After coming back from Gamcheon Culture Village, we checked into our hotel for the night, Le Ide:A, whatever that means. We liked it better than our hotel in Seoul!

This is what the room looked like after a minute of us infiltrating it. Chooch was thrilled because there was a computer in our room and he immediately started screaming about FORTNITE and I can’t tell you how quickly I start shutting down as soon as I hear that word start wisping past his dumb lips. The computer was in Korean though so when we were leaving for an evening out on the town (lol), Chooch asked the girl at the front desk how to get it in English and she practically chortled and said, “Oh no, Korean only” and it was Chooch’s first Alamo Basement moment in life, I think. It was awesome to experience as a bystander!

ISN’T THE HALLWAY COOL?!

We headed out to Gwangbok-dong, Busan’s culture & fashion street, which is also considered to be Busan’s answer to Seoul’s Myeongdong area. It was a beautiful street bu there was only one thing I had my eyes open for: Gentle Monster. If you follow me on Instagram, or have the misfortune of having to talk to me on a daily basis, you have probably heard or seen me mention Gentle Monster a hundred times by now. It’s a Korean sunglasses brand and I am completely head-over-heels obsessed with it because its concepts are 100% my style. There are stores all over Korea (as well as China and the US even has two) and I wanted to try to go to as many as possible because it was something I was super excited about. I think of each store as sort of a contemporary art museum that just happens to be selling glasses on the side. Henry was “……….” about this because he has seen so many vlogs on YouTube since I am always excitedly stalking Korean YouTube-celebs. Have you met Henry? He’s preeeeetttttty fucking blue-collared and would rather just try and win a pair of fluorescent-framed plastic sunglasses out of a claw machine from 1990. But he knew that this was something I was serious about so he quietly went along for the ride and didn’t even give me the Dad Look when I picked out the pair that I wanted. That’s true love, guys.

So right away, we walked in and saw this thing pumping out red stuff. What does it have to do with sunglasses, you ask? I don’t know. Call Gentle Monster and ask them. I’M NOT A REPRESENTATIVE!

Ooh, I wonder if I could be their representative though? MAYBE THEY WILL OPEN A PITTSBURGH FLAGSHIP.

Lol. The Gentle Monster Yinzer concept.

Gentle Monster is famous for their ridiculous sunglasses (see above, modeled by a ridiculous boy) but they do have “normal” designs too that can be worn on actual city streets outside of a sci-fi Con.

At first I thought that maybe they were in the middle of changing the concept because there were like, wires and other construction-like sundry strewn about but then I realized that no, this probably WAS the new concept. Gentle Monster, you’re so weird. Let’s get married. 

I ended up getting this pair after going back and forth for nearly an hour and I think Henry was seriously reconsidering his choices in life that landed him in a Gentle Monster in Busan, Korea.

Regrets.

“Just please choose a pair so we can leave.”

Yay!

Meanwhile Chooch had imprinted on some round yellow pair that were kind of Lennon-esque but bigger, and we were like, “No, a 12-year-old boy does not need a $260 pair of sunglasses I don’t give a shit how aesthetic they are” because he just going on and on about how aesthetically pleasing they were (thanks, Instagram culture) and for some reason, he actually got REALLY MAD about this and was a fairly huge dick for the next hour, to the point where I was like, “I did this. I created this (non-gentle) monster.” Because boy, this was totally how I was when I was a kid – materialistic and a spoiled brat. (I’m still a spoiled brat and just materialistic in different ways, according to Henry.) Anyway, it turned out Chooch was just hungry, lol. I mean, he did want those sunglasses for whatever reason, but his hunger level was definitely ramping up the way his displeasure was being served to us.

After walking around with his miserable ass for awhile, we found a restaurant specializing in Busan bibambap and tofu dishes so we went inside before Chooch started murdering people with his words.

Starting with us.

Mmm, banchan. Busan bibambap was definitely different than any other bibambap I’ve had before. First of all, there was no gochujang! And every table had a basket of eggs on it so we got to crack our own eggs onto our bibambap and I was stupidly happy about this. After we ate, Chooch was back to being the pleasant version of himself, so we went and had bingsu for dessert!

In Korea, many of the shops and restaurants have sliding glass doors which you open by pressing on a box or strip in the middle of the door, but it only stays open for so long. So when we went to get bingsu, Chooch and I were able to slide through together but when Henry tried, the door shut on him. We started losing our shit over this because every single thing that happened to Henry in Korea was hysterical to us, but the ahjumma who was working behind the counter cried out and ran over to help Henry. That made us laugh even harder, someone actually caring about him! Oh holy shit, it was so funny. I GUESS YOU HAD TO BE THERE!

Anyway, I got the original patbingsu and it was served to me in all of its traditional Korean glory. Thank you, Korea, for inventing bingsu. 

That’s not a scoop of chocolate ice cream on top of my bingsu, that is a shiny globe of sweet fucking red bean (pat) and it melted into absolute perfection on the palate. Henry and I ordered it to share but I could have easily downed without any help. Chooch got the “cereal” version which was very similar to mine but without the pat. And the nice lady even gave us a cute bowl of tiny chocolate chip cookies for service!

We were stuffed and happy after this, and my favorite part was as we were leaving. Chooch and I had already left, but Henry was still at the counter paying. As he turned to leave, the ahjumma excitedly told him to wait and ran over to open the door for him! HAHAHA, HENRY YOU SUCK! She thought he was too incompetent to open the door!

Or, you know, she was just really nice and didn’t want him to get nearly-vivisected by the door again.

Now that Chooch was fed and sugared, he was so lively! He did a total 180, attitude-wise, and was so animated and hilarious. Still obsessing over foot massages, he kept bowing to every foot massage sign he saw and I was almost peeing my pants. Henry was just like, “It’s not that funny” but everything was funny to me and Chooch in Korea! 

We swung by the Lotte department store on the way to the subway station (you can access it underground from the subway station, even!) and Chooch got to have his Line Friends fix.

I was staunch in my desire to see the ocean at night, and Henry kept arguing with me because it was already after 9 and the closest beach was like 20 subway stops away, and blah blah blah, but finally he was like OK WE WILL GO so we took the subway all the way to the end, to Gwangalli Beach, which was cool but you know, it was a March night, pretty chilly and super windy. Not much was going on there. We started walking out onto the beach and then when I noticed the huge mountains jutting out from the left, I got super panicked because I’m weird about nature-things (DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT ALASKA, IT IS THE HOME TO A BEVY OF NATURAL NIGHTMARES!) so we turned around and got back on the subway, which Henry was happy about because it was getting pretty late and the subway was going to stop running soon. 

“I bet this place is rockin’ in the summer,” Henry said about the entire area, and Chooch and I latched onto this SO HARD and mimicked him saying it for the rest of the trip. If we’re being honest, Chooch actually just referenced it again today.

AGAIN, MAYBE YOU HAD TO BE THERE. LEAVE ME ALONE. 

The subway ride back was long and excruciating because we were all falling asleep and someone had to stay awake to make sure we didn’t miss our stop. Guess who that someone was?

Sigh.

This was the view from our hotel, lol. The KTX tracks and a colorful bridge!

We went to bed, exhausted and delirious from laughing so much. Maybe it was something in the air (yellow dust?) but it felt like Korea as a whole was just one giant drug being pumped straight to my brain. I think back on it, now that we’ve been home for a month (SAD FACE), and I just get so giddy at the memories! And that is better than any souvenir I brought home, because you can’t put a price on memories as golden as these.

*(I totally typed “Threats” at first which could easily be the case on any day.)

Three very important things happened today and I just couldn’t wait until the next bulletpoint post / word smorgasbord to tell you.

I mean, it’s not THAT great, but anytime anything even remotely exciting happens in my life, I’m pretty happy.

It all started last night when my favorite Pittsburgh ice cream joint posted on Instagram that, in honor of getting 10,000 followers, they were declaring today FREE CONE THURSDAY.

Just in their Market Square location!

Which happens to be right by my work!

I texted Amber and she was like YES so today we rallied our little group together and made a date for 2PM Free Ice Cream Cones. I emailed everyone the list of May flavors which Millie’s just released today and Glenn was like, “WHAT NO KIMCHI?!” I know, right?!

Anyway, I walked over to my old side of the floor at 1:58 to get everyone together and of course I was the only one ready! And then we had to wait for Amber to finish doing work stuff! Ugh! But eventually we all headed out together and everyone was so excited to be with me since I moved and now they don’t get to see my dumb face for 8 hours a day anymore.

And I was happy to be outside of work with real life people and hoped that some of the weirdos who are always slithering around out there would see and realize that I’m not just That Girl Who Walks In Circles Alone Downtown, but someone who actually has friends!

When we got to Millie’s, the line was out the door and down the sidewalk, which wasn’t surprising, but Amber was like, “Well, let’s just get in line and see how it goes” so we did and it actually moved pretty quickly! I mean, luckily for them, I was there to entertain them with my wildly riveting stories that they don’t get to hear everyday anymore.

I was so worried that people were going to cut in front of us and Amber and Lauren were like “You’re being silly” BUT THEN PEOPLE CUT IN FRONT OF US AND WHO IS THE SILLY ONE NOW?! I was so mad and I kept loudly saying, “Did those people cut?!” and Todd was like, “They sure did” and then Lauren was like, “Let’s distract Erin before she makes a shiv out of her plastic kpop keychains and stabs those people” so she started asking me questions about Mr.Small’s because she’s going to a concert there but I literally couldn’t stop staring at the people who cut and I was so afraid that they were going to get the last scoop of whatever flavor I wanted, and I didn’t even know what flavor I wanted yet.

“I FEEL LIKE I’M AT KENNYWOOD AND SOMEONE JUST LINE-JUMPED,” I seethed to Glenn and Todd who were both like, “It’s over now. Move on.”

But then we got inside Millie’s and Charlie Puth’s “We Don’t Talk Anymore” was on and I was like, “REMEMBER WHEN I SAW CHARLIE PUTH” and Lauren took this as her opportunity to make me forget about seeking revenge on the line-jumpers and said, “YES I DO! AND YOU WERE LIKE IN A SMALL ROOM WITH HIM TOO RIGHT” and then all was well. Thank god too, because I was almost as mad as I was the day before when I was on my lunch break walk and Henry mentioned something about golf on the phone and I flew off the handle about how golfers aren’t athletes.

“EXCEPT FOR ONE, AND YOU KNOW WHO I’M THINKING OF!” I cried.

“Phil Mickelson,” Henry sighed, because my Phil Mickelson obsession is something that he has been trying to figure out since like, 2004.

OMG, the rest of my day was pretty much ruined because of this. Thanks, Henry. Thanks, GOLF.

Um, back to Millie’s. Surprisingly, they still had all but one flavor left! I thought for sure we’d get there and they’d only have Golden Milk left, whatever that was. I kept wanting to call it Yellow Snow. But anyway, I got Yuzu Meringue, which was made with Asian citrus so it was the next best thing to Kimchi!

And it was sooooo good. There was a huge chunk of pie crust in it and you have no idea how much I love it when there is pie crust in ice cream.

Lol, I made them pose for this Team Building Ice Cream Cone picture and they were like, “For God’s sake, Erin.” BUT THEY DID IT.

Thank you, Millie’s, for having such amazing fan service! Or customer service. I keep forgetting that not everything is about Kpop.

Then later that afternoon, I was on my walk and saw Ovechkin, LOLOLOL:

In case you don’t know anything about hockey, he’s on the Capitals, and they are currently playing the Penguins in the Stanley Cup playoffs. He’s a huge rival of Sidney Crosby and Pittsburghers hate him.

AND THEN I CAME HOME AND KCON ANNOUNCED PENTAGON AS THE FINAL GROUP FOR KCON NEW YORK AND I STARTED CRYING!!!! They’re in my Top 3 favorite groups and I kept hoping they would be announced!!

However, if I’m able to get BTS tickets, there might be nothing left for KCON tickets. I mean, I guess I could always sell my plasma?

Do people still do that? Being obsessed with things like I am makes life super stressful sometimes, haha.

This concludes my Three Thursday Treats blog post. I HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT.

I’m going to do this thing where I pretend like I’m a legit blogger instead of someone who writes on their dinky WordPress site using an app on their phone while laying in bed half asleep, and actually give you some FACTS about Gamcheon Culture Village. And by FACTS I mean various tidbits that I have collected from the Internet so that you don’t have to go Googlin’.

