Day 281: Livin' La Vida Loca

Ahhhh Saturday again.... I met up with Micahel again today (yes, once again I "fled to Seoul" for the weekend as Addie puts it...hehe) and we had lunch at TGI Friday's. After lunch we did a little shopping in Myongdong and then later on in Dondaemun. Both areas were nuts with crowds. You can hardly move with all the people there, but luckily being 191 cm. tall gives me a strategic break-in-the-crowd search advantage. Sometimes I wish I had a video camera to accompany me on these little rendezvous throughout Seoul just so I could capture the magnitude and volume of these crowds. It really is like swimming through a sea of black (black hair, black eyes, I mean). Yep, I definitely *do not* "blend in" here in Seoul!

Tonight was Angele's birthday party so we met her and Nick and a bunch of their friends at a restaurant in Itaewon called Our Place. It was a really nice restaurant and the food was quite yummy. After dinner we went to a divey kinda bar called Dolce Vita to relax and chat over drinks. The gin n tonics were a flowin' and everyone was having a really good time.

After that we caught a cab to some area of town near Shinchon I think and went to a salsa club! Now I have no idea how to salsa but the one thing I can say that is man is Latin music ever infectious! It's so fun and free-spirited and it just *makes you wanna move!* The small club was packed (and half of which were of Latinos!? Where the hell did they come from? What are they doing in Seoul? They're foreigners but they're not teaching English, they're not in the military, so maybe they're migrant workers like the Indians and the Pakistanis? Either way a strange sight here in homogenous Korea!) and everyone there was having a good time.

There were a lot of dancers there who look like they go out salsa dancing every weekend cause they sure got their moves down. Luckily for me the salsa dancing was intermixed with fun familiar Latin pop including some Lou Bega "Mambo Number Five" and Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca" (it's official now that *everyone* in the world knows all the words to that song, regardless of what mother tongue they speak!) so I didn't have to feel like a dancing chump with my two left Latin feet.

After salsaing (not a word, I know) we had some late night greasy dinner. On the way to the restaurant we passed this dance studio where there were people DANCING IN A JAZZ CLASS doing their exercises at like 3am!! What the fuck? Who signs up for jazz classes that run from 2 til 3am? Man, you gotta either have like NO other free time in your life or are just hardcore to be doing that. It was a strange and particularly hilarious sight when we stumbled upon that one in our drunken hungry stupor.

Oh, the things I see and experience here in Korea...too much fun!