Earlier today, after breakfast, I was feeling energetic and restless, and I said to Andrew, I’m going to take a walk. He came along, of course.
We walked over to the new “Onemount” mall that’s been built on the west end of Lake Park, a few blocks from my apartment. There is a waterpark inside the mall. That’s pretty common in Korea – waterparks, I mean. But there is also a “snow park” in this mall – ice skating, manufactured snow, an indoor sledding slope. That’s not so common. I think some hot day I’m going to pay the entrance fee and try it out.
Then we walked into Lake Park. That’s a common enough walking route for me. The air was stormy and thundery and deep gray overcast. It was beautiful. And there was enough of a breeze that the heat wasn’t so stifling.
I knew there was a “toilet museum” inside Lake Park – I’d seen it before. But I’d never actually visited it, although it’s a kind of famous (or infamous) landmark in Ilsan. Today it was open as Andrew and I walked past, so we visited the Toilet Museum.
Then we saw some men running one of those sewer-exploring robots – just something in maintenance going on unrelated to being next to the Toilet Museum. We watched them for a while – they seemed disorganized.
We walked toward the southeast end of the lake. That area looking toward the highway bridge over the lake always reminds me a little bit of Minneapolis’ Uptown area.
Then we walked around the end of the lake and ended up going to HomePlus, where I bought some vitamins and exotic tea and a few other things.
Then spontaneously I said, “How about instead of going home for lunch we go to that Indian Restaurant that I like that’s near here?”
Andrew seemed to like this idea.
So we had Indian food for lunch: samosa, vegetable raita, malkhi dal, some mutton curry, lots of garlic naan bread. Very delicious.
It was pouring rain so hard when we left the restaurant that we stopped in a cafe and had coffee and talked for a long time.
When the rain had let up and we finished our coffee, we hurried home and I quickly got ready and went to work.
Work felt good today: I felt useful. I did a substitute teaching in one class, because of a scheduling mistake. Then I corrected some student essays and helped fixed the scheduling mistake.
I like feeling useful.
