Summer's here!

Real excited about our Western-style breakfast!
The massage chair line-up. That's Sarah and Nicole.
My new friends Sarah and Scott horsing around.

Yeah baby! Summer weather is here!! One weekend in May, 6 of us went to the coastal city of Busan. It's 3 hours by high speed train from Seoul. The train gets up to around 190mph. Saturday it rained all day, so we hunted out a place called U-Para. It's a huge game center. Like an adult Chuckie Cheese or something. It has bowling, table tennis, darts, video games, massage chairs and so much more. It was huge! You pay $8 (!) and get use of their facilities for 3 hours. Pay $10 and you can stay as long as you'd like. It was great! I bowled, played some ping-pong, and sat in a massage chair for an hour.
Sunday's weather was amazing! We went to a popular beach that usually gets packed in the summer (umbrella to umbrella) but in May it was pleasant. We sat around and soaked up the sun. My friend Sarah brought her guitar so she played for us on the beach. Geoff and I brought our tennis rackets so we hit the ball around a bit. (oh yeah, I'm playing tennis again...I'll save that for another entry)

Another highlight of the weekend--we found a place that serves Western-style brunch. It's hard to come by in Korea, the land of rice, soup and kimchi for breakfast (vomit). So we thoroughly enjoyed pancakes, omlettes, french toast, bacon, sausage.....

Interesting instance--our group was 6; 3 guys and 3 girls. In Korea, there's an option of an "ondol bang" hotel room. That is Korean style. It means there are no beds, just mats for the floor. That's usually the best choice when you want to cram 6 people into a room. And it's like a slumber party! So as we were comparison shopping for the best price of the beach-front hotels, we got turned away by one who refused to let us have men and women sleep in the same room. They told us that no Korean hotels will let us do co-ed (bullshit). Anyway, it was sort of a strange form of discrimination. It does speak to the conservativeness of the culture, but in most cases they want your business so they bend the rules a bit. Anyway, the next place we went checked us in no problem. Here are some pics. New friends: the blonde girl is Sarah and the reddish blonde guy is Scott. They are super cool.