Strange and Wonderful Things

I made a few discoveries today that I have to share. The first goes under my mental list of "awesome" things here that don't exist back home.
I'm usually bad with money, but I'm actually very good about keeping up with my check book. I'm not one of those people that will stand at the checkout and enter the total into my book, but I will go home, sort through all my receipts each night, and check what's in my checkbook against what's cleared on my account online. So after having to switch to a different bank, KB, because the first bank, ShinHan, wouldn't give me a check card, only an ATM card (which really defeats the purpose of having an account, don't you think?), I stopped by the ATM to check my balance since I got paid today. As I'm carefully looking through the menu options, I notice an 'Update Passbook' button. And I look a little more closely at the ATM, and notice that not only is there a place for cash, for your card, and for the receipt, but a place to enter your passbook, which is like a checkbook, but has your account information printed on it. So I hit the button, insert my passbook, and without even inserting my card, the ATM scans my passbook, determines what's already been printed and where, and then prints all of the transactions on my account since the last entry! How cool is that?!? Imagine being able to go to a Bank of America ATM, inserting your checkbook, and having the bank print all your missing entries. It's almost like a portable quickbooks or something.
Completely unrelated, but also wonderful, I found a tiny little shop in the metro station that sells body jewelry. They also do piercings, but it can't be sanitary. Imagine getting pierced in the subway station... uck. Anyway, they have a bunch of earrings that are my size (they go by millimeters here and not gauges), so if I loose mine, I know where to get replacements.

So tomorrow is Friday, and then I have to be at the metro station at 5am on Saturday. We're going with Adventure Korea to the Mud Festival. We're taking a chartered bus from the express bus station to Boreyung, where I'm going to spend the weekend at the Mud Festival. I'm really looking forward to it, and if I can keep my camera from getting too muddy, I'll post pictures next week.

Edit: I forgot to write about the Strange Things I encountered as well. It was in my lunch. Or to be more exact, it was my lunch. What was it you ask? Minnows. You know those little tiny fish that swim in shallow water? Yeah, those. They're dried, and caramelized. In soy sauce. I ate them in my rice. Other than the obvious squeemishness I encountered while eating little dried fish with their eyes still intact, they're actually not that bad on rice. Much better than the sponge-like substance that was in my soup today. When I say sponge, it was like they cut up a dish sponge, baked it in mushroom water, and then handed it to me in a bowl. Lovely.