Day 175: Paying For It

After only a mere three or so hours of sleep, I woke up at 7AM today feeling like *absolute shit.* I felt like I hadn't slept at all. I felt like I had been run over by a squid truck who then decided to back over me a couple more times just for shits and giggles. I felt....TIRED! But hey this was no surprise at all, right? This is what you get, Mr. Erdman, when you stay out way past your bedtime on a school night! I wasn't even hung over (cause I had barely drank anything last night) but it was just from sheer lack of sleep.

*tisk tisk* (gives self a disapproving grimace)

Jeremy lives in SE Seoul and luckily near the Orange Line. I caught a train and rode all the way back to Ilsan and it was a looooong ride. But, for the first time ever in my life, I slept on the subway! I've always been way too paranoid to sleep on the subway (even though, on any average day, a good third or so of your fellow passengers in your subway car will be sleeping.) This is not for reasons due to concerns regarding my personal safety, but mainly cause I'd be afraid that I'd wake up too late and not only be way past my stop, but be on the same train heading the *opposite way* back down the line again! But, today my exhaustion won over and I slept most of the ride home on that train.

And luckily I did not miss my stop! I got off the subway and decided to walk the rest of the way to work, thinking that the fresh air (ie: hot humid stale grossy sticky smoggy furnace-like air) would wake me up. It helped a little, but not much. Friday turned out to be the longest day at work in the history of mankind. I was okay for the morning, but by the time afternoon came I was barely hanging in there. It took several cups of coffee and a whole lot of patience, extreme focusing, and some fancy mind-over-matter tricks to make it through the day, but I did - and no one was the wiser about it. 7:30pm came and I was thrilled (or would've been thrilled, but was too tired to even know how to spell the word 'thrilled') that the day was over.

I had made plans to go camping again this weekend with Pauline, Nick and Angele so I went home and packed up all my gear. I had some dinner, relaxed a bit, and actually wasn't feeling too tired after all. Brian wasn't going to be able to come out this weekend, but I borrowed a bunch of his gear, met up with Pauline, and we subwayed it into Seoul to meet up with Nick & Angele. Nick & Angele live only a few stops away from where Jeremy lives so that subway ride was totally dejavu from the morning (only no sleeping this time!)

Pauline and I had been invited to crash at N&A's because our bus to the ferry terminal was leaving bright and early and they live much closer to it than we do. Nick and Angele live in a really cool, spacious apartment in a very 'Korea' neighbourhood - steep hills, windy alleys, dirty unnamed streets, hodgepodge buildings, a few highrise apartment towers soaring above clusters of old-style housing, and random snapshot vistas of the Seoul landscape. Super cool. The four of us ended up staying up a bit to hang out and chat (where this energy was coming from in me, nobody knows, cause at this point I was defying all laws of physics just by staying awake) and eventually went to bed around 2am. We'll see how I feel tomorrow morning, eh? ;-)