Random Incidentals

Thanks for the DVD Tracy! And Mom, I finally got those pictures you sent me. The one of Grandma sniffing the octopus treats I sent home is priceless.

So, after a week off I'm back in the office for "winter camps". In Naju English town, winter camps mean half days teaching kids games, when all they want to be doing is playing outside. There are about ten boys in the class that spend the entire time repeating a bastardized version of my name in the back of the class: "Candy! Candy! Candy!" and trying to beat eachother up. Drives me up the wall. Apparently kids here call me Candy because there is some sort of old-school anime character named Candy with blond hair, "Who was very nice and beautiful" (or so says Mrs. Lee), but it still drives me crazy!!!

So, what did I do on my week off... hmmm... I went to Seoul with Mrs. Lee and her family (her husband, who speaks a lot of English and her really cute but-crying-a-lot baby Ka-young). We went to Co-ex and did some shopping, then split up so that Mrs. Lee could visit an old university friend that lives in Seoul. So I tried to find myself a hotel to stay in, which is harder than one would think!! After wandering around the train station and finding only sketchy pink-light districts, I ended up finding a motel in a shopping district in "downtown" Seoul. In Korea there are two kinds of hotels:

1. Really expensive hotels catering to the travelling businessman.
2. "Love Motels" catering to married men and their mistresses. They often come with mirrors by the bed, porn on tv and condoms in the drawer. But they are cheap. There isn't a great deal of Tourism in Korea, so cheap hostel-type places can be hard to come by unless you know where to look.

So I stayed at a love motel that night, then later when I went to Gwang-ju with Alex, we tried to find a place to stay and ended up booking ourselves into the shadiest motel in the history of love motels. We should have gotten an inkling of foreshadowing when we found that the entrance to "California Motel" was down a small alley (not even two feet wide- I shit you not). When we got up to the room we found nothing less than a circular bed with mirrors on both sides of course. The furniture was Palace of Versailles meets Rocky Horror Picture show. Then when we pulled back the sheets and found multiple stains and fresh lipstick on a pillow case. When you're fighting over which stain you don't want to sleep on, it's time to get another place to stay!! So when we got our money back and had finally found what looked like a reputable place, we were awoken at 7am to the sound of... think about it. I believe the first thing I said was "You've got to be kidding me".

So needless to say, I'm all love moteled out.