My once a two week blogging quota

It's Friday, the 13th of October. I hope something really spooky happens today. It is 2 thirty in the morning. I am again sustaining a 72% cacao chocolate high. I am relaxing and enjoying a glass of red wine while listening to pandora.com--for those of you that have not yet experienced the sweetness of pandora, you can type any any song or artist and it will fabricate a station to your tastes! So you can find artists much like the ones you already like without much effort.

SO... this week it's back to the old grind after Chuesok vacation. Chuesok is like Korean Thanksgiving, but more celebrated in Christmas fashion. There is a ton of food, a gathering of family, making of songpian (sp?) which is korean rice cake and is quite tasty, and oftentimes a wearing of hanbok which is korean traditional dress. Furthermore, people get money and gifts. Avalon gave us sets of shampoo, conditioner, with a ton of toothpaste and brushes to probably last all year. These gifts come in varying monetary value, but some a elaborately wrapped and this costs a fortune.

For good ole chusey, Sam, Carrie, Ann, Don, and myself headed down to the Southeast coast to check out Busan. Don split off from us to chill with his cousin while we explored. We hit the fish market, some clothing markets, and supposedly the largest sauna in asia. It can accomodate 2,000 people at once and I had freshly squeezed mango juice as well as a full body exfoliation, hair washing, and facial. Mind you, all this was occuring with me lying naked on a massage table by a naked old korean lady. it was something everyone should experience! there were a few domes above the different temperature baths and this is what it felt like to be a greek goddess. galavanting around in the buff with natural light and freshly squeezed juices. i left glowing.

sam and i went to one of the markets but didn't stay for long b/c we weren't really into shopping. the fish market was much different than tskigi in japan... for one, it was stinkier! it may have had something to do with getting there at 10 am instead of 6 am. I have footage of a octopus trying to escape on the blacktop. here sam and i feasted on eel cooked over a burner with hot spicy sauce of course! before i came to korean i was told they had two flavors--HOT and salty. i thought i was being very exotic, but then i realized i have eel all the time at sushi joints. it just felt like it was stranger, the way it was cooked.

we also swam in the ocean!! it was so clear and calm and bit chilly, but refreshing.
one night at a little chicken joint near the beach, sam and i decided to plunk down for dinner. it looked quaint and homey with natural wood decoratings and such. it turns out that most everyone just orders out from there as we noticed not a single soul entered the joint as we ate. furthermore, some of the platform seating area that you enter shoeless was taken up by piles of junk like some lady's old house. which, i do think they lived behind the restaurant. a teenaged girl came and then left again when a male suitor arrived. so we were sucking down some domestic beers and then got on the fried chicken (a korean favorite) and we pull a leg off the stack and what do we see? a piece of chewed up mint flavored gum (i sniffed it) deep fried in all the grease. now, i have a theory, actually two theories as to how that gum arrived on our plate of greasified chicken. one) someone could have been walking by the restaurant and disposed of their gum in the big vat of grease out front used to cook their chicken. who knows how often they clean it. or two) the woman was pissed that we actually sat down in the joint and decided to give us a little surprise. at least it was deep fried and disinfected. only in korea! you know, i would have never let this fly in america. i would have raised hell and made sure i got a meal on the house. but we kinda of chuckled and then pushed away any idea of being sicked out and ate on. we peeled off the skin infected with mint gum germs.

i think this is it for any wittyness i have in me tonite. no more photos will upload b/c all you guys in the states are hogging the damn thing.
by the way, these photos are of sam in front of a great tree outside of a little temple in gyeongju. then there's a photo of some squid or octopi, i can't remember. can you tell? someone tell me!

oh and finally, a photo of a young girl that we actually ate dinner with on Chuesok day. Her family saw us riding around Gyeongju and they had just finished their feast. They asked us in. We had rented mountain bikes from town and were on our way to hike and see temples. I was wondering if we would be able to find any restaurants open that holiday or if we would have to subsist on quickie-mart food (which isn't sooo sooo bad like American style q-m food, but still). Luck shined upon us which just shows you have to have faith. We feasted and had a few pre-hike beers. I tell you, that helped me up the rocky incline and had NOTHING, i say nothing to do with me falling off my bike and two older koreans laughing at the misfortune. it was a fun, light silly fall so don't worry!