May 17th 2009 - Wine tasting
Our Korea Diary - May 17th 2009
Fine dining and Grand park
Returning to Ulsan on Tuesday, I was thrown right back into the normal work rhytm with a late inspection on Wednesday, finishing at 8:30 at night. Not really a jetlag cure ! Needless to say I hardly made it through the apartment door before Paula found me in coma on the sofa!! Thursday was much the same and on Friday we went out for happy hour and dinner with Carlos. We wanted to try out one of the many Chinese restaurants in our neighborhood, but when we reached the one we had in mind, we saw that it didn't have any chairs, so we quickly changed our plans and went to Toinbe instead - a decent Korean restaurant with chairs !
It wasn't this Chinese kitchen we were looking for, but they didn't have chairs either! Carlos in front of a rolling China kitchen.
It was raining cats and dogs on Saturday, so we stayed in for most of the day. I was working on a movie from our trip to Palau in 2007. It has kindly been removed by Google from the hosting site, and as I didn't have a backup (Doh!), I had to do it all over again. So I decided to make it even better and longer ! For those of you who are interested in diving and have 17min (!) spare, you can see it here or here.
When we were in Sweden I picked up all the old negatives I could find and brought them with me to Korea. on Saturday we went to HomePlus - the new(ish) local supermarket - and handed them in for scanning. I have been kicking myself for years for not having these photos in a digital format. Today Sunday, we went to pick them up. I will have a lot of organizing to do, but here is a quick teaser - a very young Pedro Nielsen on the porch of his Caribbean mansion:
Saturday night we went to the New Foreigners Compound for a wine tasting dinner. Jamie and Colin (why do I always want to call him Oliver ?!?! haha..) and Mari and Gokhan were also there. We made up an excuse to go pick up Jamie and Colin, so that we could drop off the BBQ grill that I had finally gotten hold of for them, with lots of help from my Korean colleague Mr. Oh. Now we feel fairly certain that we will be invited for a BBQ some day soon !!
Anyway - back to the wine tasting. It was a very nice evening in very good company, but unfortunately the wine which was served together with the food wasn't really my cup of tea. Imagine, I - a red wine lover - only really liked the Rhiesling we had as a welcome drink and the Rhiesling desert wine (it was the only Chilean wine of the evening, so of course it was my favorite!).
Mari, Paula, Teresa and Jamie - the girls at the Wine Tasting.
Colin, Trevor, Gokhan and Wayne - the boys at the wine tasting.
Paula and Jamie
He should be ashamed of himself !! Look at all those wine glasses ....!!!
She's definitely had enough!
To end the evening off we went upstairs and played pool for a couple of hours.
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And she was the one not drinking ... !
Sunday got off to a late start. Could it have been for all the wine from the evening before ? Peo - our normally well behaved cat, had been a naughty girl, sitting right in front of Paula and her litter box while she was making pee. Not in the litter box, might I add. She never does that, but she must be really pissed (!) off by all the travelling we do! In any case we had to spend the morning trying to clean up after her - cat pee stinks !!
From when she was still popular!
In the afternoon we hooked up with Jamie, Colin, Teresa and Wayne at the Grand Park. There was supposed to be a big international flea market there. The flea market was there but it wasn't big. It was more a cluster of 10-15 tents offering ..... well, to be honest I don't know what!! But it was a lovely day and we couldn't complain about the company, so ...
Wayne, Colin, Teresa, Jamie, Mari and yes ... that's me graciously eating a hot dog!
The weather was really nice and Mari, Gokhan and Erkan turned up also. We also ran into Ingo and Jörg - I think all the foreigners in Ulsan was at Grand Park today. And that's even though the Whale Festival was on at the same time at TaeHwa River
Now that the days are a bit longer, I managed to get a short bike ride in after we got home. I wasn't in a good shape after the holiday and almost two weeks of sore throat, but I really enjoyed being back in the saddle.