Grand Adventure Day 10: 2nd Reunion

Today I would meet up with my cousin Tina who was teaching English in Korea - the reason I made the stop over in Korea in the first place. Since she doesn't live in Seoul (I think she mentioned an hour or two or three by train) she could only come to hang out on the weekend. Met up at Myeongdong station and walked around the area for a bit. Visited an Artbox where I would continue my search for another notebook, and another Line store

Christmas Brown

After being on my own for the past couple days it was nice again to have someone to joke around with: to say the stupid things I normally say on a daily basis (you know what I'm talking about) and have someone laugh instead of stare at me because of a language and culture barrier. Or, at least when she would stare in confusion, it wasn't an "I don't understand what you're saying" but the "Are you a moron" stare. Not to complain, but for the past couple of days I've only had the other foreigners staying at the hostel and they don't really understand my humor. Also, unfortunately for you the reader, with Tina around I now have more pictures of myself than I've taken this entire trip. Especially dumb pictures in dumb poses, which we'll get to more of them.

As we walked around, we came across a ... I want to say it was some sort of temple or shrine. Whatever it was, there was something going on so we decided to take a look. Apparently, it was some sort of festival involving ... I have no idea. But they had all these plants and flowers growing into animals which I thought was really cool.

From my shitty memory, I want to also say there were foxes? deer? tigers? I really don't remember what other animals they built and no, I didn't take pictures of any other ones. It also reminded me that, apparently, I can't go one weekend without being near flowers as typically I would be at the orchid farm on the weekend. Weird. I got to try hodduk (I spelled that wrong, I'm sure), bread filled with melted brown sugar. So simple and so good! I actually remembered to write it down, but eaten too quickly to remember to take a picture of it (but that's what the internet is for if you want to look it up). Went to Gyeongbokgung palace today. Took a bunch of pictures and was tricked a number of times to reenact images from dramas Tina watched (that damn "look-back" pose). I feel like we walked in circles at times, but honestly, I couldn't really tell, since, after a while, all the buildings kinda looked the same.

The look-back

We were there in time to view a series of traditional dances at the palace museum auditorium. Not to insult someone else's culture, but it was a dark auditorium, it was the afternoon, I'd been walking all day, there was a lot of slow, stringed instruments and drum beats, so I fell asleep for a bit. I'm sure Tina did too, so at least I'm not alone in that. After resting my eyes, I was a bit more attentive as my day-dreaming brain started to ask, "In a fantastical universe, what type of ritual would these dances be used for?" As I've mentioned numerous times, I steal ALL of my writing ideas and though I didn't get a recording of the dances or the music, I feel I locked away enough of it that if I really, really needed to, I can recall it to use as needed. There was one involving women banging drums at a rapid pace which I guess would be for summoning a deity associated with war or festivities or anything involving energy and activity. A woman in rich, elaborate outfit dancing slowly to show herself off would be used for a sacrifice. A man with the fan would be used for banishing demons, not summoning one obviously since, practically and symbolically, you'd use a fan to blow or disperse things, not bring them to you.

When Tina sent me some of the pictures she took, she included this one of me jotting down notes after the show. It's kind of weird to see myself from the outside when, internally, I'm in my own nonsensical world. From there we headed to Insadong for food. I got a fish dish with a ton of side dishes. Afterwards, I got a poop-shaped chocolate snack.

Came across a lantern festival ... someplace on a river. No, at this point I'd completely lost track of where we were. Anyways, here's some pictures I took as we walked down from one end of the river to the other.

Later on that day, we hung out at a bar in the Hongik area with two of Tina's friends who, I think, were also teaching English. This was probably the most comfortable I've felt the entire trip, being in a Korean bar since that's where we've been drinking at these days. As Tina pointed out, we're from Hawaii so we were morally obligated to get the Spam and Eggs plate (which was actually really good). We also got a pancake with huge slabs of bacon on it. Swapped stories. Drank. Walked back to my hostel afterwards (this whole time, I thought it was so much further than it actually was).