NUS MBA Business Study Trip To Korea - Monday Part 2

As this was our first real free and easy night in Korea, Jong Hee decided to bring us to a Lotte (one of the few big supermarket chains in Korea) mall to have a look-see and guess what... It looks very much like a mall in Singapore...




I naturally gravitated to the food section while the girls when to get their nth pair of shoes (n being a positive integer more than 100) which, despite its similarity to Singapore had a number of unique gastronomical offerings...







I even bought some seaweed, coaxed by a promoter who was quite good at English (oh, all right, she was cute too)... Pity she didn't get my joke...

"Could I barbecue it?"

"No sir, no need to cook. Just eat like this..."

"I know, but I like to smoke my weed..."



After that, I had a decision to make - either go with one group drinking, or another to Dongdaemun to shop. I'm no lover of alcohol or shopping but at least I do not have to pay to window shop so I opted to go with the Dongdaemun group.

Dongdaemun is actually Korean for the Chinese Dong Da Men, which means Big East Gate, which means that this place was actually the Eastern Gate to Seoul in days gone by. Again, you can see how the traditional blends with the modern...

Big East Gate....



And even bigger shopping complexes...




Which the girls in my group did not want to go to... For they believed all the best bargains were found on the street. So this is where we went in search of dinner...



These stalls generally sold stuff fried in batter - sausages, eggs, squid... Very unspectacular, ordinary stuff... Which was cold to boot...




At least that walk brought us by the Cheongye Stream... You may have seen what it looked like in the day in an earlier post. It's pretty in the night too...





As you could tell, we weren't that satisfied with our first round of nutrition so we went in search of more grub... Once again spurning the upmarket...



For the... umm... downmarket....



But really, this time the food wasn't half bad.... Traditional Korean rice cake in spicy sauce...



Seafood pancake...



Pig intestines mixed with rice rolls which looked like intestines (yeah, I know...)



Fried octopus...



All of which came with fish cake broth which was on the house...



And so it should have been, because by the time the bill came the girls felt as if we had been fleeced....

And then it was shopping.... And so we journeyed on (the girls forging forth, I tagging behind), shunning the complexes....



For the streets...






I followed dutifully for a while, but when the girls wanted to extend their activity by another, I told them I'd rather go drinking - and so I went, to one of the upmarket malls, to drink, in a Coffee Bean, stuff which I you can get in Singapore, which I did not photgraph. So there...

This is a curiosity though... You take it with you after your order is taken and when it beeps, you can go and collect it. Not really new to me though... I had written about a similar contraption in one of my earlier Hong Kong posts but still, for the uninitiated and those who -sniff- do not read my blog often... Have a -beeping- good day....



For I'm now going to try and get some revision for my -beeping- MBA course ...