Quiet weekend.

Man. I've missed girls. Last night, Hot Yellow Fellows and Dating in Korea came out to Incheon so I could show them around a bit and they could get a feel for the way we do things out here. DIK kept insisting she had a good night, and I would have probably had a better one if I didn't feel like I had something to prove. Incheon, you let me down. Just a little.

The night started at the samgyeopsal restaurant the boys always take me to. What I feared would be the standing joke of the night surfaced when we couldn't figure out where the napkins were: "Why are there no napkins on the table?/Because we're in Incheon!" We had some dumbass waitress blow us off multiple times when we were trying to point out that we had been there for nearly an hour, and neither our rice nor our kimchi jjigae were anywhere to be seen. She just literally waved us away. Eventually, we grabbed another waiter and he actually checked on the order, only to find the girl hadn't even entered it into the computer. We were told the kimchi jjigae would be another ten minute wait. Fine. Not a problem. Then we heard the Koreans at the table next to us order kimchi jjigae and almost immediately, a bowl appeared on their table. When we flagged the waitress over to point out that we had ordered ours over an hour ago and already asked for it again twice, while they had just asked once and had it show up right away, she tried to tell us that they had ordered theirs first. Mistake. We may be foreigners, but we're not idiots.

The bars were one bomb after another. There was literally no one around. I accidentally blanked a really nice foreign guy at one place, only to have him show up at the other and point it out to me. Oops. It's been a good six months since I've seen him, to be fair, and he looks a bit different. Still, it shouldn't be hard to notice when other foreigners are around. Had a very strange conversation with one Irish guy I've known for ages, of which I still can't make heads nor tails, even in the sober light of day. Need to phone Smalltown up and run that one past him. It involved a weird interrogation about why I wasn't "with" Smalltown, and if I had feelings for him, followed by an assessing of his character and a really odd entreatment to have dinner some time, just the two of us, because we've never been that close, but after Smalltown goes, he wants us to keep in touch. The whole thing doesn't sound that odd, but there's something off about this guy, which Smalltown has tried to explain to me before. I've always known him on the sidelines as just a really, really kind guy, but last night I finally got what Smalltown means. Dissettling, when it really shouldn't be.

Ran into the Korean Body Builder again, briefly, but he was a little cold as he's phoned a few times in the last few weeks and I haven't returned a single call. Because he's an asshole. A likable asshole, but still an asshole. Also some Korean woman grabbed me by the hand and claimed to know me from, first, earlier in the night and then from sometime last year. She was pissed off I didn't remember her and apparently invited HYF and DIK to stay the night at her place? I was outside having a conversation with the epitome of a Scouser for most of this about a bar in Liverpool he couldn't believe I'd been to.

Weird times all around. Afterwards, we all came back to my place to sit around and do a fair bit of gossiping before going to sleep with the heat set too high. The Kid and I always make jokes that we'll still be doing sleepovers when we're forty. There's nothing quite like it for making you feel a bit at home, wherever you are.

It's been a long time since I've been out round that way properly, and it seems the scene has settled significantly. Not that many people anywhere, and all around mild, wherever they are. The foreign guys are all kind and jovial, if at times a bit strange. And there were way more women about last night than there usually are. Not foreign ones, but still. Some of the Irish guys are still a bit rough around the edges when they get too much drink in them, but the real troublemakers of the old guard seem to have fucked off. Which is nice.

Decent enough night, but I just don't think I can hold my drink the way I used to. Of course, the fact that we began the night with two bottles of soju at dinner probably didn't help. I'm much better off when I just start with and stick to beer. I don't like being properly drunk, or even tipsy. And last night I was somewhere in between the two. Just wish there had been a bit more of a scene to entertain the girls with. Ended the night walking back toward the station with the two ragging on about how they were never coming back to Incheon ever again. But it was all in good fun -- I'll get them out again. Maybe a bit of proper hof drinking out here in my hood, for the real hardcore thing.

Now I'm just trying to stay awake until a decent hour, after having toyed with a few notions of getting out this evening. Can't be arsed with showering, truth be told, in the end. Can't believe Monday's happening again tomorrow. But this week is a field trip to the science museum with the third graders, who are just about as excited about it as I am (not at all). But it'll be good to get a little more one on one time with them before they fuck off to high school. The little brats.

A little reading, coffee and apples. Then sleep. Another year in the ROK begins. They're starting to run over into each other nicely.