Kimchi Chloe!: 2015

Here in Gunsan (pronounced goon-sahn), the foreigner crowd has dubbed itself, the Gunsan Goonies. I proudly bear this moniker myself, as a guest in this great little city by the sea.

I've been blessed to be sent to a city with a solid foreigner community. I've made some great friends here. Recently, I traveled to Seoul with three of my Goony friends who I first met at orientation. Really, the four of us see each other three to four times a week and more often than not, hang out on the weekends. So really it was a normal weekend but new location.

Our three main goals this weekend:
1. Shop
2. Brunch
3. Mexican food

If the traffic gods are pleased, a bus ride from Gunsan to Seoul will take 2 hours and 20 minutes. Unfortunately for us, we left on a busy, drizzly Friday night so we were on the bus longer than that.

Once we got to the Seoul bus terminal, we hopped on a subway and found our way to Dongdaemun district, where we had an Airbnb booked and waiting for us. The place was tiny but in a way that's cozy and just right for four people. It was fairly late by the time we checked in but, hey, we were in Seoul so we weren't ready to call it a night quite yet. We wandered around for a while looking for a cafe, realizing that we were in one of those rare pockets of Korea where there is no cafe in sight. Eventually we wandered our way to a Paris Baguette, where we could order warm tea. In a cute cup, of course.

And that was enough fun for one night. We crawled into bed, with ideas and endless possibilities for the weekend ahead of us dancing through our heads.

The next morning, we woke up with a unanimous craving for genuine breakfast food--a delicacy here in the land of kimchi and rice.

In Seoul, finding a place to appease our Western appetite for eggs, bacon, and potatoes cooked in a breakfast manner was suspiciously easy.

We found this restaurant called Factory M, advertising brunch. We ordered two of these platters and shared. We were pretty pleased with our meal at the time, not even realizing how much more amazing our brunch would be the next morning.

For the next few hours, we explored Dongdaemun market. This is supposedly where the cool people go to shop for clothes. I only made one purchase. It's a purchase I will always be fond of:

See the middle hat? I own that! And it gets better. The inside looks like this:

Even though I didn't buy much, I had a lovely time walking around with my lovely friends.

And taking selfies, of course...

And casually being photo-bombed by a Korean police man!

When we were finished in Dongdaemun, we hopped on a subway and headed toward Hongdae. Every time I go to Seoul, I end up spending a lot of time in Hongdae. It's a wonderful place!

Of course we had to stop by the Hello Kitty Cafe:

We continued to shop, eat street food, shop, eat street food, shop, until dinner time. For dinner, we tracked down one of the popular Mexican restaurants in Seoul, Vatos, located in Itaewon.

I ordered a shredded pork burrito and got it in the Vatos signature style which included kimchi. I know, I know--I go all the way to Seoul in search of authentic Mexican food and I dare to taint it with kimchi. Help, I'm becoming Korean! I also ordered a virgin orange frozen margarita, which was pretty tasty. Vatos was good but we had to wait for a long time--they were packed! I've since eaten at another Mexican place in Seoul that I like better.

I've heard ex-pats say Itaewon district is great during the daytime, but scary at night. Boy were they right. I won't take too much time explaining why but just know we were ready to go back to Hongdae district after eating dinner and trying unsuccessfully to find a not-so-seedy norebang (karaoke room).

I'm so happy we returned to Hongdae for norebang time! We went to a major one in Seoul. And painted on the wall next to our room is my favorite super hero:

After singing our hearts out for a good hour, we were ready to go to bed.

In the morning, we went back to Hongdae to hunt down another brunch place. This time, it was one we'd read about on someone else's blog called Cafe Burano.

Also this time, there was no sharing. We each ordered our own monstrous plate of breakfast food and had no regrets.

Look at that delicately powdered french toast. That slice of bacon. Those breakfast potatoes cooked to perfection. The monster omelette stuffed with fresh vegetables. The...green salad? Yeah that was alright too, I guess. But look at my apple strawberry smoothie! It has a heart-shaped macaroon on top! Beautiful.

Next on our to-do list was to get a message. We were looking for a Japanese-style massage and cafe place one of us found on another blog but it appears that place had since had a change in management as we ended up getting Thai massages. A word of advice to those exploring Korea, blogs are a great way to find new places--just be aware that even if it's a fairly recent blogpost the place your reading about my be closed or in a new location. Another word of advice, wait at least half an hour before getting a massage if you ate a monstrous plate of breakfast.

In addition to the Hello Kitty Cafe, we went to see real kitties at a cat cafe!

Gumby cat <3

What a great weekend! Our bags were stuffed with new purchases, our stomachs were stuffed with brunch and Mexican food, and our heart were stuffed with....love? Yes, love. Because of the cats. And our friendship. Yaaaay!

Okay I'm finally going to write a blog post about something that happened two months ago. Hey! Don't act so surprised.

October 9th is a national holiday in Korea called Hangul day. Hangul is the Korean alphabet and Hangul day is a time to celebrate the creation of Hangul. While I enjoy Korean, I especially enjoy three day weekends, which is what I got thanks to Hangul day.

It was a pretty eventful weekend with lots of travel time. I started by going north to Seoul for a Kpop concert, then back down close to my part of the country, then way down south to Jinju for a lantern festival, and finally back home to the middle area of Korea.

My first Kpop concert

The concert was so much fun. It was only 15,000 won per ticket and I got to see about 30 different Kpop groups perform at the world cup stadium. The audience was huge and loud! We were surrounded by screaming fangirls wearing light-up headbands that had the names of their favorite group and member. When the most popular male kpop group, EXO, came out on stage, the reaction was unreal. It was how I've imagined it must have been like when the Beatles came to America.

My friend and I stayed at a jimjilbang (bath house) in Seoul that night. Unfortunately it was packed. I ended up sleeping in the locker room area because there was just no space left in any of the sleeping spaces. Regardless of the rough night's sleep we had, we knew the next day would be fantastic.

In the morning we took a train from Seoul to Daejeon, where a friend of mine picked us up and drove us to a city called Nonsan. Nonsan is well known for Daedunsan mountain. What's so special about this mountain?

This! I'm not sure how it looks to you, but since I've seen it in real life, it's pretty impressive. There are two suspension bridges you can cross on this hike but one of them is a fairly intimidating set of stairs. It was a great hike, even though we opted for taking the cable car half the distance!

Here comes the cable car!

In the cable car with my friends

Beautiful view!

First suspension bridge

View from the bridge

Up, up, up

View from the top of the floating stairs

On our way back down, we spotted this lovely rainbow off in the distance

Right when we finished hiking, we hopped in the car and headed towards Jinju, traveling through a torrential downpour! Really, the rain was horrible and I was super stressed. But we made it to Jinju in one piece and enjoyed the lantern festival for a little while before the rain caught up to us again. I hear this is a very famous festival in Korea and I would like to have enjoyed it more but unfortunately the weather just want being very agreeable. I did get a few pictures in the short amount of time we were there.