A Very Full Weekend

The weekend started on Friday with the final Goodbye party for our friend Garrett, who has promised to return next September. During the evening, I mentioned that I'd lost rings at his place - Garrett's huge apartment was the perfect location for everyone to get together to celebrate Thanksgiving, both American and Canadian, and I'd lost my 2 favourite rings (one from India, one from Mexico) after a party at his place. His reply was something along the lines of: "Those were yours? Oh, I think I might have thrown them away....".


However, the next morning, my phone rang at 7:45am and I found myself running to the train station to a) see Garrett off one more time and b) get my rings - which he had found - back! Cue the happy dance!

We (me, Ty and Nicola) headed off to Gwangju for the day. We were meeting up with a few other people (Stu, Sarah and Victoria) to try to find some sort of gondola/cable cars that went up the side of a mountain. Victoria, Garrett and I had found ourselves at the base of said mountain lifty things when we had been trying to find the airport to go to Jeju a month ago (we'd taken the right bus in the wrong direction and had been slightly dismayed to find ourselves in the middle of nowhere at the base of a mountain instead of at the airport...).


What could possibly be at the top of this mountain? We hopped in our ski-lift-like chairs (not cable cars or gondolas) to find out.

There must have been something more touristy there before, but now, everything had the rusty feel of abandonment about it - an empty house, a broken fence, signs with the paint peeling off. We followed a path, our sights set on a sort of orange bridge. Surprisingly, we found ourselves at a mini-monorail station of sorts, creeping along through years of dead leaves, until we had no choice but to hop on the tracks to continue until the end.


Along the way, we found one dead mini-train, then continued on until we located the other dead mini-train, still in its berth.


Okay... for those of you who are familiar with Stephen King's Gunslinger series of books... this place smacked of the Cradle of Lud with Blaine the Pain (the crazy monorail), and Stu and I quoted continuously from the book as we walked along.


The crazier amongst us decided to walk on the narrow rails, while the saner folk headed further up the mountain to a sort of broken down two-storey look-out. We had a full view of the city of Gwangju (Korea's 5th largest city), but cloud and haze (and then rain) made it difficult to appreciate the urban scenery.

We returned to the city to get ready for an evening of live music at an Open Mic organized by our friend Matt. He gets everyone together for Open Mic nights about once every 2 months, with the proceeds going to a local orphanage. It was a great night, with a variety of performers, and a lot of really good music.

At the end of the evening, Ty, who had been quivering in his seat, aching to jump on stage, joined in for a group guitar jam.


The next day, Ty and I met up with Stu and Hayoung and went to a Korean music museum. We were going mostly for the room full of traditional Korean musical instruments that you can crash and bang and play with. Our cacophony was hardly traditional, and we had a blast killing the huge bells, drums and hanging chime things. I liked the big drum....



Finally, Ty and I headed to another part of town to attempt to locate an art museum I'd been to two years ago. Unfortunately, we ended up getting lost lost lost in a cold grey afternoon and went shopping instead (he bought a new camera).

Sometimes, weekends can be downright dull... obviously not the case this time.