Little Things

A little post about little things in Spring that made us happy, that wouldn't warrant a whole blog post but are nice enough to share.

Firstly, macarons and excellent drinks at our favourite little cafe, The Ark, not far from the underground market in Bupyeong.

...and it was all yellow (8)

Seoul Food | Salon de Mon Chou Chou

TREAT YO SELF part 2 continued with a trip to Bucheon for some sweet, sweet Crycheese burgers (I'm noticing a worrying burger trend with this weekend) before nipping off to Garosugil in the Seoul district of Gangnam. You may have heard of it. <eyerollemoji.jpg>

So, we got our fancy on (or, at least, our attempt at fancy) and tried to not look TOO out of place at Salon de Mon Chou Chou, a famous brand from Osaka, Japan.

Nicolette was sat opposite me, so expect more photos of her than myself or Nick.

It was very faux-chic, almost distressingly so for a country girl like me, in all its white and gold Rococo-esque splendour, filled with painfully trendy Gangnam-ites delicately sipping unusually-named teas and eating hugely expensive desserts.

Naturally, we Instagrammed the heck out of it.

스튜디오 지브리 입체조형전 | Studio Ghibli Exhibition

Party Trick: Taking reallllly flattering photos of people.

We were told about the Studio Ghibli exhibition aaaages ago, and went "it's okay we'll get round to it later on. It'll be less busy that way." It was on for several months, so there was no rush (especially as we were hoping to get tickets for the Ghibli museum in Tokyo).

Flashforward to a few weeks ago and I suddenly remember its existence. We check the website, and lo it's the last ever weekend that it's running for. Of course.

As luck would have it, it coincided with a time we'd arranged to meet up with our friend Nicolette (another south coast buddy), so we all met at Yongsan iPark mall, where the exhibition was apparently hidden away.

Unfortunately, iPark is both enormous and really confusingly laid out. We got lost, quite frequently (as documented in the above photo), even though there were maps dotted around. Maybe it was just us, because nobody else seemed to be lost.

As you can expect from the title of this post, we did actually make it eventually, paid our money, and went in.

Google GIF magic

The first thing you see as you come in is a big animated model of Howl's Moving Castle, complete with clanking, groaning sound effects from the movie. It's so nice and really got us excited for the rest. The photos are pretty self-explanatory, and there are plenty of blogs online that probably did a better breakdown than I can, so I won't bother saying too much.

Calcifer! Eggs! Bacon!

東京 | Tokyo (7) - The Last Day

Found this set after scouring Japan these past 3 trips. Just after buying a slightly-less-cool one.

Our last day was a bit of a weird one, because we knew we'd be ending it early in order to go grab our luggage and head to the airport for a less-than-comfortable sleep in the waiting room.

We ended up not risking doing anything too major, and just went back to Akihabara to spend the last of our yen and play some last few games.

My mantra for this place: I do not need any more plush toys. Repeat.

I could never live in Tokyo because I'd always be painfully poor and would probably die in an avalanche of anime memorabilia crammed dangerously into my cheap little 4-tatami bedsit (that I can't even afford because of my terrible spending habit). Oh well. Go out doing what you love, eh.

I wanted this so badly.

You can buy room interiors for your figurines and the displays are incredible.

Learning from experience, we got to Akihabara at a decent time and found it as busy and hectic as we'd been expecting the first time around. It probably helped that it was a weekend.

Girls cosplaying as an Idol group, quite possibly selling something.

東京 | Tokyo (5) - Imperial Palace, & Tokyo Tower

So, if you've been wonderful and reading all the previous Japan posts, you might have noticed my constant mentions of how glorious the weather had been. Warm, sunny, inviting and generally really pleasant to be out and about in.

Enter day 5.

Rain. And lots of it.

I'm not even sure where it came from (the sky, hurr) considering the absolute clarity of the sky the day before, but oh well. At first it was only drizzling so we thought we'd take a chance and head to the Imperial Palace for a look around, but by the time we got there it had worsened to the point where we were worried about the contents of our bags (expensive cameras ahoy!) and our shoes were starting to get...sloshy. I wouldn't have minded, but half of us had come without umbrellas and they weren't exactly big.

Sparrow friends, hiding from the rain.

Happy New Year!

I finally bought AC:NL on NYE and partied like an animal. In my pyjamas.

UPDATE: Again, this is another post that was just languishing in my drafts. Bad Bloggers of the Internet Unite!

New Year's Day was a holiday! Woo! But...it was also cold and we were tired (what with it being just another random holiday in the middle of our working week) so we just stayed indoors and played with our new Korean Pokemon cards!

It's pretty fun because the rules are very simple (more simple than Yu-Gi-Oh! which I love, but it drains me a lot more mentally) and we try to do as much of it as possible in Korean (emphasis on try).

I was really worried at first, because with this game there are various effects and things that you use to your advantage, and obviously we don't know enough Korean for that.

What we quickly learned, however, is that it's like 60% Konglish (English written in Korean style) which makes it a bit easier to guess at what's going on. The rest is easy, because in the bottom corner of all the cards is a serial number. Thanks to the magic of the internet, we can search up this code and just find all of the information in English. Imagine doing that 15 years ago. Wow.

東京 | Tokyo (3) - Sumo and Akihabara!!

Intriguing post-breakfast drink. Bought it solely because it looked carbonated but it told me I should shake it?

