Scenes From Seoul

This weekend we went to Seoul to hang out with a couple of Joel's friends from college. His friend (and taekwondo instructor) Yung, who's Korean American, has been in Korea the past few weeks visiting family, so we got a chance to hang out with him and his cousin, Jun, who also went to UIUC and who now lives in Seoul.

We spent most of Saturday night in Hongdae, a university district. We had Mexican food and margaritas that almost tasted authentic, although they did serve us pretzels instead of chips and salsa! Then we went to a couple of hangouts in the neighborhood.


The coolest spot was Brixx, a hookah bar, but the bar with the best name has to be Ho Bar.


Joel, Jun, and some friend of Jun's whose name we can't remember (but she was really nice).


The next day we spent most of our time in Itaewon, a shopping district that caters to foreigners and is near the army base. It doesn't seem to look much different than it did in the 1960s, except it's decaying and dirty. There's pretty good shopping and food, though. We had Indian food that was really delicious and went to the tailor's with Yung to pick up a suit he had made. You can also get all kinds of fake designer bags, leather goods, and jewelry. You can also see all kinds of foreigners--I've never seen so many foreigners in one place!