추석 in Busan: Part Deux

I am liking this new Akon song. It has that David Guetta collab feel to it.


Day 3 in Busan: We decided to spend the day at the beach since the weather was awesome. We made our way to Haeundae to check out Haeundae beach. Haeundae beach is one of the most popular beaches in South Korea and many tourists check it out in the summer. Except we went in September so it was practically empty! Once we got to Haeundae, we got some food because we didn't want to leave for food once we got to the beach. Staying true to our college ways, we stayed away from restaurants near the beach since we were cheap kids. We didn't walk far until we found a hole in the wall Korean restaurant. We ate some delicious bulgogi (ground beef) stew and headed out to the beach.

Great sun, sweet Pacific ocean waves, and warm sand...awesome combination.

just rockin a suit at the beach, no biggie

The water was excellent. A bit on the colder side once you get deeper, but nothing to complain about. The Pacific knows whats up. It gets my stamp of approval.

So we spent a good 4-5 hours at the beach, playing in the waves, getting even tanner, sand castles...the usual.  There are actually 3 or 4 beaches in the area with this one being the most popular, but we decided to check another one out anyway. Gwangalli beach is about 3 km south of Haeundae beach so we made the trek. There was a scenic route along the shore and cliffs that we took.

a lot of luxury hotels and apts.

notice the no fishing sign...

the badasses of South Korea who don't care for signs

This is the halfway point of our 3 km trek. We stopped for ice cream at a 7-Eleven and continued on our way. Finally made it, but the sun was starting to go down so we figured the water would be cold and just chilled on the beach.

I don't know why, but there was an art exhibit going on at the beach...I think. Here are some exhibits that I thought were sick. They ran up and down the whole coastline. 

just your typical alien sculpture at the beach

The day was ending...but the night was just starting. There is a university near the beach so of course there is a nice college town bar scene. So we changed into our spare change of clothes and made our way to the university. Here is a picture of the bridge at night. This is Korea's longest bridge and encompasses the whole beach.

So we made our way to the University area. Cheap drinks+college students everywhere=fun night

Koreans have such a social culture. They would put us at tables with another group whenever we enter the bar and then we would proceed to play drinking games and share food. It didn't matter where you were from or how old you were because everyone there just wanted to have a fun night. We met a lot of people that were not from Busan like us because they were visiting friends in Busan over the holiday. We traded numbers with a lot of people that we met and planned on meeting in Seoul in the following weekends. The next day I saw that there was a number from someone named Dragon in my phone. Not really sure how that happened, but I am guessing that is his American name. Around 11:30 PM if I recall correctly, everyone dispersed out of the bar area. The subway stops running around midnight and most people had to go home so they can party tomorrow night as well. I started to chat up some foreigners who were English teachers at a food cart on the street selling corndogs and waffles. They took us to a foreigner bar called the Basement where we decided to chill out since most of the bars were dead. Played a lot of pool and just hung out with the locals. I started talking to one guy at the bar who actually ended up being the owner. The owner is a really chill dude named Matt. Here is Matt:

Matt is from New York and has lived in Korea for 4 years. He actually owns 2 bars, one here and one in Songjeong beach, which was about 10 km north of where we were. After talking over some beers and pool, I found out that his cousin owns a bar near Georgia Tech in Virginia Highlands called the Dark Horse, which I've visited before. He told me if I drop his name to the manager, they'll hook me up. Another thing added to my list once I get back State side, so if anyone reading this wants to join, lemme know. Matt gave us some drink coupons for his other bar in Songjeong beach, so of course we had to check it out before we left Busan. The night ended well after raging pretty hard.

Check out the third and final part of my trip to Busan real soon.

추석 in Busan: Part Uno

Here's is what I'm listening to right now. I know you wanted to know. New Bruno Mars with Damien Marley.


Chuseok holiday was last week and it was awesome. What is Chuseok you ask? Well, it is equivalent to thanksgiving in the US. It is a national holiday and harvest festival that is about three days long. Most Koreans will travel to their hometown and spend time with their families and eating good food. Samsung gave Tuesday through Thursday off last week for the holiday. Most employees used their holiday time to take Monday+Friday off for a nice long vacation. As interns, we do not get any holiday time off so I was pretty disappointed that I had to come in on Friday when almost none of my coworkers would be here. Luckily, my mentor pulled some strings and filed a holiday request for me so I ended up getting Friday off. Most Koreans actually book vacations, flights, trains, etc. in the summer in anticipation for the holiday. So it ended up being almost impossible to go anywhere or to travel at all on such short notice and my coworkers told me there are always major traffic jams throughout the country as most of the population is travelling somewhere. Then a knock on my door Wednesday afternoon prompted us to go to Busan.

