♡ Seoul Trip 4 부 ♡

みなさん、こんにちは!

I have never written so many blogs in the space of a couple of days! I know I've done small blogs every day, but not ones of these lengths! Anyway, here's the final installment of what I did in Seoul.

For our last few days, We didn't go far, only to places we knew best as money was kind of running out (well for me it was) at this point, so we went to the Kyobo book store near Myeongdong and checked out their cd and dvd department they had and managed to nab some other cd's and even a Boy's Over Flower's DVD set for a good deal! And then walking past their electronic section, Rachael bought a Winnie the Pooh cheki camera! She's finally part of the cheki club! And it seriously was so adorable! And I almost bought some Miffy and Hello Kitty cheki films but I worked it out in my head that it was actually cheaper to buy them on ebay... go figures huh?

Sitting outside the store in the early evening is so relaxing because we don't have to worry about rushing anywhere before the stores close as many of them shut between 10 and 11pm, so it's just nice sit outside and soak up some of the atmosphere... until we saw a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf shop across the road and so we found a crossing (seriously you cannot just walk into the road here, it's much safer to walk the extra distance to a level crossing so you don't get killed!)

What I like about The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is that they have these buzzers you get given with a number on, so when your order is ready, the lights flash up and the disc starts vibrating. It saves so much hassle for the workers to try and find you in such a large space and you get to burn off like 3 calories walking back and forth to your table! I bought this time a white chocolate nut cookie and a peppermint iced tea and you would think that the iced teas are sweetened for you like they are over here, but it is actually cold peppermint tea. You have to add sugar syrup to your own liking to your drink and it's amazing because I don't like overly sweet foods (and I kind of found the cookie a bit too sweet...) and so doing my own measurements of sugar in my drink is pretty sound.

There was a really cute water pond piece as we walked to the subway but it was too dark for my flash on my camera to make it out properly... goddamit. I shall have to buy a dlsr and actually take it to Korea with me next time. Oh, I also managed to sneak Rachael in the picture below! So much laughter! This was taken just outside the subway station near the Kyobo book store, it's behind me in the picture. Can you still see what I mean when I say everything is so tall in Seoul?! Immense!

So, even though we had many cd's on us at that point, we decided to head back into Sinchon as it was nearby to return to the first music store we went into as we knew what to expect and because we couldn't find a couple of things in the Kyobo book store, we went back to see if that store would have the items. After we had our fill of cd's (we managed to get Super Junior's Mr Simple album at this point, I got Leeteuk as he's my joint favourite with Heechul, but I couldn't decide and in the end... Leader won!) we headed over to a traditional bbq place where a member of staff would stand outside clapping trying to get people in and well, I had to literally drag Rachael inside and we were placed at the front of the restaurant as if we were the main attraction or something! But everything was in hangul and we didn't know what was what so we pointed to the people next to us and asked to have what they were having. It was chicken, sausage, cabbage, beansprouts, noodles (honestly it was spaghetti but they call it noodle out there) with a red pepper paste sauce and it's cooked right there in front of you.

I'm not even going to lie, I loved the macaroni waldorf salad they gave us as a side dish! Seriously going to make that when I can ♪( ´▽｀)

Delicious food and the atmosphere was just buzzing... I kind of expected all the workers to just jump up and go OOPAH at everything! Afterwards as we felt extremely full at this point, we went and sat in a little park area just outside of the restaurant. It felt like a communal meet up point... like a concrete part that all the students sit to either eat, smoke and talk with their friends at. As it was a Friday night at this point, we watched couples and small groups of people going past to club nights in the area, would have been nice to have gone to one but alas we wouldn't have gotten in because of one of us being underage *shoosh*

At this point, it was pretty late as we had been out all day and we were too tired to tackle the 6 flights of stairs at Dapsimni station so we headed over to Wangsimni station and caught a taxi from there to our hotel instead. I didn't realise to get out of the station, you had to walk through a giant shopping centre to get to the street level... seriously it was massive! Even bigger than Westfields here in London!

Everything was either closed or starting to close at this point, but there were a few shops instead still open, mainly coffee shops. But yes, that was what we mainly did in Seoul. I wish we had gone to some places like Hongdae, Busan, Namsam and Lotte World but honestly, I'm now saving to go to them places next year when I go again. And there is now a few more spots I would love to go and see also! Even though I have only been back in England for a couple of weeks, I am itching to return to Seoul once again!

