Korvia Autumn Party 2015

Basically, I'm so bad at blogging that I decided to combine two draft posts into one thing.
I'm also so bad at remembering to document these things, that I've just stolen all the nice photos of me from Korvia's facebook page. Why bother taking photos when you've got paparazzi documenting everything? ;D

Also, I blog so infrequently that I wrote half a blog post about the summer AND autumn parties, before realising I'd already written about the summer party half a year ago. Oops.

SO. Here is is, the Korvia Autumn Party.

I retract my former statement, hahaha.
Nick and I decided to combine our trip to Hongdae for the party with one of our Once in a Blue Moon trips to the hairdresser, so naturally we looked awesome. I re-installed my full fringe out of nostalgia for the good ol' days when hair was thick and plentiful.

However, nostalgia is one of the worst inventions ever and rose-tints everything, cutting out all the bad stuff. My greasy forehead and lots of running around excitedly nattering to people at 100 miles an hour in the hopes they'll not notice I'm secretly bricking it means I ended up with a clumpy, hairy mess stuck to my forehead before it was even dark.

Turns out, that's exactly the reason I grew out my last full fringe. Sigh.

Anyway, we needed to arrive early since Nick had signed up to help take photos. I hadn't signed up to do anything, because I'm a poor excuse for a citizen, so I tried to take the edge off of my guilt by pretending to be staff. To be fair, I usually help out at the parties and all my friends were there as volunteers, so it felt weird to just sit around like some kind of dictator while everyone else works.

Vadering

I decided my skills as an anxious, introverted human shell would be most well-suited to meeting and greeting hundreds of strangers and helping them make their way to the party. Hence the sweaty face.

I mean, that mostly involved just standing at a table with some of my friends, saying "hello" to anyone that walked up to us or looked lost and not-Korean, and providing them with pens and stickers for making a name tag.

Also, since we were outside and upstairs (the party was at Mike's Cabin in Hongdae, which is a roomy, comfy bar in a building's basement. It's nicer than I've made it sound.) we decided to bring the party to us, by messing around with the photo wall next to us.

Once the stream of arrivals had died down, we called it a day and went in to grab food (pizza and crisps, courtesy of Korvia, thank you!) and find everyone else. There were some funny games, some presentations, some dancing, standard party fare.

I'm not very good at talking about parties, and I've talked enough about how great I think Korvia are at every stage of the application and transition process to Korea, so there's not really much else I can say other than it's always a lot of fun and I'm glad these parties exist. I'd never have met a lot of my friends here without them. </cheese>

This is the best photo because it looks like I broke my leg or something.

Seoul Food | Cheese Otaku

Been a while since I did a post like this, eh

Now this is a story all about how... we went and ate an absolutely enormous meal back in June. Hongdae is a great place for food of all kinds, so it's hard to get bored considering the amount of choice they've packed into one area.

We went to Cheese Otaku (치즈오타쿠), a Japanese-themed restaurant along the "barbecue street" where the star of the show is a gigantic platter (with different sizes starting at, I think, a 2 person serving) that sits in a custom slot in the table to keep the food warm, sauces at the right consistency, and to melt cheese. CHEESE!

I guess it should be obvious from the name that you get a lot of cheese.

Depending on the portion you buy, you also get a sizeable chunk of a whole chicken. Goodness me.

There's also fried rice, fried chicken, corn, and a million other things all on this sizzling platter. I can't remember if it came with fries or if we ordered extra. But they were there and they were rapidly consumed.

Seoul Food | Cooking Mate

This is a super-old post from last year that I totally forgot I'd started. Oops! I remember it was from somewhere around last Christmas, because the restaurant was playing some very dubious Korean covers of classic Christmas pop hits.

I'll keep it short and sweet, mainly because I can't remember anything except that I enjoyed the food. Heh.

Passionfruit Lemonade

Cooking Mate is a little restaurant in Hongdae, right on the corner of  the road leading from Parking Street up to Artbox (addresses? What is addresses?), next to where the man with the huge, adorable dog usually sets up camp.

There's usually a person stationed outside to let you in or sort out something if there's a wait. Since it's upstairs, I guess it saves you some time rather than going all the way up to find out there's a 2hr wait.

They also have little walkie-talkies, so when we went in we were announced FBI-style to someone upstairs. By the time our unhealthy selves had carried us up, they were all prepared and ushered us over to a specific table. It was fairly quiet when we went, because it was late, but I can imagine this place is pretty organised when it comes to seating customers.

