What's a face diet.

This was taken in gangnam.

Journey burger

We have found something awesome. Yes it's another post about western food. But this post is also about the best burger I have ever had. And at a reasonable price too! We have gone here many times since we first found it. It is hidden away in an alleyway and has a travel theme. The staff all speak English and the food is awesome.

It seems to me that in Korea the really good places aren't more expensive. If you pay more you will get something more fancy I guess. But you don't have to pay extra for the really good food, but you have to find it. While journey is so nice it makes it harder to go looking for new places than just eating at journey, I really wanna find more places like this. So we have to keep on exploring. In the meantime you can have look at this awesome burger

Mobile phone cases

One thing Korea is crazed about are mobile phone covers. They don't just protect your phone but show who you ARE. They also change your phone to huge bulks If you want. Like this one we saw today

I will

Quiznos subs

We are getting a bit sick of Korean food after a month.  That is mostly the one on campus. A good escape for us then is going to Quiznos sub close to our dorm. I just realized that this is a very boring post for most people not living in Korea.  For us though, good western food is worth blotting about.  Basically it's just a slow subway chain. But we get bread! And they use veggies on stuff.  A bit more expensive than our normal breakfast,  but once in a blue moon its worth it.

New phone, new possibillitys

So i got a korean phone now with 4g and wifi everywhere. That means i can blog on the move. So hopefully it can help stop my dryspell. Phone posts will be shorter and contain pictures i take on the move. Like this post. Written in the middle of a crowded subway car. Ill try to catch you guys up with what has happened lately, but there is alot of things to fix with university so it might take a bit of time.

Korean Food: Man-Du

This is a short feature on a Korean dish I have really come to like. Its called man-du, or Dumplings in English. I figured i should start writing about the food I eat, as my daily routine might be less exiting after a while. So this is a new segment called Korean Food! Welcome

Don't they look delicious? Well they are!

I have had experience with Dumplings before, but Korean man-du are a bit different. They can be filled with normal pork filling or kimchi, or of course any other thing. The kimchi variant is a bit spicy, which is a good thing.

This place is in Nok-Du, which is a area favoured by students because of its close proximity to the SNU campus. This is a man who makes really good man-duh. He is one of many who keep shops open  24/7. We ate here at Friday night, after we had been out drinking, and also on Saturday for lunch. The man-du are ready to eat, but are steamed before served so they are, well, steaming hot. 

This type of street food is available any time, any place, and is dirt cheep. These man-du cost me 1 500 Won, or around 7,50NOK. They were super delicious, and quite filling!

Mmmmm. This is one thing I really love about Korea. 

SKONO

So here is a small post about a fun shop we found in Hongdae. We saw the logo in the subway station with a map to go to SKONO. We had never heard of it before, but it carried the Norwegian flag as a logo. And sko in Norwegian means shoe. So we decided to take a look.

This is Frédéric outside the store. He is a Norwegian going to KAIST for exchange. He goes to the same university as I do back in Norway. He also blogs about his life in Seoul. You can follow him here:

There really isen't much to say about these photos other than that they did not have my size, and they had misunderstood and put Lego in the shop. Ida, The Dane i live with on home stay, got quite upset, and we told the people who lived there. We got to use the things we learned in Korean class, on how to tell people where you are from. Useful.

Frédéric is considering getting new shoes. He decided to wait though.

Here are some Norwegian style decorations.

Token cardboard moose.

The shoes were really nice though. Too bad they did not have my size. We should import these.

Puppy Cafe

The other day after class, I went to Hongdae with some classmates from the Korean Class. 

In Hongdae, we found this! This magnificent thing is a puppy cafe. At least at the moment. This place seemed to have been a cat cafe for a while. The difference being that now instead of cats walking around, they have puppies. The cats at the cat cafe I have often heard are really sick of people and cuddle, like cats often can be. Now the nice thing about dogs is that they can't get enough of it!

So this is the place on the inside. Often you have to pay to get in to places like this. Here you just needed to buy a drink. I got an ice mocha. It was quite good, but it had mini marshmallows in it. It does not work as well with cold Chocolate drinks as with hot ones.

This is Jee-Wei, a new friend of mine from the LEI intensive Korean Course I am attending. He is from Taiwan, and normally studies German of all things. The dog he is about to pet was my favourite. He loved cuddling.

