Giant Mistake Day

This morning, we got up after a few short hours of sleep and somehow stumbled through our morning routine to get to the airport. The train from Yeomchang to Incheon airport was blissfully easy. We wandered the sprawling, sci-fi cavern of the airport (they have gardens in there! a performance stage! a giant spa!) and found the check-in counter for China Southern Air. We got up to the counter and handed over our passports. The girl asked, "Do you have a visa to travel to China?"

Game over. I knew it right then!

HOW could we not have checked whether we need visas to enter China? What a colossal mistake. We said all the stupid things one might expect in that situation: "You need a visa to travel to China? We're Canadian!"

I turned to Isaac and said, "Oh well, it's just money," because I didn't want him to feel too bad about the flights and hotel. The girl at the counter seemed impatient to get on to the next, properly-documented individual in the long line behind us but it was taking us a second to get our jaws off the floor.

As we silently ascended a long escalator, I thought, "Am I not too old to be making such stupid mistakes?" Is there really no age limit to extremely inconvenient, gigantic oversights? It's so embarrassing.

We went to the food area for some overpriced noodles because we hadn't eaten yet. Isaac said, "This will be our secret shame," but of course now I'm blogging it.

We took the train back to our apartment and crawled back into bed before our flight to Shanghai had even climbed into the sky. So sad.

We didn't wake up until the sun had set. What a gross, vampire day. We went to the closest resto in our neighbourhood for dinner. It's always packed. It's the place where the waiter, in our first week, agreed to give us a patio table for the duration of our stay, so I've always felt fond of it but awkward about going in, like I'd have to make small talk to the effect of, "Oh hi, we're the weirdos who dropped in asking to borrow your patio table for a month."

I had been looking forward to some donkatsu. It turns out that despite the Japanese decor, it is not a Japanese restaurant (strike one), instead, it's a smoky bar (strike two) and we ordered the first thing on the menu which turned out to be crazy-spicy odeng (fish cake) and a giant plate of even spicier blood sausage, the exact thing I've been avoiding this entire trip (BLOOD SAUSAGE - YES, this is strike three!).

Blood sausage - I mean, really. Blood sausage is quite popular here on the streets as a quick grab and as a food to eat while you're drinking. It's rice noodles in an intestine casing with blood. It is black. I don't want to eat that! But somehow I ordered a giant plate of it for the two of us even though the menu has photos and English words. How did I manage that?

Sometimes when you're traveling (or NOT as the case may be for us today), it all just comes down to having a good meal. Today we couldn't catch a break.