Oh Korea....

The weekend:

This is what the table looked like with the sides.

     On Friday we went to the city hall district where we went to an art museum and walked around a lot. We tried to go to the temple but it closed right as we got up to it. Even so we saw a statue of the man who came up with the current system of writing for Korea and we also saw two U.S. embassies.
   For supper we went out as a group to a "pork" restaurant which consisted of very thickly sliced slabs of bacon which we cook ourselves. There is also an over abundance of stuff to dip the pieces of meat in and put on a lettuce leaf with the meat to eat in a ball in one bite. They offer kimshi, stringed cabbage with 2 different sauces, pink radish slices, rice, lettuce, garlic, tofu, and a lettuce chopped up with sauce on it.
    The girl cooking was a group member's buddy and she was really nice. The girl to he left is one of my friends Caroline from Germany. At this restaurant there was table seating or floor seating. Also notice the tin thing in the picture to the right. That is the cups they use here. All restaurants use them and so does our cafeteria. They are really cute like everything else here. Everything comes in little size.

This is What the meat was cooked on and looked like.

  After going to the restaurant we met up with some more people to do karaoke. Karaoke is different here than it is in the states and way more fun. You get a group of people together here and then rent a room for like 25,000 won which is less than $25 dollars. They had tons of American songs and two mics which we could sing in. The chairs in the room were velvety and cute like everything else and they had fun lights like a DJ has to go with the songs. The only odd thing was the movies playing in the background. They had video of new york playing for Hey Jude and Nemo footage for I Don't Like Your Girlfriend  by Avril Levine.
     The next day we went to the Korean folk village. It was interesting but probably not a place I'd go again. They had old houses and we got to see how Koreans in the old days used to live. At one point we found out that fermented urine was used to cure bruises. We also saw a tightrope walker, this drum show, a horse show, and an old wedding. This part was interesting because the tightrope walker was just on a rope held up by two posts on either side and screwed into the ground. He jumped on the rope and sat on the rope.

Tightrope Walker.

He was pretty cool. There was also the horse guys who stood on the horses, picked stuff up off the ground while still on the horses, and laid down across the horses backs.There was a wedding that was pretty uneventful. The drum guys also put on a good show. Here is a video of it for you to see.
      Once we had seen all of that we came home and went to go eat supper. For the people at school the french boy didn't understand me when I said supper only when I said dinner did he finally get it. I thought that was funny. Anyway we were really hungry for something not Korean so we went to eat pizza and we found a pizza hut. Pizza here is an experience in itself. We had a pizza with corn, potato wedges, peppers, hardly any sauce, Canadian bacon (looks like American bacon), and pepperoni (ham slices). For the first time since being in Korea I drank water in a normal American glass (still much smaller than the normal pizza hut cups). After we got done with supper we came back and met up with a group to go out. First we went to Ipub and some people played pool and just talked there. Side note: In Korea people don't hang out at others places. Ever. Its a social rule that you go somewhere public. Anyway then we decided to go to the club but some of the members of the group wanted to go to Itawon. That's the district of town where all of the foreigners are due to the military base. This is the first time I've been in Seoul that I didn't feel safe. There were people everywhere and none of them looked like upstanding citizens. The Korean women everywhere else in the city always look very nice and put together but here they looked bad. We went to a very crowded club and I was very glad to leave when we did.
    The next day we went shopping in a district (I'm having troubles remembering names of all these places). We ate pizza again and again this was way different than anything in America. It was a Korean chain called Mr. Pizza and we had the shrimp king. It was good. There were lots of groups of friends having birthday parties and bringing little cute cakes in. Also everyone here is couples so they have things in twos. The salad bar is called Love Salad (salad for 2) and lots of food in restaurants comes in portions for two people. Then we went to forever 21 which was kinda expensive compared to the states and way expensive for shopping here. There were lots of high end stores in this district but I ended up getting a pair of vans due to the massive blisters on my feet. Hopefully these let my feet heal. While we were there we met up with Emily another girl from Creighton who is at another university here in Seoul. It was really nice to see another familiar face. Once we finished we came back and relaxed. It was the best feeling to relax after that jam packed weekend.