Drama on my street...

Not much interesting happens around my house, but last night I heard a bang at about 10 o'clock. I always hear noises, but it struck me as strange. Then I heard sirens coming and I kind of knew they were coming to my street. One of the buildings behind my apartment had smoke pouring out the windows. The fire department came quickly, along with two ambulances that I didn't see get used. They had the fire out within 5 minutes, it couldn't have been big, but it's more action than my little side street has had since the drum band strolled in one day randomly at noon time on a random weekday last month.

Firefighters bravely putting out the fire

Emergency vehicles swarming...

Random marching band that appeared on my tiny side street at noon time about a month ago for no apparent reason. Korea is never boring

Seoul Forest (서울숲)

Sunday we decided to check out Seoul Forest (서울숲 - pronounciation is complicated, but Seoul Su should work in most cases if you don't feel like getting a lecture about Korean rules of prnounciation) We walked there from our area in Sindang and it took about a little less than an hour. Actually, it wasn't a very interesting park compared to some other parks like Olympic Park or Children's Grand Park. It was a bit smaller than these and quite a bit less to see. The did have some interesting things to see though...



Horseback Riding. Folks riding seemed to be quite experienced. A friend of mine did a little research on it because she was a big rider back at home. I guess it's around 45,000 for 45 minutes. Seems a bit steep, but not really since we're in the middle of one of the most densly populated metropolises in the world.


Here's a typical water fountain around here. In the summer these kinds of fountains are full of kids. Nowadays it's getting cold, so the kids just watch.



I've learned better than to have high expectations for animals in captivity in this country. Zoos are always dissapointing. These deers were pretty cool to see, but we were hoping they would rome free in thier own section of the park, not be locked in.

This was a cool part of the playground. It was a wire sculpture of a human that kids could climb through.

Seoul Forest is near Ttukseom on line 1. Since I walked I can't help you with exit numbers, but there's probably a sign in the subway station. It was a nice walk, but I wouldn't go far out of my way to see it.

Bringing Salsa to the Asian Masses

Actually, salsa is rather popular here in Seoul among certain circles despite my post title. This past month my boyfriend and I have gone to Club Caliente in Itaewon twice now to dance a bit. Neither one of us are great, but we both have enough experience to have fun even though we can't do it well. Saturday night after going to the Herb Medicine Museum, getting some dinner and a few drinks with a friend from Japan and another Korean teacher from my Free Korean Class, we decided to go to Itaewon again and we invited them along. They were kind of excited about it, even though they had no idea what salsa was.

We got to Club Caliente and satisfied ourselves with getting a drink and watching some of the amazing dancers do their thing on the dance floor. Finally I did my best to try to teach the Korean teacher who came, while my boyfriend tried his best to teach the Japanese guy some moves. Since neither one of us is great, neither one of us was a great teacher, but we did our best. The Korean teacher got some more experience because guys kept asking her to dance. Too bad girls don't ask guys to dance, I feel bad that the Japanese guy only got to dance with me and my boyfriend.

Seoul Yangnyeongsi Herb Medicine Museum

So our Korean class met on Saturday to go to Seoul Yangnyeongsi Herb Medicine Museum in Jegi-dong on Saturday. We had a large group of us, and evidently they had never had a group of foreigners come to the museum before. The museum was fairly interesting, and a nice woman tried her best to give us an English guided tour. She was a bit uncomfortable with speaking English and so she often refereed to my boyfriend to translate. Even still, the tour was nice enough.First task was to learn to wrap our own medicine. The medicine was some nice smelling dried orange peels... speaking of which.. they are still in my purse.. and I'm doubting my wrapping job held up for two days in the bottom of my purse... uhoh..

The next task was learning how to grind the medicine with mortar and pestle or these rolling contraptions that I have no word for in my vocabulary.

Here's our volunteer tour guide and my boyfriend trying their best to translate complicated medical information into English. The books in the glass in front of us are copies of the first Korean herbal medicine guide book, written by a fellow named Ho Jun a few hundred years ago.

We were educated a bit about ginseng. We learned that white ginseng should not be taken by people with high blood pressure, or if you are feverish. Red or black ginseng on the other hand is suggested for everyone. The four plants at the bottom are wild ginseng. Not farmed, but found growing in the mountains. One of these plants is worth about $30,000 USD according to a seemingly knowledgeable man who started to follow our tour around and correct our tour guide on everything she said. If you eat one of these before the age of three, you will lead a very healthy life. Here is the male parts of a seal. It's said that if men eat just a little of this with the rest of their herbal medicine prescription, they will have lots of stamina. Interesting idea...

