am, I'm tired, and I have to get up at like 8, so I'm feeling pretty much done with drinking at this point. Well, he keeps trying, and when I try to walk away, he grabs my arm and pulls me back in. Not really rough, but firm. So I tell him that I have to pee really badly, and eventually I get into the bathroom at the back of the next car. Feeling like the situation was about to get bad, I took all the money and valuables out of my wallet and stuck them in my socks, under my feet. I left 200 rubles inside, just to be realistic, and I was willing to part ways with that, since it's only 9 dollars. I come back out, and he's there, and so is my Navy Captain. The captain was backing me up completely, and Aleksey kept trying to get me to go back to the bar with him. He said we can talk about it there. I felt like he had people waiting for me to go back, so I decided that was definitely not happening. Captain keeps my back, but Aleksey isn't budging. He kept saying that I needed to pay him for the cigarette, and for some more beer. Knowing we never had any more beer, but just to get rid of him, I gave him the 200. He then said that he knows I have a 500 ruble bill in my wallet. I open it up and show him that it's empty, and he gets confused. I guess that convinced him that he wasn't getting any more out of me, so Captain motions to me for us to go back to my car. We head back, and I think Aleksey noticed he had pissed off the Captain, so he retreated with his nine dollars. Captain walks me back to my room, and I'm standing in the room with Captain just outside the door, and I tell him how much I appreciate him backing me up, and I think he was telling me what Aleksey was doing all along—building my trust so he could pull some shit later. We talk for a little bit, and mid sentence the дожёрная comes up and slams the door shut between us. I decided not to start a fight with her, so I just climbed up into bed and went to sleep, at like 5:30am.
I know, not exactly the most exciting robbery story, and it could have been MUCH worse, but I think it was an experience worth having. After all, I'm in Russia, there are a lot of criminals in this country!
So I get woken up this morning by Nina Aleksandrevna coming into my room. She asks if I have a hangover, and I tell her that of course I don't. Come on, this is me we're talking about. I'm a champ!
So we get off the train in St. Petersburg, and I can't describe how beautiful this city is. It's absolutely amazing. Every building is has tremenduous architecture. It's like they're all sculptures. We went on a bus tour around the city, and got a nice long history lesson on the way. I was passed out in about 10 minutes, so I'm not sure what all I missed. We checked out this church, which is like St. Petersburg's version of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. We headed around the city some more, saw some more sights. We went a church where all the Czars are buried, and got to see their tombs. Everyone like Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth, all the way to Nicolas II, the last emperor of Russia. It is incredible to get to see all the culture and history of this place we've heard about and read about for years. See? This whole adventure is not just a drunken bender!
After the church we saw a few more buildings, and I was put in charge of tonight's boat tour. At 12:30 tonight, we're boarding a boat to go around the canals of St. Petersburg and see the city from there, at night. It is also supposed to be a white night, so the sun will never completely set. I'm really excited about that.

Monday, June 2nd, 2008
I finally have a few minutes to sit down and recount the tales of this weekend. We last left off as I was getting ready to go on our boat tour around the canals of St. Petersburg. I was really excited, since I have never seen a white night before. Again, a white night is when places at high latitutes never experience the sun going all the way down. They happen in St. Petersburg beginning around May 20th and they go throughout the summer. We all gathered at the hotel, and we headed down to the docks. We knew it would take about an hour for us to walk there, so we met 2 hours before. On the way, we passed a сабвэй, and we all needed some American fast food. So after we finished our Subway, we walked the rest of the way to the meeting point. We get there about 12:10, and our boat isn't there yet. I watch a boat pull up to our docking point, and I found that it was definitely not the boat I was looking for. I asked the captain his name, and he said Maxim. This was no good, since I was looking for a Vladimir. So I give ol' Vlad a call. He speaks VERY few words of English, and so I had to try to function with my Russian. This is extremely difficult to do over the phone, where hand gestures are obselete. So we eventually understand that we are supposed to take the ride with Maxim. So I go talk to the driver, and his English speaking counterpart. They tell us it is 8750 rubles for 1.5 hours. Again, problem. We were told it would be 5500 rubles for 1.5 hours, to which she responded that was the price for one hour. So we agreed just to take the hour instead of paying more.
Off we go, and the sights were phenomenal. My favorite part was the sky. All of my pictures of the sky are taken at least after midnight. We go out on the river Нева and we get to see one of the drawbridges raise up. We continue winding through the canals, and it begins getting really cold, and raining. One of the things about St. Petersburg is that the weather is absolutely unpredictable. They never know what's coming, and it can totally change after 2 hours. So we get off the boat, and it's 1:30 in the morning, dark since the clouds are covering the sky, and raining. There gets to be a nice steady light rain, and Jeff and I decided to take off. We just flew out of there, got back to the hotel as soon as possible. I crashed really quickly, competely exhausted. Good thing we only took an hour.

