Sunday Adventure Part II

After my last blog, I met up with Tab. She is a girl that is from my hometown of Perryton, Texas. We didn't really know each other when I lived there, since I was so young and we were not in the same grade. But, a mutual friend put us in touch before we left for Korea. She has been here a few more weeks than me. Tonight we got to meet for the first time! Well, first time we can both remember.

We met at Hongik University subway station. She was familiar with the area, so I met her there. We wanted to get dinner, but since neither of us knew where to go, we just wandered around for like an hour. We went in one restaurant, sat down, but never got any service! So we left. We saw a Hello Kitty! cafe on one side street. Tab insisted we take photos.

Hello Kitty Cafe

Another store we saw was Frisbee. I had read about it on a blog, it's an Apple Authorized Reseller. It's the best place in Seoul to buy Apple Products. It tries to look like an Apple Store, and in my humble opinion, has better accessoies! Haha!

"Apple" store!

See how it looks so much like our store?

Finally, we went to a place that served "Spanish Spicy Chicken" - when we went in, the cute little girl working explained the process to us: order first, then sit and meal is delivered. She also took us through the entire menu. I suspect she wanted to practice her English descriptions of the meals. She was really good though! I ended up getting Spanish Chicken Dinner aka some chicken on the bone grilled with spicy sauce, potatoes and some other kind of side. It was quite nice! Tab got Chicken Paella. We sat and ate and talked for a while.

When we were finished, we decided to walk around the Hongdae area. It was so much more "happenin'" than my part of town! It's next to a university, so I think that contributes to the trendiness. I also liked that many more of the shops had English signs or at least translations. Not all! But more than in my area.

We stopped at a cupcake place and each got a cupcake. It was more like a muffin as far as consistency, and the frosting was extremely light, not thick/creamy. We decided that it was probably healthier.

Vanilla Cupcake had such cute decorations and we loved the world map!

Choco Marshmallow and Choco Chip.

After the cupcakes, we wandered the streets some more. There were music performances and people trying to give us pamphlets, etc. It was so busy! Tab told me at night, when the party scene cranks up, it's insane and there is trash covering the ground and drunk people passed out everywhere.

All the lights! Hongdae area.

We kept seeing stores that said DVD on them, and were curious what they were. We went in one and found out it was where you could rent movies and then watch them in private rooms. It was so sketchy at first, but turned out to be fairly innocent. I mean, I'm sure some dirty things happen behind closed doors, but the movies were normal movies! and the guy working asked us if we wanted to use one of the rooms. So, who knows! It felt like we were going to do a drug deal, though, the way we had to go up stairs and in dark hallways to get to the store. 

We also accidentally found a karaoke room! These are wildly popular in Korea. When you're out with your friends, the cool thing to do when drunk is go to a private karaoke room and get crazy. (Apparently, I had the cool Korean thing going on on my birthday this year! We did the same thing, but in Houston!) We decided to save that adventure for another night.

While we didn't do karaoke, we did do something equally, if not more, Korean! We went in a "digital sticker" shop. It's basically like photo booths but you dress up and can choose backgrounds etc. It was hilarious and the shop keeper helped us the whole way. We chose wigs and accessories then got in the booth. He showed us how to choose "backgrounds" which showed up in the preview when our photos were snapped. After our little photo shoot, we got to edit the pictures. A few things were green screened, so we fixed those and other minor details. Then, we got prints and the man cut them into individuals. It was hilariously fun and super Korean. As we were leaving, 2 Korean girls came in to do it. Apparently it is popular! 

After we finished wandering the streets of Hongdae and getting up to a bit of mischief, we called it a night and headed back to our respective sides of town. I really wish Tab and I lived closer to each other. She is so fun and I KNOW we are going to be great friends! I wish we lived closer and could hang out more especially because she has a small school and doesn't have a great network of teachers like I do. But, I definitely will be bringing her to dinners and over to the apartment, so she will meet everyone. I can't wait for next weekend when she comes over! She will help me move into my apartment on Saturday. :)

Tomorrow is work, so I am going to bed early!