Day 12: Tashkent - Meeting Koryo-Saram - Part I

When I woke up, the passengers around me were packing up and the train crew were loudly announcing that we were arriving in Tashkent. Outside was still pitch-dark, but the carriage was brightly filled with the familiar cold white light of Uzbek night trains. I wasn’t sure how long I had been out, but it didn’t feel like a long time. My whole body was screaming for more rest. I sat up, drank some water, and stared out the window as the train slowly passed some lonely light poles. My throat still felt sore, but at least it didn’t feel worse than the night before. I sat there for a while, crouching in that compact space with my head touching the ceiling, zoning out to the rhythmic metallic clank of the train wheels. The day was probably going to be a bit challenging, as I wouldn’t have a place to go until the 3:20AM flight in the following morning. I hoped the airport would have some comfortable place to chill.

The train slowly pulled into Tashkent South station and came to a stop with a loud, hysterical shriek. When I stepped onto the cold platform, the dark sky was already taking on a blue hue, and the smell of dawn was all around. Across the tracks, the blue sign on top of the station glared, “Toshkent Janubiy,” reminding me that I had returned once again to my last Central Asian city before heading into the Caucasus.

The time was only around six o’clock, and it was too early to do anything. I couldn’t kill time at the station because the morning air was so chilling. In search of a more humane temperature, I hopped on a bus to head to the Tashkent international airport. I figured I’d check out the place to see where I could stay that evening before my red-eye flight. Outside the bus window, the dawn was breaking fast and the darkness was fading from the sky. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with fellow passengers looking eager to start their days, all my doubts and worries about feeling unwell slowly gave way to a naive optimism and an excitement about the coming day. That day, I was going to follow the history of Koryo-Saram, the ethnic Koreans who used to live in the former Soviet Union countries.

In Korean, Koryo-Saram literally means a person from “Koryo,” a historical name for Korea. In Central Asia, there lived many Koryo-Saram who had been wrongfully exiled to this part of the world from the Russian Far East during the Soviet era when tensions with the Japanese Empire escalated. How did they survive, and what kind of life did they build here? I wanted to see for myself and talk to my distant compatriots. If I could have one candid conversation with a Koryo-Saram that day, the many months I had spent struggling to teach myself Russian would definitely have been worthwhile.

The situation at the airport was no better than the train station. It was warmer but people were practically sitting on the floor because there weren’t enough benches. There was also a baggage store but it was 150,000 sum ($12) which was as expensive as a night in a hostel. I walked out of the airport disappointed, carrying my entire backpack. I hopped on a bus to go to Chorsu bazaar to eat some food and find a place to sit down until things opened up. After getting on the wrong bus which took me further outside Tashkent, I managed to finally find a bus toward Chorsu. Having been on the road for a while, I was oblivious to the fact that it was a weekday. So I was caught off guard when the bus was full of rush hour commuters and students, and I had to inconvenience everyone by squeezing my oversized backpack into the crowd.

Trying hard to balance myself on my feet as the bus rumbled toward central Tashkent, all I could think about was that I had no idea about where to go after getting to Azerbaijan the following day. Considering that I had twelve days to reach Dublin, the lack of plan was quite worrying. Tbilisi was a possible next destination as it was on the way to Istanbul, but apparently the trains between Baku and Tbilisi had been suspended. Also, I wasn’t sure whether one day in Baku would be enough, as Kostya suggested on the train to Samarkand. I also wanted to visit other cities such as Naftalan or Batumi on my way to Istanbul, but whether I would have the time was a big unknown. The bumpy bus ride was no place to figure out a solution to such complex situations–it was too hard to concentrate. The best way, it seemed to me, would be to figure it out once I got to Azerbaijan. So I tried to not worry and instead just looked outside the window as Tashkent slowly woke up.

I suddenly realized that my most pressing concern wasn’t actually about what to do once I got to Azerbaijan, but getting there. I had never bothered to check whether I needed a visa. Having rarely applied for a visa in the past, I had assumed that I didn’t need one. I quickly searched the Internet and found that I needed a visa, after all. It was bad news, because my flight to Baku was in less than twenty-four hours and I couldn’t afford to stay another day in Tashkent to wait for the visa processing. All this time, I was worried that sickness would derail me from the trip, but it was my own negligence that threatened to jeopardize everything. As a silver lining, there was an express application that would take three hours. I got off the bus near Chorsu bazaar, crouched in front of a shopping center that was still closed, and hurriedly submitted my express visa application on my laptop. I could only hope that the express application worked as advertised, and that I didn’t make any mistakes on the application that I had filled out in such a hurry.

