Happy time fun weekend!

This weekend was one of the best yet (the title says it all, huh...). The son of the landlord from Jamie's apartment invited us to see a rock and roll show that his friends were playing in Venture town. Venture town (I don't really know much about it) is this area in Chuncheon that has ice sport competitions as well as the animation museum. But mostly I just know it as this place we went to that was really far away from our house and downtown and anything familiar at all here in chuncheon. We hopped in this really compact car with Young Sun (I think), a complete stranger to me and Rory and mostly a stranger to Jamie, and he drove like a madman out of our "hood." It was really weird being on the highway at night--the first time I've been on the highway since our initial drive from seoul to chuncheon, actually--and we were on our way to a rock and roll show. In Korea. I'll be honest, I wasn't sure how it would be, so at dinner we were trying to pump ourselves up--"even if it sucks, at least it sucks in Korea" and "at least it's not the shitty pop music they play on the radio..." In the car on the way there, I had one of those moments where it really hit me that we are in a foreign land, not just as visitors, but that we freaking live here. Chuncheon is our town now. Not to sound too cheesy or hokey, but it was really pretty at night, seeing views of these mountains that we hadn't really seen before and realizing that almost everyone in Chuncheon lives in a huge skyrise apartment building within a two-mile radius of us. We were being chauffered away from all of this busy-ness, and it was really nice. So we get there, and we walk into this club called "Sailing." It had big comfy couches, and there was a table right up front (maybe reserved for us? I don't know, but it was supposed to be a special set for "the americans who were coming..."). The band had already started playing, so we sat down, ordered a giant pitcher of beer and just tried to take it all in. To our surprise, they were good. They were very talented musicians, and though they were very technical like a lot of musicians you will see on tv here, they seemed earnest. They played songs about the Chuncheon moon and songs that had a lot of traditional Korean folk-y elements, and they were just great. One of the songs sounded like a tenacious d song, but I don't remember which one. It was so awesome! They also did two covers of American songs, which shall remain nameless (Rory will be posting video clips soon...). Giant pitcher number 2. After they played, we spoke with the main guitarist/vocalist guy, and we told him that we were interested in playing a set with them soon. They are on tour now, but they come through Chuncheon at least once a month. We exchanged email addresses and stuff, so we'll see how it goes. Our ride ended up leaving us because he had to go to some other city, so we drunkenly walked around venture town a little bit, trying to find a cab out in the middle of nowhere. This is when we met Michael. He was a friend of Young Sun's who had been to the show. He talked about guitars for a little bit with Rory and then showed us where we could find a cab. He was shocked when we said we were going home, so then we changed our minds and all rode to Miller Time, a bar close by our house. We talked and drank with him, this complete stranger who spoke really good English and is a doctor ("just a general practicioner"), and we exchanged phone numbers and promised to hang out. It was just a great night.

Today we went to Myeongdong again to have some Dakgalbi. This is our weekend thing now. We are going to try to go to a different joint every weekend and then start over. Today's place was a lot bigger inside than we thought it would be. It had two stories and we ended up at a window overlooking a different part of myeondong. Our waitress was really nice. When she came over to our table the first few times, I noticed she was just staring at me and smiling. Then she came back to our table, smiled some more and started speaking a lot of really soothing sounding Korean. She started touching my face with the back of her hand, petting me. It wasn't weird or anything, because I knew she was saying nice things and that her gesture was a nice one. But that's one of those things you would never expect to see in the US. Or the man on stilts in a clown uniform who walked past our window. Twice.