The First Weekend - Seoulsearching (Part 1: Friday-Saturday)

Peeking in on classwork.

Finished my first week of teaching at a Hagwon on Friday. These kids are so damn cute. I actually had to kick one kid out for being insanely uncooperative, but everything after that was smooth sailing. They are generally eager learners and I'm loving my job more every day. My co-teachers invited me out for drinks after work to celebrate my first full week in Korea. I told them I would go, but I would have to meet up with them later. I had promised a random Korean man dinner and I wasn't about to bail on that drunken promise. We had agreed to meet at 9:00pm in front of 7-11. I even emailed him earlier to remind him (I don't know how much he was able to read since it was all in English). So, I show up at 7-11 a few minutes early and I wait...and I wait...and I wait..until past 9:30pm. It was beginning to look like I was the only one of us who had remembered this drunken conversation. I wait another 10 minutes before giving up and heading to meet up with my co-teachers.

We grabbed drinks and dinner at a local bar/restaurant? It's kind of hard to tell the difference sometimes in Korea because you can buy alcohol at most restaurants, and eating is a big deal in Korea so food is always a given. Whenever you buy alcohol, they typically bring out a tray full of snacks to eat with it at minimum. Honestly, the main thing that unnerves me about Korea is how everything is paid "Korean style." Splitting checks is not only unheard of, it's probably impossible for Korean cash registers. It simply just isn't done, so I felt bad that I was basically riding around on someone else's dime all night, but I suppose one weekend will be my turn and my wallet will be the one crying then.

So we had dinner and drinks at this bar/restaurant for a few hours. Many chicken dishes came and went (Koreans LOVE chicken, if I haven't mentioned that yet.) and it was all 맛있어요 (delicious). We also had what I would consider the Korean version of a sake bomb...ish. It's 맥주 (beer) mixed with 소주 (soju [a bit like sake]) and my co-teacher called it 폭탄주(pok-tan-ju), which is pretty much just the Korean word for a boilermaker. It's really delicious because of how sweet and floral the soju is (not to mention the added alcohol content).

After dinner, we headed off to a karaoke bar. I learned very quickly that Koreans have NO idea what the word karaoke means, despite the fact that it's practically their cultural pastime. They call it 노래방 (no-rae-bang) which roughly translates to the same thing. It was pretty cool. I still was floating on my co-teachers dime, but I didn't really know what else to do, so I kept drinking. We then went to a second karaoke bar (why, I cannot remember...I was pretty drunk.) and I sang a few songs, all of which my co-teachers were quick to praise and claim I had a wonderful voice. I'm pretty sure they just don't know what American songs are supposed to sound like... lol. I took some pictures at dinner, but I feel like it would be rude to post pictures of people without their permission? So I'll leave them off.

We are practically dragged out of the "song bar" at 6am and I felt terrible for keeping the staff up all night so I bowed quickly with an apologetic "미안합니다" (mi-an-ham-ni-da), to which my co-teachers drunkenly yelled "no!" at me, so I don't know if I said it wrong, or I'm not supposed to apologize to waitstaff, or I'm just not supposed to apologize for partying hard? lol. Not sure.

I had promised my friend Lais that I would meet her in Seoul tomorrow and I quickly realized tomorrow had already come. The train system is still alien to me and I was too uncomfortable to try that journey while intoxicated, so I asked my co-teachers when the first bus left for Seoul and they said seven. Realizing that was only an hour away, I called a cab, took it to the bus terminal, and purchased a ticket for the 7:30am bus to Seoul. I was hoping I could just sleep on the ~4hr (people say 5-5:30 but both ways to Seoul were 4 hours each so...lucky bus?) bus ride there, but I still needed to stay awake for the next hour in the terminal. I couldn't even ask someone to wake me up if I fell asleep, because no one spoke English -_-; So I powered though and crashed as soon as I boarded the bus.

Some points of Seoul are just sheer cliffs.

Waking up in Seoul, I let Lais know I had arrived and she told me she would be there in an hour (I had estimated my bus arriving at 1 and it arrived at 11:30) so I tried sleeping some more in the terminal, but with little success. Still, by the time Lais called me again, I was pretty alert and we started trying to locate each other using Korean signs, directions, and landmarks we couldn't understand. The problem was, we soon discovered, that the train station was not even remotely in the same area as the express bus station. I attempted to take a taxi to "Seoul Station" and was promptly told "no" by the cab driver and forced out of the cab. I will apparently learn that Seoul is nothing like Changwon and some Koreans there aren't all too fond of foreigners.

