Chuseok Weekend

So, one of the advantages to my birthday (aside from sharing it with Confucius) is that staying in Korea means I get a nice vacation within a few days of it.  This year, Chuseok fell the weekend after my birthday, which meant I got a nice sexy long weekend to travel around a bit.

Chuseok is the one weekend of the year that pretty much everyone gets off, as opposed to the quite actually zero time off you get the rest of the year, or the occasional assigned vacation time you don't get to really plan for at your hagwon.  The one week that we all, altogether, get time off.

So of course I wasted it by going up to Seoul.

The bus ride up was long and boring and I was seated next to an old man who kept falling asleep on me.  To add to this, the friend I was staying with lived in Incheon, so I need to take an additional two hour subway ride to get to the Incheon area of Seoul, which is quite confusing itself.  Partially because I'm colorblind (the route maps are color coded of course!) and partially because there is a difference between Line 1 to Incheon and Incheon Line 1.  Of course I flubbed all over that, and wound up on the wrong part of Seoul, which caused me to be even later to my destination.  Luckily it was still early enough in the evening to go out, so after dropping off my luggage, we headed to Gangnam.

We wound up going to a hip hop nightclub that I'm still not entirely sure wasn't a gay club.  There were a whole bunch of guys grooving on each other, and some random Korean guy tried to get me to go up to the bathroom with him.  It was a pretty cool place despite the ridiculous cover charge, and there was a huge jampacked dance floor that served as evidence that Koreans don't know how to dance. Or at the very least, that every single one of them dances like a white person. Kind of grooving in place, nodding their head, shuffling slightly.  It's in direct contrast to the enormous popularity of dance teams in the country.  It's almost as if the teams need to channel energy from the rest of the population, leaving them void of the ability to pick up a beat. It turns them all into shuffling, arhythmic zombies, longing to belong to a world of music and festivities that they don't understand.

The club was densely packed, loud, and overpriced, and two stories as well.  Because too many places that are two stories end up separating the floors, this place counteracted that by having the staircases incorporated into the dance floor. In a club. With people drinking everywhere on the floor.  So needless to say, the tiled floor, which crawled up and around the staircases, were covered in spilled spirits, with bottles and broken glass littering the ground in all directions.  Each step would force you to slide across the floor, yet somehow we were drunkenly hopping around the whole place and from what I could tell not a single person died. It was truly a Chuseok miracle.

We did some mart drinking with some friendly strangers right outside the club until the subways started up again. I had to explain to one of them that there are no strip clubs, and no opening one up wouldn't be lucrative. There are girl bars. There are anma massage parlours. There are norejujangs. They don't need strip clubs because there are hookers everywhere, and a club with women you can't pay to sleep with would, unfortunately, crash and burn in the country.

When the subways reopened, I got to try dak galbi for the first time, which is essentially delicious stir fry in a spicy sauce. It's delicious and I want it forever.  We got the galbi in an area of Incheon that had just recently been built...or was in the process of being built.....or was in the process of being demolished.  As with most Korean construction, it's difficult to tell.  Point being, the place was a hazard, lawless wasteland. With delicious food.

I showered and took an our nap, and headed back out into the world to meet up with some of my friends from the states who were also in Seoul for the weekend. One of my friends had a visiting brother, so ideally that was going to lend itself to some touristy sightseeing, which is something I almost never do.  And it did!

We went to the Gyeongbak Palace which was definitely a good choice.  There were performances and festivities going on, and the whole palace was open to the public for the holiday.  We spent a good chunk of time there watching the dances and exploring the castle grounds.  At one point we were treated to a scene where we rounded the corner and some child had his pants down weeing in the castle grounds with his father's assistance, from which we quickly retreated.

We wound up in Itaewon for dinner, at a fantastic British pub with delicious burgers that I don't quite remember the name of, but it was definitely worth the price of admission.  Afterwards we needed to get ourselves to Incheon, which was becoming a problem with the swiftly approaching close of the subway lines, worsened by my friends getting cornered by another traveler when we stopped by their hostel.  So, we manage to get the last train out, with the intention of hopefully making it in time to connect to the Incheon Line 1, or at least from there it'd be affordable to get a taxi.

Neither of these things happened.

We were on the correct train when we got on.  I checked multiples of multiples of times.  You want to be certian when it's the last train.  There was an announcement at one point, which, due to the fact that none of use knew Korean (a fatal error) we assumed was simply the 'last train' announcement.

We were wrong.

