Our Outback Adventure
Part II Into the Thick of it
After making our way into what I now know is Meokgeori (see below sign), Our happiness was forced to be extensively short lived. The GPS was telling us "you are five minutes away from your destination!", but on the map, it noted that it was also around the next immediate street corner. This was extremely confusing and flustering information. So many shops where everywhere, as well as tons of traffic and people, so it was a extremely distracting to our search. Trying to follow the instructions given to us was mostly hopeless.
While my husband was trying to drive, our friend was stuck in the tiny back seat of our little two door hatch back, and was the only one fully searching for the X on this misbegotten treasure map. And I, being as useless as ever, was in the front seat blocking all view and was happily snapping away pictures. As he's trying to both look and drive, my husband turned to me and asked, "Do you see it anywhere?" and at that exact moment, I snapped this picture and said a rather lazy, "Nope."
So of course the GPS does its defiant and conclusive answer of "you've reached your destination" and immediately shuts off the guidance system. This leaves the three of us, now slowly rolling past the restaurant, in a small panic. We're starting to think this place wont be found in the messy paper stack of stores; unbeknownst to us, we had just dim-wittedly driven past.
This lead me into a sort of hunger driven panic: "Where are we? There's too many cars! Why are there people dancing in the street to political music? There's 50 people on this crosswalk!! Is there even food here?! What the hell have we gotten into??!!"
Oh rapture, a Dunkin' Donuts! Something we finally recognized. And even better, we see foreigners walking in the street! We may be able to survive to eat after all, or snack at least. But how do we park and where? These street blocks are humongous and there's no parking anywhere. The steady flow of traffic and cramped streets had us pulled further away from the safety zone of coffee shops, and into some seriously bizarre territory. What little hope I had received from the previous image, was now quickly snatched away.
"Mickey Mouse, why are you here and what happened to you? Why do you have scars on your face? Where is your hand? Why are you looking at me like this?? OH GOD!" Things were only getting odder, and I was frothing into a human whirlpool of panic-driven confusion.
Fortunately, for all three of us, my husband learned, a long time ago, how to overcome me flailing around like a caged animal when caught in scary situations. He drove as if he was floating, in a boat, on a pond, but all I could see was daredevil maneuvering and flashes of Jason Statham movies, mingled with horrible past memories and pink elephants.
As my childhood was quickly being ruined by the previous statue, He pulled up onto a large sidewalk and parked right there. Facing opposite traffic and everything. Just bam, car on the sidewalk. See, this sounds really illegal and bad; but I'll let you know, when we came back, we were closed in by three other cars just in that bit of the street. In Korea, sidewalks = lanes for
Now that we had found a place to leave our vehicular burden, we figured the best bet was to hoof it in the general direction we came from. This was in hopes that we'd fall upon it, or at least somewhere else with something edible. Foolishly, we'd all decided not to eat before this excursion. Leading into this crowded pile of people, streets, and buildings, was more easily braved from our desire to feed.
I would be understating things if I said Korean architecture is different than American architecture. These are things easily noticed while walking the streets around here. The purple building above, I assumed, was some kind of children's recreational center or an art museum. I am currently in the understanding that this is their city hall. Bright purple, like the 고구마 goguma (sweet potatoes) they sell seasonally in our local 시장 shijang (street side market), is pretty interesting for a colour choice.
We crossed past that building and traveled on into many other metropolitan eccentricities. Some being so, more than others. The Olleh phone store seems almost normal, especially when paired with the pawn shop next to it (bottom right). But having a nail shop and hair salon above it was something new to me when I first arrived here. It's now old-hat after living here more than six months, to see stacks of different business on top of each other. More oddly, is the adjacent middle eastern themed pub that was definitely new to me. and next to it was a one-off clothing store. These types of stores are sprinkled everywhere, being more concentrated in locales such as this and are great places to find one-of-a-kind items.
