Why Do Koreans Wear Sombreros?

Answer: No idea.

Alright, so you people are an unforgiving lot. Apparently I was way too vocal about my wicked long break Wednesday, because when ya'll didn't have a piping fresh blog waiting for you Wednesday morning (Don't forget, I live in the future), I heard about it. So now I'm doing it on Thursday.

"But Al, how can you do that? You don't have a wicked long break on both days, do you?"

Glad you asked, unassigned voice. No, I don't. But I do have 2 new teachers I am training, and one of them volunteered to grade my papers. So she is doing that, I am blogging, and my life essentially rules.

The new folks are named Mike and Clair, they're from upstate New York. They're really cool folks, but they're going to be working at a new Plus Academy about an hour Southeast of us. So that SUCKS. But I still think we'll be seeing (and you'll be reading) a lot of them.

The newer teachers are named Dave and Savannah. They hail from Chicago, and they seem nice. Haven't gotten to hang out with them much. They'll be taking the spot Jen and I tried (and failed) for. Dave likes poker, which makes me happy. No word on what they're doing about Head Teacher.

The newest teachers I haven't met yet, I don't know they're names, but let's pretend their names are Rhinehold and Moonbeam. They can be from Timbuktu. Moonbeam was an illegal arms dealer before coming to Korea. Rhinehold sold tea in a small shop outside the city.

In news I'm not making up, the wedding was SO freakin cool. I'm posting a bunch of pics slideshow style, so enjoy.

The outfit we're wearing is called a hanbok. If you really care, you can read an outdated article about them here. But to be honest, I wouldn't. It barely has any pictures, and no pictures of what they guy's hanbok looks like. Both outfits have the same name, dontchaknow.

So I put on the hanbok, and I have to admit, I felt pretty hardcore. We got lucky and chose our own colors, which is a big deal since they really dig pink and pastels. Since this wasn't Benoit's wedding, we got to wear man-colors. And I don't care how messed up the toast was, it was his fault for putting me in pink. Besides, Benoit doesn't read this thing anyway. And Layne, who I'm pretty sure does read it, still should have let us play "Seasons of Love" as the second to last song. Since she didn't, that 3:02 song will haunt her randomly for the next 10 years. Maybe longer, depends on how well my brain holds together....

ANYWAY, I'm with Sam (white guy), Sean (black guy), and Alex (Korean guy) thinking to myself how wonderfully multicultural this is (and how it's begging to be made into a joke that gets emailed to a bunch of people who don't want it, but read it, laugh, and tell their friends later), when they come over and give us these little straw sombreros. We went from looking like all we needed was a wicked looking sword to looking like all we needed was a maraca and maybe a chimicanga.

Now, theoretically, these hats were part of the traditional Korean hanbok, but *I* think it went something like this:

Random Korean Man 1: Wow, they look really good in those hanboks.
Random Korean Man 2: Yeah, way better than we do in them.
Random Korean Man 1: We should find a way to make them look dumber.
Random Korean Man Whose Really Jealous 2: I've got some really dumb looking party hats in my trunk. It was my daughter's birthday.
Random Korean Man Whose Really Jealous And Malicious 1: Great idea! I hate America.
Random Korean Man Whose Really Jealous And Malicious And Should Have Admitted How Awesome I Am And Given Me A Sword Instead 2: Yeah! Me too!

I'm certain that's how it went down.

Anyway, enjoy the pics, and the random explosion of randomness that is my blog....

-Al