End of the first week of Winter Camp.

I had a strange day yesterday and it was in two parts.  The first part of the day was at my winter camp, it was not a difficult day by any means, I had no classes that I had to teach, so I had some time to prep instead.  During the day I was generally very cold due to the school's inability to properly heat rooms and Korean's general incapacity to close doors.  However, I did get a chance to talk with some of the people running the camp, which was good.  In all the day didn't turn out too badly.

The second part of the day was somewhat crazier.  I went out with a couple of the guys we went over a hill, but not too far away in the dark to get some food.  It was pretty good food actually, but the road was near deadly.  Buses and cars just barrelling down the road to a bunch of on coming whiteys.  After the meal, we headed on back to Tongdosa and headed to our usual bar for a barrell or two. 

The first thing we noticed while there was that there was a monk in the bar, often enough you'll see monks in the town, since there is a large temple on the hill just above the town.  However this monk was somewhat different from the norm.  First of all he was in a bar and secondly he was drunk.  The guy attempted to talk to us a few times.  Now and again he would burst into song and then he'd go back to his massive drink.  When he saw some christians on TV he jumped up and started shouting until the barkeep turned the TV off. When he was finally done he upped and started begging for money from around the bar, before finally taking his leave.

After that a guy came in with his friends for a drink, a guy that one of my friends kn ew randomly.  This guy was a Korean and had little English, but we had a few drinks with him and I thought we were done, since I wanted to get home and have a nice sleep since I was going to Busan the next day...but that's not how things worked out.  Instead he grabbed us by the hand and dragged us off to his house, there was no getting out of this.  We went back to his place and he brought out the stuff he makes.  Some of it was really good and other stuff, not so.  But the guy decided that we must take a present each.  One guy had already recieved his gift prior to this occasion, but yesterday the other guy got a scroll and I recieved a piece of art, it's actually pretty good.  It's of a mountain spirit, I think I may get it framed, not sure yet.

So, we were not there long, just long enough to recieve our gifts and for his wife to get pissed off and of course long enough for us to have a strange broken English and Korean conversation.  All in all a pretty good day.