Thinking I was a skilled navigator, I found out where the nearest Imsil Cheese Pizza was to Yonsei and figured it was about a 10 minute walk from the campus main gate. As usual, I overestimated my orienteering abilities and we wound up walking 35 minutes in the blazing hot sun and stifling heat, retracing our steps twice and never finding the pizza place.
I was pretty embarrassed that I led a big group of people on a wild good chase all over Sinchon and we didn't even find what we were looking for! We decided to eat the nearest Korean pizza place (since we have Papa John's in America), which ended up being Pizza Heaven. Naturally, I wasn't able to eat the pizza but it looked good and everyone said it was good, albeit greasy.
Unsuccessfully trying to use NaverMaps to find Imsil Cheese Pizza
After lunch we headed back to the dorm and I spent 45 minutes trying to a locate a music venue in Hongdae that I want to go to this Saturday to see a concert. GoogleMaps is extremely unreliable in Korea, and almost never gives correct directions and often cannot even find addresses when you type them in. Most Korean people use NaverMaps, which is an exclusively Korean map website (part of the Naver search engine, which is sort of like the Korean version of Google). NaverMaps works really well but the one problem with it is that it is entirely in Korean with no option for English language, so it's a bit of a struggle to use.
Luckily, I can read enough Korean to painstakingly find my way with NaverMaps and then compare it alongside to GoogleMaps and make a decision as to where to go. I'm planning on going with some friends to see a Korean punk band called Counter Reset which I've listened to for about a year before coming to Korea at the venue on Saturday, which is called Sapiens 7.
At 3:15, I met up with three girls I know and we went to Myeong-dong to meet one of our Seoul Mates, which is a native Korean who befriends us and shows us around Seoul. Once we met up with her we shopped around Myeong-dong for a few hours. I bought a nice new phone case for only 10,000 won and some small gifts for friends back in the US.
The lunch box I had for dinner, before mixing it up
For dinner, we went to place that serves dosirak (도시락) which is a sort of Korean lunch box similar to bibimbap. Regardless, it was very good and we got bingsu (빙수), which is a Korean dessert made of shaved ice with different topics on it (usually including sweetened azuki beans). Ours had the beans as well as vanilla ice cream, sweet chewy rice cakes, bananas, watermelon, various nuts, kiwi, and a cherry tomato (weird, I know). It had a different taste than I expected but it was very good.
The bingsu we had for dessert, with some sweet rice puff desserts as well.
After dinner, we shopped around a little bit at the stores in the Myeong-dong train station and then decided we were tired and headed back to Yonsei University so we could turn in early because we have to get up early tomorrow for an LG electronics field trip.
That's all for now!
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