This past weekend, because it was Buddha's birthday on Monday, I had a four day weekend.  I'm not sure why I had Tuesday off as well as Monday but I'm glad I did.  Saturday and Sunday were rather boring but on Monday I went to a picnic.  I had gone to this website called meetup.com because I need to make some more friends here and one of the expat groups in Seoul was having a picnic.  So I decided to go to a picnic where there were lots of strangers.  At least all of them spoke English.  And it turned out to be a ton of fun :)  We had for a couple hours until it started raining and I meet a lot of people from around the world.  I meet two people from Uzbekistan, a girl from Germany, a guy from Argentina, lots of Koreans who had studied in the U.S. (one at Penn State), and lots of Americans.  We ended up going to a couple bars after that where I tried makoni, which is made from rice and played some darts.  My partner and I won too!  Then we did some karaoke and I sang a couple songs too.  It was quite embarrassing but fun too. 

On Tuesday I wanted to explore some of the markets so I met up with one of the Americans I had met the day before.  He's a captain in the army that's stationed a bit north of Seoul.  We walked around a couple markets, found a second-hand clothing market that I want to go back to, and saw one of the gates that was built back in the 1300s.  It was all a lot of fun and this group meets up to do lots of cool things.  This Sunday I'm going hiking in the mountains around Seoul.  I'm really happy that I decided to be brave and meet people.  It's working out great so far!