WednesDay of the Dead

It can be pretty common (and often infuriating) as an English teacher in Korea to arrive at work and be handed some sort of last minute task or assignment.
From arriving at school to be told you must make a speech, in Korean, to all the student's parents in a few hours time (this one happened to me) to being given an armful of reports and told they all need to be done by that afternoon, it just seems normal over here to do everything at one hundred miles per hour, stressfully, and at the very last moment.

There can sometimes be a flip side to this coin however, as today I arrived at work to empty classrooms, and was told when i cornered a lingering student that today is 'MT'.
MT stands for Management Training, and is the phrase used in Korea for what we in the west would probably call team building.
It traditionally consists of a day trip or weekend away, partaken by all university students or employees of a company, and from the Koreans I've quizzed about it, it seems to consist mainy of being pressured into drinking copious amounts of the devil's juice, soju.
It's possible I may have been expected to join in this trip, but not being a fan of pressurized fun, I quietly retired to my office.

And so my morning instead consisted of watching the latest episode of the still-brilliant The Walking Dead and wandering around a deserted campus that could've come straight out of the show itself. After a lunch of tofu and walnut tacos, and a look back at my pics, I headed home early, thankful that I blipped indoors today and avoided the grey and bitter cold outside (a shock to my system after yesterday's beautiful stroll).
Today's shot pretty much sums things up, and when I think about it is also on the same theme of abandonment as yesterday's blip.


Here's a quick poster to show you how soju is commonly marketed in Korea.

And then here is the quite brilliant Black Out Korea blog, documenting the reality of what too much of this insane liquid often does to the locals (and many an uninitiated foreigner).