................Taking Flight...............: Breaking Ji out of "prison" and back to Kyunghee University

Jacob and I met in Hapjeong to go visit Ji. My friend is still in the hospital after his knee surgery. He said he will probably be released Nov 3, the final push-back. And he’ll start working on the 6^th. Poor guy. Anyway, we arrived at the hospital and found him on the roof with another roommate. He didn’t have crutches or a wheelchair with him! He had started walking about 2 days earlier. We asked what he wanted for lunch and he said he wanted to break out of his “prison” and go to Wangsimni Station (big subway station with a mall and movie theater above the station). We had lunch in the food court and then talked about watching a movie. So we went to the CGV and looked at the movies and times. Nothing really jumped out at us, so we decided to pass. Ji called his girlfriend, Yeojin and told her to come meet us. We browsed in some of the stores and then went to meet Yeojin when she arrived. She hadn’t eaten anything so she went to get some bread and then we did a little bit more ‘shopping’/browsing. Ji wanted to do a photobooth thing—where you can get your pictures taken with your friends with different backgrounds and add decorations to the pictures, but when we went to where he thought the store was, it wasn’t there anymore. We went to get coffee instead and sat outside talking. Jacob had bought Uno, so we taught them Uno and played a few rounds.

Ji was getting tired—he hasn’t been doing too much at the hospital and he hasn’t been walking for long. We did quite a bit of walking earlier so he and Yeojin went back to the hospital. Jacob and I went on to visit Kyunghee University. We figured since we were already on the east side of Seoul we should visit our alma mater. Jacob did the Kyunghee University program (that I did last fall) in March. There was a fried rice/stirfry place we both knew so we picked that for dinner. When we arrived to the area, we couldn’t find the restaurant! We spent about 10 minutes walking around trying to find it. Just as we were about to give up we decided to go one other direction and…there it was! “Oori Doori” is the name of the restaurant. We got ‘pizza fried rice’ with extra cheese. Yum. It was delicious. Then we went to take a walk on campus and went to visit our old language building. We stopped to get ice cream at a Baskin Robbins and then took the subway back to the west side.