The Weekend

After staying out extremely late (early?) on Friday/Saturday, my roommate who went out with me and I slept basically all day. I woke up for a short period of time, felt motivated to study, and then promptly went to sleep again. At around 5:00 ish we all got up and decided to go out to eat somewhere. We ended up going to another donkatsu place, and this time I got cheese donkatsu because I was in the mood for cheese (for once in my life). It was delicious, but way too heavy and I couldn't finish it all.

Then on Sunday we went to Chinatown and the Cartoon Village (?), two neighborhoods in Incheon, a city right outside of Seoul where the major airport is. Chinatown was really interesting, there were so many different foods. My roommate, who is from Taiwan, said it was more like Taiwan-town because there were so many Taiwanese restaurants and food stands there.

It was also extremely crowded, but I didn't see any foreign people or hear any languages other than Korean being spoken there which was strange. Living in Hongdae I've gotten used to seeing at least a few foreign people everyday but in reality there are very little foreigners living in Korea, Incheon included. Right next to Chinatown was the cartoon village, and it was interesting to say the least. Apparently it was a part of some sort of revitalization project to draw more visitors to Incheon, which is a pretty old city with a fairly elderly population. There were murals painted on all of the houses and themes cafes and restaurants everywhere. It was really adorable to look at it, and the little kids who were there with their families really seemed to be enjoying it as well.

After walking around there we had a smoothie at a Taiwanese coffee chain in Chinatown to cool off, and then we got back on the subway to go somewhere else since we still had a little time left.

Incheon is over an hour away from Hongdae by subway so we decided to stop off at the Han River and Yeouido Park on our way back. Yeouido is an island-type area in the Han River and its mostly covered in high rise office buildings, including the buildings of all of the major broadcasting companies in Korea, but it also has a beautiful park and (in my opinion) one of the coolest sections of the Han River. The park was nice, but it was super hot there. It has three different sections- a forest, a grassy field-esque area, and then a traditional Korean forest, containing trees and plants only native to Korea.

After that we walked a few minutes to the river, which was beautiful as always. Since it was the weekend there was so many people there (and unfortunately, a lot of trash) but when I went during the weekdays two summers ago it wasn't that bad.

We were extremely hungry after that so we hopped on the subway and went back to Hongdae where we met up with two of our other roommates and went to a restaurant on their recommendation.

It was probably the nicest restaurant I've ever been to in Seoul but luckily it wasn't too expensive. I got a soup of some sort, it was delicious but the English menu was just as confusing as the Korean one so I'm not quite sure what it was. After dinner we all watched "The Conjuring," and American horror film and for some reason I agreed to this. Overall, a pretty fun weekend!