Last night was a potluck dinner @ Sarah my boss’ flat – it’ll be the last one we have there because she is moving out of London soon for a new job.
Su and I brought a tub of Wing Wing chicken wings – these are Korean style beer-battered wings flavored with garlic and soy sauce, and are just delicious. The korean name of the chain is Chimek – the Chi is chicken and the mek is mekchu, which means beer. We also sneakily had our own Chimek dinner before heading to Sarah’s – didn’t want to have to fight for wings once we got there!
Most of the English staff were there when we arrived around 7pm – and a few brought their partners too, which is always nice. Partners means the topic of conversation is unlikely to be about work, which is a real pleasure! I talked to folks about:
- How Su and I met – at the Tokyo Picnickers group in Yoyogi Park, and went on a first date after that to the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi, where we saw Damien Hirst’s ‘Mother and Child’, the two cows cut in half in tanks of formaldehyde.
- Su and I having an early date to the Queen Chateau Soapland, where she wowed me climbing to the top of the water tower on the roof without being bothered at all!
Those topics came up because folks were talking about how they met their partners. I also talked about:
- My Red Dead Redemption adventures, and playing the co-operative cooking game Overcooked with Su. Others talked about early video games like Metroid, we all luxuriated in nostalgia over the bike racing game Road Rage, then some Wii tennis and such.
- Su got into making websites with someone who is interested in selling their art.
- I got into the news with one of the partners who works in the news – we agree coverage of Trump needs to change. He’s more conservative, and we came down to the question of should we be letting people starve in the streets if they are unable to work. He seemed to think yes. A tricky position to defend, really.
- Chatted about business ideas – one of Su’s longstanding ideas has been to import/export antique furniture from the UK to Korea. A colleague described his idea from several years ago – after seeing a particular rocky channel on a beach, where if you started swimming in that channel the waves coming in held you in the same place. His idea was a small swimming pool with jets to let you swim without needing a full pool. Unfortunately, it already existed…
- One of my colleagues lives in a house share in a very old building with no wired lights – it’s a listed building so they can’t install them. Instead they have 8 lamps around the walls of their one room, and it’s still always dim!
- The news guy from earlier has gotten back into LEGO, buying a castle and building it. In his dream future house he would have a display room full of all the castles he has built.
After this point, nearing 10pm, I was all out of socializing energy and just sat there like a deflated balloon. Su knows well when I hit this point. It was time to go anyway, so we did, in bed by midnight, sleep through til 9am!