Busan and More!

Whew that last one was a long post.. Okay here goes a recap of the first of November thus far!

Our advisor, Michelle's son had his 1st birthday! It's called 'dol' in Korean and is a really important birthday. He had a big party in a banquet room at a buffet restaurant.








Jaewon picked the mic from the box of items, which means he's going to have a life where he speaks in front of audiences a lot.



Another day, I met with Janet, a 동생 (younger friend) of mine from back in high school! She's two years younger than me, and I actually only took a year of Spanish with her before she transferred schools so we weren't very close, but it was still nice seeing an old face :] It was our first time meeting in about 2-3 years, and she had gotten a lot prettier. We met in Idae and had pasta for lunch. Then we went to Lucygato, a chocolatier and dessertery (ok I made up dessertery, but chocolatier is a real word despite the red squiggly that's coming up right now). I forgot to take a picture with her, but I didn't forget our pretty cappuccino and sweet potato cakes! :D



A couple of weekends ago, Dianne, Ray, and I went out with Gina and Michelle. They're exchange students at Yonsei as well, but we don't hang out with them as often because they live in the International House on campus. I know Gina from high school and she goes to UCI.
We went to a cool hookah bar in Hongdae called Oi, right above Club Catchlight. The hookah was so cheap, only $10 so $2 per person!



Samara!

Then we went to another bar called Inside the Box, which had really cool interior and really nasty, too strong Long Island Iced Teas and Black Russians -.-




And last weekend, EAP went on a weekend trip to Busan, a port city famous for its beautiful beaches. We went there by train, which took about three hours, and arrived there just in time for lunch at a delicious, famous barbecue restaurant.









The ginormous bowl of nengmyun that came out at the end, which was more bowl than nengmyun, but still delicious!


After lunch, we went to our youth hostel to rest a bit from our travel and take a short nap.

And woke up for dinner -.-
We went to the beachside in search of delicious sashimi.

What a photogenic restaurant, it didn't look this nice in person!








We drank quite a bit of soju at dinner and all got into fabulous moods :D
Outside the restaurant











We made our way to a bar and drank some more there (just beer) before going to a club. It was such a nice club, but no pictures unfortunately.

The next day, we went to the world famous (?) Busan Aquarium. It was actually pretty fun!

Inside a tank:

A car full of fish!


Afterwards, we went to a restaurant (뜰아래채) at the top of a cliff with a beautiful view of the ocean, shoreline, and city lights. It was a traditional Korean style meal with endless courses!






Afterwards we walked in the sprinkling rain to Starbucks, where the red cups are out <3



After, we headed back to our hostel to have a little "house party" ^^ It was fun and cute! Michelle even provided us with hats and long shirt things that said EAP Seoul on it hahaha



On Sunday, a bunch of girls went to Vespa, a 찜질방 (sauna with many different steam rooms) that is supposed to be the best, or one of the best in Korea. It was quite nice, but it was the first one I ever went to so I can't compare.

The view from the balcony:


You wear these little outfits they provide you with:

And make sheep heads (or Princess Leia heads, w/e haha) out of the towels:

And that was our mini-vacation :] It was probably the best EAP activities thus far. We all had so much fun and got so close with the other EAP'ers. Our only regret is that we didn't do the trip sooner so that we could have gotten to know some of the other kids better before we only had a month left of our program!

Yesterday morning, some of EAP went on a tour of MBC (one of Korea's biggest cable TV and media networks) studios:






The sets look sturdy and real but actually are made of styrofoam so that they are easy to move around inside the studio.













That was a pretty cool experience, which would have been perfect if we had run into some celebrities! How unfortunate...