• This area only had around 20 houses pre-Korean War, but then once the war started, Busan became an area of refuge to many Koreans, and the hills of Gamcheon acquired about 4,000 of those refugees. Shanties were erected out of scraps and rock, and Gamcheon became synonymous with poverty and slums.
• Sometime in the mid-50s, Gamcheon was infiltrated by the Taegukdo religion, the leader of which helped them build up their shanties into better houses. But even as recently as the 90s*, this area was still considered to be the poorest part of Busan.
  • SHUT UP, THE 90s WILL ALWAYS BE LIKE 5 YEARS AGO TO ME.
• Anyway, in 2009 some Korean tourism organization started panting over it like a mountainous slab of samgyeopsal and came up with the “Dreaming of Machu Picchu” project. Artists and residents teamed up and turned this town into the magical maze of art installations and culture that is now known for today.

GUYS DID I DO GOOD?!

All I knew about Gamcheon prior to visiting is that it’s a must-see in Busan and full of things I like: cafes, pretty views, and quirkiness. But I wondered how Chooch would like this place, since it seemed more geared toward touristy shopping and, you know, walking. When I was a kid, my family would go to Wildwood, NJ for vacation every summer which I loved because hello BEACH AND BOARDWALK. But there was always one day when we would take a daytrip to Cape May because my grandma loved it there and I absolutely hated it because it was so slow-paced and all we did was go in one boutique after the next and I didn’t care about that shit when I knew that there were RIDES WAITING FOR ME back in Wildwood.

Morey’s Piers for lyfe, yo.

But as it turns out, Gamcheon is pretty much a dreamland for people like Chooch who like to have something to work toward, a goal to achieve.

Because what I didn’t know about Gamcheon is that there is a sort of scavenger hunt you can partake in by stopping in the tourist center and getting a map. Hidden around the village are “stamping zones” where you go in with your map and have that certain spot stamped. I became immediately obsessed with this idea too and even backtracked to the entrance of the village because the first stamping location was in a small museum there and we had passed it up!

“We’ve been here for an hour and haven’t made it more than 100 yards yet,” Henry mumbled, because we totally pissed around when we first arrived, getting ice cream, waiting for Henry to find a bank, taking pictures at one of the photo points, waiting for Henry to find a map, buying dried flower tea from some old lady selling them next to her house, chasing a cat down an alley, waiting for Henry to stop yelling at us, buying postcards, and stopping at the Gamnae Cafe:

RUNNING MAN HAS BEEN THERE!!

I got a sweet potato latte and cherished every last drop of it while we kicked back and wrote out some postcards which sadly wouldn’t be mailed until we got back to Pittsburgh because we forgot to look for post offices in Busan and then the post offices in Seoul are closed on Saturdays! So, I was that totally That Person, sending international post cards from a post office five blocks away from my house in dumb Pittsburgh. Lame.

I know, I posted like ten rooftop shots in my last post about Gamcheon, but I was just so enamored by the colors!

In case anyone was wondering what Janna’s favorite picture of our vacation is, it’s this one. SHE TOLD ME SO ON INSTAGRAM AND ALSO IN REAL LIFE.

This is a really good example of what a lot of the alleys are like in Gamcheon. It was a breeding ground for sprained ankles. Surprisingly enough, Chooch only fell once, and it was UP a set of steps, thank god. I get jello-legs just thinking about him walking on steps, if we’re being honest.

One of my favorite things about Gamcheon is that you would find yourself wandering off the main road, into an alley full of residences* and then suddenly here’s a random room housing a confusing art installation. Mattress Factory vibes, for real, and you all know how much I love the Mattress Factory! This place was like walking through an artist’s dreamscape and I felt like a little kid again, all excited about what was going to appear next.

*(We were literally walking right open doors of peoples’ houses — there were signs posted everywhere reminding visitors that people do actually reside here and to be respectful and quiet; Chooch and I managed to keep our giddy braying to a minimum.)

Chooch loves posing for pictures on his own terms and this town provided him with so many opportunities! You think this post has a ton of pictures? You should see how many I didn’t post.

Before you raise hell about rude Americans being vandals, writing messages of peace on the wall of this little room was encouraged and markers were even provided! It was one of the hidden gallery-type spaces that we stumbled upon thanks to the map. (Finally, Henry got a map that worked.)

This room scared the shit out of me because those hands are motion-sensored and started clacking away when we walked in!

Imagine coming home drunk, though.

This is a picture of me with art in the back. In case you didn’t know.

Chooch’s review: “I really liked it there! I feel like it was my favorite place in Busan. My favorite part was following the map because it took us to really cool places like when we went through alleys and saw all of the cats and the scary motion-sensor typing thing. And ‘Henry’ couldn’t effing take it seriously and kept saying ‘shut up people live here’ and I was like ‘eff off mate.'”

We strongly considered visiting. Henry (and his lack of map-reading skills) was tearing us apart! But for the most part, our afternoon in Gamcheon was a good one…

…because Chooch was in control of the map. Henry didn’t know what to do with himself!

We made friends with two cute girls from Shanghai here after they asked me to take their picture. Henry thought it was SO FUNNY that everyday, someone was asking me to take their picture. I was once told I was stand-offish but clearly I’m not anymore. :/

Chooch was in his glory.

고양이! 
We followed this cat around for awhile and it was just the cutest thing ever and I want 
a Korean cat!!

I was obsessed with getting to this particular art installation because I had seen videos of it and Chooch was getting so annoyed with me because I kept trying to grab the map from him to see how close we were/if we missed it/if it even really existed. Finally we found it and he was like, “here’s your precious house thing” and I was convinced that it wasn’t it because it wasn’t moving and here that’s because IT WAS BROKEN.

Oh, I was so sad. But yeah, there’s a crank and if you turn it, the roofs will lift up and down.

This was inside a small market where we got the second to last stamp.

Cheetos chicken endorsed by Wanna One!

We made it all the way to end of the longest path in about 2 hours, I would say, and it was totally worth it. The weather was perfect that day and the town wasn’t oversaturated with tourists. Most of the time, it felt like we had the whole town to ourselves once we ventured away from the entrance. I suspect most of the people there that day eschewed the scavenger hunt portion of the Gamcheon experience. Their loss! This was such a highlight of the whole trip for me!

Anyway, once we made it to the bottom / end of the maze, we tortured ourselves by WALKING BACK UP TO THE ENTRANCE because we needed to catch that shuttle bus thing to take us back down the other side where the subway station was. It wasn’t so bad though because we just followed the main street back up to the top.

When Henry went inside the tourist center to inquire about the bus, Chooch slyly slid his completed, fully-stamped map on the counter and cleared his throat until the person working there noticed and gave him his reward of two free postcards.

Then we got street food!

I FINALLY GOT SSIAT HOTTEOK! So, “Ssi” means “seed” in Korean, and these Busan-specialty hotteok are prepared much like traditional Korean hotteok but THEN THEY ARE SLICED OPEN AND FILLED WITH A GENEROUS SCOOP OF SEEDS (pine, pumpkin and sunflower seeds). I had to wait quite a while for one because the ahjumma ahead of me had ordered like 10 of them. I really liked this lady a lot because some tourists tried to cut in front of me while I was waiting for my turn to order and she quickly scolded them. Then a group of school boys around Chooch’s age came walking by, as school was just letting out, and they very cheerfully and respectfully greeted her because she must be a popular fixture around Gamcheon, and I got so much joy out of listening to their interaction. She seemed like such a great lady!

And then finally, my ssiat hotteok was handed to me, piping hot in a paper cup, and I thought my eyes were going to roll back into my head. IT WAS SO GOOD. I wish I could hand them out to everyone reading this right now who has never experienced the tongue-burning glory that is hotteok. You can typically find them in the freezer section of your local Asian market but brother there is nothing better than being served one sizzling hot off a griddle-thing in Korea.

I probably ate more hotteok than anything else while we were there, now that I think about it.

Afterward, we caught the small bus at the entrance and survived a harrowing, careening recreation of a scene from Speed down the mountain. The bus was full so we had to stand and Chooch almost wound up in the laps of numerous ahjumma and at first I was annoyed by the driver’s recklessness until I caught a glimpse of him in the mirror and HE WAS SO FUCKING YOUNG AND CUTE.

And then we took the subway back to Busan Station, where we took the short walk to our hotel for the night. The next post will finally be about Gentle Monster!

For those who are like, so over the vacation recaps, here’s a blog post chockful of happenings from last week. Tres exciting. Oui oui.

NEIGHBOR “NED”‘S BACK

So my neighbor (“Ned”) who was recently raided in a drug bust (his hearing is next month, we checked lol) and GAVE CHOOCH AND ME A FAKE NAME stopped by last Saturday to get the rest of his stuff (can’t wait to see who my next neighbors will be #help) and I was spying from my window when it occurred to me that I’m always pointing my neighbors out to my friends like “THAT’S THE ONE ON HOUSE ARREST” or “SHE MIGHT RUN A METH LAB” or whatever but I wonder if any of them are like “THAT’S THE PSYCHO WHO IS ALWAYS JOGGING IN PLACE OR DANCING TO WEIRD KOREAN MUSIC IN FRONT OF THE WINDOW.”

But holy shit, Ned came back the next day too to get the rest of his stuff and I was dying to talk to him but I held back. But then I saw him out there taking pictures of the damage that was done to his car and I just couldn’t help myself, I ran out there without any makeup on because I needed him to know what happened to his car. Henry was leaving at the same time to take Chooch to his piano lesson and I could tell he was dismayed that I went out there and involved myself.

Wow, I thought he’d brush me off but NO, he started talking to me ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED THAT DAY!

“You were there when it happened, right?” he asked, and I was like, “Hoooo boy, are we really going to talk about this right now, this is so WISTERIA LANE!” but it turns out he was only asking because he wanted to know if I remembered what time everything happened.

“I think around 6:00am,” I answered thoughtfully.

“Are you sure?” he asked, “because those guys in that house said it was about 5:30.”

As I was mulling this, he told me that the search warrant said the cops couldn’t come in before 6 and he was sure that they did, and he has an investigator on the case, and he’s going to come and talk to the other neighbors, could he come and talk to me too?

“YES, SEND HIM TO ME. I WILL TALK TO HIM,” I said firmly, dying at the chance to bring down the popo, especially after Ned told me about the racist bullshit they said to him that day.

Meanwhile, the broad who was living there with him is in jail! He said something about how she violated her work probation or something, all I know is that I’m sure she framed him and this was all about her all this time so I don’t care that she’s in jail.

After I wished Ned good luck, I came in the house and called Henry.

“No, it was probably around 6,” Henry said, while I was screaming about him about being. “Here, I’ll check my texts and see what time you texted me about it that morning….it was 6:03am.”

“NO, probably that’s just when I woke up and they had already been in the house for QUITE SOME TIME!” I yelled.

Then I asked Chooch when he came home from piano.

“Mmm, it was after si—-”

“NO YOU’RE WRONG, YOU IDIOT, IT WAS LIKE 5:30, GOD!!!” I cried. “I can’t wait to talk to that investigator, I’m on a fucking crusade for Ned’s innocence,” I said.

“Well, if you have to testify, they might as well just put him in jail now. You have NO control over your temper,” Henry sighed.

SPRINGTIME PLAYGROUND TRIPS

Just the other day, we drove past one of the playgrounds in Brookline and I felt kind of sad that Chooch is well past the age of playground trips, but I also felt relieved too because I always hated the inevitable small talk that would happen when a mom would sidle up beside me. UGH.

But then last Sunday, Blake asked if we wanted to walk to the playground with him, Haley, and Calvin. EFF YES WE DID! I needed steps for the walking challenge! And you know, we’re always up for hanging out with fam.

One thing that hasn’t changed — Chooch still sucks at pushing himself on a swing.

And one thing that HAS changed: Calvin can walk now!

We stopped at Las Palmas on the way back and I used this as my opportunity to snap a pic of my longtime taco cart boyfriend. Henry was just like, “Whatever.”

