day one: visiting Insa-dong and Bukchon Village

Yesterday began with me learning how to use the toilet. You may laugh, but that's probably because you've never seen this bad boy before:

So many buttons. So many choices. There's a button that, if pressed, will cause a little stream of water to be shot at your back door. I guess if you run out of toilet paper? I have not been brave enough to try it yet.

Unfortunately for my bladder, JB (my handy dandy Korean speaker) was still asleep, so I searched the phrase for, "How do I use the toilet?" on Google translate and practiced saying it a few times before trying it out on Mrs. Lee, which produced the desired results. :)

Oh also, I slept from 6-8am and woke up feeling fine. I was exhausted by 10pm last night and completely conked out, but was up again at 3:30am to pee and then gave up after trying to fall back sleep for an hour. We'll see how today goes, haha. Interestingly, I noticed that the sun starts to rise around 4:45am here and sets completely before 8:30pm. In Cincinnati it's still light out at 9:30! So that was a little surprising.

Anywho. After my toileducation it was on to a delicious breakfast prepared by Mrs. Lee:

She wakes up every morning at 7:30 to put this together. The bowl near the bottom of the picture has a mixture of steamed white and brown rice and red beans, and there were also hard boiled eggs, some cut-up zucchini that had some sort of spicy something on it, some seaweed (I think?) pancakes (those are the green circles near the top left) (they are SO GOOD), and some other yummy pickled stuff. There were also sardines. I tried one just because that's what I'm here to do, but let's just say I'm glad that that particular taste test is over with. ;)

After breakfast, JB and I walked to subway where I purchased a subway card. The way the transit cards work here is you pay for each time you swipe your card to get in and out of the platforms, and also your card has an expiration date. I bought a card with 60 subway swipes (a good deal- I paid the price of 44 swipes), so my card will stop working either in 30 days, or when I use up all the swipes. If you don't use all the swipes before the card expires, you lose the remaining swipes. If I want to take the bus, I have to get a bus card.

Then we rode for about an hour to Gyeongbokgung ("gyong" which rhymes with "strong"-"bohk" which rhymes with "poke"-"gung" which has the same /u/ sound as "good"), the ginormous palace that was built in like the fourteenth century, no big deal, and which is featured in about a million k-dramas, including my favorite (Queen In Hyun's Man, if you're wondering). I was standing in the same place they filmed some scenes in my favorite drama ahhhhh what is life!?

Anyway, the palace is closed on Tuesdays for routine check ups, so I'll have to go back another time. I have to say, it is incredibly helpful to be traveling with someone fluent in Korean who can ask the police officers all the touristy questions for me and make me feel less touristy, haha.

Even though the palace wasn't open there is still a lot to do in that area, so we walked over to nearby Insa-dong, which is kind of a touristy spot but is really, really cool. Also a lot of the tourists are Koreans and other Asians, so the fact that it wasn't swarming with Americans was actually really nice. This seems backwards now that I'm saying it but it made me feel like I was standing out less. Kind of like.. it's a normal thing for Koreans to do, so it was okay for me to do too. Does that make sense? I don't know if that makes sense.

Insa-dong is a neighborhood filled with little shops and restaurants that all gear towards traditional Korean culture. They had a lot of things for sale like hanbok, the traditional Korean dress, and masks, for traditional dancing. The coolest thing I saw was this shop that would personalize a seal for you. (This has good info about Korean personal seals.) They were around $30. I might have to go back and get one. Some of them were so beautiful. They also had matching stamps for couples.

After wandering around for a while we chose a traditional-style restaurant for lunch. JB had bibimbap (which is like a bowl of hot rice and vegetables that you mix together, usually with spicy sauce) and I had this thing called mul naengmyeon, I think...? I don't really remember the Korean name but basically it was chilled buckwheat noodles. It's actually a Japanese dish (called zaru soba), so it came with wasabi to mix in. It was very refreshing! I was so pleased that I liked it because I don't think I've had cold noodle soup before, so I was a little nervous.

After lunch, we walked around Bukchon Village for a few hours. It was AWESOME! Bukchon (book-chon, like "the book goes on there") Village is as old as the palace, and they've preserved and/or reconstructed a lot of the architecture to give you a really good feel for what houses looked like in Seoul about six or seven hundred years ago. We walked through the place that used to provide crops to the palace (it's all houses now). The awesomest part (besides the view, which you will see later) was the silence. It was so quiet and so still back there. Where we were walking was mostly homes, so the only traffic was the locals going about their biz and a few tourists here and there. Actually it was kind of funny because we encountered many people, none of whom spoke English as their native language, who heard us speaking English and approached us for directions.

These steps made my quads hurt just to look at. They were so steep.

It's also very, very hilly (read: super narrow, car-hating streets that people somehow manage to drive on) and some of the views are wicked cool:

Over on the left is modern-day Seoul, and then you pan to the right and it's traditional Bukchon Village with the mountains in the backdrop. So! cool!! I actually didn't even realize the mountains were there, so when we came up out of the subway I had an o-m-g moment. Korean mountains are not like American mountains. They're kind of rounder, I guess? The peaks aren't as craggy. I want to climb them!

Anyway it was funny because while JB and I were walking along talking about how cool Bukchon Village is, he commented that I would have never found that place without him, which I scoffed at because he is a total homebody and would have never been there himself if he hadn't had to take me. Also, we spent several hours talking about the differences between the words leather, lather, ladder, and letter. It took some hard work, but I think he can recognize as well as say them all now. Good job JB!

Around 4pm we looped back to Insa-dong to hunt down some patbingsu (sounds like "pot," "bing," and "soup" but without the p). I opted for the traditional version of just shaved ice, red beans and bits of rice cake. When I took the first bite I wasn't sure if I liked it or not, but by the time we got through, it had my approval. The taste kind of reminded me of Japanese daifuku. It was cold but didn't give me brainfreeze, and it was sweet but not too sweet. Not like Coldstone sweet. Just refreshingly sweet. It was perfect after the hot and humid day we'd been traipsing through. :)

Then we went back to the subway to go home. During the ride that morning, there had been a man who came into the subway car we were in to advertise and sell some sort of electric drill, which JB said is technically illegal but most people won't report it because they understand that the economy is hard. The man walked around asking if people wanted to buy it, but he avoided me because I obviously am an English-speaker, haha. JB said there are basically two types of people: those who are excited to talk to me, and those who are afraid. I guess in the case of the drill-selling guy I didn't mind that he was one of the afraid ones.

Also once while we were talking, an old man sitting next to us asked us to keep it down. I felt really bad! I have to remember to be more quiet and respectful in public spaces.

When we got off the subway we stopped by a bakery, and the selection was so big! Everything looks so good, and it's pretty reasonably priced.  I'll probably stop by there to grab breakfast before my class a few times, and I can't wait!

Also, one thing that I already love here is that tax is included in the price, so I don't have to worry about pulling out extra money. The price you see is the price you pay.

It was about 6pm when we got home and we were planning to rest for a bit and then go back out to see Cheonggyecheon, but it started raining pretty hard so we just stayed in and JB taught me numbers. I can now (theoretically) pay for things by myself!

And that's pretty much everything that happened on my awesome first day! One more thing I learned is that the bug I killed during my first night is actually considered to be good luck, and is believed to bring money and fortune into the household. So....... oops. I guess next time I see one I'll have to suppress my bug-killing tendencies. :(