a weekend in gimhae..

this past weekend was spent with jessie and justin in the little town (at least, compared to busan) of gimhae. arriving in the afternoon on saturday, we spent little time sitting around at their house; they already had an awesome night planned out for becky and i. we started out going to this cool chinese food restaurant (not quite the same as back home) and we had supper. my ability to read korean has reached a point where i can usually identify at least one word in a description of the food, but choosing a meal is still like pointing at the menu with your eyes closed. luckily, the menu at this place was all pictures so it was much easier to order than at most other restaurants.
jessie and justin picked their dishes (fried tofu with veggies), and beck picked her's (mixed stirfried veggies surrounded with tofu), and then i chose a chicken dish. when reading the description of my order i guess i didn't pay too much attention. i saw the word dalk which usually means chicken. i seemed to overlook the word beside it too in my rush to order- the word bal (which means "feet"). sigh... when i received my plate of deep fried chicken feet i kind of regretted not paying closer attention to the order. the texture was terrible, but the taste was pretty good - like a spicy lemon chicken...
from that place we walked to a restaurant called muse. it was pretty fun- there was a live band playing the whole time we were there (two lead vocals, a guitar player and some electronic synthesized background accompaniment. it was there where we met up with jessie and justin's friend, ju. he spoke enough english to communicate with us, and he helped us order food and drinks too.
the last place we went to was another live music place, but more of a bar than the last one. we ordered what we thought would be a pitcher of stout, but it turned out that the bartender just mixed a bottle of dark beer in with the pitcher of light beer - it was still good though. it was a great place. on the stage there was a lone guitarist playing with electronic accompaniment, singing as the smoke machine gave the place a kind of 'hall-o-weeny' feel. in the middle of our time at this bar this random korean guy came up to our table and asked me where i was from. he then shook all of our hands and proceeded to buy us beer on his way out. not even to share a drink with us, but on his way out. i'm not sure if we look like celebrities, or perhaps the older korean men really want us to feel welcome while away from home, but having people buy us drinks after merely looking at us is becoming a common occurrence here. as we reached the end of our night at the bar, our new friend, ju was the one who got up and paid for our pitcher. what a generous culture! in so many cases that i've encountered here, the eldest male usually will make an attempt to pay for the food or drink. i like that this tradition still lives on... and that i am usually one of the younger ones at the table.
today was spent sleeping in and hanging out at coffee shops playing uno together. we capped the weekend off watching this video that justin and jessie rented from the library, called miss potter. set in the early 20th century, the story is about how the struggling artist beatrix potter makes a stand for something she believes in as the creater of the children's books starring peter rabbit. i won't go into the movie or how i was affected by it because this blog is already longer than i was intending. however, i do hope to write other blogs this week inspired by this movie, or maybe just by the thoughts that this movie has led me to.
if you could only map your train of thought... i wonder if it would make sense to anyone else who looked at it?..