more Korean culture

Last weekend my friend Amy came up to visit me! She was the first guest I've had overnight at my place, and the guestroom has been deemed sleepable. So come visit me friends! ha. Anyway, so we went out for dinner with some friends Saturday night, and I got some serious perspective on my Korean skills. While I still understand little to nothing and my vocabulary is limited, I realized that I'm getting the gist of more things. I managed to negotiate with a cab driver that he was going the wrong way, and I was able to direct him in Korean to my house! Understand, this was a matter of saying right, left straight, but hey. We got home. I was proud! I'm getting hooked up with a Korean college student sometime soon too. She wants to learn English, and I've agreed to trade with her to learn some Korean, so I should be getting better at this. One can only hope. I've been here way too long to have picked up as little as I have. People weren't kidding when they said Korean was hard.

I also had my second go at a bath house this weekend. I called and arranged some massages for the girls, and I decided that I wanted to check out the hot tubs. Apparently I shouldn't have chosen a Saturday for my first venture. The place we went is an enormous four story spa with all kinds of services available, and for just a couple bucks, you can go and hang out in the hot tubs and saunas for as long as you want. I only needed about a half an hour to realize that there were way too many people there. Hanging out with a bunch of naked women isn't quite relaxing, but hanging out with over a hundred naked women and their kids and grandmas is just stressful. And it is truly a bath house. I was the only one there to relax it seems. Everyone else had a bucket of products and were cleaning themselves or their family quite vigorously. I did manage to find an outdoor hot tub that was almost empty and closed completely from the noise inside. This was quite pleasant. I also found turbo showers. These throw water down so hard that the only place you can stand for it to hit you is on your back. It seemed like something you would find at a water park. It was an adventure to say the least. I think next time I'll try a weekday. :)