WALKING CHALLENGE UPDATE: WEEK ONE

The results for week one were released and I was pleasantly surprised to see that I made it in fourth place for individual walkers without even really trying, and my team made it in the Top 3! (YOU’RE WELCOME, C.E.W.L. AND THE GANG.) I won a $10 Starbucks gift card for my efforts, but I will likely not win anything in the next mini-challenge, which is “best healthy recipe.” Glenn was like, “Yeah, maybe Henry could win that one for you” but I’M NO CHEATER. So I won’t be submitting anything for that mini-challenge.

“Stop walking so much,” Ethan said to me when I passed him in the hallway, and then Sandy called out, “Professional walker!”

“I’m back!” I laughed, and you know what? IT FELT GOOD. I think sitting out during those last several Walking Challenges was a good thing because I feel less burdened.

We’ll see how I feel when the next week of results are released though, lol.

CHOOCH’S BIRTHDAY WAS THE WORSTDAY

I had the day off on April 25th because it’s my annual “nursing phantom c-section pains” and “wallowing in self-pity for having a [insert age]-year-old.” Did you know that I have horrible luck when it comes to taking off random days in the middle of the week? Well, I do. And this day was no different. I noticed that Drew was acting super weird, walking around the house and then squatting like she had to pee or poop, but nothing was coming out. She never goes to the bathroom outside of her litterbox, so that in and of itself was bizarre. Immediately, I was like DREW IS DYING and was in panic-mode until Henry came home from work and we were able to take her to the vet for an emergency appointment. At first, the vet said that it appeared Drew had a bladder blockage, which I had read on the Internet earlier because YOU CAN’T TELL ME YOU DON’T GOOGLE WORST CASE SCENARIOS TOO, but that this was very rare in a female cat which I had also read earlier, and this was the part where I was waiting for her to basically tell us this was the feline version of the Crying Game but no, Drew is still a girl and the X-rays actually revealed NOTHING, no stones or crystals which meant no surgery, and the vet was able to physically express Drew’s bladder THANK GOD so crisis averted but this still cost us so much that we had to pay out of three different accounts, oh that Paycheck-to-Paycheck lyfe, y’all! Honestly though, we were so grateful and relieved to be bringing home a healed and healthy cat that I would gladly pay that again.

Chooch: Guess I’m not getting a birthday present now.

Me: We just kept your goddamn cat alive – WE GAVE U THE GREATEST GIFT OF ALL.

Ugh! Kids! And pets!!

We weren’t home for more than ten minutes when I stepped on the edge of one of the cats’ scratch pads and rolled my ankle so far that the top of my foot was touching the floor.

WOW THAT FELT GOOD!

I honestly can’t remember the last time I was in so much pain that I was screaming out loud. I fell back onto the chaise, writhing in pain, and screaming WHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYY like the Nancy Kerrigan of the Law Firm Walking Challenge, trying to find a way to blame whoever was in fifth place for Week One.

Somehow, I was able to walk it off, literally, but ended up walking with a slight limp for the rest of the week. That was a close call, C.E.W.L. and the Gang, but don’t worry – I’D WALK ON CRUTCHES IF I HAD TO.

We were both doing much better by the next day.

Honestly though thank god this little nutcase is back to her normal, spring-footed self.

BTS WORLD TOUR

Sometime last week, I started to see rumors that BTS was about to announce a world tour. I got excited for a split second and then felt immediately stressed and hoped that it actually was just a rumor because I wasn’t prepared for this. Not at all. Especially not after just dropping $500 on a vet bill (LOVE YOU, DREW). But then it was announced on Thursday and I was immediately thrown into psychological turmoil, thinking of all the things around the house I can sell. (ANYONE WANT A 12-YEAR-OLD WHO ENJOYS SHOVELING SNOW IN THE WINTER?!) And then the very next day, it was announced that tickets are going on sale NEXT WEEK. NEXT FUCKING WEEK! Like, give some Armys a chance to fucking scrounge up their allowances OK?! (J/K I’m not an Army but I do like BTS a lot.)

Henry jokingly said it was too bad that BTS tickets weren’t one of the Walking Challenge prizes and an image of the bloody stumps I once called “feet” flashed across my vision because bitch you best believe I would walk until I collapsed for a chance to win tickets.

“You’re going to have to start doing odd jobs around town,” I said to Henry, very matter-of-factly. “Like, surely someone needs their chimney swept or something.”

“Yes, because that’s exactly something I know how to do, sweep chimneys,” Henry said with a mouthful of sardonicism. WOW I THOUGHT HENRY COULD DO EVERYTHING. So much for the Mary Poppins role-playing I had in mind for later.

At one point Saturday night, Henry called out from the kitchen, “WHAT are you doing?” Oh, I was just laying upside down on the arm of the couch with my arm splayed across my face, thinking of how impossible my chances of getting tickets are. These fuckers are going to sell out so fast, between Armys, dumb Americans who just jumped on the bandwagon thanks to motherfucking Ellen DeGeneres and that awful Desiigner remix, but most of all THE TICKET RESALE COMPANIES. Oh, I just feel sick.

Add to that the fact that Henry heard one of their songs at the grocery store, and I had no idea they were at “grocery store sound system” levels of fame in the US so RIP any hope I had for getting even a nosebleed seat.

Send me prayers on May 5th, you guys.

UPDATE: Wendy just told me that she would help me get BTS tickets if I paint her house. I don’t think I like BTS that much, though.

IMPORTANT WORK NEWS

The new admin assistant started last week and I really like her! I’m not sure if anyone told her yet that she’s acquiring a new Work Child with her position, but she has several adult children so what’s one more, right? Glenn was like, “Hopefully she knows how to cut apples.” I mean, duh.

(I literally, as I’m writing this, woke up Henry to cut an apple for me and then I didn’t even finish it because it’s NOT SO GREAT.)

I said something to Todd about how hopefully she will start buying me presents too and he was like, “Yeah, I don’t see that happening.”

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

I mean, we walked out of work together today and I basically saved her from getting hit by a car and by that I mean we were crossing the street and there was a car way at the other end and I was closest to it, so….I pretty much blocked her.

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Well, that’s all for now. The Korea posts will resume tomorrow, GET SOME SLEEP TONIGHT, lol.

My only plans for this weekend consisted of walking & more walking, but we did sprinkle in some other things too. Nothing too riveting, but here are some pictures anyway while I’m taking a break before my last surge toward 30,000 steps. (I have a sickness. Help me.)

Saturday morning, we went to the gifted center because Chooch has been taking some kind of Lego robotics class there on Saturdays and this was the last class until next fall, so parents got to come in and see what their kids had accomplished. In our case, there wasn’t much to see because, as expected, Chooch spent the year doing more socializing with his partner Jamin than actual coding. Jamin proved this as well when he arrived later and struggled to show his family what he had been working on. It was whatever though because those classes were free for gifted kids and he made a friend out of it, so we can’t complain.

We were one of the first to arrive though and I was in dire need of coffee. There was a Keurig on the snack table with a wide array of K-cups so I waltzed right on over and helped myself because when I need coffee, I am suddenly Miss Independant. I took my coffee and sat down at a table, acutely aware that no one was else was scavenging the snack table but I didn’t care.

Moments later, a small crowd of parents had clustered in front of the Keurig and there was a hushed dialogue of “Are we allowed to use this?”

“I smelled coffee when I walked down the hall and now it’s all I want,” one parent said wistfully as I sat back and openly chugged on the root of the scent they were talking about. LOL just make a fucking cup of coffee you weirdos! Shit.

We came home to two packages from Maya! One of them contained a delicious assortment of K-snacks and it brought a tear to my eye. It was almost like being in South Korea again! I immediately dumped it all out into my Running Man bowl, with Pentagon performance videos playing on the TV in the background. KOREA FOREVER! 감사합니다, Maya!!

Later that afternoon, we went to Tillie’s for Chooch’s belated birthday lunch. It was a wonderful meal as always (Tillie’s is super good Italian, and their homemade gnocchi is the best I’ve had this side of Italy, thanks) and we were so giddy because Christina had made me download some stupid Marco Polo app earlier so we sent her all kinds of dumb videos and the waiter was like THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING every time he rolled up to our table.

I couldn’t leave without taking a post-eggplant romano bathroom selfie. I always laugh when I come in this bathroom because Janna brought  me here several years ago for my birthday and I turned the light on her while she was in this bathroom, lolololol. My whole life has been devoted to punking Janna.

After we left Tillie’s, I made Henry pull over so I could take a picture of this gorgeous Russian Orthodox church and then do the traditional point to the People’s Building while saying, “I used to work there,” as if Henry doesn’t know that by now.

Later that evening, Henry Oppa veered from the traditional fare and instead made Korean BBQ tofu sliders with kimchi slaw, and that slaw was motherfucking Last Supper-levels of divine, my friends. Pass some down to Peter, and don’t forget Mary Magdalene if you know what I’m saying. #BibleStuff

Here are two random pictures of Drew in my room:

We ended Saturday night with a really good hour of kpop dance cardio and I was proud of Henry for putting forth a bit more effort than he normally does. Usually if there is anything involving arm movement, he’ll just keep his arms down at his side, but I caught him putting one of his hands under his chin during one of the routines, JUST LIKE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO!! One day, Henry and I will have our own k-fitness channel, I can’t wait.

Today has been pretty boring and lowkey. I’ve just been walking a lot while watching my k-dramas and panicking about the upcoming kpop concerts that I can’t afford. What a life, right?

I’ve been on a heavy SHINee kick all weekend and have visions of Henry, Chooch, and me arriving places in perfect kpop formation:

View this post on Instagram

I don’t think it’s going to come to fruition though.

Then Henry made this wonderful noodle dinner for me :

Long live Henry though for real. He is such a good cook and I appreciate that a year and a half later, he hasn’t tired of cooking Korean meals for me every single day of his life.

After dinner, we went to Crafton Ice Cream Delight and I was so excited when Chooch ordered the apple pie sundae because I wanted to get it too but knew it would make me sick, so now I could just eat some of his and he hates sharing with me so this made it taste even better.

I was bitching about how it better worth it since it cost $6.95 and then the guy slid it out of the pick-up window and I was like, “OH OK HOLY SHIT THAT’S WORTH IT.” It was a large and in charge sundae. I’m glad I didn’t order it for myself because I’d be in the bathroom puking right now instead of writing this worthless blog post.

I just got a small vanilla cone with chocolate peanut butter dip. I originally ordered the cake batter dip BUT IT WAS DISCONTINUED. I have a really great track record of getting screwed at ice cream joints.

I snapped this picture of Henry and was all excited to post it on Instagram because he’s smiling and just I was about to type in some poignant caption about how ice cream brings our family together or whatever the fuck, Henry yelled JUST EAT YOUR ICE CREAM AND SHUT UP to Chooch, who had just mimicked Henry noisily eating his ice cream. Oh god, I love my family, LOL.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and finish walking my way to 30,000 steps. IT’S CRUNCH TIME.

Here’s a live performance of one of my favorite SHINee songs. I just said to Henry, “Onew’s face is so joyful. I wish you would just watch this once” and he snapped, “I’VE ALREADY WATCHED THIS BEFORE.” Wow.

I think this is going to be my official Walking Challenge theme song but instead of “I’m love sick” it’ll be “I’m step sick.” I NEED A DOCTORRRRRRR.

Sometimes I just want to dump a bunch of photos on here and be done with it and BY GEORGE that’s just what I’m going to do today.

The following is a collection of photos that we took with the actual camera (as opposed to my phone which is mainly what I used on this trip because CONVENIENCE) at Gamcheon Culture Village on Thursday, March 29th in Busan, Korea.

Gamcheon is considered to be Korea’s Machu Picchu and Korea’s Santorini. It’s also known as the “Lego Village” because of the brightly-colored block-shaped houses. It went from being one of the poorest areas of Busan to a thriving cultural village brimming with boutiques, cafes, and quirky art installations tucked away in the twisting maze of alleys.

Unbeknownst to us, there was something akin to a scavenger hunt that we found out about in the visitor’s center, so we easily spent the whole freaking day here. I’ll get into that more in the next post, where we will do a more in depth exploration of the village! But for now, please enjoy the beautiful colors of this village, and add this place to your bucket list because it was definitely a sight to behold!

The start of our Gamcheon experience, unless you count the long trek up the mountain.

There were so many photo op areas!

Korea loves their poop-themed food. (Also, because I know he’s going to bitch that I put this picture here, Henry’s not actually pregnant in this picture; his shirt was too big and was blowing in the breeze.)

