Valentine's Day, Kpop Dancing, and Cheonan

Monday (February 14th, obviously) was Valentine's Day.  In Korea, on this day, it is not the guys', but the girls' responsibility to give chocolate.  in one month, on March 14, also known as white day, the boys return the favor and give girls non-chocolate candy.  I cannot remember if it is supposed to be white, but i guess I have 3 weeks to figure it out.  also there is black day, on April 14, where boys who didn't get any chocolate are supposed to eat jajamyeon, which is black bean paste with noodles(?).  it tastes really good.  I had it when we went to Chinatown at the beginning of orientation, but yeah.

Anyway, some of the girls we were in Seoul with got a bunch of us guys chocolate gift bags for Valentine's, so that was a nice gesture, though even now, over a week later, it is still sitting unopened and uneaten on my desk.  But i think that I still have the repay the gesture and get them something on white day.

also on Monday night I went to kpop dancing lessons.  the song was shy boy by Secret (a girl song), and i wasn't very good at it.  I need to up y cuteness factor.  more poffins (it's a pokemon reference, if you didn't get it lol)  The instructor only spoke korean, but she kept telling us to be cute.  The tuesday night song was I'll be Back by 2PM (guy song) and though i was initially worried since I wasn't able to do the running thing before, but by the end I had it pretty well down.

at this point, our group decided that we would do a dance for talent show.  We talked about it being no pressure and just to have fun, but i'm sure I will get more into that in a post or two.  We have five girls and five guys.  our setlist is now girls doing Nobody (by Wondergirls), guys doing Digital Bounce (by Se7en) and then all of us doing the Nobody Tango that 2PM and Wondergirls did a couple years back.  The dance isn't very technical, just a bunch of tricks.

On friday we were split into teams and we either went to Cheonan or Daejon.  My team, the G6 (Group Six) Tigers were sent to Cheonan.  Here we had to do several things that we might have to do later, like buy a train ticket, find the market, use the bus, etc.  The market was full of seafood of all varieties.  everything from shrimp to flounder to sea cucumbers to turtles.  The turtles were still alive and I would rather not think about eating them.  I can eat a lot of food and by no means am I a vegetarian, but I don't know that I could eat a turtle, but we shall see what happens in the next six months.

I am also getting more addicted to street food.  basically any city will have stands along the street selling food.  This is a big part of Korean culture and the food is really good and cheap.  my favorite so far is odeng, but i also like dok bogi a lot too