Seoul High Lights Reel

Oh my God, y'all. There's a lot I've been doing since I wrote that first email about a month ago. Here are the high lights:

-Korean Kristmas
(Warning: Most of this stolen from an email I wrote to Victoria, because I'm lazy)
I don't know what I expected Christmas to be like here, but I ended up having an almost traditional holiday. We had lights in the apartment, Justin stole a bunch of branches from Namsan hill and he decorated all our doorways. On Christmas eve, he nailed some of them together to a plank of wood and I made paper and popcorn garlands and an angel and voila! The world's most ghetto Christmas tree was born.

He and our neighbor Craig made eggnog from scratch (you do NOT want to know how many eggs went into it) and mulled wine and we had people over and got really drunk and watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas. ( P.S. I am not going to tell you how many Christmas cartoons I watched in total because you would be disgusted. I even watched Scooby Doo Christmas!) Some of my house mate Paige's friends spent the night and we opened presents in the morning and had breakfast (I made it!) and later, we had a traditional dinner ordered from the Army base. It was pretty nice.

-The Sauna
Seriously, you have lived until you've been to a Korean sauna. I went after having a few drinks, praise Allah, because I could not have done it sober. I went with Craig, his girlfriend Sunah, and Justin at about midnight. I did not know that I had to strip down and shower with a room full of naked women but boy was I glad I had had that beer before going. It was so intense that you just have to say, fuck it and be naked in a room full of naked Korean women. The rest of the sauna (where you get to wear clothes) is pretty surreal, too. Unlike American saunas, which are pretty basic, these saunas are basically a place where you can do everything in matching pajamas. There are computer rooms, restaurants, movie rooms, massage chairs, traditional sauna rooms, bars, blah blah blah. I can't wait to go back.

-New Year's
Oh, New Years. My least favorite holiday...so much pressure to have fun. This was actually pretty fun. Started off at a hotel party, went to a weird club that looked like the bastard love child of a wasp nest and the bar from the first Star Wars, grabbed and pulled some random dude, cried while eating fried something, drunk dialed Julia, and passed out in my clothes. Good times!

-The Shopping
It's amazing. I love Muji (www.muji.co.uk) and the little stands that sell cute ankle socks. As Paige says, go cute or go home. Anyone planning on visiting, come prepared to do some serious damage.

-The Drinking
Dudes and dudettes, it is way too easy to get totally wasted here. Bars are open so late and the (shitty) beer is so cheap. This past weekend, I was the drunkest I've ever been in this country and it was pretty damn drunk. I'm not going to lie, there was puke involved and non-consensual toe nail painting.

That's been my month so far...there are tons of little things but I'll write about those later. Let me know if you want to be automatically updated (or hopefully there's some way you can sign yourself up because...seriously...I'm lazy). I'll try to be good about updating and responding to emails.