Randyland vibes (but better, because this is Korea. Sorry, Randy).

Yes, I paid 500 won for this picture even though no one was around to know the difference! #respectforkorea

I had a picture similar to this one as my desktop background at work last year and when I got to look out over all these rooftops in person a year later, it felt so surreal. Fight to make your dreams come true, guys.

Oh, thanks for taking this picture, Henry, so that I can show everyone the BACKPACKS YOU MADE US LUG AROUND. Also, that’s Song Joong Ki in that Hite beer ad on the store window. I get so happy every time I saw his face!

Chooch was in novelty photo-posing heaven.

One of the many break-your-neck alleys. Surprisingly, we only had one close-call with Chooch that day!

Ugh, take me back.

In the next post, I’ll share pictures from my phone and tell you about our stamp-collecting mission and finally eating the one food that I was most anticipating in Busan! I sent some postcards from this town, so if you’re one of the recipients of those ones, just pretend like you don’t already know about all of this for the sake of my blog stats, haha.

Isn’t it crazy when you can not see someone for years and years yet somehow fall right back into a comfortable groove when you do? That’s how it is with my friend Alisha, who I saw for the first time last summer since 2010, and again last Friday when she was in town visiting from Arkansas.

I was so glad that she carved out some time for me on this latest visit, especially when I texted her a picture of a Julian Baker concert flyer and her immediate response was, “YES LET’S GO TO THAT” and within minutes she bought tickets. I forgot what it felt like to have a friend who wants to go to shows!

But first, food. Alisha picked me up from work and we skipped all the frou-frou salutations and went right into our routine of her being annoyed and exasperated and me being totally giddy – ugh, I missed our dysfunctionally perfect yin and yang!

Alisha’s British-voiced GPS led us to Apteka, an Eastern Europe-Yinzer-Vegan joint across from the Allegheny Cemetery that my friend Sarah recommended to me over a year ago and I never made it there because kimchi or GTFO. However, Alisha is vegan so I thought this would be a grand time to check it out and I was happy that it wasn’t crowded yet and the staff wasn’t off-putting as they sometimes can be in a niche vegan eatery, leaving me feeling not inked-up enough and half-assed in my veg-ways. (Which brings us back to kimchi, which I know is made with anchovy paste but I still eat it because I never signed a contract, OK? Korea has changed me!)

Apteka is cafe-style which is kind of annoying when you walk into a place for the first time and they’re like BAM HERE IS THE MENU STAND HERE AT THE COUNTER AND I WILL STARE AT YOU WHILE YOU TRY TO FIGURE OUT OUR WEIRDO MENU GOOD LUCK WITH THE POLISH.

Alisha had a million questions and the Apteka girl very patiently answered her. She asked what the waitress recommended and she blew through the menu so fast I felt like I just been lead through a polka.

Alisha ordered the thing I was going to get so then I had to stand there and stammer, and of course I was unable to pronounce anything on the menu (is it nuts that I was trying to imagine what it would look like in Hangeul to help me sound it out?!) so I just pointed and said, “Lima bean.”

Because the thing I got had a lima bean purée and it was shockingly not phrased more dumb or pretentious than that because you know how nauseating menu descriptions can be in these types of places.  Let me see if I can find a menu…

Kluski Slaskie

baby lima bean + winter bitter leaves + potato dumplings + fried buckwheat + marjoram (GF)

I didn’t even notice that my meal had marjoram on it and I guess it doesn’t matter because I didn’t even notice it while I was eating it to even wonder what even is it. That was a weird sentence.

(GUYS, I LOOKED IT UP. IT’S MINT.)

Alisha also ordered a pot of some kind of tea for us to share. It tasted like ground. Maybe it would have been better with sugar but do vegans eat sugar? I didn’t see any.

Alisha also ordered the Kanapki which was three pieces of small toast, each with a different spread on it. One was for sure carrot and that was the only one I liked.

Guys, that’s my plate at the bottom there and it was so fucking good – those potato dumpling dickheads were so fucking divine and I wanted so much more, and the fried buckwheat was WHAT THE HELL WHY HASN’T HENRY BEEN CRACKLIN’ BUCKWHEAT FOR ME ALL THIS TIME levels of tasty. And that lima bean puree? I didn’t have time to grab my bathing suit before diving into that bitchin’ legume lagoon.

That’s Alisha’s crap at the top.

Boczniaki z kapusta

oyster mushroom + braised cabbage in beer broth + butternut miso + rye crumb

Somehow, my dinner was considered a “large plate” and hers was “small” and cheaper yet seemed so much bigger and she was still working on it a good twenty minutes after I had licked the last lima smear from my plate.

To cap off our meal, I ordered dessert for us to split, and again, I could have eaten 5 plates of these.

Bogate ciasto smietankowe

Rich cream cake + roast pear

My Apteka verdict is that the food was bomb and inventive, and even had a level of comfort to it that vegan joints sometimes lack. But, for the price I paid and the amount of food I ate, I was a little unsatisfied. I was ready for second dinner less than an hour later. Even still, I’ll probably go back again because I liked the atmosphere, the staff was great, and I want to try the other things on the menu — I’ll just be prepared to eat my arm later on.

Afterward, we went to the Carnegie Library lecture hall to see one of my favorite female vocalists, Julien Baker. Ugh, I have been dying to see her live for years now but something always comes up when she’s here. I thought I was going to end up going to see her alone because I don’t know anyone else who likes her and Henry was a hard nope, but it ended up coinciding perfectly with Alisha’s visit. She was my concert buddy when she lived in Pittsburgh back in the day and I was so excited to have another good music night with her!

Alisha was all frenzied because she wasn’t sure if we were allowed to park in the lot she chose, and then she was mad because we walked some totally long-ass way to get to the lecture hall when we could have taken a much shorter route, but I was selfishly happy about this because I needed the steps since it was week one of the Law Firm Walking Challenge (OH, I HAVE AN UPDATE ABOUT THIS TOO, CHECK BACK LATER) and I was kicking myself for planning an evening of DINNER and a SEATED CONCERT. Alisha was miserable because she had a bad cold and here I was, walking her around Oakland on a super chilly April night.

When we arrived, she was immediately annoyed because the young girls checking tickets at the door were all googly-eyed over my knack for accessorizing and then we stood in the bathroom waiting for the two occupied stalls to open up and then the bathroom door slowly started to open on its own and we were like WTF SCOOBY, GHOSTS!? but here it turned out Alisha had leaned on the handicap door opening button.

And then a few minutes later, we realized that only one of the stalls had been occupied that whole time, so that was cool.

“I should have known it was going to be a night full of stupid things,” Alisha sighed, insinuating that my presence draws this stuff out!?

Whatever!

Anyway, we found some good seats nice and close (BUT NOT TOO CLOSE) in the first row off the floor. Alisha was whining about why it hadn’t started yet and I was like, “Because it’s only 7. We have another hour.”

LOL Alisha thought it started at 7 that whole time and was so angry that now we had to sit in this growing-more-stifling-by-the-minute room. She amused herself by spying on a man who apparently looked at me twice after I said “bless you” to Alisha so she was convinced he was obsessed with me but clearly I think she was obsessed with him! He kept pretending like he was waiting for someone but then no one ever came…

Then people attempted to speak to Alisha and I thought she was going to will herself to incinerate into a pile of Arkansas ash.

“Why does this always happen? I was doing so good all these years and then I’m with you for like a minute…”

“And the awkward social situations come back?” I laughed, and she emphatically agreed.

It really was an interesting mesh of people there that night though. Lots of punk rock college lesbians, little girls, and old guys.

And us.

Tancred was the opener and I really don’t have much to say about them because I have tried so hard over the years to like them, especially when I got more into that Bledfest-type of scene, but I just can’t. The singer is fine but her voice doesn’t evoke a single emotion from me and the lyrics are kind of middle school diary.

But Julien though….

She performed mostly alone until closer to the end of her set, when her friend came out to accompany her on violin. I didn’t take any video and this picture is actually Alisha’s, because I kind of felt paralyzed with regurgitating grief and realized at one point that I was barely breathing.

Julien has this poignant and measured way of singing the most delicate, whispered notes and then, before you have time to prepare yourself, she is lurching her head back and full-blown power-vocals are roaring out of her small frame and sucking up all the oxygen in the room. She will leave you fucking breathless.

So, there’s this thing about me that you should know, and it’s that, as much as I love words, the lyrics of songs usually come secondary for me. It’s the music itself that heals me first and foremost, it’s what gets my heart started, the tears flowing. And then it’s the tone of the voice singing against that music. I have to laugh a little bit because when I was super into the post-hardcore and screamo scene, people would ask me how could I tell what they were saying? And I would say, “I can’t, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s still touching me.” And now, I get the same question because 99.9% of what I listen to is in Korean. And again, it’s the same thing. It doesn’t matter to me what they’re saying, because the music, and the sound of their voices singing in that perfect language, fills my heart with joy that I haven’t felt in such a long time.

But yet, Julien is the rare exception for me. Because I AM listening to her words. And they are slicing through my wrists like a rusty razor. To write the songs she writes…and to sing them with such brittle sincerity and honesty…you have to have a lot of pain in your life. I can’t imagine standing there on a stage in front of so many adoring fans, stripping down to your bare, aching soul, letting us all watch you relive whatever you were going through when these songs came to fruition. She gave us a gift that night, and I will forever cherish it!

This is one of my favorite songs. Careful, she might break your heart.

And then we thought we were going to have to live in the parking lot because one of the parking ticket machines wasn’t working right and traffic was all backed up and we blamed Henry for not driving us.

“You never asked?” he replied to my text. WELL, HE SHOULD HAVE JUST KNOWN TO DO IT!

And don’t you worry – I came home at 11pm and still managed to eke out 20,000 steps.

As much as I wanted to spend every waking moment in Seoul, I also wanted to explore other parts of Korea, too. I was torn between Jeju Island and Busan, but then Henry wisely pointed out that traveling to Busan would be easier, probably, for a bunch of dummies like us. And he promised that we could go to Jeju another time and when he was sleeping, I drained him of a small amount of his blood and snipped some of his beard hairs for my YOU PROMISED, MOTHERFUCKER potion.

That being said, Busan won out and I wasn’t mad about it. I got to make the obligatory TRAIN TO BUSAN joke on Instagram which no one got, but that’s OK!

I have to laugh a little because before we left for this trip, several of my friends were like, “Send us your itinerary!” and honestly, aside from our flights and hotel, nothing else was set in stone. Not even this overnighter to Busan! In fact, we didn’t even get our KTX tickets until the day before. We were on our way to Myeongdong, I believe, and got off at Seoul Station first in order to buy the tickets. Seoul Station is not only just a subway station, but also a large bus transfer terminal and major railway station where you can take the KTX to other cities in South Korea. It’s also SUPER EASY to get tickets (there are a ton of self-service ticketing things but we opted to just go right into the KTX office and have someone do it for us because #dumbAmericans).

In hindsight, I can’t believe how flawless this whole process was.

Thursday morning, we threw some clothes into our backpacks and set off for Seoul Station. We bought some snacks at GS25 (one of the amazing convenience stores in Korea and I miss it so much, take me back!) and then went down to our designated platform and waited for the train to arrive, at which point we boarded the train and showed our tickets to literally no one. I was a nervous wreck about this, but I guess that’s just how it is in South Korea! I was watching some broad’s vlog the other day, and she was on a train in China that’s similar to the KTX, but was joking that she had to go through all this security and show her ticket numerous times, unlike in Korea, where you just walk right on and no one bothers checking.

My banana milk (uyoo) and vacation journal which I nearly filled up by the time the trip was over! And you guys, banana milk was one of my favorite things to drink there. I thought, man, there’s no way this will live up to the hype. Especially since, while I love bananas, banana-flavored things aren’t usually my thing. I hate how synthetic it tastes! But these little jugs of banana milk blew my mind. They were sweet, not too sickeningly so, and felt like liquid silk on my tongue. Ugh, so good, and I drank them very slowly to make it last. They’re so popular that there are special straws available in all of the convenience stores, just for them!

