Sightseeing activities

20071003_German_Connection

So, finally some time to comment on the photos I already uploaded before.
On Wednesday, there was a national holiday, so I had some time to recover from the first two days of the course and meet some friends from old days again. Some pictures - especially of Seoul by night that were shot before the meeting - can be found here.

20071007_Gwanak-Hiking

Today I went hiking in the Gwanak Mountains with Sebastian and Urte, two German exchange students to Seoul National University. We met in Shillim-9-Dong, and had lunch in the place I've always been to after language class two years ago. Then we started walking to the mountains. Actually we didn't really find the one we were looking for and therefore only climbed an intermediate one... which turned out to be completely right later on (just when we were back in Shillim, it started raining). Going all the way up was actually quite exhausting, and I realized I should definitely have been working out more back in Germany. On the way up, we always passed (while going) and were passed by (while resting) a Korean family with two like 13year old girls (forgive me if I'm wrong, I can never guess ages). After walking and actually sometimes also climbing more and more up, we met them again while having a rest at a place with a very nice scenery and a bit of a view over Seoul. They were so nice to offer us some drinks, and so we gave some of our cookies in return, and finally took some pictures together :-)
Then we kept on going up and rested again at another place to drink a bottle of Soju together. Actually I had hope to figure out how to drink in public already but of course we were doing wrong again. We had brought a bottle of Soju and some "glasses" so we could just sit down somewhere to have a drink on the rocks (haha!)... so we thought and did. We also offered some of the Soju to the Koreans sitting next to us and that way we learnt that it's not good to drink only Soju. You should obviously also have some food to accompagny the meal (this is a habit I will never adopt to, I guess: in a lot of bars it's actually mandatory to offer addional food called "anju" when you just wanna drink some beer, as Koreans use to like snacks while drinking - I personally think it's pretty stupid to eat snack with a lot of fat or oil while drinking, but luckily usually there's fruits as well). So we were offered some anju, which we gladly accepted.. or rather me, the other two didn't like the squid parts too much. However, we had some Soju on a mountain, and even together with one of the Koreans :D And we learnt that for the next time we should buy some dried squid or some other Korean style Anju. Not to actually eat it, but to take it out while drinking Soju as some kind of alibi maybe :)
Pictures of our trip can be found here.