Seoul felt like such a long time ago but it was only about 2/3 weeks since we got back! So this post might be a bit lacking since it's not fresh in my memory.
Our trip to Seoul was to celebrate our first vacation! SLP gets a summer break from July 28th to August 2nd but we wanted to come back on the Sunday to watch the Pohang Fireworks Festival. First things first, JULY IS LIKE THE ABSOLUTE WORST TIME TO VISIT SEOUL. It was so damn hot that you were constantly sweaty. It felt like you were swimming, which totally bums you out when you're wanting to just wander around or walking up from the subway.
Let's actually back it up to the real sweat-fest: buying our bus tickets. So we knew where the machine was but we got in a trap of trying to guess the Hangul in the hot glass bus shelter. We eventually decided to just hop in a taxi and head to the Terminal where we could purchase tickets from a real person. After four hours on an Excellent bus we were soon in Seoul.
The area that we agreed would be best for our interests was Hongdae, close to Hongik and EWHA Universities, nightlife, food and restaurants. It had a chill artsy vibe too, which was something we were down for as a first trip.
Starving, we wandered around Hongdae and stumbled across a burger joint called New York Apartment and stuffed ourselves. Since we were so full we ended up chilling in the park with some soju. Chill night.
The next day, we did some more wandering to kill time until Aaron's friend, Steven, got in from Cheongju. We did ate in Hongdae, shopped in Myeongdong and Naedaemun Market, saw Sungnyemun (which I'm teaching about in one of my classes!) and "eye shopped" at the Nakwon Music Arcade. Aaron was like a child in a candy shop.
That night we got some grub and Alex finally got ID'd. He didn't bring his wallet (oh, and did I mention he failed to bring his T money, used for the subway, card with him to Seoul so he bought a new one and forgot to bring it out that day too) - HOW TYPICAL! So no bars for us since the ones we wanted to go to were checking IDs. But at this chicken restaurant we managed to get passed it by showing her Alex's birthday on his Facebook profile... sounds legit enough to me! Then we ended up meeting a Bible thumper who tried to open our eyes to God. Needless to say, we let him down. We ended up staying up until 7AM playing card games (and somehow getting wrecked by Aaron and Steven in Signal, who were stupid drunk).
Now to the best part of our trip... the Trickeye Museum! We were waiting for Steven to visit this place as we knew we'd all get a real kick out of it and did we ever! Here's some photos of us having way to much fun over optical illusions.
(Click the pictures to see them in all the glory)
There was also an Ice Museum, which our Canadian blood craved but it was ridiculously cold, haha. We thought we were finally adapting to the Seoul heat.... JOKES IT WAS SO HOT THE ENTIRE TRIP AND I COMPLAINED THE ENTIRE TIME.
Afterwards, we went on the hunt for the Lego cafe and had a nice time relaxing with air conditioning while working on our X-Men Legos. From there we hit up an all-you-can-eat sashimi place recommended to us and DAMN, WAS IT GOOD. 15/10 would recommend, it's called 연어상회 close to Sinchon Station.
The night ended back at the same park where we watched a lovely group called, The Mockingjay Trio, perform covers from Prince to John Mayer. They were so good that we stayed there until they got a noise complaint from the cops.
We headed back the next day to actually miss the Pohang Fireworks Festival because our bus was later than expected but then found out the next day that the festival was cancelled due to rain!