Cherry Blossoms

I had a little subway adventure, choosing a destination that required two transfers. I got them all right and felt pretty good about myself before I realized that there was another subway line that would have taken me directly there. Oh, well.

In the subway station. Koreans love Kim Yu-na. Can't say I blame them.

I went to a little tiny island in the middle of the Han river. I had to walk many blocks from the subway station and didn't get lost once!

These intersections are like running a gauntlet. If you're in a big group cars will usually wait for you, but I'm walking alone and I guess the death of one person isn't a big enough deterrent to get people to slow down. So I'm constantly dodging, weaving, and screaming, "Bitch, I have a green light!"

I swear to God this is a gym in the middle of a sidewalk. What I thought were odd little children's climbing structures turned out to be resistance machines. People were stopping and working out right there by the side of the street.

This was on the footbridge over to the island. Someone pre-did my graffiti for me!

The island was beautiful, with cherry blossoms everywhere. There were also some visitor centers and greenhouses, and what I think was some kind of irrigation experiment.

I'm back in jeans today, and I got even weirder looks than normal. When I passed a group of men on the bridge, they snickered and only stopped when I turned around and glared at them. When I approached a group of people my age (some of the boys were really cute), they walked off giggling. Finally, in the subway station, I went into the bathroom behind a middle-aged lady and when she turned and noticed me she stopped dead in her tracks and stared at me expectantly. We gestured helplessly for a while, she obviously waiting for me to do something and me trying to figure out what she wanted. Eventually I made some small noise in the back of my throat, and I guess the register of my voice tipped her off that I was a girl. That was when I realized that she had thought that I was a man who had wandered into the ladies' restroom.

This kind of thing happened every once in a while in the States, but I guess I should have expected it would be more common here. After all, half the boys here look more feminine that I do! Well, getting laughed at three times was kind of depressing, but other than that it was a very nice day.