Saturday was another busy day, but a shit ton of fun! We met at 10am and headed to a place Царское Сeло. This was the summer home commissioned to be built by Catherine the Great, but I don't believe she ever ended up living there. We walked up to this enormous palace. The building itself is awe-inspiring. The first thing you notice when walking up is this giant, incredibly ornate gate. Then I realized I'd seen it before—it was the cover picture of my first Russian book! So that was exciting to see. So inside the gate is a massive yard, probably spanning 8 acres or so. The house extends the entire length of the yard, and is this bright blue color. It's absolutely beautiful.
We then had the luxury of going inside, but not without putting on booties first! We got to wear these adorable little shoe covers. The staircase we enter on is a room with white walls, and gorgeous porceline vases on the walls. It also had red curtains over the huge windows. We proceeded down a line of rooms, where every room was very different than the one before. At one end of the line, still not at the end of the building, was a massive ball room. The ceiling was painted with a mural, and the walls were covered with gold. It was truly a gorgeous room. It was also here that my camera batteries decided to die, so I need to steal some pictures from other people.
My favorite room in Царское Сeло was definitely the Amber room. One of the Czars met with the king of Germany at the time and as a gift, the King of Germany gave the Russians an entire room full of Amber. Three of the four walls were covered in Amber, with paintings with Amber frames all over the walls. It was truly amazing. Unfortunately, they don't allow pictures in there, but I did get a couple of post cards and a panoramic picture of the place. It is phenomenal.
The whole building was destroyed by the Nazis back in the 1940s, and all the Amber was stolen. Over the years, the Russians have been able to piece together all of the Amber, and have reconstructed the whole palace, including the incredible Amber room.
We went into the gardens of the complex after we finished in the house (and I bought some new batteries!). These were incredible. I could have spent hours walking around this garden. It reminded me of my old days of playing in my great-aunt's back yard, only infinitely better.
We left there and headed back to St. Petersburg. Along the way, we drove past a large number of Russian bunkers from the Seige on Leningrad of WW2. Most countries clean these sort of thing up, but we think the Russians have so much room, they can afford to leave the bunkers laying around. It was really interesting. We got to see the site of a massive battle, where thousands of Russian and German soldiers alike are buried still.
When we arrived in St. Petersburg, we went to the Hermitage Museum. This is considered to be in the top 5 largest art museums in the world, if not the largest. With over 2.5 million exhibits, we were only able to see a very small portion of the museum in the 2 hours we were there. Our tour guide said we saw maybe 5%. What we did see was amazing. I took a lot of pictures, and it was awesome. The place was packed, but it was beautiful. We saw pieces by Leonardo de Vinci, Rembrant, Michelangelo, Rachael, probably Donatello, since we have the other three turtles mentioned. I wish we could have stayed there longer.
There was one room in the Hermitage I found impressive. It was an exact copy of a corrador in the Vatican. What I found interesting was in one of the mirrors on the walls, there was a bullet hole from WW2. They decided not to replace the mirror, and let that piece of history stand.
The Hermitage Museum served originally as a palace, and it was here that the Czars ruled. We got to go into the room where Catherine died. Unfortunately, it is now just a room with more paintings in it, and you would never know it to be different from any other one.
One piece of tragedy did happen. The night before, I placed debit card into my pocket to keep it from being in my wallet, in case I got pickpocketed—a huge problem in Russia. Well, I found out in the Museum that it had torn across the magnetic strip. It tore the hell out of it. I realized at that point that I was completely screwed. I knew I had a spare at home, but getting it to Russia was going to be a serious problem. I wasn't sure what to do, and it put me in a panic for a long time. I borrowed money from other people, and I should be okay for a few days. I'm so used to horrible things like this happening to me, though, that I didn't let it upset me too much. I was not about to let it ruin my night.
After the Hermitage Museum we were set free upon returning to the hotel. We basically had our evening planned—it was Amy and Andy's birthday! Amy turned 22, and Andy turned 19. Of course, we had to celebrate. We grabbed dinner at a little restaurant down the street from the hotel, and picked up a bottle of vodka. Amy, Jeff, Mark, Andy, Dan, Jenn, Kim, and I killed it pretty quick, so we went and got 2 more bottles. Once we felt we had suffiently pregamed, we went to bar number one! It was called Liverpool. It was a British Themed bar, and it was far too pricey for my tastes. We all had one drink, and we headed out. Our second bar we went to was called «BEER HOUSE». I felt it was promising. We go in, and they only served beer. Well, some people aren't quite as skilled at drinking as I am, so they were scared of mixing vodka and beer. I drank a beer, and we met some Russians! They were all in their 20s, named Sergei, Artyom, Nadya, and….Nadya's boyfriend. Nadya was half Russian, quarter French, and quarter Congo…ese? She was, hands down, the most beautiful person I've ever seen. I want one. So we hang out with them for a while, and they ask us if we want to go to another bar. Um, YES!
We went to another bar. I have no idea what it was called, but we drank quite a bit. Amy and I went and bought a round of vodka shots for everyone. Well, three people didn't want theirs, so I had to do 3, and Amy did 2. Our new friends decided that we shouldn't speak English anymore at the table, since we're in Russia to learn Russian. Fine with me! I speak so much better in Russian when I've got a few in me. I'm always a little nervous when speaking in general, but once those inhibitions are removed, damn it I can fire it off! So we hung out for a good long time there with them. I guess it closed at 2, because we were invited to, yes, yet another bar. Now, I was pretty trashed at this point, but I wasn't about to go home! Everyone else did except for Mark, and I sent my camera home with them, just in case I got robbed again. We go to another bar, and we get inside. First thing I notice is 10 girls and 1 dude on the bar dancing to «Staying Alive». It made me a little sad for them, since they were really damn bad at it. I guess Russians still don’t know how to disco. Well, the guys we came with start macking on the girls we met at the previous bar, so I decide to do the same. She spoke about a word of English, and we sat there talking for about 2 hours. A few minutes after 5, Mark starts bitching about wanting to go home, having to get up at 8:30 or something. So we leave, and wander home to our hotel. We crash immediately and ended an awesome day.

