cheese and sour cream

so things are good here. other than the fact that ive gained about 10 pounds in the past two weeks. no word of a lie. i had been really good at going to the gym for the past few months and things were going well. until....my friend brought us to costco. it was definitely not as good as the ones at home, but it did have significantly more "western foods" than grocery stores in busan. needless to say we stocked up on 4lbs of cheese and a massive tub of the best sour cream ive ever had in my life. so the past two weeks have revolved around me trying to plan every meal to have cheese and sour cream in it 1. so they wont go bad, 2. because i love them. (ssshhhh the sourcream went bad on the 24th, but im still eating it)

Early april was the cherry blossom festival in a nearby city, jinhae. it is supposed to be absolutely beautiful (although packed) so allan and i had the best intentions of going. uuntil we went out the night before. damn korea and its cheap drinks. we missed the bus by about a minute and the next one wasnt for hours. so we decided to head to a random city instead called gyungju. well i guess its not random. it was the capital of korea for while...albeit in 57 BC, when julius ceasar was still alive. its really amazing the length of the history here compared to canada. anyways we headed down there without too much direction or idea of what to expect. when we got there the street was lined with bike rentals. allan insisted on renting a double bike, initially i resisted but man, am i glad i caved. it was the most hilarious thing ive ever done. i thought i was going to pee my pants. there are a lot less foreigners there, so we got tons of stares, never mind the fact that i was hysterically laughing the entire time. it was really really hard to steer though....i hit someone.
we headed to a park that had huge hills throughout it. ill i could think of was "my humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps". (ps have you seen the alanis morrisette version of that??? horrible! look it up on youtube). we couldnt figure out what it was until we saw a sign for a tomb. They have one open for visitors to walk in and see. The tomb is a huge wood box about 13m high and 47m in diameter (haha, "about"....no, thats exactly what it is. thanks LP). It was built in 5 AD. most of the tombs are of royalty from the Silla dynasty.
luckily for us this city actually had a ton of cherry blossoms, which were beautiful....but you can only ooohhh and ahhh so many times. we double-rode through a park with tons of trees and people. koreans love taking pictures of each other, especially boyfriends and girlfriends, so it just looked like a big photo shoot everywhere. we got a lot of "hellos and nice to meet yous" and some people asking to take our picture too.
our last stop for the day was a temple that was supposed to be gorgeous. we had to take a city bus there, but because of incredibly horrible traffic it took an hour and 45 minutes to get there (20 min on the way back). it was hot and sweaty and the bus was packed, and to top it all off, the yellow dust was so bad that you couldnt even open your window. it just coats your throat and gets in your nostrils and feels disgusting. sooo when we finally got to the temple it was great. there was a field of more cherry blossoms on the way up the hill to the temple. a bonus, since we got there so late, was that they were closing soon, so it was quiet. apparently this temple was the first thing put on the unesco world cultural heritage list. it was built in 528 but has been rebuilt and restored many times because of fires, etc.

we played in a frisbee tournament a few weeks ago in busan. it was gorgeous weather and it was a great time. I had my first random encounter when i bumped into someone i had played with at queens, who i didnt know was here. strange....

allan was "lucky" enough to spend a day in the er on friday. he was super sick with a fever, passing out, vomiting, etc. seems to be getting better slowly but surely. it sucks not having your mom here, and it sucks even worse having to play "mom" for someone else. im glad my mommies coming soon! as of now we are planning a few days in kyoto japan, beijing, and then the rest of the time here in busan. should be great fun! im going to get her to try all of the "good" food here. (most of it is good, but then theres the silk worm larvae, chicken anus, live octopus, etc)

my last big news is that i have to decide whether to go back to school or not by tuesday. eek. give me advice. if i dont, i will most likely travel around south east asia with meag and meet up with cp, boy jamie and sarah. hmmm.....