SM Tour and Rookies Concert

Memorise these tiny, adolescent faces.

Because in a few years' time, if EXO are anything to go by, and the fact they already have a lot of hardcore fans before they've even debuted, they'll be all you hear about for a long time.

We went to the COEX mall again, because SM were holding a few concerts for their "Rookies". If you're not particularly down with your kpop info, most of the big record labels still live in the 90s golden era of manufactured pop stars. And, despite all the jokes we made (and still make) about it, I think in the case of a lot of these artists, they're a lot better off for it.

They hold auditions to pluck willing and highly-talented (and beautiful) tributes barely out of nappies (okay, slight exaggeration, but they're usually primary school age when they get taken in) from the public sphere and basically put them into Pop Music Hogwarts. Or maybe Fame Academy. Whatever. They live in dormitories, usually with their future group members-to-be, and get trained daily by the best vocal coaches, choreographers, public speakers, models, personal trainers, drama teachers, musicians, etc, to be the perfect pop star.

And to be honest, it pays off. I'll get more into that later, but basically they school these kids until they're "ready" and then pop out a group of ready-made celebrities every few years or so. One of the things that's impressive is how prepared they are for hoards of screaming fans. I suppose it's because they gradually expose them to this most terrifying part of fame throughout their training. We'd seen some of the older Rookies during the SM Town concert as backing dancers and occasionally given a brief set to sing or dance. Presumably, this series of shows was also to get them used to a concert environment as well as gauge popularity, what works, what doesn't, and to generate hype.

SO. Being rather into kpop (in case you couldn't tell), we fought our way to some tickets and headed over to the COEX. We popped into the merchandise shop just to see if there was anything interesting or new, but mostly I was amused by the fact they'll brand ANYTHING. Here's a multipack of snack nuts (called Super Nuts, presumably linked to Super Foods) and someone presumably went "omg, you know what else starts with Super? Super Junior. Slap some faces on it. Boom. Done."

SM Town COEX Artium

I've heard the name COEX (COnvention centres and EXhibition halls) a lot in tourist things about Seoul as well as from people who generally seem to sing its praises, so I've always been intrigued by it but never enough to make my way to its rather out-of-the-way location (in relation to our home)

But the SM Town exhibit is still there and something we both really wanted to see, having given SM Entertainment a fair amount of our time and money in the past year alone, haha.

It wasn't too hard to find, considering the gigantic signs everywhere and the crowds of teenage girls coming and going from the direction of the entrance, laden with bags saying 'SMTOWN' on them. It's very pretty and elaborate for something that I've been told is just a temporary fixture.

Inside, the exhibition covers several floors, each with a different function. The walls are covered in photos of SM's various successes as well as display cases full of costumes and memorabilia from different artists. The first floor you come to is the pop-up shop, where you can buy all kinds of SM merch for almost all of their artists.

부산 | Busan (Part 3)

One more shot of that fantastic wallpaper.

Final post for Busan! After the fireworks show, we had the majority of a day to do whatever we wanted, so we took a trip to Haedong Yonggungsa (해동 용궁사) which is an old Buddhist temple by the sea.

We took the subway to a place where we could hop onto a bus that would take us to the temple. Unfortunately, it was a weekend and the temple is a pretty big tourist trap, so the bus was packed.

A flattering attempt at showing you how full this bus is. Hi Erin.

By 'full' I mean most people were standing ear to elbow, with more people being squeezed on at every consecutive stop. After a while, you couldn't get on at the front so the driver began letting people in through the exit door. Nobody was getting off, because we were all going to the same place, save for one poor person who had the joy of grabbing a seat early on...but then had to try and squeeze through the press in order to get off.

I can tell you, we went round a reasonably tight corner and I'm amazed we didn't capsize.

We arrived safely, and after a slightly harrowing walk up a hill that for most other people was reasonably easy, we arrived at a sort of bustling marketplace crammed amongst some trees. There were people shouting and waving things in every direction, as well as traffic wardens, tourists, as well as the omnipresent pushy ajummas.

We didn't have all the time in the world to hang about shopping for trinkets, but we did pause to appreciate the 12 anthropomorphic statues of the animals of the zodiac, all lined up in various kinds of hanbok and armour. There were also a couple of skittish, grumpy cats lurking about, presumably disgruntled at their lack of representation in the astronomical committee of pseudo-deistic animals. (Try saying that 5 times fast)

Much to our amusement there was also this incredible shrine to "traffic safety"

We joined a worryingly long queue for the entrance and admired the little worship shrines dotted here and there for rather specific purposes such as "giving birth to a boy" and "exceptional results in school exams" while we waited.

SM Town Live 2014

This is VERY overdue. About a month ago now, we went to SM Town Live. After staying up late and freaking out over the user-unfriendly and foreigner-antagonistic GMarket, we had tickets and the event had actually arrived. I don't think it's ever come to London. I think the closest we got was Paris, so we were determined to go.

For those that don't know, SM is a music label in South Korea, home to some of the biggest stars in K-Pop, including Super Junior, Girls Generation, and the ever-ubiquitous EXO. SM Live, is basically a huge gig where their entire roster performs, as individual groups or artists, as well as some inter-band collaborations. It's also an exciting chance to see the SM 'Rookies' (future K-pop stars in training) in their element before they've even debuted.

Me, trying (and failing) to take a photo with the World Cup Stadium sign.