Busan is actually the second largest metropolis in Korea behind Seoul and I am pretty sure it suffers from little brother syndrome. I think it's the fifth largest port city in the world...or something like that. We found out most people would be travelling to their hometowns earlier in the week and we saw some train tickets to Busan available for Wednesday night so we decided to take our chances and go to Seoul Station to see if we can snag some tickets. We wanted to travel light because we would be moving around Busan a lot...and I had ten minutes to pack. So I tossed some stuff in a backpack and was out the door. 3 hours later, the two other interns and I arrived at Seoul Station from Suwon. We found exactly 3 tickets spread across the train for departure in an hour. I swear the train station looked like King's Cross station from the Harry Potter movies/London...except filled with Korean people.

The KTX (Korea Train Express) is stupid fast. I think it goes like 300km/hr if I heard correctly? Anyway, the ride was pleasant and smooth and only took about 3 hours. We arrived at Busan station and proceeded to find a hotel/motel for the night.

right outside Busan stn.

We found a pretty shady motel room, but it only costs us 10,000 won (bout 10 bucks) each for the night. We decided to head out for the night to check out the local nightlife...it wasn't what I was looking for in a sense. Right next to our motel and Busan station is a street called Texas street. The street actually caters to foreigners, mainly US and Russian sailors who arrive at the port. I actually saw a banner that said "Welcome US Navy!" as we entered the area. As I was standing under that banner surrounded by all the bright neon lights, an old Korean lady wearing sunglasses (at night?) walked up to me and said, "You like Russian girls?" I looked up and down the street and noticed that this place was mainly a red light district for sailors. Half the signs were in Russian lettering and had Russian women sitting outside of the bars/whorehouses. I really hope these girls were not what you get if you pay because they were seriously a 4...out of 10 and that's being generous. We proceeded to a few somewhat decent bars and took it easy as we had to get up early the next day to head north.

We made our way to Geumjeong Mountain the next morning for some cultural action. It is the most popular hiking destination in Busan and the weather was spectacular. Korea's biggest fortress tower was on top so we decided to check it out. Here is our the city at the base of the mountain looked like.

So we made our way around the city and found the way to the mountain. You have to walk out of the city and little ways up the mountain and then you find a cable car that will take you halfway up the mountain if you don't want to hike the first part. We were a bit intimidated when we saw people with camelbacks and hiking poles taking the scenic route as opposed to the cable car, but we had some great views of the city from the cable car!

So we got off the cable car and hiked up for about an hour until we reach the South Gate of the fortress. 

Then we hiked for another 45 minutes 'til we reached the first watch tower and saw some more pretty views and junk since we were pretty high up.

There are actually 4 gates along with 4 or 5 watch towers. It would take us about 6-7 hours to travel from one end to another...we weren't planning to spend our whole day like this. So we decided to head back down after we checked out the watch tower. We kinda got lost since there were various paths to get back to the cable car. We ended up taking the more scenic route...

This path had a more calming zen like atmosphere since we rarely saw another soul on this path and there were a lot of creeks/streams. So about 2-3 hours later we made our way back to the cable car. The sun was setting by then and we took the next to last cable car of the day down so we made excellent time.

We were starving by the time we got back into town as we didn't really plan this hiking thing out by bringing food. We found a local Korean restaurant and had some Samgyeopsal (grilled pork, bacon sliced style) Pork is actually the cheapest meat we have found in Korea. Beef is pretty expensive wherever you go and I do not find chicken that often.

coals of hot fire and side dishes

acorn jelly...mhmmhmm

not rly sure what this was

carrots: baby food style!

awesomeness

So I'll stop here and post part two soon.

Search Result

So yeah..

So apparently Flickr only lets you upload 200 pictures max on your free account otherwise you have to upgrade to a paid account. I'm trying to fix this and some other stuff. Stay tuned and I'll blog some more once I get my pics uploaded elsewhere. Maybe Picasa...just more proof Google can take over the world as I already use them for everything else.

So here is some Korean dog clothing from Busan.

Tokyo Bananas and Honey Mustard

So time for another blog post of what I have been up to. I bought www.joelmathew.net the other day so I am in the process of building it so you should check it out. Got home from work not too long ago and now I am listening to Pretty Light's most recent EP "Spilling Over Every Side" while I write this. Pretty chill EP and I def recommend checking it out. I personally like "Hot Like Dimes" and "Forever Lost."


