The Last Couple of Weekends

Note: I wrote this at least a week ago, but for some reason I didn't publish it.

The last couple of weekends have been rather eventful for us. Although there are no pictures, we did some cool stuff and had quite a bit of fun. We also have gotten really, really worn out.



The weekend before last (September 19) we went out of town. PapaFish went all the way to Camp Casey - a good 1.5~2hr subway ride from our place in Seoul - to play board games n' such with some guys. He had fun, but it was a long day.



TheFry and I opted out of this kind of gaming, and so we went to hike Soyosan instead. I was winded after about 20 minutes of climbing up the hill.



Soyosan was a little disappointing. To its credit, it had been largely destroyed during the Korean War and it looked as if there was a lot of renovation still going on. Nonetheless, there were plenty of piles of random crap on construction sites, intermingled with lovely statues, buildings and scenery in general.



The waterfalls are made to look much more impressive in the marketing, but they were still graceful and sweet.



The temple had been recently reconstructed, and included a gift shop. I understand that it's customary to sell candles and incense and other things necessary to make offerings at holy places in such locations, but there was plenty of jewelry and cellphone accesories alos, which was quite disappointing (along with the coffee vending machines, and big black plastic sewage pipe running down out of the waterfall into the cave of worshippers).



Furthermore, hiking a mountain on a weekend is like asking for advice from every Korean grandmother in town. There was plenty of advice to go around, mostly to keep TheFry from getting crooked teeth and a cold. I didn't mention that he already had a cold that weekend, and no one seemed to notice or care, either. They also didn't seem to care that I understood very little of what they were saying, but the power of miming pushed through.



I was thinking of going there later in October because they supposedy are having a red maple leaf festival, but I don't think I'll make it. It's not worth the 3,000won to go inside the park - the outside is just as lovely, as far as maple trees goes - but traveling that long and tiring journey with a toddler in tow just to see the outside of a park whilst getting parenting advice from strangers in a language I don't fully understand doesn't sound like a relaxing time at the park for me. I think we'll stick closer to home, and hopefully by then we'll have a camera to share pictures of all the wonderful fall goodness.



This last weekend (September 26~27) we had a full weekend of events. On Saturday we went to Myeong-dong and Dongdaemun (and wound up walking through Namdaemun in between destinations) on a hunt for yarn so I can make myself a fall sweater. I've shrunk my other fall sweater, and my post partum self is just not fitting anything I own properly anymore. I'm too cheap to buy clothes in Itaewon, so I'm going to be making my own sweaters and such come fall and winter. Since I hardly have time to get this stuff done anymore, I thought I'd start now.



I ended up buying yarn in Dongdaemun. I remember thinking to myself (and actually saying out loud once) that there was no decent selection of yarns in Dongdaemun. That's probably at least partially due to the fact that I have a tendency to show up at the wrong time on the wrong day(s), which can really happen to anyone. Also it is partially due to the fact that a number of shops only display their thinnest, thread-like yarns on the outside, keeping their wooly yarn of delicious heavenly goodness on the inside for serious browsers. It also seemed, the first couple of times I went there, at least, that the kinds of items people like to make are those fishnet-esque sweaters and caps with tiny yarns and tiny tiny hooks...I'm just not interested in that.



This time, it must have been the right day, the right time, and I actually carried with me a recommendation list of stalls to go to. I picked up 1000 grams of super-soft yarn (I think it was wool, but I'm not sure) for 24,000 won (sold in 500 gram increments). I know for a fact that you can buy yarn even cheaper than that at Dongdaemun; last time I bought 500grams for 6,000 won each, which is comparable to Wal-Mart! I think that kind of yarn only comes in fruity bright colors (I bought royal blue and a lighter shade of blue) but if you're doing something fun then it's worth it.



There were also a fair amount of stalls that had boxes of miscellaneous yarns for 1,000~1500 won apiece outside their stores. I thought about sifting through some of those but I decided I'd spent enough time already.



Last night (Sunday) we went to the Grand Finale of the Seoul Drum Festival in Seoul Forest Park. It was an interesting show. The announcements were made in both Korean and English, to our surprise. There was a fusion group combining Korean traditional drumming and Peruvian music, a group from Mexico that mostly danced, and several other groups fusioning traditional Korean drumming techniques and modern music. It was interesting, but we could have done with out the techno beats in the background. Furthermore, every time the audience applauded, TheFry started freaking out and crying. It would have been sad, but after the 10th time or so, he wasn't crying anymore, he was just screaming, as if that's how he felt he was supposed to react. It was hilarious.



The weekend was long and exhausting, but we got to do some free stuff, so it was not all in vain.