My weekend started at about midnight on Friday as I sat in Seoul Station waiting for Chris' train. The station is normally quite busy what with being the main train station in Seoul and all, but not at midnight; there were few people around, and I sat silently in the cold. My eyes were acting up and I was nervous about the new relationship and generally trying not to have a panic attack, but the peaceful (and somewhat surreal) atmosphere of the station helped me feel better somehow.

Of course, eventually I got a phone call from Chris asking me why I wasn't at Yongsan which, as it turns out, was where he'd actually asked me to meet him. 133 IQ FTW. Well, we worked it out and finally met up in Haebangchon.

It was also our first night sleeping next to each other and that's always kind of a big deal to me. I never sleep well, but it's always a warm, happy experience anyway.

So much for being nauseating. Our weekend was devoted to seeking out abandoned places. On Saturday we tried a couple of spots in Incheon; one was no longer abandoned and one had been torn down, so the day was pretty much wasted for me. That evening we saw a punk rock show; mediocre bands, for the most part, but I got the midnight kiss (okay, maybe I'll be just a bit more nauseating), got to chat with my friend Mike for a bit, and finally met Jon, a photographer here who's been very active in both the Korean punk scene and the Korean urban exploration (read: abandoned places) scene. I've admired his work for some time and was pretty thrilled to finally meet him. Meanwhile, Chris flitted back and forth between me and the front of the room where he was busily photographing all the bands.

The next day we headed down to Daejeon to another supposedly abandoned amusement park. We were somewhat confused as to which parts of it were actually abandoned, but we had fun making fun of the place anyway; the stupid alien mascots, the exhibit on saving energy which opened with automatic doors and an escalator, the blatant ripoffs of Disney, and the fake metal palm trees all provided plenty of suitable material for snide comments and sarcasm.









Near the end we finally found a building called StarQuest which was totally abandoned and with the doors wide open. While we were groping our way around the entrance, a couple of girls with flashlights came in behind us. They turned out to be fellow Canadian urban explorers (I hate that term, as it seems awfully pretentious to me, but it does express my meaning pretty well here) also out to check out StarQuest, so we tagged along with them.

















I guess all those are pretty self-explanatory. I felt like I was playing Fallout IRL, only without all my awesome plasma weapons and no Nuka-Cola. '

And that's about all; I stayed out too long and got colder than I probably should have, but that got me a lot of hugs, so it wasn't all bad. We had some unexciting samgyeopsal for dinner and took a late train, standing room only, back to Seoul.