With the visa problem out of the way, I turned my attention to the day’s plans. I needed to head to this village called Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz. During the time of the Soviet Union, a “kolkhoz” was a collective farm, and this village was a kolkhoz that had been largely run by Koryo-Saram. The village was situated south of Tashkent, and the map showed no public transportation for getting there. There were some taxis that would cost around 80,000 sum ($6.18), but taking a taxi straight to the village didn’t sound very fun. I figured I’d take a subway to Qu’yliq station which was at the far southeastern corner of the Tashkent metro. Qu’yliq was almost halfway to Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that there would be some local transportation that would take me to the village from there. I headed to the subway station with this plan in mind, ready to begin my day once and for all. I was kind of hungry because I didn’t even have a proper dinner in Bukhara the night before. So I nibbled on the samsa that the Belgian grandma had given me the other day. It tasted a bit stale but still gave me some much-needed energy. The blue sky and freshly crisp morning air emboldened my steps, filling me with a vague hope about the day.

At the station, I got on an old Soviet subway car which raced loudly through the dark tunnels, leaving behind whooshing echoes and high-pitched squeals. The rush hour had already ended and, through the subway window, I was able to peek at the impressive and grandiose architecture that adorned the stations along the way. The old train car passed Alisher Navoiy station with exaggerated arches and towering domes. Everything there was built in such a dramatic style that I would never have expected to see in a subway station. Then, we passed Kosmonavtlar station which was filled with these impressive mosaics and murals depicting the space program. There was a large image of an astronaut waving from space, and I could guess that it was probably of Yuri Gagarin, the first “cosmonaut.” Then there was this station, Gafur Gulom, which went all out with lavish columns throughout the platform. But not all the stations had the same flamboyant design. There was this station called Mashinasozlar, which had more restrained and brutalist architecture featuring square and austere columns. Its walls were devoid of any decorations and simply had the name of the station written in plain block letters. Eventually, I transferred to a more modern subway line which seemed to have been built quite recently. I rode in a fancier subway car which made less noises and had nice screens. Somehow the raw and unprocessed ride of the old subway line felt more pleasant.

After riding for about an hour, I arrived at Qu’yliq, a modern-looking subway station basking in the bright rays of the autumn sun that was now high up in the cloudless sky. Now I somehow needed to find a way to get to Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz. “Kim Pen Khva” was a Russian transliteration of a Korean name more closely pronounced as “Kim Byeong Hwa.” Since it was neither an Uzbek nor a Russian word, I was doubtful whether people would even understand me when I asked for directions. There was only one way to find out–I started asking people around me, “Ya khochu poyehkat v Kim Pen Khva, kak mozhno?” (“I wanna go to Kim Pen Khva, how can I?”) As expected, none of the people seemed to know where that was. The street vendors shook their heads curiously, and the passersby shrugged and continued walking.

Feeling rather lost, I walked into a nearby shopping center to sit down and think about what to do. On my way in, I had to pass a security checkpoint where some security guards attentively went through the contents of my oversized backpack. While they were at it, I asked the guards whether they knew how to get to Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz. One of them understood what I was talking about. “Kim Pen Khva?” he answered, “Da, ya znayu” (“Yes, I know”). He took me outside onto the streets of Qu’yliq to show me where to go.

