Fun in the Sun

Unplanned weekends are the best weekends

It's Monday morning and it feels like I got ran over by a truck. Not because this weekend was to ruff but simply because I just didn't sleep through the night. I'm kind of starting to feel how a baby feels when he wakes up in the middle of the night a few times. With all the hours of sleep canceled out I also wanted to cry since I knew what's coming. 

This weekend was really great. Very relaxed at times and really busy at times. The neighbour and I left for Itaewon in Seoul on Saturday morning. I arrived at the Hostel dropped by bag, got back on the train again and met up with a few friends from a different town, quite far from me, in Hongdae. Hongdae is like Stellenbosch just bigger with more shops, pubs and clubs as well. But we didn't do the clubbing thing. Instead we wondered around in this really bust part of town and watched street performances. It's quite popular in Hongdae to see artists reveal their talents and it's quite unique. You will see anything from acoustic singers to heavy rock singers to piano players, dance groups, pop dancers, sketchers and so much more. I must say it's quite weird to see a colourful piano standing in the middle of nowhere where people will just go sit and play a piece, stand up and leave. In Korea every child must play a musical instrument and because of this every person here has some kind of music literacy. 

So after the nice little walk in town I returned to the Hostel to meet up with the neighbour again. There we met a very nice Korean girl who just used the Hostel for the weekend to have some "Me time". It was really interesting for me when she mentioned it because I was actually wondering how the Korean students do it. Here a big family will all stay in a small apartment which leaves nobody with personal space. I know I sometimes felt like it was necessary to just escape from the world and the family sometimes. We had a very nice chat with her about the Korean ways of doing things. I also asked her opinion on clothes that I bought earlier that day that I wasn't sure about. She gave me some nice honest advice and it saved me some money too since I returned half of it on Sunday. We had fun in the Hostel even though it was literally just a room full of beds and had plugs that only worked when the light was on. This very fact caused us some cellphone charging problems. 

The next morning in comes a french girl who just returned from a big night out in town just to freshen up a little. We started having a nice conversation and eventually ended up going for breakfast together. We also walked into our married friends who's from the same town as us and they joined us as well. While the Americans and Africans had a nice English breakfast the Parisians had apple pie for breakfast which is such a french thing to do. After dinner we all went our ways and since I had to claim some money back with returning clothes I had to go back shopping and ended up showing the Parisians where they could buy some clothes. Obviously after arriving with only one bag of winter clothing I had to shop to the extreme since my closet consists of only winter clothing which also means I spent way to much money. It hurts and it's really much better if mom buys it. 

We got a little split up at one stage and it's really damn hard to find anyone in the place if you don't have airtime and even without having any data your battery runs out like wild fire. So after quite some unnecessary efforts I got hold of the Parisians again to collect my phone charger which I borrowed to her in the Restaurant to charge her phone while we eat but as karma works we forgot it there and she had to go all the way back to fetch it again. And that's how we lost each other. 

The Parisians and I met up again at the palace of some ancient person (I didn't read the information boards) and the day ended up to include a little sightseeing as well. After the palace I took the 2 hour journey home.