Vampires in Seoul

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Now that finals are over (yes my last final EVER as a college student...undergrad that is) I have some time to update you all quickly on our trip to South Korea. I went with Matt, my roommate Vishaal, and Kevin (an American guy from U Illinois who insists on giving me endless amounts of crap about USC going down in the Rose Bowl but doesn't seem to want to put his money where his mouth is). It's the first trip I've done with my roommate, a great pleasure because he makes ridiculously hilarious comments only strengthened in hilarity by his "propa" British accent. For example, one morning he started off the day with the following comment: "Listen sorry lads but I've got a nob-on right now so just look away while I get out of bed, I've just gotta run to the toilet". I've actually gotta make this short and sweet because it's Vish's last night in Hong Kong and a group of us are meeting up for dinner in an hour. I'm sure it will be a long night.

We only had time in between finals for a 3 night, 2 day trip to Seoul. Turned out there wasn't much in the way of sightseeing in Seoul, even after hounding Korean friends in our program who live in our hall and our from there. We threw a few options around, including driving to the border to look in at North Korea... just to see it. Kim Jong Il's presence always seems so massive in media that I guess we expected his inflated head would be visible from a distant vantage point on the border. Our Korean friends strongly steered us away from this absurd idea. We also considered going skiing which would have been possible, at only a three hour drive away from Seoul, had we not spent most of our time awake during the night (hence the title of the blog).

Seoul's nightlife is absolutely unreal. Some of the best I've experienced (and I only went to a handful of different places on two different nights). Whether it was small bars, light-show filled clubs, or even simple restaurants, everyplace was packed, come nighttime, with locals getting their drink on, making fools of themselves, and having a generally awesome time. The first area we went to, Hongdae, was a more Korean spot. We headed there on Thurs and Fri. The first night, we went to an underground place, Noise Basement, full of locals in flat-billed American baseball hats, baggy jeans, and hooded sweaters doing the "Superman" dance and other coordinated numbers, brushing the dirt off their soldeirs and gangsta-leanin like they came straight from a rap video. Hilarious. They took themselves so seriously. There was a huge stage and all these locals dancing on it. I got up there, in my button up and sweater, and the guy next to me looked at me as if I was insane. He stopped fussin when my dance moves put him to shame. I am, after all, from the country that pioneered all this crap for him to live his life by. We made it home, god knows how, at 7am that night (morning?)

The next day, waking up at 3pm, we barely made it to Seoul's famous palace. I don't know the name of it because we got there just as it was closing and peeked in to realize it was nothing like what we'd seen in Beijing. I've got a photo to prove we at least saw it, and we spent the rest of the afternoon walking through the palace museum which was still open, and the shopping street Insadong which was nearby.

The next night, we headed back to Hongdae to check out M2, a club that came recommended to us by a group of locals we met at dinner that night. I have to tell more about this particular situation because it was probably the highlight of the trip. Throughout the trip, whether it was on the subway or in the airport or the streets, we kept remarking at how quiet the Korean people were. When we arrived at the restaurant, this assertion was thrown out the window. There were a group of guys, dressed up in their suits on a Friday night straight from work, putting back shots of Korean vodka/schnapps (tasted like a sweeter version of Guaro), yelling and laughing at each other, falling out of their chairs, and doing sexual poses up against the wall. We ate our meal, bulgogi, a traditional Korean meal where you sit around a circular table with a grill in the middle and grill your own pork eaten with veggies wrapped in lettuce, and giggled at the local drunkards in awe. It was only a matter of time before we engaged these guys in conversation and were trying the local liquor ourselves (much to the smiling chagrin of the hostess). After talking to the guys for a while, the kind owner came over with a slab of skin, yes pig skin, and threw it on our grill. We had no choice but to try it. We noticed that there was a nipple on this skin as well. Not a huge nipple, but a little guy right there in the bottom right corner of the rectangular piece. Might as well have been an elephant on our table. Matt and I, as the most adventurous and most competitive, played rock-paper-scissors to see who would eat it. One of my favorite moments from all our trips was watching his face after losing. He put the thing down quick, wanting to get it over with as soon as possible. The owners in the restaurant were so kind to deal with all this commotion without fussing too much, until finally begging the guys to leave at which point we followed, but when we got outside we realized they'd probably done this a hundred times before. We posed for a picture with all the guys and tried to get a cab in the streets dodging hordes of more drunk Koreans coming from every angle. Look to your left there's a guy IN A SUIT throwing up on his shoes. Look straight ahead there's two guys arguing incoherently (and no it's not because I don't speak the language their friends are laughing at them too). Look to your right and there's a drunk girl who can barely stand up yelling at her boyfriend. Look behind you and there's a guy standing awkwardly alone, with a HUGE grin on his face, talking to himself and drooling. All four of us are bent over laughing so hard we can hardly breathe in the frozen air.

