BANG BANG BANG 뱅뱅뱅 (and other awesome things)

What a week. I'm so tired. Like my body,my brain, my heart, my soul and everything are so tired. Which means it was freaking awesome. 

Random updates:

Strange bruise on my arm....

Finally got to wear this shirt with my cooling undershirt since I can't show my tattoo. Also, new shorts!

We had our English speaking contest throughout the week, which drove me up a wall. I'm really proud of my kids, but it literally took up all my free time at school. My babies were so cute and did so well though!

To help me get through this week, I had special plans with my coworkers. Once again, I went to see the Mr. Show! I keep telling myself it's the last time, but I can't resist the abs. But this one let me go out on a high note (literally), so I might call it.

First, we went to dinner. We went to this cute ddeokbokki place and I got to impress everyone with knowing how to read some Korean. You had to circle the things you wanted in your custom pan.

Then they bring it out to you and you cook it and eat and it is incredible.

After the ddeokbokki is gone, you can ask to have the sauce used with some rice and other toppings. We got cheese and flying fish eggs. No joke. It was delicious.

Little red dots all over the rice are the eggs. Mostly just salty and awesome. 

After dinner we still had some time to kill, so we got dessert. Bingsu season is upon us! And the kind we got isn't just all ice flake. It had the frozen yogurt and so much topping that I never got a spoonful of just ice, which is awesome. I must eat many more.

Obsessed. So good.

Finally we headed into the venue.

A lot of the guys were different from the last time I saw the show, so it's practically new, right?

I noticed the MC was the same as the times I went with Tina, not when I went with my cos last time.

They also updated their billboard thing.

So many abs in one place.

Since we ordered early and are awesome, we were in the first row on the right side of the stage. It was right in front of where I sat with Tina and Young Ah. We drew tickets randomly and I was on the most inside closest to the center. I sat next to Moon Jung, my Korean soulmate (we went to a lot of the same places in Japan, including the maid cafe, and also discovered that we stayed at the same hotel in Vegas).

This proved to be quite beneficial as I was once again pegged pretty early on by the MC and the cast. When you're a foreign girl with (apparently) blonde(ish) hair in a sea of Korean women, you can guarantee that there are gonna be some stares.

The MC pretended to walk by me then did an "oh hello foreigner" type thing before pulling me up on stage. I had debated telling him to let one of my coworkers go in my place, but it happened so fast and the words wouldn't come out. Perhaps I was too happy to be chosen again and never really intended to give up my spot. I won't get to experience this kind of positive singularity when I go back to the US, anyway.

So I got pulled on stage with two ahjummas. Unfortunately the guy I picked from last time was no longer in the show, and two of the guys were not my style. Fortunately the first ahjumma pounced on the one I liked least, and I was second to pick. I picked Troy, who reminded me very quickly why I thought I liked him last time: his voice is like 8 octaves deeper than like every other man I've ever heard speak. 

I also now know the drill that each guy has his assigned seat, and my Troy happened to be the center one AND THEY RAISE YOU UP ON A PLATFORM.

Troy's hair wasn't styled like his photo: it was long and swoopy in his face which all of us agreed looks better and I of which I am a huge fan. Also pictured, Marco, who was my actual favorite.

I remember my last time on stage, and I feel like Troy got wayyyyyyyyy closer to me than the first guy. I mean, it was largely the same with lots of him taking my hands and running them all over his muscles (dude had some serious thighs and pecs along with insane abs), but equally as awesome. at one point they pull off their underwear and my coteachers were so scandalized and were like "OH MY GOD DID YOU SEE HIS..." and I had to explain to them that they wear another pair of underwear underneath and are suuuuper careful about not having a malfunction. They all really liked Troy so they were quite jealous. But I asked if they wanted to go up and the answer was a resounding "no" for various reasons: shyness, boyfriends, embarrassment. Only one said she would have wanted to go up. Alas.

