Luckily for us, we had shelter covered. For a few days, all of us dudes would be under the roof the generous Choqs (until we went south, anyways). When Rahul came, him, Eric, and I would split off and stay near old town. For the time being, however, skyscraper central. The above is the awesome view from Andrew and Mary's place. 29th floor. Facing southeast along the Han River. And the panorama is below.
One nice thing when you work for Samsung (or any other big Korean conglomerate), especially when you are an ex-pat, is that they take care of housing. Which is a BIG deal. Language barriers aside, Seoul has expensive real estate, especially in the city center. Well, let me qualify that. Rents are pretty reasonable (relatively). In the Denver/Dallas/Cleveland range. To buy, however, you are going to pay New York/San Francisco prices. Why the dichotomy? I don't know. But for pretty much this reason, more people rent here than in comparable cities I have lived in. And apartments are everywhere.
Renting is also a bit weird in Korea. For the most part, the country has transitioned to Western style rents, where you pay every month. A significant minority, however, use a different system where you give the landlord something analogous to a down payment (usually six figures), don't pay anything else while you live there, and then at the end of your stay, whenever that may be, the landlord gives you the down payment back. So how does anyone make money? Well, in theory the landlord is supposed to take that money and invest it and whatever returns they get will serve as the monthly rent, i.e., the tenant gives up opportunity costs. As you can imagine, however, not everyone is an investment genius (or six figures lying around), and so there are often issues when the tenant wants to move out, but the landlord doesn't quite have the down payment to give back. Hence the transition to monthly rents.
Anyway, back to the issue at hand, as you can see, Samsung knows how to take care of its people. Three bedroom, great views, sunshine, friendly doormen, hardwood floors, and even one "American" electrical socket to boot. All in a great location right in the center of the city near bus lines, subways, etc.
One amusing thing we found next to the apartment is a wedding hall next door. Amusing because the wedding hall is the building to the left of the parking lot, and on top of that building is a fake Korean folk village, complete with grass, a bridge, and a real live horse to go over the bridge!
You can get a better view of the little village here. I should also explain about weddings. Weddings here, especially receptions, are shorter, more business like affairs. Think of it more as dinner theater than anything else. You would recognize religious weddings as generally like those in the West, but that's only true for the 25% Christians or 20% Buddhists. And then you would have the reception. For the rest of the country, however, who is Confucian, the ceremony and reception are merged into one.
The above picture is from another friend Dave's wedding (yes, I know a lot of Davids), which I use to point out traditional Korean marital clothes. And yes ladies, the dress is a pain to get on. In a bit of irony, this one was taken in Houston. They incorporated the Korean ceremony in after a Western one, a fairly popular option in the U.S. these days.
Anyways, a typical wedding would start with the family and close friends in traditional Korean garb, taking pictures in villages like the one above, with the dude on the horse. Vaguely reminiscent of Indian weddings, sans the elephants. There is also a whole ceremony with lots of bowing (and drinking) that you do with the family and such, but we won't get into that here. After this, the couple usually changes into traditional Western garb (white dress, tux, etc.). While they are changing, the guest arrive at the wedding hall, and you sit down for a multi-course meal. While you are eating, a civil ceremony is performed on the stage. Like I said. Dinner theater! Anyways, after about an hour or two (literally - 90 minutes is not uncommon), everything ends, and you go home. No dancing. No massive imbibing (unless you can get it done very quickly). It's no wonder that wedding halls will do up to six ceremonies in the same room every day (marriage mills), so it wasn't surprising for us to see the parking lot fill and refill, and the village to be continuously occupied, during pretty much our entire stay. Not a bad way to pass the time.
Okay, enough "learning" for one day.
Some of us woke up earlier than normal due to jet lag, but we were still fairly well rested. Mary took us down the street for some awesome buns and coffee, and then we came back to wake up the other sleepy heads. After hanging around for a bit, Andrew was excited he was free to take us around for the next two days (Saturday and Sunday - working a half day/attending classes on Saturday is still very common in Korea, so he was glad to be off), so we didn't waste any time.
We walked a few blocks down the street and entered the subway system. Calling it a Byzantine maze doesn't do it justice. Not only does each station have a dozen exits, but the whole system has eleven lines, none of which overlap or are "express." On the plus side, it is cheap (usually under a dollar) and goes everywhere. No surprise, we told everyone to stick close, since they had no idea where they were going. Wasn't too bad today, but during rush hour, there has been so many people that I have been unable to get off trains at certain stops, unable to swim upstream on the river of humanity.
John showing some American pride. This ad is actually sort of big deal, because Korean are convinced all imported beef has mad cow disease, so this is the pushback campaign. And it's not a fringe thing. One of my cousins actually did a double take when I mentioned I eat American beef all the time, and she's lived in Indiana and Florida!
So anyways, we all got on the train (with reusable passes donated by the Choqs - did I mention they rule?), where Andrew, David, and John lorded over everyone like giants, which was actually a little surprising since Korea is catching up in height (mostly a nutrition thing). But I digress.
Anyways, we eventually came to our stop...
... at the ever fashionable Insadong, which is sort of an art/antique district - with good restaurants.
Insadong is generally closed to traffic, save the occasional delivery truck, which is good for us...
... and this dog strutting her stuff. At least I hope it is a her.
First order of business, however, is eats. I think smorgasborg is appropriate word for the variety and amount we ate at our first Korean restaurant...
... and I think it is safe to say we thoroughly enjoyed our meal. Nothing super unique - just your typical Korean food, which I will periodically cover in future posts.
Apparently unsatiated, John gravitates to a stuffed string candy maker.
They put on a whole show where they take a piece of stringy sugar, and fold it over so many times that it becomes 256 strings. They then cut it up and put those nuts in between, all the while singing in half-Korean, half-English.
As you can see, it takes some "special" people to make such candy. We all had some, and it was delicious.
What wasn't so appetizing to the group, however, was snails and bugs. Yes, that is correct. Snails (left) and bugs (right).
John couldn't really stomach the bugs (more like larvae), but reasoned that the snails were just like escargot, so he braved the effort. You take the boiled snail shell, stick a toothpick in to poke out the morsel of "meat," and eat it. As he put it, "it tastes exactly like it looks."
Eric was more adventurous and went the bug/larvae route. His sentiments were a simple "crunchy."
I leave you with one of my favorite street foods - dried oysters/octopus! You can eat them as-is, but it tastes a bit better if you lightly toast over an open flame.
And with that gastronomical thought, I will take my leave. Talk to y'all soon...
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