Halloween in Korea

Friday was of course Halloween! We both went to school in costume for kicks and to teach the kids about this English holiday. My fiancee was an angel, and I went as a bond-ish villain, with a black shirt, white bowtie, and eyepatch. The kids and teachers got a good laugh. The one co-teacher made herself a candy costume on the spot in order to join in. Very inventive. The classes of the day were the grade threes, my fiancee's favourites. They've just started English this year, and are pretty nervous using it, so most of my questions were translated for me. They loved the candy we brought. The whole school loved the candy. During lunch, the English office was swarmed by every student I think. When they heard the policy of one candy per kid, but two for a costumed kid, they started sharing all of the costumes that the kids had come in, so we saw a lot of repeats. It was really crazy, the VP had to come and pull kids off us and get things organized. I think we kinda annoyed the one co-teacher too. Things were quieter after lunch.

The English office

Candy and costume

The hordes

The evening belonged to the big party. I changed into my not school appropriate night costume, an Ajamma! It was a multi-floor open house with a number of English teachers in the same building. Each room had a drink. We did sangria. We didn't have our usual liquer to fortify it with, so of course we used Soju. It came out very tasty. Around 11pm, we wandered off to Hongday, the university bar/clubbing area, and went to a place called Gogos that my fiancee is a fan of. It was crazy busy, and very smokey (people are allowed to smoke inside) and I had quite the sore throat by the end of the night. We danced for a while, but decided to leave early (1am ish) as we had our early morning flight the Jeju island. On the way out, we ran into one of the English teachers passing out. She apparently gets stupid drunk every weekend and usually needs someone to help her home. It's gotten rather tiresome for everyone. She also never remembers any of it. I don't know how people can do that every week. Seriously, the teachers here are acting like they're frosh all over again and I don't think I'd be able to go out with them weekly.

Anyway, no one else was willing to leave early, so we dragged her along with us to crash on our chesterfield until we had to leave in the morning. She was horribly uncooperative, and spent the next hour or so crying for no reason. She has crying drunk phases. Nice. Anyhow, our trip home was also a bit interesting because of the other teacher in the same that we shared the cab with. You see, the first cab we hailed wouldn't take us, as he was going the opposite direction, so we decided if we cross the street, we could hail on the the other hundred cabs we saw that was going in the right direction. This guy though, who's been learning Korean, convinced the driver to take us and called us back to the cab. When we neared our destination, we discovered that the way he convinced the cabby was to offer him twice the going cab rate, and now that we were there was backing out. The driver was pissed, and this guy basically insults and threatens him, a few times saying he'll open the passenger door into traffic. Hi tactics managed to get us only 1.5 times the going rate. Never taking a cab with this dude again, he lies to a cabby, pisses him off, and ends up having us all pay 50% more when there were plenty of other cabs to choose from across the street. I was not impressed. Oh well. Apart from the cab dude and the crying drunk girl, it was a decent night.