Today was probably my favorite in Korea. Sandra and I met at ______ station and went to eat at a tiny, local hole in the wall place that had a very long line of (all Korean) people waiting to get in. While waiting, we looked at the grafittied wall we were leaning against and added our own random bits. Obviously people were used to waiting to eat here, which was a very good sign. Sandra ordered our _______, a stew with a red sauce/base, noodles and seafood that you can add things to (we added dumplings, rice cakes and cheese), and added a note asking them not to make it too spicy since I was a foreigner and to add extra cheese. We finally got to sit down and in a very short time, our ________ came out, boiling hot. The waitress put it on top of the portable burner on top of our table and we started eating. This was really delicious, and as I ate more, I liked it more too. It was spicy, but in a good way, like spicy for the flavor, when so much of the other Korean food I had seemed spicy just for the sake of spiciness. Also, it wasn't too spicy; it was just yummy. I could see why people were willing to wait so long for it.
Afterwards, we wandered around the area for a while, which was fairly traditional and just charming. I stayed at Cafe H Works to have some tea as she left to go tutor.
I got a bit lost on my way back to the subway station, but that's all part of the fun. On the way, I passed this, which I found interesting because someone actually had to put the effort in to place it just so instead of throwing it to the ground,
and this, which was neat.
I also passed this, which I still don't understand.
So I went back to my hostel for a short time, then met Sandra at ____, from which point we went to Cafe Benne, a very popular coffee chain, and I tried ______, a warm, almost grainy type drink that I could understand as being very comforting, esecially when it was so cold outside. It sort of reminded me of oatmeal, and it was actually quite good until the last bits, which were a bit too chunky.
Her friend _____ met us there and we all chatted for a bit about this and that, and then there was Rain. RAIIIINN!!! Rain is apparently a wildly popular Korean singer who outranks Stephen Colbert yearly in Time magazines online poll. I don't think I'd heard of them before, so they fixed that by showing me all the Colbert clips, which are genius. I'm a Colbert fan and have seen a lot of it, but somehow I'd missed all these. Watch them- they are amazing.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Stephen vs. Rain | ||||
| ||||
We went shopping a bit and I realized how much I missed shopping. According to Sandra (and based on what I saw, I'd agree,) Korea is an extremely superficial society so everyone follows trends and dresses really nicely. People always say "Oh the women are so fashionable/chic there!" about New York or Paris. I never noticed it in either place, even though I actively looked for it, but here it really does seem to be true, though maybe I just thought that because I felt so frumpy myself. I wanted to buy new clothes and everything so so bad, but I refrained. It did make me sad though, and this is one of those things I really do miss out on traveling so much.
____ left us a bit abruptly but said he might meet us later and we went over to Fruit Bar- at least I think that was the name of it- and met three of her other friends. They were lovely and fun to hang out with. We ordered Pineapple Soju and it came out like this:
Then we ordered _________, which is a sort of rice wine that was quite good. I told Sandra that I was exhausted and that I had to stop at some sort of convenience store to get a Diet Coke. Sandra relayed this to the other girls as I started to walk off as "She has to get some coke." They stopped and stared at us, "Um, we don't really do that." Sandra and I laughed and explained the mistake as I ran off and downed a can of Coke Zero as quickly as possible.
We found another bar and a group of guys one of the girls knew came in and met us. We ate and drank soju and played drinking games all night long. Below is a bit I randomly wrote afterwards, but explains and describes much of it that I barely remember now (I'm writing this about a week later).
You know what, I had such a good time in Korea. It really was so much fun- from the photo booths (my friend Sandra and I got the best pictures EVER, though sadly, I can't upload them now) and batting cages to the wandering to the late-night drinking, I had a fantastic time. I wasn't a huge fan of the food, in fact, overall, I hated it, though I did like the Korean pizza, Korean BBQ and the one place Sandra took me to, but the shopping was great and everything was just so interesting.
Probably the thing that fascinated me the most was the dating culture and trying to understand that. It really was incredible and so totally different from the Western model of dating that it was just fascinating. Everything goes towards coupling; from drinking games to random dating. There is no hook-up culture.
It's hard to say that this is always so great because it's a very important part of the rather sexist part of Korea, but this aspect of it really was, well, quite nice. At least for me, seeing this side of the culture made the sexist and difficult parts of the culture so much more understandable and logical, in a way I don't always get to see, even with all the respect I noticed for local women in previous cultures.
All the drinking games were intended to couple people up; the first was rearranging our positions so that the seating was male-female-male-female. There were a few other drinking games: my favorite was where someone made a general statement like "Dirtiest Person" or "Funniest Person" (at which point one of the guys reminded everyone that I was a backpacker) and everyone would take one chopstick and point, on the count of three, to the person they thought fit that description the best. Whoever had the most chopsticks pointed at them had to drink and made the next statement.
P.S. The blanks are spaces I'm waiting/hoping for Sandra to fill in for me.
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