Octopus Breath

Today's fun and frolic was the tangible benefit of finishing my term paper early.  I knew being studious and an early worker would pay off eventually.

I slept in until around 9:30 this morning, and then took a nice long shower and waited for the rest of my suitemates to get up.  Once we reached a critical mass of people, we headed off for the Paris Baguette shop down the street from the university.  Paris Baguette is a shop similar to a Panera bread, though there's tons more pastries to choose from, and the prices are much lower.  Oh, and there's one about every 300 feet in Seoul.  There's also a chain of shops called Paris Croissant, but I haven't tried that store (I imagine it would be fairly similar.)  We all picked out various pastries and drinks that we wanted to try, and then brought them back up to our suite for brunch.  I had a vegetable bread, parmesan doughnut (yes, that's right), and a custard-filled bread.  We all agreed that the food seemed to be the best we had ever eaten, and I think that might just be because most of us are going through bread withdrawal, as the main carbohydrate here is rice - nothing wrong with that, but our American palates are used to starches of the more processed and baked and yeasty kind.

This is where the positive benefits of finishing my term paper early start to appear.  After we finished eating, three of the girls from Cedar Crest decided it was time to buckle down and finish their term papers, while the three of us who had gotten done early decided to do some more sight-seeing.  Two of the Korean students came with us as our guides, and so we set out.  We decided to go back to Insadong, even though we had been there back in the first of the week trip, as the two other Cedar Crest girls needed to buy more souvenirs, and I was game for anything.

On the way to Insadong, my coughing cold kicked in, and as I didn't want to have a giant hacking fit on the subway, I tried to hold back, but this somehow messed with my sinuses, and I started crying involuntarily.  The two Korean students with us couldn't figure out quite what was going on, so to them (and the rest of the subway car), I just spontaneously started crying.  Luckily one of the other Cedar Crest girls was able to explain to our Korean friends what was going on, and they understood that I was really okay (other than the whole random-coughing thing).  This cold I have is strange, as 90% of the time, I'm fine, but all of a sudden I'll be hit by a wave of something, and I'll sound like I'm dying, and I won't be able to hold back.  I just hope that I'm all fixed up by the plane ride home, and today's subway episode isn't repeated on the plane . . . that might be a bit awkward.

In Insadong, we wandered around the streets that we had been down before, but this time there were WAY more people, probably because it was the weekend this time, and there were far more foreign tourists.  Maybe it's because we normally travel with Korean students as our guides, but I don't feel like a tourist in the way I normally do when I travel.  I mean, I get that I obviously stand out as not Korean, but I don't feel like a tourist tourist.  So every time I think "Oh look, a tourist!" I have to remind myself that I am actually a tourist myself.

While in Insadong, we decided to revisit a waffle-and-ice-cream restaurant that we ate at the last time we were there.  It took a good 20 minutes of scouting to figure out where we had gone last time, as we tred to retrace our steps and failed miserably, going up and down the street and disagreeing about where we had eaten, and whether it was important to eat in the exact same place again.  In the end, we went back to the same place, and it turned out to be a good thing, because one of the Korean girls was friends with the waitress who worked there, and after we had ordered and eaten our waffles with ice cream, she brought us an order of patbingsu for free.  I think I mentioned this dessert before, but in case I haven't, it's kind of like an ice cream sundae with extra shaved ice that you mix up before eating . . . the wiki article on it can fill you in on the rest.

We got done with Insadong much more quickly than we had thought we would (perhaps because we had been there before and kind of already knew what was there), and from there we decided to visit Gyeongdong Market.  This turned out to be a huge market selling all kinds of dried foods and fish and seafood and fruits and everything you can imagine.  Most of the items I have seen before in various travels, but there were a few unique items.  We saw some dried centipedes, which actually looked remarkably vegetable-like.  There were also a few butcher stands selling dogs' legs, which was a new sight for me.  The one Korean girl was embarrassed to tell us what they were (we kind of guessed from the appearance, but were just asking her to confirm our suspicions), afraid that we would freak out and/or think Korea was weird.  We assured her that we were fine with the concept, just making sure that we had correctly identified the item in question.  We had.

We continued walking around, and eventually ended up at Lotte Plaza (I wasn't kidding when I said this store is huge in Korea), where we went in and spent some time poking around.  At the beauty shop I bought some items, again, uncharacteristic for me, but fun.  The clerks threw in a bunch of extra free samples in my bag, one of which says it contains "snail essence," so I'm torn on that one, as to if I should use it as a vegetarian.  That, and I don't even know what kind of product it is, so I'll need some Korean help in figuring how I would use it, if I am going to.  Around Lotte Plaza there were a number of little kitschy stores which we wandered through, and I bought a pair of socks.  Random, I know, but there seem to be socks EVERYWHERE here.  Socks with bunnies, socks with cats, socks with Korean flags, whatever.  The cuteness factor of Korea is inescapable, and even the socks are touched by it.

We wanted to try some Korean pizza, so after we were done shopping, we took the bus to what is apparently the Korean pizza center of the world, as a number of restaurants' workers were calling to us to try their shop's pizza (though they were calling in Korean, so we only knew what they were saying after translation).  It turns out that the place we went to, I had been to before with my homestay buddy and her friends, but the rest of the Cedar Crest girls had never been there before.  It was quite funny, that two Korean girls, without contacting each other, would both choose the same restaurant as the prime choice to get Korean pizza.  I guess the place we went to must be pretty popular . . .

The Korean girl (in case you're wondering, our group started out as three Cedar Crest girls with two Korean girls with us, and in the middle of our adventure, one Korean girl left to spend the rest of the free weekend at her parents' home, so that explains why I switched from "girls" to "girl") ordered the most popular Korean pizza for us, which isn't really pizza at all.  I'll let wiki explain what pajeon is for me.  Ours came with lots of green onion and octopus, which I really hadn't planned on eating, but I at least gave it a shot (last time we had the kimchi pajeon, so I hadn't been worried about eating meat and messing with my vegetarianism).  The octopus was really chewy, though the taste wasn't bad.  But given that eating a lot of meat tends to make me sick, as I'm not used to it, I did my best to eat around it and just have the onions and "crust".  It was quite good, and we shared a bottle of Magkeolli.

And to just think, if I hadn't gotten my paper done early, I wouldn't have had the chance to do all that.  Makes me glad I'm not a procrastinator.