Finally Leaving Gwangju.

So I slept through my alarm this morning and had to hustle to get to the bus station in order to catch a bus out to Seoul before 11am. The original plan was to meet up at 1pm at the Nambu station in Seoul, but after last night's festivities, I'm not surprised that the adventuring this morning was so slow to start up. I learned a very valuable lesson here. Thinking I could get by on 3 hours of sleep was stupid. I need to be less stupid in the future. Talk about good lessons to learn...

I arrived at the DongSeoul station at 2:30pm. No. That is not the right station. That station isn't even on the right side of the city. Then I had to figure out how to work the pay phone and wasn't sure how that was going to happen. Every single one required a card to operate. I didn't even have the slightest idea how I was going to figure out how to get this card. So I walk out of the bus station thinking about how helpful a cellphone would be right now when suddenly I remember that in all the Korean Dramas people are feeding coins into the pay phones. I go back and investigate those phones one more time with a 500w coin in my hand; ready to pop it into the first coin slot I find.

Nope. Definitely no coin slots. Whatever. I did not ride my butt here on a 4 hour bus to let a row of pay phones stop me from having a weekend of most excellent adventures. I head on down the street in search of another pay phone. Just two blocks further, there it is: a coin slot. I give Renee a call and explain the situation. She accepts my stupidity and doesn't hold it against me. She says she'll be by to find me. Just sit tight. Sitting I can do.

About a half hour later I'm sitting in the bus station right across from the Lotteria when I look up and see another foreigner. She's obviously the only American in the place and I suspected she was the other half of Renee's welcoming party. She was probably the other girl that she and Teresa work with. Any normal person would've gotten up to check, but I decided I'd just sit there and see what this girl was going to do.

Around the corner comes Renee confirming my suspicions. She took me to go get a Seoul Metro Pass and a couple of maps. She walked me through the process of getting both so that if I ever need to do it again solo, I can. I can't, of course, my memory is not worth the space my brain allows. It's alright, though, I just have to make sure I never lose these things and I'm set. Now it's time to find some food.

They lead me to a burger place where I eat my first cheeseburger in 2 months and it's delicious. And Monstrous. This thing was way to big to feed two people, but I gave it my best shot. Didn't quite get it done, but I enjoyed every bite.

Seoul is super packed with people. It was hard to change direction and nearly impossible to do it quickly and without cutting 10 people off. When you look down on the streets it almost looks like the street is alive. It's more people than I've seen in one place in a good long while. Gwangju isn't quite so population heavy.

In need of a new hoodie, we hit up a couple shops and I buy one. Black with lego smurfs. I'm pretty pleased with it. It's super soft and warm and I'm really hoping that this caving adventure tomorrow is ridiculously cold so I can wear it all day.

From there we check out a few stores full of Korean idol merchandise. Any guy who's been in a KDrama can be found in these stores on calendars, stickers, keychains, posters, postcards, and post-its. I, of course, picked up some postcards. The first ones I've seen since I arrived. My city just doesn't stock them.

We headed over to the book store and I bought a photo book of my favorite jpop group, Arashi. While I'm here, I am going to completely immerse myself in the popculture. So that's the last jpop purchase I'm allowing myself during my stay here.

We called it a night early and made our way to the hostel. This was my first hostel experience and, I must say, I'm thoroughly impressed with it. It's clean and relatively quiet and we got our own bathroom. Man, this is one classy hostel. The beds were pretty decent, even.

Except Renee's, of course. Poor girl lost Rock, Paper, Scissor and had to sleep on the concrete mattress. I'm sure that really sucked.