Wild Weekend

Okay, so, it's been a wild few days.  Let me try to get things back up to speed so that I don't fall even more terribly behind with things than I already am.

On Saturday, I left for my weekend homestay with one of the Korean students who I only met the day before I was to stay at her house.  How's that for being a homecrasher?  A big part of this program seems to be pairing up students with other students they don't know, in order to get the most "mixing" of people, and to prevent people from getting too stuck in their own little cliques (but it happens anyway).

My homestay buddy and I, along with about 7 other students, went to the giant amusement park of Korean awesomeness that is Lotte World.  Lotte (check out the link to the Wiki page) is an absolutely ginormous brand here in Korea, and everything from soft drinks to gum to department stores and amusement parks are owned by them.  There's both and indoor and outdoor part to the amusement park, but it started raining quite heavily as soon as we went to the outdoor section (and I heard my first few bits of thunder since being here), so we spent the majority of our time inside.  There's an indoor roller coaster, water ride, viking ship ride, the works, so we had a grand old time wandering around in there.  Oddly enough, for lunch we ate at a "Mexican" restaurant, and I put Mexican in quotes because on the side of the dish there were still pickles and a bit of kimchi, makes me wonder about the authenticity of any food if you're eating it outside of its home country.  I also had a bit of (what the stand called) "Peanut Buttered Squid".  It was basically little strips of squid that were deep fried, though it did have a vaguely peanutty taste.  And in case you're wondering why I ate squid, I am willing to break with my otherwise fairly strict vegetarianism in order to try new things.  Perhaps this indicates that I have weak moral standards, but I like to think that it means I strike while the iron's hot and opportunity is knocking.

After we were done at the park, my buddy and I split from the rest of our group so that we could go to her apartment and meet her family and have dinner.  My homestay buddy lives with her two sisters and mom and dad, but I only met one of the sisters, and the parents.  They were all absolutely lovely and very cute (the mother gave me a big hug as soon as I walked in the door), and my homestay partner had made sure to let her mother know I was vegetarian and she cooked a meat-free meal for me.  Their apartment was a reasonable size, but modest compared to the size of homes back in PA.  The funny thing was, though their home was fairly modest, they had the newest and shiniest TV I think I've ever seen, a factor of living in the home country of Samsung, I suppose.  I've noticed that everywhere: the buildings and general environs might be a bit "shabby" to American eyes, but their technology is lightyears ahead of ours.

After dinner we watched a bit of Korean TV, where a magician bent a spoon in half without touching it, and made coins pass through the walls of bottles.  Interesting.  We then watched a movie, but not before my homestay buddy went through all the Facebook photos of me, and kept making approving noises every time a picture of my and my boyfriend came up.  I don't know if it's a Korean thing, or a college-age girl thing, but whether or not you have a boyfriend seems to be a hot topic for discussion.  At dinner last night, the conversation was on something completely unrelated to relationships or boyfriends or anything, and then out of the blue, I hear "Helen has a boyfriend!"  I still don't know why or for whose benefit that was said, but apparently it had some sort of significance to something.

The next morning we woke up, and I took a sort of half-shower.  I say it was a half, because the shower was more European-style, where the showerhead was handheld, and there was nowhere to hook it.  I'm not co-ordinated enough to use those well, and especially not when there's no shower curtain, as there was in this case, so I resorted to just splashing myself with water from the bath tap.  (Not to mention I couldn't figure out how to direct the water to the shower head away from the bath tap, so I figured this was the safest way to avoid watery disaster.)  The mother had made us pumpkin soup (seems to be Korean oatmeal), and we had a plate of cherry tomates and grapes.  The grapes here are literally 2 to 3 times the size of the ones we have at home, and are delicious.  My homestay buddy was able to suck the insides out of the grapes and not eat the skin, but this is a skill I discovered I do not have.  I suppose it's because our grapes at home are so small that accounts for why I never learned to eat them this way - take the skin off of PA grapes, and what'd you'd have left would be the size of a pea.  In the morning, the mother of my homestay buddy also gave me some lovely presents to take home, but I won't mention them here, because one of them I was told is for my mother, and I know she's reading this, so I'll keep it a secret.

After breakfast, my buddy took me to the area around Gangnam station, which is known for its shopping.  It kind of reminded me of Michigan Mile in Chicago, with store after store after store, and cafe after cafe after cafe.  I have noticed there are a lot of chains here, but mainly of stores I've never heard of.  There's a Paris Baguette on every corner, tons of Etude House and Ariatum (I might be spelling that wrong, both are beauty stores), and Baskin Robbins seems to have taken over (okay, so I have heard of that one before).  We stopped in a Uniqulo, and I made a quick trip to the Lush I saw.  It's becoming my mission to stop in every international Lush I can, and I'm making some headway towards that goal.  I got some hair conditioner, as two weeks of Korean water and travel shampoo is starting to take its toll.

We then met up with my buddy's mother and sister again, and she drove all of us to a vegetarian buffet (I told you these people were lovely).  It was quite delicious, and made me wish I could find an all-vegetarian restaurant at home.  We then went to a small park for a walk, and then we were dropped off at the subway station to meet back up with the students we were with at Lotte World.  The group of us met in a mall, and then ventured down the street to a sauna/spa.  There were many different sauna rooms, at different temperatures and with different "themes" (one was the "salt" room, one was shaped like a pyramid, one smelled like tea), and spent the afternoon there.  I discovered that I don't seem to sweat a whole lot when I get hot like that, I just get sticky.  This spa also seemed to have a bit of an identity complex, as there were arcade games in the hallways, and a magic show going on as we left.  There were a lot of kids there with their parents, so I suppose it is more of a "take the family and spend the day!" kind of a place, rather than a "tranquil retreat," the way we normally think of US spas.

After the sauna, we went to a bar/restaurant and had plates and plates and plates of food, including Korean pizza, some cheesy corn thing which was delicious, and makgeolli mixed with soda.  It was all very yummy, but quite filling, and I think I'm going to come home much larger than when I left.

Today so far has been "normal," in that we had a lecture on Korean film this morning, and watched a Korean movie this afternoon, called "The King and the Clown."  It was possibly the most bizarre movie I have ever seen, so I feel I am in no position to really make any kind of commentary on it.

The cafeteria set up a suggestion board for what people want to eat, and in response to the one suggestion that was written about five times, they had hot coffee with breakfast this morning.  Perfection.  The weather is also quite hot today, and is supposed to stay that way for the rest of this program.  It had been raining off and on for nearly all of last week, but now it's stopped and the sun is out.  Makes me wish I owned more clothes appropriate for summer weather.  I also think I am getting a cold, there has been one going around, and for the past two days, when I go to sleep and get up in the morning, I have a scratchy throat.  And that scratchiness hasn't really gone away yet today.  Yippee.  I'm sure my water bottle isn't helping things, considering I haven't washed it out in over 2 weeks, so all my germs are just swimming around in there.  Wonderful.  I think I'm going to work on that right now . . .