Seoul
What a fabulous weekend I have had!
On Saturday morning I awoke at 6am. This was not as hard a feat as you would imagine, fore I had been very tired the night before, and had fallen asleep at 8:30 watching Stardust, which I had downloaded after school that evening. So anyway, 6am I wake up, shower, pack, finish Stardust (fabulous movie, btw), and take a cab to the train station in old Mokpo. Amazingly (as I left a little later than I wanted), I am the first to arrive at 7:50, but by 8:05 I was joined by the rest of the group: Liz, Krista, Christa, Camille, Tanya, and Justin. At 8:20 we boarded our train and began our crazy trip to Seoul.
The train is 3 hours long, which is obviously shorter than the 5 hour bus ride and significantly more comfortable. Also, while buying indivdual tickets is rather expensive (41,000원), you can buy a table (4 seats) and the price works out to only 30,000원 per person, which makes the trip only slightly more expensive than the 26,000원 bus ride. Anyway, the journey was really nice and I had some great conversation with Tanya and Justin, even though we were told to be quiet several times along the journey. This, I do not understand. We were not very loud and there were others talking in the car!!! But you just go with the flow (the foreigner’s mantra in Korea) and tell the train attendant “OK” and resume talking once they have left the car.
When we arrived in Seoul the first thing we noticed was that this city is far colder than Mokpo. I am not exactly sure how much colder, but mitts were needed. This did not stop us from purchasing the first of a long string of western food - Baskin Robbins I had 엄마는 외계인 which is pronounced ‘eommaneun wehgyeain’ (mmm coconut and chocolate swirl with chunks). and looks like this:
We then took a taxi to our hotel in Etaewon - the foreigner diskrict of Seoul. Seoul is a very dispersed city, and is divided into 25 distinct areas that fuction as little cities of their own. I was told that taking a single line on the subway from one end to the other can take over 2 hours. This dispersion and division is necessary as there are 23 million people living in the Seoul metropolitan area (~10 million in the city alone) making it the 2nd largest metropolitan area in the world, after Tokyo. This is pretty astounding considering that Korea itself has a population of only 50 million. However, because of this division there is no real “downtown”. The tallest building in the city is located in Gangnam-gu, and is called the World Trade Centre of Korea. Gangnam-gu is an island on the boatless Han River (boatless as the river leads to North Korea, therefore there is no reason to be using this waterway), and you can kinda think of this as the Manhattan of Korea, as there is a small clustering of financial buildings, though many others are spread throughout the city.
The area that we stayed in, Etaewon, is very reminiscent of Queen St. in Toronto. The buildings are not very tall, only around 5-6 storeys, and the first 2-3 floors are commercial restaurants, shops, and bars. The bustle of Etaewon is concentrated on one main strip, and our place of accomodation was located ~30 minutes away by foot. The hotel/motel was called SungJi Motel and it was clean, fairly cheap, and quiet. Once we had checked in we made our way to the main strip for lunch. We ate at KFC. I ordered the spicy zinger burger, which was significantly spicier than “spicy” burgers at home, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle now and I enjoyed it immensly. There were a couple of things that I noticed 1) I understood much of the conversation around me 2) most of the people were foreigners (both white and not white - this was surprising as Koreans tend to be quite racist towards people with dark skin, and 3) most of the Koreans spoke english. This whole situation made me very uncomfortable. It was like culture shock - in reverse! I felt very out of place and awkward in this much western-ness.
After lunch we went shopping, 1st along the strip - which was a lot of fun and I was able to buy so great christmas gifts. There were a lot of knock-off stalls set up along the street and I was tempted to buy a “Burberry” scarf, but I didn’t, though when I go back I think I might. Burberry plaid is rediculously popular here, and its not so much that I want to be like everyone else, I just like some of the different colours that they offered and I think the style is quite nice too. After the strip we went to ETLand - the world’s largest electronics market. The whole this spans ~20 buildings, though it is consentrated in a couple near YeongSan train station (which is where we stayed). Here I bought myself a camera. I did this for 2 reasons 1) I forgot to bring mine to Seoul and 2) I need a newer camera so that I can use the entirety of my 2GB memory card (my camera is too old to understand anything beyond 1GB). But I did like my camera a lot, so I decided to simply buy an upgrade of the casio exlim - the Z8 (8.1 megapixles….).
