I was walking down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley today, and, well, I can swear I saw a wizard. He wasn't like one of those wizards from say Lord of the Rings, where he was dressed in all white with a long beard, but a wizard in truly Bohemian, Berkeley style fashion. But, naturally, it reminded me of this time I went to a fortune teller in Korea. Fortune telling is big business in Korea. There are even reports of past presidents, not sure of the current president, but past South Korean presidents consulting fortune tellers on important issues with perhaps nationwide consequences. I guess fortune telling is a huge part of traditional Korean Shamanistic beliefs though not in the way that, say, some Chinese may interpret the symbols on the South Korean flag. (The South Korean flag, while currently symbolic of a country of fifty million has traditionally been symbolic of Chinese fortune tellers.)
Anyways, I went to a very commercialized fortune telling place (COEX); the lady used all types of strange cards and asked me when I was born, what time I was born, and other details, many of which I didn't know or couldn't remember. She read my fortune anyways. I'm not sure if they always use cards, but it seems to be down to a science in that country where extravagant sums are spent to see the future. Well, I'm not sure what glimpses of my future the fortune teller saw, but I remember a card showing up with a figure that had a rather uncomfortable resemblance to that wizard from the Lord of the Rings. I don't see myself as a particularly superstitious person, so a card with a wizard on it didn't do much to make me take much of this seriously. On top of that, I couldn't decipher some of the words the fortune teller was saying as she was using many words that I was simply unfamiliar with.
But, one thing I do remember was that during the Year of the Rooster, I was told "to apply" and I would receive a favorable outcome; I applied to UC Berkeley that year.
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