Ummm... also I didn't really want to write another blog post about purchases so I thought that I'd add them onto this one.

CD/DVD Purchases:

Picture One: Kim Hyun Joong Lucky mini album, Playful Kiss Photo Diary, You're Beautiful OST, Mary Stayed Out All Night OST, Kim Hyun Joong First Fanmeet DVD, SS501 Solo Projects album, SS501 Destination, Rebirth and ST01 Now albums, Jang Guen Suk Japanese album, Boys Over Flowers Limited Edition OST and Yamashita Tomohisa Supergood Superbad album.

Picture Two: Kim Kyu Jong Turn Me On mini album, Infinite's repackaged album, JYJ In Heaven album, SS501 Find and Deja Vu albums, Kara Step album, Park Jungmin mini album, Orange Caramel Bangkok City single and an indie singer cd which I got as a free gift.

My Leeteuk Mr Simple album! eeeeeeeee~

Boys Over Flowers DVD boxset and SS501's Persona Concert Photobook!

Beauty Product Purchases:

Because of the immense amount of things I had bought from Etude House, Nature Republic and Face Shop (oh and two things from Skin Food...) I managed to get a load of freebies!

Picture one: freebies from Etude House, Nature Republic and Face Shop... I managed to get some more which filled up the whole case in picture three!

Picture two: Red Bean BB Cream and pale pink lipstick from Skin Food

Picture three: Collagen Moistfull kit containing moisturiser and cream, Aura Primer, BB cream and lemon face masks.

Picture four: leopard print nail stickers and eyebrow shaper blades

Picture five: Etude House matte nail pastel collection, Peach (panda) and Apple (penguin) lip balms.

Fangirl Spazz Purchases:

Picture one: Jang Guen Suk and Kim Hyun Joong memobooks, stickers, socks and photocards.

Picture two: Jang Guen Suk and Kim Hyun Joong posters.

Picture three: Jang Guen Suk and Kim Hyun Joong 2012 calenders (not official but don't care ohohoho)

Picture four: Boys Over Flowers memobook and Jang Guen Suk phone charm - these were actually free from the nice lady on the stall I bought these from.

So that's it! That is what happened on my holiday in Seoul. I'm really looking forward to travelling back there again next year and seeing more sights and I just hope you enjoyed reading all my posts about everything.

Thanks for reading!

xoxo

♡ Seoul trip 3 부 ♡

みなさん、こんにちは! 

On the Wednesday, Rachael and I went back to Sinchon as we now knew about a music store that was near the subway (hence Anna's amazing map drawing skills) and as we were there, I fancied trying an ice-cream waffle that is pretty famous out in Korea and there was a tiny little cafe called Tomo's Cafe about a five minute walk from the subway that had the plastic models of their food outside and it looked pretty amazing so we went into there to eat, even though we'd just had some ox-bone stew literally 10 minutes before hand!

The waiter was so sweet, he asked us if we spoke Korean very well and we said so-so and he said it was ok he understood basic English, such a sweetheart! So I ordered a cookie creme frappuccino and an ice-cream waffle whilst Rachael ordered and lemonade and a honey maple toast for herself. From where we were sitting we could see the people behind the counter making our food and just soaking up the general atmosphere it was actually, in my personal opinion, the nicest place I had eaten in on the whole trip.

My cookie creme frappuccino reminded me of the Baramint Bailey's drink I had had at TGI Friday's a few weeks beforehand when everyone in our house went there for dinner one night, except obviously there was no alcohol involved and it actually tasted more delicious. Rachael let me have a taste of her lemonade (and obviously I let her taste my drink) and her drink was like a proper old fashioned lemonade drink! Wonderful! The only thing I got a tiny bit freaked out about was the fact there was a tomato on my food! I know tomatoes are classed as fruits but still.... it was weird!

Oh and another thing... Rachael's toast, I swear, was like 3 maybe 4 fingers thick! Biggest slice of toast I had ever seen in my life!

On the Thursday, we awoke at 4am (ok I slept for an extra 15 minutes as I didn't actually fall asleep until 2am because I was excited) but we awoke so we could catch the first train out at our station to Digital Media City, which is where all the major music shows are filmed, especially M!Countdown which was the show we were trying to get into that day!