Sunday, June 1st, 2008
We had to be packed and out of our rooms by 9:30, and we loaded the bus. From the hotel we traveled to the river, and loaded our boat. From there we went to Петргоф, the favorite summer home of Peter the Great. It is built on the Gulf of Finland, and it is my favorite place I've been in Russia so far. It is absolutely incredible. We came in from the sea instead of by boat because Dr. Efimov wanted us to experience it the same way the invited guests of the Czar would experience arriving. We walked up the canal from the dock, and it is undescribably gorgeous. The canal runs straight to the mansion, where it is met by the most beautiful collection of fountains ever. The centerpiece is Samson slaying a lion, symbolic of Peter the Great's victory over the Swedes. When they turned on the water, it was spectacular. We decided to bypass entering the house, since Dr. Efimov said it is not as nice as Царское Сало we were at yesterday. She said our time there was better spent in the garden, viewing the different fountains Peter the Great built all throughout the palace grounds.
All of these fountains run by the use of the springs behind the palace, and gravity alone powers them, no electricity. The fountains of Versaille have nothing on these, since these can run all day, every day, without electricity, whereas our tour guide said those of Versaille only work for 2 hours. We eventually left Peterhof, and got on the bus. We were all completely wiped out, and pretty much all of us fell asleep on the bus.
We arrived at the Dostoyevsky Museum around 4, and everyone was wiped out. We got to see Dostoyevsky's apartment where he lived in up until he died, including the room he died in. They had things such as his hat, his pen, several notes from his children, all preserved. It was pretty interesting, but, like I said, we were all so tired. After the museum, we went on a walking tour of Dostoyevsky's characters in Crime and Punishment. We took the metro (deepest metro in the world, at about 270 feet underground) one stop over and got off. This part of town was the serious slums during the time of Crime and Punishment, and it isn't a whole lot better. If you have ever read Crime and Punishment, you would know that Dostoyevsky outlines exactly where the story takes place. He uses street names, descriptions, measurements, everything. Crime and Punishment is a story with fictional people living in our world. From one bridge, you can see the house where the old lady was killed, Raskolnikov's house, Sophia's house, the police station, the bridge where one character was run down by horses, the bridge where another killed himself (sorry I'm a little rusty on my character names). We could also see the house where Dostoyevsky lived when he wrote it, right in the middle of all these places. It was incredible.
We walked into a building which was believed to be Raskolnikov's house. We went up the stairs of the sketchiest building I've ever been in. It was old, frightening, littered with used hypodermic needles, covered with graffiti, and we stood outside of the room which best fits the descriptions of where Raskolnikov lived. The apartment was closed off by the police last week with a large steel door after they found a dead woman in there. This freaked a couple of the girls out in our group. It was a little disturbing. Anyway, we left there, and we walked the 730 steps to the house where Rasknolikov killed the old woman. I was asked to count my steps. When we got there, I was at 780, so I wasn't too far off. We went in the building that fits Dostoyevsky's description of the house where the old lady lived, and that was really cool, minus the blood stain on the stairs we stood in. We weren't exactly in the best part of town.
Anyway, that was the end of that tour, so we went and had dinner. We were forced to bypass lunch, so dinner was definitely welcomed. Our group split into two groups, and we each went to a different seafood restaurant. I have been craving some seafood, but I'm scared to get it in Moscow since it is so far from the sea. I spent the last of my money on the best fish I've ever had, and it was so worth it.
We loaded the bus after dinner, and my group got on the bus about an hour before the other group. We just talked and told stories, and had a damn good time. The other group got there, and Nina was cracking us up. We headed to the hotel and grabbed our luggage, then went to the train station. We were all wiped out, so we only finished the 2 bottles we had already killed. Among the 6 of us, that means about 2 drinks each. Then, Andy, Amy, Jeff, Kim, and I stayed in a room together. The girls were still a little freaked out from the dead woman thing earlier, so we let them sleep in our room. We talked for a long time, probably until 2. During the conversation, I found out that one night when I was inebriated I had said something especially offensive to one of the girls. This was about 2 weeks ago, and I had completely forgotten about it, but it apparently really upset her, so I went and immediately apologized. She accepted, so I was glad about that. I was then able to sleep. I slept ok, except for when the damn bottles kept jingling on the table and waking me up. Not to mention the stupid sun coming up at 4:30 in the morning.
We arrived in Moscow at 8am, got off the train, and headed back to the university via metro. It was PACKED. We had class at 9:30, and after class I went bank hopping. I was really hoping to find someone who could just enter my debit card number into the system. Well, either no one could do it, or no one understood fully what I wanted, so I after going to 8 banks all over the city, I was forced to come home. Completely wiped out, I went to my room and started writing this, passed out after finishing the section on Friday, then woke up. A bunch of people are going out tonight, but I don't have any money, so I'll be staying home. It's ok, it wasn't the most restful weekend. I'm just hoping my spare card gets here soon! I'm just trying to keep in mind that this isn't a vacation. The struggles are part of the experience.

Travel Log 6

2008-05-29T14:33:14Z

Thursday, May 29, 2008
I haven’t written in a while, so I’ll probably leave something out.
Sunday- I slept until 10 then joined up with Kelsey, Lindsay, James, Mike, and Dima to go to the market. This is a huge bazaar, where all prices are negotiable. They sell everything you can think of, from matroshkas, scarves, and balalaikas to wolf skins and art. It was amazing. I bought a book from an old man named Vladimir about the history of hunting in Russia. Mike bought an accordion for 500 rubles. James wanted to buy a balalaika, but they were like 3000 rubles. I’m going to go back one day and buy a bunch of matroshkas and scarves.

Monday-Monday morning I got up and went to class. That afternoon I decided to buy a phone, so I could contact my Russian friends here. That was certainly an adventure in itself, since the two guys working didn’t speak any English. I was trying to understand how it all worked. Eventually, a worker showed up who spoke enough English to make the sale, and now I have a phone. Sorry, but I’m not passing my number out. Overseas calls cost me about a dollar a minute. I’m only giving my number to my family. That night, we went to the lookout restaurant. It is a place with 80 ruble beer which overlooks the entire cityscape of Moscow. It’s beautiful. I called Jackie then, and that was nice to talk to her for the first time since I’ve gotten here. 5 beers later we walked back. The weather was horrible all day Monday (temperatures in the 40s, and raining since Thursday), so the streets were way too wet for illegal street racing. We just headed back and went to bed.

