We somehow forgot that children carry a myriad of little ailments. The majority of children we teach have yet to master the ancient technique of covering your mouth while you cough or sneeze. They do it openly, freely, and sometimes even passionately. One of our students even imitated a monster after sneezing and having snot come parading out of his nose. Of course the students thought it was a riot, and we have to admit that even we laughed a little. Now that we are sick, the humor of it has somewhat faded away.

Our plans for the weekend were to see Insadong and Itaewon, the two more alternative and traditional districts within the city of Seoul. Itaewon is basically the American district of Seoul, and is reputed to even have a Hooters. Guess it was a toss up between that or Chuckie Cheeses. But skanky restaurants aside, we both lacked the drive and health to visit either district and so were stuck with option B...Go and see what Koreans deemed LOTTE WORLD, their equivalent to the Mall of America.

We figure that any experience here has to be confronted with an open mind, being that so much of Korea orients its activities to one past time...Shopping! Thus it was with trepidation and a sense of defeat that we entered Lotte World; the halogen, concrete mecca of discount shopping, overpriced leather, and bad restaurants. But it wasn't all that bad.

Most of the day was spent people watching and marveling at how incredibly big the place was. There was everything from a theme park to an ice skating rink, including over six floors of merchandise, food, and other various things. It wasn't until we stumbled onto the gamers convention that we were able to really laugh at where we were.

For those of you who wouldn't have guessed it, video games are huge here. There is even a television station that runs two guys playing a computer game against each other, while another man announces the events like it was a WWF match. This runs twenty four hours a day. The anomaly is that these guys are celebrities, entertainers, a kind of new century athlete. In America we have shows about them, but they usually carry a theme like "Intervention," "Manchild Arrested in Development," and so on.

From the third floor we could see a complete fashion show with models dressed up as video game characters, who simulated everything from sword fights, karate moves, running from their pimps, and gunning down the bad guys. There was also an entire paparazzi there to photograph the show, a DJ, a man with a giant fog machine, and a predominantly male audience on standby waiting to actually order some of the costumes modeled. Adjacent to this there were about one to two hundred gaming booths where you simply just play video games. You are rewarded by making the effort to play in the mall, rather than on your couch, by being given a beautiful Korean girl bedecked in nearly nothing to stand next to you and root you on as you attempt to proceed to the next level...STUD! And to top it off, complimentary energy drinks in case you tire yourself out in the vigorous process of gaming. Being that it was too intense for us to even dare get close to, we decided ten minutes of marveling was good enough. With wide eyes and a box of hot chocolate mix, we decided to take our leave.

Every time we return home we seem to always smile at how fortunate we are to live in what is, in Korea, a quite place. Whether we have been conditioned or merely raised right to be impatient with excess is beyond either of us. LOTTE WORLD was nothing more than a challege of acceptance and tolerance. We aren't shoppers, but we aren't subject to be above going to see a giant mall and finding it interesting.