My alarm went off on Saturday morning, and I was oh so tempted to just throw it across the room. But instead, I pulled myself out of bed (my eyes glaring at the bright light that was shining through my blinds) and threw myself into the shower to wake myself up. I took it slowly, gradually getting ready with occasional checks of my e-mail in between and was out of the house by 10am to meet Geri and Jess and head together to the bus terminal to meet Shaina.

After missing our intended bus, we were on our way to Osan about an hour later than expected, but in high spirits none the less. An hour later we arrived at Osan bus terminal and dragged ourselves off the bus to wait in the freezing cold for a train to Songtan and finally bundled ourselves into a taxi to get to the marketplace. What was so important that I was willing to not only wake myself at 7am, but also travel halfway across the country for?

DR FISH! I finally found one!!! Jess had told me about it weeks and weeks earlier, and ever since I had been mentioning it at random intervals and trying to convince her to come with me. With Shaina's help, we finally persuaded her, and decided to make it a real girly day out - manicures, pedicures, shopping and eating to be included. But it was the Dr. Fish that had really sold me.

After arriving at the spa, we were directed to the back of the room where we glanced into a pond that was indeed filled with little (and some not so little) fish that were waiting to feast on our feet. We went in one at a time, washing our feet before climbing into the pond and carefully placing them in the fishy haven. I let out a little squeal as I placed my feet in and they all swarmed towards me to start nibbling. I am generally ticklish, and this was worse than I had imagined. They all pounced on me and I had about fifty of the little fishies on me at once. As you can imagine, having so many on you can lead to being more than just a little ticklish, and it did in fact hurt at times (particularly when they started attacking a small mole on my ankle) but I still managed to stay in for a good fifteen minutes, occasionally removing my feet to give them a bit of a rest.

Next up were the pedicures. We were seated in massage chairs with foot spas bubbling away at their bases, and I started really relaxing, the tiredness that came from my early wake-up finally kicking in. And then the woman came to work on me. I had never had a pedicure before, and my feet were fairly disastrous to tell the truth. I have never been a fan of my feet, and have thus never looked after them particularly well. This meant that I spent a little longer at the chair than the rest of my friends. My ticklish feet did get in the way at times, and the instruments that were used seemed absolutely horrifying, though none of them were particularly painful. I managed through it, however, and came out of it with beautifully smooth feet and pretty pink toenails with flower designs on them. So yay! After the pedicures came the manicures, another first for me. This was a far less torturous ordeal, however, and was over quicker than I had imagined. I came out of it with pretty pink fingernails to match my toes, with flower designs on my thumbs, and spent the next five minutes drying them off while Jess, Shaina and Geri patiently waited for me to finish up. I managed to put on my shoes without destroying the artwork too much, and it was time to pay up and head off to our next destination. Shopping ahead!

When we had walked down the market on the way to the spa, Shaina had spotted a handbag store, and that was the first destination on our shopping tour. We wandered into the shop and looked around at the rather badly made Louis Vuitton, Juicy and Coach fakes. These weren't what Shaina had in mind.
"Is this all," she asked the shop owner, who looked at her confusedly.

"Better?" she tried again.

With understanding dawning on the owners face, he told us to wait upstairs as he made his way down a narrow staircase. We waited around, wondering if what he had downstairs was really worth our time. A few moments later, he came back up and indicated for us to follow him. We made our own way down the narrow staircase and found ourself in what appeared to be the storeroom. We looked around us, and weren't very impressed.

"It's all the same stuff," Jess announced, saying exactly what all of us were thinking.

The owner squeezed past us (the storeroom was not particularly large and there were four of us down there after all) and pushed open a door that doubled as a mirror, opening up a roomful of handbags beyond. A communal "aah" filled the room as understanding dawned on us and was quickly followed by laughter as we realised just how dodgy a situation we had gotten ourselves into. Only two people could squeeze in there along with the owner, and Geri and I impatiently waited as we heard Jess and Shaina "Ooh" and "Aah" over their findings. After a few minutes, Jess returned to the real world clutching three handbags and Shaina returned cradling one and it was our turn to check out the room. I wandered in and my eye immediately fell on a Coach handbag that I absolutely fell in love with and had to have despite it's price. I also ended up walking away with a Chanel purse (wallet for the Americans) that I couldn't resist buying for myself, especially since my own was in the process of falling apart. Geri also bought three of the Chanel purses and we left the shop with thick black bags filled with our finds to hide their quality from the outside world.