Don't let this picture fool you,
it gets ridiculously steep on the hike up to Seoul Tower.

Lais took the subway to me, but we still probably wasted a good hour just trying to find each other. Apparently she had walked into the wrong building and it took forever to realize we weren't even in the same building. Luckily, we found each other and didn't waste any time grabbing a subway train to a tourist section of Seoul with plans to go to Seoul Tower. We walked around a bit to grab lunch, and I soon got this vibe that I didn't like Seoul as much as Changwon. There was certainly much more to do, but there was also this strong foreigner presence that kind of trampled the cultural ambiance of Korea. Everyone was military, military families, or teachers from America and the U.K., and no one really had any intention of trying to fit into Korea. Quite the contrary, they all seemed to be forcing Korea to fit them. Walking down the street, I felt more like I was in a New York City street market than in a foreign country.

Benches at Seoul Tower force you to like the people you sit with.

We ate at a Subway (because nearly every restaurant was American), and this English lady had the most complicated order for a 6-inch sub ever. I swear the employee was looking for his protractor to get some of her specifications right. I made the comment to Lais about how expensive subway is here (6 bucks for a 6-inch sub that's mostly bread) and the lady turns and tells me "I know, isn't everything?" My jaw dropped and I swear I thought about hitting her. Everything is expensive because you demand culinary consistency in a foreign country. I've been eating for maybe a 3-8 dollars A DAY in Korea just by eating Korean food. So we sit down and then I have to listen to her daughter (or whatever) drone on about how cultured she is because she taught in China for awhile before teaching here, even though she's eating at Subway with a bunch of Americans right now in Korea and I suddenly start understanding why that cab driver wanted me the hell out of his cab. I don't like these people either. "Cultured" apparently now means taking your culture wherever you go and remaining wholly ignorant of the beautiful culture permeating the air around you.

Trees covered in "Locks of Love"

Luckily, we soon leave and grab a bus to Seoul Tower which....I can barely find the words to explain. I want to just leave it at "Awesome." Basically, the bus stops 3/4ths of the way up the mountain at a 7-11 type convenience store (where we ran in to get some drinks and ice cream) and you have to walk the rest of the way on foot. This doesn't seem to be a big deal except for the fact that the road slopes up at at least a 40 degree incline (That's a low estimate because I don't want to be hyperbolic....it felt like walking up a wall) and girls were walking up in 4 inch heels! Korean girls are really committed to looking good always. We get to the top and (ironically) there is a mariachi band playing in the square -_-; We take some pictures with the tower and the surrounding area, but what really catches our eyes are trees and fences 100% covered in what seem to be gym locker locks.

People lock everything from phone cases to toys
covered in messages to loved ones

We get closer and find out that is exactly what they are. Seoul Tower has a superstition associated with is that if you write a message to your loved ones and lock it to the area around the tower, you'll have eternal love and happiness (I guess because it's at such a high point...like a beacon? Not really sure how it got started). Lais and I cannot resist taking part in this cultural phenomenon, so we get our own lock and write secret messages to our loved ones. We thought about locking it to a tree, but the trees were so covered in locks, we would never find ours again. Then we tried the fence, but our lock chain wasn't big enough. We finally decided to lock our "Locks of Love"to a giant heart statue erected on the terrace that was impossible to miss. The whole terrace area was cute, with benches built so you slide toward the middle and have to sit extremely close to whoever you are sitting with =3

We picked the perfect spot to put our notes.

We then rode to the top of the tower and committed more acts of cultural love graffiti wherever possible (like everyone else at Seoul Tower), and the view from the top was breathe-taking. It's not even something worth describing, you just have to go. I was not a fan, however, of the digital floor panels that pretended to fall away when you stepped them. Children were obsessed with them, however.

Realizing I didn't bring anything with me to stay overnight anywhere, Lais took me to the bus station and I boarded the last train to Changwon going out the same way I came in - sleeping.

View from the top.