Birthday Weekend

This past weekend was the weekend before my birthday, and we did all kinds of fun things!

On Saturday, we did some shopping downtown during the day. We went to a craft store someone had recommended to me called Esdot. There, we got some face paint for the Zombie Walk we are going to do in Daegu next weekend. Should be fantastic. We also went to my new favorite store, Hot Tracks. They sell a whole range of random things from stationary and cards to toys to accessories. It's a wonderful place. At the underground mall, I got a few shirts. One of them is gray with embroidered faces in all different colors. The faces have handle-bar mustaches and top hats. I also got a pink sweater with cat faces all over it and a stripped sweater with a cute cat face sewn on the pocket. At a boutique shop downtown, I got a plaid skirt that flows and is different lengths on the side than it is in the back and front. To go with it, I got a knit, wool, off-white sweater with brown, suede patches on the shoulders. It's an adorable outfit, and I wore it Monday just to show off. I needed to satisfy my urge to shop. There are so many cute clothes in Korea. I know my mom thinks I'm crazy for some of my recent purchases, but this is Korean fashion--I'm telling you!

That night, we scheduled a night hike of the mountain in the southern area of Daegu, Apsan. If you are driving on the highway, you can see an archway glowing on top of the mountain. Turns out that is a lookout point at the top of Apsan where you can see all of Daegu and the surrounding mountains. We planned to meet up with our friends at around 7pm. Gianni and I got there first because the train stop for the mountain is actually fairly close to our house as we live in south Daegu. You have to walk about 15 minutes to get to the entrance to the path up the mountain, and it feels like you're hiking just to get up there! When we arrived, Maria, Matthew, Jackie, and Stefanie were still waiting for a train from downtown, so we decided to go to a coffee shop to wait for them. There isn't much in the way of coffee shops up on the hill at the base of the mountain. Most places were restaurants. Also, the buildings around there were so weird! They were the least Korean buildings I've seen here. Some looked like they were Italian style architecture with red, clay roofs! They were also big places, normally spaced apart, and not very tall. It was crazy. I felt like I had been transported somewhere else! Gianni and I found kind of a shady coffee shop. It was upstairs, and we were directed to a private booth to have our coffee. We sat down and the host pulled down a shade so no one could see in. It was really bizarre. Sometimes you see this with restaurants, but is privacy really a concern with coffee? After sharing an iced coffee, we met up with 4 of our hiking group members. It then took us 40 more minutes to figure out where Sian and Marie were. They were the only two of the group to take the bus, so no one knew where they had gotten off. Turns out they got off at the wrong stop pretty far from the base of the mountain and had to walk a bit to get to us. While we waiting, we got to enjoy some nice outdoor music that some ajushis were playing at an outdoor seating area. The spectators were loving it--dancing and clapping. Eventually, we collected all the members of our group.

Then we had to find the actual trail to get up the mountain. It took a bit of doing, but we found it. It's about an hour long hike to the top of the mountain and was pretty steep almost the whole time. The first half of the trail is cemented and well-lit with street lights. There were people hiking along with us, so we weren't the only 8 people hiking at all. The half way marker is a Buddhist Temple built on the mountain. From there it got a little creepy because we had to pull out our flashlights and walk up an unlit, uneven stone staircase the rest of the time to get to the top. There were still some other people hiking, but it was a little strange at first. After a few stops and a good leg workout, we got to the top of the mountain where the glowing archway is. There were tons of people sitting up there, eating snacks and enjoying the view. It was an amazing site to behold! We could see all the lights of Daegu and all the mountains that surround it. You can see the mountains from the ground, but you can't fully appreciate that Daegu is actually in a valley until you see it from above. It was gorgeous. We could see Daegu Tower all lit up. I still really want to go there and check out E-World as well. Oh well. Plans for another time. We took some really nice photos and had a snack together before making the arduous trip down the mountain. Some of the group had bad knees, which made the walk down a bit hard. When we got down the mountain, we still had enough time to make it home on the subway before it closed.


