Happy New Year!

I finally bought AC:NL on NYE and partied like an animal. In my pyjamas.

UPDATE: Again, this is another post that was just languishing in my drafts. Bad Bloggers of the Internet Unite!

New Year's Day was a holiday! Woo! But...it was also cold and we were tired (what with it being just another random holiday in the middle of our working week) so we just stayed indoors and played with our new Korean Pokemon cards!

It's pretty fun because the rules are very simple (more simple than Yu-Gi-Oh! which I love, but it drains me a lot more mentally) and we try to do as much of it as possible in Korean (emphasis on try).

I was really worried at first, because with this game there are various effects and things that you use to your advantage, and obviously we don't know enough Korean for that.

What we quickly learned, however, is that it's like 60% Konglish (English written in Korean style) which makes it a bit easier to guess at what's going on. The rest is easy, because in the bottom corner of all the cards is a serial number. Thanks to the magic of the internet, we can search up this code and just find all of the information in English. Imagine doing that 15 years ago. Wow.

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.