Everland

I was exhausted yesterday and this morning I slept in til noon, so you get a belated account of my adventures with Eun-mi in Everland.

The place was huge and gorgeous, but really crowded. This is the tulip garden. On stage in the foreground are a brass band dressed as bees. Korean entertainment is really weird...

Here's a giant fake tree covered in flowers and fiber-optic cables that lit up when it got dark. I think they were trying to invoke Avatar.

Me and Eun-mi, trying to perfect the blind-camera-shot. Seemed like everyone was at Everland either with their kids or with their significant other. I'm assuming enough people thought I was Eun-mi's boyfriend that we fit right in. Speaking of which - tons of American boys with Korean girlfriends, but I have yet to see an American girl with a Korean boy. Hm. This is not promising...

We wandered all around the park. There were a few animal shows, and man do they put Portland's Birds of Prey show to shame. Their raptors caught arrows out of the air, buzzed the crowd's heads, and never missed a cue. The finale was a veritable deluge of colorful little Korean chickens fall-flying from over the trees. They were followed by peacocks, albino peacocks, storks, and parrots. They just never stopped.

Then we saw a little play featuring trained animals. It was about a forest that was kept alive by a magic necklace, and a villain trying to steal the necklace. Inexplicably, it starred Peter Pan and Captain Hook, I suppose for the recognition factor. The animals in this show were terrifyingly well trained, with guinea pigs and spitzs running across the stage at one point and a young lioness doing the same shortly thereafter. The techs backstage must have never missed a beat. They also had parrots who could fly to a volunteer in the audience, take money from their hand, fly back to the stage, then return the money to the person. Most of the animals appearances and tricks worked right into the play and were a cool addition to the narrative (the parrot taking people's money was part of the villain's plan), except for a complete non sequitur when the necklace was returned to Peter Pan and the forest celebrated with... a border collie doing frisbee tricks. I don't even know.

We got ice cream and burgers for dinner. Now, I've been eating lots of Korean food, and I'm getting used to it. Korean cuisine is actually wonderful except for an unfortunate obsession with chewy fish and spicy pickles. But there is a place in my heart for a big, juicy burger that kimchi will never fill.

 Poor Eun-mi doesn't like thrill rides, but I dragged her on every roller coaster in the park anyway. This one is the grand daddy coaster, with a frame made entirely of wood. That's a little scary. When I hurtling around a track hundreds of feet in the air I'd like to be held up by metal, thank you very much. But it was fantastic.

At first I thought these guys were in costume as part of one of the attractions, but it turns out they were just randomly cosplaying. Seriously? Cosplay in the middle of an amusement park for no reason and not a convention in sight? I love Asia... By the way, I think the blond on the left is some kind of anime character, but the rest were just... weird. There's a cow in a sailor hat, an SS officer, and a cute skinny boy in an oversized witch hat. Why? Um... just 'cause, I guess.

When it got dark we went on safari, and here's where my camera crapped out. So I didn't get pictures of the bears we saw later in the ride, who did tricks for bits of food.

And I also don't have pictures of the fireworks show at the end (Eun-mi took some, so I might update with more pictures later). Actually, Eun-mi described it as a fireworks show, but it was much more than that. It started out as a light show, with green lasers stretching out to the horizon and spotlights making an aurora in the sky. Then there were some fountain effects in front of a stage leading up to the appearance of our hero/MC... a white bear... clown... thing... in a tux. To be clear, it was a woman in a white bear-clown-thing costume. She pranced around and shouted heroically, and a projection on the backdrop behind her combined with some smoke and trapdoors revealed... multicolored bear-clown-things in Power Ranger formation! Good God, it's like Korea looked at Japan and decided to be even more over-the-top and ridiculous.

Then some dude in devil horns showed up, rode a pedestal to the top of the stage, and used a wand to fight the Power Ranger bear-clowns with pyrotechnic effects. Then he called on an animatronic dragon who defeated the bear-clowns! But the white bear-clown returned riding an animatronic phoenix Voltron-style and defeated both Satan and the dragon. It was both epic and completely pants-on-head stupid. But I couldn't help but get a little into it, because watching so much anime as a kid has trained me to take it very seriously when a grown woman shouts heroically in the voice of a teenage boy (thank you, Megumi Ogata).

After that there was finally a fireworks show. But this wasn't just a few sprays of light and a big one at the end. It was color-coded, symmetrical, and set to an orchestral soundtrack. Epic, and also charmingly ridiculous.