We wandered down the streets some more, glancing at shops and occasionally stopping to look at or buy something or other (I left with some fans to give as gifts) before making our way to a Brazillian restaurant for an early dinner. If Dr. Fish hadn't been enough to convince me that this was a trip that I wanted to make, Jess's raving about this restaurant would definitely have done the trick. And her raving was well deserved. We seated ourselves at a table and prepared ourselves for the meal that was to come. First off came the salad bar where you could take as much stew, soup and salad as you liked. Along with the normal salad ingredients of lettuce, tomato, cucumber and (normal in Korea anyway) corn, you could add quails eggs, string beans, olives and a number of other bits and bobs. There was also "potato salad", which caused a bit of a stir between me and the Americans. I would refer to as mashed potato with carrots, having grown up with what is apparently traditional South African potato salad. After a few minutes, the meat started arriving and it didn't stop coming - sirloin steak, bacon-wrapped beef, bacon-wrapped chicken, roast beef, garlic steak, two different kinds of chicken that were both grilled and both delicious and more. By the time dessert arrived we were absolutely stuffed and there was some talk of purging, but none of us could resist the cinnamon grilled pineapple that arrived for dessert, and it was truly heavenly after such a rich meal.

After paying, it was time to walk it off and we decided to try and find the Love Store that was said to be situated in the area. We wandered around for a minute outside the shop before spotting it directly opposite, only to discover that it was closed. Not to be disuaded from our quest, we asked someone for directions to another one, and were given them without any qualms or hesitation (from a Korean, I might add, which I thought was quite humorous in itself). And so we were on our way. After walking for around twenty minutes without any luck, we were starting to lose hope and, looking at the time, we decided to give up our quest and hail a taxi instead. We signalled one down and climbed into the cab and were on our way to the bus terminal. There was a bit of confusion about which terminal we wanted to go to, but after about five minutes of driving in the wrong direction, we were on the right track and passing the place where we had been picked up.

"Let's see if it was further down," Jess suggested.

And sure enough, two blocks later, we spotted a building with a giant heart on the front and words like "sexy" and "erotic" written on the side. This was it! Our quest was a success!

"Yogi-yo!" we shouted. "Yogi-yo! Yogi-Yo! YOGI-YO!" Until the absolutely confused driver did a u-turn and realised just what it was that we wanted.

We tipped him for his efforts, something that I have never done in Korea, since tipping is usually frowned upon, but we decided that if ever a situation called for a tip, this was it. We made our way inside into the dingy building and spent about five minutes looking around before leaving, some of the girls having found a couple of goodies for fairly reasonable prices. Now that our quest had been completed, we hailed down another taxi and really made our way back home.

I arrived back home and immediately went on Skype to tell Grant about the day I'd had. I was fairly exhausted, and rightly so, and was just about ready for bed, but wanted to tell him about how much fun my girly-day-out had been. Upon telling him about the bags, he said something that I had put out of my mind for the whole day.

"You realise that handbag was probably stolen."

I had vaguely considered it, but the thought had been easily ignored amidst the mountain of fun that we were having. As soon as Grant mentioned it though, I started worrying. Buying a fake handbag was one thing. Buying a stolen handbag was another. That was feeding into the crime that tends to corrupt South Africa, and it wasn't something that I wanted to support. Even the idea that I had bought stolen goods made me feel terrible, and so, hours later, after I had settled into my bed for what was supposed to be a night of rest, I was still awake thinking about it. I SMSed Jess to see if she was awake, and she was. So we started a skype call where we started checking our "fake" Coach handbags and comparing them to the real things (which we each happened to have one of). We brought up websites and started checking the lists of things that indicated that a Coach bag was fake and, about 20 items down, I found one that reassured me that it was indeed a fake rather than stolen merchandise. It was something that I would never have noticed otherwise, but the quality statement on the inside of the bag wasn't quite right. While a real Coach will say "This is a genuine Coach bag," mine read "This is a genuine leather bag." While that in itself wasn't quite enough to dissuade me, the minor typo further down the statement was. Once that had been found, the other small things that could have been excused - there was no number on the zip, for example, which most (though not all) Coach bags have - all started adding up, and my worries were qualmed.

I ended up getting a great night's sleep, fed by my worrying I'm sure, and am extremely happy to say that the day ended up being a complete success. It's just a shame that I won't be able to go back there before I leave. If I am ever in Korea again, though, you can be sure that this is one day-stop I'm going to make!