Bad luck day continues...

Mr. James and I leave our horrible work day on a low note of Minnie asking us for money. We tell her we don’t get paid till Saturday, or probably Monday, and we have no money, but I don’t think she was understanding because she kept asking. Sometimes, the language barrier is rough. I kept getting more and more angry the less she understood. I was already not having a nice day, so I had no patience for that. So Mr. James and I left with “Cora,” our Californian co-worker, and we decided to get dinner....Oh wait! Mr. James and I have no money! So Cora, a.k.a. my favorite person in the whole world right now, told us she would treat us to dinner! Yay! We are saved! After delicious dinner, we decide it was late and head on home. On the way, we see some “white people” In a restaurant which was cool, but we didn’t really do anything. Korea is like that. We drop Cora off at her apartment and head on to ours. We get to the door before I realize my key is not in my pocket. It’s also not in my bag, or in Mr. James pocket. OH NO! I must have left it at school! So we head on back to the school, get in the elevator and head on up. Right as the doors close I ask Mr. James,

“Do you think they gate the doors so no one can get in?”

“We can just jump over it.”

“No. I mean straight across the who

le doors... like that.” Sure enough, I was righ

t and there was no way to get in. We head back outside and start retracing our steps. We head back to the kimbap place. With continuing poor luck, we find no keys. We decide to keep retracing our steps and come across the restaurant with the other foreigners, and they are just finishing up their meal and coming out. Oh cool! We meet the foreigners, although I had met one of them before! “Ninja” is the first foreigner to ever talk to me (besides Cora and Tom) since I came to Korea! I was outside taking pics for Tom and someone taps me on the shoulder! It was Ninja. She’s so cool! Anyway, we meet up with her and her friend “Lily” . We get to talking and It just happens to come up how we are locked out and Ninja invites us up for tea. How nice! We accept because we have lots o time to kill until 12 p.m. tomorrow (when the school opens).

We go in to her apartment and IT IS AWESOME! If you want to know why the you will have to find her and meet her yourself. While drinking tea, we decide it might be worth a shot to

see if we can some how break in. We head on up to our apartment and and look up three stories and realize there is no way in hell. The time now is about quarter to one and we are getting desperate. We head into the bar below our apartment and ask if they know who the land lord is. Of course they speak NO ENGLISH, language barrier, so we leave and talk outside. About five minutes later she comes outside and tells us to come in. We follow her thinking she is going to help us. She tells us to sit down and we comply. Then she comes over with three beers and 4 glasses and sets them down with some crackers. No quite what we wanted but... OK! Oh wait! I don’t like beer. Unlucky day continues... After Ninja, Lily, and Mr. James (Wait a sec! Mr. James doesn’t drink! Guess he does today...) finish off the beer, we head back outside. Ninja tells us we can stay with her, but I would hate to put her out like that. Especially with people who she barley knows. Who knows!? We could me notorious murderers from the states who came here with stolen identities and a thirst for blood, not that we are, but she doesn’t know that... yet! So we say our goodbyes and they head off. We are seriously thinking about calling Cora, but at this point, it is around 2:30 a.m. and she is probably sleeping. Not to mention she does a lot for us and I would hate to inconvenience her again.

We decide to walk across the street to the local park and play on the exercise machines. It’s like our own personal gym! It was fun for about a half hour and then we were bored again. Mr. James then had the bright idea to call Tom and tell him about our misfortune. After we decide to see if we can find some internet. We head to the cafe, but it is closed and they locked away all our their outside furniture, so we keep on walking. Mr. James then remembers where we met “Rock”. I remembered I had opened my laptop there and got on facebook and friended him on the spot (I’m so lonely!). Good old Unicorn internet source, I’ll never know who you belong to, but you have an awesome name. We went to Buy the Way, which may be the great

est name for a store ever, and sat on the uncomfortable plastic chairs and somehow got to talking about spiders and sloths. To clarify a bit, Mr. James was thinking if reincarnation is a legitimate phenomenon, it might be great to come back as a sloth. I mentioned they are very good swimmers, which made Mr. James happy, because he does love swimming. We then happened to see a spider have dinner above our heads, which was beautiful and disturbing both at once. We stayed at this store for the better part of two hours, and it is where I started writing my blog post, While we were at the store, multiple interesting things happened.

