Petering Out

As you may have been able to infer from the title of this entry, my friend Peter is in the wind. He did his year, and is off to see East Asia now; well as much as he can pack into one month. Before he left we had to observe that ancient english teacher tradition: the going away dinner. In Peter's case we got a bunch of folks together and feasted on Galbi (basically marinated pork strips that you cook at your own table) at a restaurant that Peter and I both were frequent guests of. After a delicious meal we headed to local live music venue: the Led Zeppelin Bar. Unfortunately the Korean jam-band playing that night was only marginally better than the sound of nails down a chalkboard. Next on the agenda was a rainy cab trip to one of the big party areas of Seoul: Hongdae. After an hour or so of walking around in the rain looking for a perfect spot, we decided to hunker down in Brixx. This Arab-themed bar is quite laid back, and a good place to chill out for a while. Bora and I called it a night reasonably early, but the rest of the lads stayed out partying until the sun came up.

A few days later Peter was at my apartment dropping of a massive box, which now almost fills my kitchen. I agreed to store some stuff for him; and if he doesn't come back I can sell it all for a tidy profit haha. Later in that day I was out for dinner with a few co-workers around 11pm when I got a text on my phone from Peter. He was on the ferry from Incheon to Tianjin, China and he reported that the boat was quite comfortable. Getting these reports and providing some advice from my own Asian travels gave me a twinge of wanderlust, there certainly is a lot more of Asia to see. On the top of my list now are (in no order) Hokkaido, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bali, Tibet, and Nepal. I've got a week of holidays to use, so we'll see where I end up.

The weekend before Peter's dinner Bora and I made an outing to the zoo. It was alright, definitely nothing spectacular. The cages weren't as small and miserable looking as I'd imagined, but it's certainly not up to the standard of the zoo in Toronto. Afterwards we met up with Peter and ate a Korean delicacy I'd never tried before: live octopus. Now before you freak out, they've cut the octopus up but the tentacles are still flailing about madly as you grope at them with your chopsticks. It was actually quite tasty, but very chewy. They also tended to suction on to your tooth as you were chewing them.

So that's what's been going on. I'm going away for the day on Sunday to some mountain lake north of Seoul and will hopefully be able to get some good pictures there. The following weekend I'm headed down to Daegu for a much anticipated soccer game. Keep the comments coming.