Monday, May 28th
I had the always lovely morning shift. After that a group of us headed to the beach. One of the people had been to the beach before and another seemed to know how to get there, so I just kind of tagged along and got on the bus that everyone else got on. After a while though, while we were chatting with some Koreans, we asked how long it would take to get to 만성리 (man-seong-ni, the black sand beach). They looked at us kind of quizzically and said that the bus didn't go there. We decided to hang out on the bus anyway and go to the end because we assumed the route was circuitous, but that was a wrong assumption. The buses travel in lines and at the end of the line you must get off. I don't know if the buses then just drive back and start the line over or what, but anyway we had to get off at the last stop. So then we wandered to a bus stop and got on the same bus line going in the opposite direction. Well, we decided to be a bit more intelligent that time and we checked the route, although we did that admittedly after we got on the bus. It turns out that since Expo had started, the bus no longer went to 만성리. So we got off at a bus stop and finally got on the right bus. It took us an hour to get to the beach when it should have taken less than 20 minutes, but none of us really cared since we were in a huge group and we were all just hanging out anyway. The only sad thing was was within that hour the skies had managed to go from sunny to cloudy. The beach was being advertised as a black sand beach in everything I had read about it, but as a friend put it, the sand was just browner than usual, not black. It was also a man-made beach and it was really rocky. But I can't really be that picky considering any beach is better than no beach. The water was chilly, but in a good, refreshing way. Overall the afternoon was a lot of fun. At one point, we started singing Disney songs in both English and Danish in tandem simply because we could. Insanely fun.
After the beach, we went out for dinner. One of the guys really wanted to go to a specific restaurant so he could say hi to his 엄마 (mom in Korean). He apparently calls the restaurant owner 엄마 and she absolutely loves it. It was so hilarious. He was walking around the restaurant like he owned it, getting us more side dishes and rice when we ran out. She also gave us an octopus for free with our meal to put in the soup everyone (but me) was sharing and she told us it cost 6,000 to 7,000 won. Their interactions were only the more amazing based on the fact he speaks no Korean and she speaks no English or Thai. It was really awesome though. At the end of the meal I translated for the two of them and it was so great.
After dinner, I met several of the people to play volleyball. Others were supposed to join us after they got off their shift, but something happened so they couldn't not really sure. Anyway, even though there were five us, only me and A actually played volleyball so the game kind of died slowly but surely. After taht we just hung out and chatted until people from some Middle Eastern pavilion got the bright idea to shoot off fireworks in the courtyard area. That was when we decided to leave because we knew Expo security would be unhappy and taking down their names and we didn't want to get in trouble with them. So we found a staircase that led to nowhere and sat there for awhile.
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