Sweet dreams are made of this?? Seoul: revenge of the taxis

I'm not sure how to tell you about Seoul (pt 2) without sectioning it off into all of it's parts.  It was probably the longest weekend of my life, not because it was bad by any means, but because it was so full.  We drained every possible second out of the space between work on Friday and passing out Sunday night.  So, be prepared for a blog in parts.

We did learn a lesson from our last excursion, and that was to by tickets in advance, which is exactly what we did, and I happily surrendered mine to Lindie because I'm having quite a losing-things streak.  So, here's the scene for part one:  Lindie and I, Friday night, trying desperately to maintain excitement throughout our work days, grabbing cabs and heading to the KTX to start another amazing adventure in the capital.  Our tickets were for 10:20pm, which would put us in Seoul at around 1am.  Depending on our luck (and the kindness of strangers) we set off, with barely a moment to spare, for the platform.

Ready??  :-)

The ride there was very nice, we had a lot of laughs (laughing until we, I think, started to annoy the people around us who actually appreciated the late hour) and then finished the trip reading quietly and trying to be good.

We made it!  The other end of the KTX!

 There was one problem that we didn't at all anticipate:  the subways closed at midnight.  I would have bet my last dollar that in a city this size the subways would HAVE to run 24 hours a day, right??  But that's not all.  On our way to the subway we noticed a strange gathering of people near a bus stop.  What could they possibly be waiting on?  I thought to myself.  Surely they could all just get on the subway and get to where they're going.  Obviously not.  These people were all waiting for taxis.  As we approached the first of what we were sure would be many Seoul lines (Seoul Lines, the Sequel) we eventually realized that the cab drivers were just walking through the crowd asking people where they were going.  We were immediately asked, and we really just barely knew, the man who asked us disappeared into the crowd and then came back and asked us again, bringing another man with him (a man who spoke English) we told him and more or less motioned that we should follow him and essentially cut off this throng of cold, waiting, tired would-be passengers.  The man told us that he had convinced the taxi driver to take us with him because we were going close to, or through, or something the way that he was going, so he paid the driver a little extra and we all climbed into the cab giving apologetic looks to the people waiting.  The man told us that those people would be waiting for well over and hour for a cab because no one wanted to run this late on a Friday night, which was, to me, the second mind blowing piece of public transportation information.  How could subways not run?  Why would cab drivers, who are working all night anyway, not want a far, no matter where they were going/

This would turn out to be the only piece of taxi good luck we would have the whole weekend, but it seemed to be quite a good one.

The man talked to us while we drove around.  He didn't really like the sound of where we wanted to stay because he was convinced that we would not be able to find a room there.  And, if you read my last Seoul blog, this was a suspicion that we readily believed.  He told us that he could take us somewhere that would have a lot more options and would literally be right on top of a subway stop so we would be able to get anywhere that we wanted to easily.  He was so very worried about us, it was kind of funny.  He kept saying that he thought he had better take care of us and take care of the situation for us.  And I guess he more or less did.  The cab dropped us off, we walked into the very first motel on the street, and got a room for about $50.

The motel we walked into was called "6 Motel" and turned out to be one of the many "love motels" that are so very popular here.  This one was one of the most interesting as it came with a very telling feature:

I wonder what happens here??

It wasn't very big, as you can see, the smallest so far, but it had a bed, and that's all that was required.

The only bummer about it, we thought initially, was that it didn't have a tub.  But, turns out we wouldn't have had time for a bath anyway, so it ended up not mattering in the least.  We took showers, got ourselves feeling and looking a little more human and got ready to go.  Now, it's time for part one of our adventure.  

Friday Night with Terry and the Boys--somewhere around 2:30am.   

Terry is a fabulous guy in Seoul, one of Lindie's dear friends, who treats her like a little kid sister and dotes on her.  Too sweet.  Anyway, he was in Seoul, so we decided that we had to meet up.  We had planned on meeting up Saturday night, but he is moving back to Ulsan so he was going to be busy packing Saturday and Sunday, so Friday night was the night.   Lindie and I grabbed a cab (not as hard as we were led to believe. . .) and headed back out to Itaewon, Foreigner Town.

