Global Gathering 2010 Seoul

I'm starting to get into some K-pop and rap. I am currently addicted to this song. Notice how they dance in front of Mercedes Benz Semi trucks, that's how Koreans ball out.





On October 9th, my friend JP and I headed to Nanji Han River Park in Seoul to attend Global Gathering 2010. Global Gathering is a huge annual electronics music festival and the headliners in Seoul were Justice, Fatboy Slim, and Armin Van Buuren.A ton of local DJ's played too. The concert started around 2pm and lasted until 5am or so. JP and I didn't get there 'til about 7pm, but it was just in time to catch the headliners. We left Suwon around 1pm and found a legit burger place for lunch. Closest thing that resembles something from America burger wise. Kinda pricey, but I thought it was well worth it for the quality of food you're getting. Nothing beats a Coke and a burger before raging all night. 

So after getting our energy for the day, we grabbed a bus to Seoul from Suwon. GG had a shuttle to ferry people over from the subway station. Once we got to the designated subway station we made our way to the shuttle area. This was not for us. The line for the shuttle bus extended all the way down the block and around the corner. There were at least 6-7 buses worth of people in front of us, so that's at least a 2 hour wait right there. The weather was warm without a cloud in the sky, so JP and I decided to take our chances and see if we could walk to the venue. Apparently, we heard it was only a 15 minute shuttle ride from the subway so we figured it would take us about an hour at most on foot. We later found out this was not the smartest idea. 

We started walking towards the Han River in Seoul without a care in the world because we were going to see some sick DJs and have a fun night. Except we started walking to the wrong side of the river...We finally reached a bridge that crossed the Han River, but we didn't hear any music or see huge crowds. We asked a couple of people walking along the bridge where Nanji Park was, but most of them didn't know. One guy finally told us it was across the bridge. So we decided to trek across the bridge in hopes to find the land of glowsticks and techno.

45 minutes later, we had finished crossing the bridge. We had spotted a huge tent that could hold thousands of people from the bridge and started walking towards it. It was a bit strange not to hear any music, but whatever. We made our way to the giant white tent and were severely disappointed. The tent was for a huge annual fireworks festival happening that night in Seoul. We did not come to Seoul for this. So now we are lost in Seoul with no real direction. We headed to a cafe to steal their wifi with my iPod Touch so we can look up the address for Global Gathering. We found the address and wrote it down in Korean in JP's pocketbook so we can show a cab driver. 

We hailed down a cab and proceeded to show him the address and then were on our way! Except this was only a false hope. I found out the Han River Park ran alongside the Han River for kilometers (gettin my metric on) and Nanji park was a small part of the overall park. By the time the cab driver got us to the Han river park, night had fallen. We stepped out of the cab and couldn't exactly figure out where the concert was. We walked along the street for a few minutes then we heard thousands of people screaming and crowds of people walking towards a common destination. Finally, we thought we had found the venue, but life isn't always that easy. We made our way towards the noise of thousands of Koreans. Except, this led us to the World Cup stadium in Seoul. There was a FC Seoul soccer game going on that night. Pretty much a fail on our part. We asked a couple more people around the stadium if they could direct us towards Nanji Park and they kept saying it was too far away to walk. This didn't make any sense since the cab driver dropped us off very close by, so either the cab driver screwed us over or the people we asked didn't know what they were talking about. With our confidence in the dumps, we started making our way back to the spot the cabbie dropped us off at and what do we find...a sign for Global Gathering!

We found ourselves walking with tons of other foreigners towards Nanji Park. Nanji park is located right next to the river so you have to walk in a good bit. 3 hours after getting out of the subway, we had taken the scenic  route around Han River and reached Global Gathering 2010. We appreciated the music much much more after working pretty hard for it. I spent a couple of hours in Photoshop putting this detailed, color-coded map together of where we went. 

Luckily, we had made it about an hour before the headliners came on, so we drank some party water and started raging. First up was the French duo, Justice. 

I didn't think the DJ set was all that impressive as there were some mixing errors early on here and there and some better songs could have been picked. Still a good warmup to my favorite, Fatboy Slim! I even made it up to the front row for Fatboy.

Then Armin Van Buuren finished off the night with a 2 hour set. I had to fight my way up to the front row for this too. He was pretty good, but it was typical AVB. Personally, I don't think he topped Fatboy Slim, who just killed it.

All in all, it was a spectacular night. Met a lot of cool people and had a ton of fun since everyone is just so friendly at a concert. This picture pretty much sums up my night.

And this picture sums up the aftermath of the concert on the subway back home the next morning: PTFO.

One thing I did learn from this trip is that there is always something happening in Seoul. If you can't find anything to do one weekend, then you're not looking hard enough. Rest of my GG 2010 pics are on my website, www.joelmathew.net