Student Life Night Out

Turns out I wasn’t actually rostered on to work today. Though I only found that out when I got to work and my manager told me. She said I could stay since I was already there so I worked a three-hour shift until 3pm. Tonight I was invited to have dinner with the guys from my Student Life Action Group at a Korean BBQ restaurant in town. They said it was fine for me to bring my brothers along too since they had nothing else to do. We got into town just before 7pm and parked down a side street off K Road. We were sure to take everything with us and not leave anything valuable in the car since the alley looked pretty dodge.

The sign outside our restaurant

My Action Group leader Chris came out to meet us on the corner of K Road (that’s sounds dodgy in itself…) and he walked us down to the Korean restaurant where everyone else was. I saw Josh and Nesta, the other two guys from our group, as well as a bunch of other guys from another group. After grabbing a plate, I had a look at the different food that was available. I didn’t actually recognise much, if any, of the food there apart from the kim-chi. I opted not to try the kim-chi though since I knew it was really spicy. Instead I had Korean noodles, Korean pancake, seaweed and some other creamed pasta-looking stuff. Since it was a Korean BBQ restaurant, we had to cook our own meat on the gas stoves provided on every table. The raw meat all looked pretty similar and I couldn’t tell what was what, so I just grabbed a few pieces of random raw meat and took it with me to the table. The other guys were already cooking meat on the stove and some of it was ready by the time I sat down so I tried what I think was lamb. I’m glad they cooked it for me though because I don’t think I’d be able to trust myself enough. Because the restaurant was a buffet, I filled myself up until I was full.

After the dinner, Chris suggested that we go to play some pool. As we walked down the road, I realised one of the other guys who was with us was Toni Keeling’s boyfriend, Alistair. I had only met him once before, and it was brief, so I wasn’t sure if it was him or not at first. He told me that he went to Rangitoto College last year and he met Toni last year at MAX, the maths extension programme for Year 13 students at The University of Auckland. This year he’s doing Engineering – good stuff!

Chris taking a shot

The place we went to play pool was on Queen Street, just up the road from the Town Hall. We hired three tables between us and I played my first game against Chris. I played a few more doubles games before the final game where I played together with Chris against Ryan and Nesta. It was a contested battle to the end, and what made it more interesting was the new rule that Ryan introduced halfway through. Basically before we took our shot, we had to make a call and decide whether or not we were going to sink a ball. If we said we were going to sink a ball but didn’t, then we’d get chalk rubbed on our face. Similarly, if we said we were not going to make the shot but ended up sinking a ball, we’d also get chalk to the face. As you can probably guess, by the end of the game we all had blue faces covered with chalk. All in the name of fun though! We ended up leaving just before 11pm and we were relieved when we saw that our car was still where we left it and in one piece!