In the glow of all this, I got to speak some Korean when the MC talked to me. He laughed when he asked me what I did and I said I was an English teacher but I said it in Korean. He also asked me if I had a boyfriend, and I said no. He was like, "Why? Your face is so beautiful. And your hair is so cool (my hair was quite a talking point when he picked me). And your body is amazing!" Thanks, MC of this testament to the fine male specimen for telling me I have a bangin' body. I have been losing weight recently and I looked pretty good, so it was nice to hear in front of all these chiseled ab men and a bunch of screaming Korean women,

Weirdest thing though: MC forgot my name. Pretty typical since my name is hard for them to remember, but he called me by a different name. What did he call me?

Christina.

He kept calling me Christina last time, but it made sense since Tina was there and had gone up first then passed it to me. But how freaking weird? that was like a year ago, Whoa. 

Anyway, it was awesome, as usual. It really helped get me through a really stressful week at school.

So Jung and I had a funny conversation after when I told her I thought Marco liked her (he was always on her part of the stage and was seriously always staring at her):

So Jung is probably my favorite person I've met in Korea. Her emoticon game is strong.

Let me take this moment once again to thank whatever powers that be placed me in this school with So Jung as my main coteacher and with such awesome coworkers who will go with you to a male strip show. I'm pretty lucky for a lot of reasons.

Wednesday was also payday, so Thursday before Korean class we celebrated by trying the BBQ place near our hagwon. They do a lot with bamboo and bamboo wine. It was so good!

I love Korean bbq so much.

We have a week off from class so I get to relax. Woo!


Saturday we went to get our medical checks near Lauren's apartment, and I almost passed out from the blood drawing because she had trouble finding my veins and was poking around a lot with a needle under my skin then had to resort to syringe drawing it from the back of my wrist. Thankfully Ga Hyeon took us so he got thing sorted for me. I am not confident in the training these "nurses" had and I realized pretty late in that the one wasn't wearing gloves when she took my blood. Yikes.

Anyway, with that out of the way I took a nap and got ready for a night out in Itaewon. It was my friend Hanh's birthday, so I got to see a lot of people from my intake from all over the city. It was fun!

This is my "My hair game is so strong but I've been waiting for the bus for like ever" face.

Lots of love for the bday girl!

The original restaurant "lost" her reservation, so we ended up at Blue 55, a beer garden that had lots off cool food and drinks plus a waiter with neck tattoos. Itaewon is pretty sweet.

Beer Menu.

I got the "bacon potato" which was a basket of french fries with bacon on top. Also that is whipped cream. I have no idea why.

"Simple pizza"
?????

Afterwords, we headed to another bar and drank and chatted the night away.

Chocolate Cake birthday shots!

It's always nice to see friends, especially as our contracts come to an end and a lot of people aren't renewing. A bittersweet time, indeed.

Sunday was the day we've been waiting for for a looooooooong time. Well, since June first when Big Bang's "BANG BANG BANG (뱅뱅뱅)" was released.

We were finally learning it in dance class!

woooooo!

Please take the time to watch this performance. The song is awesome. This performance is amazing. And you can get a taste of the choreography.

Big Bang isn't a big dance group like Super Junior, EXO, or even Beast and other groups we've done the last few weeks, so the choreography is pretty tame compared to a lot of other groups. But we do the background dancer stuff too so it's a lot. Also it's harder than it looks. We did manage to finish the whole song, though!

I was so tired by the end but it was so much fun. Probably my favorite one we've learned.

Tina and I bought special hats for the occasion. We've been wanting these for a while: it says "waygookin" which means "foreigner"

Our hats got lots of love. I could tell people on the street and subway saw me wearing it and were confused. Does she know what it means?  Classic.

뱅뱅뱅 in our coordinated outfits

There are not enough words to express how much I love our class and studio and this song, so here is this picture.

After we died in class, we hung out for a bit. I can't wait for the video of this one to come up!

Some of the crew. 3 foreigners and 2 Korean guys. They guys don't come for the girl dances so much haha.

Exhausted, I decided to grab a quick and cheap dinner and experiment with my palate. I have had a rough time with seaweed since my incident in Italy, but I'm trying to eat it little by little. This time I got myself a whole roll.

Get in my belly and don't make me sick.

