Chuseok weekend (Week 3)

Hello everyone! Classes this week only had Monday and Tuesday. Everyone is preparing for Chuseok!

Chuseok (추석) is Korea's longest holiday. It is a major harvest festival and a three-day long holiday in Korea. It's a combination of our Moon cake festival, Grave visiting and Chinese new year.
During Chuseok, they pray and thank their ancestors for the good harvest. On the table, only freshly harvested crops are used - freshest rice, newly plucked apples.
It is also the time for families to get together and talk about their year. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

So, we got our Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and weekends off!
Of course, with such a long holiday, we didn't want to spend all of them up in the mountains.
We went to SEOUL!

Train to Yongsan (lol)

The train ride took us about an hour to get to Yongsan station directly from Chuncheon station. We then took a taxi to our Airbnb which was located just about 10 minutes walk away from Seoul station.

We had allocated seats on the train but were all being split up. I guess everyone is going home for Chuseok.

Yongsan Station!

We spent quite some time looking for the taxi stand when we reached Yongsan. We didn't understand where the arrows were pointing towards. But, we got it.



And here comes the legendary....

REAL MYEONGDONG!

It's like a really really really gigantic Orchard Road with tons of small roads to walk into, with more shops in between. They have all kinds of stores, from H&M to Innisfree, to Shoe stores, to Jewellery shops to Mask stores. It feels like anything and everything can be found here in Myeongdong.


This is definitely the real deal.
We managed to (kinda) finish walking between all the alleys and around Myeongdong.

There was just so many things to look at and so many shops to enter we took a solid 2 days to walk around.

Everyone says Korea is all about the street food. They all smell great everytime we walk pass the stores. They sell a wide array of delicacies. Strawberry mochi, sausages, Ice cream Taiyaki, dried squid, fruit juice, even glass noodles!
It was really hard to just watch when all of the food smells so good.



This was our dinner for the first day >

Why would you open two same stores side by side?
Why not? It's Myeongdong!

Here are some of the street delicacies we tried!

ice cream waffle

strawberry mochi

sausage with cheese sticks

All the food was making us hungry all the time we were walking around even though we had dinner earlier.

It's okay to "dabao".
Just buy everything.

Sneaked a wefie with their cute caps

that Brown is HUGE!

We also found the Line store in Myeongdong!

We went there on Thursday but since it was Chuseok, the store was closed.
We went back the next day, on Friday, and hurrah! It's open!

Line seems to be everybody's favourite. The store was packed with customers, and many people queued up just to have a picture with Brown (picture on the left).

We bought bags full of gifts and little line goods for ourselves.
They were just too cute, we couldn't resist!!
We'd probably buy everything if we had the money to.

Oh! YG!

That night, we went to Lotte Mart, which was near our Airbnb. It's like our NTUC just that it's probably much bigger, with more customers.

Edible fish

They had rows and rows of snacks, even beauty stores like Etude House and Innisfree inside! The beauty stores are smaller, like a pop up store instead of a real physical one but it's the same thing.

It had Toys' R Us, MUJI and Uniqlo on the second floor, and even a pet shop!

not edible fish

they look like mochis

There was a parrot on the lady's hand when we walked pass. It was really cute.

They had fishes, hamsters, snails, beetles, hedgehogs, guinea pigs and birds on sale.

On Saturday, we went to a raccoon cafe in Yongsan! 

We had to order to be seated!

Yes, raccoons. There were 2 black-grey raccoons and 1 all white raccoon.
The main attraction? A small little corgi pup in the store!
Just kidding. But the corgi pup was really cute.

yes, they let visitors do this

The chocolate cake was really delicious and was only for 5000Won (SGD $4.50).

How rare.
We dont have raccoon cafes in Singapore, do we? It's not everyday you get to see raccoons.

They were really cute and fat. We also didn't know that raccoons could climb.

fattest

fat

After the cafe, we went back to being 2000% tourist. 

Seoul Tower! 

Before we went up to the tower, we stopped to watch them perform! It's a kind of traditional performance. The photo on the left was the first. It was very entertaining. It was an uproar as they played the drums while they performed. The photo on the right is a performance for the king back in the Tang(?) Dynasty. It's a martial arts and swordsmanship performance. They sliced bamboo sticks right in front of our face. 

Island is lost in the horizon!

Up on the highest floor, they had an array of glass panels with the names of countries and cities in that direction.
We walked down the aisle and managed to find Singapore!

No, we couldn't see Singapore from where we were (lol).

we tried. 

Here are some of the stunning views we managed to get up in the tower!

Is Chuncheon somewhere there?

Seoul Tower's shadow!

Seoul has a Fortress Wall that surrounds it's perimeter

Our dinner for the night! It only costs 8000Won/person (SGD $7.20)
Best part? It's buffet!

