Day 7 - Climbing and Soju

Yesterday wasn't the most exciting day, but did involve a lot of good food. We went out for Ramen for breakfast, and just sort of hung around the hostel watching films on TV. They have very odd TV here, they Televise games of Starcraft and Warcraft, as well as Go (Even though I've watched a fair bit of it, I stil have no idea how it works).


In the evening Leo and I went to Ewha Women's university to meet Kate, a friend of theirs, to go climbing in the Summit climbing centre. Owing to my massive feet, I ended up being crammed into a pair of size 290 climbing shoes, which were smaller than my feet by a good half inch. It was a lot of fun, although I discovered that I'm rather crap and have no strength in my forearms whatsoever. We went out for dinner and Soju, then on to Mike's Cabin for more Soju, (near Sinchon, right) and I even managed to drink Beer! On our way to meet the others we met a few Korean guys who shared our Soju and gave us some directions, and who we later got to do a 'Ben Bruce' on camera for us. Shortly afterwards we were accosted by two drunk Koreans, who for some reason took a dislike to Jim (we were just walking along a fairly quiet street, minding our own business) and wouldn't leave them alone. We enlisted the help of two Korean businessmen, who tried to dissuade them from attacking us, and all seemed well until the original antagonist ran up behind Jim and launched a flying kick at his back as he walked into a shop! Still Jim ignored him, but then Leo arrived and the guy punched him in the neck out of nowhere, resulting in Jim knocking him over and Leo mounting him and choking him out, thereby stopping the fight. We all walked away up the road, when suddenly the other guy ran up and jumped on us. It was a really weird occurrence, apparently there is never any violence on the streets over here, it just so happened that these guys took an intense dislike to us - even after they had both been floored by Leo, Jim and Jan (all in a very controlled manner, no punches or kicks were thrown, the guys were just taken down and stopped) they kept following us, so we had to take a circuitous route back to the hostel to avoid any further trouble. No one should worry though, apart from this isolated incident there hasn't been any trouble with Koreans at all.

Today has also been a slow one, we just went for dinner near Yongsei university, had really good pork BBQ for only about 6 pounds, and we're now sitting around napping. We didn't get in until about 5 or 6 last night, and apparently that wasn't a big one. Oh dear. Also, I managed about four beers last night, taking my lifetime total to ooh... about five. This will make my life a lot easier and cheaper, as far as going out is concerned anyway. Also, the book of shit has had a lot of new entries recently, Korea appears to be retarding us all.