adventures in korea

day 1: land. rent mobile phone. take bus to bun-dang. get picked up by my aunt who - after asking after my health, the flight, etc - asks me if i want to go shopping, cos if i want to go shopping we must go now! i say i don't need to but she asks if i'd like to so i say sure and we stop by her friend's shop. acquire two dresses. back at auntie's house we re-heat some delicious miyeok soup. so, so good.

day 2: get up to alarm at 8am, fall back asleep. auntie wakes me up at 11, saying mummy's friend is going to pick me up for lunch at 11.30! time to get up. mummy's friend and her daughter yunji come by and we go for a yummy lunch. not typical korean food, but korean nonetheless, and good too. nambu bus terminal. one ticket for namhae, please. don't get on the wrong bus! my mum warns on the phone. on the bus i'm sat next to a frail man who can't stop weeping, but i can't do anything about it. mummy picks me up from the bus station and she looks great :D

day 3: drive to nearest big town, jinju (pearl). get my hair done. shop. pick up some big sticks. go home and use the sticks and some yellow string to try to prop up the corn stalks that fell over in the heavy rain the night before. ama makes it look effortless while i'm standing there on the uneven soil just trying to keep all the bugs off me. i'm sent off to weed the grass around the putting green. demoted.

day 4: weed some more, fighting off the giant ants, spiders, grasshoppers and whatever else is lurking in the grass... help mum clean the guest rooms upstairs. drive over to the german village and house/garden land next to it. strange place - each house supposedly has a different national theme, and the appropriate kind of garden. we passed french, dutch, korean, japanese and finnish houses, but they all sorta looked the same... my dad came home in the evening with a new lawnmower, so we started mowing the grass and doing some more removal-of-unwanted-plant-just-cos-they're-not-pretty-enough-or-because-we-didn't-plan-for-them-to-be-there. then we visit a couple my parents know fairly well in the german village to give them an apple pie my dad picked up from the new costco that's opened up in busan. they have a new kitten.

beginning again

i stopped blogging when i realized i'd stopped writing in my journal. i assumed i was diverting all my sophisticated, abstract thoughts to the web rather than paper.

then i realized i just wasn't writing full stop. i've since begun journalling again - though not as faithfully as i was a few years ago - and i thought i'd have another go at blogging.

first blog: i leave for korea on sunday. i'll be there for ten days, visiting my parents and going on a blind date that my aunt set up for me. i might as well humor them, i think.