After five full days of walking to and from my apartment and work, I finally ventured out into the great city of Seoul.
Now, it's important to understand that this city is ENORMOUS, and one day is simply not enough to visit it all. In fact, I only visited one of the city's five temples and two of its numerous central districts in one day, of course with the expectation that during the upcoming YEAR I will be able to handily discover, absorb and get to know the rest of the metropolis. Nevertheless, this first day of exploring was actually my first real contact with Asia, one that definitely left me impressed.
We set a meeting time of 2:30 PM on Saturday afternoon and the new staff members from my language institution all met up with some more senior staffers who were to show us around some of the city. After roughly half an hour on the metro (and yes, that is a "short journey" here), we ended up in one of the city's main squares, which was flanked by the enormous Gyeongbokgung Temple. Now, I'd seen photos of Asia before and this is pretty much what you'd expect:
I particularly enjoyed seeing the old Korean houses, which are so unique in their architecture that it's unlike anything I'd ever really seen before.
We then took a walk down one of Seoul's main walking streets, and yes, even this was typical Asia, though navigating through the crowds of people and taking in all the sights, sounds and smells was an experience on its own.
We even stopped for some traditional tea. Obviously, seeing as it was sweltering hot and quite humid, a citron iced tea was in store, and it featured quite the unique set of flavours. In fact, this fruit, citron, is not a lemon or any other citrus fruit we may be familiar with back in Canada or Europa, it's its own citrus that's unique to Asia.
We then met up with more staff and went to an area called Gangnam. Now, Gangnam is known as the place to go out in Seoul. Crowds are aplenty here, especially on a Saturday night, and the area is overrun by restaurants, bars and clubs, ergo, the perfect place for your first Seoul night out.
Of course, in typical Korean fashion, our meal consisted of... meat! I will be writing lots more about my introduction to Korean cuisine and liquor in a future post, but in short, well, they eat quite a substantial amount of meat, especially beef, in this country, and this "Korean Barbecue" dinner consisted of beef, cut in a variety of ways, on a grill. And let's not forget the abundance of sides that come with the meal, such as rice and my favourite pickled vegetables, kimchi.
Now, I'm not vegetarian or anything, but this past year living in a relatively vegan-friendly household back in Montreal has caused me to realize that too much meat is too much meat (it was quite delicious though), and thus I strive to moderate and limit my meat consumption. Clearly here it will be very difficult, though I now vow to not ever purchase any meat at grocery stores and limit my meat consumption to only when I go out to restaurants.
And yes, the national drink here is soju, a highly addictive beverage that comes in flavours which completely mask the alcohol taste. Each bottle contains 20% alcohol and costs as little as 1,600 won (roughly $2 CAD) at supermarkets. Soju is said to the be the most consumed spirit in the world, and you'll be hardpressed to find it in any country other than Korea, a nation counting no more than 50 million people. I'll let you do the math and figure out how much alcohol gets consumed in this country.
Nevertheless, after the restaurant we went out to a bar, then we went to drink in the park, and then we went to a club. And then, for some reason, after leaving the club at 4:30 AM, we decided to walk home, a journey we thought would take about an hour, but instead took nearly three hours.
And thus concluded the first instalment of my Seoul adventures, at 7:00 AM in the morning after a day filled with new friends, ancient temples, historic streets, traditional teas, bustling neighbourhoods, egregious amounts of meat, a mediocre club, and way too much soju.
-Daniele