The seaweed flavor isn't super strong with most kimbap, but when I first got here I couldn't even manage it. Now I can! I want to try a bunch of kinds now to make up for when I was missing it.

Bulgogi kimbap.

Monday was stressful. Lots of stupid little things. But here I am now sweating my butt off in my 90 degree apartment waiting for the sun to go down so I can practice this dance more. Here's the dance practice version. I cannot take G Dragon seriously in his shorts because he looks so badass on stage with his red hair. I'm digging Seungri's white hair, and his part and Taeyang's "B I G yeah we bang like this" are my favorite parts of the song.

Also the music video for this song is sick. Love it.

I don't even have much else to say musically because I effing love this song and everyone should listen to it a million times the end.

뱅뱅뱅, bitches. I'm out!

C-R-A-Z-Y

Hello~

After a hectic week trying to recover from missing days due to a MERS scare, I'm back!

I caught up on Penny Dreadful since I have no Game of Thrones to watch. I also just started Orange is the New Black, so that's fun.


My week was such a blur. I had to be lesson planning with So Jung like every free minute. We were supposed to have out English Speaking Contest last week, but MERS ruined everything so it got moved. As a result, we need to be planned since our afternoons are entirely taken up by this for this whole week. I think we get a break on Wednesday, but whatever. I have a lot going on at school this week bleh.

But we had the prelims for my 4th graders since 23 of them signed up to participate in the test already, and OH MY GOD MY 4TH GRADERS ARE THE MOST ADORABLE ANGEL BABIES AND I LOVE THEM SO MUCH. They were my little angel babies in 3rd grade and they totally did not disappoint. They all tried so hard and did so well and were so cute. So Jung doesn't teach them but even she was like oh my god you are so lucky to work with them and now understands why everyone is gunning to be a fifth grade homeroom teacher next year. I love them so much that I wasn't even mad that i had to listen to the same story 20 times.

So this week we have the prelims for 5th and 6th grade, then the final contest for 4th on Thursday I think, and 5th/6th on Friday since we have double the number of 4th graders participating. I'm excited but also ugh this takes up so much of my time. I am hella excited that even in my small school they I had almost 40 students try, which is a lot since it's voluntary and my school has a lot of low income kids who can't go to hagwons for more English. I'm a proud native English teacher.

In other news, So Jung and some of the other teachers and I are learning to play the Janggu, a Korean traditional drum,

This is what the music looks like, It tells you what side to hit the drum and which mallet to use.

The Janggu, left hand mallet, and right hand stick. 

So every Wednesday at 3:30 I will be learning to play a Korean drum. Cool! It's a little difficult since the teacher speaks no English. But it's also good practice for my Korean, and it's fun. I also didn't know what a janggu sounded like before I got to Korea, so this is all new to me. So Jung asked if I wanted to learn and I was like why not? Might as well. When in Rome. Or Korea, if you will.


Other than that, this week was pretty typical. I cleaned my apartment Friday night (because I am the most exciting human on the planet) and on Saturday ventured out to Itaewon for some tacos and delicious drinks. Tina came over and we watched our shows: Penny Dreadful, Orange is the New Black, and We Got Married. We're almost done with our We Got Married couple though wahhhhhh.

Sunday was a day of crazy. Literally.

We finally tried a crepe place near my apartment, then headed to dance class.


This week we got back to our girl groups with the wonderfully sexy 4minute and their awesome song Crazy:

I really love this song. Also, the choreography repeats itself throughout the song so we actually learned alllllllllllmost all of it!

Tina took some pics of me during practice.

I call this series, "The Dance Is Not That Impressive in Photos."

Though this is my favorite part of the dance.

Haha it was fun!

Dance practice version:

4minute is known as being a sexier girl group, and they also are labelmates with my now favorite group, Beast.

Hyuna, the group's rapper, gets the most attention for being sexy:

And damn is she gorgeous.

But seriously all of 4minute is so sexy.

Hyuna also performs with Hyunseung from Beast in a duo called Troublemaker, and they get some heat for, well, the amount of heat in their videos. WHICH I FUCKING LOVE.

