On Day 2, I received a Facebook message from Sam and she and Matthias just reached Seoul the day before! So we decided to meet at their place in Myeongdong because we needed to get EG sim card and they are only available in certain places in Seoul, Myeongdong being one of them.
So it’s Myeongdong again yay!
I like this place although it’s a rip-off to tourists, please do bargain when you purchase stuff, usually they’d allow cuts of 2000 won, any more is usually hard and depends on how good or convincing you are. For the sake of it, here are some terms:
깎아주세요 Gga-gga juseyo: “Please lower the price”
깎아주면안돼요? Gga-gga ju-myeon an-dwe-yo?: This is my own way of saying it, it’s a little more of a sad plea LOL “Is it not possible to lower the price? :(” and it gets the shopkeepers looking a little more flustered/somehow LOL.
저는 학생인데요… jeo-neun hak-saeng in-dae-yo: “I’m a student…” which is a way of saying you have no money. I tried this a few times and one time the shopkeeper replied “I’m also a student!” so i failed oh wells but it should work most times LOL.
We chatted with one shopkeeper and he cut the price for us nicely. He was asking us which country we liked better, Singapore or Seoul? And praised our country for being clean. It was awkward cuz it’s not that we couldn’t understand but how do we praise his country in return and even begin to answer if we like Spore or Seuol better?? I wouldn’t be able to answer these questions even in English.
Zenn was telling me to pull the ‘oppa’ card if the shopkeepers refuse, it COULD work but I never tried it! Oppa is a friendly way of a younger female person greeting an older male person. Oh yes on this note, Koreans typically ask for age pretty early in any conversation, in fact they hardly ever ask for my name before my age, cuz they wanna find out first how to talk to us. I’ve been lucky to meet Koreans younger than me so far so if I slip up on my formalities it’s okay hahaha. But when I meet older Koreans, especially elderly, I’m going to have to formalize my speech like by three levels OTL I’m REALLY bad at that…
Oh yes fun fact! 네 ‘Nae’ means ‘yes’ in Korean, and is a typical general response when talking to people to acknowledge what they said or answer their questions. For elderly though, we’re actually supposed to say 예 ‘Ye’ as it’s more polite, I had no freaking idea and we have been saying nae to everyone including the elderly asking us stuff ._. sorry!!
The street food too!! Super amazing and cheap :’) mostly ranging from 1,500 – 3,000 won (less than $5)
Ah btw here’s some explanation on EG Sim card for foreigners that we obtained on Day 2: https://darmawanders.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/eg-sim-card-for-foreigners/
Anyway it was a short trip because we had to head to Seoul Arts Center for Seohyun’s muscial! Yay finally!
The musical was great, based off a drama i really loved “The Moon that Embraces the Sun” ahhhhhhh i loved that drama so much I had to attend the musical, specially since Seohyun was playing. I understood less than half of it but oh wells it was still great :’)
As we left, we were lucky enough to bump into Taeyeon and Yoona who were leaving from backstage after watching Seohyun’s musical :)))) Really lucky to have seen all three of them up close in just the 2nd day of Seoul!! ❤
(As promised, no spazzing here, spazzing remains in IGAT. Let’s just say i had no idea they attended the musical and it was an amazing surprise :’))
Fast forward to 3rd day!
3rd day was a lot more lazy. We again slept in till the afternoon and headed down after that to Digital Media City because we heard the notice was up for MCountdown! For those who are unsure what it is, basically Korea holds 5 weekly music shows for music artists to promote their latest albums. M Countdown is one of them. Zenn and I wanted to go for at least 1 because currently both Taeyeon and Jonghyun are promoting TOGETHER for SM the Ballad and it’ll be so awesome to watch them perform live. The best part is that it’s free lol.
So how it works is that as soon as the notice is up, you’d have to head down to CJ E&M Center at Digital Media Center (at least for M Countdown) and take a selca with the notice and send it to the number posted there. The notice would be at some random wall in the area LOL. They’ll reply you with your queue number, mine was 23 and Zenn 24. What this means is that we were 23 and 24 in line for the non official fans queue. Official fans are those who paid to register membership and so they get in first no matter what. So let’s say on the day itself 300 official fans turn up and 300 is the quota that day, then you will never get through. But still, 23 and 24 were good numbers so it was pretty hopeful we could get in. We would have to return at night for a ‘roll call’ where they will confirm your registration and slash out those that didn’t appear. They’ll then tell you what time to come the next day to catch your artist’s recording live. Still no guarantee tho cuz as i mentioned, official fans always get priority.
Regardless, it’s nice we don’t have to physically queue, just get down early when you know the notice is up, so you can get a good number, and turn up for the roll call. Next day is a designated time so you can relax and if you’re not meant to enter cuz of the official fans, getting earlier isn’t going to help anything!
After this, we headed down to Kwanghwamun to explore, meet Shaun (another Yonsei student and also to get SM the Ballad album because we need it to enter music shows. Lol. Turns out it’s pointless though, because we found out later on there’s gonna be two fansigns going on and you have to purchase an album from the organizing party to qualify for the lottery/lucky draw! So we’d probably head down tmr and get those 🙂
Oh yes and SM the Ballad got cancelled .____. we were so disappointed to find out! They rarely ever cancel shows but I think it was a rare circumstance. So we won’t be going any music shows, but instead try to get a fansign.
We also met Shaun going to Yonsei!! He just arrived today so we had dinner with him~ nice to meet another Korean speaking Singaporean!! He said apparently Kwanghwamun was also a Running Man filming location but i didn’t take photo 😦 We walked around abit and ate somewhere with a really nice ahjumma but the food portion was so big lmao. When you see food prices a little pricey, e.g. 18000 won for one portion ($20ish), sometimes it’s not that the food is actually pricey, it could just be the portion was huge. We packed them back.
Good news is I seem to be catching on Korean a little faster now! After all the speaking with service staff I could catch on a bit faster when they speak, but my talking is still weak. Haha.
Two new Koreans from Jeju moved in today! They’re super cute and are EXO fans and we sat down together at 2am+ to watch Kim Yuna skate and own everyone. Koreans are SO proud of Kim Yuna it’s really cute ❤ she’s like their national treasure. The Koreans I watched with just kept sighing and proclaiming 멋있다 which means ‘She’s so cool’ haha. And she didn’t let them down yesterday – 1st place!!
That’s all for now! Today we’re separating to help each other get the albums for the two separate fansigns, so it’ll be interesting i think. We promised to get each other a 5000 won gift from the different sides of the world we’ll be in~ I’ll prolly explore Ilsan while I’m at it! 🙂 Shall plan my itinerary~
darmawanders 