This weekend was a good one.  On Friday I went to a Samgyepsal (pork) restaurant with some friends, and then we headed to... the Live Jazz Bar!  Now, Pohang certainly doesn't have the reputation that Seoul, Busan, or even Daegu has.  It's smaller and it's dominated by Posco, the huge steel factory that pollutes our air and water.  Changsong-dong, the neighborhood where we live is somewhat trashy - meaning there's lots of garbage on the ground, everywhere.  And I've even heard of Pohang being referred to as the armpit of Korea.  But despite these things, this city has slowly been growing on me more and more.  One reason for this is that there are these cool little spots in the area that I find quite interesting, cultural, or homely - like Jukto Market, or Bogyeongsa, or Bukbu beach, or Tilt, or the Live Jazz Bar!.  The Live Jazz Bar is a small bar on the third floor of one of the many multi-storied-multi-purposed-multi-business buildings in that line the streets and that I find characterize Korean cities well. 

This is a pretty good example

The lighting in the Live Jazz Bar is cozy; we sat on tall comfortable dinning chairs; and we were only one of two groups of people in there.  Then, around a quarter to ten, four guys stepped onto the small stage and started playing really good jazz music.  I've never really gotten into jazz, but whenever I hear it, it always reminds me of driving home at night - it's a good, comfortable feeling.  And these were good musicians, which doesn't really surprise me given most Koreans' talent for music.  One guy played the keyboard, another was on a smaller electric guitar, another played the saxophone, and the fourth, the owner of the bar, played a big bass Cello.  I'm not a musician at all so I'm usually quite mesmerized by people who can play a musical instrument well.  We sat and listened as they played for quite a while; Larina, my co-teacher who has a beautiful opera voice, was brave enough to sing for us all; and we went home having experienced another something new.

Saturday morning I was woken up by Kory, with whom I had made a scooter repair date for 9:30.  He knows a guy who fixes and sells scooters nearby and so he offered to help me take my scooter to the guy so he could take a look at it.  Which was great because Kory has a car... into which he thought we could fit the scooter somehow... and we did! somehow.  We squeezed as much of it as we could into the trunk and then with most of it hanging out, held on by bungee cords, we cautiously drove down to the scooter guy who didn't seem all that surprised by our transportation methods (We were probably not the first to move a busted scooter like that).  Well, the guy fiddled with it for a good hour, communicating with me through a friend who translated over the phone, and eventually decided that there must be something stuck inside the engine which would mean it would have to be disassembled.  That would have taken some time and money, and I had gone into the situation with the idea that trading the scooter in for a better one would be an option.  And that's what happened.  He showed me the one that he'd be willing to trade, gave me a good price, laughed at me when I tried to barter, took my money, and that was it.  I have a new scooter!  It feels nice to have the freedom of getting around whenever I need to.
And that was just the morning.  That afternoon a group got together for some beech baseball (which I'm hoping will become somewhat of a bi-weekly tradition around here).  Baseball was fun, but it was a little too cold and we didn't have too many people, so after a while we decided to go to a game room instead.  Now, I don't think I've really written about Korean PC bongs, or Nori bongs yet, which will have to happen at some point, but something I find very unique to Korean life is the many different entertainment rooms ('bong' means room) that are found everywhere in Korea.  The place we went to was partly a nori bong (singing room) and partly a gaming bong.  So, around 20 of us just walked in to one of the rooms and played Nintendo Wii for a good 2 hours.  It's sort of crazy to me that there are these places with the sole purpose of giving groups of people a place to hang out and play video games.  But what's more was that this place was beautiful - that clearly someone had spent a lot of time designing and decorating it.  So that was fun.
That night, I joined people going to a friend's apartments where we played Apples to Apples - a good group game.  There I met a Korean guy named Moopy, who I ended up having a long and very enjoyable discussion with.  I found that him to be quite different from most Koreans that I've met, that he doesn't really follow the same cultural expectations (having to do with marriage for example) that I find others do here.  He is a very deep guy and we had a great discussion about love, religion, and life in general.  Afterwards, I went to Tilt where they had a mini dance party going and I got to dance the night away - something I've done quite a few times lately.

Sunday was the day of our first home soccer game!  After church, David, an awesome guy from South Africa, drove some of us over to Uidok University where our home games are played.  We were playing a good Busan team and I'd say our team hasn't yet reached it's full potential, so I didn't expect to win.  We didn't, win, but we played very well I thought.  We have some new guys and I have high hopes for this season.  Mostly it was just awesome to be playing soccer again.

It doesn't end there though - well, the weekend does, but the fun doesn't.  After school today I scooted over to Frank's apartment.  Frank is a guy from the upper penninsula, and one of the coolest.  He's also the king of games.  He's got lots of them.  Tonight, in his very homely apartment, he made me and 3 other friends some super burgers and then we sat down to play games.  We played two games that I've never heard of before (which isn't suprising, coming from Frank).  The first one, called "Slapshot", was made around 1983, in which each player manages it's own hockey team.  It's a simple game and very fun.  Then we played a Korean game which turned out to be very much like the card game called "President (or Butt)", which we used to play on the bus in high school.  It was another great night.

All in all, things are going well.  Summer is coming.  And someone else is coming too, but I can't talk about that yet - next week.

Thanks for reading.
Mike