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Stolen from friends' Facebooks.

berfday

Went out last night and got shittered. Two hours at an all-you-can-boozery (amazingly good microbrewed beer including a stout on par with Guinness and a Belgian white that's far better than Hoegaarden or Blanche de Chambly), followed by drinks and dancing in Anyang. Dude at the Microbrewery from Seattle was also celebrating his 25th birthday. He was weird.

Know what's easier than posting photos on a blog? Posting photos on Facebook. I have lots of pictures there. Yes, it's narcissistic and stupid, but you know what? YOU'RE NARCISSISTIC AND STUPID. I will still post some here, though.


Lookit all these people I work with! In a bar!







Then we went dancing. There was supposed to be a 10,000 won (~$10) cover charge, but we didn't have to pay it, and the cover charge is supposed to include a free shot of tequila, but instead of that they served UNLIMITED FREE TEQUILA all night so I had like six shots and danced to shitty music with my friends until some douche bag decided to act all hard. The dude in the black toque in the top left of this next photo wanted to pick a fight with me for no reason. Ge (centre of picture) stepped between us and asked him to go away, so he tried to punch her in the face. Dylan (Ge's husband) was thereby obligated to fight the piece of shit, whose friends were very apologetic about the whole thing. I need to get a taser.



Hey, check out this comic I didn't make!

Food

I've found cooking to be pretty frustrating here--nobody has an oven, and toaster ovens have limited utility by comparison. We usually have a hell of a time finding key ingredients for many of our favorite dishes--for instance, Jimmy has a tough time finding stuff to make good Mexican food with, and the selection of cheese at CostCo, while pretty good, is effing expensive. Also, I've never seen cream anywhere, and herbs and spices are very limited. So, improvisation is key. That said, I've had some really good home-cooked meals here, and I've managed to not fuck up a few of them myself. Tonight I decided to do something with the giant jar of capers, nearly-expired zucchini, pound of salami that needed to be eaten sooner rather than later, and crushed chili flakes that I'd yet to put to any use. (Most or all of that stuff is from CostCo, of course.) I was really pleased with the result, and will definitely make it again. Here's the recipe. Try it out for yourself, and if you're so inclined, leave suggestions or one or more of your favorites in the comments (especially if they require relatively straight-forward ingredients).

-Penne
-Olive oil
-Butter
-Capers
-Chili flakes
-Lemon zest
-Garlic
-Basil (fresh is better, but dried worked fine)
-Coarsely ground pepper
-Chopped salami (calabrese would be perfect--feel free to send me some by courier)
-Chopped zucchini (they call it "green pumpkin" here, in case you care--what's that? You don't?!)
-White wine (I used the good stuff--Carlo Rossi, natch)
-Salt

Cook the pasta, al dente being ideal. (You could use gnocchi, but I'm saving the fresh stuff I got in Thailand for when I find gorgonzola cheese.) In a frying pan, combine olive oil, butter, salt, chili flakes, and wine, and cook on low heat until the garlic is translucent. Add zucchini and basil. After maybe two minutes, add the salami, lemon zest, and capers. When the zucchini is tender, add coarse pepper, toss in the noodles, and serve with parmesan.

I'd recommend adding chunks of bocconcini or buffalo mozzarella when you're tossing the noodles with the other stuff, but I won't be extorted to the tune of $20 for 200g of either, thanks.




Once I find ricotta or chevre (that isn't $15/200g), I want to try making pork tenderloin tournedos in my toaster oven, but I might have to settle for cream cheese. Pine nuts are inexplicably affordable here, so I think I'll try spinach, soft cheese (whatever kind), crushed pine nuts, and rosemary wrapped up in tenderloin. I might also try and make a lemon risotto to accompany it, but the likelihood of me botching that is pretty high considering my shitty cooking implements and inability to pay close attention to anything for longer than eight seconds.

Blooga blooga

"Winter" here is pretty sweet. I'm sure the abnormally warm weather can be in part attributed to global warming, but I say we enjoy it, at least until New York and London are under water. It's like ten degrees outside today, and I've been wearing a spring jacket for the past week or so.

I've been downloading more music than I've had time to listen to. I have fallen in love all over again with the Jesus and Mary Chain, especially their Munki album. Holy crrrrrap is it good. And I listen to "Elephant Stone" by the Stone Roses like a hundred times a day. I kind of want to learn Portugese just so that I can sing along (poorly) to Seu Jorge's Bowie covers from The Life Aquatic. I love The Thermals' new album, The Body, The Blood, The Machine, as well as Fuckin' A. They're touring with the Hold Steady. I assume they're going to be in Toronto. And I've been listening to my friend Jeff Latosik's new album a lot since he e-mailed it to me a couple of weeks ago. He's an incredible songwriter and a gifted musician, so it'll only be a matter of time before you can go see him play if he's not already doing so on a regular basis. Get on it! (And Jeff--despite the fact that MySpace is really annoying, it wouldn't be a bad idea insofar as you want people to have access to your songs, no?) So, what have you all been listening to?