I saw three or four drunk crazy Korean guys walk up the street. I didn’t pay too much attention at first, but when I looked up from the computer again, I noticed one of them staring at me. The others, of course, were peeing in the bushes not ten feet from me. I looked away and pretended to be embarrassed and looked away. He waved and proceeded to walk over, when he reached me, he started talking to me in Korean, I asked him if he spoke English, but he didn’t speak much. Only “A little.” His friends were finished peeing and walked over. One of them, wearing a gaudy lime green sweatshirt thing. He stuck out his hand and started shaking my hand. At that point, I realized he was probably using that hand to pee, so I wiped it on my shirt. Ewww! He started talking to me, so I was surrounded by three creepy old Korean men. At this point, Mr. James had

been playing a claw machine across the street, and noticed the commotion. He crossed the street, and with a brief nod of the head, the men ran for the hills. Literally, Daejeon is surrounded by hills.

Later, an old trash man came and was collecting cardboard. He had a very old, disheveled looking dog, who was cute in a sad sort of way. An old lady came out of the store with a sausage for the dog, and he was so cute when he sat and asked for it!

After several failed attempts at a highly rigged claw machine,

Mr. James suggests we walk more to avoid freezing to death. Well, some people say that things happen in sets of three. Those people are understating, because it started to rain somewhere around that time. Freezing cold, windy rain. Luckily? we ducked into our apartment because we were close; we always stay arms length from our apartment at least until we get paid. We went and and huddled next to the apartment door. It was around three o’clock at this point, and dark and quiet. Being so close and so far was really becoming depressin

g, so we left when the rain slowed down. As we walked, we neared the kimbap shop we dined in earlier to see that it was open. In fact, it was one of the only three places that were open, including Buy the Way and a rival kimbap shop. Well, the employees give us we

ird looks sometimes, so we decided not to enter, and just kept walking. To cut the rest of the boring part out, I will now sum up what we did for about three hours in one short paragraph. We walked, We sat protected from the rain in a dark corner of a closed bank. We walked. We visited our coffee shop; it was still closed. We walked. We entered our apartment building, but it was no more uplifting. We walked.

Boy! We must have lost a lot of weight! Anyway, we eventually sat outside our bar we had the experience at earlier, and we stayed there for quite sometime until the hour of seven in the morning. We then walked some more, around and up the street that led back to our school. We had been walking for pretty much six hours straight, with some periods o

f sitting spaced out in between. When we got to our building of employment, we saw a chair, and I sat down and Mr. James sat on the floor and fell asleep. At this point, it was about quarter past eight. We were actually waiting for our coffee shop to open so I could get a hot chocolate, but fortune smiled on us at last. The super-amazing-awesome janitor-lady came down and led us up to our floor where we got the key. The stupid thing snagged on my chair as I got up and the lanyard must have just ripped it right out of my pocket. When we headed back to the elevator, the gate was back up. Janitor lady closed it on us! But we took the stairs all the way down, and she was there waiting for us at the bottom. We debated about actually going into the coffee shop for the long awaited hot-chocolate, but fuck it! We went back to our apartment and slept for four hours, and let me tell you, that apartment was like walking into heaven from an extended visit to hell. So good!

In the “morning” we went to work, and everyone was staring at us.

“What’s wrong!? I heard you slept in the building all night!”

Ha, gross misrepresentation. Mr. James was only sleeping in the corridor for a MAX of fifteen minutes, people. Thanks for the concern, though. Well, Boss Lady finally gave us the spare key, but way to lock the barn door after...wait, I’m not using that saying right now. I’m just not.