Mom's visit - Sunday

Carl and Mel came over around ten the next morning (Sunday), and we all shared some birthday cake that mom and I had brought from the previous week. It was good, then we said our goodbyes, and Mel and Carol headed back to Suncheon.
Mom and I had a pretty relaxed day. We headed back to InSaDong,
(I need to interrupt the narrative to give a bizarro Starbucks update... they're playing amazing music in here, for one thing. Stuff you would rarely hear even on the radio in Canada, which is amazing, because it's amazing Canadian indie stuff... anyways, the real bizarre thing is that there is this woman sitting on a lounge chair about ten feet away from me who is reading picture books with her very young son (who looks like he took his first steps last week) and she is reading to him in English with this terribly thick accent with apparently no understanding of what the words she is reading mean. She's just sounding them out for him. And he probably doesn't understand Korean yet, and she's reading English to him... oh man, the lengths people go to to teach their children English here. It's part admirable, part fucked-up. The poor kid just want to see what bug is inside the "Big Black Box", he doesn't want to be read to... poor kid. He'll probably wind up in three hagwons studying until eleven every night by the time he is ten years old.)
anyway... InSaDong... so we headed down, because mom wanted to more art shopping. I also found a decently sized and reasonably priced copy of the painting that I have been looking for for almost two years now. It's the summer/original version of the winter painting that I bought last year. It's pretty famous here, and it's in most temples and palaces, copied and usually placed behind the seat of whoever was important. It's funny, because I see it everywhere, so it's obviously a fairly important piece of art, but hardly anyone here seems to know what I am talking about when I ask about it. I also bought an acoustic guitar modeller, which I have yet to actually learn how to use properly, and I met a man who used to play bass for Bill Haley and the Comets. Now he's in Korea spreading the gospel, as he quickly informed me. He looked good though, for someone who was old enough to play with Bill Haley. We went out for tea, then we headed back to the hotel and each took a nap. It had been a pretty exhausting week.
We had dinner at, where else, Outback. We ate too much , again, and then retired for the night. We had clearly already had enough excitement, and with Mel and Carol gone, we had no-one left to prove ourselves to. haha.