Outta' Seoul

This week our beloved Seoul English Village was shut down by the city government, which in and of itself is something I like to off-handedly mention because it makes us sound like some kind of espionage multinational exposed in a government sting operation. I'll let all of your imaginations run wild with that and move on to chronicle my adventures of the past 3 days.

Sprung from the confines of the SEV compound we had one mission in mind: Get the hell outta' Seoul. 3 friends (who's names have been changed to protect their identities) Bith, Saen, and Jomes and myself skirted town and headed out on a bus to the east coast, Sokcho and Seuraksan Mountain. Loaded down with only essential gear: books, CD's, wine and m&m's, we arrived on the coast around 6:00pm with snow-covered peaks on one side and a sandy stretch of beach on our other. We crashed at a off-season Beach "Condotel" with heated floors, a balcony overlooking the ocean, and even a hairdryer in the Room!

The first night was spent exploring the off-season resort area, where we were the Only foreigners to be seen. Our presence grabbed the eager attention of many restaurant owners and shopkeepers who leapt from the floors of their restaurants to come to their big sliding glass doors and beckon us in. At this point we were hungry enough to order something off the menu without knowing exactly what it was. Some hot red spicy stew arrived with some kind of seafood floating in it. Halfway between sea-sponge and scrambled egg, it elicited some very interesting facial contortions. In the end we identified it as a somewhat phallic sea urchin we had seen in the huge tanks outside the restaurants. "Cha-chi mulgogi" in Korean (in Latin, "aquias-phallusius, or its common nomenclature "penis-fish")