drums and fish

Can you believe we’ve been here a whole month?! Neither can we! Time has flown by… partly because our weeks and weekends are so packed with stuff to do! This weekend we stuck around Seoul. I got to sleep in on Saturday, which was so amazing. I’ve missed sleeping as much as I want (and believe you me, I do sleep a lot when I set my mind to it.) We left the apartment around 1 and went to a neighborhood close to Yeouido (an island in the Han river) so that we could scout out a good place to watch the fireworks festival. The process was a bit frustrating, since we couldn’t find a subway stop right by the river and we had to walk aimlessly for about forty minutes. One random occurrence during our search for a perch (like my rhyme?!) was that when David went into an elevator to find a good rooftop a Korean man gave him two clusters of grapes! It was really unexpected and random, but we enjoyed the fruit on our walk back. Korean grapes are actually a lot different than American grapes. They have four or five big seeds in the middle (which is annoying since you have to spit them out) and they have more of a tropical fruit taste to them.
Much to our dismay, after all of the effort we put into looking for a great place to watch the fireworks festival, we heard that it was cancelled due to the swine flu!! How frustrating! The Koreans have been really uber-paranoid about H1N1. They had expected 120,000 spectators for the fireworks, so I guess they were afraid that the plague would spread through the crowd or something to that effect. David was the most disappointed, since he’d been really excited about getting some pictures of the fireworks display.
So instead of watching the fireworks like we’d planned, we went over to the Seoul Forest (which is really just a park with lots of young trees) and watched the Seoul International Drum Festival! There were lots of fun drum displays that you could play on, and we had fun beating away some of our weekly stress!


The main event itself was phenomenal. I’ve always loved drums and percussion. There’s something about the raw power of the drums that moves your spirit. The way the beat causes your whole body to shudder. The way it causes your heart to skip several beats and you can’t escape its thrum through your chest. There were seven teams which performed on Saturday, most of them were from Korea. My favorites were the traditional drummers—some of the women even beat drums with their fans.



When we were leaving we ran into our other teachers and rode home with them. One of the teachers has family in from out of town, and it was refreshing to be around Americans so fresh from home!
Because we’d been planning on watching the fireworks on Saturday we’d thought we would do the drum festival on Sunday. Since those plans were suddenly irrelevant, we decided to spend the day taking it easy. Ever since we’ve gotten here our coworkers have been raving about “Dr. Fish” and how we have to try it at least once while we’re here. The “Dr. Fish” café is only a few stops away—so after listening to one of Buster’s sermons online this morning we hopped on the subway and made our way to the Arts Center.
“Dr. Fish” works like this: you go into the café and order something off of their slightly overpriced menu. David got a strawberry smoothie and I went for a pumpkin cream latte (I love pumpkin stuff!) and a Belgian waffle.
After a leisurely drinking and reading session the real fun began. We went over to a pool on the edge of the restaurant and stuck our feet in. There were probably fifty or so fish in the water. They immediately rushed to our feet when we stuck them in and started nibbling away at the dead skin cells. David was having a really hard time not bursting into hysterical laughter. It was a really odd sensation, almost like the little pin pricks you feel after your foot falls asleep. Anyway, it’s tickly! The fish seemed to prefer my feet to David’s, but we already knew that I’m sweeter!





This evening should be full of resting, perhaps a movie. Thankfully we have a short week ahead of us. Next weekend is Chuseok, which is Korea’s version of Thanksgiving. That means we get Friday and Monday off! We’re planning on going to Sokcho over the long weekend to enjoy the national park up there and drink in the colors of fall!