i got seoul

CATCH UP WITH ME

2008-07-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

So, I'm still like a week behind on blogging, so why don't I catch up all in one shot? Here we go!!!

Who goes to some East Asian country without visiting all of the temples and palaces and such? Of course not me. Our first day we barely had any time to relax and Dr. Frank Plantan (the program's director) took us to the palace where the Korean royalty used to live. Pretty cool. Here's a pond:

shopping

If anyone ever tells you not to shop in Seoul, they are smoking. Seoul is seriously one of the dopest places that anyone like myself could ever go to for shopping. Well, almost. If you are about my size and have the same kind of steezy fashion sense, you could not ask for more. There are so many dope shirts and brands here I'm surprised I'm not broke yet. But here's the catch: they're all fake. There's a place in Seoul called Dongdaemun (동대문) and there you will find three really large department stores: Hello A-PM, Migliore, and Doota!. Go into any of these places and head over to the men's floors and you'll find TONS of Bape, Supreme, Kikstyo... even the Hundreds. But its all fake, you say... well yah it is. But they fit great, you can't tell they're fake, and they're usually anywhere between 8000 won and 20000 won ($7.60~$19). But if you're not my size, then your sh*t out of luck. Most shirts come in a Korean 'one-size-fits all' which just happens to be my size.

oh korea, i love thee

As is true for all foreign countries–and especially is true of Asian countries–you will find some really funky things while walking around that I'm sure you might never find in the US. I'm working on collecting a bunch of pictures of random stuff, but here's some just to get you started.

Marlboro = Man always remember love because of romantic occasion

Even the people in the advertisements can do air flares.

And of course, there is always the random chubby nerdy Korean kid with the shirt that says "Black by nature, proud by choice."

What is an awesome foreign country without an awesome Indian dude?! Haha, I'm kidding, this is our great friend, Vikram. He's one of the kids on the program. He looks high. Probably because he had a sip of beer. This kid is effin' hilarious when he gets drunk (and he gets drunk pretty quickly).

We all went to a buddhist vegetarian restaurant. It was pretty good, except for the fact that all of the food looked like they just went out back to the forest and picked it off the ground. Its ok. The highlight of the trip was the really cool drummer guy in like some KKK robe. KKK as in 'Korean Kulture Klub' of course.

And we spent our lovely 4th of July with the other exchange program at Kyung Hee, the global collaborative. It was a pretty cool event, mostly because there was this really awesomely cute Korean chick singing.

She is probably the only cute chick on Kyung Hee campus. Oh well. Here she is singing 'Ironic':

And who saw this one coming?

random pictures out of chronological order

Soju! Konbe!

GINYU FORCE!

Pretty fresh, if you ask me.

We're not drunk in this one. We're eating pot bing su. Its like tua bing in Chinese and Matsumoto shave ice in Japanese. But better.

But I think we're definitely drunk in this one. Or at least I am. Its not my fault! Its Korean culture! Its the SOJU! THEY MADE ME DO IT!

OK. Sorry if this post was really really disjointed. I had to catch up somehow! The entries from now on, I promise you, will follow a much more structured path and will be much more coherent. Peace!

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE 38TH PARALLEL

2008-07-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

If you've got an hour or so to spare while you are waiting for me to catch up on my Seoul trip, watch this. It will blow your friggin mind.

WELCOME TO SEOUL

2008-07-04T21:30:00.001-07:00

This entry is over a week late but oops sorry my MACBOOK PRO (i bought three weeks ago) BROKE on the plane. Its ok, its fixed now, but I'll leave that story for later.

Anyway.

Hi, my name is Ronny Gallegos, I'm a student majoring at UPenn in international relations and east asian languages/civilizations. I'm here in Seoul, South Korea, for two months on a program called 'Penn-in-Seoul' on which I take two classes and I participate in an internship. FRESH.

flight to seoul

I arrived in Seoul after a lengthy 13 hour flight from LA last Wednesday, June 25th. Korean Air pwns any of the American airlines. They served me wine (AND I DIDN'T HAVE TO PAY!!! but i hate wine... whatever the lovely Korean stewardess lady convinced me to have some) and a pretty nice bibimbap meal. AND YO! If you went to Temple City High, you might remember Ms. Park. She sat right behind me on the plane.

I arrived in Seoul not knowing where I was going to stay for the first night because the dorms hadn't opened to us yet but luckily Sunny and her aunt were at the airport and they came to my rescue.

in seoul

I had my first Korean breakfast at her aunt's place. On the top left is some yogurt drink... there's some deok at 3 o clock, some tomatoes, broccoli, french toast, and muskmelon? I think. DEOK! Its like rice cake.

It seems like they do everything so much better in Korea. Below is the first example of many. The escalators in grocery stores don't have steps, so you can roll your shopping trolley onto the escalator and... it stays in place! Its friggin magic or something I don't get it. Even 400 lb Sunny can't budge the cart.

welcome to kyung hee university

I arrived with Sunny at Kyung Hee University the next day (Thursday) and the first thing we see as we are lugging our baggage up to the front is this HUGE staircase. We're thinking "WTfizzle how the heck are we going to lug our stuff up that?!?!" while some white student with glasses and one leg kinda just sits there on the staircase staring at our plight. "You guys need a card to get in through the ground floor for the elevator," he tells us. "Good to know... as I don't have a card and that doesn't help us one bit," Sunny and I both thought as we were staring up the staircase. I start carrying up Sunny HUGE suitcase and a really nice Korean janitor old man runs down and says he'll use his card to open the door so we can take the elevator instead of lugging Sunny's thousands of clothes up the stupid stairs. Then mister one leg yells at us, "Oh yah, I have a card, do you need it?" Bas. Tard. Too late, haha it's OK the old janitor man came to our rescue, keep sitting there watching us struggle.

I reach my room to find that my room has already been moved into! While all of the other Penn-in-Seoul kids have Penn-in-Seoul roommates, I am the only one that has a Kyung Hee student. He wasn't there when I arrived though, but I received an introduction to him when one of his friends came into the room looking for him. It was then that I found out he was Korean, from Brazil, and spoke Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. No ingles. To speak to him, I have to use the two words I know in Korean (kimchi and boo goe gee), the no words that I know in Portuguese, and my Mexican accent in English mang.

dorm rules

So here is one thing that Korea doesn't do better than America: dorms. The dorms have 78349 different RULES from the 19th century and if you break any of them, you DIE!

No, really, the rules are strict. Girls cannot go onto boy's floors, and vice versa. If a boy/girl is found in the room of the opposite sex, they're kicked out of the dorm! No cooking, no bringing friends, no staying out past 12 (if you do you have to make sure you sign the 'staying out log'... no breathing, no snoring, no sneezing, no nothing.

campus

Here are a few pics of campus (these are of course the nicest pics... there are some pretty fugly parts of campus too but no one wants to take pictures of those parts):

And of course, once I met up with all of the other Penn kids, we had to break the ice with the traditional Korean pastime: DRINKING! The drinking age is something like 18 in Korea, and drinking culture is a big thing. I'm pretty sure kids start drinking when they're in high school. More on drinking culture later. Here's Yasha about to conquer a behemoth pitcher of HITE!

The saga shall continue... in the next post. Peace!