Thursday, May 7, 2015

Day 75: Exploring!

Day 75: Tuesday, May 5


Children's day holiday, which meant no school!

Met up with my friend around 12:30 to go exploring for the day! We decided to start the day with lunch and went to the famous Tosokchon (토속촌) restaurant.  I had never heard of it but apparently it's pretty famous so he wanted to try it.  In line (which wrapped around basically the whole building) we were talking about everything, and it came up that I lived in Minnesota and was moving to Madison in July.  Well, this Korean lady in front of us turned around and said "Oh, I lived in Minneapolis 35 years ago!"


So we kept talking to her and it was just fun.  Her friend didn't really speak English, but my friend's Korean is pretty good so he just talked to her a bit too.  When we finally got to the front of the line, the guy asked the size of the groups to determine where we could sit.  The lady just told him "oh 2 or 4, whichever gets in faster".  He was confused and she just called us her friends and said we could sit together or apart.  So, we ended up sitting together :P  It was just fun, we didn't talk much at the table, but we did a bit.  Nice to meet nice people everywhere in the world.

After lunch we went to Insa-dong; I thought I had never been there before but apparently I have, I just didn't know the name of it!  It was fun, just seeing street vendors and exploring the area.  There were a lot of lanterns everywhere, which was just nice to see.  We tried a type of icecream which is in like an inverted candy cane shape made of probably some sort of corn meal?  Whatever it was, it was good.  I had blueberry and it was delicious.

Lanterns on the roadside

The icecream

We walked around more, explore some sights, went to a large building that only sold musical instruments (I was going to buy a pocket trumpet but they were all too expensive :< ), and just relaxed.  When walking around, we say a temple with THOUSANDS of lanterns, it was just amazing.  We spent quite a while walking around in there, just admiring it.  You could pay like $30 to get your wish written on a slip and hung on a lantern, but we didn't do that, just took pictures.  It was so pretty~

Just a small, small part of it
It was so great to see.  We went walking by a little man made stream that I think ends up going into a real stream?  I don't know what it is, but it was a beautiful place to walk, and one in the city too!  So cool.  Apparently you can use it to walk the whole way back to Anam, which I may try one day if it's nice and I don't have plans.  We went to a few shops after that - I bought a few lanterns because they were cheap and I thought they'd be great decorations at home.  I ended up buying lights for 3 of them which were a bit more expensive and I still need a battery for them, but now if I ever put them up in a place where I could reach to turn the light on and off I'll be able to :)

Walking down there was so relaxing

We got more icecream and had two separate incidences where students interviewed us on camera for an English class; I bet they needed to practice speaking with a native English speaker and prove it.  I bought another house decoration from a street vendor, which was pretty nice.  We took the subway back to Anam and got Japanese curry for dinner and just talked for another few hours sitting there.  It was just a great day.  Ended up getting home around 9pm, so I just showered, worked on homework more, and went to bed.



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