Bang to the Bang

There comes a time in every man's life when he has to make a decision. A fork in the road approaches nigh, and a choice must be made as to which way the rest of your journey unfolds. I sometimes feel like I either stopped my journey to take a satisfying dump or lassoed the nearest albatross to take me away to Never Never Land. Alas, neither is true. My life, like yours is on a path through time and space to an ultimate end point. Since coming to Korea, I've considered part of my journey to be blogging. Now, I'm not having the break up talk with you, but I'm just laying it down that I find it more difficult to blog these days when life runs together and I forget to bring my camera almost all the time. Things are not divided into hilarious episodes as they once were. I believe that also is denoted by a decrease in readership?

With that said, let's see. What do I have to tell you? I thought I had something, but I drank those brain cells away. Ah yes...

Ah no...

Ah yes...

So I was finally lucky enough to visit the illustrious Woobang Tower Land last weekend. This was on Sunday with Saturday being the big bull push--er, fight. The only way to describe Woobang Land would be to say that the $20 entrance fee was pushing it. Hey, Woobang, you're pushing your luck there.

I can tell you, in detail, the experience I had on every ride I went on because there were only about six that I could tell (outside of the kiddie rides):

First, we hit that one carnival ride where they strap about twenty of your luckiest friends into one of two caged cars that subsequently swings to build up momentum (like that stupid pirate ship ride) until it eventually flips you upside down. I believed this would be a good litmus test for the rest of the park as to whether the rides could accommodate a person of Western stature (read: fatass), and it generally was. My shoulders are still a little tender from the bar. It wouldn't have been so bad if the shoulder bar actually did anything to keep me in the seat. Instead I had to hold on for dear life with my feet, lest I fall through the cage bars to my, perhaps, timely death.

The second ride consisted of a single "car" (used liberally) that held maybe 40 people and teeter-tottered forward and backward on a central axis while being flung around in a quick circle. This one, instead of focusing on my shoulders as the basis for pain infliction, decided (correctly) that my balls would be a more vulnerable target. The seats inexplicably had a gentle hill where a normal man would rest himself that almost perfectly fit in sync with the shoulder bar that you lowered, creating a vice. They literally had me by the balls. This was surely planned out by the engineers as some kind of forced self-torture. Despite this flaw, I can still say it was more fun than the first in at least during the second ride I didn't hear the carney maniacally laughing as we spun.

The third ride was a roller coaster that I would rate one step above my first one ever, the Scooby Doo. It was called 'The Camel' alluringly enough because it only had one selling point: hills. It had the necessary curves to make its shape a two storied race track. You could tell it was one of the first steel coasters ever built by the Soviet style architecture. Still, those are fun in their own right. Clearly most fun ride thus far. Our fourth ride would be the culmination of Woobang Land. Do you like my use of suspense? I'm a regular Alfred Hitchcock here.

The fourth ride actually had the caliber of a ride above and beyond Woobang's low bar setting. I don't recall if it had a name or not, but it was the kind of roller coaster that brings you up the hill backward with the help of a magical magnet only to launch you forward through the housing you boarded the coaster from. Then it proceeds to go through a few loops and then up a one sided hill. Once to the top of this hill, you are sent back through the same course you just traversed but backwards, doing your best to remember what came next amid the jarring G force hurling you around at a larger object's will.

The fifth ride wasn't even a ride. I include it because it was just as adrenalitous as the other four. It was one of those stupid haunted houses, equally-stupidly named "Ghost Adventure." The reason I hate these things is not because they are lame. They totally are. The reason I hate them so much is because there are always those things that jump out at you and I hate that feeling. So, instead I slowly creep through the whole thing with my fuse at its end because I feel constantly annoyed and I just want to get out. Only...this one didn't have anything pop out at you. So the feeling was for nothing. Which, to me, was probably better than having people and spring action anamatronics scare the crap out of me.

If you tally up those numbers, that comes to just about $4 per ride. That's definitely pushing it, Woobang. Granted, one of the roller coasters was closed and we got a $5 off coupon for it, and most of it was geared toward children, what with the fuzzy Russian actors and the carousel rides. Anyway, good job Daegu. It was a fun Sunday.