I’m currently sitting at some random gate at SFO waiting to hear about my gate information for my flight to Pittsburgh. I was just in China for 6 days and they block wordpress/facebook/twitter so I couldn’t update basically anything. It was refreshing to be disconnected though (although I did use instagram and email so I guess I wasn’t completely offline…such is life).
I’m trying to remember what I did in Korea since the last time I updated….I don’t think I did much. It was mostly a frantic/traumatic packing experience. We went out a few times because it was our last weekend…also I went shopping near Ewha Women’s University, where there’s a ton of cheap/cute clothes and accessories and such. All of us who were there bought matching Korean-middle-aged-lady pants (아줌마 pants, if you will) which was pretty fun. We all wore them tot the SNU ISI closing ceremony (which was less fun……actually no it was pretty funny) and got some strange looks from people but mostly people just said that they were jealous and that they wanted a pair.
yaymtachingpants
I came to Korea with one large suitcase, a backpack, and a tote baq. Looking back, I’m not sure how I managed to fit 10 weeks worth of stuff in such a small volume without it being over 50 pounds. Most of the stuff I brought with me was gifts, but I also bought a lot of stuff and also got a lot of really heavy/voluminous stuff from relatives to take home to my mom & grandma. I started packing at maybe 8pm the night before leaving for Shanghai and packed half my suitcase and realized that there was actually no way I could successfully pack all of my stuff in one bag. Given that it was 9pm and I didn’t really know anywhere near the dorm to shop for luggage, I just got in a cab and said “Homeplus” (홈플러스), which is kind of like Walmart; it’s the only store I knew that 1) was open late and 2) sold luggage. The cab driver was really confused because there wasn’t a Homeplus anywhere near my dorm, so I just started naming regions in Seoul hoping that there would be a Homeplus in one of them. The only one I had been to was in Jamsil, but that’s like 45 minutes from where my dorm is and I wasn’t looking to go that far because only about 20% of my stuff was packed, but, as it turned out, the Jamsil one was the only location he knew of, so I had to go all the way there to buy a freaking suitcase. It was also raining and still sort of rush hour so there was sooo much traffic. I got there after bout an hour, ran inside, got lost looking for the luggage section, bought pretty much the first large suitcase I saw, and then ran back outside to hail a cab. It took another hour or so to get back to the dorm and I ended up getting back to my room at around 11pm. People were going out because it was everyone’s last night, so I ran into them in the lobby on my way back to my room. They all looked nice and ready to go clubbing and such and then I walked into the lobby without any makeup wearing running shorts and a sweatshirt, carrying a large suitcase. Basically I looked like a homeless person. I went back to my room and said bye to everyone who was going out (I had to leave my dorm by 6:30am so I definitely wasn’t going out) and packed all of my stuff until about 2am. I didn’t realize how much stuff I had until I tried packing all of it….. and I knew both of my bags would be overweight because they were literally completely filled with very heavy things; my great-aunt gave me like 6 vacuum-packed packages of dehydrated food items to put in my suitcase and each of them resembled and had similar masses to a medium-sized stone. When I got to the airport, both of my suitcases were about 4 kilos overweight (which is like almost 9 pounds). There was literally nowhere for me to rearrange my stuff so I told the airport checkin lady that I would just pay the fee. I think that’s the first time she’d ever heard that because she looked at me like I was insane, but I was running a little late and I didn’t want to try in vain to move around all my stuff.
I arrived in Shanghai and met up with my freshman year roommate, Christine. She was waiting for me at my gate and said that her driver would be picking us up shortly (I’m not sure if this is a thing in China but like this further confirmed my suspicion that she’s super rich and just didn’t tell me). We stayed in her dad’s company’s apartment rather than the apartment where she actually lives because there’s more space and we’d be more free to do stuff throughout the day. We dropped off my luggage at the other apartment and then went to her regular home apartment; Christine ordered a masseuse to come to her house, so we hung out at her house getting massages and eating dumplings. It was quite the afternoon. I’d never gotten a legit massage before, so it was a bit painful, but it’s wasn’t an unpleasant experience. After that we went out to dinner at Christine’s dad’s favorite Japanese restaurant because he loves Japanese food and was leaving for Australia the next afternoon. The restaurant had apparently just killed a tuna so we had a very fresh multi-course meal of tuna-related foods.
😮
hard at work
literally the best fish i’ve ever eaten
Most of my experience in Shanghai were eating at various restaurants, admiring the view at all times of the day (afternoon, 6-7am, 10pm…yeah), and shopping. I bought a bunch of “designer” bags from this underground mall type of place which was really cool. I don’t really feel like writing about all of it, so i’ll just post some pics and call it a day (I’m really tired because I just got off the plane and am chilling in SFO for the next 7 hours or so).
so many people omg
pigeon :O
chicken feet :O
pearl tower
staying up til 6 to watch the sunrise
wah 예쁘다
I’ll post a more summative (if that’s a word) post after I’m home and well rested (I can’t remember the last time I slept is that bad); I feel like if I wrote it now it’d be incoherent and not reflective of my time in Asia. For now, though, 안녕!
Seoul Adventures 