Oh, the glamour....

Sometimes traveling makes you feel like a baller.  It is, on occasion, a tiny whiff of what I imagine it feels like to be famous.  Particularly in the smaller and less tourist-traffic'd cities and towns we've been to, some locals are pretty amped to see us.  Strangers ask us to pose for photos with their families, shop owners ask us to try things on, chefs send us extra stuff, managers of hotels thank us (sincerely) for visiting their city, random old men shake our hands and shout at us in Korean.  This last one, the whole "these people will understand my language if I speak it loudly enough" is apparently a global phenomenon.  I thought it was just us worldly Americans who did this....

Other times, traveling makes you feel like a hobo.  A couple of days ago in Andong, we went to visit the Icheon Dong Buddha which is real famous around those parts.  The mosquitos were so bad we couldn't walk without windmilling our arms to keep them from covering our faces.  Fortunately, they were scared off by a pounding thunderstorm that brought lightning and torrential rain.  This drove us into a bus station covered in spiderwebs where we were treated to a viewing of a shot-glass sized spider catching a moth in its web, mummifying it, and draining it of blood.  Then we waited 1.5 hours for the bus. 

Last night we were wondering around Gyeongju's downtown and I saw, glowing, from across the street a shop so fabulous & so quintessentially Rodney, that I had to go in and touch each of the garments.  That store was called "Thursday Island," and I didn't buy a thing.  Because while there are swank moments when I wish I weren't wearing technical fabrics, the reality is that I ended the evening doing our laundry in the sink at our love motel.  Which isn't very Thursday Island at all.