After we very eventually found a good place to meet up with Terry, we met his lovely friends (one of whom was celebrating passing a very important interview!) and followed Terry to a little Indian bar where we got (of course) our own little private room.  :-)

Lindie and three civil engineers :-)  Her brother is the one on the left.

Is that a magic hat, or what??

Gangsters.  :-)  They were too much fun.

Is that a killshot?  

These guys were actually made of awesome.  

We sat in our little private room and they started teaching us some games.  One was the "stupid game" where the person who was the most stupid was the winner. . .I think that's how he described it.  You go around in a circle and you show the person next to you some number with your fingers between 1 and 5 but you can't say the number that you're showing.  The next person has to say the number that you showed, but has to show a different number.  The next person say the shown number and shows another, and so on.  It was confusing to learn but that was nothing compared to actually trying to do it.  :-)

Another game was the 007 game, where one person points to another person, says "0" that person points to another and says "0" then that person points to another and says "7" and then that person points to somewhere else and says "bang!" the person that gets the "bang" has to freeze and the two people on either side of them have to throw their hands in the air.  Got it?  Ready to try it?

Another game was this really fun game where you did the chicken dance while saying something like "this is exciting!  this is fun!" in Korean, and then each person takes turns calling out numbers and then everyone points to each other.  The caller finds the pattern of people pointing to each other, counts down the number he called, and then the person he lands on loses.  This game was actually really fun, partially because it highlighted the boys beat boxing AND chicken dancing skills :-)

Another one was this game where one person said "who here tonight, do you think. . ." and then something like hasn't taken a shower today, or is the most talkitive, or something like that and then everyone would point and the person with the most people pointing to him was the loser.

Eventually, whoever lost just got to choose the next game and we played those over and over for a while just laughing and being stupid and it was awesome.

Then, they had to kick us out, so we made a detour by the sandy room with swings.  See?

Pretty awesome, right?

We couldn't find any place open to go dancing, so we headed down to this Irish pub which was absolutely crawling with foreigners, especially Army guys, and randomly people who MUST have just come from some really crazy costume party.  At least I hope it was.  Otherwise there were girls dressed up like Snookie and one of the Cats from. . .Cats for no reason.  Which is also possible.  We got a little corner table and kept playing games and messing around while the bar literally fell down around us.

Two out of three happy.  That's not too bad!

Where's mini?  And what's he doing?!

Mini loved them too.

They soon took him in as one of the boys and tried hard to get him drunk.  Poor little Mini.

I don't know when we left, but I know it was after (or in the middle, rather) of at LEAST four different fights in the same bar.  All of them Army related.  There was one at the table behind us that was a rager, complete with broken glass and screaming, the whole lot.  Maybe we should have been a little nervous, but Lindie and I being Lindie and I, we took the opportunity to start screaming at and punching each other, so convincingly in fact that someone actually cried out "please don't fight!"  :-)  Success.

Then we got out of there and started to search for one of the main missions of this trip:  Burger King.

We parted ways with the lovely boys and started searching.  There was one on that very street, we knew, but it ended up being already closed.  Shame.  More than a shame, really, we were really disappointed.  But, we hailed a cab, showed him the card for our motel, knowing that we had seen one on our way here, and hoping that we could just tell him to pull over when we saw it.  Not only did he not take us to a Burger King, he didn't take us anywhere, just dropped us off about $8 later in the cold.  Fortunately, we were near our motel and managed to find out way back, but that didn't do anything for the absolute raging hunger that came from our not eating for nearly 20 hours at this point.  So, we tried again to look for a Burger King (not a McDonald's, of which there were plenty, at least before we got dropped off) but at this point it was about 6 in the morning, so most places were closed.  Also, we couldn't find the motel.

Once we finally found our motel, after walking up and down the street a little bit, we accidentally noticed a chicken place that didn't actually look quite closed.  There was one waitress inside and two very rude patrons, so we ordered some fried chicken and sat down to wait.  Wait like starving wolves.

We got our chicken, got some chips to go with it and laid into it like it was our last meal when we reached the motel.  It was 7:30 before we fell asleep.

Saturday "morning"- -the 12:30 wake up/check out call.


