In which I go to a water park, meet Eunmi's friends, and discuss Taylor Swift in more detail than I probably should

There was no wi-fi in the hotel room at Daemyung, so today is a two-day catchup post. Sorry there are no pictures for most of it, but I could hardly carry my camera around at the water park, could I?

The car ride to the resort was only about an hour long, but it still managed to be hellish. It was sweltering hot, and I got carsick in record time. While I sat back, looked out the front window, and tried to dissociate from my nauseous body, I stuck my earbuds in because if I have to listen to Eun-hyuk's English phonics tape one more time I swear I'll stab myself in the face.

When we got to the hotel room, I flopped onto the couch and mumbled to Kris that I would not be moving for the rest of the day. She, having one four-year-old to deal with already, took none of my crap and dragged me out to the water park. Still hot and still uncomfortable, I tried to get in the spirit of things and took a plunge down a huge water slide.

As soon as I hit the water, to quote my favorite WWII history book, "it was as if someone had passed a magic wand over me and said, '[Christina], you feel great.'"

After that, I had a fantastic time. The water slides were epic, the water was cool, the air was warm, and the lines were short. I went on one slide three times in quick succession while the lifeguards smiled at my exuberance.

Near the end of the day, Sunghun showed me a truly epic wavepool near the back of the park. It was made to look like a beach, with the bottom sloping very slowly up so that the waves broke on the shore realistically. I immediately flopped into the water and swam for the deep end, where every minute or so a new, enormous wave was released to the sound of a gong. I was stopped about a quarter of the way in. I needed a life vest to go farther.

Well, just then the gong sounded, so I figured I might as well ride the wave back to shore. As the frothing water hit my back, I threw myself forward into the water with my hands above my head and my feet straight out behind me in a diving position. There was a thrilling sensation of movement, and then suddenly the textured bottom was scraping my belly. I had somehow covered the 50-odd feet of space between me and the shore in less time than it took me to wonder if I should come up for a breath.

I was still going pretty fast, so with some difficulty I managed to plant my hands and the balls of my feet and lift my body out of the water until the rest of the wave passed. Sunghun was nearby, laughing. He said that I had looked like a shark zooming through the water, and from then on he's been calling me "the mermaid." I can't say I dislike it.

It was so much fun that I did it again, but by then I was aching to go deeper. Sunghun took me to rent a life vest, and I paddled into the deep end where the waves began. I don't know how much time I spent bobbing on the crests of those enormous waves, ducking underneath them, and surfing them into shore, but finally Sunghun had to wave me in because the pool was closing.

This morning we woke up tired and sore, and hopped in the car to head back to Seoul. I managed to fend off carsickness this time, but Eun-hyuk kept pulling my earbud cable out of my iPhone and undoing my seatbelt while I tried to relax. He's growing on me, but he still drives me up the wall.

I had just enough time to shower and change, and then I went to meet Eunmi and her friends in Gangnam. And finally I had the use of my camera again!

Eunmi's friends are fantastic. They all went to PSU together, so they all have at least enough English to get by. For some reason, even though I don't really have anything more in common with them than I did with anyone else I've met so far in Korea, we really clicked and the whole group talked and laughed all night. The language barrier was enough to keep things interesting, but not enough to seriously hamper the conversation. It was perfect, and everyone was so interesting and nice to me.

We started out at Two-Two Chicken, which does Korean-style fried chicken. It is DELICIOUS. We joked that Hwa-soo, one of Eunmi's friends, should move to the US and open a chain of them. Actually, I was only half-joking. I think Two-Two Chicken would put KFC out of business in about a week.

After gorging ourselves on chicken, we moved to a cute little restaurant with some epic graffiti on the walls of the upper level, where we sat.

We had a second course, and it turns out I wasn't as full as I thought I was. That is a gigantic omelette filled with kimchi and cheese, and on the grill is a kind of spicy bulgogi pancake. It was all delicious, and we knocked back a few bottles of soju while we ate. By the time we stumbled back into the street, it was dark and we were decidedly tipsy. I wanted to go to a noraebang, but everyone else has to work tomorrow morning, so we went for ice cream and called it a night.

After ice cream, we all said our goodbyes. I promised Eunmi that I would visit Suwon again as soon as I had time, after China. I started to walk toward the subway station with Hwasoo, but then he remembered that I had wanted to go to a noraebang. Even though it was only the two of us by that time, he ducked down a side street, found me a noraebang, and sang with me for an hour. What a great guy! He works very near Kris's place, so we traded numbers and promised to have lunch sometime.

The noraebang had a pretty average selection of songs, so I sang "Single Ladies" (which is fast becoming one of my favorites), "So What" (because the last two choruses are an absolute joy to belt out), and "You Belong With Me" (with which I have a strange relationship due to it being sung by Taylor Swift).

Ah, Taylor Swift. Allow me, if you will, to go on a (long) tangent about Taylor Swift. And let me make one thing perfectly clear: I hate Taylor Swift's music. I hate it. She is so calculatingly virginal and innocent. She puts big glasses on her pop-star face and tries to convince her listeners that she's a geek just like them. Every line of every one of her songs reinforces a conservative, obsessive status quo concerning teenage girls' sexuality (namely, that they shouldn't have one). By glorifying her uninteresting Ingenue persona, she sets an unattainable standard for female adolescence and subtly shames anyone who cannot conform to it.

But that's just why I hate her music on an ideological level. I hate it on a personal level because it is just. So. Goddamn. Angsty. She doesn't write about teenage angst. She distills her own teenage angst into essence of teenage angst and sells it to us without a hint of irony. She really seems to think that her angst is the most important thing in the world.

"And Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind / And we both cried." Yes, because if you sleep with a boy you have given him EVERYTHING YOU HAVE, FOREVER. "When you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you / You're gonna believe them." Damn you, Taylor Swift, when I was fifteen weren't no boys telling me they loved me! Damn you and your adorable, blonde, beauty-queen entitlement!

"He's the reason for the teardrops on my guitar." So melodramatic! "The boy I have a crush on doesn't like me back! I shall cry single, glistening, crystalline tears onto the instrument through which I shall express my suffering!"

But, but... for some reason that is deeply shameful, some of her music resonates with me. This may be because I am, in fact, not too far from being a teenager myself, and I also sometimes operate under the delusion that my angst is the most important thing in the world. That one song gets to me especially: "Can't you see that I'm the one who understands you? / Been here all along, so why can't you see, / You belong with me." Pathetic, possessive, extremely derivative (seriously, listen to "Girl Next Door" by Saving Jane; it's basically the same song). And yet. And yet. I have had these same thoughts deep in my angsty teenage mind, and the chorus is full of long, heartfelt vowels right in my belting range. So in the end, "You Belong With Me" is the only song I want to sing on those days when I feel like curling up in a ball and screaming out the pop-country equivalent of "whyyyy won't he loooooove meeeeeee???"

Taylor Swift. She speaks for privileged-yet-emotional teenage (and older) girls everywhere.