Jim jil bang

 Jim jil bang

I am currently laying in an igloo-type sleeping cubby hole; with a single naked red bulb to dimly illuminate it. It's 12:47am, and I've got to get up at 5 am to get a flight back up to Seoul tomorrow morning. My best friend, Jewely and I came to Busan for the long weekend holiday for Bhuddas birthday, and tonight is my second time sleeping in one. This is by FAR already better than the first time, which was Friday night. That one was over crowded to the point that I felt like goldilocks looking for the things that are just right; in that first we tried sleeping in the playground. Too hot and too noisy.

Next up was outside on a pagoda on the rooftop where there were scattered couples. It was kinda cold but do-able.. That is until the mosquitoes found me, so we finally settled where the majority of the people were; inside on the main rooms floor, with one thin blanket to sleep on, and one to cover with and all donning matching jim jil bang issued clothing. I had my friend to one side of me, and the other was a mans feet, the owner of which was snoring nice and loudly. This was the only spot where we could cram two bodies in next to each other as the stairwell, other rooms, and every inch of free space was already occupied. It was so surreal - kind of just dead bodies littered everywhere and some Korean tv program playing in the background.

Tonight we did our first shower at the sauna as they are reffered to in English. You are segregated by sex, and then from the change room get undressed and go naked into the area usually only a few steps away where there is a communal shower area, large hot spa, and even massages and body scrubs can be done for you by women who work there. It's definitely a whole new experience for those of us who haven't grown up with this type of thing.

We are still a bit western and are each sleeping on about 4 blankets each rather than just one.I know we should tough it out and get used to it, but it's not easy to sleep on a solid marble floor and not have half your body go numb if you lie the wrong way. Here's hoping these four hours of sleep are solid!

 Busan flight

 Sky view of Busans islands

Adventures of late

The daily grind in the marketplace means the vendors sit here for hours upon end

So the following days have been fun:
Monday - moved out of my place at Eemonims, but only after a morning at the markets where she swindled me a lovely deal on a ring I've been unable to forget, and a delicious traditional Korean lunch. Then I scooted out to my friends place way at the very south eastern end of Seoul; well so far south it is out of Seoul an off the subway line. It took about an hour to train there. My friends family is so cute! Pregnant sister and her husband, a fun and adorable mother, a father with a shock of pepper hair littered with salt, but Spock-like eyebrows that are all grey and have just enough of a zenith to make him seem extraordinarily interesting. All this topped off with a midnight screening of Iron Man 2, complete with Korean subtitles, beer served draft for only $3.50 a pint, and no line up since you pre-select your seats upon purchase. Seriously, can this be beat??

Tuesday - Ruski came to town. Well, to country to be exact. We bused in to Myeongdong to
meet him and from there the hunt for a suitable resturant began. Rejected were the uncharacteristic holes above the wall ( not a hole in the wall since most places here are stacked floors and floors high with the establishment you are after), scoffed at were expensive menus ( although this place let me reach incandescent catch one of their squids, which then suction-cupped on to me until I screamed a little and dropped it back into it's watery home), and also this one amazing place that we missed the dinner menu of, and they were now only serving booze and booze eats since it was after 9pm. To rest your worries, we found a great spot, bib em bap really is a good tasty dish. We also made sure to show Ruski the MyeongDong ropes- how they literally give you a free gift just to come into the store, even if you purchase nothing. Dope! Then came hunting down a place for the light traveller, who ended up at a Jim jil bang in GangNam- 10,000 won (like $10 basically) to get a locker, clothes for the night, access to showers, saunas and communal rooms you can sleep in or hang out in until you want to leave.

Meat on display at the markets

Wednesday - I climbed up the mountain which is steps from the back of my friends house, where they have hula hoops and excercise equipment which is free to use, as well as a lovely old man just hanging out drinking macolae - rice wine - and offered me a drink. So we chatted for a while until I headed out again, crawling under fences, discovering small hillside farms and feeling like I had a moment of solitude for the first time since being in Korea for 5 weeks... and then I heard all the gunfire. Turns out literally next to the walking path I was on, was an army training ground, and they were definitely working on live ammo that day. Goodbye solitude and quiet. My friend and I headed back into the thick of things in Seoul, anyways though, so it was most certainly short-lived.

No dmz for me

Today my two friends and I had planned to go to the infamous DMZ, the zone between North and South Korea. We got up at the ungodly hour of 7.30am on a Saturday and met at 9am before coffee.  Trust me, these are all key factors.