The phone woke us rudely out of a coma at 12:30.  It stopped ringing before I was awake enough to find it. . .even though it was right by my head.  From past experience we knew that this was the kick out call.  Since we were staying another night somewhere in the city and there was no way either of us were ready to face the task of packing, moving, and finding another place, Lindie went downstairs, handed them some more cash, and we fell soundly back to sleep.

Here's the first vid of the blog!!

We had to move because Lindie had an appointment at 5 and, unfortunately, we had to feed again before we showed up there.  We were a little farther away than we anticipated initially, but we headed bravely into the subway and found out route.  All by ourselves!!

Chucks in the subway.

Wanna know how long it took us to find the "you are here" sticker?  Long enough to warrant a picture.

We found our street and looked again for a Burger King.  Nothing.  Not even a miserable McDonald's to be found.  But with time running out we decided to go with a classic, a bakery.  There was bound to be something there, right?  It was a cute little bakery and they had a lot of cute things, not the least of which were these little bread loaves:

Can you believe these things?  Little black olive eyes.  :-)

We were there, braved crossing traffic (which is a mission, let me tell you!) and got back across the street to Tattoo Korea!  The place where the magic was going to happen.  And just in time too!

Saturday evening, Tattoo Korea--5pm

She looks just a little excited, right? :)

Now it's time for another amazing video with Jean and Lindie.  "So, Lindie, what the heck are we doing here?"

We walked in, went upstairs, and into the main room.  It was busy.  It was more than busy, it was crazy.  We waited a little while for attention, then we waited for them to remember that Lindie was coming today, then we waited for them to find her paperwork, then we waited to be told that the artist overbooked himself and that we would have to wait. . .for another four hours or so. . .so, we went back downstairs.

Here's the clip!

Saturday evening, back on the street--5:30pm

We walked around for awhile before realizing that it was December and therefore a little chilly.  We decided to do one of our favorite activities and do a Nori Bang.  Do a nori bang?  Maybe go to a nori bang.  The ironic thing is that literally every other building in Korea is a nori bang but for some reason we couldn't find one for a while and when we finally did find a street that had four in a row they were ALL closed.  But, never fear, unlike Burger King, a nori bang was not going to beat us.  We were going to get our singing on.  So, we finally found one, an underground one, with the lights on.  A tiny woman greeted us, seemed incredibly happy to see us, gave us a couple of cans of Coke and ushered us into a large and lovely room.

There's always the outside chance that you're going to get one with very few English songs. . .this wasn't necessarily the case, they had some (the ones we do EVERY time, most importantly) and we had fun singing really stupid songs.  

This was Zombie, which we do every time.  Every.  Time.  I took a video of our awesomeness but blogger won't let me upload it.  And actually if anyone has any ideas on how to edit videos I would LOVE to know!  I  tried movie maker and stuff but I can't make them see the videos that I want to edit.  Anyway, I digress.  

The line up always has to at least include Zombie and Killing In The Name Of, but this time included a lot of really silly stuff, so it was fun, as always.  

Sing it, Gracie :-)

Saturday night, back at Tattoo Korea--9pm

Lindie is READY to GO!

We had to wait on the roof for a while and just hang out before they finally finished with the other guy and cleaned up and everything.  One good thing was that it was a LOT less crowded at this point, so that was cool.

Getting drawn-on.  :-)

Chucks in the tattoo parlor :-)

Digitally what the wings will look like.  Pretty elaborate, huh??

Her artist, Kim, who drew the wings and then free-handed them on her back.  Pretty amazing.

This was our little mascot for the evening.  Someone brought her in at some point and she was freezing, so she spent most of the evening wrapped in my coat.

poor little freezing thing.

After he was done drawing, this is how she looked.  Pretty impressive tattoo, I must say!  And he sat there and did that freehand!  Anyway, while waiting for the ink to dry we went back up on the roof.

Cheers to the roof!  :-)


Then, finally, they began.  Lindie had a reaction to the tattoo process that I didn't expect. . .

He worked really fast, I was sitting there thinking that must really hurt, he was just carving away at her, but she seemed to handle it well, right?