Anyway, just some observations that I have made over the last couple of weeks.

Fun Fact #1: South Korean men love messenger bags.

I can safely say about 85% of the men working at Samsung use a messenger bag or a backpack. Most of the time though, its a messenger bag. I am not too sure what all is within said messenger bag...an umbrella maybe? I have realized of another phenomena. Younger Korean guys like to wear skinny jeans/pants. Maybe they can not fit anything in their pockets and need to put their wallets and keys in their messenger bags? Anyway, I carry my handy dandy GT sack pack to fit in with the locals. I only have an umbrella, a pen, and some keys in there...haha. I actually saw someone carrying a similar Starcraft II messenger bag over the weekend.

Apparently, there are computer cafes where you can rent a computer per hour to play Starcraft among other games. Yep...

Over the past weekend, I was planning on going into Seoul, but then it started raining and since tons of walking is required to do anything, I stayed around locally and postponed Seoul to this upcoming weekend. So on Saturday, I walked into Yeongtong city...and got lost for a couple of hours. It is pretty hard to know where you are when you can not read any Korean. I found this hole in the wall restaurant for some authentic Korean food for lunch. Luckily, the menu had pictures so I could just point and order.  I think I ordered a pork cutlet set (meal) or at least that's what it tasted like for about 5,000 won (~$4.50) And it was awesome. The set came with a whole bunch of traditional sides like soup, kimchi, salad, some unidentifiable vegetables, as well as 2 sushi rolls and 2 sashimi rolls, both were delicious. It was great to find some fresh made food, I will definitely be visiting this place again if I can find it.

I ventured out after lunch to find my way home and I came upon a store called Homeplus. Homeplus is not an ordinary store. It is a Walmart+Target+Costco on crack. 

This place is ridiculous. It has 6 floors plus 2 floors of parking and the first floor is a food court. The 2nd floor is literally a Farmer's Market condensed. It puts Sam's Club+Costco's free food samples on Saturday mornings to shame. However, the free samples consisted of some fried octopus tentacle. It was actually pretty good, just chewy and moist. It's a full Publix on one floor...redonkulous. The rest of the floors are dedicated to clothing, electronics, and other household items. Also, the shopping carts move sideways. I wasted about 3 hours of my day here. Well spent in my opinion. 2 hours later, I toured the city some more and made it back to my place after spotting the Samsung skyscrapers and walking in that general direction. All in all, pretty good Saturday. 

Co-worker returned from a business trip to China and Japan today. He brought back souvenirs, and by souvenirs, I mean food.

This is the infamous Tokyo Banana. Japan's version of a Twinkie with banana custard/cream inside. Apparently it is the #1 souvenir from Japan last year. Not gonna lie, it was pretty damn good.

Another weird thing I noticed is that every time baked/fried chicken is ordered or eaten, honey mustard is always there on the side. This is how concluded my next fun fact.

Fun Fact #2: Koreans love honey mustard.

The kneebone of cattle...

Today was the farewell dinner for some of the interns from the summer that are leaving this Friday. We decided to go to Yeongtong which is on the east side of Suwon. It is a pretty lively district and a lot of Samsung employees live in apartments here because it is only about 1 Km away from work. Also, there is a pretty good bar/club scene here.

We went to Viking seafood restaurant...and it was glorious. 

The main feature was the huge variety of sushi, which I absolutely loved. The sushi rolls were more complex than what I have experienced in the States. There was also a western food line and traditional Korean food line. It was pretty much a Korean Golden Corral, except classier and they had free self serve beer on tap. The wine selection was one of the best I have seen so far at a Korean restaurant. 

Some Korean food I tried that was a bit out of the ordinary: shark fin and kneebone of cattle. Shark fin was a bit chewy, but didn't really taste like anything because the seasoning really drowned out any natural taste. The kneebone was pretty much a soup with cartilage floating around in it, the soup part didn't taste that bad but I am not a big fan of the cartilage. The kneebone seemed a bit bland, I should have eaten it with some rice or kimchi haha. After all that I moved back to the sushi island as it was the most appealing to me. For about 15 bucks for dinner buffet including beer, it was well worth it.

shark fin

 kneebone of cattle

Afterwards, we walked around and went to a bowling alley. AMF exists here except the bowling alley is a lot smaller. After bowling the two losers in our group (not I) had to pay for billiards. We probably walked into 5 or 6 billiards shops...except they didn't have American pool there. The popular game to play here is called Carom billiards or French billiards, which is what most of the shops catered to. If you don't know what Carom billiards is then check out this Wiki entry. Anyway, we found a place to play and it was a very chill time. Out of about 12 tables there, only one was American pool while everything else was French pool. We played for an hour or so then we hit the bars for a bit for a proper farewell.

