Bright Lights, Big City

"The sounds of the city, somehow they comfort
me, on mornings when I am lonely"

A litle musical quote to start off this weeks blog seems a little fun. I'm a week behind again, and my apologies for that, but hopefully I can deliver on a modestly enjoyable blog-reading experience for you.

Last weekend was a great one, with a whole wack of teachers from Mokpo heading up to Seoul. I'm sure most everyone out there has heard of Seoul, as it's one of the largest cities in the world and has been ranked as one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in as well. 1 in 5 Koreans live in or right around Seoul, and while I've been to it a few times in the past, this was the first time I'd had a guide with local knowledge of the city.

I wasn't able to make it up until Saturday evening, as I was stuck at school working during the morning. Friday night had seen a major flurry of snow roll through Seoul, and I was sad at having missed out on the very Western wintery feeling everyone had had. Still, it was good just being able to get out of town for a while, whether it's for a few days or just a few hours.

We had a reservation for 20 at a Indian restaurant that night, and geez-oh-my was it amazing! I've never really had Indian food very often until this past year, and this was by far the best I've tried. I managed to make a complete wiener of myself trying to speak Korean to the Indian staff working there too, but that didn't seem to bother anyone and made for a good giggling at me with everyone. I guess the idea of traveling to Korea to try Indian food and using English as the means to communicate just seemed a little odd to me at the moment.

After dinner we got a good sampling of the night life away from Itaewon, the infamous tourist/foriegner district of Seoul. Itaweon is not really a bad place to go to, but it really loses any feeling of being in a foreign country, and quickly feels more like a backpacker hostel mixed in with a US military base. Speaking of US military, I learned that there are some 30,000 of them living in Seoul, and that they have a midnight (or maybe 1am) curfew every night. It seems excessive alcohol, late nights, and foreign militiary boys from the US don't go over so well in Seoul.

Anyway, we staying in the Hondae district, which is where (one of?) Seoul's major university is. I'm not sure if all night-time venues are overflowing with foreigners, but wherever we went there was an excess of Western faces sights and sounds. I don't think I needed to speak Korean to get a drink all night. Though speaking it better than I do would have come in handy at around 5 that morning when we went looking for somewhere that would serve us some food.

The next day had a moderately slow start to it. Two of our friends are moving to Seoul, so we helped move some things to where they could be stored till March, and grabbed some breakfast as well. We hit up a small diner, a "greasy spoon" I'm told is a good word for places like this. I hadn't had a big meal of eggs and hashbrowns in ages, and i made a moderate pig of myself scarfing down all the exciting morning goodies I hadn't had in so long.

The rest of the day was spent shopping, which was relatively unintersting. Everyone had hit all the neat touristy artsy spots the day before, so on Sunday we stuck to foreign (Western) food markets and cheap electronics shops. By the time we got home, I was deathly exhausted.

It's almost Christmas now, and while Canada is pumping itself full of Christmas music and commercial marketing schemes, it's pretty quiet here. There's been a few times out for dinner that I've heard some Christmas jingles, and every church has christmas lights strung around them. Still, it's not the same overwhelming cram-it-down-your-Celine-Dion-Jingle-Cats-what-would-Jesus-do-throat kind of experience. There has however been a different Christmas party every few days around town, with lots of singing and various forms of merry making. So even all this distance away, it's still very holiday-ish here too.

Well, I'll let everyone know how the actual Christmas day went down later. Till then, have a fun holiday!