Seoul Adventures, Part 1: Foreigners Meeting Foreigners

I have now been to Seoul twice (written prior to last night’s clubbing). It takes about 40 minutes to get to the north side of the city, where I started out both trips. It is interesting to be so close to an international city such as Seoul. It will take a while to get used to it. Although I have been twice, I have not ventured out very much from this area within the city known as Insadong. Insadong is considered one of the cultural capitals of South Korea. It is a market area that has a number of stores with “traditional” crafts. The odd thing about it is that there are permanent stores and mobile carts and stands in the same place. It is an interesting dynamic. Although I have been twice, I have still yet to purchase anything, but I am formulating a list of good gifts to get for friends and family.

All that said, now I can go into the specifics of each visit. The first visit was over our Christmas vacation weekend. Most of my coworkers had planned a trip to Tokyo for the 4 day weekend, but I was not ready to jump on a plane so soon after arriving. So I went with my other abandoned coworker (just kidding HR-ites who are reading), Amanda, to explore Seoul. I wanted to go to a palace and see the architecture and read about it while Amanda wanted to go get gifts for friends and family.

We started by going to ChangDeokGung, an ancient palace inside the city of Seoul. While waiting to purchase tickets, I heard some people speaking English so I decided to strike up a conversation, and boy was that the right idea. The couple that were there were brother and sister on a 12 hour layover from Vietnam, where they are English teachers, to Hawaii to meet their parents for a little vaca. So we just ended up walking around with them in the palace and spent the majority of the day with them.

The palace was gorgeous, however there were no posted signs or anything to read about the different areas of the vast complex so it was much more of a visual tour. If you do make your way to Korea, I would recommend going to a palace, but with a tour. I plan on going back and taking a tour of the same palace with the extra secret garden tour, which is supposed to be phenomenal, sometime this spring or summer when stuff is in bloom.

Palace Gates

Welcome to Korea, where I am taller than 15% of doors

This is the basic design on all the buildings. The picture does not do the colors justice.

So the group of us left the palace to walk down the street. We decided to take our new friends on a crash course of Korean cuisine. We stopped for KimBap, a Sushi-esque rice, egg, radish, assorted greens, and chosen toppings wrapped in seaweed sheet. I will need to do an involved blog soon on cuisine, but this description will do for now. After our little appetizer, we went to find a Korean BBQ*. While we ate the BBQ, we swapped stories about life and teaching in our countries. They had so many funny stories about living in Vietnam and how backwards it is, it made Korea sound like a cushy job teaching in the suburbs. After we ate, we found a cool little tea shop (more on the shop later oddly enough) and shared more. It was truly so much fun to randomly find such cool people and connect in such a short period of time.

Jujube Tea from the Traditional Tea House

After that, our Vietnamese friends had to head back to the airport to head to the warmth of Hawaii (yes, that is a hint of jealousy). Amanda and I went back to Insadong to do some shopping/looking for a bit but neither of us were particularly successful. The two of us split up as I went to Chabad House for services and dinner. It was really wonderful to have a good Jewish experience so close to arriving. I did enjoy it, but there were times of frustration, just based on the differences with practice between myself and the Orthodoxim who led the services/house. I was able to light the Channukiah which was really touching. Unfortunately most of the people who were there were just visiting so I could not find and meet peers or people who I could connect with, so my social group remains only those who I work with (again, HR-ites, this is not a bad thing, just a limiting thing). After services I found my way home on the subway.

Snow falling as I left the Chabad House

Trip number two was for New Years. It will be in the next post.

*If you have not had Korean BBQ, you really should try to find one. Get KalBi or this thin pork stuff that I can’t remember what it is called