Humility Room

Sorry for the long wait. I swear I will pick up the pace. One of the new teachers from school has graciously let me borrow her camera for a couple of days, and I finally got some pictures from some friends I've hung out with. So now, I have some pics to work with. I plan on doing one new blog post a week unless I start running out of material (which I highly doubt. This place is a goldmine). I will also apologize for those that know about this blog story already, but that's what you get for pestering me with Emails. Just kidding, please pester me. I did write it differently, and I've added some random notes and info about Korea, which I will try to do often. I also added a few more pictures, and info to the original blog post. I italicized all the new text for all of you lazy bastardos that don't want to reread the whole first post. There are two new sections of text added, and I will also add some pictures of my place soon. Wouldn't you know it. The camera that I borrowed didn't have enough battery power to transfer all of the pictures to my computer. Now, let's get to it.

Nori bong. Direct Korean translation- song room. What it be- karaoke room. What it really is- humility room. Just kidding, who cares when you've been drinking amongst friends. They would never make fun of you at a later time. They are your comfort and support group. At least they might be if you don't have friends like mine.
Nori bongs are soooo much fun. You get your own private karaoke room for your group of friends. It's awesome! You can act like complete jackasses, and only your friends will know (unless you go blogging about it for your family, and the world to see). Each room has a big screen TV or several stacked TV's, a disco ball or colored light-ball-thing, two microphones, and some tambourines. One of the ones I went to, pictured here, even had some wigs for us to wear to complete our breakthrough into super stardom. They have a nice thick book of songs. Almost half of them English songs with a full range of music artists. To sweeten our voices, we also sneak beer and *Soju in with our backpacks. Who knew I was such a rock star? I sound awesome! As an extra bonus, you can marvel at the wonderful videos for the songs. For they don't use the original videos for the English songs, you see. Instead they create Korean videos for every song. They really try to match the song lyrics to the videos. They had a video depiction of a war going on for "Uptown Girl" by Billy Joel. I can see the relation.?.?.?.?.?.?

*P.s. Soju is like the moonshine of Korea. It's extremely cheap, awful tasting, made with some crazy fermentation processes, not too alcoholically strong but can cause black-outs (so I've heard), and sold at every restaurant and convenient store on every corner. All the businessmen and old Koreans drink it. Women drink it too, but usually mixed with juices or other flavored Soju (yes, it comes in flavors too). Drinking Soju, and drinking in general, is a big part of Korean culture. I will explain more in a different post. I just wanted to give you an introduction to Soju for future stories. Let me just finish this paragraph by letting you know that I've seen a businessman passed out on a bench more than once. I don't see it all the time, but it is not rare.

Here's my random bit of info on Korea: Koreans' ages are 1 to 2 years older than us. They are born 1 year old. They count the pregnancy period, which also explains why abortions are illegal here. I'm not quite sure about the other 3 months. Last time I checked, it's still 9 months, even in Korea. Anyway, EVERYONE'S birthday is January 1st. At least, that's when they age themselves one more year. They still celebrate their birthdays with cake and gifts and such, but they don't actually get a year older on that day. I said 1 to 2 years older than us because when they are born matters. If a Korean is born on December 31st, they will be 2 years old on January 1st! Two years old right out of the chute!