Insadong Market & MEGA MART!

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We woke up early and had breakfast on the floor in front of the TV showing a bunch of crazy Koreans. Mike, a former CN and Namseoul Univeristy student, meet us at Heather’s apartment building to pick up our stuff. We were to meet him later in the day because he was going to drive us to Namseoul.

We walked over the popular tourist trap, Insadong market. They had plenty of shops selling traditional Korean stuff; every shop, though, basically sold the same things. Every shopkeeper, though, was very anxious to receive your business.

It was at this point were I started feeling very overcome with emotions. Everything was just so overwhelming. I was finally in the midst of daily Korean life with nothing but Korean people, the Korean language, and the Korean culture completely surrounding me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like was I was encountering; I loved it all, and I wanted to take it all in...all of the sights, sounds, and experiences that Korea has to offer.

We meet up with Heather and Celestia in the market and continued to do some shopping. I definitely need to go back there before leaving because I couldn’t make up my mind what all I needed to take back with me.

We ate in this awesome restaurant in the market that had some great food and was decorated like a traditional Korean house. I had a dish called bibimbop, and it was excellent. I got to try everyone else’s food, and all of it was nothing short of fantastic. They even brought out a free squid omlette/pancake type of thing because they accidentally spilt some of our side items on Charity, and it was really good also. I was a little nervous, but I did drink some water at the restaurant. Apparently, it is true that tap water is not safe to drink, but Koreans do not drink from the tap before purifying first. My Korean friends also told me that restaurant water is safe to drink.

After the restaurant, we walked around the shops some more. Before we decided to leave for Namseoul, we decided to head to the nearest photo shop. No trip to Korea is complete without a trip to a photo booth complete with sticky photos, crazy hats and wigs, and crazy Korea pop music.

Sadly, we had to depart from our friends for the week. We got in the car with Mike and headed South to Namseoul. Traffic was mostly horrible for most of the journey.

When we finally arrived, I was really impressed by the vast campus with nice buildings among rural Korea (apparently, it was ranked this year as the number 1 university in the country). We were greeted by the two, very friendly building staff, Kim and David.

After unpacking a bit in our nice dorm rooms, the six of us packed into Mike’s car and headed to the local Pizza Hut, which is pretty expensive compared to our prices back in the US. I wasn’t that hungry, but I had a slice and had a great time talking with our friends.

After dinner, we headed to the Korean equivalent of Wal-Mart - Mega Mart - to get some needed stuff! I was so excited the whole we were there! Charity and I ran into stuff that we really liked and bought just to take home; we even want to back before returning home (I can tell already that will be a sad day!).

We returned back to campus and headed up to our rooms. We did discover a few quirks about the place. The lights and the hot water go off automatically at 11:30pm. We’ll just have to deal with that and maybe buy a small lamp at MEGA MART!

Tomorrow we’ll get a tour of the campus and, hopefully, an orientation for the camp, which starts Monday.

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