a week in

You want to scare the crap out of yourself?

Go for a bike ride on the streets of Seoul.

You are competing with cars that seem to go at will, scooters and motorcycles who disregard lights, pedestrians and even go on the sidewalks as it suits them, and just an overall mayhem of city drivers who are not used to looking for bikers. Good thing I've got a bright pink helmet, I guess.

Yesterday was one of my favourite days so far; I went adventuring with a friend of a friend for the first time, and even how we met up was out of the ordinary. I was walking along looking for a payphone (good luck finding one of those on the street), and she recognised me merely because her cousin, whom I've met, told her I dressed like 'an artist'. So some girl just stops walking and points slightly mouth agape at me, and after a second realised it was each other. We then went wandering around; up old alleys where we found a super excitable puppy, 4 old ladies crouched and trying to coax a cat to come close so they could get the big sticker off it's belly, and then we even climbed up a billboard-type sign to get to the top of a huge heap of dirt. This turned out the be a construction site, and we got yelled and and chased all the while running down this sliding sediment to get back to our make-shift ladder. After dumping buckets of dirt out of both of our shoes, we wandered around a corner and realised we had entered an all boys high school. Some kids from a few floors up were yelling 'wegwegan!' which means foreigner in Korean, and then we joined in a basketball practise. The kids were all giggling as I lined up behind the completely oblivioius couch, and when it was my turn and he saw me, he just chortled, guestured like 'go ahead' and then let us join the class!

I hereby suck at basketball and can hardly make a hoop to save my life.

All this on top of a batting cage that cost 50cents for 15 hits, and a $5 korean-chinese food dinner, and it was a winner of a day!