Mona's visit to the Gu

Last weekend, my friend Mona, who went to McMaster with me, came for a visit.  It was great to see someone from back home.  Mona was excited to be able to go out clubbing as she lives in a small town in north-eastern Korea about 5 hours away by bus.  Her town only has 12,000 people and she is the only foreigner.  She was supposed to go to a bigger city, but they wanted someone Caucasian for the bigger town and she got stuck in the small town.  I've heard sometimes people applying for jobs in Korea face racism because schools are looking for Caucasian teachers to please the parents.  When applying most of the jobs ask for a photo with your resume.  She is handling the isolation a lot better than I would.  I would have gone crazy by now. 

She arrived Saturday afternoon. We went for dinner at the Holy Grill and had some good poutine.  Afterwards we strolled around downtown then went to a birthday party at the Ariana Hotel.  A Filipino band was playing and they were amazing as always.  Mona got along well with my friends.  We had a couple drinks and listened to some great music then we went downtown for some clubbing and bar-hopping.  It was a great but exhausting night.

Mona left Saturday afternoon.  I went downtown and meandered around for a bit before my book club meeting.  My new obsession are these buns from Pappa Roti.  These buns are soft with warm melted butter on the inside and a hard caramel shells on the outside.  They are AMAZING!!.   The book we were discussing at the meeting was Dante's Club.  It's a really good murder mystery.  I really enjoyed reading it, although the first 100 pages are a bit slow.  Our book for the next month is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  He's the author that wrote No Country for Old Men, so I'm really looking forward to reading it.