So now I must go to sleep and I will leave you all with my first Korean picture taken at Viking restaurant. Enjoy!

Annyeong Haseyo!

bus from the airport to my hotel

That is the formal greeting for hello in the Korean language. I have started taking the Korean I class for foreign employees by Samsung =) 3 days a week and 2 hours each day. The class is already 2 weeks in, but they still let me attend class so I have some catching up to do. I should finish the class around the end of October and hopefully I can start the Korean 2 class in November. I am pretty excited to learn some Korean so I can converse with the locals when I go out. I am experiencing some sort of a culture shock being fully immersed in the Korean culture without much of a background, but learning the language should even the playing field somewhat.

Most of the summer interns that are still here will be leaving at the end of the week with the exception of about 4 French interns who will be staying until December. We are planning on having our farewell dinner tomorrow night at this Viking Seafood restaurant. I guess we will see how many things I will eat while it is still moving on my plate, I'll post an update tomorrow after it goes down. Luckily, we will have about 20 more European interns coming in mid-October.


Also I finally received my first month's stipend today. It took a while because I had to go open a Korean bank account and I kept forgetting my US passport at home, but I finally got it done. However, the jerks at KEB bank won't give me an ATM card. I am gonna go back to the bank and tell them what's up soon. 1.2 million won has been deposited into my account today though. Yeah, I am living the baller life.  All that converts to about $1000 USD. Thankfully, I only have to pay for going out and eating out, which is only on the weekends usually since all our meals are paid for at the Samsung cafeterias. Now I need to go get a pre-paid phone from Samsung for my stay here. Just in case you were wondering, here is how I get around the huge Samsung complex. These bikes are called Doobaloos, aka my bucket ride.

We can only use orange and pink Doobaloos. It is a free for all bike, so if you are walking and you see one in front of a building, it will most likely not be there after 10 minutes. The interns are a clever bunch though, we ride the Doobaloos back to our dorms after work if we can find a free one. Then we hide them in a dumpster overnight outside of our dorm so no one takes our Doobaloo and ride them back to work the next morning. Work smarter, not harder.

Here are some pics from my Mcd's experience in Korea. I had a bulgogi burger and it was delicious. The burger patty is just ground beef or pork marinated in Asian spices. It pretty much rocked my world. I highly recommend it. Interesting fact: Mcdonalds delivers to your door. Check out these sweet Mcdonald's branded scooters and helmets. This doesn't seem like a bad high school job. 

bulgogi burger was LEGEN...wait for it...
DARY!!

One Week In...

I am pretty late on posting this, but I promise I will update this more often. A little background on why I am in South Korea. I accepted an internship for the fall at Samsung Electronics at their R&D facility known as Samsung Digital City in Suwon-si, South Korea.

I work in the dark tall building on the right. We call it R4, no one seems to know where the name originated though.
I am keeping a blog on my experiences here in South Korea. I do not know any Korean and I have never traveled to South Korea before so it will be an exciting couple of months. I know the title says Seoul and I am living about 30 minutes south of Seoul in Suwon, but I liked the fact that it rhymes with my name and I will be visiting Seoul among many other places in the next couple of months so the title will remain unchanged. I am working in the Intelligent Inspection Group of the Innovative Equipment Technology Research Team (fancy right?) within Samsung Electronics. Basically, our team supports all of Samsung Electronics' divisions (Mobile Devices, Digital Displays, Semiconductors, Computers etc.) Specifically, I will be working on a project for the Digital Displays division, mainly LCD and LED displays. That's all I can say about my work as security is super duper strict and I can not stress that enough. I pass through about 4 airport security style checkpoints walking from my dorm to my office. They have special paper that sets off an alarm if you try to leave the company campus with it, so I can't exactly print off map directions at work and leave the campus. Security is some serious business. I am living in the dorms on company property and all the meals are free, so it's a pretty sweet deal. When I say dorm, think of a freshman dorm: 2 double beds, closet, and a bathroom with a shower. It's not the best, but I'm not complaining. I'll toss up some pictures later today of what I've seen so far.