::A Geek in Korea::

After yesterday’s post, my wife and I went out to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We hadn’t gotten official "Anniversary Gifts" of a sort, since it’s only a week to Christmas. We didn’t really see a point to going out and purchasing something extremely expensive only to need to do it again for Christmas. Instead, we made plans to spend some time together shopping for clothing and have an evening out on the town for ourselves. We left Yoshi in the cage and went off to the nearest department store to catch some pre-Christmas bargains.

Thrifty people we are, our anniversary gifts to each other turned out to be a wool turtleneck and a wool jumper/jacket we got at a steep 70% discount in a store that was going out of business. I fit in the largest sizes (length wise) commonly available in normal stores, so the process of trying on clothes is simply finding the biggest thing the store has seeing if I’ll be able to do a "fat guy in a little coat" sort of thing with the sleeves or not. There were several things I wanted to buy that I would have burst out of, Incredible Hulk style, but eventually we found something good for me and her.

Next, we went to Bennigans, which is the best upscale American restaurant we’ve found in Korea, bar none. We’ve ordered a few dishes from them, and they’ve all been fantastic. I didn’t know the Irish threw shrimp on everything, but according to the Bennigans menu, they do, and it’s delicious. This is our third trip in three months or less, so it’s a good thing we picked up a membership that will get us free food every once in a while.

Yeobo, Yeobo, (This is how you would call a spouse to get attention, like "Honey, Honey")
A Transgender Bar in our neighborhood.

After the meal, we headed to a singing room. We were checking the local singing rooms in our neighborhood. They varied from "shady" to "less than reputable". In the building we ended up going into there was a transgender bar. I remember hearing about such a place from some of my old adult students, but it was odd stumbling upon it randomly. Eventually we found an abandoned singing place on the fifth floor of a building that had a modest collection of songs. I still haven’t gotten to do Gnarl’s Barkley’s "Crazy" yet. The singing room didn’t have a version of "Gay Bar" to sing either ironically, which is now my singing room staple song.

We had an hour’s worth of time, but at a unpopular singing room, you always get more free time. This is in the hope that people will hear your crooning and think it’s a good idea and a nice place to sing. We were even stationed at the very first room, and our speakers were deafening. Since I didn’t have some of the songs I usually do, I got to try some new material to what turned into a marathon two hour session of singing.

I cheated however, and did a few songs I was familiar with via Elite Beat Agents. It turns out, my wife likes "I was born to love you" (NSFW?) by Queen, and it makes a decent song for me to sing too. I also tried out Highway Star (I rocked out), Jumping Jack Flash (It was great.), as well as September by Earth, Wind and Fire (This song is IMPOSSIBLE.). My wife liked singing some Korean songs, and she was backup on some of the tracks she knew. We even got some praise from the owner as we left for our enthusiasm. All I need to do is getting the lyrics down, then dance like the Agents in the game do and I’ll be a singing room legend.

We had a great night out and did our own thing. We’re still planning on doing some Christmas shopping sometime this week, so even if we haven’t exchanged big ticket items for our anniversary, the chance to spoil each other will still be possible.