Ughhhh this video is so good and both of their looks are on point. The song is also called Troublemaker, confusingly enough.

And my other favorite, "Now." Though I prefer the Korean title, "내일은 없어" which is "There is no tomorrow"

Anyway I love this one too. 

In other music news, I'm obsessed with some of the groups we saw at Dream Concert.



This is Boys Republic with "Hello."

And SPEED with "What U"

This video is creepy and also hilarious because they use those weird heelies shoes and also the video makes no sense but the song is so good.

To leave you off now that you have hopefully watched some videos in between the actual Kpop sensations doing the choreography and me showing you, here's a bunch of us doing Crazy at the end of class:

NEXT WEEK WE GET TO LEARN BANG BANG BANG AND I AM SO FUCKING EXCITED.

I really missed dance class, and the girl group ones are a bit more manageable. And it's all for fun and it's a good workout. I love it!


Here's to another C-R-A-Z-Y week! 

Roses are Red... and a lot of other colors... (A Lot of Little Things)

Hello all! After finishing Game of Thrones (WTF, GOT??) and having a busy but wonderful weekend, I'm back!

Game of Thrones got me like:

Also please listen to this. You will not regret it.

Seriously, I am so glad to put this season of destroying plotlines, characters, and using sexual violence as a plot device behind me.

On to Penny Dreadful, which I am also watching! Soon I'll watch Orange is the New Black.


This last week has been crazy. MERS is causing all sorts of panic. My school decided on Wednesday, after being informed that Mokdong Hospital and a small clinic close to my school had confirmed infections, that students wouldn't come in on Thursday or Friday. I had to go into school Thursday where I planned some lessons since this messes up my schedule, but we got to leave at noon and were informed that we didn't have to come in on Friday.

Yay!!!!!!!!!!!! It was stressful coming back today because like every grade I have is off track now, but whatever.

Other random happenings this week:

My cellphone is like no.

This is the second time one of my earbuds has been like no within 2 weeks. I suspect these headphones are cursed.

On the same day as the headphones, I bought Vitamin C drinks for me, Eunhae, and So Jung to stay healthy. Mine, of course, broke when I tried to open it. Sigh.

This bag is hilarious. TVXQ had one of the most famous splits in KPOP history and now consists of only 2 members. 

 So after relaxing on Thursday and knowing that Tina also didn't have class Friday, we planned to go shopping and see Jurassic World.

We went shopping in Edae, which was hella empty. Consequently we got a lot of attention when we were in stores. One beauty store actually had people drag Tina in and refuse to let her leave until she started yelling in Korean and muscled her way out. It was really scary and unnerving. Some salespeople here are pushy but this one was extreme.


Jurassic World was awesomely terrible. Like soooooo bad but so entertaining. I loved it. Would totally go see it again.

I stayed over at Tina's after shopping, and on Saturday we headed across town to Olympic Park because I wanted to see the Rose Garden. We were shocked to find out there was a TVXQ concert that day, which is especially funny due to our shopping adventure the day before with the bag. Hehehe.

Anyway, the roses were beautiful. Not much to say other than they were stunning and also I had no idea there were so many kinds of roses.

Lovely.

Some of them looked like cake frosting 

Oklahoma roses <3

I think these were my favorite color combination. 

She;s the fairest flower of them all.

Flower fairies.

Pose!

We had a lot of fun!

For more roses: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10154067094824968.1073741862.697649967&type=1&l=b3af6e4da8

After, we met up with my friend Helen in Itaewon for some burgers and goodness.

Fried pickles!!

Burgers and mini chickens

Heavenly Baked Mac & Cheese

So much good food. Must go back. Left Coast Artisan Burgers, you are awesome.

In other news, here is other food I ate this week:

My first time eating fish mandu, and some awesome pork - like sweet and sour

My unfortunate streak of small mishaps continues.

On Sunday we headed across town to the Seoul Arts Center (I was all over the place this weekend!) where I saw the piano concert and where we saw Dracula to see another favorite: Giselle! I love the ballet Giselle, and I was so jealous when Tina saw it last year. We booked these tickets back in March, so it finally paid off!