Seoul Food | Abiko 아비꼬

One of our Korean friends had told us about this restaurant and sent us pictures, and it looked great. When I realised it was the curry house we'd walked past a couple of times and commented on the mouth watering smell coming from inside, it was settled, we had to go.

They sell all kinds of Japanese-style curry with rice or noodles with a few choices of different meat and spiciness. I love the little spice scale on the menu that lets you know what to expect, with descriptions that compare to other famous spicy foods in Korea like "Shin Ramyeon level spiciness", "spicy jjamppong", and "buldak" (super spicy chicken, literally "fire chicken" famous for being delicious but murderous). Seeing as Shin Ramyeon gets gasps from me, and the only time I've fought through buldak was with copious amounts of cheese and alcohol, we usually go for the "mild" option which is described as being "not spicy at all" but definitely still has a faint kick. Which says a lot about Korean spice tolerance I suppose, haha.

Cute decorations!

We went to the one in Hongdae but we've since found out that it's a chain and there's one really close to us, so that's dangerous ;) The food is really great and the service has always been very sweet. I'm fairly sure the menu is in English, Korean and Japanese, so that's pretty fun, but even if I've remembered wrongly and there's no English it's yet another case of it being 90% 'Konglish' so as long as you can read hangeul it's fine ;p

We got a set menu each, which gets you a curry rice or curry udon

Since we were in Hongdae we took the opportunity to get our hair cut at our usual, so here are some unnecessary selfies celebrating how great the people at Hair and Joy always manage to make us feel :p

I also bought the cutest lipstick that smells and feels like it's made from Ponds Cold Cream Cleanser. Also very adorably, it's called "Dear My Wish" which makes no sense at all. Unusual for Etude House, which usually has pretty sensible names for its products in my experience? Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

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.

Coffee and Bossam with Han and Lina

I stole this photo from 이민정 ^^;

A little while ago, Nick and I met up with some of our EPIK orientation co-ordinators for some dinner and a chat. We went to a bossam place in Hongdae and had a really great time! 

I'm always happy when I can talk freely to people without awkward pauses, and meeting and talking to many Koreans is a big priority of mine here. I can talk to Westerners all I want back home and even in my apartment, but there's so much to hear and learn from people in Korea that's just so much nicer than reading it all in a book. There's opinions and stories there you'd never read otherwise.

What's the point in living abroad if you don't interact with the locals?

After eating, our conversation was mid-flow so we went to a nearby coffee shop which was incredibly adorable and seemed to know what they were talking about. All kinds of mysterious roasts, blends, and coffee making devices could be seen.

It reminded me a lot of the cute, hipster places I love visiting at home. As it was fairly late, the cafe was quiet and service was very fast.

Pre-Birthday Treats

In the ongoing series that is "My Birthday Celebrations", I will tell you about the weekend beforehand, where we went out for Korean BBQ (understandably the best thing ever and so my favourite thing to eat in Korea)

Nick and I went with Erin and Morgan and we basically had a bit of a food adventure around Hongdae. After a rather large amount of BBQ, and possibly the best I've had so far at this point in time, we headed off in search of something sweet. We grabbed some fruit Mochi, which I failed to take a photo of because we were too busy devouring it, but it was so soft and velvety and the filling of a chunk of fruit was far preferable to the usual red bean paste.

Then we decided to get something to drink, whereupon we were introduced to O'sulloc, the land of tea, tea and more tea. Everything is tea and nothing hurts.

I ordered a rather exotic sounding Tangerine tea that I think used various ingredients from the lush mystery island of Jeju. (I say mystery because I know barely anything about it other than it has Olles and it's very gorgeous)

The waitress placed the little lid on top, saying "Wait. 3 minutes. Enjoy happily."

And enjoy happily I did! It was great tea, with wonderful presentation, and a couple of little biscuits on the side that I am fairly sure were flavoured with tea. They might even have been traditional Korean tea biscuits in a bundle similar to that of the tea set we bought at the guesthouse in Fukuoka. They certainly go with herbal teas a lot better than a Rich Tea ;p

We also grabbed some (second) dessert. Nick had the Green Tea tiramisu on the left, and I had the monstrosity on the right. I'm pretty sure it was just called "roll cake" and there were a lot of interesting-sounding flavours but of course I had to go for the one that was simply named "black".

