Trip to Seoul

A few weeks back I took a trip up to Seoul. This was so I could attend a week long seminar as part of my master's studies. A couple of professors came over from England and offered a series of presentations on the theme of 'Current Issues in Applied Linguistics'.

I went up to Seoul the weekend before the seminar so I could hang with Tanya and do fun stuff. And so we did.

Saturday afternoon we went over to the Hongdae area, which is a very funky university district with lots of clubs, restaurants, bars and shopping. On this little street we found some good clothing shops and some seriously groovy little bars on the upper levels.

Later in the evening we saw this Chinese restaurant. I really liked the lanterns. It reminded me of the Japanese anime movie 'Spirited Away'.

We also went to this really neat bar which was basically an unfinished basement with concrete walls, but what was unusual were the floors. Several areas were covered in sand, and in the centre of the room was this shallow pool with candles and lights set in and over it. It's difficult to get a sense of it in this picture, but if you notice in the background you can see a couple of people standing up.

Here's a picture of Jordan and Tanya, and man who's about to try and sell us some lovely straw hats. The funny thing is Jordan was just visiting Seoul from Montreal, and had met us because he was a friend of a friend of Mark and Tanya's. Amusingly enough I recognized him from seeing him around town in Montreal and it turns out he's very good friends with my friend Paul. Small world huh.
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I'm not sure which night exactly, but at one point this giant mama flew into Tanya and Mark's apartment. In this photo it's resting on some stacked canvases and is about 10 cm long. These we do not have in Ontario or Quebec. These mighty insects are cicadas. Cicadas are in fact incredibly noisy. During the hot summer days large numbers of these bugs create an incessant deafening drone. This one seemed a little upset at being trapped in the apartment. Mark hastily caught it and released it outside.