Seoul One More Time 6

the final series of photos from my trip to Korea.  All in all it was 3 weeks of fun

one last kogi dinner with duks, hakmin, and ivan

naughty girl bar

kanako from tokyo and yena from tokyo via seoul

hakmin from the old yonsei skateboarding days.  he still skates and even got his gf naoko skating too

hongdae looks like this on the weekends.  craziness

the park in hongdae

the same makkoli guy from 10 years ago.

yena's sister's friend pole dancing.  they def party girls.  there's a word for it in korean but i don't know how to type it in romanized english and im too lazy to look up how to now.

BBQ blowout at yoon's house.  nice tiki torch action.  we made it a cinco de mayo theme, but the only thing that was mexican was the food, and beverages.

EJ and friend from my early FIT days.

Nana, my old roommate from Beijing got married to a Korean guy and lives in Seoul now.

later ivan

JP that rascal from my Japanese class in tokyo

eventually rock band made it's way out, but not before there were many issues getting it to work with yoon's new expensive sound system and someone poured a whole beer directly into the large open ventilation grates directly onto the mother board of his receiver.

what is dave hooper doing here?  Dave came to teach english in Korea shortly after Teo and Kaitlin left Korea.  It's so weird having my childhood hometown world collide with my globetrotting world.  but me and Dave we super buds so it was good to see him.

I curse this girl so hard.  She's better than me at drums and looks effortlessly cute doing it.  

Indian art in ivan's house.

i guess people releasing their pets on base when they leave to go to their next assigned country has been a problem.

met Jiyeon from my Japanese class in Tokyo and her friends by the han river for some sunday drinks.  Were they needed after a friday and saturday night out on the town?  no, but for some reason i was ok.

more plastic surgery ads.  at least in this one the before pictures aren't so extreme, like they are frowning and haven't slept for 3 days with the worst kind of lighting possible.  

why?

so all in all i spent 3 weeks in Korea this time around.  it's maybe my 5 or 6th time to korea besides living here for a year in 2001-02 when i studied abroad.  i've spent an average of 3 weeks a year in Korea for the last 4 years.  It wasn't until this time that I finally made my peace with Korea.  I loved it when i went to school there, and that may be because i was 20/21 and young and drinking soju everyday.  After that i became more cynical about Korea.  I am an adopted Korean American but i still feel some sort of connection to Korea and it would always irk me how people on the street are so rude, physically pushy and unapologetic, super vain, robotic, racist, ultra prideful, etc.... I guess i feel like i expect better from "my" people, mixed with embarassment, alienation, and identity issues.  This time around in Korea I had a mini spiritual awakening and finally have made peace with Korea, it's people, and in a small way myself.  Over the years I have found genuinely nice Korean friends and I saw other parts of Korea besides Seoul and even parts of Seoul that i've never experienced before.  This combined with Yoon, Will and Ivan being in Korea made this trip one for the books.  I am also a different person and in a different place in life since even last year so I think this helped.  So, final verdict, I love Korea.