We were on the subway (I admit, we jumped the gates so we woulnd't have to pay), and then realised we had ALL forgotten our passports. The one thing you need aside from money to pay to take the buses to get to the DMZ. So we decided to catch a bus, anywhere. Well.. anywhere our budgeted $20 for the day would take us, so we went to the main bus depot and for us some tickets for a place that was $6 each way, and went to find our bus. Turns out a lot of people had this same idea, and it was something here called 'parents day' that exact day, so everyone was holding carnations in one form or another, waiting to catch a bus to where there parents live. Our line was easily the most popular, and after trying to figure a way to hop that line, we just came to realise we wasted an hour and the mob WOULD attack. So we got a refund and headed on the subway again, this time to a place called Suwon.

We stumbled around and found this fortress stuff; old ancient walls and archery towers and other cool stuff at the top of a small mountain (huge hill?), which we got to after paying $1.50 to get thru to some weird old villiage...deciding it was lame, and hopping the fence in search of a giant gold bhudda we had spotted earlier. Turns out we hopped into another area you were meant to pay for, but due to the lnaguage barrier, we just got away with it with directions to the bhudda! We found him, by the way. He was huge, and there was a monk who went to go bang on some hollow gord type thing that mad a surprising amount of noise while chanting for a while in the sanctuary underneath, and then we found all these yellow bikes, all lined up. We stood there mostly just poking them and trying to figure out how to use them, when someone who spoke a bit of english explained that we could take them for free!

The three of us basically terrorized the city for about 40 mins, riding down the back alleys, on the streets, up thru the old city gates, and wherever we felt the urge to go. We even found a man pooing outside on accident. He just yelled at us a lot.

By this time we were staarrrrving, so we returned the bikes, and went on the hunt for food. Somehow we got the attention of a drunk middle-aged man and he followed us for a few blocks, determined to get us to sit down - anywhere in any resturant it seemed. So when he was talking to one of the resturants, we all ran as fast as we could away and ducked down an alley, faint with hunger. We landed right by a bib-em-bap place tho (we love bib-em-bap!), and went in there for our meal.

Afterwards, I went to go try and figure out the automatic coffee machine, and got talking to the only other patrons there - some drunk old guys who ended up buying us a bunch of beer and talking to us in Korean the whole time, while the owner of the place (who was drinking with them just before us I would like to add!), just shook her head the whole time, and tried to get us to sit back at our table.

Turns out one of the old guys totally understood english (whoops, we were making our own subtitles to what we thought they were saying and gesturing about... busted!).

One more hour home on the subway, and we were back in Seoul; our packed lunches not going to waste for the day. Phew.

Dr. Fish

So on the weekend, my friend Jewely and I went to something known ominously as... 'Dr. Fish'. We hunted around trying to find it in a part of town called Myeongdong, but no dice. I mean, we found it, but by the time we did, it was after 9pm and apparently closed. So we looked on the internet, found another one in Gang-Nam (line 2, 2nd floor above WHO.A.U.). It was in a place translated to something called the Tree Cafe, so you climb upstairs to this place with trees and coffee and people sitting around, but up by the window, there's this section with water troughs embedded into the platform you're on, and after washing your feet thoroughly, you stick your feet in and the fish literally go crazy!

check it out.

Tooo much fun

Popstars from Ariana Rock on Vimeo.

5:55pm

 I went down south on a KTX train for a few days, and snapped these two shots in a town called Gimje

Lately, there's been this expo on for images and photographers. Thank God I came here just in time for this, it's turned out to be a little bit invaluable, in the way that I have not only met photographers galore, but I've also made some connections to join biking clubs, where to go to develop my film myself, and possibly even a studio that I can use... I think for free. So I feel like I can definitely say that I'm starting to feel as though I'm getting my footing in this new city of mine. Plus I have also gotten a tshirt with one of my photographs printed on it, six 8x10's, and one enlargement all printed for free! Yes, I am having a good week. 

It was a CRAZY experience there though - there are models hawking everything, and the photographers are just snapping like it's a major red-carpet event or something, just most of these photographers are amateurs, and here the light and scenes are set up for them already. It's intese for sure. Mind you, that's how they do things here, even if a new bakery open up, a model is out the front dancing, posing and just generally trying to get the attention of whoever walks by.

The closer it gets, the more I become excited about this bike adventure of mine. My plan is to get from Seoul to Busan on my bike somehow. I KNOW this sounds slightly over-ambitious, but I really just want to give it a shot and see where I land, you know? I'd never know if I never tried, and just can't live that way.

Unlike Seoul people, these two both obliged when I asked to take a photo