The easiest day of the week yet! All of my classes were "cancelled" or rather, they were just all finished. We are required to teach 51 hours of English to them and they had all reached their 51, so we were finished with everyone. I spent the morning working on an interview questionnaire for my friend SooBok who is creating an adoption newsletter/newspaper/magazine in Italy.
Originally I was told we were having a staff lunch and we would go around 1 or 1:40. A little after 12, when some other teachers were finishing their classes, they started talking and I noticed people putting their coats on. My favorite COT told me "let's go" and then explained that they complained to the Head Teacher that they were all hungry and we got permission to leave for our lunch early. We went to shabu shaub (the soup you cook yourself with thinly shaved beef) for lunch, but it was kind of expensive. More expensive than what I remember. Oh well. After lunch, we were done for the day! I headed to Hongdae and met Jacob. We wandered and shopped a bit before finding a cafe and hanging out there. I was meeting my friend Jenna at 6:30, but she sent me a message saying she'd be delayed quite a bit, so Jacob and I stayed at the cafe until she was closer to Hongdae.
I met up with Jenna and we went to Oodle Noodle. I wanted to go to Grill5 (the taco place) but it was on the far side of Hongdae and it had cooled off quite a bit. We decided since the noodle place was closer we'd go there instead. It was great catching up with her. It's only been 2 months since I've seen her, but a lot has happened! She got engaged while she was home. Her fiance is Korean, Korean, so, her engagement wasn't really like a typical American one. After we had dinner she suggested coffee, but I told her I had one errand I needed to run before. I had gone to this chocolate shop/cafe once before and wanted to get some chocolate for Jacob. Valentine's Day in Korea is celebrated a little bit differently. Valentine's Day the girls are supposed to give the guys chocolates. March 14 is called "White Day" and this is the day guys give girls gifts (typically white chocolate or other white gifts). There's actually a whole year of holidays on the 14th of each month... April 14 is called "Black Day" and the singles all eat jjajangmyeon (noodles with a black sauce). There's also Yellow Day on May 14...and on and on... Anyway, I wanted to pick up some chocolate for Jacob so we wandered around a bit while I looked for the shop. The chocolate is really good, but extremely expensive!
We then walked a little more to find a cafe. We picked one called Cafe Etonne and it was really cute. It was kind of funny, we watched a blind date unfold while we were there. (Another side note, blind dates are EXTREMELY common in Korea. I think almost the #1 answer I get when I ask a couple how they met is "소개팅" /sogetting/ aka blind date). When we arrived Jenna spotted it immediately and said "look how nervous the guy is!" As time wore on I would catch the new couple out of the corner of my eye and they were holding hands. After we finished our teas we headed back to the subway station. Jenna wanted to stop at a stationery store, but I had to duck out because it was getting late and I was pretty tired.
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