a weekend in my life in seoul, korea vlog (and busan) | lil mental health check in
Good morning everyone, good afternoon! So, have you ever had - do you get those days where you like wake up and you don't feel actually awake and you're just doing everything by muscle memory? That is what I'm doing today. I knew that I was gonna start filming and so I just like grabbed all my stuff and I left the house and I don't know what I'm doing. So I'm in the Insadong area and we're gonna get lunch to hopefully wake me up and make me feel alive again. I don't know. It's
like slightly raining, I took a wrong turn, this is a dead end. Welcome to the vlog. Feeling a little bit more alive. So I occasionally will get messages from you guys telling me like 'you should go to this place' 'you should go to that place' but it's usually not as many people as I got for this place. There is a content creator who lives in Korea named Agata, she's super nice.
She made this video, an instagram reel, about this new cafe that opened in Insadong and I have never in my life had so many people send this to me. Like, 'you gotta go, you gotta go, have you seen this? you gotta go!' So for you, for Agata, I'm gonna go. And there's a giant truck coming so hold on. Okay so this is called the Temple of... The Temple of Ungnyeo I think and it is meant to look like a cave. It is based off of a, what's it called, a folk folk tale. So yeah we're gonna go in and personally, I mean, it's not my style. I wasn't gonna go because to be honest it kind of freaks me out, but you know, might as well. For you guys. So here we go!
Okay so you know that was actually pretty good. I really love mugwort so I gave it a pass. It was definitely weird to be feeling like you were sitting in a cave. I felt very sleepy, I felt very disoriented, but a cool idea nonetheless. So our last stop before I kind of head towards home, I think is we are going to just check out Jogyesa, the temple over here. It is almost
Buddha's birthday so all of the lanterns are up and then I might be meeting up with a friend later and in a completely different part of Seoul so I think I'm gonna head home and get situated and do all that stuff. So let's head to the temple! So you can actually buy a little, I don't know what you would actually call it, but a piece of paper that you can hang on one of the lanterns. You see? Everybody has them so all these like papers that are flowing in the wind, they are - they all belonging to someone which is so cool so yeah. And this does - I don't know if actually are these, did these light up? I know at Bongeunsa, which we will go to, they light it up like crazy but I'm not sure if these do. But either way it's beautiful. And as I'm heading home I want to show you one thing that boggles my mind that this is even happening.
They are completely redoing Gwanghwamun or the street in front of Gwanghwamun. So how it is set up currently is that there are lanes of traffic and then there's a big like island in the middle that has the Sejong statue and everything, but they decided that they want to move it and so instead of having a center aisle, they're going to move it to the side and have - I don't - anyway. It's a big, it's a big thing that they're doing. There's a lot of construction, confusing, but so if you have come to Seoul before and you come back by like the end of this year, it's gonna look really different. It's kind of a good thing that nobody's traveling right now because that central area is sort of a mess but I'm gonna catch my bus over there so I will show you what on earth is going on, so let's go see! Hello friends we are back home and I am temporarily in my pajama pants because I'm going to read a little bit before I head out to see Anne. My mom sent me this, it is the new Murakami
and you guys know how I feel about Murakami, I really love him. This is I believe a collection of short stories and I really love, yes it is, okay, and I actually really love his short stories more than his novels so I'm very excited to read this. But Kurt, I swear he thought he had a stroke this morning. Because he has this book - it's much easier to translate Japanese to Korean like very quickly so he has had this book, he's already read it I think it was like last year. He has it it's actually like on our bedside table for some reason and he woke up and was like getting ready he was like staring at the coffee table and I was like 'are you okay?' and he's like 'is that yours?' because he thought that his book had like magically changed into English overnight or something or like he was suddenly so good in English that his book - I don't know, so he lost his mind but this is my copy. I cannot read Korean well enough nor can I read Japanese well enough.
So I had to wait for the English version so thank you mom. I bought, I stopped and got some grapes so I'm just gonna sit with the windows open, eat these grapes, they are delicious. So I will see you guys later. Okay :) Happy Friday from an unexpected location. So Kurt is actually - has like a business trip thingy down here in Busan so I came along and I'm going to just head to Gwanganri - so let's do that! Okay hi everyone. Happy Sunday. Coming at you from a very bad mental health day.
I woke up feeling wretched and I don't really know what to do. It's just one of those things where you just gotta ride it out. I'm gonna do that by the river. So as I mentioned earlier, I got the new Haruki Murakami stories, short stories collection. You know I'm a sucker for short stories. The air is absolutely beautiful today, it was rainy last night. So I'm gonna go down to the river and read which is something that you have seen many times before so sorry about that but that's just what I've got to do. I have a lot of work piling up as well which I think is a contributing factor to my ugh-ness today but I know that - the major part of me wants to just sit down and knock out all this work but I know that it in the long run, that won't be good for me. Like if I just,
it's Sunday, if I just take my weekend and I give myself some time to just disconnect and read, I know that it will be better so I'm gonna do that. Anything else to say? Not really. I hope you guys are doing, doing okay. One thing that I got - I feel like I talk about Taylor Swift in every single video but I recently watched her folklore documentary I guess it is, where she plays all of her songs and then in between each song she talks about the songwriting process and whatever. When she talks about the song 'this is me trying' I think she said something that was really important, I think for all of us. And she was basically talking about how every single day, like no matter what you're doing - if you're an alcoholic, if you're you know you have some kind of addiction, if you're struggling with mental health, whatever it is.