The museum didn't take long to get through and a group of us downtown to the Jongno area for dinner. That was a fun time too, and maybe I'll post about that later.

Walking to Jegi-dong and around Kyungdong Market

As I said in my last post, I found a way on Google Maps to walk to Jegi-dong by following the Cheonggyechong to another small stream right up to the main street and walking a little more and arriving right where I wanted to be. Well, I followed that path correctly, but as it turns out, that second stream stopped about 100 m down because it was under construction (how can a stream be under construction? Only in Seoul would this be possible). So, we walked down some back streets to come and arrive in Jegi-dong. As I suspected, it was about a half an hour walk.




We arrived in Jegi-dong but we were about 2 hours early for the field trip. I grabbed some lunch at Kimbap Chongguk and then we decided to walk around Kyungdong Market. This was not my first time to Kyungdong Market. Last time was to find some traditional Korean medicine. This time around we had time to just wander freely. This market is a must see in Seoul if you're interested in unusual things, or just need a fresh dose of culture shock.

Kyungdong Market is most famous for it's medicinal market, though they sell fresh seafood, fruit, vegetables and assortments of other random things that you'd expect to find at a market. It's actually a great place to buy vegetables. They have some of the cheapest prices I've seen in this city.
These wriggly little fish are used to make chueotang; a soup made of these fish ground into a paste.

Deer antlers are a rather expensive but popular medicinal item when making hanyak, Korean traditional medicine.

Duck Eggs. I learned a new word yesterday: 오리 (ohri)-duck.

Bees for sale.

Down in the fish market...

10 points to the first person to guess what kind of meat this is correctly... hint, look at the feet.

Love me some dried fish

Chicken is ridiculously cheap at the market. One whole chicken is only 2,000 won ($1.71 USD)

The next adventure after looking through the market was the Seoul Yangnyeongsi: Herb Medicine Museum for our field trip, but I'll write about that in the next post.

Seoul on Google Maps

Today I'm going on a field trip with my Saturday free Korean class to a Traditional Herbal Medicine Museum in Jegi-dong. I know Jegi-dong is actually not far at all from my house, so I'm thinking about walking. Though I know it's close, and I know the general direction, I didn't know quite how to get there, since I've never walked in that direction before. I was going to google up a street map, but then I thought... what about google maps? Actually, I thought I had Google Earth on my computer, and I was going to look on there, but I guess I never downloaded it onto this computer, must have been just my old one. But, Google maps has all the same information so I checked there instead of downloading another program onto my computer that's getting overloaded with photos lately from the new camera. All I typed in to Google Maps was Jegi-dong Station, Seoul and I was given a beautiful map. If you zoom in, you can get a very detailed map, with labels on nearly every building, plus colorful labels on all the nearby GS25s, 7/11s, FamilyMarts, pharmacies, churches, universities, police stations etc. etc. Actually Jegi-dong is even closer than I thought, and should only be about a half an hour walk. I'll bring my camera and see if there's anything interesting out there to blog about on my little walk. I'm going down the cheonggyechong to another little stream and up to that area, so I'll avoid most of the crosswalks and such. It should be a quite pleasant walk on a crisp fall day such as today. Anyway, point is; next time you want to go somewhere, check out Google Maps for detailed directions.... Sorry, no English, the map is all labeled in Korean. Learn yourself some hangul.

The magical disapearing view out my window

Here was the view from my window not long after I moved in to my apartment last July. I don't have any good photos of it, but this was a great view of Dongdaemun Stadium. At night, the view was fantastic! As you can see in this first photo, there is some construction going on down there, right in my viewline and I knew it wouldn't be long before I would loose this view all together. I decided to document the process, because.... well, I'm not sure. Maybe someone out there cares about my plight...
Here's maybe a month later. You can see that they've got a few floors built up now.

Now at this point, a few weeks later they started to creep up to my level. Once they got the first few floors in, they were going up about a floor a week. By the way, there are three towers here, though you can't tell...

They finally totally obstructed my view come wintertime.


Now they're almost done. I just took this photo today. I expect in a few months they will be opening. Probably not before I leave though.. they still have a little ways to go. The outside is done, but I'm sure inside there's still a lot more work to be done. It looks like they're gonna open a shopping center downstairs, then, obviously, apartments up top. Luxury apartments, no less. I'm just hoping it brings up the property values of the area, because there are some super sketchy "massage shops" and "norebangs" on my street. Not to mention the obnoxious HOF folks that scream and fight in the alley at 1 am EVERY night.

But, I just want my view back....