Tuesday was a little more interesting. I actually woke up with a hangover, which was really weird. I woke up at 5 with my stomach hurting pretty bad, and I couldn’t sleep. I finally fell asleep around 6:30, and woke up at 8:30 to go get breakfast. My stomach felt a lot better, but my head still hurt a little bit. Eating and drinking water didn’t get rid of it, so the morning class was a little hard to get through. I ate a very quick lunch, then headed to my room for a nap. I woke up feeling great, except dreading the fact that I had to go to Russian Music class. It’s exceptionally boring. We basically get a half-assed biography of the composer, then we watch a video of someone performing it. It’s horrible. I think I managed to get through the class without sleeping this time, so that was an accomplishment.
I’m getting a little nervous, because a lot of the Americans are getting sick. One girl came down with Bronchitis, my roommate has a cold, one of my classmates has a sore throat. No good. I’m just hoping my daily naps and vitamin C tablets keep me going strong!
After class, I knew I had to wait until about 7:00 when I knew Aleksey, one of my “Russian Boyfriends”, as the other FSU kids call them, would be home from work. I called him, and we met up to go have a few beers. I got there, and Dmitri was there too. Which is definitely good, since Dmitri speaks more English than Aleksey does. They walked me to their favorite bar—the liquor store! We bought a few cold beers, and headed to their real bar, a park! We sat down by the fountain and just hung out for a good long time. A super drunk homeless man came over and started talking to us. When he realized that I didn’t understand, he kept looking at me and saying “зелёный берет!» «Green Berets!» My friends translated that he is going to swim in the fountain tomorrow as a part of the big celebration for the green berets. He eventually left, and after a while, Slava showed up. He's a lot of fun too, and I met a bunch of their Russian friends. It started to get a little late, so we hopped into Slava's car and drove back to the University. It was quite a fun little evening.

Wednesday was a trip. It was one of my favorite days I've had here in Moscow. Class was ok, nothing special. Russian Art in the afternoon was decent. After class, I convinced two FSU girls to go see Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian with me. Or, as we saw it : Хроники Нарнии: Принс Каспиан. I know the story, so I knew I could follow along with everything, even if I didn't have a clue what was going on. Before we went in, though, we had to buy tickets. That was an experience. I had no idea what the lady was asking me. I told her what movie I wanted, what time, and she then kept asking me all these questions. I noticed my movie was playing in theater 7, so I kept saying 7. I got my ticket, and then the two girls just said тоже. They got the same thing I did, and we went into our movie, after riding up the best escalator in the world, at least most adorable. It was all of 5 steps high, and completely useless, but we rode it! We got to our theater and realized what the lady was asking—what row and what seat I wanted. OOOHHH. We just sat whereever, because row 7 seat 7 wasn't a very good seat.
The movie was awesome. They did a good job dubbing it into Russian, and I forgot at times that I should know what they are saying….until I can read the lips. I loved the movie, though, and can't wait to see it in English. I have no clue what happened in the last 15 minutes. Very confused.
During the movie, Dmitri sent me a couple of text messages inviting me to a football match. Not American Football, but I decided to go. After the movie, I ditched Amy and Amanda and got on the metro to go meet him. Dmitri met me at the station where the stadium is. This is the same stadium that hosted the big game last week with the two English teams. We walked over to the stadium, and went in. My ticket was only 70 rubles, so that wasn't bad at all—under 4 bucks.
The game was fun. No body actually watches the game. Everyone just sings their songs to the people in the other sections. Fun part—the team Moscow was playing is from Krasnodar, which is Tallahassee's Russian Sister City. I thought that was pretty exciting. Anyway, back to the stands. It was a little hard to breathe with all the smoke surrounding me. I'm think I will have either lung cancer or a nicotine addiction by the time I leave. When Krasnodar scored, about 6 people in their section set off the handheld flares, so there were lots of fireworks in the stands. A little while later, two guys ran across the field. They jumped into the stands, but one got caught. The other escaped into the crowd. At one point, everyone in the middle section (to my right) passed a giant banner of the Moscow Team symbol up the stands. It was about 30 feet wide and long. It was huge. They passed it up, also while setting off flares. One guy threw his flare down the stands to the empty bottom section, where it burned out on the ground. I love this country.
We left the game, and I had to do homework, so Dmitri and I parted ways.
I met up with my roommate Andy, who was going to meet up with some Russian dude. I said I would join, so we waited for him to meet us until 10:30. Jeff was going to go with us, but had stepped into his room. I hadn't eaten dinner yet, so Andy, Jeff, and I were going to go to Koshka Kartoshka, my favorite fast food place in Moscow. Basically, it's a huge baked potato with whatever you want on it. It's amazing. I go to Jeff's room to get him, and his roommate makes us join them for some drinks. They have vodka, wine, beer, and all kinds of food all over the table when we joined them.They convinced us to stay (all I needed was the food, but the drinks were an incentive to stay). The food was some grapes, a big piece of salted pork, which I think was all fat, some odd but delicious cheese, a kind of summer sausage, another kind of salted pork with spices on the sides, and a salted cheese that was very tough, but so good.
We sat there drinking like Russians. We had a 42 year old Korean man who lives with Jeff. We also had 2 Korean girls, a 36 year old Korean guy, a Russian professor who spoke not a word of English, and some other professor who I didn't catch his name. We'll call him Dr. Sketchy. Not sure why? Just wait.
Here's how Russians drink (Russian adults, college kids drink like college kids everywhere). You get a shot poured for you. One person pours, of course himself last. Everyone gets a shot. Then you sit there and talk, tell stories, joke around, whatever. Until it is the common feeling in the room that it is time to do the shot. However, before you can do the shot, you must make a toast. The first toast in Russia is always За здоровя! To health! Then, we pour a second shot. Our first shot was a Russian Vodka called «Russian Standard». Since the 11 of us killed that bottle of vodka, Dr. Sketchy said we needed to bring out the special vodka, since it was a special occasion. They poured everyone a shot of a golden vodka. It is flavored with peppers and honey. Dr. Sketchy said it was very special vodka, and you only do it when it's a special occasion. They pour the shots, and we sit around talking for about…….15 to 25 minutes is the norm between shots. So we do the shots. I thought it was terrible. First off, the bottle has a long pepper inside of it, which has lost its red color, but was there nonetheless. The second Russian toast is always «To friendship» I don't know the Russian word for it. So we toast to friendship and take the shot. It tasted like black pepper. I didn't like it. Next, we switched to Korean Vodka. These come in little, deceptive juice boxes. They're only 20% alcohol, which is why I hardly got a buzz after doing these for the rest of the evening. Every 15-25 minutes we do another shot, followed by long stories and conversation. Dr. Sketchy keeps helping us with our Russian, and I was trying to speak as little English as possible. About 11:30 the girls leave and so does the Professor who speaks no English. So it's the two Koreans, Dr. Sketchy, Andy, Jeff, and I. Conversation now gets dirty after about 1:00am. Dr. Sketchy starts telling us about how all Russian professors get a certain «Perk» for teaching all the girls. He's a dirty, dirty old man. He lives in Vladivostok, which is on the East Coast of Russia. He said if we come with him in July (we won't be here, so not happening) he would take us on his archeology excursion in the Taiga Forest with his students, and he would share his female students with us. Hence his name, Dr. Sketchy. A dirty, dirty old man.
About 2:15 we decided it was late enough, and we needed to go to bed. We said goodbye, and headed back to our dorms.