The train ride itself was a relatively uneventful 2 and a half hours. Chooch watched YouTube videos the whole time and kept snickering to himself, which was annoying because his big head was blocking the window and I was like, “Thanks for crying over the window seat when you’re not even looking out the window, asshole!” From the glimpses I got, it was lots of countryside, low houses, and mountains.

Meanwhile, Henry befriended an older Korean businessman (I mean, older than me; he was probably the same age as Henry, lol) named Jeno who was actually born in Busan but currently lives in Seattle. He told Henry that he owns a company in Seattle and also has an office in, I believe, Daegu which is where he was taking the KTX that day. They talked for a really long time and I was so mad because of course HENRY would make a friend in Korea. I was furiously scribbling in my vacation journal the pieces of the conversation I could hear and then Henry texted me something about “don’t listen to my conversations” ugh.

I was hoping Henry would have the good sense to ask his new friend for a job (in the Daegu branch, obviously) but no, of course not.

(Although, if he insists on staying in the beverage industry, I think he should aim for a job at Binggrae and sling some banana uyoo on the daily.)

We reached Busan Station around 10:30am and Chooch was excited to mock Henry’s map-reading. Also, Chooch’s backpack is so stuffed to the gills because he insisted on bringing that damn Peachy Boy with him, which took up almost his entire backpack so Henry stuffed most of the clothes into MY backpack, which means that Chooch and I both had overstuffed backpacks.

How stuffed was Henry’s backpack, you ask? N/A. HENRY DIDN’T BRING ONE AND RELIED ON CHOOCH AND ME TO CARRY EVERYTHING!

On the train, Jeno told Henry that Busan is a friendlier city than Seoul, and right off the bat, and elder Subway worker came over to help Henry and another older man use the T-Money card refilling machine. And then he gave us explicitly instructions on how to get Gamcheon Culture Village, which was where we figured we’d start the day since we couldn’t check into the hotel until 4.

Busan’s subway stations are smaller than Seoul’s but still packed with flair! The trains are older and definitely warmer, that’s for sure. We had been spoiled by the sleek and sparkly trains in Seoul! Busan’s had its own personality though and I was happy that we could still get around pretty easily – and our T-Money card was valid in Busan so we didn’t have to buy a new one!

Anyway, we managed to take the subway to the station nearest to Gamcheon Culture Village, at which point we had to embark on our, what, 7th urban hike of the trip in order to reach the entrance of the village, and if you Google “Gamcheon Culture Village,” one of the first things you will see is “STEEP STREETS” and “COASTAL MOUNTAIN.” And what made it even more fun to trudge up that perpendicular pavement was being strapped with backpacks. Honestly, at one point I was climbing that hill bent over at a 90-degree angle and my backpack started to feel like A SADDLE.

Years from now, I imagine all of us gathered around for a Christmas picnic in the cemetery, someone bringing up “that one time we went to Korea” and Chooch is going to flip the fuck out at the memory of walking 35,000 steps uphill for the whole time.

And then Chooch and Henry fought over the map because this was one of the main themes of our Korean Odyssey. Chooch must be earning Boy Scout badges through YouTube or something because I never knew he was so good with directions and using compasses on phones to find North and you know, like basic survival skills that I never learned even after spending my entire elementary career in Girl Scouts.

The fights they had over maps and directions were hilarious, you guys. I laughed myself to pee-drops so many times, all the while thinking, “I CAN’T BELIEVE WE’RE LOST IN KOREA AND THIS IS SO FUNNY TO ME!”

To be fair to Henry though, we didn’t get lost at all going to the Gamcheon Culture Village; however, we did find out after the fact that there was a shuttle bus we could have taken. But hey — what’s 45 minutes out of the day?

There are worse places to be walking, that’s for sure.

The weather was perf that day. Low 60s and sunny. Our first cherry blossom sightings happened on this day, too!

This alley went straight-the-fuck-up.

Same.

Chooch and I had to take a break because being Henry’s pack-mules is hard work. Henry just kept moseying on up the street because all he was carrying was a two pound camera bag. Honestly, some parts of the sidewalk were so steep that I was afraid our backpacks were going to make us fall backward and I didn’t want to fall! I’m scared of falling! Have you ever seen me on a playground? I get stuck on things and I start crying about being afraid to jump down because I don’t want to fall and then Chooch has to be like, “You’re literally two feet from the ground, if that. You can do this.”

Anyway, Henry eventually noticed that we were missing. He turned around and saw us sitting on a bench and made the WHAT THE HELL Dad-hands-to-the-sky and then stormed back down the road to fetch us.

“IT’S SO HEAVY!” I cried, trying to shift the weight of my backpack to no avail. So Henry, ever-so-valiant, grabbed the backpack off my shoulders and thrust the camera bag at me.

WOW! WHAT A FUCKING PRINCE! Nearly an hour into this hike!

Chooch and I were cracking up so bad. Maybe it was the altitude, maybe it was the train to Busan, maybe it was just us being us, but we were so slap-happy.

We made it to the crest of the mountain at the same time a bus was dropping off a handful of tourists.

“THERE WAS A BUS?!” Chooch screeched. And so our Gamcheon Culture Village experience began! (Stay tuned for a million pictures of it, btw. Sorry, but that town is so pretty!)

(See also: That Time I Forgot How To Spell ‘Twelfth’ And Had To Look It Up)

Well, it’s here. Another birthday. The one thing that has always stuck with me from when I was pregnant was someone telling me, “Time moves so much faster when you become a parent.” I thought this was a fucking joke because those nine months of being pregnant moved like sludge. But shit, it really does feel true, maybe because I’m so hyper-aware that he becomes less of a kid as every day passes and I just want to go around curb-stomping clocks and burning calendars.

And now he’s 12.

Just like that.

He was 3, just about to turn 4, when I started working at the Law Firm. It feels like yesterday.

My friend Christina was like, “Wait until next year when you have to start adding a ‘teen’ to his age” and that scares me too, but honestly when I  think about, he’s been acting like a teen for the last 10 years at least, so at least I’m sort of prepared.

Maybe?

He was about 3 months old in the above photo. Maybe 4? I’m a shitty mom, lol.

We had a small little celebration last night at Breakout, the escape room down the street. Chooch is obsessed with escape rooms and he and my mom have gone to three or four of them at this point but have never won because it’s always just the two of them, ha! So this time, we wrangled up a group of 7 (Chooch, his bff Sharyn, me, my mom, Janna, Blake and Haley) and we managed to escape with 4 minutes left! I’m so glad my mom joined us. She is hilarious, especially when we had to be handcuffed and she cried about how whoever found the key had to unlock her cuffs first and then I found the key first and made Haley unlock me and then we unlocked Blake while my mom was like, “HELLO” but then Blake was the hero and unlocked her cuffs since I’m an awful daughter, ha!

I didn’t care if we actually escaped so much as I just wanted to do better than Janna. I think she was low-key afraid to go with us because I hit her once playing Scattergories so she was probably thinking, “God only knows what she’ll do to me in an escape room…”

Afterward, we came back to our house and Henry and Calvin joined us for strawberry cake from the Priory, which was really good thank god because I’m a cake snob and it’s technically my birthday too so people should be glad that I was pleased.

It was nice to not have a full-blown party this year, especially since Korea was so close to his birthday, but I suspect that we’ll be doing something festive next year when he turns 13 because that’s a pretty decent milestone. Sigh. Maybe a recreation of his 1-year monster-themed party!?

For as much as we butt heads, this kid is honestly my best friend in the whole world. Who else would put up with my antics, let me slather make up on them and dress them in my clothes for lame photoshoots, cry actual tears with me when we watch videos of the Seoul subway announcement music, die laughing at random people’s birthday party videos on YouTube, learn all the names of 9-member Kpop groups with me, go on roadtrips for concerts, act as my wingman when we walk past my Mexican taco cart boyfriend, and just be the ultimate partner-in-graying-Henry’s-hair? Chooch is the best kid I ever could have asked for. He is so independent and smart, hilarious and sassy, and compassionate and empathetic. He’s wise beyond his years and can hold his own in conversations with adults (don’t get him started on his thoughts about Trump!). My friends are just as much to credit for him growing into such a cool guy. Henry and I are so lucky to have so many great people in our lives who love our kid, so thank you!

And now I will leave you with the last photoshoot of 11-year-old Chooch, taken last weekend. The theme was “stressed businessman” because he had slept over his neighbor friend’s house the night before which meant he didn’t sleep at all and had huge bags under his eyes in addition to being mad that I was keeping him from playing Fortnight.

With the exception of the small portion of the afternoon we spent in Yeouido earlier in the week, we had been spending all of our time in “old Seoul,” which is north of the Han River, while “new Seoul” is south. I can tell you without any uncertainty that old Seoul was where I would gladly spend most of my time if/when I ever get to return, but I had to cross the Han in order to visit some kpop places of interest, the most important being SMTown.

But first, Henry had to look at a map…

I had just been saying that so far, this day was the best we’d had, what with starting our morning off with a hike up to Namsan Tower, and then eating lunch Myeongdong, and pretty much not having any direction snafus! But then…Gangnam.

But wait, let me back up. So, Gangnam is the ritzy neighborhood of Seoul. You might remember back in 2012 when there was a huge kpop hit that crossed over to American radio: Psy’s “Gangnam Style”? I knew a girl at the time who was so offended that this was being played on the radio because she thought he was saying “condom star.” OK…

So, that kind of put Gangnam on the map for the rest of the world. It literally means “South of the river” and is ridiculously upscale. I mean, as soon as we got off the train in Gangnam Station, the underground shopping went from sock vendors to motherfucking designer brands. It was like being in a completely different country. And then once we emerged from the subway station, even the people were different. The fashion was way more sleek, the men all dressed like they were straight out of k-dramas with their perfectly-fitted pants and pastel shirts and it was pretty hard not to stare in awe because everyone was so beautiful and physically curated.

Of course, Henry took us the wrong way right off the bat and we ended up standing in the middle of a sidewalk next to what appeared to be the main and extremely busy multi-laned street in Gangnam, looking like fucking losers for the millionth time of the trip, when an older man on a scooter rolled up to us on the sidewalk, and in broken English asked us where we were trying to go.

Henry looked at me like, “This is all you, YOU tell him!” so I sheepishly said we were looking for SMTown.

“Oh, idols? Idols!” he said, recognizing immediately what I was looking for because everyone in Korea knows kpop idols. This man was so freaking sweet and tried his very best to help us even with the very strong language barrier. He told us we could walk there, and pointed the way, but made a motion with his hand and sound that I think was implying “walk waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down that street.”

So we set off BACK THE WAY WE CAME because traditionally this is what Henry does to us, and before we made it off that block, the man in the scooter came back to us. He must have thought about it after we left and waved off his original directions. He pulled out a notebook and wrote down the names of subway stations in his best romanized attempt (honestly, romanization of the Korean language sucks. I wish I had the foresight to tell him to write it in hangeul) but we we were able to understand his new directions, and god bless that man because we got off at the subway stop he suggested and literally SMTown was RIGHT THERE when we emerged from the exit.

SMTown is this really cool multi-level building owned by SM Entertainment and full of interactive exhibits, a gift shop, a cafe, and displays of costumes worn and awards won by artists on the SM label. It’s also the collective name that the artists on SM go by.

My second favorite kpop group is on SM—-SHINee. There was no way we were going to leave Seoul without a visit to SMTown. I needed to see all of the SHINee displays!

Close-up of the mirrored facade.

I almost fell off the escalator while drooling over these large SHINee portraits on the wall. I’m notoriously terrible with escalators and generally need to devote every ounce of my attention to gripping the rail and keeping a solid stance on the step. I had one really scary escalator incident when I was around 4-years-old in Atlantic City and my SHOELACE GOT CAUGHT.

Don’t worry — my Pappap was there to rescue me.

I watch all of these different Korean music countdown programs whenever my favorite artists are performing so it was really fun to see some of these awards in real life, and for Red Velvet no less! (Chooch and Henry both really love Red Velvet, FYI.)

Super fun fact about Red Velvet: one of the members (Wendy) is actually from Minnesota. During these past Winter Olympics, one of Amanda Kessel’s (Team USA hockey and also sister to Pittsburgh Penguin’s Phil Kessel) college friends posted a picture of their college golf team group picture for Throwback Thursday and someone noticed that Wendy was also on the team! So random.

BUT TAEMIN, THO.

