Quick update.
DAEGU
Two weeks ago my friend Emily and I went to Daegu and Seongju. Turns out both of our birthmoths' are from the same town, Seongju, which is outside of Daegu (Korea's third largest city). We decided to take a day trip to save money on lodging etc. so we left at 5:30 am and got back to Seoul at 10:30 pm. It was really fun! we took the Saemaeul train (one of the slower, cheaper trains) down to Daegu and then a bus to Seongju. We got to Daegu and couldn't figure out how to get to Seongju! We walked out of the subway exit and saw a long line of idol taxis but no buses. I walked up to one of the taxi drivers to see where to catch a bus. He told us that it was better to take a taxi because the buses didn't go to Seongju very frequently and we would have to wait a while. While he was talking to us, all the other taxi drivers crowded around us; we were surrounded by 10 middle aged men, all telling us their opinions and arguing with each other. haha. We ended up taking a taxi. Our taxi driver drove so fast! Like a Seoul taxi driver, but we were on windy country roads and there was actually space for him to get somewhere! Yikes! We got to Seongju and the driver dropped us off at the Civil Affairs building... I don't know why. We were both feeling pretty car sick after the ride, so we plopped down on the side of the steps. I'm sure we looked odd - Emily sprawled out and me sitting there in a daze. After a while we got up and wandered around. There really isn't much there. We ended up eating at the same restaurant that I ate at with Mom and Sarang two years ago! (same table too!)
After lunch we decided we'd explored enough and decided to head back to Daegu. We bought our bus and tried to figure out which bus was our; there were two buses back. The bus driver figured out we were foreigners and told us to wait for the other bus. When that bus arrived he told the driver where we wanted to go. How nice! There were also two halmonis (grandmas) who were really intent on helping us. They were so sweet! but I had no idea what they said. While we were on the bus I offered them some Choco Pies. So, Em and I were sitting on the bus minding our own business (we were both writing stuff) and all of a sudden the two grandmas and the bus driver start talking, pointing telling us to get off the bus. We were so caught off guard, we grabbed our stuff and ran off the bus. As the bus pulled away, we were like "wait, where are we???" They had misunderstood and thought we wanted to go to the subway station... We actually just wanted to go to the main part of Daegu to look around.
...we got a little lost...
They dropped us off in a suburbish area of Daegu at the end of the subway line. We stood there where the bus had dropped us off for a good five minutes while Emily finished writing her letter and just looking around until this lady who had been riding the same bus as us came up and pointed us in the right direction.
We ended up taking the subway into downtown Daegu and then we wandered around there for a while. It was really fun! We were seriously impressed by how clean everything was! The subway station was empty and immaculate! It was a good day.
DAEJON
Two Saturdays I went to Daejon to visit our family friends, the Kim family. I went after my samulnori classes because it was my last class before our final performance, so I felt like I ought to go. I took the bus from Seoul to Daejon. It was really nice to see them! and really fun.
Danny, their son who is my age was home for summer vacation, so we hung out. We went to dinner, watched TV, took a walk, ate breakfast, and lunch. I ate so much! haha.
We went to this really weird restaurant that had lots of odd rocks, fossils, sculptures, and a mini pirate ship?...
It was just really nice to chill and relax. It was funny because before bed Sunny, the mom, asked me what time I normally get up in the morning. I didn't want to seem really lazy, so I underestimated a little and said 8:30ish... I didn't want to seem like a slug or something, because I was the guest. But she told me, "we sleep til 10, so please get up at 10." In my head I was like "YES!!!" I was so happy. I think I got 11 hours of sleep that night! it was wonderful.
NANTA
Last week I finally got to see the Nanta Performance!!! It is a non-verbal performance using cooking utensils and is extremely famous in Korea. Its been running for over 10 years! It was so cool! They use samulnori and poonmgulnori rhythms and beat them out with knives, brooms, cooking pots and pans etc. It was so awesome. I recognized a lot of the beats too! I think my favorite part was the ending. They used Sang-mo hats (the ribbon hats) under a black light to that they showed up in florescent orange and green! It was pretty sweet looking.
SAMULNORI PERFORMANCE
Last Saturday was my final performance for my Samulnori class. It went pretty well and was lots of fun! As I've said in previous entries, I've been taking Saturday samulnori classes at the National Center for the Korean Traditional Performing Arts.
We played YongNam, which Shinparam, the MN group also plays. So, it wasn't a new piece, but the way we played had some differences, which I kept messing up on because I was used to something different! I couldn't keep straight which variations I was supposed to play for this piece, and I kept playing things that we play in our MN version... I managed to playing it through correctly for the first time during our performance; whew!
My friend was in the beginning gayageum class and she did a great job! She got to wear a pretty hanbok and we wore samulnori chibok.
HAGGLING
This past week my friends and I went to TechnoMart to try and buy electronic dictionaries. They are pretty pricey, but one of our other friends had bought one there for a decent price after haggling quite a bit with the salesperson. We spent over an two hours walking around going stall to stall checking and comparing prices, and haggling. We finally ended up with three dictionaries (I need to buy one for my neighbor). I got back and realized the menus did not change into English... Gr... I want them to change so it would be easier to use. So the next day we went back and spent another hour there haggling with the salesman trying to get a decent deal for different dictionaries. Apparently, only the more expensive ones switch to English. How unfortunate! We finally wore the guy down enough, and ourselves that we struck a deal! yay!!! It was the most haggling I've done this entire trip. I tried to look and sound really nice and cute and desperate.
