Sabbatical Day 52 (6.29.16) - Gangnam Part 1

Today we decided to explore Gangnam. It was a 45 min subway ride to the area and I found out that the area is huge! The interesting thing about being here for me is that I just follow James wherever we go. I have no idea what direction we are going in, or what the street names are. I usually do a little more research but decided to leave that all in his hands.

And I digress...back to Gangnam. The area was made famous by the PSY song, but the music video was at Gangnam station. We decided to make that our last stop for the day. We started at Samseong station (yes, Samsung) and checked out the Coex mall. James read the description and told me it was Seoul's largest mall. Once we got there and walked around a bit, we both thought it was nothing special. Then we found out it was Seoul's largest underground mall....big whoop. We got out of there quick style and went to look for the Korean Buddhist temple called Bongeunsa Temple which was supposedly across the street.

Well, we walked in the wrong direction and found ourselves at a casino. This casino only allowed foreigners in which is pretty genius. (Something else to note about the Samseong station is that it also has Seoul's World Trade Center and a giant convention center. There were a lot of foreigners around.) We ended up staying there for at least an hour with James playing several hands of Blackjack. I don't know what it is with that boy and Blackjack but he loves it.

Once we headed in the right direction to the temple, it was very easy to find. It was like being transported to the rural countryside which was very cool. The temple offers an overnight temple stay for meditation and to see how the monks live. It was weird for me to see a Korean Buddhist temple because most Koreans I know are Christian and I associate the Buddhist temple with funerals and Vietnamese school from when I was a kid.

We left the temple and decided to walk to the fancy shop area of Gangnam (aka the Rodeo drive). It was luckily only a mile and we knew we were there once we saw designer shops that were 3 stories high at least. Each of the buildings had a cool design and structure. I think my favorite was the Omega store.

This road with the designer shops was also called Kpop Star Road. It had statues of a bunny (?) that were dressed like different Kpop stars. At the end of the road was a giant statue dressed like PSY. At the end of the road was the Galleria which had very high end shops and a fancy schmancy food court.

We ended up walking around more and went to the back side streets because James had found some shops to visit. What was weird was that there were apartment complexes right next to the super nice Galleria that looked very very ghetto.

Later that day James made a very interesting observation to me. I think he's a genius.

The way that Seoul is laid out is very different from San Francisco. In San Francisco, each neighborhood is known to be nice or not etc and all the houses generally look similar in each neighborhood. In Seoul, you can visually see the wealth disparity. People in the city usually live in high rises or in 3-4 story buildings called villas. The high rises are seen as nicer and show a price tag with that association. The villas are seen as not as nice and are much cheaper. The streets are also very narrow in Seoul. We were walking down some narrow streets and had to move to the side for cars to pass through. James made that observation that even that is showing the wealth disparity - you're on foot and I'm in a car so you need to get out of my way.

Crazy....

To say the least I didn't have the best impression of Gangnam. We didn't make it to the station but plan to go back to check it out. We are also going to check out two smaller neighborhoods in the Gangnam area that have turned more hipster. Excited for that!

Sabbatical Day 51 (6.28.16) - Errands

Today was our first full day in Seoul and we had a lot of errands to run. We woke up at 5 am and couldn't go back to sleep and are pretty jetlagged too!

1) Get our resident cards

2) Get a Tmoney card to use on the subway

3) Open a bank account

4) Get a Sim card

What an experience. You'd think it would be easy to do any of those things but it was anything but. Unfortunately most the items required one of the others as a prereq. For example, in order to get a bank account, we need a phone number or our resident card. 

We ended up running around the city going to several different phone stores for the sim card and several banks to find out what their requirements are. We couldn't get the resident cards because they require an appointment. Funny enough, their site wasn't working and they don't do same day appointments anyway. We were able to get a Tmoney card but bought it at the first place we stopped by (our local 7-11). The worker there only had cute cards with Line and Kakao mascots. We found out later that those cards are more expensive than the plain cards. 

While we ran around doing errands, we were able to explore our area further and I took the subway for the first time!

My observations for today are that 1) the style is to wear long sleeve shirts with short shorts 2) girls here wear light brown almost red eye shadow all around their eyes and very pink lipstick. That would look NCAA on me so I'm not trying that trend anytime soon.

Sabbatical Day 50 (6.27.16) - Seoul, Day 1

We finally arrived in Seoul! I barely slept on the flight because I was having issues with the entertainment system and really wanted to watch movies. Our flight got in around 3 pm local time (which was way past my bedtime in SF). Of course we wanted to eat and explore the city a bit so we did a bit of unpacking then headed out to the street.

The area that we are staying in is where all the universities are. I am amazed by how many food and coffee shops there are-it seems like every other shop is either of those! We ended up eating a few doors down from our apartment and ordered kimbap and bibimbap. The meal was VERY cheap ($6 for the both of us). I'm so excited to eat more delicious food!

After our meal we explored the neighborhood more. We found a lot of interesting places to eat, more coffee shops, and a shopping area. Since it was just getting dark, we also saw some street vendors out. My initial observations from walking around tonight are:

1) I didn't see too many women wearing tank tops. Most had t-shirts on or were covering their shoulders. Interestingly enough, I saw a lot of women wearing long sleeves with short skirts or shorts. 

2) People walk on the street glued to their phone. Even crossing busy intersections they are looking down! 

We have a laundry list of things to take care of tomorrow. Hopefully it's not too hot-today's weather was perfect!