Merry Christmas Everyone!!!!!

Merry Christmas!!!!

Jessie and I have had a pretty great weekend, but at the same time, a very unconventional one, as far as Christmas weekends go!

Yesterday (Christmas Eve), we went to Mokpo, for a Christmas Party at Rodrigo and Sarah’s place.
Well, more accurately, I went to Kwangju to meet Rodrigo to see King Kong and pick up some chickens for dinner. Unfortunately, the snow from Thursday had melted on Friday and refroze overnight, creating a horrible track that cars had to follow, which was too narrow for buses and led to them being jerked around on the road and bouncing around like crazy. In Naju, it took almost twenty minutes to cover two city blocks, because the car in front of us got stuck four times, in the middle of the street. Then there was gridlock on the highway, because there had been a fender bender. Rodrigo had a similar experience, and we both wound up being about an hour late, so we couldn’t see the movie, which sucked.
We picked out a couple of chickens, got some wine, and took the subway out to the edge of Kwangju. We took the train to Mokpo, which was amazing. It is actually cheaper than the bus, and is a much smoother ride. It also drops us very close to their apartment, so it was very convenient.
Anyways, we got into Mokpo, got to the apartment, and the festivities began. Jessie got there a little later, more than a little lost, but luckily Rodrigo has a big voice and managed to yell her in the right direction when she called. A picture of Rodrigo yelling out into the street, attempting to get Jessie’s attention with a Canadian flag will be coming soon.
We started drinking soon after that, and the night got progressively more fun from there. We got dinner ready, I had brought some cabbage casserole, with meat separated for the sake of all the vegetarians. There was mashed potatoes, the chickens, some great tofu stirfry (seriously great!) and salad. And of course… more wine!
We had a great dinner, with the exception of some griping of the vegetarians… which led to some griping from the meat-eaters.

Here’s the night’s dinner conversation, as I remember it (vegetarians are in italics):

“Wow, this chicken is incredibly strange! It tastes like ham!”
“Yeah, it’s crazy! It’s really good though!”
“Is that what it looks like? Does it not have any bones? It looks so strange!”
“Wow, this is delicious!”
“Meat disgusts me!”
“How can you eat that!”
“This tofu stirfry is great!” (meat-eater speaking)
“Seriously, how can chicken taste like this? It’s bizarre, how much it tastes like ham!”
“Would you stop going on about the meat?”
“It’s just really strange how much it tastes like ham. It’s good though!”
“Do you know how they harvest chickens?”
“It’s so inhumane how they are raised, I don’t know how you eat it!”
“I’m just saying it’s good…”
(At this point, Jessie leads the meat eaters in loud “mmm-ing”, “top of the food chain”-ing and just commenting on how amazing meat is until everyone moves on)

Seriously, why is it that vegetarians feel they should tell us again and again about why eating meat is wrong, and about how disgusting it is that I eat meat when I don’t even comment on their vegetarianism. I even went out of the way to prepare a dish that was vegan so that they could eat it without any problems. And yet, I can’t comment on how good the bizarre chicken-ham is without infringing on their vegetarianism.

After dinner, we sat around and had some camembert with home-made apple sauce and reminisced, and drank more wine. A girl named Jodie was there, and she had brought a cribbage board. It was her Christmas tradition to play cribbage with her grandfather, and he had recently passed away. I was the only one who knew how to play, so I was picked. Not that it mattered, because when she asked if anyone wanted to play, my hand shot up so fast I would have decapitated anyone else who tried to play. It was a lot of fun, and I think she had a good time playing. She was really missing her grandfather, I think, and kept making comments about things he had taught her and how her grandfather probably owed my grandfather something (because I beat her). It was a lot of fun.
Jessie and Shona picked up their game of throwing things into other things that they had started at the UNESCO camp. Not having any oranges and Pringles cans, they went with corks and cups, and eventually went with the more drunk-friendly “throwing playing cards onto a flat cushion” game.
We laughed so much, it was a really good night.
We all drank a lot, especially me. I didn’t even realize it, somehow me mug just kept getting filled with more wine.

Then we went to bed. Jessie and I slept on a floor mat in the TV room. The floor heating was on, which meant that we woke up in the middle of the night in the middle of a burning inferno. I got up to turn it off, or down, and realized really quickly just how much I had drank a few hours earlier. I mashed the thermostat buttons until a light went off, assumed I had vanquished the foe and went back to sleep. It seemed to work, because the room got cooler after that. It worked a little too well, unfortunately, and I wound up turning off the heat for the whole apartment… so it got a little cool for Rodrigo and Sarah.

This morning I woke up, turned to Advil to get rid of my first-ever Christmas hangover, and went out to the kitchen, where Rodrigo was beginning to make breakfast. I tried to whip the cream for about thirty minutes (I may be exaggerating, but I don’t know) but I just couldn’t. We had crepes and more ham-chicken. Delicious.

I feel very twenty-something this Christmas. TV twenty-something.

And now, we are sitting at home, working/procrastinating, because we have 20 lesson plans each due on Tuesday.

Merry Christmas everyone!