“Vot, pod zemley, vidite most?” (“There, do you see the underpass?”) he said, pointing to the underpass entrance across the road. “Pod zemley, da,” (“Underground, yes”) I answered, listening very intently to follow what he was saying. “Spracivai tam lyudi, mnoga tam,” (“There will be many people there, you can ask them”) he continued, “i oni s vami govoryat, nu, To’ytepa, To’ytepa. Vy na nego sidit v To’ytepa. Po doroge uvidish Kim Pen Khva.” (“They will say to you To’ytepa, To’ytepa, and you can sit in those taxis and on the way, you will see Kim Pen Khva.”) I didn’t understand what To’ytepa was, so I tried to ask him, “Khorosho, kak nazyvayetsa … uhh..” (“Sure, and what is that… uhh…”) The guard pointed to a place on a map further south called Nurafshan. “Vot, smotrite,” he said, “Nurafshan nazyvaetsa To’ytepa” (“Here, see, Nurafshan is called To’ytepa”). He went on, “Taksist vse znayut Kim Pen Khva” (“Taxi drivers all know Kim Pen Khva”). I tried to say something in broken Russian that I didn’t want to take a private taxi and wanted to try Damas taxi for an adventure. I am not sure whether I made any sense, but the guard just laughed and said “Ya vam sovetuyu” (“I advise you”). Maybe he was telling me not to take Damas. I wasn’t too sure but thanked him and started heading toward the underpass.

Damas is an ultra-compact minivan manufactured in South Korea, and I had forgotten all about this car until I got here in Uzbekistan. Damas were everywhere on the roads of Tashkent, and they jogged my distant and fading memory of seeing them while growing up in South Korea. Many of those Damas cars seemed to be marshrutkas transporting local passengers. There had to be at least one Damas taxi that could take me to Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz. When I crossed the underpass and came out on the other side of the main street, many drivers were shouting “To’ytepa!” One of them led me to his charming Damas sitting on the side of the busy main road.

“Izvinite, ya khochu tuda,” (“Excuse me, I want to go there,”) I asked the driver while pointing to my map, “Musei Kim Pen Khva, my idom?” (“We are going to Kim Pen Khva museum?”) The driver looked at the map and said, “Ax, Kim Pen Khva, da? Idom, sadis” (“Ah, Kim Pen Khva, right? Sure, take a seat”). After haggling the fare, I jumped onto the aging vehicle and threw my backpack on the backseat. It seemed that I was the first passenger onboard, and Damas would only depart once all available seats were filled. But more passengers showed up in no time, and the Damas started moving through the busy traffic into the greater Tashkent region in the south.

There were seven of us including the driver and the space was tighter than it had looked from outside. I was squeezed in the back along with two other passengers and was practically hugging my huge backpack, which was placed on top of my knees. The fellow next to me and I started talking. He introduced himself as Boymurod, and I told him that I was going to Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz because I wanted to see the history of ethnic Koreans here.

“Otkuda vi, zdes’?” (“Where are you from? Here?”) I asked. Boymurod replied, “Ya iz drugoi oblasti” (“I’m from another region”). Then we both discovered that we spoke English and switched to it. “So, there are a lot of ethnic Koreans here, right?” “Yes,” Boymurod replied, “there are Koreans here.” He then went on, “Ten years ago, more Korean here, but no more.” I was kind of surprised. “No more? What happened?” As we talked, the Damas abruptly went over a bump and came to a stop at a traffic light, and the old seats made squeaking noises all around. “Umm, people moved to Korea, to Seoul,” Boymurod said plainly. That was kind of unexpected news to hear, and I hoped that I could still meet some Koryo-Saram.

Boymurod told me that there were still Koreans in the area and pointed to Korean houses and restaurants that were passing outside the window. “Are there other towns where there are a lot of Koreans?” I asked Boymurod, hoping to find some places to go after Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz. He showed some places on the map, saying that I could go to villages like Yangibazar, Dzhumabazar, and Ultasaray. They kind of seemed far away, and I wasn’t sure what to do even if I got there. Would I just walk around asking whether there were any Koryo-Saram I could talk to? I decided to first see what it was like in Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz and play it by ear.

Soon the Damas stopped on the side of the road and the driver said something to me that I didn’t understand. “It’s here?” I asked Boymurod. “Yes, it’s Kim Pen Khva.” Since I was in the back seat in the opposite corner from the door, all the passengers had to get off to allow me to pass. I made a very clumsy exit as I tried to simultaneously film, carry my giant backpack and a bottle of water, and shake Boymurod’s hand, while sliding my body across the tiny seats. I was bumping my head and body everywhere on the walls and ceiling, which amused everyone. I managed to drop my stuff on the roadside, paid the driver, and thanked him. The Damas drove off into the distance with a loud belch. I picked up my water bottle and backpack from the ground and looked around me. Cars passed me by indifferently on the busy six-lane road and the sun was still shining from the cloudless sky. I wasn’t even sure whether I was in the right place because there was no landmark or a sign. I walked down a smaller road that seemed to be leading to the village and looked for Kim Pen Khva Museum. I wasn’t sure what to find in that museum, but it sounded like a good place to start looking for the history of Koryo-Saram.

