Day 1 - Seoul!

Day 1

The city gives a good impression. When I got out of the subway I found myself in a big street with tall buildings. I immediately noticed people noticed me. They looked at me a bit longer than people would do in Amsterdam. Some make eye contact and seem to keep it, I should test their limit. One girl smiled at me as we passed. I quickly noticed I was the only non-Korean there. No tourists? Maybe it was the wrong area for that.

For dinner - I had to cook it myself in the restaurant! It must be a special type of restaurant because it was 21OOO for 3 things & side dishes. What I liked about this restaurant is that all the waiters loudly say "hello" when a new customer arrives.

A guy from the group of 4 next to me sat down in front of me and told me I should mix the dish with kimchi and other things in it with rice and seaweed. It seems like they had noticed my non-Korean eating style. Later I asked them about the gochuyang and one of the girls took one of her lettuce leaves, with her chopsticks she took some of my gochuyang and put on a piece of meat and then folded the lettuce. And then she said "Aaaah" and put it in my mouth. We all had to laugh, they are really nice people ;) ;) ;)

After dinner I walked around and I ended up in Sincheon, which is next to Hongdae. There I met the nicest girls on my first day in Korea. I asked them for directions back to Hongdae and they asked where I was from. We talked for 3O mins. They studied Chinese but they were surprised that I speak so many languages. One of them didn't have a bag but she held her books/papers in her hand (it was cold) so I told her she was still studying so late. I showed them some pics of a gay bar in Amsterdam & showed them the gay hand shake. We talked about body language, the tall girl seemed to already know that in Europe we touch more. She showed me some pics of her town (she studies in Seoul) but her boyfriend was on most of them so I couldn't see much of the town.

What was very different compared to Amsterdam was that I could keep the conversation going very easily.  In Amsterdam it would be sort of hard to have this kind of conversation with someone you haven't met before. I think Seoul is a big city but the people have a warm and friendly mentality.

Anyways, I later went in the direction they told me Hongdae was in (it was the right direction) but to me it felt it was exactly the wrong direction because I had been walking around too much.

Into the new world