Co-Fellows

In addition to moving to a new city, doing PiA means being presented with a new set of friends. Not of your choosing. For a year. That's a situation that could get dicey, so I'm really grateful that Jessica, Tae, Chris, and I get along so nicely as a group. We're all easygoing (perhaps to a fault) and immensely respectful of one another. But we are all very different people (or perhaps I just feel different, which is usually how I feel), so what happened Thursday night was that much more wonderful and funny.

We were in a taxi heading back from Free Club and I'm not sure how it happened, but suddenly we're all belting out the score to Les Miserables. Yes, our little mixed-gender group knows the entirety of Les Mis, a musical I have seen at least five times and know by heart. It's admittedly not the hippest of musicals - it's probably closer to CATS than to RENT in terms of coolness - but that makes it all the more remarkable that we can sing of Jean Valjean's plight together. Drunkenly. Verbatim. The driver must have thought we were nuts.


On a somewhat related note, we've decided where we're going for our holiday in October. We get eight days off for National Day (it's the 60th Anniversary of the Republic), so we've settled on Chang Bai Shan. Also called Baekdu Mountain, it is a dormant volcano on the border between North Korea and China. This was my first choice for a trip, so I'm really excited we're going. It involves a 20+ hour train ride (yes!) and we'll probably stop in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province. A quick Wiki search for images of Chang Bai Shan turns up something like this: