Second posting in 3 days!

On Monday we visited a jazz club in nearby Hyehwa, a surprisingly happening district I've never been to before. Cade met the (famous) drummer with the band below on the subway a few days before and had been invited along. It was just like a proper jazz joint ought to be: bare brick walls, candles, cosy. The second band featured a big black American pianist...he looked like someone fresh off the plane from New Orleans but was too much of a jitter for me to get a decent photo. I don't know jazz as well as I'd like, but it sounded pretty good to me. Last night Kiwi Tony invited Irishman Daragh, Georgian Alicia, and myself for dinner with the local policemen that he teaches English. As practice for them, he wanted to invite a variety of different accents to come along, hence the mix of nationalities above. We ate shabu-shabu, a Mongolian-inspired dish, which originated in the 13th century as a way for Genghis Khan to efficiently feed his soldiers. Each person has a pan of boiling water, into which you can throw whatever you fancy from the spread on the table: lots of vegetables and mushrooms, oysters, clams, mussels and octopus, and beef sliced so thinly that it cooked in a few seconds, though Daragh was leaving in for 10 minutes as he wasn't so keen on the bloodiness. Afterwards the oldest Korean man, already pretty drunk from soju, announced it was 'Korean wine time', and we were dragged, almost literally, to an Makgeolli bar that he knew. Makgeolli is a milky-white rice wine that Jake (our designated driver) told us only old people really drink. It's supposed to taste sweet but was quite sour, and the older gent, Peter, ordered two kettles full, most of which he drank himself (although Tony put away his fair share too). Most of the conversation at this time revolved around trying to get Peter to stop calling me 'Lion'. 'Wyan' was about the best we got out of him, but I'm used to that by now...