Getting in touch with my Seoul

As you may have noticed, my blogging has completely stopped. I stopped partly because I'm lazy and hated editing each post (there were always grammatical & spelling errors, and uploading photos was an exercise in frustration), but I also stopped because I didn't think anyone read it.

Well... sure... a few random people read it and posted on it (thanks random people!) Actually after looking at my blog stats, it turns out that most of my viewers came from the USA, followed by Canada, and then a tie between the UK, Germany, India, and Australia (which is odd, because I don't actually have that many friends in those countries).
Furthermore, it turns out most people found my blog by googling 'Johnny Cade' (HEY!), or some other special key words that lead them to reading my post about Loveland. I do NOT want to know what they were googling.

Of course, after I stopped posting and got back to Canada, it turned out everyone and their 2nd cousins had been reading my blog. So once again I will attempt to maintain a blog.


So, would you all like a mini update?

I'm moving to Seoul!!!

Yes I've taken on a new job in a hagwon and so this blog while be dedicated to those experiences.

So I have decided to update a few things in this blog.

Deep Fried Seoul is the new name. It's meant to be a pun off of the fish 'Sole'. I actually looked at a lot of potential puns (Chicken Soup for the Seoul, Seoul Survivor, Seoulmate, Mind & Seoul, Seoul Sistah, Seoul Train etc), but, tragically, it turned out that they were all taken. So to all the random bloggers, tour agencies, documentary film makers, I hope you're embarrassed by your ridiculously cheesy names!

Still, I'm pretty pleased by this choice and it's a good follow-up name from my previous salad dressing-inspired blog name: 'Memories of Jeju'. (Don't sue me President's Choice!)

The background image is taken from an image I found on google. All credit goes to the photographer who is uploading here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doegox/
Thank you random photographer, I liked your photos of the lemurs, and now I have officially followed your reproduction rules. The fish were stolen from a random blog I found here: http://sellmic.com/blog/2008/02/15/the-constructor-that-doesnt-construct-blooper-of-the-day/. Uhm, your blog was nice... but I didn't really understand any of it.

So now the adventure is about to start up all over again. I hope you enjoy it! Please write as many comments as you can, I like reading them and it encourages me to be more active!

No, really! You keep commenting about how awesome I am, and I'll keep making your life better with tales of my life!

(Sounds like a deal!)

Seoul Sistah!

Although this is being posted up reaaaally late, this is the tale of my weekend trip to Seoul. After spending months in Jeju and never leaving that island, my 2 male escorts (Mike and Justin) and I headed up to the capital city for a weekend getaway.

Of course my tale wouldn't be complete without some snazzy background (or at least random) information about Seoul, so let me indulge you. Now the population of the city itself is over 10mill, and if that doesn't make your jaw drop, the suburbs around Seoul boost the entire province (which pretty much is just the city and surrounding suburbs) population up to about 24 million. So... what does 24 million look like? Well literally rows upon rows upon rows of appartment buildings. Literally 24 million people stacked on top of each other. Seoul isn't your typical western city, where upon reaching the downtown core the buildings suddenly become skyscrapers. Nope, instead I found most of the buildings to be similar and not terribly interesting.

In a way I found it to be a little futuristic looking. Almost as though everyone was a designated number, living in a designated section of the city, in a designated building, on a designated floor with a designated room number. In the end, I found it was a little unsettling and not a future I want to envision.

Now while I did not find Seoul to be the prettiest city in the world, it certainly was the most technologically advanced city I've ever seen. The metro system was what stuck out the most for me. You can use your phone as the swipe 'card' to get on the metro (as well as the bus, train and taxi!) and the metro seats were comfortable and heated! There also was rather calming classical music played between each stop. Each metro line had a different song. Furthermore when waiting for the metro, there were doors separating you from the track to avoid any possibility of falling and getting hit by the metro. One of my male escorts dubbed them as 'suicide doors'.

But I guess you guys don't want to hear about the metro. We arrived early Saturday and spent most of the day looking at cameras. However that evening we headed off to check out what was dubbed the 'Light Festival'. Now initially when I heard about this festival I was imagining Koreans in Hanboks dancing while they paraded around intricate paper lanterns. This 'festival' was actually just projections of images onto the buildings that surrounded Gwanhangmun Square where it was hosted. It was actually a little lame as they mostly just projected the same images over and over again. And considering how cold I was, watching a fish swim across a couple buildings lost its appeal pretty fast!




The next day we headed to the GyeongBokGung Palace! This is the largest palace in Seoul and is a part of a district that includes about 4 other palaces. This palace is actually right infront of the parliament buildings of Korea, which is actually a palace with a signature blue roof. Like Canada and England, GyeongBokGung had its own changing of the guard, which was neat to watch with the halberds and flashy clothes.

The palace itself is huuuuuuuuuuge!!! Hopefully you can tell that by the picture I included. This is just the outer courtyard, which has its own man made stream running through the middle.

It was offered and I couldn't resist. So here's me being a tourist and dressed up in a hanbok

Now I didn't grab a headset tourguide for this palace, so unfortunately I'm not up on the history of this palace. I do know that it has spent a vast amount of its time being burnt down and rebuilt. Being burned to the ground by the Japanese or other Koreans, the oldest part of the palace was only from the 1800s. Almost everything in Korea is just a recreation of something that was burnt down. It's actually quite tragic, but for me it didn't lessen the experience. But literally everywhere, there was a little emergency fire extinguisher sitting on every corner of the palace grounds.

Here are the scribbles of my cruddy future. Please never ask me the price of this piece of paper

After this we headed to Insadong, a popular tourist place, to try out one of the popular fortune teller cafes (no I'm not a believer, but I am fascinated by it). I paid my fare and had an 'interesting' fortune told. In summary I was basically told that I would not have happiness or true satisfaction until I was 46. It would be because of my large ego which would get in the way of work and co-workers. Furthermore that any husband I have, I would only be able to see him once a month. For if I saw him too much, I would end up trying to change him, thus causing him to resent me. So my marriage would be one of permanent long distance. He also said I was the element Water , but I'm pretty sure I'm Fire.



Needless to say, it was not the cheeriest of fortunes. Highly entertaining though and worth the money! And that about wraps up my trip! Of course I spent time with friends and meeting new ones, but that isn't really worth blogging about. Besides, I'll be back soon enough to see the rest of Seoul.