Mar. 5!

Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 7:27am
Today started out pretty slow but had some sweet parts to it.

The plan for today was to go thrift store shopping. Our friend Angela wanted to go as well, so we said, yeah sure, after lunch then. Our lunch time was -1200. Too bad that was EVERY single other person in the world's lunch time too. We visited 5 restaurants on campus before finding one without a really long line. Thank goodness it took a while, too, because what we found was great. It was a restaurant on campus whose prices were higher than the rest, but it was traditional korean dining. They had a smorgasbord of food for us, lots of little things, and we also got our main course. All in all, it was a great meal.

After that, we went back and looked for Angela some more, but she was gone (turns out she had an unexpected class). So we went to Hayang before the rain started up. We got there and found the thrift store market place, and also found the presbyterian church, it was huge!

The street with all the thrift stores was just what I hoped, a smallish street, with a market, not covered, but it was a market nonetheless. the thrift stores looked especially shady and full of 70s era clothes, so we only checked one out. We did find a covered food market, however, which turned out to be the highlight of the trip.
We turned a corner and there was a guy lying down on a bench just smiling at us in a really funny way. I wanted that picture, so I went back, but he was outside and posed for us in front of some dried and salted flounder. We thought nothing of it and walked on after the picture was taken.
Turns out Hayang is even smaller than we thought, so we decided to go back into the covered market for pictures of all the neat korean produce and fish they had for sale there. The guy was there again, except this time he seemed really excited to see us. When we got closer, he motioned towards me with the universal motion meaning, come in here please.

However, I was 6 years old once, and my mom specifically told me about the stranger danger rule, so I was pretty weary of this middle aged Korean man wanting to show me something inside of his fish store. Going in there kinda seemed funny at first, and Kayla was having none of it. She was determined to make sure that she wasn't going to get snatched or something so she let me brave the peril on my own.
When I got in there, though, I felt silly for the assumptions I made about this guy. All he wanted was to give us some coffee and talk to us. It turns out, this was probably one of the nicest guys we had met yet. We sat in his fish store office for a good hour, just stumbling through conversation and listening to him talk. The best part was, I understood a lot of what he said, and I could even say things back. It was pretty much at the same rate a small child would, but I was having what appeared to be a real conversation.

What I learned about random korean fish market guy:
1.His name is actually Song Yang Lee, not Korean Fish Market Guy. Guy is a french name and we are in South Korea.
2. He owns the fish store, but he has only been there for 9 years (2001-2009).
3. His last job was as the manager in a department store in the women's high fashion department.
4. He has a daughter in elementary school, who he homeschools, and a daughter in middle school (8th grade) who goes to regular school.
5. His wife works at the fish store too.
6. He gave us apples, for free! When he saw we were leaving and had no umbrella, he gave us one!
7. He taught us Korean! We learned all kinds of stuff, but mainly how to say ok, thank you, and no thank you in a really polite way.

It's this kind of thing that really helps keep faith in humanity. Who would've thought that random korean fish market guy would turn into Mr. Lee?

We came back and I read and stuff, but the cap on the day was surely meeting Mr. Lee.

Until next time,
Aron Huckaba International Vagabond