It’s been a week since I’ve had any clean laundry. It’s such an unsatisfying feeling to shower and then slip into the clothes still covered in yesterday’s street dust. I went walking around the markets yesterday, and in a moment of weakness, I bought this silly shirt, out of a yearning for something fresh smelling, and a fascination with the ability to create different moods for the character on the shirt based on how you’ve unzipped his mouth. You can also use his mouth as a pocket. Silly and functional. That’s my kind of design philosophy. Today I have clean laundry, but I wore the shirt anyway, and I feel like a ten year old in it. It will have to do.
There’s a banana thief in the hostel. I left one on my bed when I went out last night, and was kind of thinking about it all night. I didn’t find any good street food, so I gave up and got a donut instead. I was going to follow it up with my banana as a midnight snack. When I got home there was no banana to be found. How concerned should I be? Some would argue that banana theft is the gateway crime into things like laptop and camera theft, and it’s possible this scoundrel is one of my roommates. Sleeping with the enemy, in a room where the air is thick with bad breath and the smell of dingy socks. It’s all too much to bear. I switched places and now I’m sleeping in a tent on the patio. How kick ass is that!
China is the first place I’ve ever been in Asia, and Korea the second. I know I probably shouldn’t compare the two, but I’m going to anyway. Koreans do not stare, at all. How wonderful. The fact that they don’t stare provides me with the space and privacy I need in order to stare at them. They are much more successfully fashionable than the Chinese, and it looks like they all work out. In China there were always people doing stretches and low impact exercise type stuff outdoors, dancing, and things like that, but it looks like Koreans are actually hitting the gym and tightening those buns, but it seems like there’s a pretty even distribution of wealth here, so I’m sure more people can afford things like gym memberships. This is going to sound mean, so I’m sorry in advance, but they also have way better breath than the Chinese. I guess there’s some crazy smelling fruit or vegetable they eat in China that westerners can’t abide, and they’re nuts for it. To me it does not smell like plant material. It smells like old sausage that’s been sitting in someone’s intestinal tract for days, just hoping to be digested, meanwhile its scent is wafting out from inside them, all over the airspace in the subway. I guess Koreans don’t eat it, because the subway here smells great. America is so huge and homogenous, in so many ways. It never ceases to amaze me when you see completely different cultures and mindsets living within just hours of each other.
So far I’ve just been hitting up the markets here. Korea is expensive, right on par with Los Angeles, so I’ve been trying to do free stuff, and I’m constantly resisting the urge to go to Lotte World. I really want to go! The markets are interesting though. Today I met a lot of fun kittens in the medicine market, Gyeongdong. I guess that makes up for missing out on the world’s largest indoor theme park.
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