On day 3 we decided that our punishing schedule had been enough to keep jet lag at bay a little longer, and took a slightly more relaxed day out. We went to check out the sumo as there's only a handful of official tournaments in Japan each year, and even fewer are in Tokyo. So the fact that one happened to coincide with the dates of our trip was quite serendipitous indeed.

We headed off to Ryogoku, home of the Ryogoku Kokugikan (try saying that 5 times fast) bright and early to get ourselves some day tickets, the cheapest but also the most likely to sell out.

The whole station seems to have been dedicated to sumo.

Once we were through the ticket barrier, we could see all kinds of old paintings of sumo tournaments, as well as what we later found out were probably photos of the current yokozuna or 'Grand Champions'. To become Grand Champion you have to win 2 tournaments in a row. There are a lot of stages to each tournament and a lot of participants, so to win once, let alone twice, is an intense feat in itself. Testament to this is the fact that there are currently only 2 or 3 Grand Champions still competing and only 71 have been named in the last 300 years!

Yokozuna handprints. They are HUGE. Interesting to see how they get bigger over time.

There's also a cute homemade height chart, so you can see how you measure up to previous yokozuna. Annoyingly, I'm taller than all but one of them. Sigh. Again, it was interesting to see how obviously genetics, diet and environment have made increasingly bigger contenders.

67th yokozuna Musashimaru Koyo and Ann-Marie. 6'3", 518lb vs a kitten. Beast. 

東京 | Tokyo (2) - Meiji Shrine, DOGS! & Merch

However unsavoury this might look, yakisoba sandwich was a true winner imo.

Another "surprise grab" breakfast from 7-11, and then we set off for some cultural and historical enlightenment. Off to Harajuku to visit the Meiji-Jingumae Shrine!

Sake barrels annually donated to the shrine as an offering.

Wash your hands in the icy January water before going in!

The weather was, again, wonderful, and we headed along the long path to the shrine with clear blue skies and bright, lukewarm winter sun overhead. What with it still being the first couple of weeks of 2015, there were a lot of visitors dropping by to make their wishes and prayers for the new year.

It was certainly very busy! I think actually there was a special event going on, as there were quite a large number of girls wearing kimono and furisode posing for photos. (EDIT: I've found out that by some stroke of luck we happened to visit on Coming of Age Day, which is a bit like a nationwide birthday for all of the people that turned 20 that year, the legal age in Japan)

Creepy sneak photo of a girl walking past in her furisode.

Pepero Day

Collective Pepero haul from students and each other

Technically the 14th of every month in Korea is a little commercialised 'love'-based holiday. From January's Diary Day where you buy a diary for your loved ones to use in the new year, to the more well-known and largely-celebrated Valentines Day and White Day in February and March.

My favourite is 'Black Day', generally the antithesis of White Day where singletons wear all black and eat 'black' foods to mourn their suffering love lives after 2 months of loved-up celebrations.

November 14th's 'day' is supposedly for movies, but I'd guess that it's generally overshadowed by Pepero Day which occurs on the 11th.

The story goes that on November 11th a group of middle school girls exchanged boxes of Pepero to encourage each other to grow tall and slender. Other people say that it's just because the date (11/11) looks like Pepero sticks.

Text: Happy Pepero Day!

Either way, it's very popular (well done, marketing team) especially with younger people, and the stores were piled high with intricately-arranged boxes of the stuff days or possibly even weeks in advance.

I wasn't really expecting to get anything aside from jokingly trading a box with Nick, but we both ended up with a few at school!

It's cute and silly and I love it even though it is just a big manufactured day to make money. As long as I'm getting tasty snacks out of it, who am I to argue? :p

Sunny

chub

Due to my non-chronological, nonsensical posting order, you probably all know by now that I have one of these little beauties. It's a Fujifilm Instax and its basically fulfilling all my young hipster ideals of photos that print out instantly and develop magically before your eyes.

It was an early birthday present from Nick and it's become my little project to take it on special days out and really think about when I'm going to take that ONE photo of the day. It's nice to get back to grips with "the value of a frame" and focus on quality rather than quantity, and it's helped me cut back on my incessant snap snap snap that's all too common nowadays with digital photography.

I'm by no means great, but each photo I take with this camera has so much more meaning, as well as increasing quality on a much steeper curve than my digital photos have. I actually have to think and concentrate because damn that film is expensive.

I bought some Shavet pens, which are like a thick paint/gel pen, so I can write and draw on them in all sorts of cute colours and remember what I was doing, on what day, and with whom. There's just something so much more personal about doodling all over a photo and really personalising it that I'm really enjoying. I'm sure I'll look at these a lot more than the thousands of photos I have sitting on hard drives at home.

I bought a little Instax photo album and there's just enough pockets to use up all the film Nick bought me, and it should take me a while to fill it. I'm excited to reach the end and see what adventures I've been on!

Now, all of this stuff was taking up an awful lot of space and was generally really messy to have floating around on tables or in whatever bag I happen to be using, so I went out and bought a cheap little bag specifically for holding my Instax kit. I got this wonderful bright yellow beauty in the underground market for 10,000원 and it's almost perfect!

Because of all this yellow I seem to have amassed, I called the camera Sunny, because I'm the sort of weird person that gives proper names to inanimate objects. Here's to 50+ little adventures in the future!