this is hongdae

I experienced my first all-nighter in Seoul this weekend…….and I survived!!! I think I’ve mentioned earlier that the subways close at midnight, so if you’re not out of the city by then (aka haven’t even gotten to the club by then), you’re out of luck getting home until the next morning. A few weeks ago this same thing occured, but we got a hotel part way through the night so I didn’t feel quite so out of it. However, this time we decided to rough it and pull the all night adventure, and still made it home alive to bed by 7am.

As a recap of the adventure, we actually headed to Seoul about 1pm to go watch Clint finish his 10 K race and cheer him on. Due to some mishaps on the way we were a bit late, but we still got there in time to say congratulations and meet some of the other runners. We (Beenish, Dario, Freddy, Jono, and I) entertained ourselves with rock-paper-scissors tournaments all the way there, which can surprisingly keep you occupied for hours and hours. The Korean kids use R-P-S (ching, cheyng, chong… or something like that) to determine the order for evvverything, so we foreign teachers have adopted the same technique. It works for just about everything, surprisingly. RPS to take the next drink, RPS to carry a box, RPS to take a picture with random Korean, RPS to drink out of the cup on the ground or eat something terrible looking, etc etc. It’s amazing.

So after the race congratulating we moved on to another part of town to go to this big buffet dinner thing with a bunch of other foreign teachers. Most of the people there actually RAN the race, but we snuck in and pretended we were as hard core as them. Somehow we killed like 5 hours just hanging out there as we waited for the realllll part of the night begin. The food was pretty good– salad and wings and hot dogs pleased our little Caucasian hearts.

Next, meet HONGDAE, one of the clubbing districts of Seoul, where we went to support the RUBBER SEOUL AIDS DAY event. It was basically this big fundraiser to support AIDS research,and one ticket got you into like 3 different clubs all night long. So, we ended up at Jane’s Groove around midnight, but then never ended up using our “unlimited usage” part of the deal because we were too unfamiliar with Hongdae area and didn’t want to get lost. We were so relieved to even just find Jane’s Groove that it was much easier to just stay put and make the rest of our friends find us there. I haven’t had a big night out dancing for a verrry very long time, so it was really nice to just go crazy and have fun. Dancing all night provides this huge outlet and it’s nice to pretend nobody’s watching for a little while.

Eventually our feet were tired and we were ready to be done, but the subway still didn’t open for a few more hours. So Beenish, Freddy, Jono, and I wandered to this funny little rasta bar down the street. I don’t know how we found such a place, but I think it’s my new favorite wind-down location. The owner was this funny little Korean guy with dreads, and everyone there was sooo nice to us. Jono played the bongo with some random people while the rest of us found little corners to crash in for a while. We woke up with blankets and pillows– so apparently this place must be used to the middle of the night stragglers taking refuge on their carpeted floors.

At 5:30 Beenish and I decided to search out the subway station, and then spent the next hour and a half miserably trying to get home. Luckily the subway was very empty so we didn’t attract too much attention with our nodding heads and open mouths. So we made it back to Dongducheon, taxi’d it home (even though it’s only like 4 blocks…) and then took advantage of our day of rest and got plenty of rest. On the subway trip home Beenish and I were both like WE ARE NEVER DOING THIS AGAIN THIS IS SO MISERABLE. Yet, here we are Monday already planning our next all-night Seoul trip. I guess the fun side outweighs the awful tired early morning part….. So where will you find us next Saturday? Probably in Hongdae.

korea is SOOO blasted cold

nice run, clint

intense RPS. loser had to drink out of dirty cup off the subway floor...

another RPS incident, i believe

clearly we're into taking pictures of ourselves...

jane's groove is full of groove

uncontrollably sweaty (tori, this one's for you!)

good morning, korea