When we arrived at the place that Waze deemed was the appropriate location, I was a little confused. No where in sight was a cave, all we saw was a huge factory that was painted bright pink with big fluffy white clouds. All around the grounds of the factory were super random sculptures and what appeared to be larger then life works of 3-D art. We were limited on our time, since Little A had Taekwondo at 3:00, so we didn't have time to see the art around the Pink Factory. We will have to save that for another day.
I didn't see a cave anywhere. Luckily, most signs in Korea are in Korean and English, so we followed the arrows to the cave. After walking up a million stairs and down a long street, we finally arrived at the mouth of a cave!
When we entered the cave, we were immediately surrounded by thousands of multicolor lights! As you walked down the throat of the cave, beautiful changing lights were on every surface area of the arched walls. The lights would change from solid colors, to neon colors, then to multi colors, back to solid colors.
The Korean workers/ guides would hurry us along if we stopped to look at something or to admire something. They were always shooing us out of the different rooms. Or they would not let us move straight if we were going to miss a side cave.
One such side cave was a mini aquarium. This is seriously Korea at it's finest! If one word could describe South Korea, it would be "random". Who would think- hmmm, let's combine a cave, aquarium, concert room, later show, art sculpture, history museum, and wine cafe into one...
Back to the first act of randomness- a mini aquarium. There were so many neat fish to behold. There was a large open tank along one wall, and a bunch of small tanks built into the wall. We saw so many different fish. The fish that won the most favorite award, was a goldfish- looking fish, that had gigantic air bubbles for cheeks. The kids kept going back to that tank just to get a giggle.
The second act of randomness, was the wishing ornaments. It reminded me of the locks on the N. Seoul Tower. A little vendor had a stand where you could buy a Korean Luck ornament and tie it to the cave for a wish. It was only about 3000 won, so we bought our wish. As I was getting ready to tie it onto the cave wall, Big Sis snatches it and very secretively hides it in her pocket and asks if we can take it home and put it on our tree instead. I said I didn't know if it would bring us bad luck, but since we paid for it, I didn't see an issue. So we took a vote and all the kids wanted to keep the wish and take it home. So, the semi-stolen cave wish made it's way to our home and Christmas tree.
The third act of randomness was a scene from Lord of the Rings. In one section of the cave, Golem and a huge Dragon were made and displayed. The kids thought the dragon was the coolest thing!
The fourth Randomness that we encountered was an indoor garden. Inside this cave was a huge section that was a mini botanical garden. The plants were green, lush, thriving and beautiful. I'm not exactly sure how this came about, but it was neat seeing green life so far below the surface.
The last two acts of randomness, were the mini History Museum and the Wine Restaurant. The best part about the wine restaurant was that we had a ton of small kids. Remember how I said the guides/ workers would shoo us along and hurry us if we stopped in the wrong location? The Wine Restaurant was one of those instances. The guide stood in our way and gestured that we needed to go down the cave to the right. We figured that was the only way, so down we went. We thought we were missing an exit, but after finding nothing, we went back the way we came, only to find the same guide with a smile and now showing us down another tunnel.
I am so happy about the Korean Randomness! I loved the cave and all the unexpected that it produced. The kids also loved the cave. When we left the cave we had about 10 minutes before we had to leave, so we sat down and ate our sack lunches. Around the outside of the cave were more statues and art structures. We took a few minutes to look around at all the art work around the cave. Here are a few of them:
No comments:
Post a Comment