Won Rate/Flying/Random Stuff

So I have my fake CROCS and they're one Korean size too big, but they're sure comfy (except for the blister on my foot) but hey, for 7,000 won, what do you want? I want better shoes!
And I wish I had brought more flight suits. I have 2 that don't make my eyes bug out when I sit down. At least I wear jammies to work. If I can do that for 10 more years, I've won. Besides, wearing a flight suit makes people automatically think you know what you're talking about and I need all the credibility I can get.
Julie called me when I had $5,200 in cash and I'd handed to the guy in the money change booth (hole in the wall where he plays Mah-Jong all day and smokes) and just then Julie called and said not to change the money so I asked for my money back and ran out of there. Burned that bridge! Apparently the won rate is supposed to go to like 1500 or 1800 to the dollar. So you get more bang for less buck.
Korean TV is sure funny. I love the commercials to death. The anti-smoking one is good too. It's 'cheeky'. And the telephone one with the chick and big, white mallet. I think it's long-distance. Or the COLD brand orange juice lady that is actually eating an orange, not drinking the juice! If only the subtitles to the shows made any sort of sense to me, I could learn Korean faster, but they flash as fast as they talk here so you can't keep up. I can recognize the characters at least and what they sort of sound like. Half of them sound the same to me, but I'll never learn Korean to the point I could speak and be understood. Spanish on my mission was bad enough- 'lost in translation' is the rule with me and that's if you're speaking English, let alone Spanish or Hanguk-mal.
Why does bedtime become so lame when you have kids? Violet fights her sleep and by then she falls asleep at 10 and your night is shot. Gift from heaven, my keister!
I should have at least picked up the violin today. I need to take it down to Insa-dong (there's a lot of dongs around here- but it just means 'village'), and get the violin fixed. Do I dare trust a family heirloom to foreign hands? And cheaper hands at that. I'll take all that money and change it into won and buy a lot of toys and labor with it. I wish I had 200,000 won the other night for the car to get fixed, I used US and lost about $80 in the change. The mechanic should have dropped the price. Maybe I'll go to the guy next door for that.
I'm learning Hangul from the signs even better now, but I still have no idea what the words mean and they don't sound right in English. Sindorim, Sadang, Yeongdunpo. I could write all that in Hangul, but it doesn't work here and I usually get it wrong anyway.
There's a chili cook-off this week. I need to take some magic won and buy some tomatoes off the street vendors, and some more secret ingredients so I can bag the #1 spot again. I have to win chili cook-offs. When you're a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, you have to be good at something. Shoot, I used to make chili in the jet and eat in front of my crew when it was 10 hours into the 16-hour flights. Stale sandwiches to my hot food. I should have sold it for 5 bucks a cup. When the won hits 1800 per dollar, I'd be crazy not to buy one. Dang, I miss having a gun around. But since I drive like a native, it's good to be in a place where there's not any guns because the road rage here could make 22 million Seoul-ites become 3.
Spencer about lost 2 fingers on the subway today. He put his hand on the door as it was opening, and I had to grab it since I was worried he'd lose it. This is a limited-liability country, so if you hurt yourself, you can't just sue Korea.
Here's Spencer's pic from the school field trip to KBS (Korean Broadcast Studios) here in Seoul. He had a good time- and I was bummed I had to work and couldn't skip out to see the place.