Traveling Alone is So Much Less Complicated

Once I got my door working properly and after Sonja and I had lunch, the four of us from the Bay Area went to the market.

Daegu has a huge market that has several buildings and is a maze of confusion. It's like a department store with thousands of vendors instead of one owner. We took the bus which somehow I remembered from 3 years ago. Something about Daegu is very easy for me to find my way around.

Once we got to the market though, I was a little confused. I was able to find one stall which had little Korean tchotchkies that make good souveniers, and we also found the stall that sells these lightweight type of linen jackets that men and women wear in the summer. Sonja bought a beaufitul one to cover her bare shoulders in class (apparently that is a no-no, but many of our students have bare shoulders - which is why they keep turning the air-con off).

We tried getting money from the ATM but once again failed. It is really difficult to find ATMs that work with foreign credit cards.

Walking around the market was exhausting, but interesting. I bought this little pancake like thing in a cup. The woman making them started with a ball of dough and then she put some cinnamon and sugar in the center and made it into a pancake. Then she fried it on a grill and stuck it in a dixie cup. It was super deliciously yummy. I would go back to the market just for that! It tasted like a cinnamon bun, but better.

I also liked the area where they sell hambok. Hambok are traditional Korean dresses, kind of like a Japanese kimono, but I think they are more beautiful. That section seemed cooler and less crowded than the rest of the market and all of the women working there were well-groomed, made up and some were wearing hambok themselves.

From the market we were able to figure out how to get to the subway - it all started coming back to me...but we made a stop at "sock street" which I don't remember seeing last time. After sock street we decided to take a cab and went to Dong A - a big department store on the edge of the downtown area.

Dong A had a little Starbucks on the first floor and we sat outside. It was nice and cool, even a little chilly - so strange for Daegu in the summer. I was sitting outside with my lemongrass tea (without caffeine) and a little old man wobbled by. He looked at me and then came over to talk to me. The only problem was that he was speaking Korean and I didn't understand a word he was saying. A young woman sitting alone at the next table began to translate for me. She told me he was curious about me. He asked where I was from and if this was my first time in Korea. It felt a little strange, and afterwards the woman asked, "do you ok?" I told her I was fine and that he was just curious.

When Sonja, Sue and Elizabeth joined me we all started talking to this woman who was a business administration professor at some university outside of Seoul. She was very nice. As we were leaving, I thanked her again for helping me with the old man. She told me he was actually very sweet. He was.

We walked through the traditional medicine market and down the little street with pottery shops and made our way to the bank that I knew had an ATM that worked with our credit cards.

I got money from the machine but when Sonja tried all she got was a piece of paper. She began to freak out. We grabbed a young couple at the next machine and asked for help. We explained that she tried the machine, got the receipt but no money. The young woman said "aeeeeeeh?!!!" - but after looking at the receipt Sonja got, they told her it said there was an error so she didn't have to worry.

I told Sonja to try the machine I used, and she did, and again the same thing happened. After talking about what she did, we figured out that she was using an ATM card and not a credit card, so that rather than doing a cash advance, she should have been making a withdrawal. She tried again and got her money. Phew! Problem solved.

We walked back to Dong A to eat. By this time we were all tired from walking and hungry. I thought we could go to the top floor where there were restaurants. Eating is troublesome with this group. Elizabeth doesn't really like Korean food and neither she nor Sue eat beef or pork. Sonja won't eat octopus (not a huge problem), and Elizabeth and Sue don't eat red pepper paste (a huge problem, since many Korean dishes have it in them). I thought we'd have a choice of restuarants and that the restaurants would offer more than one thing (most restuarants specialize in one thing - pork, or beef, or chicken, or chicken soup, etc.)

We got to the 12th floor and walked right into a restaurant. It turned out to be an international buffet. They let us look around and we saw that there was sushi, steak, pizza, Chinese food and salads, plus desert. It looked good and we were about to sit down when Elizabeth informed us that she has a problem with Korean buffets. Ugh....

So we went down to the 10th floor where there were two other restaurants. One was sushi and looked expensive. The other looked like shabu shabu, but seemed to have other stuff on the menu.

We went in and sat down. Sonja and I ordered a seafood hot pot and Elizabeth and Sue ordered some sort of rice with vegetables. With the help of Sue's guidebook we were able to say "no octopus" for the seafood dish.

Our dish came first and looked good. It had lots of seafood in a broth with some green vegetables on top.

Next Sue and Elizabeth's dish came. A big plate of different types of leaves and a small plate of bulgogi. Bulgogi is a type of beef dish. Turns out the English translation on the menu failed to mention it was beef with rice and vegetables.

After a big confusion, the waitress brought them bi bim bap to share. Elizabeth was going to eat the seafood and I was going to eat the beef, but Sue and Elizabeth ended up sharing the bi bim bap and I ate the beef and some seafood. They were nice enough to give us the bulgogi on the house.

It was total confusion but everything worked out. I found all of the Koreans we dealt with, especially our waitress, to be extremely kind, accomodating and gracious.