clubbing at aura

dear diary–
the weekend before last jenny and i went into hongdae to do a little bit of shopping, eating, and band watching. it always seems that every time i venture out there's some little mini-adventure waiting to be had and of course this outing was no different. we started off the day shopping at the ewha womans university stop. it was mostly girl shops but there were a couple of guys stores that are worth checking out again. i tried on a shirt at one of them and it barely fit my upper arms. i seem to have a problem here with buttondown shirts being a bit tight. i'm a little more broader than most of the korean guys here i guess. but never fail, i'll find a shirt one of these days. i also tried on this silver chain belt which was way rad. again it barely fit. sadly i had to put that back too. i also stumbled upon a little punk rock shop. it was great to see that. then i wanted to buy a bandana from this little market store and she wanted 8,000 won [us $8] for it. i wasn't in the mood for bargining so i left. in our journey we stumbled upon this store that has a lot of japanese pop band imports. a whole store devoted to pop stars who all look twelve. you gotta love this country sometimes.i did find a barbapapa notepad. unfortunately it was a bit expensive for me. i still can't believe i actually saw some barbapapa merchandise. barbapapa was my favorite childhood book. for the last couple of years i've been asking people, bookstore clerks, etc. if they ever heard of it and most of the time i got a blank stare. i couldn't remember how to spell it either so that didn't help. then oneday while talking with my friend magali the barbapapa subject came up and knew actually had heard of them. that made me so happy. for awhile there i look i had made the whole thing up. anyway…back to the now. i manage to leave the japanese pop import store empty handed. as we continued on our way we found this giant anime store. HELLO!! how happy was i. the store had lots of great stuff. i bought a little figure. hee-hee. jenny disappeared while i was in the store and returned moments later barring gifts: waffles with creme. i love these things especially when the waffle is nice and warm. during our stroll i noticed little mini-pizza vendors. "what's this new magic", i thought. i haven't seen mini-pizzas before. i didn't get one cuz i had just ate the waffle but next time i'm so going for the "mp". by now it was 6pm and we figured we should start finding our way to the club. jenny forgot the directions and all i had was a map that was in korean. we saw this girl infront of another club and stopped and asked her. we found the club which was kind of the beaten track. we figured we should get some dinner so we started to scout out the area. all we wanted was a pub to drink some beer and something fried. all we kept finding was bbq places. most of these places too were all korean. both of us sucked at speaking or reading korean. as we continued on we saw this cool guitar bar and down an alley i saaw an open door taht said "HELL". not really sure what it is. just as we were about to give up we found a friend chicken place that also had pitchers of beer. score! of course as we order 6 pieces of chicken and a pitcher we realized we had no idea how much it was going to cost. oh well. the chicken was excellent. i love how you can stumble into a place and ending up with a great meal. after dinner we made our way back to club aura. with our admission price was a free drink. we had a choice between welch's grape or strawberry. i went for the strawberry. when we got down to the club everyone was sitting down around the perimeter of the stage. no one was sitting in the middle or up front. odd. we found some seats along the floor and planted our asses down. the first band was a korean band called marijuana. the lead singer of marijuana is so cute. he's going to be my new bf. the music reminded me of a mixture of sonic youth and my bloody valentine. they're my new favorite band. the next and last band to perform was limited express [has gone?]. they're a trio from japan. and how much did i love her and i know misty would too. they were way indie rock with a slight popness to them. during their performance i went over to the merchandise table. marijuana didn't have any goods but limited express [has gone?] did. when i walked over the guy working the merch table gave me a big thumbs up to my smiths shirt. its great to know folk are still listening to the smiths. they didn't have a large tee so all i ended up with was a cd. i chatted with the merch guy for a bit. he was way cool. when i walked back over to jenny the guy from marijuana was standing behind us. after limited express was over i had jenny ask him if they had a cd out. not yet but it will be out in july. yeah!! we hung out a little while longer drinking beer. afterall it was only 2,000 won. jenny's friend who happened to show up wanted his picture taken with the singer from limited express so jenny went over and asked her. the next thing i knew all three of us were having our picture taken with her. hee-hee. overall the crowd was very cool. there were a few annoying wayguks, and during marijuana's set a lot of people with giant cameras kept getting in the way. the one thing i do know is that i will definitely be checking out marijuana again. its been so long since i've seen a gig and i felt so alive after it. it was like i've been rejuvenated. what a great feeling it was. now all we had to do was catch the last train. on our way out i got stopped by one of the girls who work there to make sure i added my email to the list. i told her i did then she asked if she could take my picture with the singer of limited express. after my picture with her she said "thanks for coming". how cute is that. luv her. the trip back home was uneventful except for the fact that i had to pee. be well…

snaps from club aura…
Links

• club aura