The announcement was telling us that we would be traveling on the alternate route for the final train. Which took us... in the opposite direction that we needed to go from our destination.  The second we realized this, we hopped off and tried to flag down a taxi, which we did, and gave him directions to take us to the arts centre.  Or we tried to, anyways. The first cab we called over simply shook his head and drove off the second we said where we wanted to go.  After a bit of hiking, we managed to get a second cab, and climbed inside before telling him our destination so that he couldn't back out.  The cabbie spoke absolutely no English (which seems weird for being in Seoul)...which isn't a problem when you just want to go to a neighborhood or you know the name of your destination.  But we only knew the name of it in English.  There is the Arts Centre stop, and then also the Arts Gallery stop.  Our cab driver took us to the Arts Gallery stop, which unfortunately got us even further away from our destination than we were when getting onto the subway.  Also, it cost us 40,000 wan( ~$35SUSD)  After calling a friend to figure out where we were, and him laughing at us, we realized that we were, as it were, royally fucked.

Not wanting to pay for the cab all the way back, we decided to try trekking back toward Bupyeong station and take a cab from there to save some money.  We stopped a local and asked him how far away our destination was (after he kept trying to tell us the buses and subways were 'broken' because he didn't know 'closed', despite two buses driving by as we spoke to him) and he told us it was a three hour walk.

So, laughing, we headed off in our direction.

After we got over the initial irritation of the night, the walk wasa actually pretty fun.  We saw a whooooole lot of Seoul that I'm sure most foreigners never do.  We were quite actually at the edge of the city from the start of the walk, which is saying a lot being in a city that takes three hours to cross.

We wandered throught a few different districts; business districts, red light districts (where an angry Korean drunk got waaaay up in my face), terrifying children's playgrounds, rice fields.  Eventually we did make it to Bupyeong station, after a long trek of drinking at marts and wandering around a bit to do some sightseeing.  Bupyeong area turned out to be a pretty good destination for the night, as well.  It was the first place I've been in Korea that had, quite actually, no foreigners in it.  It was quite strange to see. The country is just filthy with westerners, Seoul especially, and not seeing a single other whiteface was a neat experience.   The district itself was alive well into the night, and we got some food and drinks in the area amongst friendly strangers. It's a pretty lively area, standard shopping district full of clothing stores and restaurants, but it's well put together.  We got some dak galbi again at my insistence, and then parted ways as the subway opened up.

The next day, my friend and I went to the International Business District.  From what we had heard, the International Business District was an area in Incheon that was lavishly built up with the intention of opening it to foreign businesses who needed a place to host conventions, or house their employees for long term projects.  Unfortunately, it had, allegedly failed miserably, and is currently in its renovation stages for its grand reopening in 2014.  As such, it's supposed to be entirely abandoned, almost a post apocalyptic city area.

Considering we went during Chuseok, apparently everybody wanted to see it, because the place was packed.  Not to say it wasn't impressive.  There is gorgeous architecture there, a beautiful modern canal, statues and sculpture everywhere, and well maintained gardens in every direction.  The place is pristine and awesome.  It was definitely worth the trip out to the area, and I'd highly recommend anyone in Seoul to venture out that way.

We stopped in a few buildings that were mostly empty. Not a whole lot of people live out there yet, so there aren't a lot of  businesses around.  As such, we did get to experience the abandoned city aspect of it.  Pretty much just walking 15 minutes in any direction will take you to an area that nobody is really going to, and in our case it was completed with a bunch of destroyed statues that were present in the otherwise empty parks.

After this adventure, I decided to head back to Geoje.  I had to travel by way of Busan, so I needed to get back early enough to purchase a ticket (this has become a reoccuring problem in my stay thus far).

I did not make it.

I took the KTX, which everybody compares to the shinkansen in Japan.  They shouldn't.  The KTX is garbage.  It's filthy and cramped, with stale air, and you really don't end up saving that much time on the trip for the extra money you're paying to use it.

The KTX dropped me off at Busan station, which was out of tickets, as it normally is, which is why we generally use Seobu/Sasang station (also because it's nicer).  Seobu was also out of tickets.  So I went to the night bus window. Which was also sold out.  There was a cab driver offering to ferry myself and three other passengers to Geoje for 30,000 a piece, but it's the same price to get a hotel room, so I did neither of those things.  Instead I found myself on the last train to the Pukyong University area to spend some time amongst the Busan nightlife crowd.

I wandered about, barhopping, marthopping, and talking to random strangers.  I won a bottle opener ring from a street game, and talked with some locals and generally had a good night of it, until I was exhausted from all of the not-sleep I got over the holiday so far.  Considering I was sticking to my not-spending-money-on-hotels policy, I had to find somewhere to sleep for cheap.

Because I've done my tutelage under the craftiest of vagrants, I found a 7th floor yoga studio that kept the mats outside its door.  I settled in and set the alarm for 7am on my phone, and took me a quick nap before the buses started up again.

After some good, quick rest, I ate some McDonald's breakfast, and headed home to sleep in an actual bed and get some actual sleep.

All in all, it was a pretty good Chuseok.