I got up at about 6 AM, did some work, and then slept on and off until about 10:30 AM. I think all the running around and eating or drinking at irregular intervals is getting to me.
At about 11:30, I decided to do some shopping at Namdaemun, which is essentially a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The following picture is just about the first thing I saw when I got off the subway. It’s creepy-cute.
There’s also a rather large sculpture at the Shinsegae Department store:
Once you get into the market itself, you can find just about anything you want to. As it happens, the threads that held one of the backpack straps broke, and I figured I’d need a sewing kit, which I was able to find. It turns out later that I was able to thread the strap through one of those plastic buckles, and that worked, but you get the idea.
The other thing I bought was this hat. I’m sure only tourists buy them–I haven’t seen any native Koreans wearing anything like them. The lettering says “Republic of Korea.”
At any rate, pictures from the market:
All the big department stores have them, and they need them to direct traffic into the parking lots. They bow and wave you forward as you pull your car into the parking garage. The guy dressed in red has a wireless headset connected to a speaker so that drivers can hear his instructions. Traffic is just a mess near Namdaemun. I can’t imagine driving there.
When I got back to Dongdaemun Stadium, I decided to see what was on the other side of the street from the hotel. Most of the restaurants on the hotel side were rather uninviting. On the other side, though, nearer the stadium, there’s a great selection of restaurants and shops, including a donut shop, which is on my list of places to go for breakfast in the future.
I went to the Itaewon district to see if I could get any souvenirs; it’s a tourist trap designed for foreigners and near a US military base. It was weird seeing so many non-Asian people in one place.
I stopped at a small restaurant and had o-jing-eo-bok-ggeum, which is stir-fried cuttlefish with vegetables in hot sauce. It was quite good. They had what I thought was some soap opera on TV, about a black GI who took away the daughter he had fathered with a Korean woman. The kid was then placed in the hands of what could only be called a prototype wicked stepmother who treated her like dirt and made her eat from the garbage cans, while neighborhood kids taunted her. The kid’s dialog consisted of nearly 15 minutes of weeping and wailing at the drop of a hat, and I was almost at the point of laughter, as it was all so over-the-top. Then I found out that it was a [vast over-]dramatization of a true story, and the girl had grown up to be a pediatrician and was now in Korea and was, in true “This Is Your Life” fashion, being reunited with her mother. Everyone started crying, including the hosts of the show.
