jinny invited me to join her and some of her friends she works with at the animation festival for drinking at the bar her brother runs on saturday night. i met hyejin for dinner in gangnam first, and then brought her along with me. we had some delicious japanese food, which seems to be very popular here these days.

the bar was called투다리 (two dali, which means two legs), it's apparently a well-known franchise here, and he just owns one of them. it was really small, only about fourteen feet wide and thirty feet deep, with enough room for maybe eight tables that would seat four to six people each.

jinny didn't mention that it was a girls night out type of get-together, so i was a little surprised, but as you can imagine that was just fine with me. most of them couldn't speak english too well, but we managed to communicate anyways, mostly with the help of jinny and hyejin doing some translating.

right away one of jinny's friends, named �정 (hee-jung), hit it off with hyejin, and before too long they looked like best friends. we were having fun, just drinking draft beers and eating some yummy side dishes like spicy chicken shish kabobs. here's some pictures:

unfortunately i forgot the names of the two on the left. the one with the glasses was an english major, so we could communicate with no problems. the one next to her didn't speak much english, but she really liked asking me a lot of questions. we talked about what animation we liked since everyone there had either studied animation or was working for the animation festival.

eventually, however, it was hee-jung who seemed to really take an interest in me, she was asking me a lot of questions and trying her hardest to remember her english. at one point she got up to use the bathroom, and after coming back decided to sit next to me. everyone started commenting on how cute we looked together, it was pretty funny.

of course by now everyone was getting a bit tipsy, and hee-jung began trying to tell me all sorts of things, but unfortunately she had completely abandoned english and was speaking to me strictly in korean. i'm proud of what little korean i know, but i really couldn't understand any more than one percent of what she was saying. despite that, i just pretended that i understood, mostly i guess just to be polite since she seemed to really want me to understand. she tried speaking slowly and going one word at a time, but of course that wasn't any help since i simply didn't know the meaning of the words.

then of course everyone thought that it was amazing how well we were communicating even though we couldn't speak the same language. i guess it looked pretty funny to see her speaking korean to me and me sitting there nodding like i knew what was going on.

soon after that some of jinny's brother's friends showed up, and they ended up hanging out with us for the rest of the night. unfortunately, they also instigated an increase in the consumption of beverages, and before too long everyone was gone. hee-jung retreated to the corner to rest, as she had definitely drank her fill. one of jinny's brother's friends took a liking to hyejin, but she later told me she wasn't in to him, and spent the rest of the night trying to stay away from him.

by this time it was probably after 2:00a, and before i knew it i was sleeping sitting up with my head on the table. i guess i just rested there for quite a while, because the next thing i knew it was like 5:00a and everyone was wanting to get going. we had to take it slow since one of jinny's friends needed some time to puke on the table before composing herself to go.

by the time hyejin and i got out of there it was 6:00a, which was actually a good thing since the trains start running at 5:30a and we could get home that way. the subway was filled with old people who were up at the crack of dawn, i don't know where they were going. i was still a bit tipsy, so it was very surreal riding the subway with a bunch of old koreans.

it was after 7:00a when i finally made it back to my apartment. i drank lots of water and hopped into bed, i didn't wake up until 3:00p sunday afternoon. it was a wild night, but definitely one of the most fun times i've had so far here. thanks, jinny!