The Ballerina Who Loves a B-boy

We went to see a play called The Ballerina Who Loves a B-boy a few weekends ago and I've been putting off blogging about it because I had too many pictures. I wanted to try and do something cool with them first and I just finished.

The theatre wasn't the best venue I've been to. It reminded me of a cheap school theatre that didn't take comfort into consideration when it was being built. The seats were hard plastic and the back of the chair only went 3/4's of the way up my back (made for smaller people I guess) which wasn’t the recliner feeling I was hoping for.

The crowd was very involved and everyone cheered throughout the play. It made the crowds at NHL hockey games back home sound like nothing. Let’s just say that if they did the wave, everyone, and I mean everyone, except for a few foreigners, would have gotten up.

The play was really cool. There was no dialogue but lots of music and dancing. “B-boy” stands for break-dancer and that’s exactly what we saw, a lot of really amazing moves that told the story. Since you probably won’t see the play, in the end the Ballerina becomes a break-dancer to be with her man, any they live happily ever after.

The tickets were $40 Cnd each and were very easy to get (click here to see what I mean) since a friend of ours figured it all out for us. Thanks Ben!

Drinking in South Korea

Every now and then we find ourselves going out on the town and drinking some of South Korea's finest alcoholic choices.

The most famous has to be "Soju" which is South Korea's version of Vodka, in my opinion. Koreans usually drink this straight by the shot, and at an average of $1.00 Cnd per bottle at 20% alcohol, you could easily do some major damage with this stuff. We find it is best mixed with other fluids like juice or pop and although it isn't the best alcohol we've had, it is definitely the most cost efficient.

Beer or "Mek-ju" is probably the most popular drink here for foreigners and Angèle is even finding herself with no other choice but to drink beer. Hite, also known as "Shite" by foreigners, is our favorite, although it isn't that good of a beer, it will do the job while we are here. (that rhymed, unintentionally.) The most cost efficent for drinking at home is the 1600ml bottle which is $4.30 Cnd.

Drinking is very popular in South Korea, as it is in most countries, and it is very common for a group of men to go drinking after work while the wife takes care of the kids. We often see groups of men wandering around downtown drunk out of their minds by 9pm. If you are asked to go out for drinks after work, it is considered insulting to decline, so no one does. It would be hard to be a recovering alcoholic here.

Drinking at the table with friends in Korea is quite fun. You don't usually order anything for yourself, but everything is ordered as a group and you share. You never pour your own drink, even if you get a bottle or pitcher and start pouring for everyone else. Once you're done, someone will quickly take the pitcher from your hands, grab your glass and pour one for you. Koreans are very good at noticing when your glass is low and they quickly fill it up. It's sometimes hard to keep an empty glass! Restaurants or bars never split the bill. I'm sure they would if we asked but we just figure it out for ourselves.

Corner Store

This is a little blog on the corner stores here in South Korea, they are pretty much all alike. Out front they have a few stands with some product for sale, the one we shop at the most has a lot of produce outside. The corner stores don't have a back room so they stock all their product in the store on the floor or on the outside as you see in the pictures. The floor on the inside in some stores is so packed that we have to walk down the aisle sideways to get to what we want. The prices are usually pretty good and somewhat compare to all the other shops and stores around except for when it comes to pop, I pay an extra $0.90 Cnd for a Coke Zero at the corner store compared to the grocery store.

Recycling

We realized that we were wrong with some of the recycling procedures and we knew that there was a small window for when recycling was done but we could never figure it out. The only time we saw it being done was on a Friday night when we got back from school one week. We have been reading this sign in our elevator and we were almost sure it explained the recycling details and so I took a picture of it and asked one of the Korean teachers at school.

It turns out that every Friday between 6:30am to 9am is recycling time and our building which is 102 needs to take their recycling to the front of building 104 along with building 101 and 104.

This explains a lot since every Friday morning there is a guy giving 1 minute announcements every 20 minutes on the very loud speakers in our apartments. It's hard to sleep in on Friday. I don't understand why they need to keep announcing it. It's every Friday from 6:30am to 9am, WE GET IT ALREADY! Too bad I can't turn off the speaker.

Police Action

This is the first time we've seen any police action since we've been here. Usually we just see the police driving around or sleeping on park benches but yesterday on my way to work I saw these 2 cops trying to deal with a drunk woman on the side of the road. That green bottle is Soju which is a very popular 20% drink of hard alcohol. The police officers stayed with her for over 1 hour and did nothing more than you see in the picture. At one point the officer helped her light a cigarette as she was yelling at the top of her lungs. We were in our school on the 4th floor with the windows closed and I could still hear her.


In Canada she would have been off the street in 2 minutes and would have received a 24 hour luxury stay at "hotel" jail. She might even have been charged with 'drunk and disorderly' or whatever that charge is. I don't know how this ended because I got bored and I had to go teach. I think they waited until she was sober and then went on their way.