Friends of a Friends Friend

Thanks to a friend I made back at Penn State, Karen, I have been emailing with another English teacher out here in Korea for about two months now, Amanda. She seemed like an extremely nice girl in here emails. You know, the type of girl who writes novels when all you ask is "how's the food?". She'd give you a detailed breackdown of the Korean food pyramid, serving size, price, and last but not least, taste. Well, we finally got to meet when she visited Seoul a little over a week ago. She brought another friend, and her Korean cousin. It is always a nice little treat to be able to talk freely in English with people, without repeating yourself, or having to dumb down your speach like you're talking to a 5 year old. Especially new, fun people, and it doesn't hurt that they were girls either. We met in downtown Seoul and I think it was pretty much fun at first sight. It only took minutes for us to be making fun of each other. Them making fun of New Jersey, and me making fun of wherever they were from, they are places not worth mention on a classy blog site like this. We walked around a little, shared some laughs, saw some sights, went to dinner, got ice cream, and then went out for drinks. Thats basically the night in a nutshell. The highlights were pretty good though:
-Cold Stone Creamery: Yes, after dinner we didn't get just any ice cream, we got Birthday Cake remix's, Berry Berry Good's, and Korea's favorite, Green-Tea Bagger's. First off, you have to understand that Korean food is not sweet, I'm not sure they even knew what sugar was before the white man came. All of there "desserts" taste more like flavorless gum, that was dropped in the dirt, then actual desserts. So visiting the most overly indulgent ice cream chain on the planet over here, was not so much a "kid in a candy store" type scenario for me, but more like a "fat kid who has been starved down to skin and bones allowed into Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory" type of scenario. Their ice cream concoctions are so delectable I actaully felt like I had gotten the golden ticket. In the words of Ferris Beuller, "It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up."
While ordering Amanda tried to be a "friendly American" (I want to say ignorant, but I like her) by leaning over the counter and saying "In America they sing for us when we leave a tip" (but there is no tipping in Korea, so she didn't know what to do). The eyes of the high school aged girl lit up behind the counter, "Sing? Song!" Then her and her coworkers bursted into song (Amazingly in English) about Cold Stone Cremery sung to the tune of "Meet the Flinstones". Because we all started laughing so hard I didn't catch too much of it but for the final line, instead of "We're a modern stone-age familyyy" it was "While you eat we sing in harmonyyy". We were the only people there who could understand it, but we got a big enough kick out of it for the entire line of Korean people there. Only later did we realize we could laugh even harder while still eating our ice cream.
We sat on a bench, on the piano street when a group of college aged girls sat on a bench across from us. Well there was one too many for the bench and the one that got stuck squating showed her crack to roughly 1000 passer-bye's in the 10 minutes she didn't hear us laughing at her. Our stomachs hurt by the end of the night, and not from the ice-cream. Who knew half of a Korean butt, shown in an extremely public place, could have been so funny. I joked about taking a picture at the time, but now I really wish I would have.
This was a nice day with some good old American fun.