a day in the life

I've sworn off alcohol.

Correction: I've sworn off going to bars and spending a ton of money on alcohol. On Friday I turned down several offers to go out drinking after work. I did this because I'm tired of my weekends being a two day journey of getting drunk, sleeping, getting drunk again, and then nursing myself back to full strength so as to be able to endure the next week of work.

So, last night I stayed in and did nothing. The benefits of this were two-fold. For one, I got to stay up late enough to watch some first round March Madness. Also, I was able to wake up refreshed the next morning and go to Dunkin Donuts to sit in the sun for an hour and fill out some report cards.

After completing a dozen or so of 'em, I headed to a cell phone store to put some minutes on my phone. From there I grabbed a chicken sandwich and some fries from Lotteria, my local fast food joint.

At about 4 or 5 I took a taxi with a couple of co-workers, one of which was the "new guy" who has been here for 2 weeks, to a more bustling part of town, where street markets abound, to find some warm-weather work clothes. We walked around for a bit, saw some meat markets with pig intestines for sale, and fish markets with the kind of horrid smell one might expect of a fish market.

While there, we stumbled across the Korean equivalent of thrift stores, pretty much people selling mounds of clothes on the side of the road. I spent 4,000 won on a couple of shirts, a purchase which immediately qualified the day as a good day.

At around 8 I was ready to leave. The three of us stopped by a little restaurant, I had the duk-mandu-guk, and then it was my intention to head home.

But! But the new guy wasn't quite ready to go home. After the other co-worker and I mentioned that we were gonna make our way back home, the new guy decided he wasn't too keen on the idea. I couldn't allow the guy to wander around in a foreign country all alone not knowing what the hell to do, so I decided to stay with him, and we went out for a few drinks. We ended up in a Western bar (Western bar=white people) where a handful of other people were. I met some nice people there, got challenged to a chess game and was ultimately humiliated in said game by a girl, a girl who later admitted to being a former child chess prodigy who was trained by a grandmaster in her youth.

After a few more drinks, while on that precipitous ledge where tipsy turns into full-blown drunk, I exercised self control and called it a night. I took a taxi home, and here I am.

That's what I did today.