underground

chelsea and i took an evening outing to see some fountain on a bridge that's supposed to spout off five times a day. we waited for an hour or two and nothing ever came, even though i'd double-checked the times. good thing we had some (really fucking expensive... these essentials haven't exactly caught on here...) wine and cheese to keep us company. after that minor disappointment, we crept back to the subway. unbeknownst to us, the underground shopping mall we entered, thinking it connected to the subway station, goes for a good number of kilometers.

indeed it did connect to the subway, but we ended up a stop further than where we'd gotten off. we walked for a good 25 minutes underground (that's kind of a long way... we walk fast) before we got to the stop. along the way, we passed hundreds of shops closed up for the night. koreans must be very trustworthy people, because the shops simply had large pieces of cloth draped across their fronts. there was a security guard here and there, but stealing something wouldn't have been a challenge.

each shop's cloth was unique. some were pretty, some looked sad, and some made me quite curious as to what was behind them. some stores' goods peeked out from behind the drapes and some were just covered with nets, exposed. there were also a few of what looked to be nightmare thrift stores. though they had actual windows and doors, inpenetrable piles upon mounds of t-shirts leaned up against them. we came across one open store and i bought a dress there. it has silhouettes of birds, trees and taj mahals.