That bruise on her arm is definitely a "killshot" bruise. . .

Finding a little more humor in it now. . .

She can actually concentrate on reading during all of this!  Amazing!

And this is where he finished for the night.  It wasn't the six hours we were expecting, but it was an outline, and the appointment is set for the next session.  Pretty wild.

The six hour session ended early, but it still had us leaving there around 11pm.  Then it was time to find something (like food) to get into.  Remember the crazy pub where we saw all the fights?  We thought we would give that one another try.

Itaewan, once again--midnightish

We literally told the cab driver to take us to Burger King.  No.  No Burger King.  So, we told another cab driver to just take us to Itaewan, we knew there was one there, and also the crazy pub, so off we went.  We ran into so many interesting foreigners, and I use the word "interesting" extremely loosely.  We met a guy from England who thought we were pretty amazing chicks, and definitely could not believe that Lindie was South African, that turned out to be a theme for the rest of the weekend.  While walking down the street, though, we saw this little tribute to her homeland in the sidewalk.

yay

Do you know what we found?  Guess what we found.  Guess what we found and absolutely annihilated.  Burger King!  I don't know why we didn't take a picture of it, maybe because we were so busy finally enjoying the love of our lives. :-)

We walked into the crowded Irish pub, it was still "early" by pub standards but it was pretty crowded with a lot of people standing around.  We really wanted to sit, and Lindie, with her back freshly lashed, didn't feel like getting jostled around, so we found a waitress, asked for a table, and she cleared off the "reserved" sign of a perfect little round nook-in-the-wall booth that was a perfect perch from which to wait for the action.



The action didn't really get started, but they did have some good music, so we sang in the booth, because we're just stupid like that.

Ting Tings.  Awesome.

And we continued our game of "kill shot" which ended up being retired by the end of the evening. . .we had to take Sunday off.

Maybe the six millionth kill shot of the day.

We were there for a while, met some crazy people, one of whom was a professor in his fifties who REALLY didn't know what to make of us.  He was harmless and finally left our table realizing that we could take care of ourselves quite well enough :-)

Then it was time to make the long, gruesome, multi cab ride home to a place that was literally 15 minutes or less away.  We were totally and completely not impressed with the cabs in Seoul.  We took several cabs home, eventually went to a PC room to get on the internet to try to find the address in Korean of somewhere CLOSE to our motel.  Eventually we did.  They have GPS's in their cabs and somehow none of them were working or they really didn't understand when we were trying to get them to please just punch in the name or let us or something.  So frustrating.  We finally, FINALLY got there (at about 6am) with McDonald's that we acquired about an hour earlier when we got into our first cab (I dropped one of the sodas.  Dork.) ate our cold sausage McMuffins and fell asleep, knowing that the 12:30 kick out call was going to come WAY too soon.

Sunday afternoon, post kick out, subway system with all of our gear with us--2:00pm

Lindie found this palace in the area that we decided we needed to check out.  We already had our tickets back home and were not due to leave the city until 9pm.  The subway system where we landed had lockers (yes!) and an art gallery!  Awesome.  

Subway gallery :-)

Lindie was not impressed with a couple of the paintings here. . . :-)

But there was a Christmas tree!!

We found our exit and started walking toward where we thought the temple or palace or whatever we were headed for was.

Heart shaped leaf on the sidewalk.  Awww.

Turns out, it was a palace we were headed for.  A really awesome one.  We saw it in the distance and as soon as we got close a parade started.  In our honor?  I'm not really sure about that, but who knows :-)

He was how we initially saw it.

And then the procession started.

There were some people actually carrying a "king" who was wearing the most incredible aging make up.   Pretty cool :-)

There were two teams.  We thought that they would have epic battle.  They really didn't, but it was still really awesome.

Hussah!

Not actually dueling.  But, still cool.

How cool!??

Aren't the mountains beautiful!

We are awesome.

We went in and there was this huge courtyard.  We bought tickets and found out that the very last English tour was about to start in ten minutes.  Again, lucky awesome girls.

I just love those mountains.

She was our tiny little tour guide.  She was really nice and told us a lot of really cool things about this fantastic place.

