Seoul And Beyond: November 2011

A friend of a friend has headed off to India for six months and needed someone to watch her cats. I gladly agreed to take on the responsibility. I have wanted to have cats for years now, but I had never had the situation where I could have them. Settling in one place for a year has opened up that opportunity. I have had them for about a month and a half now and they have settled in fine. They are sisters and are about two years old. This means that they are full of energy and will try to use it all up around 3am.

Here are some pictures:

Chemi

Seri

Their names are Chemi and Seri. Chemi, i guess, kind of means fun in Korean and Seri is short for Serious. Seri isn't the smartest of cats and had eaten something that had almost killed her my first couple weeks having her. We brought her to the vet and I guess it somehow passed. She is fine now, but it was a scary week.
I will have these cats for another 5 months or so until their real owner comes back from India. I now know that having two cats in a cramped apartment is not a good idea and I do not wish it upon anyone, unless those people really like to sweep constantly. I also regret buying a white velvety couch, which is now more of a sandy color with all of the cat hair on it. Oh well!

So a few of my friends and I decided that we were going to go to the Mask Festival in Andong. This would also be the first time out of the megapolis of Seoul. We headed out at 7am, which is a ridiculously early time as I usually wake up around 11am, and headed to the bus stop. It took us three hours to get down there by bus, so it gave me plenty of time to catch up on all the sleep that I missed that morning. During the times that I was awake for the trip, the views were amazing! It was great to see mountains that weren't scattered with houses all over.
The minute I stepped off the bus, I realized how nice and clean the air is. I guess you become pretty inured to the smells wafting from every drain and garbage pile in Seoul. We first get our return tickets at the booth just so we know when we are leaving for home. While my friend Lauren was trying to get her ticket, an older woman rushes up to the counter and literally elbows Lauren out of the way like she was in a big hurry to catch her bus. The woman selling the tickets proceeds to ignore the older woman and finishes with all of us in line. After getting her tickets, the older woman then sits down and relaxes for her bus to come. Older people here consider it a right to do whatever they want and say whatever they want to people. Sometimes it is funny but it does kinda hurt to get elbowed by an old woman in the subway just so she can get out of the train first.
So we head to the mask festival and were surprised to see all of the giant figurines:

The main stage had a series of events happening while we were there. We saw Tae Kwon Do students, a group of older people dancing, and some young girls that were wearing something that every mom should have been in an uproar about:

We also saw a little amusement area where you could ride the most interesting carts. They were robotic characters that would cart you around:

That's right! You could have Hello Kitty and Winnie the Pooh cart you around. They were so life-like it was scary. I first thought that there were little people in there.

We then watched a series of dances in another area, all involving masks and all from different countries. We then needed to satiate our hunger and headed over to the food court area. We saw some amazing food choices and some not-so-great food choices like shark fin soup. We decided to not eat at a place that was selling shark and headed to a place that was roasting a pig. We had some amazing food that day.

On the far reaches of Andong is a little village that shows the historical life of Koreans. We headed over and explored the area.

As you can see it is a bit different from the modern city of Seoul. There were also large rice fields that were surrounding the town on two sides. The other two sides had a river meandering by.