Korean drama - day 2: Wandering around Hongdae area (25.11.11)

Morning snacks...

Woke up at 9:30am. Had breakfast and met some new friends at the hostel including a couple from Fujian, a guy from Beijing, a Dutch, the same French guy and a Mexican. The last four of us had a long chat until one plus. Then I got ready to go walk around the area.

Remembered a friend I met in Taiwan telling me about this interesting place near Hongik University! And I found out it was just walking distance away from my hostel!

First meal in Korea.. and my
favourite after that..

It was a nice sunny day. Not too chilly. Left around 2pm and snacked on some local delights on the street near the Hapjeong train station.

Nice cafes and shops...

It was a short 10 minutes walk to the place more famously known as Hongdae (dae means university). Saw many young Koreans. There were a lot of amazing and nice gadgets. Hopped into one restaurant and stopped for late lunch. The spicy soup was nice. Slightly too hot for me but manageable.

I continued to walk and walk and walk.  The café here were very exquisite exterior wise.  Not sure about the interior though cause I wanted to spend more time walking around instead.  But, they seemed to be mostly very small and cosy.

One of the many cute little cafe.

A female guitarist at the uni..

I also took a quick tour around the university.  And saw a spa on the map and thought of checking it out.  After a long search around the surrounding area based on the Google map, I still could not find it.  The staff at the convenient store looked surprised that there was even a spa round!  Still not giving up, I asked the reception at the hotel nearby and was told (in English) that it was already closed.  Whether it was really closed didn’t matter anymore but because I was finally convinced not to search further.  Anyway, the staffs were all very helpful and trying hard to explain even when they don’t speak English.

Digital public phone!

Cool cafe...

Then, I passed by a pretty cool café and hopped in for a sip.  Bearable coffee but the place was very interesting with lots of books for you to spend the rest of the winter there reading.

One of the four pork dishes!

That was Tetsuya trying
to take a picture
with his camera

After 5 hours loitering around, I was back to the hostel.  Met a new Japanese friend, Tetsuya.  We all decided to go for dinner together with Ruud (as you might have guessed, the Dutch) and Matthew (as you might guessed again, the French).  We walked around and randomly picked a restaurant with a big pork sign outside.  The menu was pretty complicated and server didn’t speak English while none of us speaks Korean. 

Nice bike!

Then, a very helpful guy, dining on the next table, voluntarily came to help us!  He was the friend of the owner and explained every single thing in the menu, although I recalled there weren’t many things written on the menu and that was why we were confused with it.  If I don’t remember wrongly, there were only 4 main dishes to be chosen, and of course all of them were pork!

Everything for the puppies!

After the splendid dinner, we moved over to an Irish pub just next door and had more beer!  Interestingly there have all kinds of cocktail made from Guinness as well, but I rather stick with the original black!  With four guys around, what else could we chatted about all night.  Girls, women, ladies and girls again.  In between, we discussed about movies and almost everything pop up in mind.

Left the place around 1 plus and strolled back home together merrily without feeling cold at all.  Reached the hostel about 2am and slept happily after a great day.