On Sunday, I decided I wanted to go to Daegu Art Museum (DAM) where they were having a really cool exhibit. I'd seen some nice photos and wondered what the exhibit was about. We had to go kind of far to get there. You go to Grand Park Station, which is on the other subway line, and then get a shuttle from there to the museum itself. The museum is right next to a wedding convention hall, so at first we were worried that Koreans dressed up to go to museums. Then we realized that half the people on the shuttle were going to a wedding. Phew! It turns out that the DAM was only built in 2011, so it's new. It's a small museum that really only houses one or two exhibits at a time. We paid 5,000 won each to see the exhibit, which is a reasonable price. The exhibit we saw was called A Dream I Dreamed by Kusama Yayoi. She is a woman in her 80's who suffers from hallucinations and OCD, and her artwork definitely reflected that. Her work was incredible. There was a mixture of video, paintings, and sculptures. It was really interesting to be able to see the world as she does. Some rooms were an explosion of color and others were black and white. She also uses mirrors and light a lot to reflect and make space look larger than it is.

When you enter the exhibit, there is a huge open area with many different sized red blown-up plastic balls with white polka dots. Some of them are huge. Some were hanging from the ceilings and others were on the ground. One ball, you could look into. I believe there were mirrors and lights in there. Another ball, you could walk into. We went inside and it was made to look bigger than it was. Mirrors made 3 walls, and there was another smaller ball hanging inside the room.

There were a few rooms of paintings where Yayoi's OCD and hallucinations definitely came through. The patterns in her paintings were repeated over and over in such detail. In the middle of one room with all black and white pattern paintings was a case. You had to peak inside, and there were mirrors all over a box. Lights of different colors were being shown in to create different patterns inside, reflecting off the mirrors. It was really interesting--like a kaleidoscope.


There was another room set up to look like a normal living room in a home. It had polka dots of different colors projected on the walls and was in complete black lighting. Similarly, there was a white room with white, flower sculptures. The room was polka dotted in various colors as were the sculptures, so they kind of blended in with the walls.

One of the video art pieces was called "Addicted to Suicide." It was a video of the artist speaking (don't know what she was saying--not in English) projected on one wall. Behind her it was like a kaleidoscope again--different colors and patterns kept changing. The cool thing was that the video was on one wall, and the two walls next to the video wall were both mirrors, so it made it look like the video was tiled against a long wall and kept going on in either direction forever.


In the same room was a piece called "Stairway to Heaven." It was a ladder with lights on it that changed color. On the top and bottom of the ladder were mirrors so that if you looked up or down, it looked as though the ladder kept going on forever.

We then walked into a box completely covered in mirrors, even the ground had water on it, so that the lights would reflect. There were hanging colorful lights that changed colors all over the place in there, and they would reflect off the mirrors to make the box look bigger than it was. It was really beautiful.


Upstairs, she created a sculpture of 3 giant pumpkins with cool patterns on them. My favorite room was a completely white room made to look like a normal room of a house. Children could take a sticker and put it anywhere they wanted in the room, so by now, the room is completely covered in colorful, polka dots.

Infinity Net

Her colorful paintings were also really interesting. She uses similar patterns as with the black and white ones, and they are very repetitive. She has a whole series called "Infinity Net." They are all two different colors in a netting pattern, and all of them seems to have a texture in the paint. They are very cool.

There was also a room filled with the same sized shiny, metal balls next to a room housing a penis boat. It was literally what it sounds like. It was a boat made of penises and a picture of the penis boat was tiled on the walls around the room. Boy was it interesting. Geez!

The museum itself was really cool. I'm glad we got to see the exhibit. The DAM is located on a hill overlooking the city, so the views from the second and third floor of the building were stunning. You could see the mountains in the distance. It was a really nice way to end the weekend.