My roommate from EPIK orientation is an amazing person, so I asked her to come stay with me for the holiday. Yesterday, we walked all over my town and saw everything--my school, downtown, then the movie theater.
We had fun at Percy Jackson 2. It was one of those movies that doesn't have any depth but is still a pleasant way to spend 90 minutes, and it was great Korean language practice because I was reading the hangul subtitles while listening to the English and seeing the subtle differences between statements, like when the plain word "brother" is translated as "older brother" because the distinction is important in Korean and not important in English. Or when one character is thanked and replies, "No, thank you." and it came out in subtitles as, "I am the person giving thanks."
Today, we're considering a trip to Seoul. The train schedule is more complicated than it needs to be, but we shall figure something out. I'm so glad my roommate's here--she's really knowledgeable about travel and we just click, personality-wise.
Only saw three students from my school, yesterday, none of them ones I really know. The town really has emptied out, but there are still places to get food, etc. If we get to Seoul, what I really want to try is a cat cafe, a place where you buy an iced tea and sit around and pet the nice, clean domestic cats.
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10:30 PM Great day! We wandered Seoul for 11 hours and it was great.
First, we went to Gangnam, because it's such a super-famous district, but because it was Chuseok the streets were vacant. At one point, we walked through a suburb and saw not another person for 10 minutes. Nothing was open except a Starbucks. We walked along the main streets past 20-story buildings and there were a few cars and a rare person, but it might as well have been the zombie apocalypse for the small remnant of humanity we saw.
So we left Gangnam and went to Itaewon, the foreigner district, where we knew people would be. It was a hit! There were so many people there, and around half of them were foreigners--white people, black people, and lots of people who looked Southeast Asian, possibly from the Philippines or Malaysia. Many Turkish people were there, too--Roommate and I actually had lunch at a Turkish restaurant, which was great.
I was losing energy completely by 4 PM, so we recouped at a coffee shop, just taking an hour to sit and refresh. It worked fine, and we went wandering down the streets, which were nice and full.
I like Itaewon. Supposedly, it's a bit crime-y at night, but during the day it has a nice personality, like you feel you could walk into any shop and be welcomed there. I bought a couple of baseball caps, a shirt, and a bracelet at sidewalk stalls--it was really fun.
Roomate and I started climbing up a random set of stairs nestled into a hill, to get a better view of Itaewon. The view just kept getting nicer, so we climbed more stairs and took trails that wound further up and around the mountain. Soon, we came to some gardens and ponds, and realized the place was a park. We kept exploring to see where things would lead because we were seeing a lot of people, many with pets or children in tow, walking up the winding, ultra-steep paths.
I saw a sign saying "Namsan Gongwon" or Namsan Park and I looked up to see...Namsan Tower in the nearby skyline. Namsan Tower is a major-major-major landmark in Seoul and I have seen it in several TV shows and read about it on several teacher-blogs. I wondered if we could possibly walk to it from our place in the park. We could. It was 2 kilometers from where we started out, but we walked to the top of the mountain and saw almost the whole city.
It was so beautiful up there, near sunset. The place was very crowded, despite it being Chuseok, and we rode back down on a cable car just before sunset.
This Is Not My Picture, It's Taken From Google,
But This Is What We Rode On.
After some more walking, we found Seoul Station and. bought tickets back home. They were standing-room only, but we sat the whole way in the cafe car, which was necessary for the survival of our feet.
It's been just over one month that I've been in this country, and today was my first time really adventuring in Seoul. And I walked up a mountain and saw a fantastic tourist spot...by accident! The Lord really took care of us today, and though there were a lot of tiring moments, I was never really worried. We always had a decent idea of where we were, and we had our phones, and we had each other.
It's been a great Chuseok.