This is one of the kings meeting rooms.  Pretty huh??

I'm really bad at taking photos by myself. . .

. . .so someone rescued us, and then made fun of my photo talents.  Oh well.   :-)

Very interesting things were happening here.  Can't you tell?

Little sister can't see over the crowd :-)

Aren't they pretty?

This incense burner was a gift from China.  The painting on the ceiling, if I understood it correctly, used to go everywhere with the king.  The blue one behind it, with the sun and the moon, represented the king and the queen.  Beautiful.

Lindie!  I've just about had enough of you making fun of my picture taking skills!!

Whoops.

Okay, sorry, you're right!  :-)

A place of learning.

"I'm going to leave my mark!" Lindie said as she scrawled her name in Korean in the sand.  :-)

Isn't it beautiful?  This was a place where they had parties.  

Actually, it was pretty interesting.  This whole place was destroyed by the Japanese, only 10% of the original structure is still here, everything else is reconstructed, and some of it very recently.  But, I love stuff like this, so it was really cool to hear about it all :-)

Behind us is the actual building where the Korean language (or the alphabet, more specifically) was invented.  Lindie and I thought we would show our respects to this historic place with the expression that we so often wear during our Korean lessons.  

I'm. . .just. . .not. . .getting it!

Neither is Lindie.  I guess we'll have to study harder.  Being here with the building didn't instantly teach us either.  Bummer.

This was in the queen's garden.  She couldn't leave or do anything, so they built a garden outside of her window that was supposed to improve her mood.  What do you think?  Do we look like we have an improved mood?

After the tour was over we were able to explore the folk museum grounds on the same ticket. . .but only until 5 and it was already about 4:30, so we had to prioritize.  

I think she really surprised the rabbit. . .what do you think?

Mini, however, fit right in.  I think the monkey was proud of his new. . .left hand man.

The folk museum.

See what trend setters we are!!

This was the only photo we were able to get out before they told us "no photos!" several times. . .

They had a make your own ancient doll. . .and Lindie could not resist.

This is an actual photo from my school. . .

And the library. . . :-)

This is a wedding procession, but the more important aspect of the photo is the child.  This is the "Korean squat" and everyone does it (as opposed to sitting on the ground) it's not the most comfortable position in the world, but you would never guess it here where it's everywhere you look.  No bench?  No problem!

Back in the Subway--maybe 7pm or so

We hadn't eaten all day, so we were starving.  We went to pharmacy after pharmacy for what was essentially diaper rash cream for Lindie's poor back and no one had it, or didn't want to look for it, or whatever the various cases were.  So, starving, tired, and reunited with all of our earthly possessions, we scarfed down what was left of the chicken from Friday. . .morning.

Yum.

 Do we have money for more food??

I think we can scrounge something up!

We took the subway, got to Seoul station, looked for more pharmacies, still had no luck, and you know finally found one IN the actual KTX station, so Lindie could finally put something on her back.  Poor thing.

There were a lot of bums around, and we were grabbed, smacked, pinched, begged, yelled at, you name it, by a lot of people while we were there.  We got Burger King again!  Yay!!  And tried to find some place quiet to just slowly die of exhaustion.  There was no such place, there was no where we could go without someone coming up and trying to get something, or yell at us or just sit there and talk at us.  It was very strange, but we decided that we would never go again without at least one guy with us, because that didn't happen to us last time.

Dying.  Done.  Ready for Ulsan.

All in all it was a good trip.  We finally got on our train, set an alarm for 11pm, read and fell asleep.  Lindie did extremely well considering how much it must have hurt to lean against her back for a couple of hours.  But we finally, FINALLY made it back to Ulsan.  Then it was time to get on a bus, the last one running, one which they crammed at least 70 people (maybe 300, I don't know) the windows steamed up instantly and we wondered how we were ever going to know when we were home if we couldn't see out, and if we did actually find out, how were we going to get out of the bus?
Well, my friends, it wasn't easy, and we very nearly kissed the dirty Mugeo Dong streets when we finally got home.  :-)
We slowly made our way back to our apartments and I barely got myself through the door before it was high time for my bedtime.

And that, everyone, was our weekend in Seoul.

Whew!