Catching up

 

Well true to my promise I got a little sidetracked from keeping track of what was going on in Seoul. Starting off from Friday we visited South of the Han river. This place was much more developed than the north that we were staying in, it was also much richer. That picture I've got up there. Its one of the smaller cheep developments south of the river. Cheep meaning that it might cost about a million dollars to live in one of those condos. We went to two other shopping districts as well. Abjugong, and another one that I totally forget the name of now. Its not really important. The excessiveness of those places just amazed me though. I keep thinking I've come across the rich of the rich, only to find richer people and places. Its really hard to imagine.

Friday night me, Matt, and his friend Kenny hit up the clubs in Itewon, the foreign district, actually I should say we hit up the gay clubs in Itewon. That was an interesting introduction to clubbing in general :). I got facebook friended by a gay Korean guy that could barely speak English Very interesting night indead. Oh and not just the night. Seoul stays up until 6-8 in the morning partying. Matt and I called it quits at 5am, and the club we left was still very very full.

The next day I was understandably very tired. I slept in till 2, and wandered out to find food and wandered back. Then it was time for a group dinner. We went to Hungki Unviersity district. Its basically like the ave on crack and not sketchy. There are apparently a lot of clubs in the area, but everyone except for Matt and I had done the night before (We got ditched on Friday due to a miscommunication, well that and drama that I don't want to go into). As a result I ended up going back to Itewon with a different group of people. We ended up at a straight club that I visited the night before called b1. It was interesting I got hit on by a girl from Yeouido (remember the super rich area). One of the girls in our group named Brenda did one better. She some how attracted the attention of this Korean guy who proceeded to take us all out to a Sake bar. The Korean in our group said she trusted him. I wouldn't have gone otherwise. Anyhow we ended up in this Sake bar at 4am with this Korean guy and find out this hes ridiculously loaded. The day before we had talked about second generation money being able to buy houses in places like Yeouido. This guy had a place in Abjugong. Apparently the apartment costs about 20 million dollars and the guy drove a 2 person Mercedes. In the end it got a bit late so we left at 5 again to get to bed.

The next day I woke up late again only to go out to a Filipino Market, and Itewon again... Only this time in the daytime. Thank god. 3 days of parties in a row would not be fun. I promptly went back to sleep after our trip. Woke up to discuss my project with Jeff at 7 and went back to sleep again.

This brings us to Monday. I wake up with a cold, most likely from saying up till 5am 2 nights in a row. To make matters worse I walk outside into heavy rain. The first and only day of rain we've had in Seoul. Well its a good thing my project was on the Subway system of Seoul. Everyones else in my class had problems with their project, but not me. I just couldn't take proper pictures or think effectively :). I was up till 1am putting together a slide show for my presentation on Tuesday.

Tuesday I was still kind of sick. Blowing my noes every hour or so. We went to Seoul National University which had a bigger campus than the UW. I was so surprised. We walked around for a bit, sat though 2 hours of presentations and critiques in a unbearably hot room and left. My presentation went off fine. I pulled out some stuff about Architecture design pattens and I think everyone though I made the presentation way to complicated. That night we had a group dinner with gelato for desert. I wasn't to hungry. I got to bed early.

That brings us to today. I've still got a stuffy nose, but I'm doing much better. Today was a free day so I woke up late to get a bit better and went off to Changgyeonggung. Its a world heritage site, and was very nice. There I ran into this really cool French guy name Peter. He grew up near the same place Kate lived I think. We talked the entire tour and I actually found out he was a Computer Science major. It was really nice to talk about PHP, C, C++, and code stuff again. Even if he was a bit hard to understand. I forgot how much I missed talking about that stuff. We went and got some lunch together. Apparently he was doing an internship in China, and needed to leave for 2 days to refresh his Visa. He'd never been to Seoul so I offered to show him around. We ended up going to the Korean War Memorial near Itewon. That place was an amazing piece of propaganda. Remember Koreans all have to serve 2 years in the military. Pictures speak louder than words in this case. We parted ways fairly late. I went back to Insadong and did some shopping. I picked up a nice hanging scroll for my self, and some presents for friends. I over paid for the scroll, but I don't really care. After that I came back to the hostel and decided to explore to the east. the only direction that I hadn't really gone before. I was a great decision. I snapped some perfect pictures, and really felt like I took in a lot of what old Seoul is all about. It didn't hurt there was some great music playing as I walked. I walked down a bit after I hit a place wall and when I turned around overshot my target. I ended up along Chonggeychong at night. I really wish Seattle had such a nice public space that we could go to at night and feel safe and at home. I'll have to write a blog entry on Chonggeychong alone at some point. Anyhow I got lost there for a bit and found my way back to the hostel after getting 3 Korean doughnuts for 1000 won. The things are amazing. Again another entry soon. Anyhow that basically concludes my stay in Seoul.

The one thing that I didn't mention was cool German and French guys, that and learning languages. I'll leave those notes to my self for later.

My flight is at 12:00 tomorrow afternoon, and I've got to get up at 7:00. The next post will be from Japan!