Last weekend, all nine of us, plus my coworker's friend who was visiting and Joel's friend from college all met up in Seoul on Friday night to stay for the weekend. The kinder program teachers got to head out of town around 7:30 p.m., but the afternoon teachers weren't off until 10, so we didn't hit the road until late. Our bus made good time, but we still did not make it to the bus terminal in Seoul until about 2:30 a.m. From there, we had to catch a taxi to our hostel in Hongdae. Unfortunately, our taxi driver either didn't know the location of the landmark we requested, or he was too lazy to actually drop us off there, so we were left on a random street corner with no sense of direction and the hostel nowhere in sight. We walked into a nearby convenience store and, luckily, ran into a British woman who gave us directions. Otherwise, we would have been screwed.
Since we were all exhausted, we did not get started until close to noon the next day. My coworker (who did a fabulous job organizing the trip and finding accommodations, might I add) was hell-bent on trying the food at an African restaurant that she had seen before, so (for lack of any better ideas) we all headed to a little hole-in-the-wall place in Itaewon called "Mama Africa House" that served a variety of Nigerian dishes (most of them had a side of fufu). It definitely wasn't my favorite - I wouldn't choose to go back there - but it was palatable IMHO and I mostly finished mine. Unfortunately, most of the rest of our group were more than a little disgusted at the food, so a lot of us were hungry and in a foul mood by the time lunch was over. We made a plan to rendezvous at one of the subway stations at 6 and headed out.
After lunch, Joel and I split off from the main group and headed to Kyeongbokgung, the old imperial palace. Joel had some work to do, so he camped out in the museum cafe (with wifi) while I took an hour or so to walk around the palace grounds. To be perfectly honest, it wasn't terribly impressive: the architecture is neat at first, but it gets a little repetitive, and the grounds are almost entirely gravel. However, there was a small grove of maple trees that were really lovely. I would love to go back for a weekend and take some time to tour the museums in the palace complex and see some of the other palaces in the city (there are five total, I think).
After the palace closed, we headed into downtown to check out the Lantern Festival, which was the original reason we all decided to make the trip. While it was kind of a neat concept, it wasn't terribly interesting, and the fact that it was absolutely jam-packed with people killed a lot of the fun that might have been had for us. After we got tired of being stuck on a human conveyer belt, we headed back to the hostel to shower and change, and then we went to a restaurant called VIPS for steak. Joel had been hankering for a steak dinner for a while and took the trip as an opportunity to satisfy the craving. Unfortunately, dinner was where the "group" outing began to unravel; we all were still at dinner when we were supposed to meet up, and only two of us (Joel and his friend in the Army) had cell phones that were able to text each other without the aid of wifi. We were in touch with them periodically, but it never worked out to meet up. After the others finished with the lantern viewing, a few of the guys headed back to the hotel, and the others wandered around for about two hours in search of a hookah bar that they had read about. We tried to meet up with them, but Joel's friend's phone was low on battery and we couldn't figure out where they were.
At that point, we decided to head back to Itaewon to meet up with some different friends from Gwangju who were also in town. We hopped the subway and met them at a bar called the Bulldog. The night started off pretty well, but by the third bar there were more than a few couples making out (which gets boring to watch after a while), and the smoke was making me feel sick, so we called it a night at about 4:30 a.m. We grabbed soem fried chicken, took a taxi back to the hostel, and collapsed into sleep.
After another late start on Sunday, Joel went home early and one of the couples split off, while the rest of us headed to a diner (yet again in Itaewon). After we finished lunch, we decided we were pretty deflated, so four of us ladies headed to the bus terminal and went home. Seoul weekend finishee.
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