Travelling Seoul

I finally have the right equipment to power my laptop off of Korean electrical outlets. What a pain in the ass trying to get a converter, or Korean cord for the laptop.

Well, here is a more in depth review of my first week, and some thoughts on Seoul.

Since I began teaching right away I didn’t really have a lot of time to do any extensive exploring. All that I saw last week was my neighborhood, and a few others that were close by. This was probably just as well, since there is actually quite a lot around where I live. Adam (my co-worker who is also from Canada) has been taking me on little trips most evenings and showing me how things work. After my first day of teaching we went out for sogalbi which is the classic ‘korean barbeque’ where you cook your meat on a little grill on the table. While slowly working our way through the food, we were also downing 750 ml bottles of beer, and bottles of soju (Korean spirit, similar to voka). Well a few hours later, we were stuffed and half cut… a fine start to my first week in Seoul.

In my neighborhood the amenities consist mostly of small shops and restaurants for the locals… for night life, more dinner options, and access to a wider range of goods you need to take a bus, and maybe the subway. Once I learned how to use the public transit system, the city opened up like a flower in bloom. Almost everything is available from the subway, which is massive in size and complexity. It is a marvel of efficiency.

This weekend Adam took a bus down to Cheoungju (city South of Seoul) to visit some friends. He asked if I wanted to go, but I decided there was still a lot for me to do around here. So I have taken the weekend and explored different parts of Seoul using the subway. It was a great experience… I’m mainly so happy about it because I found everything I wanted, and managed to not get lost. Good for me!

The places I went to were the infamous Itaewon, supposedly a very popular foreigner hang out, which I did last night (Enough fodder here for its own post sometime in the future). Then today I did a trip to Techno Mart which was a ridiculous shopping center of 8 floors or so, packed with elctronics. Every floor looked almost exactly the same to me. This is where I found everything I needed for my laptop… and some stuff I didn’t need but bought anyway.

One very odd thing I have noticed in Korea is the amount of workers that a particular store will have. This will be hard to believe, but I have been in a few very large department style stores now where there were probably as many employees as customers. Every booth has like five when one will clearly do… it is very odd.