naui chinan chumal*

as i write this, i'm watching house on OCN (channel 21), eating red ginseng chocolate squares (white chocolate studded with rice crispies & smelling/tasting like a dank-ass moldy potato). am also jumping to the world cup game on MBC ESPN (channel 31) even if i dunno what the hell is going on; the commentary is in hanggukmal. that australian guy who plays dr. jesse spencer is such a hottie. am still a little disconcerted to see robert sean leonard breathing, walking and mugging for the TV cameras; in my head, he's still that sad kid in dead poets society who blew his brains out. i love that dr. house looks constantly demented. he's a hottie too, and the only actor who has me convinced of actually having attended med school. everyone else looks too damn pretty.

so anyway, i had a great weekend.

friday after class, we (me & jose carlos & j.d. from minneapolis na tinatawag naming girl emo; don't ask) went to a tourism trade fair at COEX mall. we had free tickets courtesy of pax coreana, a korean who'd grown up in baguio and who'd attended UP diliman around the same time i did. he's cool. so thanks to our buddy pax, we scored bagfuls of tourism-related loot like pens and cellphone thingies and brochures. we had a nice omurice (omelet+rice) fusion dinner then went home to attend the crimson house roof party.

we shouldn't have bothered. it was sad as heck, just mr. manager, his friend, the ex-manager and a couple of not very scintillating guys from the 2nd and 5th floors. i had to go rescue the two boys by reminding them that we had an appointment we were already late for. am not very good at lying through my teeth so i let j.c. do most of the oh-i'm-so-sorry-flustered acting. we then went to nearby chamsari-gil: j.c. in a pink tank top, j.d. in emo-ish floppy hair, and me wearing a chemi issoyo green silk top. we were kinda playing the "agawan ng demographics" game. ever since j.d. started hanging out with us, we noticed that we had been getting fewer stares than usual from xenophobic koreans in the subway. the stares from angry-looking korean men were now being directed at our thin & looming friend (he's of scandinavian stock, so tall he has to duck to enter the train). so j.c. decided to show some skin, and in a manner of speaking, so did i. for the first time, i beat them both. ha. ha. ha. if i knew it was that easy, i wouldn't have bothered.

we got hammered by chugging down a pitcher of yogurt-flavored soju (a little like yakult that delivers a giant kick in the head) and chewing on an equally giant dried squid. we then dragged ourselves through the rain to a nure bang (karaoke room) run by a nice old ajimma (old lady). the toilet was expectedly nasty, as these places go, but being confronted by a crusty squat-type thingy when you can't feel your feet is just the most horrific thing ever. especially in a country that styles itself as being of the first world. so you learn to hold it in, as real men do. up at the nure bang, we were all drunk enough to pick faintly emo-ish songs from the english list. i remember we screeched & moaned through stuff like "with or without you", "stan", "new year's day", "the tide is high" (which j.c. was surprised i knew; kala niya talaga atomic kitten yung original; tsk kabataan nga naman), "tom's diner", "never been to me." the high point of the evening, i think, was seeing j.d. writhe and shake his very skinny ass to something by the cranberries, "dreams" i think. my personal favorite was weezer's "say it ain't so"; made me feel ten years younger. was suprised to see mono's "life in mono" on the list too. how does that work??? anyway, we saw the rain had stopped so we crawled back to crimson house at around 1 in the morning.

saturday, i think i got up at 2 p.m., having spent most of the night reading pico iyer's video night in kathmandu. went to itaewon with the two boys for breakfast/lunch/dinner at our favorite pakistani resto, spitting distance from the big mosque. this was around 6 p.m. as always, we went by subway getting the same curious/slightly antagonistic stares from the usual xenophobes that often haunt the seoul metro. at itaewon, i had a good mutton biryani (yes, i know it's meat; minsan lang naman eh) and a horrible watery dal soup that i had to make timpla with the salt and pepper shakers on the table. we then went to our favorite english used bookshop What the Book? where i scored iyer's tropical classical. i put the book in my bag with a mixture of thrill and horror and promptly declared an indefinite moratorium on book acquisition. that was two days ago. it hasn't been easy but i think i can actually manage this.

sunday was cool. tristan & i got j.c. to attend church with us. we go to the 11 a.m. service of the onnuri english ministry at its seobinggo campus. yes, that's what they call it: campus. onnuri is one of the super-hyper-turbo-megachurches here in seoul; it even has its own TV station. walking from the subway station to church, we are greeted by row after row of imported cars owned by the onnuri congregation: lots of BMWs & benzes, the occasional porsche & jaguar. the service and the message was good, even if the preacher (a guest pastor from some church in LA) was a little scatty, like a beat poet high on God but having terrible acid flashbacks. we then subwayed our way to COEX mall for a somewhat awful sbarro lunch, then waited for our other pinoy friends. we didn't really do anything, just talked outside, had a high-endish food court dinner, hung out. kinda like what pinoys do on sundays in manila. my friends wanted to buy perfume at the COEX duty free shop but that involves the insane requirement of picking up your purchase at incheon airport, 2 hours away from seoul. WTF??? wag na lang noh.

today is not technically part of the weekend but it sure felt like it. it's the last day of the spring term and there were only four hakseng (students) in class, out of our usual 14. the news team and their engineers went on a junket to jeju island, courtesy of their sponsor organization, the filmmakers had to finish some projects, and i think asma wasn't feeling well early today. we mostly filled out evaluation forms then learned about the weather in korean. after a good lunch at well-being refectory (free yakult!), we went to namsan (a hill they like to call a mountain) where you can find the seoul tower. seoul is supposed to be famous for it but frankly, i'd never heard of seoul tower till a month after i got here. havig said that, the tower has some lovely features better expressed visually. pictures here soon. really, i will. dinner was supposed to be at the swanky Lotte** food court in nearby myeongdong but the department store is closed today for some reason so we ended up eating rather good cheap-ish shrimpburgers at Lotteria, a fastfood place like Jolibee but without mascots and they use real cheese from the netherlands.


* my last weekend
** this is a nation of conglomerates. Hyundai is not just a carmaker; there's also Hyundai department store. Lotte makes not just gum but also drinks, snacks, random food items. it's a department store much like Rustan's but it's also the force behind Lotte World, sort of like a korean disneyland, complete with the gaya-gaya castle logo.