It's insane. This city has as big an overload of beautiful women as it has a shortage of trash cans. There's just one problem: they all remind me of a certain someone (the beautiful women, that is, not the trash cans). That being said, indeed most of them seem to give me a lot of curious attention as I'm walking down the streets here. Actually, most people in general look at me as if they've never seen a tourist before. Maybe they just never saw a guy with orange hair.
Anyway, the hotel was actually pretty f*cking good for a 30 dollar room. I woke up (way too early of course, after falling asleep at like 4pm yesterday afternoon) and treated myself to a nice hot bath, followed by a good cold 'rise and shine' shower. I decided to go out for early breakfast and found that the streets were filling themselves with police officers. Seriously, there must've been thousands of them. Oh yeah, that's right: today is Independence Day.. Sixty years, to be exact, since the Japanese retreated from this country. Apparently, Jongno-Gu was where the celebrations where being held, and when I found the stage for these celebrations (which was pretty easy, just follow the huge line of parked police busses), I tried to blend in with the crowd (yeah, right) to get in. It turned out I needed an invitation, but it probably would've helped if I had at least carried a Korean flag, but ok. This little trip did take me to a fascinating location though, the National Folk Museum of Korea: an open air collection of buildings that were actually build on that spot - around this palace with a name that's too hard to remember, let alone write - and statues and totems either replicated or transferred from their original locations, such as Jeju-Do.
Checkout was at twelve, so I hurried back to my hotel, grabbed all my stuff, and headed over to the nearest subway entrance, to travel to the hostel I booked. Yet again, finding it wasn't as easy as they described, even with the map they provided on their website (thank god for unprotected wifi networks..). The first guy I asked though, was standing close to where he parked his car, and he powered up his GPS for me to look the place up. I was literally only one block away, but I still think I wouldn't have found it. When I got there, the visitors and owner and staff seemed to be one big happy family, and Lee actually speaks quite a lot of English, so I'm looking forward to my stay here.
Oh and, before I forget. I hope I'll never find out what I just ate. After trying one fish restaurant where they didn't speak English and actually didn't really seem to understand that I just wanted some food, I went to another, and although they didn't speak english either, at least the waitress guided me to a table and provided me with their menu. Which was, of course, in Korean. All Korean. No pictures. Just names. And prices. So what do you do? I decided to just pick something at random, and as the waitress explained to me what it was I ordered, I just refrained to saying yes, ok and thank you, so 10 minutes later I got a bowl filled with.. something that looked like sheep genitals. I convinced myself they weren't (since I was in a fish restaurant..), but then still they looked like fish bladders. Of a very big fish. Of some sorts. It was actually pretty good.
My jetlag is kicking in again, though. Or maybe it's the insane heat. Or just the fact that I got up at like 5AM. Either way, I'm gonna hit the sack. Goodnight!
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