Seoul and Namdaemun... again.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Today, Matt, Kyle and myself went to Seoul. We got on the 8:00am bus ride and were on our way. Kyle and Matt did their normal talking, this time more about politics than anything else. While I listened to music on the iPod the majority of the way. Not that I didn't want to hear about politics because I would love to learn more about it, but just not at 8am in the morning. My brain is not functioning properly (Dad... I know what you're thinking... you're mean).

When we arrived in Seoul, luckily avoiding all of the morning rush hour traffic, we headed right for Namdaemun Market. We put more money on our T-Money cards (which Matt accidentally spent twice as much as he needed at one stop by trying to go "out" the "in" section, so he paid in twice, oops). It was much easier to find our way around the market this time. We knew exactly where we wanted to go. We went down to the underground market which we missed last time, definitely didn't miss much. We headed back up to ground level again and went down "camera lane". This place is a photographers dream or anyone who loves taking pictures. There is seriously like 20 or more stores in a row with just camera stuff and then across one section there is a couple more and an underground place that has a thousand more places. We went to one store, searching for the Canon 10-22 wide angle lens that Kyle and I wanted, and they quoted us $690. Which, is reasonable and comparable to the prices we found online at home. We said we would think about. We thought we would go back because that was a good price, but then we went one more store down to a guy that we really like. He had a used lens, in perfect condition, with lens hood and filter included for $620. So, we took it right there. Saving more money than we thought we would (since we would have had to buy the lens hood and the filter seperately) we decided to also buy a tripod. So, no more using Kyle as much human tripod of justice. He named himself.

We ended up buying what we came for in a matter of 15 minutes of being at our destination. So, we decided to go through some of the other stores with Matt since he was looking for his graduated lens. We went into one store that had a wide selection of lenses, but it smelled so bad that we couldn't even look and had to leave. It was awful. I have never had to do that before, but I just could not handle it. It was so bad that when you breathed in through your mouth you could taste it. I can't even describe the smell... maybe mouldy leather... or something like that. Gross.

We walked around and didn't find what he wanted at the time, so we headed off to Techno-Mart. This place is insane. 10 floors of electronics. 4 floors for just cameras and lenses. Nikon and Canon mostly, but the place was insane to walk through. We took some pictures... as you can see in the previous post!! Your ears pop as you go up to the top floor. While there, Kyle and I found the second thing that we went into Seoul for. We bought our Nintendo DS. We got it plus 4 games for a total of $240. Such a good deal. We got Mario Kart, Mario Brothers, Yoshi Land and Worms. We were nervous we could not change it to English, but I fiddled with it enough on the bus (by fiddle I mean going through every menu clicking on everything possible), I was able to change it to English. So happy.

After that, we headed over to the World Cup Stadium. It was so hot outside, but we managed to walk around the entire thing. A little disappointed because we couldn't go in, but that was mostly because they were getting ready for a soccer game tonight. We decided that we are going to go into Seoul on October 4th to watch a game. Pretty excited about that too.

We got back into Wonju at around 7:15pm, completely exhausted since Seoul seems to always have that affect on us. Oh yeah, while in Seoul we didn't have any problems on the subways besides some ajumas (old married women) giving us dirty looks and we met a girl who is studying here and has only been here for 3 days. She looked so lost wandering around techno-mart looking for sim card for her world phone. Poor girl. Wish we could have helped more. We sat around at home for a while and dropped off our stuff and then went out to the Italian place for dinner. This place just opened and we have heard good things about it. The food is good, not great, but good. We got free drinks, which was nice, but we left shortly after eating. I think we will go again and try other things on the menu. Kyle had a spaghetti gratini thing that had really strong cheese on it and I had a margarita pizza (cheese and baby tomatoes on a fajita type shell). I really enjoyed my pizza.

I am going to go an upload some photos for you all to see and I am also going to go and play the DS for a while. Tomorrow's agenda.... I am going out with a couple girls from my work. Just for a little while in the afternoon and then hopefully just come home and relax. Next weekend... I think we are headed for Costco. I need more dill pickles.