a few glimpses of Masan

I'm back from my quick weekend trip down to Masan to meet my friend Neil and his family. Here are some pics, along with a bit of commentary.

First up: a most frou-frou drink that I had at a coffee shop while I talked turkey with Neil. I think it was a strawberry-pineapple combination. It tasted fresh and made me feel like a proper lady. Neil joked that Masan is essentially one huge coffee shop:

I don't think I've ever seen an American-style laundromat—one that even uses the Yankee term "coin laundry"—in Seoul. So this was a bit of a revelation for me:

The next pic is annoyingly blurry. Apologies. My cell-phone camera sucks when it comes to nighttime pictures, and I suck as a photographer. I took this pic, and the next one, because both restaurants use the term il beonji, which translates as "Number One." That's a Japanese thing to do ("Number One" is ichiban in Japanese), and just as Korean accents sound more Japanese the closer one gets to Japan, it may be that certain Japanese-style locutions occur with greater frequency as one nears the Land of the Rising Sun.

This pic shows the il beonji more clearly:

Avert your virgin eyes if you're trying to remain mentally and spiritually chaste, because below, it's time for CUNT WARS! This little bit of arcade-style naughtiness is what showed up on my monitor when I booted up the computer in my yeogwan room. No, of course I didn't play the video game. Are you nuts? I would probably have had to pay a fee or something. And for what? To watch cartoon girls fuck each other? I don't normally say much about my sexual preferences on this blog, but let me make it clear that I really, really don't find animé girls a turn-on. At all. There's a creepiness factor that makes animé girls vaguely repellent to me, just as the thought of having sex with a sex bot sounds like mechanized necrophilia. Anyway, that queasiness aside, I found Cunt Wars to be a hilarious way for my computer to greet me. And could the artist have made those nipples look any more generic? (Also: it might not be visible, but if you look carefully, the "A" in "Wars" is shaped like a pudendum. Priceless.)

It's the next day, now—Sunday—and I'm out with Neil and his family at a bayside coffee shop, catching a glimpse of some of the huge ships plying the waters in this port city:

For obvious reasons of privacy, Neil doesn't want me showing pics of his family, so I've severely cropped the next two photos so as to reveal only their appendages.

More appendages here:

Another view of the water, this time from behind the coffee shop, which had some very nice, landscaped property behind it. It was a beautiful day to be out and about:

Also on the property was a cage with three dogs in it: two puppies, and an adult dog that I assumed must be the mother of the other two. Here's one of the puppies, who was very cute and pretty docile, possibly because of the ambient heat:

Caveat: the above series of pics doesn't really give you much of an idea of what Masan is actually like. If I understand Neil correctly, Masan started out as a city unto itself, but now, it's been subsumed into a larger municipality. The way Neil describes it, the Masan/Changweon region actually has three downtown areas, each with its own particular character. There was too much to explore over the course of a short weekend, just in Masan, but now that I've made the acquaintance of Neil's fine family, I hope to return to the area and do a bit more reconnoitering. It was a great weekend, albeit all too brief.