Thursday, July 12th

I got lunch with Bjorn, George, and Pete before we all headed off to a luncheon at our pavilion with the Citi Brand Manager (Citi is a USA Pavilion sponsor), who despite doing work I have zero interest in, was surprisingly engaging. He hasn't obviously changed my mind about not wanting to enter into the business world, but I'm glad I went to hear him talk.

After that I killed a couple hours in my dorm room until 4 pm. At 4 pm, I joined Bjorn, George, Pete, Emilie, and several of our security guards for an overnight at 돌산도 (Dolsan Island), which is only about 10 minutes away, to celebrate 대현's (Dae-hyun) birthday. First off though we stopped by E-Mart to get groceries for the trip. I was pretty much content eating the veggies they were consuming too, but the security guards got really worried I wouldn't have enough to eat and so I ended up getting corn, tofu, and 김치전 (kimchi pancake) mix too. I thought it was way too much food, but it made them feel like I wouldn't die of starvation, so I wasn't going to argue against us buying extra food (Although I did turn out to be right. We did buy way too much of everything.)

Us trying to jump for the photo...and failing.

Anyway, then we got to the beach house, which is where we stayed the night. We looked around for a bit and unpacked and then we walked down to the beach, which was right behind the house. There were little crabs running everywhere and we had to wear shoes since it was so rocky. Bjorn and 민형 (Minhyung) went out into the water, but when they came back, Bjorn had a couple shallow cuts on his feet from the rocks in the ocean. So thanks to him, when Emilie and I joined in, we wore shoes into the water, only taking them off when we could no longer touch the bottom. It was a lot of fun though to go swimming. It was so stress relieving.

After that we had a barbecue and the gorging on food began. There was beef, mushrooms, garlic, onions, bell peppers 쌈장 (spicy red sauce), and lettuce for making wraps along with acorn squash. Then they grilled gigantic prawns and sausages that came in an interesting array of colors, including green. I asked what green was supposed to be and Bjorn responded it was green tea flavored, but the security guards quickly explained that was definitely not the case and it meant they were 고추 (spicy pepper) flavored.

It was a lot of fun, but one of the problems I have in Korea is I can't remember anybody's name or face. This isn't specifically a problem in Korea. I suck at remembering what people look like or what their name is. Usually though I cheat and try to remember someone's hair and eye color, but that technique doesn't really work here. This is then made more difficult by the fact that Korean names are unfamiliar sounding, making them more difficult. I also admittedly never asked the guards' their names because, by the time I could tell them all apart, the time where it was okay to ask their names had passed. So even though I knew all of them,  I only knew a couple of their names. Now why I'm explaining all this is usually I luck out and don't get called on it, but at some point during the barbecue one of the guards turns around and just asks me out of nowhere if I know his name. And I'm just like uhhhhhhh and then I start going off in English so he won't understand, but it was really obvious I didn't have a clue. Luckily, I don't think he took it seriously and by the end of the outing, I had gotten one of the other Americans to teach me all their names because I seriously needed to learn them. I also realize I need a new memory trick to remember names and faces because my current one is pretty much useless.

After we finished eating, which was a multi-hour extravaganza of food, we headed back inside since the mosquitoes were starting to get viscous. We played a lot of games (called Recreation in Korean for whatever reason), which is a really common thing to do in Korea, but not so much in the US. At some point birthday cake was brought out and that got devoured. 민형 also later made a veggie stir fry and we all just sat around eating. We were all really tired for some reason though so we went to sleep pretty early, meaning 1:30 am.