NIGHTLIFE (3/1/09)

What an experience the last 2 weeks has been... Full of walking everywhere, eating all sorts of korean foods, drinking loads of soju, meeting new people, and just finding out what this city has to offer. The pace of a normal day in Korea has picked up dramatically since international exchange students started to flow into Sinchon for orientation a lil more than a week ago. With so much to do and so many people to see I barely even have time now to eat at my pad anymore. I've been going out to eat almost every meal and then hitting the town at night. With that combination, let's just say I haven't been saving that much money the past few days. After a couple days of visiting some mind-numbing tourist spots in Seoul with a giant herd of about 80 international students I went out this past Thursday to a small drinking joint in Hongde called the Pirate Bar with a few friends I had met that day and by the end of our stay, the number of people in our group swelled up to 19! After the bar, a majority of that group decided to go clubbing which I wasn't anticipating but of course, I'm always down for. The location of debauchery on this Thursday night was a popular club in Hongde called NB2, which played a bunch of mainstream American hip hop songs (the shitty likes of T-Pain among others). It was hilarious to watch the Korean guys and how scared some of them are to dance with girls. Most of them either stand there like a board or dance to the beat of a song that must be playing in their head b/c it's definitely not the song playing at the club.
A couple days later I guess I couldn't get enough of that Korean nightlife so hit another club in Hongde called M2 which played some loud ass house music. The place was crackin by midnight but there were a LOT of foreigners there. A couple of my friends and I stayed out until 4:30 getting some late night munchies at a Korean stand known as a poh-jun-mah-cha which is the Korean equivalent of a Mexican taco truck in California. After yet another long night of drinking and dancing, today it's time to rest up a bit because tomorrow is the first day of classes at Yonsei. Tomorrow's schedule is a pretty full so I'm gonna have to sign off. Until next time...

ChrisP

Gettin' my feet wet (2/16/09)

To whom it may interest,
So I'm giving my first shot at this whole blogging world. We'll see where it goes from here and how much I maintain it but it seems like a good idea for a trip that will steer the course of my post-collegiate life. For those of you that don't know, I'm out here in Seoul, South Korea doing a semester abroad program at Yonsei University. The semester will last about 4 months until the end of June from which I'll travel around Southeast Asia with a couple buddies from high school. Following the backpacking excursion across Asia I plan on coming back to Seoul to get a job/internship. The rest is up in the air which is kind of goes along with the way I operate. I tend to have a general idea of what direction I wanna go in but never really have the minute details laid out. In the end, it always works itself out.
I landed at the Incheon Airport last Thursday (2/12/09) and that's when it really hit me that I'm am gonna be in this country for a LONG time. I've been looking forward to this trip for some time now but it never felt real because it was hard for me to envision what it would be like to live here in Korea. I've never lived outside of California and I haven't been outside of the country for more than 3 weeks in my life so naturally trying to picture what life would be like in a place like Korea is near impossible. Although Korea is extremely different from home in many ways, I feel unexpectedly comfortable here. Minus some of the language hiccups I have with random people, it feels like Korea is a second home to me and I've only been here for 5 days (but man do I sound retarded sometimes when people ask me questions in Korean)
The past few days I've just been getting situated... Set up a Korean bank account, got a cell phone, and just getting comfortable in my new room and neighborhood (known as Sinchon). I live in what Koreans call a hasukjip, which is basically like a boarding house. The house is made up of 10 guys and girls all with their own rooms and then the household manager known in Korean as the hasuk ahjima cooks breakfast and dinner for the whole house. Almost all the residents are students so it seems like a cool place to set up shop during my stay in Seoul. So far so good (except for the windy 20 degree weather of the past couple days)... Until next time,

Hasta la vista, baby.
ChrisP