Incase you weren't feeling up to drinking and shopping for clothes or getting a new phone; there's a place to play pool, and an arcade of sorts all attached on the same building, and then some. There was also as a food vendor out front selling chinese pancakes and japanese bread-fish filled with sweet azuki beans which are better known as 팥 pat in Korea. I was worried we may never eat again so I bought up some of the pancakes, hurriedly, to tide me over as we looked about. It may not surprise you that it only got weirder from there.
While waiting for our chance to frogger our way across the street, I looked to the sky to see a giant staircase to nowhere, with a man climbing up. It took me some time to realize it was actually large and far away and attached to a super center, but for a while I was wondering if that was some odd way to change the street lamps. Being as I'm slightly stupid, it makes the odd things even odder.
Getting down the street, the stores only got stranger and seeing this shop made me very excited. I'd heard of these places. It was a girly place for girls, and for some reason it captured all my interests. Like the name implies, it's a store to solely take your picture, like arcade photo booths do. Purikura is one of the terms for these style of photos, where it makes all the things in your photo sparkly, cute, and adorable. They are quite popular in this part of Asia.
The store was really neat looking, in that it had lots of hats and accessories that you could wear, like crowns, and antlers, and other silly stuff. When you're done editing the photos with hearts and words and anything else you'd deem as kawaii, aegyo, or cute, you can buy sticker sets of the pictures you took. You can then place them on to anything you'd like to leave a memory on. Being that my company was exclusively manly army men, I knew I would only get to go in that shop if it was a very cold day in hell, so I quickly took a photo and noted it as nifty.
Our interests as a group began to get further split as I saw a man I swore was selling square balloons in the middle of the street. I may have been hallucinating from my current sugar high, but it looked rather magnificent to me. All though it did end up being a booth for cotton candy, that didn't diminish my excitement. My husband tut-tutted me saying I'd spent enough on the pancakes
It was a PC bang. A dragons den of sorts for all those who hold online gaming as their lord and master. A dark and deeply dug hovel, placed into the earth for souls to be lost into their buzzing computer screens. Leveling up, hoarding, and killing as you see fit is the the reward you get for paying that price. I only joke about these things, since I've never actually been in one
I continue to joke about these things but PC Bangs are actually pretty interesting in a societal and commercial kind of light. The consumers of these kinds of places leave their homes to play games in a sort of computer bar, where they can are surrounded by other members of their niche market. To Americans, it doesn't sound worthwhile to leave home to play games you could have played inside, but in Korea and other parts of asia these places do quite well, actually. It may or may not have to do with the fact that they have several world wide competitions for gaming and have several channels dedicated to watching the game-play as well.
Regardless, the boys were excited to see some fellow gaming appreciation, as it is a very loved past time of theirs
The pace of the people in the street was starting to pick up the further in we got. We decided our best bet was to follow the back streets back to the main road the GPS had placed us on. We passed many places on the way, but being so hurried it was hard to get pictures. My husband was pulling me by the hand through the crowds saying things like "You can look at it later" and "We'll see it on the way back" so I snapped one photo of a very quaint little plant store that was tucked into the road, and hurried along behind him.
We made it back onto the main street and found the Dunkin' Donuts we saw before, but we figured hell let's find what we came for, and continued on. We were smiling and having a damn good time, when somehow we noticed these advertisements, which lead to laughter and I knew then that things we're finally working out.
Fifth from the top: A monkey bleeding out of his butt. does this have some sort of cultural significance? was there a meeting where they actually decided bleeding monkey anus this was the best way to advertise their services? I really enjoy that they put a touch of detail in adding a pained look and tears. Really makes you feel sorry for this monkey, doesn't it?
Our friend found this one particularly amusing. I feel their should be a joke similar to the "in Soviet Russia" style, where you would say "In Korea, Phone uses you", or something incredibly wittier because I can only be so entertaining. I dare you to make one better!
We walked about 10 more steps, and there it was. What we'd been searching for over an hour. Sweet rapture above, it was the Outback Steakhouse we'd swore was lost. With shakey hands and metaphorical tears of triumph streaming down our faces, I took the following photo. VICTORY WAS OURS!
Now we needed to get a table... To Be Continued in part III
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