pictures of where i live

the above picture is titled "the yellow dust cometh." it was out pretty bad the other night but not as bad as it's going to get supposedly. it looked foggy, but under the unforgiving glare of my camera's flash, you can see the tiny granules of dirt floating in the air. i'll be buying some surgical masks tomorrow...no joke.

the above picture from left to right: kai, catharine, patraig, me. i met catharine my second day here and we bumped into her while we were going out to eat. patraig and kai assumed that she was my friend and invited her along...the truth is that she offered to be my friend and never followed through and this was the first time i've seen her since. they had quite a nice laugh at the perceived awkwardness of the situation when i explained this while she was in the bathroom.
this is me in front of a typical building. shops are on multiple floors and you have to walk through scary stairwells to discover what's in said building. this one has a club on the top floor for older business men. ladies get free drinks. the men try getting the women liquored up so that they can cop a feel basically. at least, that's how kai explained it to me.
the above picture is part of the main drag taken from a bridge. it goes on and on and looks like this. this is the section of town with the ex-pat bar. there are also a good number of restaurants. in suwon, at least 65% of businesses are restaurants (not exaggerating) and most of them just serve deep fried pork (bleh). there are sushi places and american places as well, but we americans have it very nice back home in terms of the diverse range of cuisine we have to choose from. this section of town is about 10 minutes by bike from me and so i go about every day. i need to buy a helmet though...i feel stupid wearing one and having to carry it around because no one else does...it's just that i had about 2 close calls tonight with cars not seeing me and me having to rapidly accelerate in order to avoid being hit.