Weekends
So I've gotten myself into a routine of travelling a lot on weekends. My typical weekend is: travel to Jeonju on Friday night, Saturday I travel to Seoul and on Sunday morning (normally after not sleeping) I travel to Daejeon, and on Sunday night I'll travel back to Seosan. So besides the generic, yey i met my friends/new people and we played all day and night, here's photos of what I've been doing on my travels.
oh and dont be fooled be the weather in these photos. in most of them it looks cloudy, but thats because we're in monsoon season now. it's still constantly around 30 degrees. once that's over it should be shooting up to the high 30s.. Dx
first up is a festival where they commemorate the kings of old in these massive temple grounds. all the old kings bodies are kept here and their chambers are only opened once a year for this event. unfortunately i couldn't get a decent photo of the festival because there was so much press everywhere.
Next up is Buddah's birthday festival, starting with a lantern parade. Sai's boyfriend at the time was also performing in the parade so went with him back stage with everyone while they were getting ready. We went to the parade with them and eventually got dragged into the parade itself while thousands of people both on the street and on TV watched live.
Following that I've been to a B-boy (street/hip hop) dance contest, which was actually surprisingly formal and well organised with some impressive guest artists.
and to match i got myself a korean student hairstyle...
I've actually forgotten who this is a statue of, but here's photos anyway...
This is King Sejong - this is the man responsible for the creation of Hangul (the korean alphabet) and some rather important social changes in Korean society.
This is one of the palaces and it's grounds... again i had to visit here twice to get all these photos. It's hard to get a day without 50million tourists everywhere.
people, particular students, are falling asleep everywhere, all the time. but I can't blame them knowing how brutal their education system is.
I got free tickets to a concert called Ultra Music. It's one of the most anticipated music festivals in the world, and it's only held in 3 locations. Seoul is one of them, and some of my favourite music artists were performing, so I fought through ravers and fangirls to get to the front and got some really good photos.
and again I returned to that first temple when there were less tourists to get some more photos of the temples and stuff. though I haven't had time to play around with the contrast or anything yet. You'll also notice there's pictures of food being prepared. I'm not sure if they do this on the anniversary of the death of the kings or they do them all at once but they prepare a meal for every king here once a year.
So I guess that brings you up to date. Appart from Sai and Tori, I haven't spent any more time with foreigners. At night i've obviously been playing with my friends in nightclubs and what not. I've also met a few upper class Koreans in Seoul who are all good friends with the celebraties and that kind of thing. We've exchanged numbers and drink together but it's not something I'd ever take photos of really.
As for school, everything is still going well. We still have our regular trips with all the teachers, and we're due another school trip this month before school ends for summer. I'm in the process of decorating my appartment, I'll upload photos when I'm done but yeah...that's it.
