Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Coex Mall

Well, we have been here for over two months now and have done some more exploring. This past weekend we ventured to the Coex Mall. This is the largest shopping center in Seoul and it is the largest underground mall in South East Asia. It is located in the basement of the Convention and Exhibition Center and the Korean World Trade Center. Not only is there tons of shopping to be done there but there is also an aquarium, a movie theater and lots of restaurants. We walked around a bit when we arrived and found a food court where you could get both Asian and western food, I had pizza and Don had vietnamese. Both were terrific.

After lunch we made our way to the aquarium. Entry was a little pricy compared to other places that we have been here at 15500 won, around $15. The aquarium is set up so that you can walk through from beginning to end starting with smaller fish and eventually ending up in an "undersea" tunnel. They have a lot of species of fish but they also have turtles, monkeys, seals, penguins, a crocodile, all kinds of reptiles, and some small land animals like chipmunks. We enjoyed our leisurely walk through the facility and it was nice to see so many fish with such vibrant colours. Then at the end while walking through the tunnel we saw the large fish and some sharks which are pretty amazing to see close up.





































After the aquarium we decided to check out the theatre. This was our first time going and didn't know exactly what to expect. We had already been told that the theatres here have assigned seating (like at a concert at home) so we knew that we would have to choose our seats, but other than that we did not know what the theatres were like here. First task was to figure out movie times, not the easiest thing when all of the movie titles were listed in Korean on the showtimes board. They had one screen that showed the movie time with the movie poster so we watched that screen until the movie (District 9) that we wanted to see poped up. The movie was not playing for another couple of hours so we made our way down to the ticket counter to buy our tickets. We waited in line for about ten minutes. The gentleman that helped us spoke some English and we told him what movie we wanted and he brought up the screen with the available seats. I guess this movie is popular here because there were only about a dozen seats left, and we werent sure from the screen if they were in the last row or the front row, but we chose two and got our tickets.

Before the movie we went to get a smoothie and went to the bookstore. The bookstore has a pretty good sized English section and Don picked up a book that he wanted (I know, we went to a bookstore and Don was the one to buy a book, not me, Amazing!). Soon enough we made our way back to the theatre, amazing ourselves that we did not get lost in the maze of the mall. We bought some popcorn that we thought was butter but it was actually sweet (they will make anything sweet here, from popcorn to garlic bread...). They had two kinds of popcorn, caramel and the one that looked like butter popcorn but wasn't. I was disappointed since I haven't had popcorn since we arrived. I miss having a microwave. Anyways, we made it into the theatre and found our seats which were at the front, but it wasn't bad because the front row sat pretty far back from the screen.

The movie started after some commercials, not movie previews. When they play Hollywood movies here they keep them in English and just add Korean subtitles which is great for us. And another nice thing is that when there are English subtitles for when a character is not speaking English, they put the Korean subtitles up in the top right hand corner so that they don't cover the English ones. We have encountered Korean subtitles covering English ones while watching TV and were worried that this would be the case for the movie too. The movie was good and afterwards we made our way home.

The mall is not too far from our place, about 45 minutes by subway with only one transfer. It was nice and we definitely didn't evcen scratch the surface of seeing all of it so we will be going back for sure.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Week 10

On Saturday we went to a part of Seoul called Itaewan. It is very popular with foreigners, and there are a lot of foreign products and services available there. We spent a few hours walking around looking at shops and at sidewalk stalls. We had a nice lunch at a pub like restaurant called Gecko's.

Here are some pictures that we took in Itaewan:

Notice the Canada team jersey??


Must be authentic if they have to write Foreign Restaurant on the building.

Just look, see if you see it...



It was Thanksgiving weekend back home so we decided to get together with some other teachers and have a Thanksgiving dinner. On Sunday I went to Costco with Erin another Canadian teacher from our school. We picked up a couple cooked rotisserie chickens (in replacement of turkey), dinner rolls, and best of all a pumpkin pie! We were so excited to see it in the store. For dinner we also had mashed garlic potatoes, and a couple veggie dishes. It was delicious and we shared it with seven other teachers. It was a little cramped in our small apartment but we had a good time. We had to stack the beds on top of one another to make room but that turned into a pretty comfy sofa.

Here are some pictures that Don and I took of our neighbourhood on our way home one day.

Not sure what this is, it is some kind of a sculpture.


McDonald's delivery bikes

A dog wandering around looking for food. He was cute, but ignored us.

Most of the cars that we see here are either white, black, gray, or navy.

Cute

A park near our place

Exercise equipment at the park

Don workin' out

A daycare just around the corner from our apartment, looks cool


Parking under apartment buildings, don't know what they do about blocking each other in...

Our building

Our apartment, second from the top, the one with the railing

Front door to our building

Entrance key pad, camera in the top part

Doorbell outside our door, camera in the top

Intercom with video display in our apartment


The power converter that we brought with us did not last long. It was just a travel converter and not meant for continuous use. It blew and soon started melting the plastic, needless to say it did not smell the best.