I think I might have figured out how to put photos in order, which has got me pretty fuckin' stoked. Turns out it was really easy and I'm just technologically inept. I'd like to learn how to post YouTube videos directly onto my blog so that you can laugh along with me at videos of people hurting themselves pretty badly or getting tasered by angry police officers. (What the fuck did people do before Teh Internetz? Read books?)

Greg and I went into the big electronics market, Yong-san, so that Greg could pick up a sweet pair of headphones. Of course I ended up buying a pair too, as well as a new mp3 player and a bunch of movies and blank DVDs for Greg to rip movies onto for me. At some point in my life I will think about curbing my impulsive shopping habits, but not today. No, sir.

Here's a poster for a musical I might go see. I hate musicals, but I've heard this one is good. I've never actually seen the movie, but it's on my list.



Here are some pictures of one of the buildings at Yong-san. I'd say each floor is about thirty thousand square feet, and there are five or six floors in each building, and maybe four buildings. Of course these are guesstimates, but the idea is, it's effing big.





Here's us taking pictures on the subway. Greg got that camera, a manual SLR with a nice zoom lens, for three hundred bucks in Hong Kong (or maybe it was Beijing...?) over Christmas. He's a really good photographer, and is working on getting a website set up to show off his work on. Manual photography is actually an even better idea these days, because for like five bucks you can get your pictures developed onto CD-ROM instead of photo paper and manipulate them like any other j-peg file.






We got back to Beomgye, the part of Anyang nearest our building with a subway stop. Here's Greg admiring one of the nice establishments:



If you're a fan of Arrested Development, as you damn well should be, you're probably wondering if this guy here inspired the odd name of the place.



This kid was running around, slaughtering imaginary jerks with his balloon lightsaber. He was pretty cool, so naturally we stuffed him into a sack and added him to the collection. His sister didn't make the cut, though, so we let her mom keep her.






Here's Greg modeling Absolut "Bling Bling" vodka. It's just a regular bottle with gold wrap on it, but still... ballin'!!!




Amanda, Jimmy, Colin and I went into Hongdae later in the evening. I've mentioned the place before, but since you've forgotten, it's an area full of artsy, Westernized Koreans and foreigners who for the most part aren't military douche bags. We ate Thai food and, after searching for what seemed like a billion years, finally found this neato hookah bar. It's a catacomb-ish basement converted into a hippie den, with good music, beer, and good sheesha. There were pools of water with flowers and candles floating in them, and everybody sits on cushions on the floor or in elevated recesses. Pretty cool place. When we left there, we ran into Drew from Montana and her friend Marlie. We went to a bar called Tin Pan, which has really cheap tequila, but stayed for half an hour because the top-40 hip hop soundtrack was super shitty. Then we went home. Fun!







Finally, some more pictures of students. The cute kid is James 3, as there are two other James in his class. He refers to himself as such, which is pretty funny. "James 3! 100%! O-KAAAAY!!!!" The other kid is 'Short-Shorts', a.k.a. Paul. Apparently he used to wear short-shorts. I hate him. He likes to threaten to punch girls in the face for fun, which is actually an improvement over his previous tendency towards actually punching them in the face. He's the tough, cool kid in the class, which is all the more ridiculous considering his affinity for yellow corduroy pants with red stains all over them and that ridiculous shaggy haircut. He sucks.

Finally...

...some photos from Thailand that I didn't take. Sara's a much better photographer than I, but these are relatively low-res photos. Included (in no order that I seem able to take charge of) are photos of us en route, in Surathani (sp?), on Koh Phangan ("Happy Shakes" totally give me the happy shakes), in Bangkok (that's a hookah in a fantastic Arabic restaurant, FYI, not a bong), and returning home. The photo of the two guys wading through the water is the closest thing I have to a picture of Tim's huge fucking octopus tattoo all over his left shoulder, which is totally bad-ass. He used to be in the navy, and is really fun and easy-going for a guy that looks really effing mean. The old Thai guy on stage, and posing in the picture with Sara, has been a staple at this really great bar in Bangkok for decades. He can wail. The Sikh guys in the bar with us are the tailors who made us suits and then insisted that we go out drinking with them at their expense. Ridiculously nice guys, whose sweatshops crank out some of the slickest-looking suits I've ever had the pleasure of wearing. (The whole process, including sizing, cutting the fabric, re-sizing the cut pieces to my body, assembling the pieces, and finishing the detailing took three days, and each suit-shirt-tie combo cost about $150. One is cashmere, one is linen. Jimmy got roughly the same thing. HOT is what we look like.) Some of the photos at the end are from the company holiday "party" and our subsequent much better time out drinking afterwards. I work with really cool, really good-looking people.

So yeah, this will amount to a slough of images in quasi-chronological order, but I'm not aware of any way of sorting everything that isn't really tedious. (Or perhaps I'm just e-tarded. Either way... same-same, as they say here.) You can always inquire as to the subject matter of a photo if you want to know, of course.