John Goes to Lotte World

For our first full day in Korea we decided to visit Lotte World.  Lotty, just your friendly small fuzzy ambigous  mammal, was the mascot for the park.  The centerpiece of the park was a large blue and white castle.  Starting to sound familiar?  Anyway other than the many similarities Lotte World  had to a certain amusement park in the U.S., we were constantly reminded of the differences between our two cultures.  Most of the rides, for example, brazenly forbade drunken guests.  The Korean people also seem to be absolutely fascinated with marching bands, and not the high school kind. Rows of women in outfits that looked precisely like cheerleader uniforms marched out into the crowd right before opening, and began to play and swing their instruments back and forth violently.  The crowd went berserk.  After going inside we decided to ride Atlantic Adventure, one of their best rides.  We climbed into the car and lowered the safety bar.  We sat there anticipating the slow, suspensful movement towards the edge of the drop.  We were both quite surprised when the car immediately shot out  and sent us plunging over the edge.  Another challenge to our expectations was the male reactions to the ride.  They weren't afraid to wail at high pitch tones right along with their female counterparts.  After our Atlantic Adventure we decided to visit the Haunted House, and yet again have our preconceived ideas challenged.  At the entrance of the Haunted House a women was handing out 3-D glasses.  Mom and I assumed that there would be tvs on the wall where things could jump out at us.  We must have looked pretty foolish to the other people in our group as we stumbled over ourselves in a dark made even worse by those shaded glasses. Finally we arrived at the 3-D movie theater. The movie was absolutely bizarre.  It followed a normal looking cat pursuing a mouse through a haunted house.  In a final twist we discover that the cat is actually a ghost.  Sounds familiar cough Sixth Sense cough cough.  We enjoyed various other rides and the folk museum at the park.  Overall it was a really fun, interesting day.  I hope you enjoyed this enormous paragraph.

John