So, we left Friday morning to catch our train to the ferry port. We took the subway from Sinchon to the train station and caught our train. We took a slower train because the fast train was sold out - it took about five hours to get down the the ferry port. It was pretty fun, but we mostly slept. 
We got in at 1 o'clock and our boat was supposed to leave at 1:30. We didn't know where the actual harbor was, so we asked these Europeans and kind of pointed us in the right direction. We had to walk there and we finally got to the building and found out that there were TWO buildings! and we of course, were at the wrong one. So, we ran over to the other building. When we got there, the people working there were waving at us telling us to go away. We missed our boat by two minutes... We went and asked the ticket lady what we should do and she was not nice. We called our travel agent and she talked to the ticket lady, who then got really ticked off. She told us the next boat was the next morning at 9 am. 
a book vending machine 
hanging out at the ferry terminal... 
We decided to watch a movie, Kungfu Panda, and then go find our motel. Yes, thats right. we hauled all our luggage into the movie theater with us. Vianey was so tired (she had pulled an all nighter the night before shopping at Dongdaemun) that she curled up in her seat and fell asleep. Afterwards, we walked around until we found a motel. Just to make sure we weren't getting ripped off Vianey and I ran around to three other motel checking prices; everything was pretty comparable. We checked into the Silk Road Motel (aka love motel) which had a vending machiene that included condoms on the way up the stairs. There was one perfectly round bed in the room; we all decided it was safer to sleep on the floor. After we got situated, around 11 pm we went out for dinner and ended up eating hobak pizza (pumpkin pizza) which was probably the most delicous pizza I've had here! Even better than koguma (sweet potato) because it had koguma on it as well! The next day we got up and headed off to Jeju!!! Our ferry left at 9 am and we made sure we were there with plenty of time. Our ferry was AWESOME!! We kind of think they upgraded us because of the mixup, but it had a noraebang, snack/restaurant area, a sauna, giftshop etc. It was like a mini cruise boat. We had fun exploring, eating and sleeping. We got to Jejudo about five hours later and were hounded by taxi drivers the second we stepped out of the station. one talked us into taking a taxi to our hotel, which was on the other side of the island!!! We thought that the boat terminal and the ferry terminal were near each other... oops! We checked into our hotel and sat for a while. Finally we dragged our sorry butts out to do some sight seeing. we were really tired. We wandered around and were too stingy to pay 1,000 won to see a waterfall... Vianey tried to sneak in - she was successful, but the rest of us were too chicken, so she had to come back out. haha. We ended up finding a really cool beach with lots of neat rocks (and sea cockroaches... ) and we played around there for a few hours. That was lots of fun! Afterwards we got hungry and went in search of dinner. We found orange flavored Jeju steambuns which were good, and then we went and ate Korean later. The next day we decided we should get up really early to see the sunrise at this famous mountain on the east coast of the island. By using her fingers, Vianey estimated that it would take us aprox. 2 and a half hours to get there by bus or taxi. We we woke up at 1:30 am (after going to bed at 11:30) and caught a cab at 2 am. The hotel concierge told us that we could take a bus, but he was wrong. There were def. no buses running at that time of night. we got in the taxi and told the drive where we wanted to go and he told us it would take 40 min!!! oops. He dropped us off at a 24 hour convenient store (GS25) which was the only thing open there. We were sitting on the curb looking really pathetic when the police drove up and dropped off another foreigner there to wait until the sun rose. haha. So we hung out in the store for a few hours until it was time to climb the mountain. We climbed the mountain-man was that a work out. Vianey and I silently climbed while Caroline and Emily followed us laughing their butts off the entire way up! We got to the top and sat down amongst the crowd of native Koreans and foreigners and waited. And waited. And waited... Too bad it was CLOUDY!!! so, we never got to see the sunrise. It was supposed to be up around 5 am, and we hopefully waited until 6 or so. On the way down it started to rain and we took a bunch of cool pics. By the time we got to the bottom it started to pour! We wandered around the town trying to find a taxi, but there were none! we called our previous taxi driver but he was long gone and couldn't make it back for an hour or so. Finally we found the one existing taxi in the area. The driver was so awesome! We told him to take us some place fun. So he took us to the northern coast. On the way there, as a service, he stopped at a rock statue garden and let us get out and take pics. There was also Mystery Road which is an optical illusion. If you put your car in neutral it looks like it is going up hill by itself, even though the road is actually slanting down. At 8 am he dropped us off at Hallim Park which was a botanical garden/bird park. Its kind of like Butterfly World in FL without the butterflies... That was actually really fun. we stayed there for four hours! Afterwards we walked down the road to the beach. But we were all really hungry for lunch so we walked around trying to find a restaurant that served normal, non-seafood food. Very hard to find. We walked and walked til we found one and man was it good! Em and I had kimchee bokumbap (kimchee fried rice) and Vianey and Caroline had bulgogi topbap (bulgogi and rice). YUM!!!! Then we went to the beach and played around. We took a gazillion pics and a gazillion and one jump shots! Afterwards, as we were leaving Vianey realized she lost her camera. Sad! We went back to look for it but couldn't find it. We have our suspicions about this large family, but who knows. It started raining again. We caught a taxi to the chocolate museum on the west coast of the island. It was VERY weird, but we just needed someplace out of the rain. Plus we were all slap happy so it was quite entertaining. Finally, we decided to go back to our hotel. We caught a cab and went back. We made it around the entire perimeter of the island in one day. The next day we had to leave. We got up and packed up our stuff and made it to the airport on time. Yay! oddly, a few of us made it through security with bottles or water and other liquids, some of them in plain view! We got back around 11 am. We all had class at 1, but I didn't go. The End.
