Big O Victory

Tuesday, May 8th

More training today. We got lunch at a new place today and for the first time, I didn't have kimbap or bibimbap for lunch. The waitress understood immediately when I told her I was a vegetarian and she told me I could eat 칼국수 (kalguksu - buckwheat noodle soup). I was a bit worried, but when they brought it out, there wasn't any meat so it was awesome.

The noodles were really good, but I wasn't a huge fan of the garnishes. It was nice though to eat something different though. Then more training. In the evening, my friend decided to cook. I don't think what he made though really qualified as cooking, but whatever. We all watched Iron Man, which has been on TV like every single day. I don't know if it's playing so much because of Avengers or Koreans just can't get their fill of that movie. Anyway, after the movie finished at like 9 pm we went out for dinner and were surprised to find every place was closing. We finally found a 야식 (night food) place that was still open and we got some 떡볶이 (ddeokbokki - spicy rice cakes) and tempura.

Even that place closed at 9:50 though. So it kind of dawned on us that Yeosu is definitely no Seoul. Not that any of us thought otherwise, but we were just so used to everything being open super late. After that my friend and I just wandered down the main street to see what was farther down. Everything here feels like it's just here for the Expo. The Expo is the life of this community. All there was were restaurants and convenience stores. Well and Korean high school students just getting out for the day, which sucked for them. I think it's going to be really hard to stay entertained here for 3 months though. I'm not complaining. It's just a statement that we're going to have to work at keeping this place interesting. The best part of the night was on our walk back to our apartments we saw that the moon was red and we decided we had to get a good photo of it. Well, that proved pretty much impossible because it just looked so small in the camera, but during our quest, we noticed that the Big O had started its show. We went to watch it, and even though we only saw a chunk, it was absolutely amazing. Just gorgeous.