Dane and I, two chemical engineering students at UF, were sent to South Korea for two months.
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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Impromptu Seoul

So Song-heong's "hometown" is Korea's capital, Seoul, and his "conference" was more like a US-visa application.

I can't say I was disappointed at the prospect of staying two days in the said city; I mean, I rather stay in a metropolitan area rather than revisiting the previous experience of farming for Won Chul's mother. Nothing wrong with that; I mean, when you come from a third world country, you should be able to perform some basic, farming tasks, right?

Not really.



Anyhow, the trip was hectic to say the least. We left YU at seven pm to reach Seoul station by 7:45pm. The trip was uneventful, and once there, I was confronted with the following scene:


Big ass screens are to Seoul streets as PC rooms are to Geyongsang's; these massive, digital canvases were everywhere and they were playing all sorts of crazy shit on them. For instance, I saw some clips of a woman hitting her husband's mother on an approximately 200 inch one, as if this was your typical Barney-meets-Mickey type of scene. Aside from that, the colossal concrete monsters dominated the rest of the scenary, and the overall vibe I got from Seoul, far surpassed that from both Daegu and Gyongsang.

We took a cab to his condo, which compared to what I've been living in thus far, seemed as an extravagant amount of space. I got a big room (with no bed but plenty of floor) with its own desktop and a few hundred, hard-back cover books. Seon-heong told me we were going out, which in my mind translated as: be ready to indulge yourself in all imaginable endeavors of a debauchery nature, but at the end was more like: let's get a pitcher of beer and some snacks (which in this case were Corn Flakes), and sit on our asses and watch Italy kick some Australian, kangaroo ass.




After the first half, our over-indulgence in the aforementioned goods made us quite sleepy; so we proceeded to sleep.

The following day I woke up the earliest I've been able to for the past month, at eight am. We had a quick breakfast (nothing), and headed to Seoul's metro station. We got off in some station of unpronounceable name and had some overpriced coffee (Starbucks). Seon-heong left to the consulate, and I was left to tour the city by myself. I headed to Gyeongbokgung Castle (henceforth referred to as GC for obvious reasons), which at first I thought would be nothing but a deja-vu of my Yeongnam trip, but at the end, resulted in something quite different:




To get to GC, I walked through this main road that had some hilarious, Korean art:



When I did get there (thirty minutes after), I crossed paths with a Saudi Arabian delegation. If you think Chinese people in general go berserk with taking pictures and stuff, you've seen nothing yet. Saudis are worse, much worse. Literally, once they had gotten out of their tour bus, they started running wild across the castle. These were thirty year old, hairy men posing as if they were some hot, Brazilian chick in the middle of a Sports Illustrated Magazine (Swimsuit Edition) photoshoot, laying on the castle's green areas, demanding that pictures be taken of their euphoric, silly selves PRONTO! Not the greatest scene by any type of standard.



As the castle was quite big, this took most of my allotted two hours of touring. I had agreed with Seong-heong (I think this is the third time I've spelt his name differently, but its all good!) to meet him in front of the US Consulate at noon.


I thought this would be easy, since in my previous experiences with US consulates, these were known for their gargantuan, American flags being paraded proudly all across their freshly-mown, green grass.

The American consulate in Korea was nothing like that: no green grass, no flags, no "welcome to America" type of stuff, this building looked like a prison:




I was lucky to find it thanks to Seoul's citizen's knowledge of English (which surpasses, by far, those from Daegu), but not before experiencing some Korean rioting on my way there:



Finally, we met up, and we headed to the metro, yet again. We met with one of his friends who was kind enough to invite us to lunch, and who gave us some World Cup memorabilia, and with whom we went to see a bad-ass, gangsta movie, Korean style:




Despite the lack of subtitles, scenes like the above one, and the typical he-loves-her-but-can't-have-her-because-people-want-him-dead plot, made 80% of the movie entertaining. Once the two hour long blood bath ended, we parted ways and we headed to the metro station where we proceeded to bounce back to Daegu.

Finito!

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