Annyong, Hello, or Hola

So, on August 19, I turned the big 2-2. To celebrate, BBro let (aka MADE) me make all the choices about what we would do for the day. Our first stop was going to be the Museum of Modern Art at Olympic Park that we had seen the last time they were there. They were having a Pop Art exhibit, which made me super excited, and I was looking forward to some culture. So I made the hour-plus trek past Jamsil to Olympic Park, only to find out when we arrived… that the museum was closed. Typical. Things in Korea, apparently, only close one day a month. It can be any day they want, they don’t have to close on Sundays, they can just pick a day at random, and that’s the one day a month that they’re closed. So it would be fairly typical that this would be the day. Luckily there was a Coffee Bean, one of my favorite places in the world, so all was not lost.

Determined to find something cultural to do, we trundled on to Gwangnam, to the CineCube, the arthouse theatre where we saw INLAND EMPIRE. First we went down to the basement, which is the theatre level
(Oh yeah, this building is a theatre in the basement, some galleries and stuff, one floor of restaurants, and then floors 2 through 30 or so are the British and Japanese Embassies in Korea, and outside there is a giant metal hammering man. It’s quite a place). Alas, in keeping with how the day was going, the only movie playing was Sommersturm, in German with Korean subtitles. That’s ok, there’s a lot more to do in this building. Next we tried to find ArtCube, which we assumed would be some sort of gallery, or something. We finally deciphered some signs that pointed out the direction of ArtCube, and followed said directions… Directly into a wall. I don’t know, maybe they renovated or something. Whatever, up another floor, we’ll try something else. There’s an art archive. Give me something, anything. But guess what? Closed. Dammit Korea, you’re closed one frigging day a month, why does it have to be my birthday!? We satisfied ourselves of the archive by peering into the windows. So, OK, we clearly wouldn’t be getting into anything in the building so we just looked at the sculptures around the main floor. Like these ones. Sheep or something. And the main plaza has a pretty cool floor too, so… There was that.

Anyway, food always cheers us up, so we found a restaurant in the same building, called Taco Factory. Now, Taco Factory wasn’t bad, by any means, but it certainly was... Interesting. As only Korean food can be. This was probably the first meal I’ve had here that didn’t come with kimchi, but they did serve their tacos with pickles. Anyway, it’s different than Mexican tacos, is what I’m saying. Also, we got this gem from BBro: “I don’t know whether to say annyong, hello, or hola!” (The waitress was clearly Korean, and in no way remotely Mexican, by the way).

Perhaps the best part of our evening came next, and it was a completely accidental find. We were wandering around Jongno, looking for something, ANYTHING to do, and we found an amazing (underground) bookstore called Kyobo. We browsed around there for a long time, it has an amazing DVD section, and lots of foreign English books too. The DVDs are really cheap, but we can’t play them on DVD players at home. Books meanwhile are ridiculously expensive. The best part of the store though was when we left – they took the creepiness of HomePlus and multiplied it by four. When we were walking toward the door, no less than FOUR women bowed to us and wished us well. We were just shopping for books! We’re not freaking royalty. But ok, you can bow to us.

At this point, it was getting late, so we trundled ourselves home.
We saw this on the way, though. It’s some sort of memorial for a King, or someone. It’s really interesting, I think, to see things like this in the middle of the city. It’s so old-looking, and traditional, and colorful, and all around it, like you can see in the picture, everything is so modern and gray and dirty. That dichotomy really sums up Seoul for me.