Korean basketball, Cass, and Shabu Shabu, oh my!

It's Sunday evening and I'm back at One Tree Hill. It's such a tease to have skype but not be able to use it here. I've considered it, but I feel a little too rude talking on skype while students are trying to study all around me.
This weekend was really fun. After work on Friday we went out to the same restaurant from last week to have a goodbye dinner for one of the guys at the office. After dinner Tyler and I headed back to Sinchon to meet up with some of our friends. We went to a smokey little bar that was located in a basement, and to get to the bathroom you had to walk up a steep staircase and then bathroom was a squat bathroom, ew. My friend Kathy said that in the Philippines (where she did peace corps for two years) all the bathrooms are sqautties (haha, potty but squatty), and let me tell you, they are naaasty. The floor is just covered in piss. Not going back ther e!
On Saturday, Tyler, Matt, Mark and I were invited to a professional Korean basketball game by one of Mark's students. It was awesome. His student gets free tickets through his company. But this is crazy: The student Jae has a girlfriend named Jessica, who lived in California for a couple years, turns out she lived in Albany (the same city I lived in), so I asked where she went to school. She not only went to my elementary school, but she was in my fifth grade class. Miss Wiley! Jessica even still has her old class roster, so Jae was like, "you used to live on Jackson street!" What a small world! I still can't believe that.
The game was pretty cool, we went to Inchoen, which is a city outside of Seoul, probably an hour drive with traffic. We were rooting for the Inchoen Land Elephants. They were playing the Hundai Egis (the top ranked team in Korea) and the poor elephants got slaughtered in the fourth quarter, but in their defense the Egis are like the Yankees or the Lakers. Each team has two foreigners, so there were four really tall african american guys and everyone else was korean and shorter. The players moved so gracefully though, this one guy looked like he floated up to the basket. One of the Elephants is called the Living Legend (I'm assuming their star player) and he was playing really badly, and he finally made a basket but it didn't count cause of a penalty, and he almost lost it. He started pounding his fists on the foam fence around the court, and then burried his face like he was crying. Then at another point in the game, the Living Legend fell down and just laid there, but the ball ricochetted off the net and hit him in the face! He was not having a good day.
After the game Jae and Jessica took us to a Shabu Shabu restaurant that was delicious. We sat on the floor, and there is a big bowl of broth that cooks at the table, and then the staff brings you dumplings, beef strips, veggies, and noodles, all uncooked. then you cook the meat and veggies and they cook really quickly in the broth and are delicious. After the meat,veggies and dumplings are gone, you put the noodles in and eat the soup, and then after the noodles are gone, you add the rice and it turns into a porridge. It's great, not too expensive, and very filling, and I like that there is a special process that you have to follow.
After dinner I took a twenty minute power nap before heading back over to Tyler's to have beer and soju. Matt and Tyler told me about Canada and the importance of patios in bars, and Jae and Jessica taught us Korean drinking games. One game is rock, paper, scissors, and the loser gets flicked in the forehead by the winner, unfortunately for Tyler, Jae was really good at flicking. I declined the offer to play.
This morning I peeled myself out of bed and went to Kathy's for brunch. I brought coffee and milk, but other people brought legitimate food so I enjoyed quite the feast. Bacon, scrambled eggs, french toast, coffee cake, yum! It was a good weekend. Next weekend will be rough because I have to work on Saturday. I'm sleeping early tonight because I didn't sleep much in the past two days.
Over and out, the weekend warrior.