weekend recap

originally posted Sunday, December 03, 2006

i like mondays. mondays are my day to get paid to email my whole family and to blog and to still have time leftover to actually do the work for which i am so generously paid.

things (in no particular order):
i am going to tibet for christmas. i've typed that sentence a whole lot since i decided that's what i was doing, but it still seems pretty fucking weird. i am going to tibet for christmas. i'm not a buddhist, i'm not a person looking for any sort of spirituality (at least not admittedly...), i don't really know much about tibet. nonetheless, that's where i shall celebrate the little baby jesus. i might die. i need all sorts of gear like in a north face commercial. not to do any serious climbing, but just to be there. i know that i am in way over my head. but i get a land rover, a tour guide who speaks english, and i get to go to everest base camp. those are all things i didn't think would be happening about a month ago. oh yeah, and it's fucking expensive. but not as expensive as flying home to "miguk" for the holiday (obligatory konglish insert). i guess it could all fall through still, as i'm still in the process of getting my chinese tourist visa. and by "in the process" i mean, i will start that process tomorrow. and none of it has officially been paid for, probably a plus considering the visa issue.

this weekend i accomplished a few things. the first being extreme inebbriation. i really like friday nights. i really like drinking. i particularly like friday night drinking. last week was sort of a rough one for me--physically, not emotionally. well, i guess the twin-less birthday was pretty damn emotional, but it didn't hurt to stand up because of it. had some intense back pain, on account of my disease (no, not the hiv. degenerative disc disease. pretty long word for a pretty common affliction, so no, i am not seeking pity here. i'm just complaining because i can.). i think i just like to claim ownership of a disease. but i guess it's more like i'm a shareholder or something. anyhoo, pain. yes. so i went to physical therapy. in chuncheon, jules had herniated discs and had physical therapy for that, so based on her screaming and the torture she endured, i don't really have a good reason for why i decided to go to physical therapy for my back here. other than the fact that i had to take some sort of action. and walking into a hospital/clinic at least appeared to be proactive. so i go in, and physical therapy involves me laying on a heating pad, laying on some bed that punches my back and having electrodes hooked up to the problem area. no bending, no screaming. actually, just sort of a waste of time, but i have bruises to show for it? so i decided i would just tough out the pain as i always do and roll around on the old yoga ball, telling myself that i'm excercising.

but back to the innebriation. hung out with matt and helen for a little while on friday night, then we migrated up a floor and i decided that i should probably drink a lot of scotch. let the drunktardedness ensue. good gad. canadian dude steve had a pretty handsome bar and i drank 4 glasses of scotch (that i pretend to like, only because it was expensive, and i just like the idea of being a scotch drinker. and i call it scotch, but maybe it's whiskey. someone help me out here, what's the difference?). then we moved onto juliana's at about 1 or 1:30 am. and kept drinking. but it was fun to be out acting like an idiot when i knew everyone else was right there with me. i think i tried to flirt with people. eek. that must have been awkward (for the recepient[s], not me. thanks, alcohol!). went home at 3:30. taxi driver didn't give me all my change, but i didn't care since i had to stop the car early to get out and yak in the bushes. i'm a classy broad!

saturday was basketball day. i was really really hoping that dave didn't call, but he did. so i played. surprisingly not as hungover as the last time. and half court 3 on 3 (plus steve's hurt hand) treated me kindly. in my opinion i didn't play as poorly as the last time. i don't know what anyone else thought. but the funniest part of the day was brad. who's brad? good question. there were only 5 of us and we were all equally hungover, so there was some debate as to whether to actually play basketball, or just to say fuck it and go to mcdonalds. but we had to wait for the elusive brad. somehow he got invited to play, though we quickly realized that none of us had any idea who he was. so he shows up an hour late, right when we were deciding to leave. so we played. and it was swell. and then we went to mcdonald's anyway. 6 of us in a tiny korean car, dave's head touching the ceiling, me crushing the nuts of at least two of the dudes in the back seat. riding in a taxi is always a wee bit life threatening, but riding with 6 big folks in a tiny car trying to bully our way through the intersections was an adventure in itself. then i ate a big mac (for the first time in years...reminds me of the days of high school basketball where we would go get extra value meals as "snacks" after practice, then go straight home to eat our "real" dinners). the special sauce still tasted...special.

saturday night, ate some lee's pizza with the mizzou clan, some light drinking. called it an early night at 1:30 am.
sunday, had made plans to go to seonamsa and the other temple (whose name i consistently forget) via mountain trail. the real adventure (as it increasingly seems to be) was getting on the fucking bus just to get out there. we had to catch the number 1 bus at suncheon yeok. so we stand on the side that i was pretty sure i stood on the last time, but then a 1 rolls by across the street, which made us doubt my memory. so a girl tells us we need to be across the street. so we cross the street (fyi, we=me and erica) and then a 1 drives by where we were just standing. keep in mind, #1 only comes by every half hour. so the third time around when the bus came, we had been waiting at least an hour. plus it takes a pretty long time to get there.

i just realized that these bus details really aren't important at all. the point is, we got there, it was really cold. some old people decked out in north face told us it was a bad idea to hike from seonamsa to the other one. so we went to the gift shop and the people started yelling (not at us, but about us), so we quietly exited. that was not monklike behavior!

the end. good gad.