Saturday morning was sunny and peaceful. I was over at Tom's house. Although his house is stupidly inconvenient, particularly for Korea (the nearest PC-cafe is a 15-minute walk, the nearest strip of restaurants 20, the subway nearly 35) it is on the 5th floor of an upscale building and has more windows than normal. Windows in Korean apartments usually strike you as an afterthought. Like, after designing a tall box, they just cut some holes in places that were convenient to whoever was on the scaffolding at the time. Along the Han River there are comical apartment highrises which are angled in such a way so that, despite being within 50 meters of the river, there's no view of it. Instead, you can look across a 20 meter gap and see your neighbor's apartment, and probably their laundry hanging in the window. My friend Justin's apartment window looks directly at a brick facade, so close you can reach out the window and touch it, which makes his apartment gloomy and dark for 23 hours and 49 minutes out of every day (a brief respite around noon being the exception). So in Tom's apartment the windows make everything pretty cheery. Lots of natural light spilling over the sofas and coffee table. Confused by a location grammar-marker in Korean, I got a crash-course in how to use it with different verb-conjugations over coffee.

Later in the day, I walked down to the subway, went over to my old neighborhood and chatted with my hair dresser while I got my hair cut. Afterwards, I sat in a Starbucks, reading a book and watching the queue of people waiting for the bus to take them up to the neighborhoods around Seoul National University. The fall leaves are all gone, now. They've been swept up by the street cleaners and rained into the gutters. The air was really clear and cold. I moved to a restaurant for a late-afternoon lunch (fried rice and cold noodles to be dipped in a vegetable-wasabi sauce), then went over to my old apartment where a lot of my old co-workers live. It was Justin's (see window with no view, above) birthday. Justin, Jane, Chris and Steven all live on the same floor of the apartment and they all cleaned up their rooms, put TVs and coffee tables and beds into Justin's bathroom. They decorated and set up a game room in Steven's room, a wet bar in Chris's room and Jane went with a rose and mulled-wine theme. About 50 people showed up between 7pm and 11pm. I went downstairs and talked to the apartment owner for a half-hour. He's a really nice guy who, between my broken Korean and his broken English, I had a nice conversation with.

About the time I was leaving the restaurant earlier, it started snowing. Just a light snow that melted as soon as it flew into your hair or landed on the pavement. It was still snowing three hours later, which is rare for Seoul, especially so early into winter. Five hours later it had begun to stick and people were arriving with chunks of ice tucked into the folds of their coats and frosty hair. People migrated around, chatting, from room to room in the party. There were a lot of people I hadn't seen for a while, and it was nice to catch up.

My favorite catch-up story came from a few co-workers. A Canadian teacher, Steven, had been dating a Korean law student for a few months, but the thing fizzled and they called it quits. Or, I guess, he called it quits and she was upset. So Jane was walking to her first-grade classroom and passed this Korean girl in the hallway who was carrying a bucket of water. The Korean girl, the Canadian's ex-, asked where Steven was and Jane directed her towards the faculty room; not really thinking much about it. Apparently the girl walked into the factulty room and dumped the bucket of water over his head and said, "You know what that's for!" Then walked out. I was almost crying I was laughing so hard.

At 2am it was still snowing, a marathon of snow in the city, because it usually snows an inch or two and then stops. The roads were icy and I skittered over to a friend's apartment to crash on a futon for a few hours before the subway opened.

Last week's first snow was a disappointment, but Saturday was completely plesant. The apartment owner commented, "It's like God knows it's Justin's birthday."