Ok at long last, my last month in Seoul

Well as pretty much all of you reading should know, I'm back from Seoul. I got in when I made my last little post. A lot of things happened in my last month and between all that and finals, then my family coming, then having no internet access into having late flights, I somehow managed to not make a post in December at all. It was quite a colossal failure and I'll try to make up for it with a good post. For now though in the interest of keeping this short, I'll stop this post at the point when my family arrived in Seoul. That keeps this post to a manageable 25 days (at least I hope manageable....).

Girls:
When I last left off, I had gone on a single date with a girl. That unfortunately did not pan out as I had hoped. We seemed to get along, but since she worked for the company I was a student for, she pretty much flat out said there was to be no dating between us and left it at that. The email was actually pretty bluntly worded and I wasn't sure if she was angry/frustrated with me or if she was just simply stating the facts. After that point, I apologized, tried to keep it professional going on, and communication with her was less frequent, though we still were nice to each other. On my last day there, I got called up to the office because she had something to give me for participating in something (unimportant as to what it was) and at that point, I got to talk to her and the director of the program a bit about saying goodbye, thanks for doing this and that, and the I'll see you if I'm ever in the area. But the assistant awkwardly forced into the conversation the fact that she would see me again if I came back to Seoul. Not in a creepy way of course, just in such a way that it was notable, almost like she was asking to meet up when I came back. Honestly, I have no idea what to make of it, though as always I will be optimistic. In the meantime though it's probably at least 8 months until I get back to Seoul for teaching, so we'll see what happens.

After getting rejected by her (which happened just a couple days after my last big post), I was a little disappointed about it, but remembered this other girl I was hanging out with a lot. She was the one that was really into Starcraft. At the point when I got rejected, I started to get more flirty with her until a point eventually when I actually talked to her about it. But she had had a bad breakup with a boyfriend who moved away and either cheated on her or just dumped her, but either way, he wound up with this girl that he had liked for a long time. I figured that had been 3 years ago and she was over it, but such was not the case. She said I was cool, but she refused to do anything long distance (especially since she is a junior in college and it would be a while before we theoretically lived in the same city (I will not entertain the idea of moving to California) so it would not work out. Now having been rejected twice, I figured it was time to just stop trying in Seoul. That conversation happened on the 17th anyway (family came in on the 21st), so it seemed a reasonable decision. I was disappointed to have been turned down twice like that, legitimate excuses or not, but oh well, that's a hell of a lot more than I've ever done in my life before so I'll take what small victory I can get from this haha.

What do you mean that's all you wanted to read about? Keep reading, there's more stuff.

Starcraft:
It was my last few times going to the GOM studio. I got to show a lot of people around there and eventually, the adventure came to an end. I said goodbye to casters and some players (they all had nice things to say when I left) and I departed for the last time. I also managed to get a picture with the girl at the front desk who I was always to shy to talk to. I did have a brief conversation with her (in Korean!) in which I told her I was leaving, but was hoping to come back next year to teach English. Then we got a picture (which took an awkwardly large number of attempts (stupid camera)) and then she let me take a picture of the picture wall. I picked on that made me laugh all season long and it is now safely in my possession...somewhere. I'll find it eventually. It's with another picture that I don't want to lose, so I know I have it stashed somewhere, unpacking is just taking me forever.

World Cyber Games:
So the WCG this year was held in Busan, the first time it had been in Korea since the first one. I was going down with Chang (Starcraft girl) as well as a friend from Canada (they were both going separately from my other group) and then also my group which consisted of me, my Canadian Starcraft friend Chris, Matt from my program, Dan (a friend of Chris and Matt), then Jan and Daniel who were the Germans. We met up with another friend there, Jens who also plays SC with Jan and I at PC bangs once in a while. Since the Germans had class on Friday morning, we all decided to leave after that. Chang and the Canadian guy left first thing that morning because there was a BroodWar game going on that night and Chang wanted to be there for it. My group got there just as it was starting, then the rest of them decided to go look around the town (they mostly went for tourism, just wanting to come to the WCG for the finals day) while I went to meet the other two at the event where I caught the last 3 games of the proleague. At that point, I met up with Jens by random chance. After the game, the four of us went out to get Korean BBQ and our drank on. Chang is really short (5'0") so she had four shots and it was all about how attractive she thought Bisu and Stork are. After that, we met up with the other people from my group and went out drinking again before everyone went back to go to bed.

On the second day, it was just the four of us (that had gone to BW the day before) again. Jens split off during the day and eventually wound up going back to Seoul because he had things to turn in for classes and he could call what was going to happen in the finals (it was the best Terran Korean in the world vs a relatively unknown Chinese Zerg player). I got the chance to talk to Moletrap (GSL caster) for a while which was cool. That night, there was an auction for charity and Stork was not quite MCing it, but not quite modeling things either. It was somewhere in between. Long story short Chang wound up buying a Samsung KHAN leather jacket that belonged to and was signed by Stork with my financial backing (she was short on cash, so I put in 70k (Won, not dollars) to help her out (I got paid back (wouldn't have been an issue if she hadn't rejected me >__>)) (I hope my parentheses open and close correctly here or I will feel the fool)) and as a result, we both got to go up on stage to meet him. It made it on a Korean news site, which was a little funny. After that, the three of us went to get some food nearby, then me and the Canadian guy went out drinking with the Germans since we had some time. We then proceeded to play semi/drunk SC which was really fun.

The third day we were there was finals day. I spent the whole day just watching finals of various games including Warcraft 3, Starcraft 2, League of Legends, and even Fifa '12. In there somewhere, I also managed to get interviewed about Samsung by Samsung. I don't know what's going to happen to that horribly awkward video. We stuck around for the awards ceremony which was fun in that it was really cheesy and lame. There was a silly performance by a magic dance troupe from Korea. They danced to All that Jazz (which since it was Korean, became "All Dat Jaj") before breaking into Danshing Queen. After that, a Chinese pop band came out to perform songs (since the next 2 WCG's are in some city in China). The C-pop was the most creepy pop music I have ever listened to, but the girls at the end when they congratulated everyone and said they would see us in China was so amazingly cute. I want to have each of them to talk to me like that forever. I would never tire of it. After all that, the entire group of everyone caught the train back to Seoul at about 10 at night. The Canadian guy had kind of made everyone sick of him, but Tasteless and Artosis (most famous SC2 casters) and a couple other guys were on our train, so the Canadian guy ditched us for the whole ride to have an epic drunk adventure with them. It worked out for the rest of us. Chang was sleepy so I let her lean over on my shoulder/arm since she is so short which made the train ride home super awesome. Chris and I talked about SC most of the way, then decided we would hit up a PC bang when we got back at 1am. We wound up going to one from 2-5. I lost a best of 7 to him, losing 4-1 (he is a platinum NA player and I am not quite anywhere near that) then we did some team games.

Classes:
Well they finally ended. Actually I really have nothing else to say about them, sorry.

It's now late and I should really get to bed because I need to eventually get my schedule normalized since I'm starting school again in two days. I'll try to fit in a post sometime next week about time until school started. Until then, peace out.