Nothing Like a Day Off...

Much of yesterday was spent doing laundry, writing emails, catching up on sleep, and attempting to replenish the stash of spare change I mostly lost at poker over the weekend.  (Wendy, if you're reading this, just remember...you had to shell out a 1,000w bill.  Which I kept.  So there.)

About money...carrying around Korean cash makes me feel rich, since the numbers are so big...

I'm rich!  (What's that?  Only worth about $100 total?  Who cares, I'm rich!)

So the aforementioned 1,000w bill is, in fact, worth only about a buck.  And I'm still amused by the fact that we refer to them as "dollars" like we're in the US.  But, rule of thumb when in Korea: chop off three zeroes and that's the price in dollars.  So--going strictly by the numbers--I might be a quarter-millionaire at the moment in Korea...but when you consider that it converts to about $250, it's a little less impressive.  So we were throwing around our spare change in poker the other night, and we gasped in horror when someone threw down a 100w coin or two (or three) and won the pot.

And then we realized we only lost about ten cents.  Commence laughter.

We weren't betting with the 500w coins (or if we used them, we broke them down into 100w coins first), because we needed them for the laundry machines.  This led to some amusement on my part, as Hao-Hua essentially wasted 500w on a dryer when he didn't realize he had to push the coin in, and then press another button to set the dryer in motion.  (Needless to say, he was pretty pissed after that.)  As for me, I'm trying to hoard all my 500w coins so I have them readily available for my next load of laundry.  I had quite a few when I came over here, thanks to the subway deposit refund-thingies...guess spending them all early was a mistake...

At least laundry's much cheaper here than in the States!  1,000w (~$1) per load here vs. $2.00 at 'SC...I'll take the Korean price any day over the US price!

Which begs the question...since the 100w coins are the exact same size as the quarter, would they work in our laundry machines and register as quarters?  Inquiring minds want to know...it'd save me a little money...

Oh, and by the way, while in the States we're accustomed to going to find food at 11 PM, there's virtually none of that around Ewha.  Everything closes around 10 PM, and those places that are still open after 10 have a very limited menu.  Hao-Hua was none too happy about that one either.

Now that I mention it, I have never seen the front of a college campus so dead past 10 PM.  The streets are virtually completely empty.  It's kinda scary.