We knew we had to queue up for 8am, sign our name down on a piece of paper and then come back between 4pm and 5pm so they could get us in for the show to start but unfortunately, we were about the 90th people in the queue (they only allow the first 80) and so we decided to go and get some breakfast and then head back to the hotel for a lazy day of sleeping and eating food from Paris Baguette and the Japanese restaurant near our hotel. We found a Starbucks across the road the the building we were standing outside of and so we both had hot chocolates to drink and a cheese sandwich (they put jalapeno peppers in everything!) and whilst I had a sausage roll (actually it was a sausage in a croissant, yum!) Rachael had a banana muffin as an extra because we were pretty starved as it was around 9am and we'd been awake for so long without eating, this was for once our first breakfast in Seoul!

I bought another sausage roll, and like a pizza bread thing and some muffins from Paris Baguette. I actually prefer their bread/muffins out there because it's not as stodgy as English bread!

Last post coming up!

Thanks for reading!

xoxo

♡ Seoul Trip 2 부 ♡

みなさん、こんにちは!

Phew! The previous post was seriously the longest one I had ever written on this blog! This one will probably be equally as long.... oh well!

On the Tuesday, Rachael and I met up with our friend Anna who is out in Seoul studying for a year and we both missed saying goodbye to her over the summer so it was pretty sound for us to go and see her for a day! We met up with her at Euljiro-4, which is a really pretty area despite there being a really bitter cold wind that morning, but the sun shone for us and when Anna arrived we walked over to the Cheonggyecheon stream (another part of it which I had previously mentioned) because we were going to Myeondong for some traditional food and to explore as it was known for a tourist area.

Everything in Korea is so high! They seem to be a country that goes upwards not outwards like London (´Д｀) but everything is so clear... you can make out every corner and line of each building and the country is so polite (despite staring and spitting but I can look past all of that...) also it's so clean and fresh! Look at me rambling on about a country OH DEAR GOD I MISS IT AND I WANT TO RETURN RIGHT NOW.

*coughs*

I'm good. Right. As we walked along the Cheonggyecheon stream, we all noticed this massive figures being put up in the water and as we wondered what they were for, each one going along the river was unique and entertainingly funny. Some were of childhood games that we recognised and some were of traditional clothed people; Anna then found out that these were for a lantern festival that took place after we came back to London... we always miss the good ones (￣▽￣;)

After a while, we were all extremely hungry so we headed over to Myeongdong for some bimbimbap! It was nice to have some traditional hot food as all we seemed to be eating was quick, easy accessible food as we kept skipping breakfast. Anna ate glass noodles which looked really delicious whilst Rachael ate bimbimbap but I decided to go for some spicy soup (note here I actually cannot remember the name of it...) and it was seriously mind blowing hot! It made my lips tingle even after one sip but it was ultimately delicious and I would definitely go back for more!

Because Myeongdong is a tourist area, Anna took us a to Purikura shop and it was completely different to what we're used to here in London! But it was fun to try for sure and as per usual, the machine made my skin look healthy and gave me a "womanly" glow. I do love the purikura machines for doing that to my skin :'D

Also I noticed that Myeongdong feels like London's Oxford Street, in my personal opinion, it was because of the crowds and how everywhere is just so busy and it just felt like we were back home just with a different language obviously!

OH there was a Lotte duty free department store in the are so we kind of went and checked it out but it was just full of the really expensive brand stuff and even though it would have been nice to have something like that, it wasn't what we were really looking for on this trip!

Rachael and Anna can never pull a nice face for me ;___;

So yeah as it was dark at this point and a bit cold, we went into a coffee shop called The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, it's like Starbucks but much bigger and more well-known than Starbucks out there. They had some really unusual drinks so I decided to try a green tea latte and it was like matcha green tea... I did like it at first but then it got extremely bitter and then I stopped liking it ; 3 ; but the tiramisu cake I ate was delicious!

Look at Anna's amazing map drawing skills!

So by this point, it was really late so we decided to all part ways (very sad to say goodbye to Anna but we'll see her again /sobs) and as Rachael and I changed over at Wangsimni to get to Dapsimni... I spotted one of my favourite actor's new film that came out in the cinema's on Friday ♪(´ε｀ )

*sigh* it would have been amazing if it had come out in cinema's when we were in Korea because I would have definitely been in the front row!

Next part coming soon!

Thanks for reading!

xoxo