Chooch and I saw NCT127 at KCON last year and when they performed Cherry Bomb, we thought the bass was going to blow the roof right off the Prudential Center. It was fucking intense.

Also, there are various NCT groups (NCT127, NCT Dream, NCT U, and now NCT 2018) and I just can’t keep them all straight. I remember watching an episode of Weekly Idol were NCT127 was trying to explain all of  the different units, and Dony and Cony (the hosts) were just like, “No, just stop talking. It’s too much.”

Anyway, one of their members, Johnny, is from Chicago I think. I would say their most popular member is Taeyong but he’s my least favorite because he makes me feel uncomfortable. Don’t ask.

Henry was like, “Just take this fucking picture, fast.”

Taeyeon is my favorite member of Girl’s Generation.

More Taemin!

Chooch was annoyed because there were some girls there giggling at him, lol.

Seriously, Henry – why don’t we have full-blown murals of kpop stars in our house?!

He was so over it, hahaha. (OR WAS HE. He loves kpop, don’t let his terrorized gaze fool you. He sends me kpop news articles all the time!)

You guys, Taemin’s hands are slightly smaller than mine and I have pretty small hands! Chooch’s hands looked like ham hocks next to all of the idol hand molds.

Chooch got this picture from one of the photobooths after two girls hogged it forever:

Yes, it’s already framed and hung on the Wall of Chooch.

We almost missed the 4th floor because there was a weird stairwell but thank god we saw it because that’s not only where all of the gorgeous fan art lives (the collection blew my mind), but also the Jonghyun memorial was there as well. I posted about that separately, because it was important and special to me and, well, I just felt that it deserved its own post. So if you feel like it, you can read about that here.

After absorbing all of the SM-goodness, we went to the cafe where Chooch and I each got a plastic collectors bottle of our favorite groups (SHINee for me, and Red Velvet for him). Henry bitched about it because they’re pretty small and once we added our respective beverage selection, they were $9 a piece. God, Henry, just pay the guy!

Random view of Gangnam.

After we left SMTown, Henry took us on a cross-country trudge to the JYP building. Oh my good god, our feet felt crushed and I sincerely thought that I had fractured something just from literally pounding the pavement with shoes that were OK comfort-wise, but not the best for walking 25 miles a day. We just kept walking and walking and getting more and more slap-happy, to the point where Henry quit talking to us altogether, especially since everytime he said something we would repeat it back to him in an Eeyore voice.

We’re such angels!

Every time we would ask him where we were going, he would fly on the defensive about how “ALL THE DIRECTIONS I FIND TO THESE PLACES ARE SHITTY, OK!? I’M DOING THE BEST THAT I CAN!!”

Lol forever.

We did eventually make it to JYP, after feeling like Henry was leading us off the face of the earth. And we knew that we had made it because we rounded a corner and saw a bunch of girls sitting on a curb across the street from it.

Honestly, I just wanted to do a quick walk-by and snap some pics of the building, but Chooch got super comfortable on the curb with the other fangirls, hoping for a chance to see someone from Got7 leap from the front door and disappear into a tinted-windowed car.

Henry was not OK with this, but I bet the Dunkin Donuts across the street is super on board with it, considering their shop was packed full of sasaeng (crazy) fans staking out at their tables with coffee and donuts.

It was Jackson’s birthday so there was a birthday sign up for him. Sadly, he was in Hawaii at the time (I believe) so there was no chance of getting a glimpse of him.

I would have been happy seeing TWICE!! That’s who I was holding out for.

Chooch kept saying, “Just three more minutes.”

“Just six more minutes.”

“We’ll leave at 5:45.”

“Make that 5:50.”

We eventually left at 6:00, after staking out for a half hour. I’m too old for that! (OK, maybe if there was a chance of seeing G-Dragon or Taemin, that would be making a bed under a bush somewhere, but G-Dragon is in the military now and Taemin was actually in LA the week we were in Seoul, because fuck my luck.)

This next part is almost too painful to relive by blogging, but we promised Chooch that we would go to Kakao Friends in Gangnam and Henry took us some convoluted way back to a random subway station and then we got off at what he assured us was the “correct” stop but we still somehow ended up walking over an hour through the now-dark streets of Gangnam, which was getting more and more crowded because people love to freaking shop, and Chooch and I were getting more and more angry and our feet hurt and Henry was trying to win back our hearts by making jokes and we were like, “NOT ON THIS DAY, HANK.”

Long and incredibly miserable story short, we did eventually make it to Kakao Friends and Chooch was so happy, so I guess it was worth it.

We split a strawberry cake at the Ryan Cafe (Ryan is the main Kakao character) and wouldn’t let Henry have any, hahaha. But at least we were all laughing at this point. We kept the cardboard coffee sleeve for our scrapbook about Henry getting us lost. We haven’t started it yet though, because I’m not a scrapbooker by any stretch and when I went to the craft store to get a scrapbook, I felt so overwhelmed and stressed out and then I just got mad because none of those kits are my style. Everything was all jesus-y and corny. Doesn’t anyone make scrapbook shit for Godless people!?

And since we hadn’t eaten a legit dinner, we gorged on street food in a side-street near Kakao Friends, because twigum (fried food) is life.

Here’s a quick compilation of street action from that day in Myeongdong & Gangnam:

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I kept telling myself, even though Henry’s screwy directions had us walking figure eights all around Korea, at least we were IN KOREA. We were happy by the time we got back to the hotel, and that’s all that matters.

Next post: TRAIN TO BUSAN!

After spending the morning on Namsan, we came back down to Myeongdong for lunch. We tended to avoid most chain restaurants or anything that veered too far away from traditional Korean fare while there, but I wanted nothing more than to eat at YG Republique, a 3-restaurants-in-one establishment owned by YG Entertainment (my favorite kpop agency!). You may have already read the post where we had drinks at 3Birds Cafe in Yeouido, which is part of YG Republique, but on this day I was interested in the KPub.

The staff here in the Myeongdong location was MUCH MORE CHILL than the barista we encountered in Yeouido, that’s for sure. Plus, we got there just before the lunchtime rush and had the place almost nearly to ourselves the whole time, which meant I could take pictures of all the YG memorabilia without looking like an eager tourist.

I had the omurice (literally just an omelette stuffed with rice and smothered in whatever delicious savory sauce that is up there) and it was reallllly nice.

K-Pub was on the second floor so we got to sit by the open windows and people-watch. I had the weirdest people of all to watch sitting right next to me.

Ugh, so much YG beauty!!

We had a really nice experience at K-Pub, and our waitress was super pretty and nice too. Henry made her laugh and then he spent the rest of the day thinking he was so cool after that.

Before heading on to Gangnam, we stayed in Myeongdong for a bit, because there is so much going on there!

Chooch was molested by a foot and then became obsessed with the idea of a foot massage since we were walking so much every day and our feet felt broken. I was like, “Ew, I’m not going to make anyone here touch your gross Barney Rubble feet!” The things Chooch latched on to in Korea, though…so random and hilarious.

I don’t know what the going rate for feet massages is here in America, but $18 for 40 minutes seems like a good deal, right? Shrug.

Henry and I shared a famous strawberry red bean mochi. I have watched so many people eat these on YouTube because this is my sad life, people. I live vicariously through super nerve-grating YouTubers. (Actually, some of them seem like pretty cool people contrary to what Henry thinks.) I didn’t get to take a picture of it because we fucking inhaled that bitch, but the strawberry was huge and incredibly fresh (we were in Korea during strawberry season and every cafe had their seasonal strawberry confections on the menu), coated with a hearty layer of delightful pat (red bean), and then wrapped in a beautiful robe of chewy and sweet mochi. It was one of the best things I ate in Korea. J/K everything was the best.

(People keep asking me what my favorite food was that I ate and I honestly start to panic when I try to answer that! There wasn’t a single thing I tried that I didn’t like. Korean food is so on point, especially their street food. Henry would never have to cook again if we lived there because I’d just be like, “I’mma run outside and grab some pajeon, do you want anything j/k get it yourself.”)

Several days after we came home from Korea, I wistfully said, “You know what else I really miss? Almost getting killed everyday by—-”

“—delivery scooters,” Chooch finished for me, knowingly. Those scooter drivers are RUTHLESS and RECKLESS! It was pretty impressive to watch them plow through the bust streets and sidewalks. Even McDonald’s has scooter delivery service! Korea has it all, truly.

Couldn’t get on the train without Chooch stalking all the underground sock vendors for Bambi socks. He would yell things like, “SERIOUSLY, THEY HAVE CHIP AND DALE AND NOT BAMBI?!”

Ugh, him and this Bambi obsession. It’s so odd. I have no idea where he gets this from.

On the real though, Korea made me feel things about socks that I never felt here in America and I became obsessed with buying them. In fact, one of the few regrets I’ve had since coming back (coming back being the main regret), is that I should have bought more!

OK, wow, this was a nice quick one! I’ll be back with the last part of my WEDNESDAY MARCH 28 recap and then we can finally move on to BUSAN!

In honor of eating at a YG establishment, here’s a super old BIGBANG video, le sigh:

I always say I’m not going to be surprised when the weather goes batshit, because Pittsburghers should be used to it, but good lord this last week has been infuriating. Last Friday, it was starting to finally feel like spring and I even left the house without a jacket when I met Kara for breakfast at Dorstop! And the next day actually felt like July – I went with Henry and Chooch for a walk on some bike trail thing and even though I am a Professional Walker, it was too much too soon and I felt really lethargic and sick for the rest of the day.

And then it snowed three separate days later in the week so I had to go back to wearing my winter coat and scarf. In mid-April.

We took advantage of the warmth on Saturday though and got our first Al’s of the season! I say that like we’re regulars there when I think it was only probably the third time we’ve gone. I was sad though because the only reason I wanted to go was because last time I had this SIMPLY DIVINE (lol) Mexican fried ice cream topping and I needed that so bad on Saturday for some reason.

BUT NOW THEY DON’T HAVE IT ANYMORE.

At least, I don’t think they do. Chooch freaking ordered like it was his last ice cream on earth before Henry and I even made it to the window, so then the lady was looking at all expectantly, order pad in hand (I’ve never seen an ice cream…barista?…write down orders before!) and people were behind us now and we felt RUSHED and OBLIGATED to order immediately.

So we both got twists with crunchies as a topping.

Thanks, Chooch.

I mean, that’s probably what we would have ordered anyway, but still.

THANKS, CHOOCH.

Speaking of Chooch, his cat is a fucking nutcase. She started jumping on him and perching on his shoulders like a parrot several months ago (in fact, moments before I took this picture, she had jumped straight on top of his head and stood there with all four paws touching like an elephant standing on a ball). But now, she does this to Henry and me, too! It stresses me out so much because she only does this when we’re standing, and every morning before work, I stand in front of the TV and jog in place* while watching kpop stuff so I’m a prime piece of furniture for her now, apparently. The other day, I caught her started to pounce and I moved out of the way just in time and thank god because I was wearing a silk shirt! God, that would have hurt.

So that’s a thing that happens in my house now.

*(Side note: Another walking challenge started at work last Monday and I originally wasn’t going to do it but then Carrie asked me to be on a team with her and Lou, and I was like “Ugh, Lou, but OK fine” and then we roped in Wendy, so Lou named our team C.E.W.L. and the Gang even though I think 3 Girls and a Lou-ser is better. I’ve been averaging 22,000 steps a day without trying too hard because my lifestyle is way different now than it was back in the days of the original walking challenges, and I think I have been pretty calm about it. I haven’t berated my teammates and I don’t feel like flagellating myself if I don’t get 71234807230847 steps now. I mean, not like I was super militant about it in the past or anything.)

Oh, you want more work tales? Well, we had a huge cake the other day because two of our peoples are leaving us :( The next day, I was on late shift and was asked to:

1. take some cake home
2. cover the leftovers in plastic wrap and put it back in the fridge

A simple request, you’re thinking. If so, wow, how novel it must be to be so FUNCTIONING!!! Because I, on the other hand, was freaking out. The plastic wrap was so jacked on the roll that I couldn’t pull any out and the sheath of it that was already covering part of the cake from the day before had icing all over it and I didn’t want to touch it, ughhh. So I’m standing there holding this degenerate roll of plastic wrap, staring at this cake that has been butchered by too many cakecutters in the kitchen (Carrie should have just been on stand-by all day with the knife because her cake-cutting skills are legit! My cake-cutting method involves only my hands and zero skill.)

