Cairo

Saturdy, Sally and I met Tasha and Hou-Jin in Insadong for lunch, we had dumplings in a beef broth, it was delicous. We walked around for a while, but it was raining so we soon retreated to a tea house, I had plum tea, it was very sweet but was very good. Shortly after tea Sally and I headed home to get ready for another Hongdae adventure.

My friend Adi, who is also teaching in Korea, but in a different city, invited me to a club in Hongdae on Saturday night because her friend was DJing. We haven’t had a chance to see each other because she lives a couple hours outside of Seoul and doesn’t come here super often, so this seemed like a really good opportunity to finally see her.

Just after we left the Subway station in Hongdae, Sally and I were walking down the street and some white people asked us for directions to a club that happened to be beside the club we were going too. We told them we would take them there. Sally knew where she was going; I did not. However, once we started walking around things did start to look familiar. We chatted with the white folk as we walked, a couple of English teachers and three Welsh guys who were on a stop over on their way home from New Zealand. After chatting for a moment, we realized that they were all actually looking for the same club as us and the English teachers new Adi, they had trained with her.

Seoul is one of the biggest cities in the world. Hongdae, the club district, is huge and full of people, you have stick close to not get separated from your friends. It is literally a sea of people. In this huge city, in this area with so many people, we accidentally run into people who are going to the same place and know the same people. Crazy! I thought things like that only happen in Winnipeg.

We got to the club, things hadn’t really started up and Adi wasn’t there yet. We decided to wait it out and see if she would turn up. We talked to some of the English teachers, compared our schools, school vs. Hagwon, school wins every time.

After we had been there for about 25 minuets, a performance artist started his performance. He started by placing a bowl of water and a face cloth on the floor. Then he mixed black paint in a different bowl in the middle of the floor. He put the paint aside and knelt in front of the water bowl and began to wash his face. After washing for a minute, he took of his shirt and continued to wash. Eventually he dried his face on the facecloth and dressed himself in a traditional Korean robe. He jumped around a bit, swishing and swooping with the robe. When he was satisfied that he swished enough, he started painting on the floor with the black paint. He drew some sort of symbol perhaps, I really don’t know, and then started tracing the outlines of people’s feet, those who stood in the front. He finished the painting and using the bowl of face water, he started splashing people gently and splashing water on the floor. Finally, he used the face cloth to artistically clean the floor and then rubbed the face cloth on his face again, the floor and paint cloth. And that was it. I felt enlightened.

The dancing started again. After awhile I started to one of the Welsh guys, his name is Ben, he is a surveyor, he was in New Zealand for three weeks just to surf, this was the his first night out in three weeks, he was thirty, and finally Adi arrived. She seemed genuinely happy to see me. She gave me a big hug and we talked for a long time. She has been here a few months and just hit the homesick stage about which Xena had warned me. I guess it was nice to see somebody from home. It was nice to see a familiar face and to talk to a fellow Canadian.

Sally and stayed at the club, which started hoping after a while, and finally left. We had some waffle fish and found a restaurant that was still open, ate a lot of fried food, and hung out until the subway opened again. Back in Ssangmun, the place where I like to get my kimbob was open and I bought one and ate it before crawling into my bed at 7:30. I love Seoul.

Desirae