It looked like a car tyre full of ectoplasm, and when I tasted it...I was confused. The texture was really nice, but very different to what I was expecting. The green tea filling was just as expected, just the right amount of bitterness and...green-ness, but I couldn't work out what "black" was.

Turns out it was just very dark chocolate, hahaha. It was great!

We also got a little art card with each of our orders and I'll definitely be back for more tea!

이화 | Ewha

Morgan and Nick climbing the steps of Ewha Womans University

I'll say this first, confusingly the 'E' in 'Ewha' is pronounced "ee!" rather than "eh." which is what I'd been going around saying until we got there and I read the hangeul. Oops. Someone please introduce a standardised romanisation system, please.

There are at least 2 things that I learnt on this trip.
1: you can visit universities, even if you aren't a student.
2: modern university buildings can actually be really pretty.

Apparently a lot of people visit the university grounds because of its beautiful gardens and dramatic architecture. Erin also mentioned some people get their wedding photos done here, which to me is unheard of. But I can see why! It's a lovely place, and surprisingly quiet.

I did some reading about Ewha Womans University before I went, and I really like the sound of it. It's currently the world's largest female educational institute and one of the most prestigious universities in South Korea (thank you Wikipedia). Its alumni include company Presidents and Vice-Presidents, First Ladies, Prime Ministers, CEOs, athletes, doctors, lawyers and judges. It's just constantly churning out a long list of really impressive women.

I also like the fact that they use "womans" rather than "women's" because apparently this is to respect each individual, rather than a collective lumped together by gender. It's also quite old, founded in 1886, so they've been doing great things even throughout the wars.

(I will say, in the name of equality, I think they do also admit some male students now.)

No filters, just pure sky.

Anyway, after a nice wander, we headed towards our next destination, which was a dakgalbi place nearby. Ewha seems to be full of cute little boutiques and cafes, all very classy and trendy to suit the locals.

At some point, the sunset happened and it was incredible.

Also incredible was the dakgalbi. Not too spicy and really delicious. It's really interesting, they just plonk it all in and cook it up for you, running around to different tables as and when needed. It was PACKED in there, and I'm not really surprised.

I think we actually walked to Hongdae from there, because although I usually get the subway everywhere because I think everything's miles away, a lot of places are only a 30-45 minute walk.

In Hongdae we grabbed dessert at Molly's Pops, where they make special fancy ice lollies in flavours like makgeolli (Korean rice wine) and...erm...cheese.

The alcoholic flavours are 19+, and I can see why! I could really taste the makgeolli in mine, but a bit sweeter and milkier.

Following a theme, we ended up going to our first makgeolli bar. They had normal style as well as some seasonal specials, so we ordered a honey one and a watermelon one. These bars are meant to have some excellent wines, brewed themselves, and incredible food to complement it all.

The...drug?

I think we just ordered some pork rolls as we were already full from dinner and dessert, but they were so good. They had a great sweet and spicy sauce on them, and were freshly made and flavourful. The presentation in this place was wonderful too, so I can see why they're popular.

The watermelon was really lovely and refreshing, but I think after a while it got a bit sickly, compared to the honey which was just lovely through and through. Honey is quite expensive here, so I've missed it.

I'd love to go to some more of these makgeolli bars, just because the food is so good, so maybe you can expect to see some more posts like this in the future.

Chop Chop

This is old news now, because I'm a bad blogger, but I GOT A HAIRCUT! Finally!

I went to Hair and Joy in Hongdae, as recommended by pretty much ALL of the expats I know. I was told they had good prices, great English and excellent hairdressing skills (having trained in both Europe and Asia), which I suppose is actually the most important thing there.

There're fancy, stylish hairdressers in abundance in Bupyeong, a stone's throw away and all open until at least midnight that'll give me a good-looking haircut for pennies. But how to explain what I want if they don't speak much English? Ultimate stress, given my previous fear of having my hair cut. (Let's not talk about afro-gate)

So, anyone who knows me will know I do not take care of my hair. At all. My hair's CV in the past year or so looks like this:

- dyed red
- bleached
- dyed green
- dye top-up
- dyed red again
- dyed brown in an attempt to go back to natural (forgetting how dark my hair actually is)
- bleached at the tips
- tips dyed green

Green. Of course.

Here's me looking despondent about my awful hair and the rubbish "semi-permanent" dye from about 2 weeks ago.