Travel log 5

2008-05-25T16:27:39Z

I'll put a little explanation on here before I actually post this on here. I was SUPER drunk when I wrote the first section, so prepare for bad spelling and grammar. I've also not had real internet since Thursday, so it's a little long. Ok, here we go:

My first travel log featureing Russans. Sorry, this is after 1 beer, 4 shots, and 2 drinks. I’m drunk.
Hol shit. So drunknwhile I’m writing this!!
Ok, letl’s reacount Wednesday, May, 21st, 2008. It is the European Finals. To me, that means sleep/ I slept all day. 3 hours, then went to Romstor, then more s wen toEgnlisj P.
ub. I wasn’t there, because I wanted sleep and magic hotdogs, so I went to bed early.

Friday, May 23, 2008
I somehow ended up going to the dorm of these Russian Students. They got me past security, and up to the 19th floor of the main building. HOLY SHIT at the view!!! It was amazing looking over the city from their stairwell, then from their bedroom….amazing. I ended up making friends.
I’ve had one HUGE complaint since I’ve arraived in Russia. I keep hanging out with Americans. Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE the Americans on my trip. They are FUN, hard drinkers, and the kind of people that I want to spend my college years with.
However, they are not Russians. I want to make friends in Russia that I can have lunch with every day, that I can get in conversations with. I want friends in Russia who I can come visit, who I can live with if I get stranded, and who can come live with me if they get stranded in America.
Well, finally, I made them. I have no idea how I met them, but somehow I ended up leaving all my American friends to go into their dorm…..(I know, safe, right?) and spend time with them! It was amazing! Let me back up a bit.
For dinner, we went to Romstor, because it was John’s birthday and he wanted pepporoni pizza. Goddamn it, it’s his birthday, he can have what he wants. After we left, I bought him a Siberian Corona for drinking before we got to the pub. While at the pub, we were all buying him drinks….it’s his birthday!!! We sang the FSU fight song, we all did 3 or 4 vodka shots, we all got trashed, then had to go home!!
Somehow, I met these Russian dudes, and I ended up going away from my American friends, and going to hang out with them in their dorm. We got up there, and bought some coke, and we all drank whiskey cokes for a while. Like, from midnight until 4am. I fucking love these kids. I got their phone numbers, and tried to explain to them why I didn’t have a Russian cell phone. It didn’t go over so well, but I got their numbers, and you better believe I’m hanging out with them Saturday night. I fucking love these people. They are so much fun, and so fascinated by American culture. I want to learn everything I can from them, so they are exactly the kind of people who I want to spend all my times around.
OK. Drunk. Gotta leave at 930 am…now 414am…..need sleep.

BYE!

Friday, May 23, 2008 ( a little later in the day)
I decided it was necessary to not mess with the brilliance that is the drunken blabbering of this early morning. I’m on the bus to Vladimir, and since I can’t sleep around people, I’ll update everyone on my debauchery. The fun part is grabing people’s wireless connections as I go down the road passing apartment buildings. Got a quick facebook and email check in!
Thursday was John’s birthday, so it was destined to be a fun evening. Russian class was fine, although it ran for 30 minutes extra. Grabbed a quick lunch and went to my room to crash before my 2:15 class. I slept so incredibly hard. I nearly had sleep paralysis. It was awesome. Then we went to Nina Aleksandrevna’s class for Russian history. We finished Ivan the Terrible and went through Peter the Great. It was really interesting. After class, I was going to go to sleep again, but the internet café in school was actually working for once, so I needed to take advantage of that free internet. I got to talk to my mom for the first time since I got here, so that was nice. I eventually left the café and joined everyone else, who were going to Romstor to go get food, then go drinking. I just had McDonalds, and a wonderful cold coke. So good. We headed from there to the English Pub for some debauchery. I bought John and I beers for the walk there, Siberian Coronas. MMM. Candy beer. We made it to the pub, and they were out of all the cheap beers we always drink. So we were like “Guess we’re drinking Budweiser tonight!” yeah, no, it was 240 rubles per half liter. That’s a little too much.
So we found that vodka tonics were only 140 rubles, and vodka shots were only 70 rubles. 70 rubles is about $2.25, so we were all over those.
I lied in my drunkenness. I actually drank more like 3 beers, 4 shots, and 3 vodka tonics. Needless to say, I don’t remember leaving the bar! However, we did meet up with Chris, our American friend, who was with a TRASHY Russian chick. She was terrifying. They joined us, and she was hammered and hitting on everyone….but in a weird fashion. At one point someone asked her about the huge tattoo on her arm, and she just laughed and licked her shoulder to her arm. Apparently she sucked on John’s finger or something. Weird.
Eventually we left, and headed to the University. Well, I guess we stopped at the beer stand, and met some people, because the next thing I remember is trying to get through the вход with my beer in my hand, and the Russian dude I had apparently met was trying to convince the guy to let me take it in. He refused, so we went outside and finished it. All of my friends went with a guy named Dmitri to the dorm, but I stuck around with Vadim. I finished my beer, and we went up to his dorm. There, I met his roommates and I guess the guys next door. They showed me the view from their room, floor 19 of the main building. It was amazing. We joked about how all I could see from my window is a tree, being on the second floor.
We got there about 12:30, and we talked about all sorts of things, while drinking whiskey cokes. I remember talking for a long time about my opposition to socialized health care, and then we messed around on facebook for a while. We got on google maps and I showed them where I live in Florida. That was fun. Well, at 4am I told them I had to go, since I was leaving for Vladimir in the morning.
Fun fact about Vladimir, it was founded in 1108, and has evidence of human residence there as early as 25,000 years ago.
So they walked me out after giving me their numbers, and the door guard wouldn't let me take the secret underground way, so I had to walk around the outside of the school. I laughed the whole way about the sequence of events that occurred that night, and got back to my room. I guess you already know what I did when I got there. Sleeping was awesome.

