Company Trip

My brain is tripped out on leftover adrenaline and endorphins right now. Ahh, exercise. Wait, I came here to narrate. Hi! Since the last post, dear coworkers and I had gone on a very surreal company trip to a small handful of places - all of which were beautiful. On Sunday, I hung out with my best friend and we bought hiking boots for me and he gave me a Domo hat. Then one of the easier work week happened for five days, and this past weekend... What did I do on Saturday? I hung out with three girl friends for a Children's Day festival and then enjoyed Avengers with a few new friends on Sunday.

It's amazing that I was able to remember all that. It took a tiny bit of work and looking at random pieces of paper that I had written down on over these past two weeks, mind you. Anyhow, on to the stories. =)

We all stood around awkwardly after arriving at about 8:30am in front of the office building, then we got piled onto a rented tour bus outfitted with flashing lights and a karaoke system. Almost every hour, we stopped for bathroom breaks. The first place we went to was a beach-side seafood restaurant. My, do I Love raw fish. While other people started drinking, I was consuming the essences of the ocean. The conversation around the table was about what exactly is healthy, and giant ginseng roots, and then a Canadian coworker had to awkwardly insult all the Korean men at the table by asking them why there are so many herbs and products that are supposed to help sexual stamina. "Do Korean men really need it, or something?" I told this coworker he was a bad egg in the silence that had fallen over the table. Soon after, the boss told us that we should go walk around the beach - so we did.

The sand was so soft, and the sun was just high enough in the sky. The weather was absolutely gorgeous. All the other women had went ahead to walk by themselves, so that Canadian coworker, a Korean man and I took off our shoes and strolled along the oceanic foam. We made fun of each other, as people do, talking about Diablo 3 which had come out recently, all the different kinds of beer around the world, and the way a towel is the most necessary thing for a traveler - one of the things that he learned from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I'm ashamed to say I haven't read yet. Then we wiped off our feet to pile back onto the bus and head to our next stop - a Buddhist temple.

Most Buddhist temples look the same. They're all in high places, but this one is especially commercialized with restaurants and a woodsy walkway leading up to it. I had started taking pictures. My two traveling companions and I started talking about religion and those kinds of beliefs, and why a person should focus on either the here and now, or the afterlife. When we came back down to find the bus, the rest of the crew were somewhere enjoying the rice wine near the temple. The Korean man was sad that he had missed it, but neither the Canadian nor I want to drink. We sat in the shade of the bus until everyone came back.

After everyone got on the bus, we're now going to the last stop on this trip, which is a barley field. When we got there, the sun was fairly low in the sky, so it cast a warm glow over everything it touched. The grass and the barley moved with the wind like waves, and tourists like ourselves populated the little dirt paths in between the vegetation. There were horses, very tired horses pulling horses, and in a fenced in area somewhere to the left middle, there were sheep. I liked the smell of barley - I eat so much wheat and bread based products that it's practically all I'm made of. My Korean and Canadian coworkers fed bits of plants to the sheep, because apparently, they made my Korean coworker uncomfortable so the Canadian suggested that he should go feed them to overcome his fear. There were little tents of products, but everyone was very drunk still and we didn't stay long.

On one part of the trip where we were all on the bus, a bunch of drunk men decided to blast the karaoke system on the bus with its flashing lights and sing and dance awkwardly. None of them looked particularly good dancing, and half of the bus was trying to sleep so they were all very irritated. Apparently, it gave one woman a headache, and she said that all this is distracting to the driver, so technically it's illegal. I was amused at the whole lack of intelligence in the situation, especially when one of the Korean American men demanded that the bus be stopped so he can pee. So then a couple of men peed together by the side of the highway.

We all got back to Cheongju about roughly 9pm or so. The sky was dark. The director asked me if I enjoyed it, and I said yes, I had fun. It's hard not to have fun when given a free tour of places I've never been before, along with free food, and then being perpetually amused the whole way at all the social awkwardnesses my Korean and one Canadian coworkers can impose on each other because we were the people who didn't have a valid reason that the management could accept to get out of this trip. It was a situational comedy. So yes, I had fun.