Lotte World + Inkigayo

Hellloooo. Before I start talking about Korean stuff, today is an important day: my mom’s birthday! Happy bday Rubes! you da best

birfday shoutout to the one and only ruby kang

Anywho, this past week was pretty hectic. I had a midterm for my US foreign policy class on Monday and another one on Thursday for East Asian history… The US foreign policy one was grossly curved, seeing as I got 103.7% and that wasn’t even close to being the highest score. I think they’re being super generous with grades since it’s a summer class; some of the TAs have said that we shouldn’t study too hard and that we should focus on having fun this summer. I’m really liking this philosophy so far. We took our East Asian history exam on Thursday and since i went to Insadong all day Tuesday, I couldn’t study, so I put off all my studying until after class on Wednesday… this is not advisable. I started studying around 7:00PM and tried studying in my room for an hour or so but it just wasn’t working, so my friend Diane and I went to a study cafe near campus to get shit done. Koreans are super serious about their studying so these study cafes are actually super helpful; everyone is hard at work, drinking coffee and studying for exams at all hours of the day. It’s open 24 hours a day and people literally stay there all night. I wish there were a place like that at Penn; I would be much more efficient in my studies. Diane and I stayed from around 8:30PM until 2:00AM, then we went back to my room and studied with some other Penn girls until around 4AM. It was a pretty crazy Wednesday night. We went through the history of China, Japan, and Korea from ancient times until 1800… Lots of dynasties and wars and trade and other not-so-exciting things. After hours upon hours of studying I now have the first 10 Chinese dynasties memorized in order (Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing) among other facts that I’ll most likely never use again.

coffee at the study cafe ❤

We had our second official field trip on Friday! We went to Lotte World, which is an indoor and outdoor amusement park. Since we’re in the middle of monsoon season, we couldn’t really do any of the outside rides since they wouldn’t operate them in the rain. I’m not sure about other places, but I’ve been to Kennywood and rode the phantom’s revenge when it was raining and there were no problems… It was okay though because Lotte World has a lot of indoor rides that are still pretty legit so we spent all day in there. Most of us bought a pair of animal ears/other festive headbands because that’s just what you do at Lotte World. I bought black cat ears, which were pretty tame compared to some of the other ones they offered. They were so cute though, and everyone was wearing them so it wasn’t weird.

Lotte World’s indoor ice rink

rainy day at Lotte world

We stayed from probably around 10AM until 4PM walking around, riding rides, and eating amusement park snacks (i.e. dip n dots, churros, etc.). I haven’t been to an amusement park in ages so it was really fun; plus Lotte World is way more colorful and bright and cute than any other place on this planet (it’s probably closely rivaled by Disney) so it was aesthetically pleasing as well as fun.

Today (Sunday July 14) was the third field trip: attending an Inkigayo rehearsal! If you don’t know anything about the Korean music scene, Inkigayo is basically this music performance show where all the groups who are currently promoting songs perform every Sunday. Each week there’s a winner based on popular vote (I think… I’m actually not entirely sure how winners are chosen). This episode was special because it was an “end of the year” special, so a ton of really famous groups came to perform songs that they had promoted throughout the past year. I’m not sure why it was an end of the year special in the middle of July but I wasn’t complaining. I actually wasn’t planning on going (I also signed up for next week’s date and planned on going to that one) so I woke up at around 11:30AM. I saw a ton of messages from my friend saying that I need to wake up and that I should go to the field trip this week because it was the end of the year special. I spent the next half hour being indecisive and tired but at around 11:50 I decided to go. I was still in my pajamas/not ready to leave the room and I didn’t have time to make it to the group meeting spot, so I put on a pair of shorts that weren’t pajamas, brushed my teeth, and left to find a cab. I actually don’t think I even looked in the mirror or touched my hair before I left. I would usually rather light myself on fire than go outside without doing my makeup or  hair so I was obviously desperate to get there on time. I’m fairly certain I looked like a hobo. I took a cab to the SBS building, but apparently there are multiple SBS buildings in Seoul and I went to the wrong one. Luckily, though, I was pretty early, so I figured out where the right building was and took another cab there. I made it on time (actually before the rest of the group) and waited around outside for the rest of my SNU ISI group. There were literally hundreds of people waiting outside to go to the broadcasting; they don’t really sell tickets so if you want to go you have to show up and wait in line. Someone said that people start to wait outside the building 6 hours before the show starts. So crazy.

people patiently waiting to catch any glimpse of a kpop idol outside the SBS building in the rain

We only got to see around an hour of rehearsal, since it was super crowded and we were a fairly large group. We JUST missed SHINee (one of my very favorite groups), which was kind of upsetting… I got over it pretty quickly though since the first person we saw was Lee Hyori (basically like Korea’s most famous solo female artist). We also saw Girls’ Day, After School, B1A4, Lee Hi, Exo, and 4minute. SO EXCITING. Here are some of the music videos for some of the performances we saw:

EXO

Girls’ Day

B1A4

I was really really really excited to go to Inkigayo and now I feel a sense of fulfillment after seeing so many idols. I’m going again next weekend, so hopefully I get to see more groups that I didn’t get to see today.

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for more stuff.

안녕!