The 1st table I went to quoted the camera at 260,000원 and laughed when I tried to bargain under 200,000원. But I shopped around and I eventually found a seller who let me have it for 190,000원 (this is about $190). Also these guys were super nice, and I can actually say I bought it from the self-proclaimed “casio master”. I took the camera to school and I showed my co-teachers and they thought it was an amazingly cheap price. I also looked the camera up online and it is 1) not sold in Canada, and 2) the prices I saw it for online ranged between $260 and $350… so I think I got a pretty good deal.
Outside ETLand they were selling some DVDs - some looked real, others not - and they had an amzing selection of old films (7 Audrey movies (inc W&P - they are seriously obsessed with that movie here)) for which Tanya and I were especially excited. Anyway it was 1 for 3,000원 or 4 for 9,900원 so I bought 4: the Umbrellas of Cherburg, Rebel Without a Cause, Wuthering Heights, and A Place in the Sun.
We were at ETLand for a pretty long time, Christa was buying A LOT! and by the time we left it was almost 7:00. So we went back and dropped off our purchases and went out for dinner at an amazing Greek Restaurant called Santorini. I had a great Greek Salad (and they actually did the feta greek style - a brick on top) and some zuccini pies. It was expensive, but incredibly delicious - we were told that the chef is actually from Greece!
After we went back to the hotel and got ready for a night out, which included some bacardi 151. We then headed out to Rocky Mountain bar (a Canadian bar). The ceiling was covered in hockey jerseys. We met some really interesting people there, including a couple of Newfies (Lori that was for you - though I mentioned West Port and they had no clue where it was - they were from St John’s though). We then went on the a dancing place (I don’t think I ever paid attention to the name). The music was pretty much everything that was popular when I left 3 months ago. The place was really crowded so Camille, Liz, Justin, and I left pretty early (around 4am), the others stayed until the bar closed at 6.
We all woke up around 10:30 the next morning, which was sort of weird since we didn’t plan to wake up at any particular time - some of us were better off than others. By 12 we were on our way to the train station for lunch before our train at 2. We had pizza - which was surprisingly cheap though extremely good. We hung around the train station after that, had some more Baskin Robbins (this time it was chocoholic - mmm swiss chocolate and brownie bits), and then boarded our train for the 3 hour ride home. Not surprising in the least, most people slept the majority of the way.
On Saturday morning I awoke at 6am. This was not as hard a feat as you would imagine, fore I had been very tired the night before, and had fallen asleep at 8:30 watching Stardust, which I had downloaded after school that evening. So anyway, 6am I wake up, shower, pack, finish Stardust (fabulous movie, btw), and take a cab to the train station in old Mokpo. Amazingly (as I left a little later than I wanted), I am the first to arrive at 7:50, but by 8:05 I was joined by the rest of the group: Liz, Krista, Christa, Camille, Tanya, and Justin. At 8:20 we boarded our train and began our crazy trip to Seoul.
The train is 3 hours long, which is obviously shorter than the 5 hour bus ride and significantly more comfortable. Also, while buying indivdual tickets is rather expensive (41,000원), you can buy a table (4 seats) and the price works out to only 30,000원 per person, which makes the trip only slightly more expensive than the 26,000원 bus ride. Anyway, the journey was really nice and I had some great conversation with Tanya and Justin, even though we were told to be quiet several times along the journey. This, I do not understand. We were not very loud and there were others talking in the car!!! But you just go with the flow (the foreigner’s mantra in Korea) and tell the train attendant “OK” and resume talking once they have left the car.
When we arrived in Seoul the first thing we noticed was that this city is far colder than Mokpo. I am not exactly sure how much colder, but mitts were needed. This did not stop us from purchasing the first of a long string of western food - Baskin Robbins I had 엄마는 외계인 which is pronounced ‘eommaneun wehgyeain’ (mmm coconut and chocolate swirl with chunks). and looks like this:
We then took a taxi to our hotel in Etaewon - the foreigner diskrict of Seoul. Seoul is a very dispersed city, and is divided into 25 distinct areas that fuction as little cities of their own. I was told that taking a single line on the subway from one end to the other can take over 2 hours. This dispersion and division is necessary as there are 23 million people living in the Seoul metropolitan area (~10 million in the city alone) making it the 2nd largest metropolitan area in the world, after Tokyo. This is pretty astounding considering that Korea itself has a population of only 50 million. However, because of this division there is no real “downtown”. The tallest building in the city is located in Gangnam-gu, and is called the World Trade Centre of Korea. Gangnam-gu is an island on the boatless Han River (boatless as the river leads to North Korea, therefore there is no reason to be using this waterway), and you can kinda think of this as the Manhattan of Korea, as there is a small clustering of financial buildings, though many others are spread throughout the city.
