1) friday night, had fruit-flavored soju for the first time with mincheol, my dowoomi (korean buddy) and his girlfriend, hyun-ook. it was more peach juice than soju so we ordered the plain stuff and mixed that in. apparently, korde students are known for being sul-kureh, which translates to "drinks like a whale." which is what some people call me here. now, i don't drink at all that much...maybe they're just surprised to see me knock back shot after shot of the fiery stuff. maybe because i don't look like i drink at all?
2) went ice skating for the first time saturday noon with mincheol. there's a skating rink at the university and so through the alcohol haze the night before, i agreed to check it out. just getting there was a chore; korea university is a big campus, not quite like diliman but seems bigger because it's hilly and the way to the rink was mostly uphill. will spare you the painful details but the whole experience can be summed up as "two hours of falling on my ass." at the end of the futile exercise, my right wrist was swollen (here i blame an old wall climbing injury) and i had bruises all over. mincheol kinda panicked and brought me to...
3) an acupuncturist. actually, hyun-ook brought us there. mincheol mainly made the strange hissing noises koreans make to show that they're deep in thought. btw, they don't like the term "acupuncturist" here in korea. instead, these venerable professionals are called oriental medicine doctors because as yeajin said, "they really are doctors." i just don't like the term "oriental", is all. reeks of exoticization. anyway, after 15 minutes of putting my pincushion of a wrist under a heat lamp, the swelling disappeared. went for another session today and if it still hurts tomorrow, i'll have another go at the needles. now i have to go around wearing a wrist support. it makes a good fashion accessory, and attracts sympathetic cooing from people. while it's not my first acupuncture session, it's the first time that i was actually scared for myself here in korea. i could've really broken something.
4) met a couple of palestinian writers at a party thrown by a group of korean writers. so...first time to meet people from palestine, and first time to hear korean writers talk without feeling a little embarrased for them. i still get a twinge of annoyance when i remember some of the non sequiturs i heard during the seoul young writers festival. granted, the korean writers at the festival had a different agenda. and this gathering was really a sort of "bridge between korea and palestine" (the title of the event), at times overtly political. some people read poems, most of us just ate and boozed.
5) first time to attend a church here in seoul and felt truly blessed by the sermon. the first one i went to (on palm sunday) was myongdong cathedral, the next one (easter) was a baptist church that just left me in a foul mood the whole day because they turned out to have the kind of redneck us-versus-them hellfire-and-brimstone theology that gives christians a bad rep. another one i attended near my dorm has potential but i didn't get much out of the sermon; i will definitely go back there because it's a mere 10-minute walk away. so anyway, last sunday, i attended onnuri community church. a most misleading name because it's a hyper-duper-turbo-megachurch that has its own TV station and everything. masyadong kano yung accent ng kor-am pastor pero may laman yung message that reached out to me.
all in all, a pretty good weekend. also: went malling at LOTTE department store with other pinoys from korde (joan, tristan, ferdie, siege + raffy from some other univ), and to a nurebang (karaoke) at jonggak district where we sang, among other things, some eraserheads and ogie alcasid and other such standards. they even had "anak" by freddie aguilar pero di na namin pinatulan.
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