Sorry for the lack of posting!! I have been travelling all over the country! My friend Brittoni and I departed Masan on Friday evening after work and went to Seoul. We met up with a friend of mine that I met through connections I have in the US and we have become pretty close friends in the month i've been in Korea! We went to "club night" which means you pay 20,000won (roughly 17$) to get a wristband that lets you into any of the bars in the Hongdae Area of Seoul. Hongdae is the Hongik University section so it's full of life (aka drunken college students and GI's). In Korea you always start the night off by eating traditional Korean style foods: anju (finger foods that you eat after you take shots and drink beer, they believe this helps relieve the enormous hangover caused by Soju(vodka-like rice liquor)), spicy bean paste soups, meat on a grill, various green salads, and various kimchi (I think i'm actually starting to like kimchi!!!). After about 2 hours of dinner we went out onto the street and started going to the bars, it was just like being in college again, dark sweaty rooms with lots of drunk people... It was fun to dance again and there were some really good DJ's but I don't think i'll be attending club night again.
The next morning Brittoni and I met up with some other friends of mine that I met throught the friend I met with the connection...how confusing is that?! We had DELICIOUS traditional Korean soup that tastes kind of like chicken soup but has dumpling paper in it. YUM!!! As Brittoni and I had stayed at a jjimjilbang the night before we had our HUGE packs, so we went to the subway and left them in lockers there. The lockers are a great, efficient, easy resource for travellers...if you speak Korean, which we don't. So after trial and error we managed to get our packs safely locked up. We then went SHOPPING! Woo! The shopping here is soo much fun, all the vendors are usually out on the streets so you peruse stalls packed full of merchandise while dodging moving vehicles and tons of people! What a delicious dinner for the senses! We nibbled on delicious street vendor food and drinks and practiced our (terrible) Korean.
After a while we decided it was time to go get a couple of drinks, have some dinner, and catch up with some other connection friends. We had a blast! Just sitting on the street eating good food with great company! Afterward we went with some of our new local expat friends to a little-known bar and danced the night away! Well, when we went to grab our packs at 3am so we could go to sleep we discovered that the lockers shut down at 1am and so I was left without a change of clothes or a toothbrush...yum. We found a love motel, which is a room that you can rent by the hour or for the night and comes fully equipped with shampoo, conditioner, toothbrush, razor, lotion, towels, and AC..aka HEAVEN. So Brit and I crashed there, when we awoke in the morning we went to get into our packs for a change of undies (aaaaaahhhhhhh). Well because we don't speak Korean we just opened the lockers, got our stuff, changed, and then shut the lockers again. But we didn't re-pay, which means ANYONE who wanted could open our lockers...idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot... We discovered this when we returned several hours later, thankfully we were able to open up Brittoni's locker and her stuff was in there, but my locker had apparently been opened, and someone else's subway card was keyed to it so I couldn't open it up. I definitely started to panic, so we called our friend who speaks Korean to come and help us and Brittoni treated me to a piece of dark chocoloate mousse cake (duly deserved). After about an hour, 6 favors, and the piece of cake we were finally able to communicate to someone that we needed to have the locker opened and sure enough...my stuff was there! Thank god my experience with Koreans has repeatedly been that they are the nicest people in the world. We grabbed our packs and treated ourselves to delicious Italian food!
Last night we slept at another jjimjilbang that had the crankiest adjimas (the name for women over 30 in Korea) in the entire country of Korea. They yelled at us for brushing our teeth in the wrong area, for not charging our phones appropriately, for turning on lights and air conditioners and god knows what else. Another thing that made this particular jjimjilbang exasperating was the sleeping room, there is usually one room reserved for sleeping, which is why, as travellers, we LOVE jjimjilbangs. You pay for a shower, a place to put your stuff, space to sleep, and it's dirt cheap. Something noteworthy is that traditionally Koreans sleep on small pads on the floor with maybe a small blanket and usually no pillow (aka not the comfortable pillow top bed i'm used to in the states). Well Brittoni and I were exhausted so we crashed by 11 (that's WAY early by Korean standards) and we were the only ones in the sleeping room. We were able to read a little by light from the hallway and passed out, when I awoke at 1am the entire room was full of snoring women. When I was awoken at 2am some girl was taking my pillow! When I awoke at 3am the same pillow-stealer was having a nightmare (karma anyone??), when I was awoken at 4am the pillow-stealing nightmare was kicking me in the head... By the morning I felt as though i'd rather stick my head in a bucket of water and breathe than suffer through another night at this jjimjilbang AND Brittoni had been yelled at by the adjima for brushing her teeth in the wrong spot (that was the right spot last night)...*sigh* we were thrilled to depart and even more thrilled to find a donut shop around the corner.
We have arrived in Mokpo today and have booked tickets onto a ferry that will take us to Jeju-do island which is essentially Korea's Hawaii. We intend to spend the next several days there, returning in time for a weekend stay at a buddhist temple about 2 hours from our home that has the original Tripitaka Koreana Sutras that were hand carved into wooden blocks years ago to preserve the history of the Buddha. Looking forward to getting a good night's sleep and looking forward to the ferry ride!!!
Anyong!
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