Suzdal, Russia, late Friday night.
I fucking love this city.
On th way to Vladimir, we went to a small little place that we ate lunch at. It was so amazingly good. No one else seemed to like it as much as I did. A fantastic salad, followed by borshch, then the main course, a small pot filled with potatoes, some meat, mushrooms, and cheese. This is the only place I've ever been able to eat mushrooms. Maybe I'll be able to eat them in America. Who knows?
We went to Vladimir, and we toured a cathedral built in the 1100s. This thing was OLD. It was also an active church still, so we got to witness part of a Russian Orthodox Service. It was amazing. I had no idea what they were saying, but I could stay there all day. This was also the most beautiful church I have ever been in. A MASSIVE chandalier hung overhead, the priests wore traditional clothes and chanting in what James called «Old church slavic». I can't describe how incredible this was. To think that this same service has been going on for…..1000 years? It was amazing. I was in complete aww. We had an awesome view of the Russian country side as well.
We toured around the small area of Vladimir we went to, then headed to Suzdal. We checked into our hotel, and I got my own private room. It's sweet.I have a couch, a bath tub (it's filling with water while I write this), a single bed, a tv. It's awesome. You really come to appreciate American luxuries while here.
Well, I ended up getting left behind by my usual drinking buddies, so I was left alone to find something to do. I grabbed Amy and Amanda, and we strolled down the street of Suzdel. We knew the Kremlin was just down the road, so we headed there. We stopped at some old lay selling some random ass drink and we bought a bottle. When we got to the Suzdel Kremlin, we think there was a wedding going on inside, so we headed toward river. We found a guy who we believed was renting out boats for going on the river, and after plenty of jokes about doing it, we decided to give it a try. For 100 rubles we got the boat for 30 minutes, and off we went! We headed down the river for a while, going to the bridge. We joked the whole way, and it was a ton of fun. Of course, I had to do all the rowing, but I'd never been in a row boat before, so it was fun. It started to rain, so we headed back, and got to where we were back at the rental place. Afterwards, we decided it was alcohol time. We went to a pub, it was underground and full of people about our age. Well, apparently Suzdal Russians don't like foreigners, so we were glared out of there after one beer. We headed to bar number two.
Bar number two was about a block off the main road of town, and we went there for a good time. Amy and Amanda protested, because it was pretty sketch. In their words—«Biker gang». We went inside, which meant going down stairs through a place too short for me. I went to the bar to get beer, and the girls sat down at a table. Let me describe this place. The roof was an arch, so the whole room was about 15 yards long and 5 yards wide, bar at one end, tables all along one side. Cobble stone walls. I go to the bar, and 3 Russian older guys come in, one wearing all camo, one with 6 steel teeth, and I didn't look at the other. While I was at the bar, the metal teeth guy was hitting HARDCORE on Amy. He tried Amanda, but she said she was with me, so Amy was all alone. All three guys came in and started harassing the girls. They were trying to force them to move over down the table so they could sit with them. But it was a booth, so it wouldn't end well if they had. So I talked to the Russians and told them we were going to leave. We left, and the girls were telling me «I'm so pissed at you right now!» the whole way. Amanda and I joked for the rest of the night about them almost getting the rape. Amy didn't think it was funny.
We headed to another bar, this one more techno dance style. However, it was horrible. There were a few Russians inside, and a dance floor with lights and no people. We grabbed a table and sat down. I got a beer, and so did Amanda. Amanda, however, didn't have the right change, and so they gave us these cardboard super sour things to eat instead. It was weird. We werne't sure what we were supposed to do witht hem, because they tasted horrible.
We finished our beers and left there, and went back to hotel. I met up with the drinking crew, and recapped the evening with them. Amanda and I went to liquor store to get more beer, then hung out with the guys for a while. I started to crash, so I left and went to my room, got in the bathtub, took a nice hot bath, and am now about to go to bed.
Suzdel…..amazing. You know when you think about what real Russia is like? This is it. This is really Russia. Moscow is too urban for Russia. This place—no one speaks English. No one. You can't get anything if you don't speak Russian. I love it here. It's incredible. I might just move here after I graduate!

