Better Day.

Today was the first (hopefully of many) good day(s) I've had in Korea. In the morning David (one of the other teachers) came by to get me because he had promised to show me a cool tea house in Downtown Daegu. I took the bus for the first time, an overall not unenjoyable experience as it wasn't too crowded, and then we wandered around downtown for most of the day. We went to the "bad" part of town which is where a lot of the southeast asian immigrants are with their cheap wares. It's awesome. I love it there. Piles of used - cool - clothing for 3000 won apiece (that's like $3). Then we went to the tea house which was one of the neatest places. It smelled so good and I got to have something called chrysanthemum tea. Then afterwards I got to keep the flowers. I'm going to try to dry them tonight and put them in my journal. We just sat in the yummy-smelling tea house for a few hours and chatted and read. It was really nice.

-----The yummy things at the tea house. Those are the flowers on the right from my tea.

After that we wandered some more. We saw some really cool graffiti all over downtown Daegu.

-----What do you guys think??

Then David took me to what he calls the "ghetto market." It was one of those markets you expect to see in Asian countries. With barrels of cool things that you can't really identify. Piles of chiles that would probably melt your eyeballs if you made the mistake of touching one and then rubbing your eye. Buckets of live eels (which the lady obligingly poked at to make them go crazy for my amusement). More fish than you can possibly imagine. And of course, endless displays of things you could buy at the dollar store - be nice this is their home country. I really liked it there. I think I'll try to go back and buy random things once I have an apartment to take them to.

-----The piles of chiles. -----Endless baskets of spices and stuff.
-----The EELS!

After a while David decided to leave but I decided to stick around and explore some more on my own. This was one of those good idea/bad idea things because left to my own devices I (inevitably) went shopping, which I'm definitely not supposed to do since I don't make any money until the 8th of January. But I think I needed a small, celebratory, welcome-to-korea, little shopping trip to lift me out of the existential funk I'd been in. And you know what? It totally worked. I ended up getting 3 pairs of shoes (fun patent leather brown boots, super cute flats, and a pair of little school marm looking lace up shoes that I've been wanting forever - which also happened to be the first time I haggled in korea, they went from 30000W to 23000W, so yay!) and I also got some leggins, which are so in here, and also a beautiful ivory coat. I love it!
I will now transition from that into saying that I LOVE the way people dress here. Especially in Daegu, which is like the fashion capital of Korea. I've decided I'm just going to start taking pictures of the way that the girls are dressed and posting them up for inspiration because I seriously am loving it. There's a lot of funky layering. Not crazy harajuku girl funkiness either. It's more toned down and girly. Anyways, I like it a lot. And the shoes here... Let's not even go there.

-----Here are the shoes.

----- I need some help.

-----Tati, you need to help me decide which kind I want.

Additionally, on the food front. Things are definitely looking much better. Today I had Tonkatsu for lunch (japanese fried pork) with the best side dishes i've had since coming here. Then I bought some candy off a street vendor. Then I found a guy that sold fried boniato strips (how great is that???) at his cart. And for dinner I also ate food from another street vendor. A really sweet old lady had some of these awesome shish-kebabs. Yummy! And I ate like 4 of them for under $4. That's pretty cool.

-----Here's the sweet old lady that gave me yummy food and was kind enough to point out which sauce was yummy and would not burn off my tongue.

So yea. That was my day. Oh and I managed to take the bus back from downtown to suseong-gu (my area of town) all by myself. Today was definitely a better day. And now tomorrow morning I head off to Seoul for training. It should be fun.