Friday, April 11, 2008

After the Wedding...

We returned back to Jamsil just before 5pm and decided to hang out and explore with Eddie and Garrett (the coworkers that also went to Charlie's wedding that day). So we went back to our apartments and changed (I nursed my poor feet with their destroyed heels from my new shoes) and met up a bit later. We went to a market not too far away that none of us had ever been to. As it turned out, it was extremely "Korean" and sold mostly food items. It was interesting though and if I ever need some chicken feet I know where to find them at a reasonable price.
We ended up walking to nearby Dongdaemun and on the walk over we saw these interesting stores. The first apparently sells every kind of plate in the universe and proudly displays them in the window. The next is where you can get a mannequin of any race or skin tone but they will moon you.

Since Garrett has never been, well, most places, we decided to show him around Dongdaemun a bit and ended up in a department store. Really I insisted a bit on going in there to prove that they do sell men's clothing in them. Walking around with Eddie was very interesting because he was wearing his custom made "Ah-ssa!" hat (Ah-ssa is written in Korean of course). You know how we pump our fists and exclaim "Yes!" when something awesome happens? Well here they say "Ah-ssa!". Also, Eddie speaks pretty decent Korean so he was actually able to reply and converse with people when they commented on his hat. He got a lot of high-fives and excited/puzzled reactions. We also saw a number of funny shirts.
After we were window shopped out we started looking for dinner. Since Dongdaemun has everything except food for sale we grabbed a taxi and headed over to Gangnam. We found a shabu shabu place which was pretty delicious but turned out to be insanely expensive (like $20/person!!!).
Here you can kind of see Eddie's hat and you can see the massive shabu shabu spread we enjoyed.

As a related aside, when asked his Korean name Eddie tells the kids "Kim Ah Ssa" (Kim is the most common last name in Korea) and it's so funny and clever I wish I'd thought of it first. One of my classes told me I should take the Korean name "Kim A Ra" because apparently Ah Ra is similar to Ah Ssa and then Eddie and I could be siblings. Hehehe.

After the meal we parted ways with the guys and did a bit of shopping in the Gangnam area (well I did... I bought more shoes!). Matt also decided to try his luck at a shooting game.
He did pretty good, actually, a lot better than I would have. Unfortunately to win a prize you needed 2600 points. Awww! Better luck next time.

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