I didn’t feel comfortable asking any of the other people in the office on late shift because I’m not very close to them so they don’t know my neurotic levels of incompetency, so I did what I had to do…..

…..

…..

…..

…..

…..

…..

Yes sir, I texted Henry, who was already on his way to pick me up and said “Sue asked me to put the cake away before she left can you help” and his response was “how much cake is there” so I said “a lot” because I didn’t know how to measure and hahaha he came in to help me and immediately was like, “REALLY ERIN THIS CAKE IS ALREADY MOSTLY COVERED?!” but there were pieces that were already cut and on plates that weren’t covered, and also a peninsula off the east coast of the main cake that wasn’t covered by the original piece of plastic wrap because I didn’t want to touch it long enough to stretch it over.

See also: IT HAD ICING ON IT.

So Henry’s solution was to just take that piece home but that would have been EVEN WORSE FOR ME TO DO ON MY OWN thank god I made him come up. And then he carried the huge box into the kitchen, where I opened the fridge door for him and yelled Team Work which made him glare at me.

Then since he was there and I still had a few more minutes left of work, I gave him a bunch of stuff of Halloween decorations I found while cleaning out my desk for my move and said, “Here take this down to the car with you.”

Get yourself a multi-purpose Henry!

In other weird weather week news, Chooch casually mentioned over the weekend that he missed Korean food and I said, “SON, SPEAK NO LOUDER I HEAR YOU” and that’s how we ended up at Korea Garden on Sunday for lunch and it was grand but not as grand as, you know, actually being in Korea which I still cry about every day. Chooch had bibimbap and I’m so proud that he actually reaches for the gochujang now. People really can change!

Our favorite Korean restaurant in Pgh is Nak Won Garden, but Korea Garden has a nice atmosphere too. Both of those restaurants are always filled with Korean people every time we go, so that’s how you know a Korean restaurant is legit! I didn’t want to write about this because it still makes me so angry, but the day after we got home from Korea, Chooch went back to school but Henry and I still had one more day off so I suggested that we get Korean food for lunch. We went to this place called the Golden Pig and this review sadly has nothing to do about the people running it or the quality of the food, but more so the experience we had with the so-called “regulars” who made us feel like shit for being there.

Golden Pig is very, very, very small. It has a counter that seats maybe 5 people, and then two or three (but I think two) tall tables with three chairs each. We arrived right on the heels of two white men who very clearly are regulars of the place, so they sat at the counter and immediately started talking to the, I assume, husband and wife owners who were in the kitchen. As soon as we sat down at a table, I turned and looked out the window just in time to see a literal procession of cars pulling into the parking lot. Within 5 minutes, every seat was taken and there were groups of people waiting outside.

This isn’t some trendy restaurant in the heart of hipster Pittsburgh, you guys. It’s out kind of far in a place called Cecil and not in an urban setting at all. But it turns out that most of these people were coming from the same company, I guess, because the restaurant was filled with, “HEY FRED I DIDN’T KNOW YOU COME HERE TOO” and things of that cordial work-bro nature. That was mildly uncomfortable only because it made Henry and me feel like outsiders and we were crashing a party, and people definitely kept looking at us. I didn’t like it.

All blue-collared white people. This fact is important.

Then these ladies who were sitting at the counter knew the guys at the table next to us so they kept turning around and talking to them about what they liked to order there and THEY WOULDN’T EVEN USE THE PROPER KOREAN NAMES and the one lady was like, “Oh, what are things we like? The sushi roll things” and she was poring over the menu while Henry was mouthing, “DON’T” to me because I was bouncing in my seat in anguish, the pure desire to shout out, “KIMBAP!” made me have actual shakes.

But this isn’t the worst part. It came later, after our food was served, and I had this dolsot pot of bubbling hot kimchi jjigae in front of me which, have you ever had anytime of jjigae / Korean stew? It is SCALDING HOT. You absolutely cannot eat this right away. So I’m sorry, but when I ordered it, I didn’t know that there would be a mass of hungry Cecil-ites congregating inside and outside of this tiny, tiny, tiny restaurant, coveting my table.

Oh, but there was!

Particularly, this one bitch and her husband (I guess? She put her head on his chest at one point). I didn’t see them at first because they were standing inside the doorway out of my view, but Henry said that they were staring at him the whole time, watching him eat. I didn’t notice them until the moved farther into the restaurant to get something to drink out of the cooler behind Henry. Then they just stood there, so now I was the one facing them. I didn’t much much attention to them at first, but after a few minutes I had this paranoid feeling that they were talking about me, and every time I looked up, the bitch was looking right at me.

But it wasn’t until I caught her MOCKING ME BLOWING ON MY SPOON that I went from mild-paranoia to table-flipping urgency within seconds.

“THOSE PEOPLE ARE LITERALLY TALKING ABOUT ME!” I said to Henry, LOUDLY in the tone that he just loves because it means I just stepped into my PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE BITCH jumpsuit and I’m ready to take flight in my rocket TO PETTYVILLE.

“I know,” he said quietly. “They’ve been staring at us since they got here. Fuck them,” and continued to eat his whatever chicken because he has way more patience and integrity than me, who was ready to launch my whole dolsot pot into her face, BE STRONG, ERIN.

As soon as I said that to him, she got all bristled and turned her back toward to me and put her face in her husband’s chest and I gave him a disgusted, “WHY DO YOU SUPPORT HER BEHAVIOR?!” grimace. So then he hurriedly looked away too.

But really? Of all the people there, you need to have OUR TABLE? You can’t wait for your turn like everyone else, or perhaps focus on the two guys who arrived before us and were already finished eating but still sitting at the counter and talking? OR MAYBE GO SOMEWHERE ELSE? I know I can be hateful but I cannot imagine ever walking into a place and being such a cunt to a total stranger. I wish you guys could have seen the way she imitated me, for no reason, just because I was sitting at a table and she wasn’t!?

And then!!! The ladies at the counter were all, “Oh  my god, do you guys want to sit down?” and moved over so they could have room at the counter and I was like, “WHY ARE YOU BEING NICE TO THEM!?” and then they were talking about their favorite dishes there and the CUNT said in her gravelly redneck  Yinzer throat scrape, “My favorite is the sweet potato noodle, I get it all the time.”

WELL THEN CALL IT JAPCHAE, YOU DUMB BITCH!!!!!!!

Anyway, my whole point to this story is that we had just spent 10 days in another country, being the token foreigners in most of the restaurants we ate at, and not once were we EVER made to feel like we didn’t belong  there. In fact, no one ever even gave us a second glance. Yet, here we are back in Trump’s America, getting low-key harassed by some entitled cunt who feels like she belongs in a restaurant more than we do.

Now I’m irate all over again. So many people experience that condescending and denigrating attitude EVERY DAY OF THEIR LIVES in this damn country. So many people. I’m not saying that I felt like a victim by any means here because fuck that white trash bitch, but it was just like a big fat WELCOME HOME slap to the face, you know? The way some people treat each other here is sickening.

AND THAT’S THE END OF THIS DUMB POST.

Me: I just don’t understand why we have to tell them more than once!!!

Henry: …they’re cats?….

Hey peeps, I don’t have much time to post anything substantive today (why do the imaginary groans in my head sound sarcastic?!) but here instead are some photos of my cat Penelope, a/k/a Peen Lop. She’s a real piece.

Here she is the other night when she and Henry were already in bed (she loves him) and I had the audacity to come up an hour later.

She was very mad about this.

And here she is looming over one of my last remaining plants.I made some snide remark about she was going to destroy it and then guess who knocked it over a few hours later?

Me.

That’s all I’ve got. Have a great weekend!

I have no idea what that title is supposed to mean but it made sense in my stir-fried brain for approximately 4 seconds. But even still, here is another blog post about, what else, KOREA. As if you’re not totally over it by now (see also: 8 posts ago).

We got up nice and early on Wednesday, March 28th to set off for Myeongdong station in order to begin our hike up to Namsan Park / N. Seoul Tower, but first: HOTEL ELEVATOR SELFIE. Henry had grown to abhor Elevator Time because Chooch and I were in this constant vacuum state of giddiness and we were known to lose it and start cracking up in front of other hotel guests several times. I know what you’re thinking and I agree: “WOW THAT SOUNDS SO ADORABLE HENRY IS LUCKY TO BE IN YOUR COMPANY.”

Once we got off at Myeongdong station, we had pretty clear directions (for once) on how to get to the start of the trail. When I say we “hiked,” I hope you guys know that this was 99.9% an urban hike and we didn’t have, like, REI survival packs on our backs or even basic hiking boots on foot or anything like that. It was mostly just very wide steps or steep concrete paths that we were walking on, but shit you guys, there was still a certain degree of effort involved. The tower literally crowns the top of Namsan Mountain, which is also considered the guardian mountain of Seoul. (I just learned this now; thanks, Google.)

The other option is to take the cable cars to the top, but I had read that walking is so much better because 1) nature and 2) exercise and 3) you can feel less slothy later on when you’re downing your third serving of ttkeokbokki and twigum. Every single person we encountered on this trek was over the age of 60 and in fantastic shape. BECAUSE THEY HIKE FREAKING MOUNTAINS ALL THE TIME. Native Koreans cracked the code of eternal youth, you guys. It was inspiring to watch them, especially when we reached one of the level checkpoints that had an area with exercise equipment and every single one was occupied by an ahjummas and ahjussi and they were GETTIN’ IT. I posted about that in more detail here.

I bet this spot looks so dreamy in the summer!

We paused occasionally to take in the view, where I would start to feel mild panic because I’m afraid of heights. I kept feeling like Chooch was going to tumble off the mountain even though there were railings everywhere but I still kept screaming, “GET AWAY FROM THERE. STAND NEXT TO ME. HOLD DADDY’S HAND. BE CAREFULLLLLLLL!!! WHY DID WE STOP USING A STROLLER??”

I’m either NOT A PARENT or SMOTHERINGLY MATERNAL out of nowhere. You never know.

You damn well know Henry had to stop and look at this map.

This isn’t actually fog. The yellow dust levels were really high most of the time we were there, in case you were wondering why you often see photos of people in Korea wearing medical masks. It’s actually not a fashion statement! (Well, it is for some people, probably, and there are certainly really cool mask options out there if you feel the basic white ones are too plain; in fact, all of the kpop shops sell masks with different kpop group logos on them, so if you want to protect your lungs while supporting EXO, you’ve got options.)

There are apps that you can use that will let you know what the air quality is for that day, and there was one day while we were there when we actually received an emergency warning text that was all in Hangul and of course our knee-jerk reaction was “NORTH KOREA” but then Chooch looked it up while we were digging a bomb shelter on the side of the road and said, “Oh, it’s just about the yellow dust, guys.”

It’s bad in Korea, but REALLY BAD in China.

It felt like the tower kept getting farther away, the higher we climbed.

Most of our ascent up Namsan was done on very nice brick paths like the one above. I loved that everytime we turned and looked back behind us, we got a different perspective of Seoul. That city is such a motherlovin’ babe and I could stare at it all the livelong day, for serious.

If you squint, maybe you can see my HEART DOWN THERE BECAUSE I LEFT IT IN SEOUL, WAHHH.

A rare picture of Henry and me. Chooch also have a version where he zoomed in on Henry’s face and cropped it and we kept laughing at that during the rest of the trip and Henry was like, “IT’S NOT FUNNY” and then Chooch did it again to another picture but on that one he added green snot dripping out of Henry’s nose and we were peeing ourselves over it and Henry really hated that one the best. Why was everything so funny!?

MAYBE IT WAS THE YELLOW DUST.

Anyway, this day was monumental because it was the first day of the trip that Henry wore a shirt with a pattern on it.

“How many more of these mountain-things do we have to climb?” I told him none, but hahaha just wait until Busan!

We finally made it to the top after maybe an hour, a little less even, and Henry bought our tickets for the tower. We got there at a great time (I think it was still sometime before 11am) because we went up in the elevator alone and barely anyone was in the observation area. It’s weird, but I felt like I had been there before since there was an episode of, wait for it, Running Man which took place there.

