Gumdo meal

When people join a group such as martial arts of swimming etc, they normally go out together often to eat/drink, perhaps once a fortnight or so. Last Friday after Gumdo training, we went out for food which was cholpan nakji bokkum (철판낙지볶음), octopus cooked on a hot plate (very good, although I hear the live one is better!) and various other foods. People normally drink Soju which is the most common alcohol and basically a bit like vodka but has no real taste. You can see in the video how the food is cooked at the table. The guy with glasses next to me is the Gumdo instructor.
After the meal we went to another place which where we could drink Mekju (lager) and eat snacks. People always have food with alcohol here. The dried fish were not the kind of beer snacks I'm used to but there are plenty of other snacks to eat. It was a good night out.

Rain

The rainy season has started and it pretty much rains very heavily every day. Although it's still warm and there's no wind, so as long as you have an umbrella it doesn't really matter too much, and most of the time you're just walking 2 minutes between underground metro stations.

Changgyeonggung and Jongmyo

Seeing that Wednesday is a day off we were lucky that we had a break in the rain and we were able to visit Changgyeonggung and Jongmyo. These two places are next to each other and were built around 500 years ago. Lots of traditional buildings and impressive steps leading up into a wooded area made for some good photo's.

The big pond had huge koi carp in it and even some turtles swimming around. They had made a Western style garden and were currently building a western style botanical garden as well.

On the road in Seoul

Just a quick video from the car, driving back from the supermarket. Nothing special but you can see a little bit what it is like on the roads. As you can see, in the opposite direction to us there's a big traffic jam, and it's 9:50pm.

Food shopping

The supermarkets (marts) in Seoul are big. This one is on 2 floors and there's a special escaltor you go up and down WITH your trolley. Don't worry, the wheels automatically lock. Nice!

Gumdo 검도 ( 劍道)

I took the camera to the gumdo class last Thursday and managed to take a few pics and a short video. Gumdo (Kendo in Japan) is the characters 劍 (gum) which means 'sword' and 道 (do - same 'do' as Taekwondo) which means 'way'. 劍道 means 'the way of the sword'.


The training has been hard but enjoyable. Tina has enjoyed it aswell as you can see. We've been training 4 times a week so are progressing fast but even so it requires 3 - 6 months before you can wear the full armour and do sparring.

The bit in the video is the easy bit, can't get the camera out any other time!

COEX mall

Last wednesday (rest day - no class or gumdo) we we're out at COEX mall, doing some shopping (nice musical instrument shop) and visiting the Kimchi (Korean national food) museum.

Seoul Panorama

It took a while but I stitched 6 photo's together to make this panorama. Click the pic for the full size version.

Food: Shabu Shabu

Eating Shabu Shabu (Japanese). I will really miss Korean food when I leave.

Outside of Seoul

Saturday: Tina's mum took us to a very nice restaurant just outside of Seoul. Heading out of the city (by car) was quite nice as it had been a while since i'd seen much green. The location was very out of the way, only accessable by car (rare in Korea) and the food was great. The typical Korean style is to serve about 10 courses of various things and they were pretty much all delicious, including jellyfish, Korean beef, nut soup, raw fish, etc.

On entry you have to take your shoes of and everyone sits on the floor. (People normally think this is Japanese style, but Korea and Japan share a lot of cultural things and a lot of them went to Japan from Korea originally). Sitting on the floor cross legged starts of comfortable but when you're not used to it standing up after an hour is difficult.

Despite being in Korea and vastly different to anything back home this place being out of the way, being surrounded by foresty areas and having a garden etc did remind of places in England.

View from the metro back from technomart

Technomart (테크노마트)

Wednesday was really hot, so we spent the whole day in Technomart. Technomart is basically a huge mall which only sells electronics stuff (see video and photos).There is of course a large food court so first we went to dunkin donuts, then shopped for a bit, then went to the cinema which is on the top floor to watch Wanted, and then went to a restaurant for dinner in the food court. The cinema had numerous hand prints of Korean actors and actresses, including Kim Yun Jin from L O S T!






























The mobile phone floor makes you dizzy. Thousands of phones and about a hundred staff trying to sell them to you.