Sleeping in

I was so tired yesterday evening that I fell asleep as soon as I got to my hotel room. I woke up around 10:00 a.m. (sleep schedule fixed?) and started updating the blog. I went to get some food in the local supermarkets around my hotel. I bought some snacks from my food list and finally found some fruit!

Trying to get tickets

Tonight there was another TWICE concert at the same venue. I had bought tickets using Viagogo when I was in the Netherlands. The sellers said they had sent the tickets to my address a week earlier, but they didn’t arrive before I left for Seoul. Another weird thing was that the tracking code seemed to be invalid, as the tracking software didn’t recognize it. I had been in contact with Viagogo about this for a few days, but they kept telling me, “Wait till it gets there,” “The seller says they are on the way,” “If you miss out, you get your money back.” Getting my money back is nice, but I’d rather have the tickets.

I finally got the call that the order was marked as “unfulfilled,” and I received an email saying I would get a full refund. But now I had to find new tickets. I eventually found a site that still had some, but all the information was in Cantonese. I managed to translate everything, find the tickets I wanted, and get to the payment step. But when I tried to use Alipay, I kept running into this error: “Error: It is too busy, try again later.”

I think I spent maybe three hours trying and waiting until I finally gave in. The ticket prices had surged to a point I wasn’t comfortable paying, especially for a concert I had seen less than 24 hours ago. I also felt the risk of being scammed was growing by the minute. I reminded myself that I already had tickets for the show on the 18th, and trying for this one too would probably be pushing my luck too far.

It really sucked, but there wasn’t much I could have done.

Taipa Village

I walked to Taipa Village, the old Portuguese town on the southern island. This area was filled with food stalls and vendors handing out samples. This was great because it was dinner time and I was HUNGRY. I stuffed my face with cookies, sweets, jerky, and beef offal—anything I could find.

But even here I couldn’t get away from TWICE. Multiple vendors had adorned their stalls with TWICE posters and were blasting their music. So I just got a milk tea at the TWICE coffee shop, ate a fried pork chop bun, and walked around the area. It felt weird walking through a cozy Iberian town in Asia. I walked up some stairs and found a small church. From there, I had a view of the hedonistic city. The contrast between the quaint streets of Taipa and the massive casinos in the background was surreal.

After stuffing myself to the brim with snacks, I headed back to the hotel to make it an early night.