Here is the probably cutes dog in the cafe. Too bad I did not get the names of all the dogs by the way. Now this one was a real bully. He always tried to get the attention of the people cuddling with other dogs. He wanted what the other dogs had.

Here he is trying to sit on the face of the cute dog who fel asleep on me. The beagle looked exactly like a stuffed animal i had when I was a kid tho, so I couldn't get mad at it. 

Here is Ida. She is my homestay-sister and also goes to my Korean class. She is from Denmark, so we always end up explaining to people how Denmark occupied Norway back and forth together with Sweden, because Koreans can relate to that. 

This one was really tired, and spent most of the time sleeping under a chair at the bar.

Here is another beagle photo, because: Beagle. A question the popped into my head while I was there though was: "What happens with the dogs when they are no longer puppies and cute?". I decided to myself that they get adopted by cafe-regulars who grow fond of them, but under this layer of naiveness,  I know that the story is probably not as nice. However I don't think the loss of one exchange student customer once or twice will make a big difference in the business of the cafe, so I did not feel very guilty about going. 

If you feel the same when you are here, this is the business card of the place. 

To find it in google maps type in:

37.553228, 126.925450

If you walk there, you will see it.

My first few days

The last few days have been adventurous, and really hot. On Friday I first wandered on my own, and took some photos, and got myself a 50mm f1.8 lens at the Yonsan electronics market. Its a seven story electronics marked that you can buy used and new electronics. You can get really good deal on second hand stuff, but on new items you really have to barter to get down to the prices they give in the bigger chains. Of course bartering on second hand stuff can give you a real steal. I Then of course had to test my lens resulting in these photos I was quite happy with: 

This Photo shows some quite classic high rise buildings in Seoul.

This is from the subway, and plays heavily on the low depth of field one get with a low aperture setting. 

Later that day I met up with some other international students in Gangnam, we went to the Coex mall, which is a large one floor mall, that is easy to get lost in. Gangnam is a really fancy new area, where the rich and powerful live, and a lot of businesses keep their offices here. There is a lot of interesting architecture here. Here is a building some might recognise from the captivating song: Gangnam style, by PSY: 

Here are the three international students I met up with aswel:

So this is Juliana and Dessie.

And this is Kazimiera and Juliana again. After that we went for a drink in central Gangnam. We were very tired because both Kaizimera and I had arrived that same day. All the bars at ground level were full, but we ended up finding one in the fifth floor at one building that was nearly empty. So here is what you can see if you end up in a bar in Korea: 

On my way home, i got to go through this street: 

Seoul at night is full of colours. It's really beautiful. 

The next day i started my day with Kimchijigge. It's a hot Kimchi soup, served with banchan and rice like any food in Korea. It has port and tofu in it, and you can get it down to 5000 won ( 25 kr) with all things included. I am not sick of spicy breakfast yet!

Delicious, delicious Korean food. I went to the Myungdong market to look around, and completely forgot to take pictures. It was that good! I need to go back there. If not to take pictures, to eat the marvellous man-doh! I ate five big man-doh buns, for 3000 won (15 kr). I was completely full. It must be one of the best places to try different korean foods.

After Even and Christian came, we went out to meet the others for Samgyopsal. André from Norway joined us. It was really good. We went to a self-serve beer bar, called Bomb Beer. Its a cool principle, and I'd like to write more about it when I have more pictures, this time, I really only got this one thats worth posting: 

And with that I will end my scribbling of today. I have gotten a bit further than this at the moment, and I am starting to realize that I can't possible write everything that happens. I guess it will be more mundane when the semester starts. But I have some theme posts i might wan to do later.

Until then, goodbye.

Hans

Arriving in Korea

I had a really pleasant flight to Korea today. My flight, including connection, was scheduled to take 12 hours and 5 minutes, which is very good. I flew through Helsinki with Finnair. When i got on the plane for Seoul in Helsinki though, I was surprised to see that I had ended up in a business class seat, even though i had just paid for economy. I had reacted on the strange seating placement when checking in the night before, and had decided I wanted a front row seat because of the extra leg-room those often provide. Oh boy did it provide more leg room! I could lie down close to flat and had a comfortable auto adjust seat.

