Titanic

To recap, my Christmas weekend was great. Friday night was our work Christmas party, where all the teachers, Korean and English went to a nice restaurant for drinks and dinner on the company. We got the whole restaurant to ourselves (there were only like 5 long tables) and everyone sat on the floor at long tables. There were burners built into the tables (as many restaurants have), and a pot of oil was boiling at each burner. Then there was the massive spread of food, side dishes as well as beef, mushrooms, carrots, onions, broccoli, cabbage, and more to put into the boiling oil. (see picture of Korean teacher stirring our dinner). When the whole pot came to a boil, you could reach in with you chopsticks and pull out the food. It was great!! And not spicy at all.
As far as alcohol goes, most restaurants only serve beer and soju (vodka-like drink). Not many choices. Koreans love their soju, and you'd be hard pressed to find other types of liquor here. It tastes like really cheap vodka though, so I don't think it's great. So anyway, the foreign teachers were pretty much at one table, at the far end of the restaurant, and the other end of the restaurant was getting loud and crazy. We didn't know what was happening, so a few of us got up to take a look, and we realized that the Korean teachers were doing shots! One of the two Korean men that work at our school is a bartender on the weekends, so he was pouring beer into mugs, and then dropping a shot glass with soju into the middle of the beer mug. They call it "titanic" here because the soju shot glass sinks into the mug of beer and it mixes. Kind of like Jager bombs back home. Anyway, one teacher would go (slam the concoction) and they would choose the next person to go (and yes, I got called to go). By the end of dinner, everyone had done one. What was cool about it was that most of the teachers at our school are these conservative little Korean women, who weigh about 90lbs. And they ALL DID IT!! Everyone would chant the name of the person drinking. Even the manager of our school (she's sort of like a principal) was chanting. It was great!!! I guess this is very normal when Koreans go out for a night on the town with their work crew. Wow.
So, the foreign teachers and I thought it was just awesome. We were expecting a really conservative, wholesome, and boring night, and it was far from that.
After dinner we went out to noraebang (karaoke) to sing, which is also typical for Koreans. It was funny though, many of the Korean women were singing these slow Korean love ballads, and Geoff (Canadian) teacher and I did a rendition of "Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns 'n Roses. We probably scared them. It was a blast.