I had this nonsensical expectation that, in Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz, I would find something similar to typical Koreatowns in other countries–Korean restaurants, supermarkets, and the whole shebang. But what awaited me was a bit different. Firstly, Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz was a very small village, and the atmosphere was much more idyllic and rural than I had expected. In addition, as I continued to walk down the main road toward the village, it gradually became apparent that everyone who passed me by on that street was probably not Koryo-Saram. There were some students walking home, and they didn’t look like Koryo-Saram at all. All the writings on the street signs were in Uzbek. The only obvious reminder of the fact that this used to be a Koryo-Saram village was the large brick gate with a lonely sign that read, “KIM PEN XVA.” Where were all the Koryo-Saram? I was starting to realize that what Boymurod said about Koreans having left the place was true. In fact, I walked past some closed shops and many signs that read “Dom prodayotsya” (“A house for sale”). I began to doubt that there was even a working museum for Koryo-Saram history in the village.

“Izvinite pozhalusta,” feeling rather desperate, I asked a young Uzbek man who was walking the same way, “Kim Pen Khva musei tuda?” (“Excuse me, is the Kim Pen Khva museum that way?”) Without hesitation, the guy replied, “Da, da, zdes’” (“Yes, yes, it’s here”), and we started walking together since we were headed in the same direction. His name was Danya, and I told him that I was a Korean wanting to check out the museum because I had heard that Kim Pen Khva was a Korean too. He just replied casually that Kim Pen Khva was indeed Korean.

“Ochen spokoyno derevnya. Zhizn normalno?” (“Very calm village. Life’s all good?”) I tried to make small talk. Danya just replied, “Da, da,” smiling. “Neskolko Koreysev zhivut zdes’, da?” (“Some Koreans live here, right?”) “Da, mnogo Koreytsev” (“Yeah, many Koreans”). Sort of relieved, I continued to ask in broken Russian, “Restoranov yest, Koreytsev?” (“Are there restaurants, Koreans?”) “Da, yest” (“Yes, there are”), Danya seemed to be growing a bit tired of my endless questions, but I couldn’t help myself. “Skolko protsentov Koreytsev zdes’?” (“How many percent are Koreans here?”) “Navernoye sorok protsentov” (“Maybe forty percent”). I think that the statistic was a bit off or, more likely, I misunderstood what he was saying. Forty percent seemed a bit high, because I had yet to see any Koryo-Saram on the streets. When we came to an intersection, Danya pointed across and said, “Vot, musei” (“There’s the museum”). There was a house with a red roof barely visible through tall trees that surrounded it.

I thanked Danya and walked closer to the building to take a better look. It was a medium-sized house with a large garden. There was a sign under its roof, and it read “Kim Byeong Hwa Museum” in Korean and Uzbek side-by-side. The Korean part of the sign was written very clearly, but there was something awkward about it. If it had been in South Korea, the name would have been written as “Kimbyeonghwa” without spaces. But the name on the sign read “Kim Byeonghwa,” separating the surname and the given name. This tiny space between the letters hinted at a larger chasm that underlay our cultures, which had drifted apart in the tides of history.

As I approached the house, a white Zhiguli sped through the road, and along came running two horses, one brown and one white. It was as though I traveled back in time to a Soviet village and stepped into a real kolkhoz. When the horses took a turn into the dirt road and disappeared, I crossed the street to get a closer look at this memorial to history. In the garden stood a bust of the man himself. Red flowers were laid in front of the pedestal as a tribute. Overall, it appeared to be a surprisingly well-groomed museum in the middle of the small village. But when I approached the gate, I was greeted by a huge metal lock that kept the gate shut.

Finding that the museum was closed didn’t disappoint me too much. I kind of saw it coming because this was a small village and I was the only tourist around. But I had come this far and couldn’t simply turn back just because there was a lock on the gate. Across the museum, there was this small one-story building, and I decided to ask for some help there. Inside the entrance, I began talking to two elderly village residents, explaining to them that I was a Korean and had come here to visit the museum across the street. “Ne rabotaet?” (“It’s not working?”) I asked the residents, holding my breath for the answer. “Rabotaet, seychas,” (“It works,”) one of the residents answered, and then he said that I would need to call the owner who was a Korean. In the meantime, the other man dialed the owner and held out his phone toward me.