Basic summary from Wikipedia: The ballet is about a peasant girl named Giselle who dies of a broken heart after discovering her lover is betrothed to another. The Wilis, a group of supernatural women who dance men to death, summon Giselle from her grave. They target her lover for death, but Giselle's great love frees him from their grasp.

Ugh I love this story.

A guest dancer is Russian. Wow!

 

They always have cool posters.

Side note they had some costumes from Sleeping Beauty which were awesome.

The Lilac Fairy and Carabosse

 So anyway going into this I knew the story of Giselle, plus I've seen it before. But we also knew that they choreography and such was reimagined. So we were excited to see new choreography.

our $10 seats.

We're seeing Giselle!!

We sat down and read the synopsis of the new version. 

Or are we?

So in the original, Myrthe is the leader of the Wilis, who are the spirits of women who died before their wedding (presumably due to betrayal or broken hearts or whatever) and they summon Giselle once she dies of  broken heart. But in this new version there's like a backstory with Giselle's parents... Myrthe was in love with Giselle's father, but he chose to marry Giselle's mother. Naturally Myrthe becomes an evil spirit and will have none of that so now she's all vengeful against men and especially in the village. Also Giselle's mom is the keeper of some weird crystal that can stop Myrthe. Okayyy....

In the original, Giselle has a heart condition so she's not supposed to exert herself - you know, not dance, or fall in love. So when she finds out Albrecht, her true love rich boy disguised and gallivanting and who could have avoided everything by not being a dick, is engaged, she goes mad and overexerts herself and dies as a result (or kills herself in some versions). In this version, Giselle is much stronger and more of a rebellious teen. Her rejection of Hilarion (her suitor who realizes Albrecht is straight up lying) is pretty funny in this version. But it makes her death make a lot less sense.

Albrecht and Hilarion are fighting over ME.

The second act was way better than the first. The first act was tooooooooooooooo different for me. The second held the spirit of the original a bit better. In the original, Albrecht is being danced to death by the Wilis and Giselle helps him by dancing with him and in his stead until dawn, when the Wilis disappear. Her love protects him and he gets to live. In this version, She fights against Myrthe, who is adamantly trying to kill Albrecht, but Giselle's mom comes in with the crystal to ultimately get rid of Myrthe. So that was different. There is still a tender moment where Giselle and Albrecht have one last pas de deux and I got really emotional. You watch them dance so tenderly and look so in love and you believe in all the things love can do before you remember that Giselle is already dead and they still can't be together. So she goes back to being dead and Albrecht gets to keep on living.

It's a beautifully sad story, really. The reimagination was kind of Giselle in names only as it used none of the choreography, setting, or even score. The names and skeleton of the narrative were the same, but they changed it to fit  more with Korean instruments and stuff.

Always posing.

I'm left to wonder: couldn't they have made a new ballet? Many cultures have similar stories to Giselle: Boy and Girl fall in love but cant be together, they try, girl dies, boy tries to move heaven and earth to get girl back, supernatural forces must be beaten by combined love, boy loses girl again. Why even pretend it's the same thing as Giselle? 

I was disappointed to not see the traditional Giselle, but I quite enjoyed this version. Had I been more aware going into it, I might have felt even better. I'm satisfied with the experience but I really want to see the classical version!

After, we got popped over to Gangnam to get pizza and cupcakes:

Butterfinger, Pink Chocolate, and Wedding Cake. He told us if we ate the wedding cake one we would get married soon LOL

Finally heading home after such an eventful weekend, we braced ourselves for the new week. MERS is still happening, and our schedules are a mess. 

I was sad to miss dance class this week but it was nice to see some dancing rather than doing it.

Still, I feel pretty good about the way things are going. 

Anyway, this week music wise here is a song I've had stuck in my head, along with the WTF video.

At Dream Concert, SPEED used skateboards. Here, heelies. Also the video is creepy to me, but the song is awesome. 

Aaaand Fiction by Beast. As you know, I love Beast. They're supposed to have a comeback soon so I'm all about them. 

Hopefully things keep improving! Stay well, all!