It's getting late here. We have school the next day so, for now! 

Last picture!

Ahem.

Good luck!
Cheers :)

Shopping!! (Week 1)

IS SATURDAY!!! That means its shopping day!!!

Before we go into shopping, let us tell you about what we did before Saturday.....

Here are our classrooms! 

They are much like tutorial rooms in NYP except they don't really have air-con in them... They're like fan-air-con. Not those huge centralised air-cons.

Management in IS

International Business

Finance

Tadah! Ajuma food!

We met up with our buddy after class and said hi to her. She was our senior's buddy as well last year!! She's super friendly.

She brought us to eat just right outside our school.

This is our first full Korean meal in Korea. 

It's exactly what you see in those drama where they sit on the floor and eat with their parents. 

Yes. 

100% Korean. 

Liang Jing's favourite was the spicy squid.

Belle and Shi Jia's favourite was the Soup Tofu! 

We would like to go back but the menu is in Korean. We only know how to say Soup Tofu in Korean - Soo Too Poo. 

We'll explain why it's "Poo" in awhile... 

We went to Chuncheon Myeongdong to splurge our money on Daiso. We bought a ton of daily necessities and materials for classes. After that, we went to a supermarket to buy a hairdryer. It was starting to get late so we went back to our dorm for the day.

Why Pie

In the early morning, we settled our dorm fee which cost us 1,202,000 Won (~SGD 1,380) and took our Wi-Fi (pronounced as Wi-Pie in Korean HAHA). 

Our finance professor mentioned that Korean doesnt have the letter "F" in their alphabets. Ho. Ho. Ho. 

Anyway, Here's an image of our Wi-Pie. 

There is ZERO CONNECTION in the room. We had to open our doors or stand outside of our room just to connect to the internet. It was terrible. 

< Until we met this life saver. We love TPLink. 

We managed to go back to the supermarket our buddy brought us to on our own! :D (We'll upload an image soon.) 

Tomato Volcano Sauce

Here's what we had for dinner on Friday. 

It's called "Tomato" and it's super delicious.

Thinking about it makes me hungry. 

Apparently, they close their shop at about 8.30 PM. It was hilarious how we were approached by the staff and told to like leave, but we didn't understand until they tried to hand sign the door closing. 

We ended up taking away our half eaten meal and finished it in the dorm HAHAHA. 

And now, to Saturday. SHOPPING TIME! 

Chuncheon Myeongdong @ night

We walked around aimlessly and spent half of our day shopping. Oops. 

A lot of the facial products are on 1 + 1 or 10 + 10. There is no in-between HAHA. 

Go big or go home. 

Pokemon craze!

We found KFC. We ate KFC for lunch. It was hard to order as we had to point at the menu or just try our luck by pointing at something that we felt was okay. Ordering was terrible. But the chicken was good so it didn't matter. 

This is for the OCD people >>

It felt like we were solving a jigsaw puzzle. 

They're so cute.

The art box in Korea has 3 floors. Gosh. How cool is that? We probably spent an hour in there or something. It's also much cheaper than in Singapore.

All these shoes but you still won't run to me.

We then continued walking around aimlessly and saw shoe shops on sale. We were extermely tempted by the shoes. Some of them were as cheap as 69000 Won! All the sport shoes we can buy....  

We went into 3 shops back to back that were having sale and they all had the same price. 

Can't tell if they were being friendly or what. 

Anyway, we managed to walk to a cinema and wanted to watch a movie but there wasn't much on show currently. We wanted to watch "Secret Life of Pets" but it was unavailable at the one we went to (I think it was CGV). 

Sassy... 

Here's Belle's loots for the day. omg.

SO, we ended up taking PICTURES! 

The Purika we went to was only 7000Won for those two pieces! 

Singapore's Purika costs about $10/12SGD for a miserly one piece. 

How nice of Korea. Tsk tsk. 

Anyway, we then walked around some more and managed to find a shopping mall called "M" that had Uniqlo in it. 

We are currently waiting for our clothes to dry as we sit down to type out this post. Here's a picture of the dorm's washing machine. 

Can you hear us scream as we jab on the buttons by random? HAHA It took us awhile to understand what each button does.
To our future juniors: 


First, put in the money.

Secondly, put in your (dirty) clothes and pour detergent at the box by the side.

Then, press the second button from the top. It means "Standard"

Then, press the last button. It (kinda) means "Start".

Lastly, watch your clothes swirl inside! 
No JK, type your blog post for that day. 

It takes about 35 minutes for the clothes to be done.



It's about time the dryer called for us. 
Here are some more images to end our post: 

View from the front door of our dorm

It's kinda like a market, like Chinatown

He's literally everywhere in Korea.

Good luck and cheers!