“Po koreyski pryamo mozhesh, ona znayet,” (“You can talk directly in Korean, she understands”) he said as the ringtone beeped. Soon the ringing stopped and a woman’s voice came on the other side. On the speaker phone, the old man said to the owner that there was a guest for her and that he was going to put me on. He handed his phone over to me, saying, “Govari” (“Speak”). I felt like I was put on the spot and I didn’t know what to do. Can I really speak Korean with this lady who, just a moment ago, was speaking in Russian? Was there really a Koryo-Saram in this village after all? “Koreiski mozhno?” (“Can I talk in Korean?”) I asked the man in an awkward voice. “Da, da, da,” the man confirmed and walked out of the lobby, as if to give me some privacy.

“Yeoboseyo?” (“Hello?”) I talked into the phone in Korean, rather indecisively because I didn’t know whether I would be understood. And the voice on the other side of the phone replied, calmly, “Yeoboseyo?” Slowly, I realized that I was talking to a Koryo-Saram in Korean. Still a little unsure about whether I was making myself understood, I proceeded cautiously in Korean to ask whether the museum was open today. The lady replied, “Myeoch saram wassseubnikka?” (“How many people are there?”) and I just said, “Han saramiyo” (“It’s just one person”). There was a brief silence. And the lady said that the museum was actually not open every day, and that she just opened it when people called ahead. It was rather bad news, but the phone call was fascinating. She spoke in an unusual way, but I could more or less understand what she was saying. It was kind of like hearing a very distant dialect of Korean in which sentences were formed and words were chosen differently from how I was used to. But it was more than just listening to a dialect. It was as though I was having a conversation in a foreign language but simultaneously in Korean–a strange experience.

In a more relaxed Korean, I told her that I understood and asked whether there was a possibility of opening up the museum that day. There was a brief silence again, broken by an unintelligible mumble as the lady was trying to think of what to do. I felt sorry that I had put her in that position and wished that I had called ahead, although it was not like I could have really afforded the luxury of planning. The lady eventually said that she could get ready and come over to the museum if I was willing to wait. She then said that she was going to take around twenty minutes, so if I was in a hurry to leave, it wouldn’t be possible to arrange a visit. I quickly confirmed that I would wait, “Algessupnida, guromyeon gidarigessupnida” (“I understand, I will wait”). When the phone clicked, I told the old man, “Spasibo vam,” (“Thank you”) and handed the phone back to him. “Nomer nado?” (“Do you need the number?”) he asked back. I took down the number for the museum owner, and the old man and I chatted for a while. He was rather interested in the fact that I was a Korean from Australia who had come all the way to this village for the museum. He helped me find a place to charge my phone in one of the offices and went on his way, saying “Udachi vam” (“Good luck to you”).

After a while, a middle-aged lady arrived at the museum gate, and I ran across the road and greeted her. She was Lyudmila, the owner of the museum. Lyudmila and I walked across the well-groomed garden and walked into the museum building. The museum was cozy and the walls were full of pictures and memorabilia from the history of the Korean diaspora in the region. When we entered the main area, an impressive portrait of the man himself greeted me. There was calligraphy on both sides of the portrait that read in a clear Korean, “Upon this ground, I discovered a motherland reborn.” This simple yet profound statement somehow touched me deeply. I thought I understood what it meant but couldn’t quite put a finger on it. I just stood there facing the wall, as Lyudmila began to walk me through the history.

Lyudmila explained that, during the time of the Soviet Union, many Koryo-Saram lived in the Russian Far East near Vladivostok. When conflict broke out between the Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire, Stalin became paranoid that the ethnic Koreans were conspiring with the Japanese because, as Lyudmila put it, “their faces looked alike.” Overnight, Koryo-Saram were forced onto trains and were mass-transported to distant Central Asia. The conditions of the months-long passage across Siberia were inhumane, and people suffered from intense sickness and hunger. Countless had perished, and their bodies were simply thrown off the running train. People were eventually dropped off in various parts of Central Asia and left to fend for their survival. Here in Uzbekistan, Koryo-Saram were dropped off in the barren land near the Chirchiq River where it was impossible to grow anything as “there was only dirt, stone, and river.” The Koryo-Saram survived the first winter in dire conditions by digging holes in the ground and putting makeshift roofs above them. Uzbeks who were living nearby helped them by sharing bread, water and taking care of children in their houses.

