South Korea
I've been already back in Korea for over two weeks and soon I'll be on a couple of airplanes again with one of my favorite, if not my favorite, destinations in Asia: Hong Kong!! I fly out on the 9th and will arrive somewhere in the night in Hong Kong.
In the past couple of weeks not too much happened which is interesting for you as a reader so I'll keep it as short as possible. I've been working for a change in South Korea, in the hostel where I stayed before. The name of the hostel is Pencil Guesthouse and it's one of the highest ranked hostel in Seoul and especially in Hongdae, one of the "party districts" in Seoul. If you check out my Twitter or if you follow me on Foursquare you probably have seen some pictures passing by. If not you can check out the website www.hostelhongdae.com. Basically I've been doing everything around here and working fulltime with the awesome staff of the guesthouse and... for the first time in more than two years I actually earned an unmentioned amount of money for a change.
Christmas and New Year's Eve have been pretty quiet around here. I spent Christmas with my friend Seohee, her brother, her mother and her best friend Bobe. New Year's Eve I spent with the staff of the hostel without any official countdown in a karaoke bar without any fireworks somewhere around Hongdae because it was too cold to go far away (around minus 15 Celcius). In Gangnam I met two girls who I met on Jeju island before: Anna and Mirinda. Their friend Bobby didn't come along because he was gaming in an internet cafe somewhere.
I mostly spend my time here cooking with Pei and the other staff members. Until so far we made some Dutch dishes like "appelflappen" and for the first time ever "kaassouflees". Cooking stuff like that is quite a mission since it's very difficult to find things like puff pastry, "special" herbs and spices. So we had to make a few trips to Itaewon, the expat/foreign district, to get all the things we needed. After all the work, cooking and stuff there might be some spare time for going out or watching a movie but mostly I'm too tired so I often call it an early night.
South Korea is a pretty nice country and I often missed its food sometimes, especially the spiciness (something that Japanese food mostly lacks). The people are generally very nice but in some districts like Gangnam the people tend to be quite rude, especially compared to Japan. Everything is pretty much as convenient as Japan but thank god much cheaper compared with the land of the rising sun.
South Korea is (in)famous for three things. I guess number one these days is the song "Gangnam style" from PSY which reached a billion views on YouTube one day after I arrived. The second thing is the ongoing war between North and South Korea and the final thing is... plastic surgery. For me it's after spending almost two months in South Korea still a bizarre thing to see all the (semi) famous people on television or all the random Koreans in the metro who obviously had their eyes or nose done. My friend Seohee told me that in the good old days 40% of the population had double eyelids. These days it's 80% of the population. According to some sources on the internet every year 16 out of 1000 people do plastic surgery. Of course I continued calculating some things myself... It means that averagely a Korean who reached the age of 62.5 did plastic surgery once and with the average life expectancy of 78.8 it means that when you die you did plastic surgery about 1.26 times. The average for women is much higher compared to men, since there is more pressure on them to be beautiful. When you apply for a job you pretty much always have to send your picture with the application and if you're not beautiful enough (read: if you didn't do plastic surgery) you'll probably don't get the job. I called this crazy (cultural?) thing "Koreafication" (from the song "Californication" from the Red Hot Chili Peppers).
Anyway, that's it for now. I'll write again if I know more about how the final part of my journey will end. If everything goes well I'll come home through Russia. We'll see!!
