weekend fun

Over the weekend we went to Cheongchon and Gangchon two small towns in the Gangwon-do province. Cheongchon was a hole in the ground really though.  After sleeping in an awesome round bed love motel (love motels are motels used mostly by hookers and business men or husbands or what not, and they are pretty cheap at $30 a night and are usually pretty clean and the love decor can be quite pleasing), we rented bikes to bike around Cheongchon's brown dirty ugly lake. My god, lonely planet told us that this was the gateway into the east of korea, well it was the gateway into grumpy andrea et louis. We moved on to Gangchon which is a town 30 min away by bus (it costs 80 cents to take the bus there). gangchon is notorious for being the student party town and as soon as our bus pulled in we saw lines of scooters, ATVs and bikes for rent. 

We rented a scooter which was amazing, and i actually drove the thing which i though i wouldn't be able to do. Of course i drove like a freaking granny and would slow down 100 meters from anything, but hey i drove. so if it counts as driving, i drove for my first time ever! It's kind of the laziest form of fun, i kept thinking about how this would be so much fun on a bike, but god, all that pedal work! We also took a spill off the scooter, oops! but luckily we were turning and going ohhhh about 2 km an hour when we fell.

when we were in Cheongchon we ended up finding this outdoor pool (in the middle of nowhere it seemed) and spending some hours cooling off there. Beside the outdoor pool was this weird zoo/amusement park that was totally run down and semi decrepit. This is the video of me harassing the poor caged monkey. There were even bears there in these tiny cages. it was SOOO sad, we couldn't figure out how they had the money to run the place, because it was also a ghost town. the zoo seemed to exemplify certain aspects of architecture and profit and no planning in korea. I feel so ignorant / arrogant making blatant blanket statements about korean culture (and architecture and planning) and what it's like here, because who the hell am i to judge/impose my cultural idealism etc etc, but sometimes i'm just like "ohhhh korea, you are so ....korean." 

 The zoo was like that. built and let go.