K-Pop and Picnics

Last weekend, I got to experience a K-pop (Korean pop music) concert for free.  There were 7 different bands/artists performing to raise awareness for the upcoming Olympics games.  We had really awesome seats pretty close to the stage.  I don't know too much about Korean bands, but judging by the teenage screaming, some of them were quite popular.

The next day (my birthday!) I went to Murang (that's probably the wrong spelling) Valley with my English Conversation Club.  My friend told me about the club, which is for people who want to practice English.  I was very excited, because I really wanted to make some Korean friends. 

Last weekend was my second time going, and instead of meeting at the library, we went on an excursion to the valley.  We hiked a bit, then had a picnic.

After the picnic, we hiked back down and drove to this...place.  Not exactly a cafe, but this place you can go and make coffee and tea and put money for it in a box.  I think it is near a monastery, because a monk came down and gave us rice cakes.

My friend Joyce:

 Jimmy (our group leader) making tea:

Gwilym and "Kim" enjoying their drinks:

Outside there were some of the weirdest looking chickens I've seen:

"Jennifer," one of the Korean members is a music teacher, and she gave Joyce, Gwilym and me practice versions of the traditional Korean short flute.  I mostly failed miserably at producing sound, but it was still an awesome gift!

So my birthday weekend was pretty amazing.

Donghae Festival

So, it's been a couple weeks and I want to do at least one update before I go to sleep.  I'm really tired though.  Solution: lots of pictures and a few words.  So, here we go:

Last weekend was pretty cool.  There was a festival in Donghae.  Festivals are seriously abundant in Korea.  For the most part, it's food and shopping and a little entertainment.  Donghae had a nice enough sized one considering what a small town Donghae is. 

Here it is, illustrated:

Getting wasted on soju during the middle of the day is a required festival activity.  Dancing with the performers may or may not be optional.

 

Can you spot the drunk people jamming with the band?!

Mmmmm...Korean street food.  Corn dog-esque things are pretty popular here.  In addition to adding ketchup and mustard, they're usually also rolled in sugar. Yum!

At a balloon game, the operator brought his dog.  I just think Korean dog fashion is hilarious, so here's a purple eared dog:

There was this cool tent with money from all over the world.  I wish I could have read what it was about, but at least there were pretty things to look at.

Performance at the festival-I couldn't see much, because there was quite a crowd, but apparently drag comedy routines are a huge hit here.

So, now I'm quite sleepy and lazy, so I'll just publish these for your enjoyment.  Still to come: K-pop concert pictures, picnic in the mountains scenes, school festival, school sports day and festivals in Gangneung.  Stay tuned!

My Chuseok in Seoul

I'm lazy and blog posts take time, so sorry for the late update.

The last couple weeks have been easy school wise, as we had midterms then a vacation.

So last week I had several days off for the Korean holiday of Chuseok. It's sort of like Korean Thanksgiving, when Koreans go back to their hometowns, eat with their families and honor their ancestors.  And foreigners have lovely vacations! I decided to go to Seoul for the first time.  The city empties out a lot for the holiday and there are a ton of foreigners coming in, so it was a fun time.

Here's the synopsis of my vacation in Seoul. I got there Friday afternoon, and it was pouring rain.

That was amusing, as I'd not packed my umbrella or rain jacket after looking at the weather report.

So I bought a new umbrella, and I made it to the subway. Unfortunately, I did not look closely at the map, as I got off at the wrong subway stop. So, I decided to take a taxi. I was trying to figure out where to wave one down, when one just stopped in the middle of the street and yelled to me. Koreans tend to be super nice, but this was the first taxi driver that attempted to engage in conversation (probably because it was the first taxi driver who spoke decent English). He spoke decent English, so eventually we got to my hostel.

It was a really nice hostel, although not a lot of Westerners from what I saw. The owners were super fluent in English. I was in a 4 bed room, but I was the only one in there, so essentially I had a private room for about 20 dollars a night!

Once I settled in a bit, figured no one was around yet, I decided to explore. I went looking for the dog cafe, which turned out to be a short, very walkable distance away!That was fun. I sat around in a room full of dogs, drinking delicious coffee and bribing dogs to love me with treats.

So after that I went back to my hostel and turned in early-ish.

Then I got up in the morning and traveled for like an hour on the subway to get to the outskirts of Seoul and meet somebody so I could take over her cell phone contract. So I met her and then her Korean friend so that we can transfer the contract. After driving around a bit, we discover this cannot be done on the weekend.

Oops.

So in a leap of mutual stranger trust, she gave me the phone, and I gave her a copy of my relevant information so they could do it over the phone when she came back from Vietnam.

And then I had a phone! So marvelous to no longer have to make eye contact or interact in real life again. Then I went back to the hostel with my prize to play a bit.

After I had set up my phone a bit, I went to Itaewon, which is a neighborhood of Seoul that's basically the foreigner district. There is lots of shopping for Western bodies and Western food of every flavor. There, I partook of my favorite guilty travel pleasure: McDonalds.

I like to go to Mickey D's in other countries and order their unusual foods.

So I had a bulgogi burger, which was delicious.

Then I walked around enjoying the sights a bit, and got in contact with someone I knew vaguely from orientation who was coming to Seoul. We were going to meet and go to Outback, but I was traveling on the subway, and I didn't realize how long it took to get where they were...almost an hour.

So by the time I got there, I realized I had to go back.

I had bought a ticket to see Wicked. So although I was a bit frustrated from wasting two hours and still being alone, I went back and saw Wicked, which was awesome. I loved the music, so I was excited to finally see the play.

I was going to try to meet people afterward, but I had a terrible headache/neckache that was about to give me serious nausea. I went to bed instead. On Sunday when I got up, I managed to connect with my project partner from orientation to meet him. He was up earlier than all his friends, because he hadn't been drinking the night before. So we hung out a bit, walked around, then went back to his hostel to see if other people were up.

We hung out a while waiting for other people to get up. Eventually a few got up/returned

so Michael and I went with them to walk around and find lunch. They wanted to go do other stuff, so Michael and I ended up going and doing historical stuff by ourselves anyway. We went to a shrine, which was nice, although not that interesting, then to a traditional village. We walked around and did some sightseeing thereand ran into all the people from the hostel, now slightly recovered.

Afterward, we went to an Indian restaurant for dinner.  One of the people from Busan said it was voted the best Indian restaurant in Seoul.  I'm not a connoisseur, so I don't know.  It was good, and nice to eat something that's not really available in Donghae.  Afterward, we went out for a few drinks and dancing, including the most crowded club I'd ever seen.

On Monday, I met up with my cousin.  He just got stationed near Seoul.  So he managed to escape from his army duties to go sightseeing with me.  We went to an awesome palace and folk museum.

 After that, we went in search of food.  To tide us over while we wandered around, I decided to try some street food.  So we had some tasty squid, walked around a festival then I decided to try these tasty critters.  We were pretty sure they were bugs.  And I'm lying, they weren't tasty.  Thumbs down.  Definitely not the tastiest insects I've ever had.

The area we were in didn't have many restaurants, so we went back to Itaewon.  Dustin wanted some authentic Korean, so after some wandering and sneaking out of a restaurant when we looked at the menu prices, we found a nice little hole in the wall Korean restaurant in an alley.  We had some delicious bibimbap, then went to the English language bookstore.  Of course, I wanted to buy every book there, but contented myself with a magazine, seeing how I already have dozens of books unread on my Kindle.  Afterward we parted ways.

So, that was the most exciting part of my Chuseok, and further news can wait til the next blog post.