Oh yeah! Before we took the elevator up, there was a photo zone which Henry tried to bypass but I was like “YOLO, Henry” so we allowed the Namsan girl to take our photos and even obliged when she told us to make finger-hearts which Henry probably taught himself how to do while watching Twice videos in the bathroom at work, and Henry claims his jutting middle finger “wasn’t on purpose” which is what I’m going to say after I sprinkle his stew with hemlock tonight.

Meanwhile, Chooch was like, “Don’t tell me what to do.”

I was excited because the gift shop had post cards with stamps that you could buy and mail straight from the tower!!

Writing about Henry in our postcards, probably, lol.

We could have stayed up there all morning, but about 30 minutes after we got into the tower, the crowds started to file in. We made it to the cafe before it got packed though and it was really fun to sit by the window and write our postcards. Sending postcards is a dying form of communication, and I get so happy when our friends Chronica and Alyson Hell send us postcards from their travels! DONT EVER STOP.

This is the postcard Chooch wrote to our friends Jessi and Bill. <3 (Yes, he signs off as Douchecup, but only to Bill & Jessi. My favorite “douchecup” moment was at his 5th birthday party when he was running around calling Bill a douchecup and one of the preschool kids’ moms was like, “Wow, sounds like he really wants a juice cup!” YES, THAT’S IT EXACTLY.

OMG as I’m writing this, the mail room lady that I thought was a high school kid here for an internship thing when she first started (it’s a long story so the tl;dr version is that my eyesight is pathetic) just delivered the post card I sent from Seoul Tower to my co-workers! Glenn just read it and tried not to smile but then he smiled and immediately tried to disparage the situation by criticizing me for writing too much but that is just how I do postcards, OK?

Here’s a fun fact about the tower, thanks to the postcard that just arrived at work: It was designed to offer a full 360 degree view of Seoul and it was also Korea’s first radio tower delivering radio and TV signals since 1969!

This is the mail box I dropped the post cards into at my own risk.

View from 236m up, whatever that means.

View while peeing, taken after I peed—I wasn’t peeing on the floor.

There was this one activity where you could stand in front of a screen and connect to Busan Tower! However, at the moment Chooch and I did it, there was no one in Busan Tower waiting to connect, so that was sad. (We visited Busan Tower while there, but didn’t actually go up inside that one. More on that in a few posts!)

After hanging out in the cafe for a while, we left the tower and milled about the area at its base, which is filled with various shops (yes, you can buy your skin care even at Namsan Tower!) and a million places to attach a love lock if you feel so inclined to purchase one from the gift. We made Chooch use his own money to buy one because Henry was running low on cash and needed to find a bank. I can’t believe Chooch actually did it; he’s such a fucking tightwad with his own money.

“I bought a stupid marker, too,” he snottily spat when he returned from the gift shop.

This where I sat and painted my nails with $2 bottles of nail polish (hot pink and fluorescent orange) that I bought that morning at Daiso because my current nail polish was looking haggard. This is also where Chooch realized that he lost his subway card, so that was cool and not really a big deal because there was only like enough fare for one trip left on it I think and it only costs around $4 to get a new card to load, but we still made him feel like the most irresponsible child on the face of the earth because we’ve earned that right as parents.

LOL back off, CPS whistleblowers. We only harped on him for like 5 minutes and then moved on with our day.

The area around the tower is really beautiful, with lots of overlooks and colorful love locks to snoop on.

It was really nice to slow our pace a bit and just enjoy the mindblowing view. I know it’s a super touristy thing to do and Henry was kind of like, “merp merp” about it but then we made it to the top and he was like, “Fine. This is fine.” But probably had it been crowded, he’d have had a different, more sad tuba-y tune.

Chronica got Chooch this shirt for Christmas.

And then we began our walk back down the mountain to Myeongdong, where we had lunch before going to Gangnam! STAY TUNED LOLOLOL.

If you watch any Seoul travel videos on YouTube, or if you’re into kpop even a little, you know all about Hongdae. It’s like THE hotspot for cool college kids, artists, fashion trendsetters, and underground culture. This is where you want to go if you’re into clubbing (I’m not, but there are some YG-owned hip hop clubs in Hongdae that are supposed to be legendary), quirky street fashion, cafes from the weirdly themed to the high-brow hipster, and watching 5 different street performances at once. I was so excited to explore it, but also nervous because I wasn’t sure if I was cool enough to hang there; luckily the vibe was super laid back and just touristy enough that even Henry was like, “No, this is fine. I like it.”

You guys, I’m crying again, lol. This whole trip made me feel like Heidi after leaving Grandfather’s mountaintop cabin and all her goatherd friends for the BIG CITY. Except for the homesick part. I didn’t miss home ONE SINGLE BIT.

Um…sorry. I get dramatic sometimes. Anyway, Hongdae is named after the nearby Hongik University which I currently have listed as #1 choice on Chooch’s list of colleges. He doesn’t know this yet, but he’ll find out once the acceptance letter comes in the mail or by hologram, however things are being delivered in 2024.

Hongdae also is home to one of the restaurants owned by Haha and Jong Kook of Running Man!

“I don’t watch Running Man, but sure – take your damn picture” – Chooch.

Another notable thing about Hongdae is that the YG Entertainment building is there, and some people apparently call the whole area YG Town because of all of the YG-owned businesses around. And on that same note, my friend Veronica sent me a message on Instagram because apparently Ikon, a YG kpop group, was walking around Hongdae AT THAT SAME TIME giving out HUGS, whaaat. I got her message right after we were waiting to cross the street and saw people taking pictures of this guy in black:

I don’t know much about Ikon so I wasn’t sure who this was, but MAYBE?! He was definitely someone.

Aren’t we all.

Hongdae wasn’t overwhelmingly crowded when we were there on a Tuesday afternoon, but we did go back on a Saturday night and it was packed, but the crowds didn’t have that pushy, suffocating feel to it. It was way more of a party atmosphere and I had The Heart Eyes for it. More on that in a separate post though, because today we’re going to focus on some of the unique, totally extra shopping options.

One Piece was one of many novelty cafes that Chooch wanted to go to but I was like WE CAN’T DO EVERYTHING OK PICK ONE but now I’m like, “WHY COULDN’T WE DO EVERYTHING, WAHHHH.”

Speaking of Chooch, I asked him his review of Hongdae and apparently he will forever associate it with nearly breaking his ankle, cry much?

OK, right, this post is supposed to be all short and sweet, and just focused on shops of Hongdae. SORRY. You know me and all my words. We’ll get this post officially started with Chuu, which I couldn’t wait to see Henry inside of because it’s SO PINK AND GIRLY.

It didn’t faze Chooch one single bit, but Henry grumbled through the whole place. I told him to sit in the hallway with the other forlorn man hating his life, but he opted to stay inside because OBVIOUSLY HE LIKED IT. Come on, Henry, it’s 2018 – buck those gender norms! Embrace the pink! Wear some lace panties! YOU CAN BUY THEM IN CHUU’S BASEMENT!

The Chuu Strawberry Milk collection kills me dead.

Directly across from Chuu was the Stylenanda flagship store, which I thought I would like more than I did, but the clothes were less eye-catching to me.

Chooch really loved this chair, although this was about 45 minutes after he “broke” his ankle so he probably would have made that face sitting in a hard church pew, too. Chooch’s main goal everywhere we went that day was finding somewhere to pop a squat, and I want to take a moment to say that I never heard of the expression “pop a squat” until MTV had that reality game show called The 70s House back in the early oo’s and the host of the show said that in the first episode and I was like, “IS SHE TELLING THEM TO PEE” and Henry was like, “NO, THAT IS WHAT WE SAID WHEN WE WANTED SOMEONE TO SIT DOWN IN  THE 70S” and I still think that sounds like you’re telling someone to go out back and piss in a ditch.

Maybe that’s just me.

Wait, is this a travel blog about Seoul or camping in West Virginia? I keep forgetting.

This is Henry’s “EITHER HURRY UP AND BUY SOMETHING OR LET’S LEAVE” face. He was looking up pictures of fourth of July hamburger-loaded grills and oil rigs to trick his weener into coming back out from hiding. Mmm, juicy masculinity.

I feel like we had a huge fight somewhere in between leaving Stylenanda and after discovering the Hongdae location of Gentle Monster was closed while the concept was changing because Henry thought he knew exactly where Ader Error was and led us down 87 incorrect streets to the point where I called a moratorium on the Ader Error JUST AS WE RAN RIGHT INTO IT.

You guys. Even if you don’t give a shit about clothes, if you are ever in Seoul, please don’t pass up Ader Error. It is an experience. First, we had to walk through a room that had nothing but mattresses in it, and then we had to enter the actual store by walking THROUGH one of the mattresses and Henry was like, “What kind of store did you say this was again?”

And I told him it was a clothes store, but then after a few more seconds, he mumbled, “But…where are the clothes?

Oh they keep those stashed away upstairs, while the first floor is an indulgent art installation where all of the fitting rooms are re-imagined bathrooms. I didn’t take pictures of anything down there because the guy working seemed like he was against this and quickly told us that the clothes were upstairs.

But the guy upstairs was much friendlier and was worried that we were going to miss one of the curious displays of branding and made sure to usher us through a doorway that seemed more like if I took an axe and attempted to make my own door after watching 2 minutes of This Old House.

I have to say that I wasn’t loving the clothes all  that much (until after we came home and they released a new kitsune line which includes this sweater FML:

I mean, it costs like $800 though.

Chooch really liked this ugly sweater that looked shrunken but the price certainly didn’t reflect the lack of material, let me tell you. He was mad for a second that we wouldnt buy it for him but I think he only wanted to buy something to watch them drop it down this weird iridescent tube to the downstairs check-out. Meanwhile, though, the guy who was on patrol upstairs latched onto us but not in a I’M HERE TO SELL YOU THINGS type of way. He seemed genuinely interested in where we were from and how we heard of Ader Error.

(“uh, YouTube vlogs,” I mumbled in embarrassment while Henry sighed.)

He encouraged us to take it all in because it really is just as much as of a contemporary art installation as it is a clothing store, and then he excitedly led us down another set of steps into a small basement soap shop.

Yes, soap.

It’s called Day After Day and whoever would have thought a bar of soap could be so hipster?

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If you know me, or if you have read this blog over the years, you know that I lovelovelove a local Pittsburgh art museum called The Mattress Factory which is always chockful of super contemporary, modern avant garde art. Ader Error (and also Gentle Monster, but  I will get to that later, I promise) reminded me of that and I loved it just like I knew I would. I mean, a soap-stuffed commode — sure, why not! #art

This room made me feel like a futuristic Alice in Wonderland.

I just realized you can see our friend in the mirror! He was so great! Henry liked him a lot too which is why I think he didn’t flinch or bitch while paying $40 for a giftset of soap, lol.

This was in a narrow dead-end hallway of Ader Error, because sure.

Man, I fell HARD for Ader Error. I fell hard for Hongdae in general.

***************

Not Hongdae-related, but we had our hearts set on bingsu after we ate at Aori Ramen, and we were struggling to find a place in Hongdae — there was one place that we saw that apparently it changed into a different restaurant a year ago but the sign was never taken down. In an effort to keep us from shambling around like zombies, I made the executive decision that we would go back to Insadong because there was FOR SURE a bingsu place there, actually it’s a franchise called Sulbing.

So that was how we capped off an extraordinary day in Hongdae, sharing bingsu in Insadong. I felt like I was dreaming because REAL bingu was something that I wasn’t leaving Seoul without trying. There is a Korean bakery in Pittsburgh that has it on the menu but I knew when I tried it that it wasn’t right, that real bingu in Korea had to be better.

And shit goddamn motherfucker, was it ever!

I was going to do with classic patbingsu (red bean) but I always gravitate toward matcha. Also, Henry doesn’t care for green tea so I knew he would eat more of Chooch’s than mine AND I WAS RIGHT. IT WAS SO GOOD.

Bingsu is a popular Korean shaved ice dessert but don’t get it twisted, it’s not like a snow cone – this ice is sooooo soft and pillowy and then there is some type of velvety cream poured over it and a scoop of ice cream and little chappsaldduk (korean mochi) surrounding it like a royal crown and just please have some if you ever have an opportunity. It’s like a sundae but one that’s made for legit angels to eat while swinging their dangling legs off a fluffy cloud bed. It’s delicate, you guys. Eat it gently.