Sunday, March 8, 2009

hardcore seoul

so i went to seoul yesterday with a guy from florida i met at the bar. said guy is straight edge/vegan and likes hardcore music for some reason...so i left my apartment and met up with him at 1pm to go to gangnam and then to central seoul. gangnam is the "manhattan of seoul." i can see that...we took a bus and he helped me figure out how to get an electronic bus card that i load money on and swipe so i don't have to have correct change every time. from there we took a series of subways, which i cannot keep straight, and arrived in hongde (spelling?). we walked through a nifty part of town with lots of touristy types. apparently there are about 6 universities in this place and so there are nothing but college kids. we went to a vegan restaurant. they had some weird looping video called "supreme master tv" and they kept showing this woman who owns the restaurants and they call her "supreme master." it's all about being vegan...but i didn't get the whole "supreme master" thing...it was pretty good food. i'm putting pictures up of it. my favorite was in the menu where it says "non-alcoholic bear." i would certainly hate to see an alcoholic bear, what a sad and angry picture.

after that we headed to a hardcore show to meet his friends. there were other westerners i met, but i most likely won't see them again, apparently that's how it goes anyway. i explained to them that i didn't like hardcore very much and they all seemed very disappointed. there were a lot of people at the show, i'd say about 100 or more in a little basement venue, total fire hazard. mostly koreans, but about 20 westerners and many of the koreans spoke some english and would strike up conversation from time to time. here's a video of one of the bands:

we stayed late and freaked out about the buses...you see, while gangnam might be the "manhattan of seoul" everything shuts down at 11. so we got on the last subway bus at 5 till 11 and rode that for about 20 minutes. everyone has little portable televisions or nintendo ds's...and people spit on the floor of the subway car...we ran to our bus stop, my pants constantly threatening to fall down (i enlisted the aid of a belt today), and there was a long line...so we waited and got on, but we had to stand for 45 minutes. it was rough because we'd been on our feet all day. i got home around 12:30 and tried to get a cab, but no one would give me a ride. i was really tired and just wanted to be home, and i had money...but 4 cabs refused to take me. so i walked 2 miles home...someone told me today that a lot of times cabbies will refuse rides to westerners...so that was no fun, but the day was pretty great all in all. i got home and watched lost...you can't watch it here on the abc website...so i freaked out and finally found lost-tv.info...man, that episode was goofy...it was great, i'm glad...but yeah, it was crazy ridiculous...i just don't want lost to pull a twin peaks and turn into a romance near the end of its course...what else...today i saw the watchmen. i loved it, though i thought the score music was a bit cheesy...the ambient chord and the soulful guitar stuff...maybe the sex scene was a bit too long and graphic, but overall i was blown away and thought the actors did really great jobs. the theater was great too. big giant seats. it was about 4.30$ to see a movie and the craziest thing was that you had to pick your seats in advance...there is assigned seating...that was weird, but i chose wisely. i did want there to be a giant squid though...sigh...then i ate at a corner shop, i had some udon and fried rice...so i've been a vegetarian all weekend. aren't you proud of me?

4 comments:

  1. Kudos on the vegetarian thing! I've always wanted to go to Africa, but I've never met an African vegetarian....so, I guess if I went, I might loose a couple pounds, hmmmm.

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  2. I don't really care about the whole vegetarian thing, I'm just astonished that you actually went to a hardcore show! Haha!!! Talk about odd man out... But I'm really glad that you're making friends, even the unlikely friends.

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  3. I WANT TO GO TO A HARDCORE SHOW IN KOREA!

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  4. I actually thought the band sounded pretty good.

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