Dong dong ju and Russians

Since I somehow had a credit on my bar-tab at Tombstone, I decided to have supper there last night. After scarfing down a cheeseburger with double cheese and bacon, I realized that I was the only foreigner in the bar. At the pool table were four Korean university students and their professor, who was treating them to nachos and vodka. Being the friendly guy that I am, and being the friendly people that Koreans so often are, I was playing pool and doing one shots with them in no time. They were all in the same computer engineering class togather, and it was their computer prof that was treating them. As it turns out , I had an hour long conversation with him a few weeks ago that I could barely recall.

Following a couple of games, I found myself walking (as opposed to riding my motorbike) to the university with my new friends. Apparently most of them had remembered me from a few weeks ago. We wandered down to their computer lab, where we just BSed about whatever. After realizing that there was only juice and water to drink in the fridge, we made the difficult decision to head down to a Korean bar to drink some dong-dong-ju. Dong dong ju is rice wine that is quite milky-brown in its appearance. It comes served in a large bowl (bowls in our case), and is served using a ladle into our individual cups. It's pretty good if it's mixed with Cider (Sprite/7-Up) too.

On our way to find a dong dong ju restaurant, we ran into a few Russian students; two girls and a guy. The guy I knew already, because he hangs out at Tombstone and is in the Tae-Kwon-Do class that I keep saying that I'm going to join but never do. The girls were new to me. One of them speaks pretty good English, and the other doesn't know any English at all. I'm not even sure if she knows Korean. Well, she did speak Russian at least (like that's any help to me!). My Russian vocabulary consists of "Privit(hello)", "Korasho(good)", "dobrae(good/fine)", "Spasiba(thanks)", "courva(#%&^%$%)", "peardolit(#$#%^#$)", "znosdraovia(cheers)" and "boka(goodbye)". I guess I learned something.

We probably spend a good two or three hours drinking dong dong ju and eating the crazy octopus omelet that they served us. I lost count of how many times and in how many languages that we said "cheers". All in all, our group consisted of one Canadian, three Russians and four Koreans. Out of the eight of us, five of us spoke working English. This is one of the reasons that I have so much fun here. You never know what language is going to be spoken and just what is going to come out of the night. I started out the night by going out in search of a burger for supper, and I ended up drinking Korean rice wine and speaking Russian until 3am.

I learned two important things last night:

1. Computer guys in this country cooler than computer guys in Canada.

2. Russian girls have sexy accents.