영국여행 | England (Day 8)

What a terrible day we're having. Ugh. Sunny.

Day 8! Day 8 was a bit of a whim because we found out a bit last-minute that there was going to be a Korean Culture festival in London, and it would be a good chance to share our current home with people. The weather was really great! So hot and sunny and, unlike Korea, not humid at all, haha.

We went with Ann-Marie and Chris, with the promise of meeting up with a few more friends throughout the day depending on their schedules, including Yasmin and a very brief, fleeting hello with Jerlen and a few of the other Filipino kids from home. If we met anyone else, I'm sorry, my memory is bad and it was 3 months ago, haha.

I also took the opportunity to be a massive tourist a) for the sake of showing my students later, and b) because I haven't been touristy in London since I was about 17, so I needed an update. Plus, look at all the sun I have to document! Sun? In England?!

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.