The Kimchi Museum, Oh God The Kimchi Museum

Straight up warning to start this one out, this will be the most boring post of all time. It's hard to not make the most boring post of all time when it's about the most boring museum of all time.

Anyway, I made my way to Seoul with my friend Michael to visit the Kimchi Museum, buy some books, and go out drinking with some Irish people. A little more about the fun stuff later.

The Kimchi Museum is located in this giant mall called COEX. It's a really sweet mall because it has my favorite book store and Mexican food restaurant in Seoul. I was mildly stoked about the museum because I figured there would at least be a lot of free kimchi as well as interesting information about it's history.

As for the history of kimchi, it's been made for centuries. They never even had really good spicy kimchi until someone started importing Mexican chili peppers. That's pretty interesting I guess.

The storage of kimchi is mildly interesting. It has to be kept at a somewhat constant temperature, so they used to bury it underground in the winter under a teepee.

A teepee like this one. Woo hoo.

There's a lot of different types of kimchi, too. Look at them all. There's probably a lot more than this in fact.

There was a nice photo opp with an old Korean woman made out of wax. Kimchi is so popular here that instead of saying cheese to get the kids to smile for a photograph, they say kimchi. Kimchi!

It turns out when you eat kimchi, you eat this little guy with a green hat and he kicks the crap out of germs or whatever that is pictured here.

It also keeps cancer inside of a tiny cage.

Kimchi is pretty popular, despite the boringness of the museum. Koreans are so attached to their kimchi, in fact, that they will usually pack some with them while on vacation. They never want to go even a day without precious kimchi.

Here's the comment sheet about kimchi:

So after leaving the museum, we went to meet up with some of Michael's Irish friends in Hondae to eat some Vietnamese food and do some drinking. It was a pretty ridiculous time while we went to this bar called Ho Bar III. We were ordering rounds of beer ten at a time and each person would buy a round. When my turn came up I was like "goody, a round of ten." It turned out the beer was only 1900 won apiece, so each round came to 19,000 won, which is $16.50 in USD. Pretty awesome. We drank them out of at least three different types of beer. Good Night.

The Tower of Seoul

Ahhh, last post of November. Another year has almost past, and by that time I'll have been here 6 months. I'm still looking for exciting new things to experience and post about on this here blog, but it's just a little slow. Sorry about that.

I did see one of the most popular tourist attractions of Seoul a weekend ago, so this should make a good post. What I saw was the large tower which looms above the city of Seoul, called Namsan tower.

This trip didn't start great, due to the fact that I decided to stay out until 8 a.m. on the morning that I was getting up at 9 a.m. to go to Seoul. Real smart, me, real smart. Anyway, I got up at 9 and met my Irish friend Michael to head to Seoul. He's a friend who got here only a few weeks ago, and we made the trip for two purposes: one to eat mexican food, and the other to meet his friend Mariah from Sweden and see where the day takes us.

As soon as we got to Seoul we went to one of my favorite spots, called COEX Mall. This place has my favorite book store and mexican food restaurant in Seoul. Needless to say the books and mexican food were great.

After, we made our way to the Namsan which involved a couple of subway trains and a long walk up a hill. Along the way I passed my favorite piece of art I have seen in Seoul, this biker with a streaky paint finish. It reminds me of something I would try to make.

This is a picture of the tower and the daunting hill we walked up. It was nice they had a cable car to take us to the base of the tower, which was a life (and time) saver.

Here's a pic of my friend Michael and his (my new) friend Mariah. She's nearly six feet tall.

I decided to get my picture taken with these two giant teddy bears outside of some kind of teddy bear museum or store or something. I thought the picture turned out well.

This tower place is built up as very romantic. In fact, one can purchase a lock (or bring their own), write their own and their lover's name on it, and lock it around this chain link fence. It was really ridiculous how many were up there. There was yard after yard of these fences with locks on them. Locks locked to locks for locks upon locks upon locks. I joked that I was going to come up one more time with a bobby pin, start trying to pick some, and see how long it takes for the cops to be called. I wouldn't really do it because I'm sure all of the relationships associated with the locks would then be doomed.

This is one of my favorites. I think it's Italian.

We decided to not spend the money to actually travel all the way up to the top of the tower since it was a super gloomy day. Because of this I didn't get any very good pictures, and I'll most likely have to go back again some day. It also started raining a little so it was time to get out of there. We opted out of the cable car ride down the hill and had to go down this stairway with thousands of steps. By the time we were down I was almost physically unable to make the motion of going down steps, although going upstairs strangely still felt OK.

Here's a picture of a cabbage garden I thought I would thrown in just to illustrate how strange this country can be.

So the day ended well, we spent some time at this huge 0utdoor market which I forgot the name of. I wish that I needed something while I was there because I'm sure they would have had it. We stopped for some coffee on the way out to try to counteract my increasingly incoherent speech due to the one hour of sleep, and then we were on our way back home. All in all, a nice day.