Saturday, May 24th, 2008
We had our second day in Suzdal, and I'm on the bus now headed back to Moscow. I've gotta admit, I really like Suzdal.
I got up at 8:30 and took a nice long shower, then headed to breakfast. We had a pretty good breakfast, and since it was included in our program fees, it was like it was free! I ate more than my fill, and went back to pack up my room.
We left the hotel and went to the Monestary. It was built in the 1100s, and we were able to see where the monks lived, their churches, where they grew their food, all that jazz. Across the way, you could see the the Suzdal Convent, an active convent with about 50 nuns today. It was also built in the 1100s, and it has a lot of history. Ivan the Terrible sent one of his wives to this convent to get rid of her, and Henry the 8th sent his 5th wife there too. We saw the prison inside the Monestary, where Leo Tolstoy was supposed to be imprisoned for one of his writings. He was never imprisoned there, since he was too popular with the people.
After the monestary we went to the museum of Wooden Architecture, and got to see how people lived and in what kind of house they lived in over the past several centuries. It was pretty impressive. Afterwards, we went to the Kremlin and toured it.
If you look at my pictures, you'll see a little bright blue cross thing on the ground. It is an example of how they used to baptize people. A few days after Christmas every year, they would go out on the river, cut a cross into the ice (since it was frozen solid), and anyone who wanted to be baptized would go into the water under the frozen ice through the cross.
After the Kremlin we were set free for lunch, and on the way we found a horse. I paid to get on it and get some pictures. Of course I wanted the one with the Soviet Symbol on it. It was awesome. I felt like Stalin, out to destroy the Capitalists. We grabbed an acceptable lunch at the hotel, and boarded the bus. We'll be in Moscow in about 3 or 4 hours.

Sunday, May 24th, 2008, 1:17am
Just got back to the room. Not the most eventful night. After getting back to the university, we all took showers to go get food. We then headed the to English Pub, and had 2 beers. I ran into Ilya, my older friend from Thursday night. We talked for a little bit, and then we parted ways. I only drank a liter of beer, but it am exhausted, so I had a nice little buzz. We got on the metro to go home, and we have found new pleasure in watching people try to listen to us. It's a lot of fun when you can understand them saying things like «Can you understand them?» «A little bit, maybe, but they are speaking to fast» «What are they saying?» That's fun. HAHAHA.
Sorry, this isn't the most interesting post I've ever done. Not much happened since returning from Suzdal. I miss the rapists.

Travel log 4!

2008-05-21T19:15:06Z

Monday, May 19, 2008
Today was extremely uneventful for the most part. My Russian class got moved to the afternoon, so I had the morning free. I woke up at 10 and got ready, then headed down to Ромстор Капитальский to get online, since the food court has free wireless. I got my pictures uploaded to facebook, and was able to talk to one friend, even though it was 4am in Tallahassee. I then went to class at 1 after eating some McDonalds (МкДоналдс). It was delicious…..the only place you can get ice in your drinks!
After class, I went to my room for a while, read, went back to , then went home to do laundry. This is where today got exciting…well, the most for today at least.
I went ahead and stuffed all of my clothes in my suitcase and started rolling it downstairs. I got to the lift, and realized I forgot my student access card, so I had to go back. I go down the lift, and the door guard stops me. All I could understand was «are you leaving or coming?» I told him I had a suitcase full of dirty clothes, but I couldn't think of the word for doing laundry. So he walked me to the Administrator of Sector Ж who I couldn't understand much of what she kept saying. She said I needed something from дежурная, which I didn't understand what I needed. So I went and got Irena, my assistant director of the program to help me. She went and talked to them and got me a card.
So I lug my suitcase down to the laundramat, inside the main building and downstairs in the basement. I go, and I pay 240 rubles (a little over 10 bucks) to wash and dry my clothes since it took 2 machines. 60 rubles per machine use. After an hour and 10 minutes of hardcore waiting action (actually I did homework then read my book), my clothes were done. Oh wait no! They're still soaking wet. So I had to come to my room, string up a makeshift clothesline out of power cords, and hang every piece of my clothing everywhere I could possibly find in the room. So my room is damp, extremely cramped, and I don't have anywhere to sit except my bed. It kinda sucks.
So along with no ice in drinks and generally no cold drinks anywhere, we can add laundry to the short list of things I don't like about Russia.
Oh well, it's like the guy said: «Anyone can live in a 4 star hotel. You are going to survive a Russian dorm.»

Wedneday, May 21
So I got my clothes all done and taken care of. I am sitting in the internet café, so let's catch you guys up on what's happened so far.
Tuesday was fun. I woke up at 9:31 for my 9:30 class that is at least a 10 minute walk from my dorm. Needless to say, I was late. After class I had lunch and went to my next class, Russian Music, which I slept through. Afterwards, we had a field trip to a museum, though I forgot the name. It was more of an art gallery. The tour guide, of course, spoke Zero English, so it was up to RHC to translate for everyone…so she could bitch about having to do it again. After the museum, we went for a walk. We headed to the area outside of the Kremlin where the English Pub is, along with a McDonalds and Sbarro. I had Sbarro, and it was delicious. So we headed to the English pub for some drinkage, and Andrey showed up with his friends. I met these two English guys from Manchester, and I couldn't understand a word of what they were saying. The girls didn't like them, so they eventually left. I kinda wish I had gone with them. That would have been an adventure. Then Chris, the ex-FSU IP alumna, joined us. We drank until about 12:30, and headed to the Metro. I spent a long time talking to this guy named Иля, which I guess means Eli. He said I spoke good Russian, so that was a great complement. I had a lot of fun talking to the Russians there.
Then today, Wednesday, hasn't been too eventful. I was falling asleep in Russian class, so much that at one point I dropped my pen. That woke me up. Oops. For lunch, I had a 30 minute nap, followed by some spaghetti. After Music class, I slept for 3 hours, then woke up, had dinner, then went to the internet café, where I am now. Nothing exciting. We're watching the European Final Soccer (FUTBALL) game now. The Russians seem interested, I don't give a damn!

Unrelated, but if you know of anyone needing a place to live for the fall, let me know!

