A Day Full of excitement

Seoul Day-7

Sunday, May 19

I first woke up really early today when I heard the sound coming from the Bell Pavilion. But thanks to the comfortable "futon," I managed to fall asleep again within half and hour. However, I wasn't really fond of the pillow as I prefer soft and fluffy pillows instead and my neck kind of ached a little bit when I woke up this morning. But that was the only thing that I wasn't happy about for today. Other than that, today was definitely one of the most enjoyable and lucky day for some of us.

Our mushroom and oyster porridge

We agreed to Prof Ahn's suggestion of having traditional Korean breakfast which is porridge. For that, we went to a cute little restaurant called 본죽 which served more than a dozen of choices to their customers. Since I am not a huge fan of porridge, I shared a bowl of mushroom and oyster porridge with Nora since every porridge came in a pretty big bowl here. Surprisingly, Nora only took a small bowl of it and I still managed to finish the rest of the porridge. It was so delicious that I thought I could actually eat more than that and still wouldn't feel sick of it. Prof. Ahn then brought us to the main shopping area in Insa-dong and we were given two hours to wander by ourselves.

We entered few souvenir shops and looked at the merchandises being sold. I really love them as most of the merchandise came in a rather bright colors such as striking pink, red, yellow, green and blue. And although I wasn't sure the standard price of merchandise being sold, I found some of them were pretty affordable. For instance,

Colorful merchandise

each bookmarks and keychains were mostly around 2000 ₩. Some of souvenirs that caught my attention the most while I was at Insa-dong was jewelry boxes. The boxes were so beautiful with inlaid of shining mother-of-pearl decorating on their lids and sides. Nature were chosen as the common designs with animals such butterflies and cranes. At the end of the street, I had the opportunity to watch "pungmul"  performance by a group of high school students. Being a part of Korean drumming myself in UofM, I was really, really excited watching their performance. And apparently, I was not the only one. An  old lady around in her fifties, was dancing along to the beat played by "kkwaenggwari","jing", "buk", and "janggu". I also had the opportunity to buy some traditional court cake called "kkultarae" which means honey skein. I have been wanting to try this since two years ago when I came across a video of it on video. It was amazing on how they can transformed hard-rock honey into thousands of fine strands within just couple of minutes. 

Now I missed the "buk" I used to play

Once the time given was over, we continued our day by going to an event that I was looking forward to the most, Inkigayo! Upon arriving to the area, we could already see hundreds of people standing in line waiting to be admitted into the auditorium. With courtesy to SBS, all of us had the opportunity to become one of the audiences and we didn't even have to line up to get in.

Hundreds of people waiting in front of SBS.
Unsurprisingly, most of them are females.

Honestly, I felt bad for the rest of them as if I were them, I wouldn't like it if other people got to walk in right away when I had spent hours waiting in line. The auditorium was surprisingly pretty small and oh my, it was really hot in there. Although I was there, sitting in pretty good spot, almost center and among front rows, it felt surreal at that time. Being a K-pop fan for few years, it never crossed my mind that I would actually be able to see them other than on the television or laptop screens. However, I was slightly disappointed with some of performances to be honest. Before the real Inkigayo started, they already had pre-recorded performances in which all the artists were giving their all, so some of them were just doing lip-sync on the second time.

INKIGAYO..!

Nevertheless, seeing them live was more than enough for their fans. Throughout the show, there was a lot, and I mean a lot, of ear-piercing screams calling their favorite group or specific artists' names coming from all around us, especially the girls. I wondered how their vocal chords still managed to produce voice to cheer for the every performers despite screaming their lungs out from the beginning of the show. I left the place with contented feeling after watching great performance by 2PM.

Supporters of LG Twins who were to excited to sit down

As we were running late on scheduled, we rushed to Jamshil Baseball Stadium to watch a match between LG Twins and Kia Tigers. I never watched any baseball games and I was never a sports-girl in the first place, so I don't really know what to expect in the game. But I have to admit, even though I only knew a little bit of baseball and I didn't even know any of the players, my adrenaline was pumping most of the time. Apparently, each of the players had their own theme songs and their supporters would sing and dance to the song as a cheers for them. Both the songs and the dance moves were simple and catchy and they changed some of the lyrics so that the name of the player would be a part of the song. It was so exhilarating that sometimes, people just stood up instead of sitting down. At the end of the day, our team won 7:4 against Kia Tigers although their opponents was one the best baseball teams in Korea. It was just awesome.

I had so much fun and had different aspects of experiences in one day. I tried Korean types of breakfast, saw traditional performance, experienced the effects of "hallyu" among Korean themselves, and watched one of the most popular sports in Korea other than football. It could have never been better and I am truly thankful for all the chances that came to my way. 

With my dear friends, Elise and Spencer.