The Apartment Hunt and Cool Spots
The last two weeks have been simultaneously stressful and undemanding- I’ve been getting up late every day, but also dealing with opening a bank account, finding an apartment, getting a phone card, and facing a lot of bureaucratic nonsense at the immigration office. A week ago I toured an apartment I liked a lot and signed for it, so a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders! I’m currently living in an Airbnb near Seoul Station, shown on the map below with a purple star. The red star is Medidata’s office, and the blue star is the location of my new apartment.
These are the pictures of my new place, though it’s much smaller than it looks here. I move in on the 30th!
I took these from an elevated walkway similar to The Highline near Seoul Station. If you zoom in, you can see a fortress called the “Great Southern Gate”, a holdover from a time when Seoul was much, much smaller.
I’m getting off topic, but this is another picture I like a lot. This is Cheonggyecheon Stream in the 1950s and today. It’s easy to forget how quickly Seoul has developed!
Choco is a feral cat who prevents me and the other tenants at my Airbnb from knowing peace. Every day he tries to sneak into the common area and steal food. The past couple of days I’ve been bringing him chicken and fish at night which he seems to like a lot, and today he let me pet him.
This is a neighborhood called “HBC” that a lot of foreigners live in. I considered moving here, but my commute would have been long.
Korean Sool Festival
A week and a half ago, I was invited by Grace, one of my friends from NYU, to a traditional Korean food and drink festival. We ate fish cakes (the ones my mom thinks look like bandaids), sampled various drinks, and learned how to brew makgeolli, the rice wine I mentioned in my last post. The main ingredients are rice, warm water, and powderized yeast made from a sort of dried-out “starter stone”. Makgeolli takes very little time to ferment, so I had my first glass last night. It was alright, but there’s no strainer in my Airbnb so I had to chew through the chunks. I didn’t go blind though, so I consider it a success!
My makgeolli, pre-fermentation
The Pyongyang Pub
This week, I also stumbled upon the “Pyongyang Pub”, an establishment I read about in a couple of articles recently. The entire interior is based off North Korean aesthetics and propaganda, with slogans lining the walls and German beer labeled to look like Taedonggang, the most popular brand in Pyeongyang. Though it was a cool experience, I have really mixed feelings about using an authoritarian dictatorship as a theme for pub in a foreigner-heavy neighborhood.
A room with North Korean cigarettes, posters, candy, and souvenirs that were smuggled through China.
That’s it for this week!
Audrey in Korea 