It can be hour to hour, the difference in how difficult it is to get through the day. And so just remembering that you never know where someone is in their journey - like how much they're trying their best, like in their journey, you know? Somebody could finally be pulling themselves out of a hole and then it just drops them right back down and so it that's why it's so difficult to pick yourself out of something. I thought that it was really important, just remembering that in most cases, everyone around you is fighting some kind of silent battle and you never know like they're just about to pull their way out or they're just about to go the other direction and you know, yeah.
I just wanted to bring that up as, as someone who like today I was kind of pulling myself out of, out of a bad place and like it took one thing to just kind of knock me down again. It's really really really hard and so, you know, if any of you guys are, as I've said before, dealing with anxiety or depression or anything like that, you will get knocked down by the tiniest of things but I do hope that you just continue to push forward and you know that you have at least one person here who is cheering you on. So yeah I obviously, I'm having a bad day. But we're gonna try and turn it around and we're gonna go to the river and we're gonna breathe fresh air and I'm gonna make decaffeinated tea and I'm gonna sit in my really comfy chair and I'm gonna read Haruki Murakami and it's all gonna be okay. Sorry that this vlog is a mess, I'm sorry that i'm a mess but
it is what it is. And I will see you guys at the river bye. Cut to tea time! What was I gonna say? Oh so this just reminded me - since this vlog is just going nowhere we're just gonna talk about weird things. I was on a flight, I suppose I was just going to - I had to have just been going home so I was flying probably to San Francisco and then transferring to San Diego - anyway. So it was like a 10 or 11 hour flight. And I sat next to - we had the middle seat empty - but I sat next to this man
from South Africa and for some weird reason he had also lived in San Diego - like he knew everywhere that I knew and stuff. And we just hit it off, like he was elderly and those are the people I usually vibe with - so we talked for probably like six hours of the flight until finally I was like, you know I got, I have to sleep or I'm gonna just die in San Francisco because in San Francisco - I was talking Anne about this when I met up with her on Thursday - my transfer time in San Francisco is usually like 30 minutes which is not, should not be legal. But I always did it so. I digress. He was telling me just all these crazy stories about his life and I remember he was talking about living in I guess it was in South Africa, his wife had made a cup of tea and she was drinking it and she was like 'you know, this tastes funny' and he looked in the electric kettle and a lizard had gotten in there. So she was drinking like boiled lizard water with her tea. And so now every time, like every single time I make tea, I think about that and I always open it and check. Yeah I don't know why that memory just like hit me so strongly today but yeah great talks. I miss like obviously I miss flying, I'm so hit or miss - sometimes I really like talking to the people next to me, sometimes I don't, he was a jolly good one.
We talked for a really long time, that was great. But anyway, the tea has been made, I am drinking my favorite it's the 달빛...oh this is 달빛섬 but usually I believe it's the same tea this one is 달빛걷기 which is moon, moonlight walk. This is technically moonlight island but I think they're - I can't open this, this is a gift that I've been meaning to give to my friend Olivia back home for over a year but miss corona does not allow me to send it to her. B it actually has Korean pear in it, has a little bit of 배 and normally I'm not a fruity tea person - yeah its tasting notes are sweet pear and honey which is totally not my style but for some reason I love this tea so much. I'm addicted to it. It's so good so if you're looking for something, you're
going to Osolluc, it's an Osolluc tea, if you're looking for something, that's a great one. Highly recommend and it comes recommended from Olivia as well. I'm sending it to her because I gave her some a couple years ago and she demands more - worldwide favorite. But yeah we're going to go. I ended up sitting around the house for two hours doing nothing. So hopefully the river isn't too crowded - let's go get my spot! Yay! And we're home! So I annoyed Kurt at work for a few hours and that made me feel better. The book -
I have two more stories left, it's pretty good. There is one particular story where he talks about a very strange event that happened to him in a semi-abandoned hotel in a hot spring town and I had a very weird experience in a semi-abandoned hotel in a hot spring town in Japan. [Keep checking my social media make sure that I keep updating it so I'm not like dead or something] So that was fun to read. I am going to wash my face, watch Netflix. I just started watching How to Get Away with Murder. I know I'm super late on that but a friend recommended it to me here I am. Tomorrow's
monday? Yeah tomorrow's Monday so I have to, I have a lot of work to do. I have many things, too many things. I'm a little freaked out. But we're gonna make it happen, we're gonna make it work. And so thank you for sticking with me, sorry that the last half of this vlog was very dull and not happy but tomorrow is a new day and we'll see what happens then. So yeah I will I will see you guys later. I have - yeah I'm not even going to make promises I don't know what my content is going to be. Everything's a mess but I am along for the ride and I
promise so hold on through it. So yeah I will see you guys later, thank you so much for joining me and I hope you enjoyed the little clips of Busan - always love that city. And yeah hope you're well, bye!
2021-05-08 03:40