And I had a haircut maybe only 5-6 times in that space for trimming deads. That's it. Safe to say, my hair was kind of frazzled, despite my original intentions to look after it in its dyed state.

Let's not even talk about the time I did my regular fringe trim (something I'd been doing myself for a couple of months) and got the level wrong. Sure, an oddly short fringe seems to be in fashion now but it sure as heck wasn't back then!

So yeah, it's a strange, miscoloured, frazzly mess. Not sure how it is my hair grows so oddly that I managed to get a diagonal ombre, but okay.

In the past 6 or months I've been trying to fix this, getting regular haircuts, banning colour, giving it conditioning masks and basically just trying to grow out this hellish state its in. 3 months into my time in Korea, and I was finally at my stage 1 goal:
Cut it all off.

Now, I don't mean pixie cut style. I just mean, hack off all that old colour, reset to default settings.

I tried it out with hairpins and didn't HATE it, and Nick told me to try it if, at the very least, it'll heal up my hair a bit.

I explained pretty much all of this to Jason (my assigned stylist, after a fairly painless phonecall the day before. I'd been asked who I wanted to see and pretty much went "anyone") and he went to work.

And that's how I ended up like this:

It's so short.
There's still a random bit of the lighter brown on one side because, again, wonky hair. Jason told me he'd fix this when I go back for a trim. But it feels a lot thicker, smoother, healthier, and it's almost all one colour. It still takes forever to wash, oddly, but it's a lot quicker to dry. One downside is that in all this humidity, it gets greasy MUCH more quickly. Or it's more noticeable anyway. I used to get away with washing my hair once a week, maybe twice if I got sweaty or did a lot of smelly cooking. But now it's almost every other day otherwise I look like Snape's offspring.

It was a great experience, the salon played lots of calming music and it's the most extravagantly decorated hairdresser's I've ever been to. Combined with the fact I often had 2-3 people working on my hair at the same time, it was a pretty luxurious experience.

The chop itself was very satisfying. I mentioned I was a bit scared, and after that, at every step before a big change, we'd have a break and I'd be asked if I was 100% sure I wanted to do it, shown how it should look when it's done and assured it would be fine. That's something really lovely that I haven't really had before. I've had lovely stylists but none of that extra reassurance.

I was going to take a photo of my huge pile of hair after the initial big cut (which I was shown to prove IT'S ALL GONE. FOREVER. SORT OF.) but they were too efficient and it was gone in the next moment.

When it came to paying (a bit lightheaded because, well, my head was...a lot lighter.) I genuinely had a moment where I just stood and blinked with surprise.
"What was that, sorry?"
"30,000 won"
That's just under £18. I usually pay £20-25 and that's a CHEAP cut. Most people I know spend £30-50.

I apologised and tried to explain so that they knew it wasn't anything bad. The response?
A cheeky smile and "Oh. Can I ask for more then?"

Nope, too late. I've paid and I'm happy. My next goal is to grow it out nice and long again, but healthy.
My other joy is the fact that it's opened a whole new set of doors for me re: cosplay, as seen below with a sort of Kiki's Delivery Service closet cosplay.

트릭아이미술관 | Trick Eye & Ice Museum

Accurate representation.

Back in June, I posted about the Trick Eye Museum in Hongdae, which ended up as a fail because we forgot to bring any money with us (Ah, the dark days before we had bank cards)

So, what with it being rainy and miserable, we thought it could be a fun indoor activity for the day to try again!

What I didn't realise is that the Ice Museum and Trick Eye are both included under the same ticket, so the price actually isn't as high as I'd thought it was. Unless this was a special event for the holidays, which is also likely.

We thought we'd head to the Ice Museum first, considering we felt hot and stuffy despite the rain.

They're not kidding about the ice. Upon showing our ticket, we were handed a very trendy looking poncho/raincoat hybrid, and guided through something that looked rather uncomfortably like an industrial freezer door (which, thinking about it, it probably was) and were immediately hit by a blast of freezing, dry air. Like the freezer section of a supermarket, or a broken air conditioner. Goodness me.

Pretty much everything in here - besides the walls and floor - is made of ice. 

One of the first things I saw was an igloo. Most people were, sensibly, ignoring the fact you could go inside, but as if I'm going to pass up the chance to do that. The shocked face you see above is my sudden realisation that a frozen floor with a small summer dress is so not the one.