A Weekend of Dancing/Um Fin de Semana Dançando

After an especially long week at work (Joel has no breaks on long days right now because of the middle school testing schedule), we had a chance to enjoy ourselves around town this weekend. After we got off of work on Friday night, we headed downtown for a few drinks and a little bit of clubbin'. There are a few bars in the area that are almost exclusively frequented by Western expats, but we also know a couple that are popular with the Koreans that live here. We ended the night at a dance club with the works, including a fog machine and glow sticks. Despite some undoubtedly irreversible damage to our eardrums, we had a fabulous time dancing the night away!

On Saturday morning we headed to the Gwangju International Center for our first Korean language class. There were an interesting collection of students: three Americans (Joel, one other teacher from our hogwan, and me), one Canadian woman, one Nepalese guy, and one Japanese woman. It wasn't too intimidating for us, since we will spend the first two classes covering the alphabet and Joel and I have already learned it, but I can tell it will get pretty intense as we move more into grammar and vocabulary. After class, we had Vietnamese shabu-shabu at Pho Hanoi. Shabu-shabu is a type of dish where you cook your own meat over a hot pot on a boiler built into the table. After we ate the meat, they added some rice and crab to make soup in the broth. It was delicious!

After class and lunch, we went home to get pretty and then headed to the Gwangju Arts and Culture Center to see Swan Lake. Apparently the national ballet company based in Seoul was giving a special performance here in Gwangju. We saw the flyer for it during our first weekend here and decided to buy tickets. I am so glad we did, because the show was phenomenal - some of the most talented dancers we've ever seen. Unfortunately, they did not have a live orchestra, but the quality of the recording they used was very good.

Also, I think I might be Tchaikovsky's new biggest fan.

Today was a little more relaxed. We caught the mid-morning Mass (many thanks to our Korean friend Nicolas, who gave me a pamphlet with the Order of the Mass; now I can follow along!) and then picked up some groceries to cook dinner. Unfortunately, our friend that we initially invited stood us up, but we were able to invite one of our co-workers and another Korean friend instead. Good times!

It would seem that the monsoon season has begun here in earnest. We got some heavy rain this week, and the forecasts have been predicting rain every day, though they do not always deliver. Thank goodness we had a sunny day today, though, since it was also laundry day, and we have to hang our clothes to dry! Still, we definitely need the rain - the Korean peninsula is experiencing a pretty intense drought, so if it doesn't rain, we may see the cost of food go up.

On a different note, I am a little intimidated at the prospect of learning Korean while I am still trying to hone my skills in Japanese - I am finally getting to a point where I am at least minimally conversational in Japanese, so beginning a new language might scramble my brain a little bit. I hope it will help some, too - the grammar and structure of Korean and Japanese is supposed to be very similar, so maybe Japanese will help me as a reference point. Hopefully my Japanese conversation partner will be patient if I start to mix up my vocabulary. I did that with French and Portuguese while I was growing up, so it wouldn't be the first time!