Good Weekend

This weekend has been quite a weekend! Friday I was still pretty sick, so one of the teachers took me to the hospital. Hospitals in Korea are just like going to a medical center, there are specialists all over the hospital. I went to the ENT, waited an hour for the doctor to get back from lunch, and then got right in. The doctor's and nurse's desks are in the same room with the examining chair and medical equipment. It is not a fancy office full of private rooms, in fact, there was another patient waiting in the same room while I got examined. After a quick examination and prodding around in my mouth, the doctor started telling the teacher my problems (in Hangul). My teacher kept on saying "Oh my God! Oh my God!" and then look at me. I struggled to keep down the panic, thinking I was dying. But it still didn't soften the blow when the teacher told me that I have to come again on Wednesday to see how bad the infection in my saliva glad is and how easily the stone can be removed. Apparently, it could be super simple case of medication or "simple" surgery, or major surgery. So that made my Friday, as you can imagine :S But luckily M arrived Friday night to help calm me down.

Saturday M and I decided that we'd start knocking things off the "things we want to do in Seoul" list. We met K in Gangnam and went to a cat cafe (pictures later). A cat cafe is an apartment or office space turned cafe. It is pretty clean, but does smell like cat. And of course cats will jump on the tables, chairs, and kitchen area where they prepare your drinks. For eight thousand won you can pet all the cats you want and drink some fairly good coffee. You sit on the floor and drink your coffee and play with cats. It was good to be around cats again, and I cannot tell you how many cats there were, there were a lot.

M and I then headed to Hongdae to the Trick Eye Museum (again pics coming soon). This is an art museum where all the art has been made interactive. You can crawl through the art, do creative poses with the art, or try on the art. It was a great time and well worth the 13,000 won! Plus it was fun to watch others make creative poses with the art as well!

After the museum we wandered around Hongdae checking out various shops and cafes. Then we wandered over to Dongdaemun to the lantern festival. None of our friends showed up, so we headed out on our own, walking all the way past city hall to Changdeokgung Palace. There were so many lanterns and so many people! It was quite maddening having to elbow people for a photo. We took pictures of every single lantern, until we finally just had to stop! What will we do with all these pictures! But I will post some up here for you to look at! We couldn't ask for better weather either! It was supposed to rain, but instead it was amazing, the sun shone all day, and it was around 50 degrees all day.