Sam came on Wednesday and stayed two nights. He was a great introduction to the whole concept of couchsurfing and I hope we meet him again someday. He's from Switzerland and taught us proscht! (cheers), and that Swiss people either speak Swiss-German, French, Italian, or something he called Romanic. He was a Swiss-German speaker himself, and he had a slight grudge against Germans because he went to learn English in New Zealand (loved it) and found that Germans could get a work visa there very easily whereas he could not. He has some amazing photos from New Zealand, which bumped that place up on my travel wish list quite a few notches. We took Sam to Gwangan Li to see the night view his first night with us. The twin buildings were new from the last time we'd been there.
But the colorful, fashion conscious yappy dogs were old favorites from the beach scene.
Thursday we got a proper introduction to monsoon season. I thought we'd met before, but we hadn't seen anything like this. The little girl on the right was bawling. For some reason this was hilarious at the time. Probably because she would be home in no time and all would be right as rain. Or maybe because she was still holding that umbrella over her head even though she was wading through chest high water. 
It was up to my hips at some points. We left the apartment geared up with wellies and umbrellas, but around the first turn we saw what a river we were going to have to ford, and we turned back to change into running shorts and rain slickers before going for our morning swim to work. Because of the flooding though we didn't make it to school until around 9:10 (1st period starts at 8:50). There I changed into teacher wear and toweled off before going to the teachers room where the principle promptly cancelled classes seeing as how there were only about 5 other teachers besides me who made it. The principle commented on how dry my clothes were because the last time the rain was flooding the streets over the rim of my rain boots I came in soaked. And then a teacher who speaks no English told him something like "blah blah I don't know what she's saying hotpants blah blah still don't know". She told him I wore hotpants to school. This was very funny to me, but I was a bit offended that she would think I would have such bad taste in hotpants (my running shorts don't have any glitter and they're not even purple, red, or gold). Unfathomably, Brian still had school. I waited out the storm til 12 and then went home, but he had a full day. There are more photos of the flooding at the end of the post.
We went to a slow dinner with Sam that night and then came home to show each other where we live on google earth, share photos and travel talk. He left Friday, and we went to school where there were no classes because it's the end of the semester and who knows what was going on. That night Brian and I went to blow fish dinner date and were reminded how great it was. So Saturday, after a dud of a trip to the Museum of Modern Art (closed) and a successful trip to a free traditional dance performance at the Busan Cultural Center near our house Ryan, Shannon, David, and Duck came to meet us for another round of it. Here's blow fish dinner 101.
First course is banchan, Korean for ayce side dishes, and blow fish lip salad. Though this sounds terrible, not only is it tasty, it's also very fun to play with.
Next up, the meal. You can see the blow fish soup in the slide show at the end, but here was my blow fish fry plate. It's so yummy. 
We also ordered blow fish sashimi, but unfortunately that turned out to be a really large portion of blow fish lip salad, which we already had never ending plates of. Now we know. But the good news is, we survived both nights. No one even had any tingly tongues. But I think that's a very expensive Japanese style blow fish sushi that leaves the tingles in. The rest of the night, since no one died, we all played rummy with rum and felt like we were already on vacation. Monday and Tuesday we have to go to school, but there's no class, so we're almost vacationing now.
