Jul 11th: Korean Life Starts

Exploring the neighbourhood, wi-fi everywhere and my first Korean party.

Because of the jet lag, I wasn’t able to wake up earlier then at 1 p.m. But my internship starts on Monday, so I have a lot of free time.

Today I wanted to explore the area around my house and also to find a place where I could connect to the internet.

Seoul looks really amazing, you can see really modern buildings if you look up in the sky but if you look down you can also see the tough asian life in the street (homeless people sleeping on the ground without anything).

After that I found one lovely cafe where I got really delicious snack and I did things I needed to do on the internet.

In the evening, Takho invited me to Korean AIESEC party to meet other Korean students and internship trainees. But before we hit the party, we went to make a sim card. There is so great wi-fi coverage that I didn’t need to buy mobile data. The only thing you have to have is Korean sim card and then you can connect to the wi-fi almost everywhere, in metro, buses, restaurants, cafés and also in some of the public places. And this is how it looks like.

Around 8 p.m. we arrived to Hyehwa-dong, the neighbourhood known for its night life. We met with some girls and went to one of the bars witch was reserved for AIESEC. The place was full of tables and full of Koreans. Everybody was sitting, drinking and chatting and some of them were playing drinking games. This is how they do it before they go to the dance clubs.

I have to say that Korean beer is not bad. But what I found really interesting is Soju — traditional Korean alcoholic drink. About 19% of alcohol, made from rice with the taste of light vodka. They drink it as a shoot or as a ingredient to cocktails.

As far as I remember I met a lot of need people. Gigi from Hong Kong, Nathali from Malaysia and also Korean students — Julia, Jooyoung, Brian, Chanho and Jay + 100 others.