seoul with the posse (posse reunited)

A day with my posse. A day in Seoul. A very, very lengthy day.

Saturday began at 7am with esther and eunice picked me up and the 3 of us headed into seoul to watch a cheap early movie. we saw "Wanted" (with angelina jolie), a 8:20 am showing. and, like usual, the movie was sold out and people were eating popcorn just like it was evening. the movie was good, we were finished by 10:30 am when we met up with katie and headed to the Insadong area.
we ate some Tak-gal-bee for lunch which has become (i think) my favorite of all my favorite korean foods. it's a big chicken and ricecake stirfry (sort of) and it's quite delicious.

this is dak-kal-bee
it came with a sweet fried chicken too.
and a cool overhead lamp too.
then we headed off to Ankuk where we drank some coffee and ate what seems to be the most common asian form of ice cream. you are served a bowl with shaved ice and a pile of various fruits and red beans (which seems to the favorite food of all koreans...).
i took them to the Coffee Factory, where i had been a few weeks earlier with my friend so young.
by the way...i'm getting used to being the seoul guide for my korean friends. i seem to know seoul better than they do. i find it quite ironic.

this is the shaved ice dessert that koreans call ice cream. it's good, but it certainly does not serve as an ice cream equivalent. i would eat mint chocolate chip over this any day.


while eating the shaved ice we (rather spontaneously) decided to go to Lotte World for the day. here katie and i are in the taxi that we took from the cafe to our car . Lotte World is a big amusement park in Seoul that is half indoors/half outdoors. the inside also has an ice rink, shopping, a movie theater, muliple restaurants and such. and a hotel. really, once you're inside, you never have to leave.
so, only a few hours after lunch and coffee and ice cream we decided to eat dinner before heading inside the amusement park. it was around 3:30pm. i'm thinking sandwich. my posse was thinking buffet. koreans love buffets. so, we did a buffet. for anyone who's been to chicago, this place reminded me a lot of "Food Life" inside Water Tower Place. except, you could eat everything. we consumed an embarrassingly large amount of food.

something i love about koreans is how communal their eating is. most americans fill their plates at a buffet with what they want and eat their plate by themselves. koreans head out, fill plates of all the same thing and put the food in the center of table with everyone eating everything. brilliant.
here's restaurant with the beloved buffet.
after the buffet, the heavier version of ourselves met up with hannah, the last missing piece to make the posse complete. and we set out to experience Lotte World.


Lotte World was fun. i was, however, unbearably tired. it was horribly humid and, in the inside part of the park, it was super hot. and, the lines were annoyingly long. the rides were fun, but not amazing so they would be worth waiting 30 minutes in line, not the 70-80 minutes that we waited. so unfortunately, being hot and tired and waiting over an hour per ride only made me more tired. it was pretty bad (not to mention that my day had started before 7am). but, it was fun.
that's me :) do i like hot and tired and partially delusional?
disney world? this is the entrance to the "outside" part of the park, though we didn't spend very much time out here. it was raining a little and it was unbelievably hot.

hannah.

Lotte World is pretty quite nice inside at night with its lights and such. there is a "hot air balloon" that loops around the park on the high ceiling so, we ended our time there with that ride.


ah yes. "mad cow" continues to be the most talked about issue these days. even though american beef is now available here and, despite protesters and obsession, it is selling like mad.