Nate turned 29 on June 29th! Being his champagne birthday, I was sweating a little bit to come up with something special for us to do. Knowing how much he loves the public bathhouses here, I thought, what better than an outdoor pool and sauna? I found the perfect place.... I thought.
Ah yes, couple's hot tubs, a cold pool, a bamboo trail and a talking well. I was sold at the talking well. I should know by now, after many slight but insightful disappointments, that my Canadian expectations of experiences here in Korea are a far cry from the real thing.
Take for example, the time when we went on a class trip with our kindergarten class to a strawberry field. So being the privileged Canadian that I am, I naively pictured fields, beautiful open fields, strawberries tumbling out of wooden boxes, stained hands, blue skies and happy bellies. When we drove down a dumpy dirt road surrounded by hundreds of plastic greenhouses, littered with garbage and various unwanted tools I was confused. Then the kids had just ten minutes to pick (excuse my pretentiousness but) relatively flavourless strawberries with pesticide residue all over them, while baking under a plastic roof.
Add to that 'camping' in parking lots, school 'picnics' in large noisy dining tents...
I'm getting ahead of myself here.
The point is I shouldn't have been surprised when Nate and I rolled up to a mob of screaming children in floaties, tubes and life jackets with parents dressed... relatively in the same way, actually. Many Koreans can't swim so this is a potentially deadly situation. We looked over the balcony to the "sauna and water park" below, which was really a large storage container for watered-down urine. Kids and parents were swarming like around the pizza sample at Costco.
So we asked around and heard about a water park called California Beach. We hopped in a cab and five minutes later found ourselves at a water and amusement park called Gyeongju world. We saw water slides, roller coasters and the spinny rotating arm ride and quickly transformed into small children. Next thing I knew we were splashing around in the wave pool, threatening to run over children or knock them out with our excited frollicking. We hopped on a tube slide that was truly terrifying. I happened to be on the leading edge (the downhill side) of a four person tube, and I wondered -as we started our momentum down the steep slope - if the large, jolly Korean man directly across from me would be my last image before the weight imbalance folded our tube in half and I was crushed in a Korean plastic sandwich. We dropped down a mathematically impossible slope into a giant funnel where we got whipped around and then spit out the bottom, more or less like a turd in a toilet. I'd also like to add that the life 'guards' ... ie. glorified tube positioners ... have the same strange inflated egos as they do back home. Which seemed quite a paradox given they were all wearing very small speedos with colourful cartoon animals on them.
At one point I actually found myself running to the next ride. The most terrifying of the day was a covered one-person slide. You stand upright in a tube, pray to your gods and then the bottom falls out from beneath you, sending you down a brief freefall followed by a series of whiplashing corners and the whole darn thing's over in 4 seconds. I came out sputtering and in shock, maybe because my bathing suit bottoms were lodged in my brain, and it took me quite some time to find words to tell Nate what had just transpired. It was awesome.
The next day we had a lovely picnic up on a forested ridge that I had hiked a few months earlier. Only Canadians would hike 30 minutes, with 15 pound backpacks, uphill both ways, in mid summer heat just to eat food and do nothing....with a view. We decorated a little pagoda overlooking the Taehwa river, cracked some champagne, lit some unnecessary candles and ate our faces off. Passerbys found it quite charming and stopped to admire the view (us.. not the actual view). Some people just clapped for us. It was a lovely weekend and totally our style; random, relaxing and organized entirely around food.
