I slept well and had about an hour to drink coffee and study before breakfast officially began. It’s a generous, if carb heavy (not that I am giving any fcks about carbs) spread: ramen, cereal, and toast.
After changing into day clothes, I took off to a nearby cinema to catch the first showing of Captain Marvel. I got there right at the scheduled start time, but there was about a ten minute window of commercials and trailers. Despite being a 9:20 am showing, there were about at least a dozen people in the decent sized theater. I was happy to find the ticket price to be half of what I scoped out in another theater. The movie was a solid, if uninspired, Marvel entry. Brie Larson seemed to be doing more posing with attitude than acting. I kept imagining the alternate universe where Hillary won, and seeing the movie as the victory lap it deserved to be, rather than the “girl power” anthem that feels hollow in the real rage of the #metoo era. I suppose it is an example of art imitating life. Black Panther (i.e. Obama) blew the socks off everyone, while Captain Marvel (i.e. Hillary) falls a little short. In any case, I’m looking forward to End Game next month.
I chilled back in the hostel lobby for about half an hour before going to lunch. There is a reasonably priced old-school Korean restaurant just down the street, and I am planning to go their pretty much everyday. The clientele is all middle aged men and construction workers, so its right up my alley. Of course, I had kimchi stew, but I swear I’ll eventually try everything on the menu.
I took a nap and continued studying Korean through the afternoon, until it was time to go for a run. I did two laps along the beach and tried to up the pace over a shorter distance. I showered and immediately went to the Home Plus to grab a salad and some sort of snacky thing.
In the afternoon, I had googled “pub quiz Busan” on a lark, and found a bar that was hosting a pub quiz that very night. Though I had been hoping to keep my dry streak going a couple more days, its been too long since my last trivia. I took the subway over to the Gwangan beach area where “HQ Gwangan” is located to find the bar completely devoid of people. The quiz was scheduled to begin at 9:30 (which is completely insane), and I rolled in just after 8. How was there no one there grabbing a burger and a drink to unwind after work? By nine, the place was hopping with English teachers. I joined the team of the guys sitting next to me playing Scrabble at the bar.
So apparently, all the pub quizzes in Korea turn it into straight up gambling. Everyone pays in (2 bucks a person) and the winning team takes the pot. That is one way to balance team sizes. We had a decent showing in a three way tie for second, but there was no scenario where we could have answered differently to get us in to first place. My teammates have already invited me to join them next week.
I left with enough time to catch the subway back to Haeundae, and swung by the GS25 to grab a little snack as a 夜宵 (ye4xiao1) because I was really feeling the three beers I had drunk over 3 hours. The spicy ttoekbokki was probably a bad idea, but it didn’t keep me from falling straight asleep. There was no one else in my dorm, so I didn’t have to pretend to try to be quiet coming in and brushing my teeth.
Friday morning, I was hanging around downstairs quietly working during the breakfast rush, when I was asked to help shoot a promo video for the hostel. The manager had asked me the other day and I agreed since I like the place well enough. I ran upstairs to get cleaned up and shave. It was just a few minutes of me acting like I was helping myself to the breakfast, and since I can’t waste food, I ate a second breakfast. I was given a few vouchers for free coffee by way of thanks.
Since I had two breakfasts, I figured I could skip lunch and took a long nap instead. In the afternoon, I redeemed one of the vouchers for an Americano in the hostel’s cafe. The cafe space in the other building is actually a lot more cozy than the fairly sterile lobby/lounge in the building where my dorm is.
I was getting really restless by mid-afternoon, but as the pollution had crept up beyond my running threshold I couldn’t go for a run. I did take a long walk, winding my way up and down most of the streets in the fairly smallish Haeundae neighborhood. It was nice to get out of the hostel, but I still had the problem of nothing to do and feeling overwhelmed by ennui.
At 5 pm, I moseyed over to the supermarket next door and grabbed a bottle of pomegranate soju. I busied myself with vocabulary while working my way through the bottle slowly and managed to forget my ennui. I suppose the many groups of people checking in provided some degree of distraction as well.
When I finished the soju, I headed over to my “favorite” restaurant to try something else off the menu, and I picked up another bottle of original soju on the way back to the hostel. I noticed a police car parked in the street and there were two cops in the lobby talking with the front desk. When they left, I asked the guy at the front desk what was up. Apparently, a guest had dropped a wallet outside the hostel in the morning and it disappeared. So, maybe Korea isn’t as perfectly safe as I have been imagining it.
The evening picked up from there as I was relaxing into the soju. A Metallica song somehow found its way onto the playlist which is usually just a dozen generic pop songs on infinite loop (thanks to Youtube’s algorithm), and a Latvian girl struck up a conversation with me when she noticed I was rocking out. We chatted while she was eating her bento box dinner and had a bit of soju together. She has tickets to see them in the summer (jealous!), though the thought occurs to me if I’m kicking around Europe in the summer, I might be able to attend some concerts. We took a stroll around a nearby park to soak up the night scenery.
Back at the hostel, she went straight up to go to sleep, but I had half a bottle of soju left in the fridge to drink. There was a large party of Chinese speaking folks chowing down on bowls of instant noodles and takeout boxes of crab legs. (Srsly wtf). I asked them where they were from in Chinese, they answered Taiwan, and then promptly cleared out. (Srsly wtf).
By the time I finished my soju, it was maybe 10 and the lounge was empty except for a Chinese girl taking photos of everything on her phone. I honestly can’t for the life of me remember if we conversed in English or Chinese, but we talked for a while. I was slightly disappointed to find I had some roommates snoring away, but such is life.
| Movie Matinee | 6000 |
| Lunch (Kimchi stew) | 6000 |
| Dinner (Salad + Snack) | 5190 |
| Beers | 19000 |
| Subtotal: | 36190 |
| Snack | 1350 |
| Soju | 1400 |
| Hangover Soup | 7000 |
| Soju | 1400 |
| Subtotal: | 11150 |
| Total: | 47340 W (286.4 RMB) (USD 42.6) |
Running Total:
9374.4 RMB
(USD 1394.7)
Daily Average:
234 RMB
(USD 34.86)