No cab would stop for us. They knew it was a Friday night and everyone was drunk (apparently the M.O in Korea) so I finally stood in the middle of the street in front of one to get him to realize we weren't like the rest of the motion-handicapped people waiting. This brings us back to Hongdae and M2. Amazing club, playing great music and full of people wanting to have a good time (not like places in NY or LA where everyone's pretentious trying to pretend like they own the place and roping off their friends from other groups). We were mingling with the locals, taking photos even though we weren't supposed to, buying bottles of vodka then realizing that was a dumb decision and pretending like the bartender misunderstood us begging him to take it back and give us our money (which worked). Matt and I, again with rock-paper-scissors determining the loser, took turns finding girls for the other to ask to dance. The object here obviously being to find the ugliest, biggest one but EVERY SINGLE GIRL in the club was pretty good looking so I just chose the ones that obviously had no interest in dancing to see him get shot down. Oh by the way, interesting statistic Kevin told me: 90% of the women in Seoul have cosmetic surgery. I don't know where he got that or how that could be true but it sure seemed like it. We made it back at a somewhat reasonable hour, right before the sun came up to avoid enduring the pain of our skin melting away.

After three consecutive traditional Korean meals, we opted for something western and were greeted with T.G.I.Friday's at our next tourist destination. Yea go ahead and laugh but we did end up going there. Funniest part about this was that it was impossible to find and we spent about 20 minutes walking through a women's department store PACKED with shoppers, going up and down floors lost, the only men in the place and DEFINITELY the only white people. Obviously, skiing was not an option that day, with limited amounts of sunlight left, so instead we went to Seoul Tower, taking a cable car up there like good ole tourists, and shot some photos of the city skyline from the top. After that, we went back to the hostel to rest up a bit before heading to Itaewon for dinner. Itaewon is the main tourist area in Seoul and we were shocked to see so many Americans. I guess these were all the G.I.s that the "NO G.I." signs in Hongdae had been referring to. We went to a Middle Eastern restaurant, Ali Baba, that was very good and spent the next couple of hours walking the streets with our cameras ready to catch the hordes of Korean drunkards. Unfortunately this was not the place, as Korean people were a dime a dozen, so we headed back to the hostel with no video to back up the pictures we have of us literally crying the night before in laughter at all the drunkards we saw.

All in all it sounds like a pretty uneventful trip but the group was the big difference here. The amount of inside jokes and hilarious moments were endless. We weren't so focused on seeing sights. We didn't really know what there was to see (with finals we didn't have time to do too much research) so we realized early on all the action was at night. The people in Seoul were so friendly and getting by in English wasn't too much trouble either. A fantastic trip that I hope I remember for a long time. Heading to Vietnam tomorrow seeing as finals are over for me and I have a week before I go home so look forward to that. Should be my last blog entry and will most definitely be one of the best as we're planning to see some pretty cool stuff in a little amount of time.

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Photos

Noise Basement
Baaadddd idea

Dinner in a Tent
Vishaal enjoying his meal and Kevin's pissed about something

Another guy who walked by us escorting his freind
HAHA