Slowly but steadily, Koryo-Saram turned their lot around by turning the barren and stony wasteland into an agricultural field that produced rice. The Uzbek government was impressed by this effort and appointed Kim Byeong Hwa as the chairman of a new kolkhoz. For the next thirty-five years, Kim Byeong Hwa led the kolkhoz to achieve incredible farm production, build factories, schools, and hospitals upon the once impoverished land. Under the portrait of the man stood a desk and a chair where he did all that, and they looked so small. Lyudmila brought my attention to a tattered suit behind a glass on the wall, saying that he always wore that one suit and worked on that very desk until his death.

Somehow I was coming to a clearer understanding of what Kim Byeong Hwa had meant by his words, “Upon this ground, I discovered a motherland reborn.” When their lives were uprooted and unjustly thrown into this faraway land, Koryo-Saram didn’t blame fate or consider themselves victims of history. Instead, they got to work, removing stones from the wasteland one by one and seeding the soil with the crops. From the ground revitalized by none other than their own bare hands, Kim Byeong Hwa must have rediscovered the meaning of a home and an image of the precious life that he was forced to leave behind. I thought to myself that, there would be times in my life when I would be challenged and would feel that the obstacles ahead of me were insurmountable. I hoped that, in those times, I would remember the tribulations of my compatriots and their achievements on this foreign land.

My high patriotic mood was somewhat brought down to earth when I left the museum and faced the empty streets of the village. The glorious chapter of history seemed to have been closed long ago, and the reality of today appeared rather disjointed from the carefully preserved and curated displays on the museum walls. On the streets, there was no reminder of the heroic rise of Koryo-Saram from rags to riches. The faces that passed me by looked different from the ones in the museum’s black-and-white photos. The languages I heard were different from the regional Korean that Lyudmila spoke. It might have been that expecting abundant reminders of the time so far into the past was rather illogical. Yet I couldn’t help but crave even the slightest fragment from the past or a simple indication that I was in a village where Koryo-Saram rose from the ashes of their twist of fate. There wasn’t a lot of it. The legacy lived on the museum walls, not on the blank streets of the village. Facing those streets, I didn’t really know what to do next or where to even go. The time was almost approaching two o’clock, so I decided to find a place to have lunch and ask some locals for suggestions. When I asked Lyudmila, she said she would walk me to a restaurant serving Korean food.

Lyudmila and I walked down the sun-drenched village road, only occasionally traversed by Zhigulis and Damas. “How many people live here in this village?” I asked Lyudmila in Korean. “Long time ago, ninety-eight percent of the population was Koryo-Saram,” Lyudmila said, “but today it’s more like thirty percent. And the population… Maybe, it is around two thousand five hundred.” “So, thirty percent of those two thousand five hundred people are Koryo-Saram?” “Yes, but all the young people have left to Korea,” she said calmly.

We crossed the main street and joined a small road full of cozy village houses. We ran into a Koryo-Saram lady walking in an opposite direction, and Lyudmila gave her a friendly greeting, “Pri-vet! Vsyo normalno?” (“Hi there! How’s it going?”) And they stopped and chatted in Russian. The Koryo-Saram lady seemed uninterested in the unkempt backpacker. When we started walking again, I tried to ask Lyudmila whether the name of the village was still Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz or something else. There was a bit of language barrier and I couldn’t understand what she exactly said. But she mentioned that there was a time that the name was changed into an Uzbek name, but it had since been changed back to Kim Pen Khva Kolkhoz. I wanted to ask more, but we had already arrived at the restaurant. “Naneun gabogesseubnida” (“I’ll leave you to it”), Lyudmila said and walked away. I bowed to her and thanked her for showing me the museum. When I turned around to look at what was supposed to be a restaurant, I just saw an ordinary house without any activity or a sign. Not sure whether I was in the right place, I walked up to the door, and knocked on it quietly.