An American, A Canadian and An English Woman Boarded a Train in Korea...

Sounds like the start of a bad joke doesn't it???

My game plan for this weekend was to stay in Friday night and get up early on Saturday and head to Seoul by myself for the day. Too much routine happening on the weekends lately and I'm on the other side of the world, I shouldn't be settling into routine, so I decided to do something about that.

I messaged everyone on Friday and said I wasn't going out that night, but sent a message to my friend, Megan, saying that I was heading to Seoul and if she didn't end up going on her temple stay she was welcome to come with me. About an hour before work was finished I get a message from her and Lauren saying let's not wait until morning, let's grab the last train out of Daejeon and head to Seoul that night! I love spontanaiety!

Two hours later we were on the train to Seoul with a tourist book, no place to stay and a few packages of Oreo cookies. And we were extremely hyper because it was just so good to be going on a little adventure! Our plan of action was to get to Seoul and stay at a jinjabong (the saunas, which also act as super cheap accomodation, they are actually like one step down from a love hotel, but sooo much nicer and way less sketchy!).

So we are wandering around the streets of Seoul at about 1am and not having much luck with finding a jingjabong, we decided to head to Itaewon where we knew of one for sure. Our next task was to find a cabby, which proved much harder in Seoul than in Daejeon.

Anyhow we are walking along and there are stumbling, drunk Korean men all over the streets. One of them decides to start following us saying things like "hello." "hello" "i speak english" "hello." "hello" "stop." Now you would think if three people ignored you for a few blocks you would give up and go back to your drunken friends. But no, this guy kept right on our tail and then finally in a brave gesture reached out and grabbed my backpack. To which I then turned around, glared at him and told him in my best Korean to "Fuck off!" (in Korean!). Do not touch!" and Go! and ya know what? He looked really scared! I rock!

After that it took us about an hour to find a cabby and by this time we were just looking forward to getting to the jinjabong, having a sauna and going to sleep. When we arrived at our destination, which is near another army base so tons of Americans everywhere, there was a Burger King on the corner, and I feel the same way about Burger King as I do about McDonalds, nevertheless, five minutes later we were sitting at the table with our cheeseburgers watching an old crazy Korean lady have an energetic conversation with herself.

Finally we got to the jinjabong, paid our 8 dollars for the night, got our two towels, our sleeping wear and a bed mat. We spent about an hour in the sauna area with the ginseng baths, hot baths, steam rooms, cool baths and finally went upstairs to get some sleep. The roof to the sleeping room was about two and a half feet off the ground and I have to admit it was one of the worst sleeps of my life, being that I was sleeping on a plastic mat, with a pleather pillow and no blanket. But it didn't matter, we were in Seoul!

We set the alarm for 8am and got up and did the sauna routine again before heading out for the day. We wandered around Itaewon for a while, had an American breakfast (which is unheard of in Korean) and then jumped on the subway to go to a place call Insanbom (I don't have a clue if that's what it was called). Anyhow it is the big tourist area of Seoul and it was fantastic! Souveneirs, jewellery, clothes, it was awesome. It is also the site of the only Starbucks in the world to have its name written in a language other than English because it is in a historical area of Korea which mandates that the stores adhere to the Korean language. A chai latte later and we were off again.

We walked and walked until we came to a Buddhist temple which was pretty cool, there was some ceremony going on because they are constructing a new Buddha and I finally bought some cards to send out (so start running to your mail boxes each day!). It was getting later in the day so we decided to grab some food before heading back to Daejeon. We went to a traditional Korean restaurant and ate some bibimbap and sat on the floor, Korean style. Now I am all for embracing the culture here, but sitting cross legged on the floor doesn't go over well for people wearing low rise pants, so we spent most of the lunch pulling at our shirts and trying to hike our pants further up, which was somewhat annoying until one of the servers came over and leaned a floor mat against my back. Megan thought this was the funniest thing in the world and we then proceeded to laugh at this for like ten minutes, which I think embarrassed the lady who was trying to help and she brought us ice tea to try and rectify the situation, which we didn't really care about we just thought it was funny. Maybe you had to have been there for that one?

Anyhow after that we made our way back to the train station and returned home for what we said was going to be a night of catch up and rest but now I think we are heading to the Brickhouse, althought it will probably be an early night.

Pictures tomorrow!