Seoul Searching

Yesterday morning we left Chuncheon and headed to Seoul. I slept most of the bus ride. Thanks to Sravan for sharing a bus seat next to me, and to my roommate Conor for reminding me not to forget a pair of shoes in our dorm. My first day in Seoul was pretty nice.

We're now staying at Yonsei university, a very prestigious university in Seoul. The dorm room is really nice, the campus is kind of pretty, BUT we have a curfew of midnight or else we can't get into our dorms until 5:30am, and boys can't go into girl dorms, and vice versa. I haven't been too excited about that.

Yesterday Shoni and I had a great afternoon and evening in the city. First we went to a huge bookstore that has a large selection of English books, and stocked up for our homestays. I'll be reading The Da Vinci Code and The Guns of August sometime when I'm bored at my homestay.

Next we went to the Coex mall. I was looking for a couple of things. We went to the Apple store there, but they didn't have the video connectors I need to connect my laptop to my future middle school TVs. I did find recordable CDs at an office supplies store. I found the Seoul funk while I watched some Korean breakdancers do their thing in the mall, and hung out and had a good time. We also found a cool salon. Haircuts in a Korean salon were interesting because of the language barrier. I ended up with a decent haircut, a little shorter than I'd like, but pretty good. It was also probably the first time I've had a shampoo with a haircut in at least 10 years.

There are so many western restaurants I didn't feel bad going to one, or two. For dinner, we went to an Italian style restaurant, and while the spaghetti was very delicious, there just weren't American sized portions. So after that we got a bucket of KFC for the subway ride back.

The subway in Seoul is huge, and very easy to use. We got back with 20 minutes to spare before our curfew. We considered going back out with people, but not being able to go to sleep until 5:30am killed that idea.