It was pretty easy to get to the stadium, as you'd expect, and even more impressive was the efficiency of the queuing systems. There were THOUSANDS of people there already, but it didn't feel particularly scary or stressful. Or maybe that was just because they were all 5ft tall teenage girls. (No, they can be pretty scary. I'm looking at you 사생 kids.)

We milled around for a while and went to buy some merch. I was hoping for a nice t-shirt or something but sadly, for a huge company with a ton of money and creative power, they don't actually have much that I would wear. There were plenty of people there wearing merch from previous SM Town shows though, and it all looked great, so maybe this is just a dry spell.

We settled for a book, which turned out to be just 140ish pages of painfully beautiful Korean faces.

월미도3 | Wolmido Again Again

As a slightly more relaxing comedown for Nick's parents (having just come off a long haul flight, then up early for a pretty intense tour), we thought we'd visit Wolmido one more time. We'd been told to expect bad weather as the beginnings of a hurricane, or possibly the tail end of one from further afield, so we didn't want to go too far and risk getting stranded.

Wolmido's actually big enough and varied enough that this was our third visit and we still managed to find new things to do. We decided to go to the mini hanok recreation and potter around.

We were pulled in by some of the staff there, and encouraged to take part in a little arts and crafts session. Nick made a little spinning top while we made...some kind of cute decorated stick? I didn't really understand what the lady helping us was telling me. I thought my ears were failing me but I do believe we ended up making bejazzled...ear cleaning sticks?

I think I'll just wear them as hair decorations. They're cute and pink with bells on.

Anyway, this place is great for a little concentrated dose of South Korea's architectural history. They've recreated buildings from the northern and southern areas, for both the rich and the poor. They're fairly similar in style but there are subtle differences in layout and size, and there's some really great examples of how they were carefully designed to ensure coolness in the hot summer, but warmth in the freezing winters.

One thing I find interesting is that the living room almost always has only 3 walls, and is open to the outdoors on one side. With the exception of the palaces, where they could afford a screen that could fold down from the ceiling in the winter to offer some extra protection.

There's also a great cutaway example of how the ondol, traditional underfloor heating, worked in the days before gas and electricity. It's similar to the way the Greeks and Romans did it, with pipes working their way under the house (another reason for the raised structure). The pipes connect to the house fireplace on one end, usually in the kitchen for cooking with. Rather than waste all that heat straight up and out, the chimney basically extends under the entire house before emerging out of the opposite side. Mm. Nice warm floors to lie on!

We played tuho, a traditional game like a cross between darts and hoopla, where you have a handful of arrow-like sticks, stand behind a line, then throw them into a narrow container (think of an umbrella stand). I was terrible at it, haha.

Singin' In The Rain

This is just a quick post about the fact Nick and I managed to get tickets to see Singin' in the Rain live a week or so ago, and went on a night where both Sunny (Girls Gen) and Baekhyun (EXO) were performing! Too exciting.

[Sadly (but understandably) there was a strict "no cameras" rule in place, so I couldn't take any photos of the show. Large blocks of text are generally dull, especially with my writing, so I've nabbed some photos from google. In my rush, I've forgotten to take down any photo credits, so if a photo is yours and you want me to take it down or add credit, let me know!]

I'd never actually seen the original, and we weren't sure how much of it would have been translated into Korean (watching some clips of Wicked in Japan, it was a really interesting mix of English and Japanese), so the night before we just stayed up to watch the film, so that if there was a lot of Korean I wouldn't be totally lost.

Can I just say, I want to watch the film over and over. It's just so wonderful. All the dances and songs make me so happy, I'm really glad I've found it, haha.

Anyway, it's a good thing we did that, because it turns out that other than the character names, and vital lines in songs like "I'm singin' in the rain", and "Good morning", pretty much all of it was in Korean. Even Moses Supposes got translated into a Korean equivalent, which was fun to see. It was so nice to watch though, and because it's a very visual format I wasn't too lost anyway. I guess if people can watch Italian opera and get what's going on, there's no reason why this shouldn't work either!


We had a very cute encounter with a Korean boy in front of us in the queue, who seemed very excited to find foreign fans there, and was eager to talk to us about Baekhyun.

Some highlights for me were moments like when Sunny runs out into the audience near the end, and pretty much everyone gasped and sat up SO straight to see her better. I'm not sure what they thought she was going to do, but the excitement in the room was adorable.

종묘 와 낙원동 | Jongmyo and Nakwon Arcade

I'm torn between using amusing/weird titles for my blog posts, or the more sensible, descriptive option.

Anyway, this weekend we went to Jongno-gu, the "bell" district near Dondaemun, previously the eastern wall of old Seoul. We came here to get some guitars for Nick from the renowned Nakwon Music Arcade, but to make the most of our day out, we decided to go to one of the nearby palaces.

We kind of failed, in that we got a bit lost, but found Jongmyo Shrine, which was also on our list of "places to visit", so it wasn't the end of the world.

On our lost wanderings, we went through a small park area, and felt distinctly uncomfortable from all the rowdy elders just hanging around in large groups everywhere. It really felt like we'd entered some kind of gang territory and there'd be a clicking advance a la West Side Story at any moment.

Except this guy.

Too cute. But anyway, we found the shrine, which was enormous, and paid our paltry 1000₩ each before heading in. Because of all the trees, it was actually surprisingly cool inside the walls of the shrine, and many of the buildings were (I think) designed to make the most of passing breezes.