Expat Festival & Korvia party

The weekend after our short teaching week (2 days) was dedicated to relaxing and recharging the battery so we didn't do much.  We explored our area, visited the Lotte Mart, did some prep and watched some movies.  Since that's pretty much all we did, I will skip a more detailed account of it.  Instead, I will jump to the next weekend, when we went back to Seoul for round 2!


Saturday, Sept 24 2011

Friday after school, we suddenly felt très lonely.  We had been here for a little over a month and we still hadn't met any friends.  So we turned to the our friendly neighborhood World Wide Web for some answers.  Being more geographically knowledgeable of where we were, we started looking for groups in our area.  Jen stumbled upon the Bundang Social Club (BSC) Facebook page.  Bundang is where she actually teaches.  It takes her 30 minutes door-to-door (15 min on the bus) to get there so it's reasonably close.  As we were reading the threads, we discovered that there was an Expat Festival slated for tomorrow (Saturday) at World Cup Stadium.  It was too bad we already had plans...  Korvia was throwing its welcoming party for all of its teachers and we were really looking forward to it...  But wait, the party didn't actually start until 6:30pm... and the Expat festival began at 2:00pm... Who said we couldn't do both?  Did we absolutely have to be there for 6:30?  A fashionably late/grand entrance would be much more dramatic!! So it was agreed... we would do both.

World Cup Stadium entrance

Sporting the FC Seoul jersey!!!

Jen's sweet potato pizza from Pizza Hut

Around noon-ish, we were walking out the door, headed to World Cup Stadium for the Expat Festival.  By now, I had my smart phone (Galaxy S) so getting there would be much more easy.  Google maps told us it would take approximately 2 hours on the subway with a few transfers.  Getting there was actually very easy.  From Jukjeon, we hopped on the Bundang line into Seoul then transferred on line 2 until we reached line 6, which took us directly to WCS.  The closer we got to the stadium, the more foreigners we started seeing.  The Facebook event page said there would be 10 000 foreigners to the 2nd expat festival.  I'm not ready to say there were that much, but there were a lot.  We were hoping to meet ppl... to have a blast and go from there.  Well, it wasn't that easy.  First, there was no real structure to this festival.  People just kind of came on their own or in groups and just hung out.  There was no real mingling going on.. which was a little disappointing.  But overall we had a great time!!!  For 10,000 KRW each, we got entry to the game, a beer and a hot dog!  Since we thought there were going to be activities starting at 2, we had wanted to be there early.  But turns out we were there way too early since the game only started at 5pm and there wasn't much going on before then.  At least I got the opportunity to have a few beers and buy a FC Seoul jersey, so overall we still enjoyed it!

It isn't a professional game without cheerleaders!

The crowd was pretty insane!  Great fans!

We be enjoying da game!!

Some game action.... For Genik!!!

Cheers to the friggin' weekend!

At around 6pm, the first half of the game was done so we decided to bail and head on over to Gangnam, where the Korvia party was being held.  Google maps had us at about 1 hour 15 minutes away so we got there around 7:30-ish.  We made our way to King's Tap where Korvia was rockin' da house!!!  We were greeted by some of the recruiters who gave us our free drink coupon and we took a seat with some random people and we talked and drank the night away.  Ann Park, our recruiter, was really happy that we made it and we chatted for a while.  We asked her to introduce us to some people from our area, which she did!  Did I mention that Ann is amazing?!?  Unfortunately, although we met some awesome people, we failed at making lasting friendships.  We did have an awesome time though.  But by 10:30, it was time to head back since we weren't sure when the last subway would leave Gangnam station.  Mostly everyone had already started to filter out anyway so we made our way back home, pretty content with the way our whole day had shaped up!

Ann Park and us!!  Thank you Ann for being awesome!

On Sunday, I woke up with a hangover... cooked bacon (the thickest bacon I have ever seen), cleaned the apartment and did some laundry... OK, Jen may have done most of the cleaning... lol..  Overall, we were happy about our weekend and we were already looking forward to Everland next weekend!!!  But for now, it was back to teaching for another week!!

Cheers,
J

I'll leave you with a shot of the group at King's Tap!! Thank you Korvia!!