The area that we stayed in, Etaewon, is very reminiscent of Queen St. in Toronto. The buildings are not very tall, only around 5-6 storeys, and the first 2-3 floors are commercial restaurants, shops, and bars. The bustle of Etaewon is concentrated on one main strip, and our place of accomodation was located ~30 minutes away by foot. The hotel/motel was called SungJi Motel and it was clean, fairly cheap, and quiet. Once we had checked in we made our way to the main strip for lunch. We ate at KFC. I ordered the spicy zinger burger, which was significantly spicier than “spicy” burgers at home, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle now and I enjoyed it immensly. There were a couple of things that I noticed 1) I understood much of the conversation around me 2) most of the people were foreigners (both white and not white - this was surprising as Koreans tend to be quite racist towards people with dark skin, and 3) most of the Koreans spoke english. This whole situation made me very uncomfortable. It was like culture shock - in reverse! I felt very out of place and awkward in this much western-ness.
After lunch we went shopping, 1st along the strip - which was a lot of fun and I was able to buy so great christmas gifts. There were a lot of knock-off stalls set up along the street and I was tempted to buy a “Burberry” scarf, but I didn’t, though when I go back I think I might. Burberry plaid is rediculously popular here, and its not so much that I want to be like everyone else, I just like some of the different colours that they offered and I think the style is quite nice too. After the strip we went to ETLand - the world’s largest electronics market. The whole this spans ~20 buildings, though it is consentrated in a couple near YeongSan train station (which is where we stayed). Here I bought myself a camera. I did this for 2 reasons 1) I forgot to bring mine to Seoul and 2) I need a newer camera so that I can use the entirety of my 2GB memory card (my camera is too old to understand anything beyond 1GB). But I did like my camera a lot, so I decided to simply buy an upgrade of the casio exlim - the Z8 (8.1 megapixles….).
The 1st table I went to quoted the camera at 260,000원 and laughed when I tried to bargain under 200,000원. But I shopped around and I eventually found a seller who let me have it for 190,000원 (this is about $190). Also these guys were super nice, and I can actually say I bought it from the self-proclaimed “casio master”. I took the camera to school and I showed my co-teachers and they thought it was an amazingly cheap price. I also looked the camera up online and it is 1) not sold in Canada, and 2) the prices I saw it for online ranged between $260 and $350… so I think I got a pretty good deal.
Outside ETLand they were selling some DVDs - some looked real, others not - and they had an amzing selection of old films (7 Audrey movies (inc W&P - they are seriously obsessed with that movie here)) for which Tanya and I were especially excited. Anyway it was 1 for 3,000원 or 4 for 9,900원 so I bought 4: the Umbrellas of Cherburg, Rebel Without a Cause, Wuthering Heights, and A Place in the Sun.
We were at ETLand for a pretty long time, Christa was buying A LOT! and by the time we left it was almost 7:00. So we went back and dropped off our purchases and went out for dinner at an amazing Greek Restaurant called Santorini. I had a great Greek Salad (and they actually did the feta greek style - a brick on top) and some zuccini pies. It was expensive, but incredibly delicious - we were told that the chef is actually from Greece!
After we went back to the hotel and got ready for a night out, which included some bacardi 151. We then headed out to Rocky Mountain bar (a Canadian bar). The ceiling was covered in hockey jerseys. We met some really interesting people there, including a couple of Newfies (Lori that was for you - though I mentioned West Port and they had no clue where it was - they were from St John’s though). We then went on the a dancing place (I don’t think I ever paid attention to the name). The music was pretty much everything that was popular when I left 3 months ago. The place was really crowded so Camille, Liz, Justin, and I left pretty early (around 4am), the others stayed until the bar closed at 6.
We all woke up around 10:30 the next morning, which was sort of weird since we didn’t plan to wake up at any particular time - some of us were better off than others. By 12 we were on our way to the train station for lunch before our train at 2. We had pizza - which was surprisingly cheap though extremely good. We hung around the train station after that, had some more Baskin Robbins (this time it was chocoholic - mmm swiss chocolate and brownie bits), and then boarded our train for the 3 hour ride home. Not surprising in the least, most people slept the majority of the way.
Overall this was a fabulous weekend, and I will definately do it again soon - maybe next month (if I can afford it :P)