Travel Log 3

2008-05-19T07:51:58Z

Saturday, May 17th
This place keeps getting crazier and crazier. We cannot seem to help but raise the bar for shocking events higher and higher. Tonight was no exception. 2 almost fights, illegal street racing, new friend, drugs, bribery, and, of course, mullets is the summery of the evening.
Since my last travel log, all of the above have happened. It’s been……7 hours? 2am now….yep.
After I left the internet café where I wrote my last log, we all went to the Romstore, which is the big mall. We ate in the food court, and headed off to the English Pub, or Английский Паб. We saw our old friend Yuri, our bartender, and got our drinks. We talked to him for a second, then sat down at a table. We notice the people sitting behind us were speaking English, and we ended up engaging in a conversation with one of the guys, Chris. Chris is a UCF grad who came to Moscow for his first time in 1998 on Florida State University's International Program….the same one I am on now. 10 years ago, he was doing exactly what I'm doing now. Even better, he knows our program director, Nina Alexandrovna Efimov, and so we had to call her. She remembered him, and they talked for a minute.
Eventually we left, and headed to the metro, but had to go back because Lindsey forgot her wallet. On the way, she finds it in her pocket, so we get on the metro.
I sit down, and I see this huge guy standing by the other door. He keeps looking at me and flashing his Россия (Russia) soccer jacket at me. Then he keeps saying something, and I can't understand a word of what he's saying. I keep telling him that I don't understand, and he eventually just flicks me off. I refuse to even look at the guy, because he's clearly drunk. This guy is wearing a Canadian Tuxedo, only fat in the midsection, has long hear pulled into a ponytail under his hat, and a full beard. Well, he stumbles over towards me, and my heart starts to POUND. We turns to my friend, John, who is the biggest of us all and the best to deal with the guy. He puts his hand on the side of John's head, and places his thumb into his ear. He keeps talking, and none of us have any idea what he's saying. John is a mixed martial arts fighter, and so he's debating whether or not he's going to have to fight this guy. The train stops, and the guy gets off after lightly slapping John in the face. I could see John was about to kill the guy. He leaves, and then walks by the other door and starts to come back on our train. The doors slam closed right before he gets on, and that ended that situation. We had a good laugh to ease the tension.
So we get off the metro, and try to buy beer at the street vendor, but they didn't have the ones I liked, so I passed. John and Kelsey got warm Сибириская Корона, Siberian Corona in cans. Gross. We walked by a crowd, and started getting heckled really hard. They heard us speaking English, and assumed that we were British. John had to restrain himself again, because they were being dicks. In case you didn't know, there is a huge soccer championship game being played on Wednesday here in Moscow, I think right across the river from my school. There was also some championship game played today. So there are TONS of British people pouring into the city these days, and everyone, including the guy on the train I think, is pestering the Brits. Well, I guess they don't know an American accent from a British accent, so they assume. It's not too bad, they're just like «ooh, we're speaking English!!» Not the best insult they could come up with, but we hear that a lot.
So we get back to the dorm, and decide that we're not done with the Evening yet. We know a lot of illegal street racing goes on around our school, so we decided to go find it. We see a милиция (militsia, cop) sitting in his car, and a motorcycle comes FLYING down the street. The cop pulls out and turns on his lights. The motorcycle stops, and they talk in the middle of the road for a minute. The motorcycle turns around, guns is, and does the highest and longest wheelie I've ever seen, going about 80. That's what we call a bribe. Then another motorcycle drives by us while we're walking toward the crowd of people. Just after passing the cop, he stands up on his seat and rides down the road for a minute, standing straight up. It was awesome. Then we passed a group of 5 Russians smoking a hookah from the back of their car, and one girl is snorting cocaine. So we get to the crowd, and there are several cops standing around with their cars. We stood for a while watching, and they would occasionally pull someone over. We saw tons of supped up cars, the most impressive being an old Charger and a Ferrari. We walked down to another spot, and saw tons more people. Here was the starting line of the races, and they were just doing short sprints down one block or so. We stood for a while watching this, cops still standing around. Eventually, we left, thoroughly impressed.

All this has happened in the first week. The FIRST WEEK. This trip gets crazier by the day. It's amazing. The only thing that surprises me anymore is the mullets. I'm just still stuck on it. We saw a guy going down the street on rollerblades (big fad here) playing with a slinky, and his mullet was the most surprising thing about him. I loved the kid today who had a fohawk, aviator sunglasses, popped collar, and a mullet. This kid must get so much play!

Sunday, May 18th.
Sunday was a little low key. I slept until 11, and had to get ready fast to meet everyone at 11:30. We went on a bus tour around the city, and got to see several new places we hadn't been yet. Once I can get internet access I'll upload them. I need to do laundry soon, but it's expensive! It's 60 rubles to wash, 60 rubles to dry…..120 rubles comes to about
6 bucks a load. A little less.
The bus tour was cool, I learned a lot. We then went to Romstor and had lunch. I ate KFC, though I had no idea what I was ordering. I ended up with French Fries and two little chicken sandwiches swimming in mayonaise. It was good.
We then went to chill on the Green for a while, then went exploring. We walked into the woods and followed a few trails, but never found anything too exciting. Eventually we ended up at the lookout point, the place where I have a lot of distant shots of the whole city of Moscow. We found an awesome little restaurant with cheap beer and reasonable prices on food. I forgot my wallet so I owe Lindsey a beer. I just ate everyone's scraps. I guess these South Florida kids don't know how to clean a chicken wing. It was delicious though, and beer was 80 rubles (3.50) a beer for half a liter, instead of 120 at English Pub. After dinner we watched some VERY impressive street performers. Then we walked back to school, and found some more street racing. This time, it was just motorcycles doing wheelies and other tricks. One beautiful Mercedes 2 seater was ripping up and down the street and doing awesome donuts in the road. It was impressive. No cops tonight floating around. We headed back in around 12:15. Everyone has class at 9:30, but my class was pushed back until 1:00. I guess I'll go ahead and go to bed. I'll get up early and go to the mall for some internetage.