Then when I arrived in Korea, a woman I had earlier helped with getting her bags up to the overhead lockers started talking to me while we were walking to the immigration control. Her name was Hyang-Soon (향순). She told me she had been to Finland with her family, and was carrying smoked salmon home. We chatted for a while about what we both did, and a bit about Korean food, and how hot it was here now. She then invited me to her summer house and gave me her card. I though that was a really nice thing to do, and I will definitely send her an Email with a thank you and a link to this blog. 

When I got through immigration and had my luggage through customs (took maybe 15 minutes in total), I headed for the queue at the airport-limousine bus ticket stand, but was quickly met by a nice airport guide in a yellow shirt, who told me the tickets were the same price on the bus, and asked me where I was going. Then he followed me all the way to my bus, which wasn't that far, but still took him 5 minutes back and forth.

When standing waiting for the bus, taking photos of the cool architecture, a man in his 40s suddenly stared asking me something in korean in a rushed voice, and suddenly the bus arrived. The whole ordeal of getting everyone on the bus, and their baggage in the right place took about 2 minutes of rushing, before the bus went off again. I have learned that the Koreans are super efficient, and that there is certainly no time for nonsense. Something I in principle approve to, myself often thinking about how to optimise procedures and tasks when doing them myself. Now I am apparently in a society where that has already been done, and all I have to do is play my part. I think it might take some time adjusting before i can play my part as a well oiled cogwheel, but I think once I got it, moving back to Norway might seem frustrating sometimes.

The trip from the airport to the city was filed with views to high rise buildings, green landscape and a taste of the heat. I got to my hostel, and it was really nice. Looking forwards to checking out the city before I meet up with a fellow SNU student for sightseeing-socialising after 3.

Til next time, Hans

Mini-vacation with Ida

So after cleaning out of our flat in Trondheim, me and Ida (my wonderful girlfriend) took a couple of days vacation together before we leave for Seoul and Singapore. What better place to do so than in a cabin in the forest? To get a real dosage of "Norwegian Nature" TM, we first took the trip to Sandvika Storsenter, the biggest mall in Norway (Actually also in Scandinavia according to Wikipedia). Here Ida bought a new lens for her canon DSLR, giving it a new dawn for her. She haven't used her Canon for some time, and has been feeling kinda guilty about it. The lens was a cheap, plastic 50mm f/1.8 lens. Its an excellent value at 800 kr, (aprox 150,000 Korean Won). Here is a photo of her picking up tomatos, since we were also present-minded enough to remember to get food in all the excitement of buying a new toy.

They were some very tasty Tomatos. After all the excitement of the magnificent mall, we got in the car towards the cabin in the woods. Only stopping when the opportunity of "Nowegian Safari" TM arose. 

Here in its natural and ridiculously idyllic habitat is the truly majestic cow, viewed from a distance by our trip photographer. I of course spent my time photographing our trip photographer.

Then I decided I would like to get closer to this fascinating creature, and touch its nose, as one does in these situations of interspecies greeting. We got safely through the intense safari, and to the cabin. Once there, we started painting to give something back to the cabin while we were there. Painting stuff is actually really relaxing. You don't have to do a whole lot of thinking. You just apply colour to stuff and listen to radio. I think the listening to radio part is actually an important part of painting. Painting might work without the radio, but I have never tried, and I am not planning on finding out anytime soon. I only remembered to document us working at the very end our of painting session.

So here is a photo of Ida finishing of the last wall of that day. Sexy new coat of pain on that cabin right? Oh and Ida is quite cute too. So after several hours of our time not being documented at all, we went down to the water to take some pictures in good lighting.

 We were originally planning to do portraits, since thats whats Ida's new lens is made for. As this stunning photo of me and my camera proves, it's also good for photographing cameras.

Here is the photo i took at the same time by the way. Those two photos together illustrates the difference between a 50mm lens and a 16mm(wide angle) lens. You can also see the photo of me has a far narrower field of depth, that creates a sensation of even crispier focus on whats actually in focus. Thats good for portraits especially, and thats what Ida's new lens do so well. Being in Norway tho, it didn't take long before ducs arrived to be photographed.

They arrived really right after we got down there, and it's not until now that i actually realize we did not go down there to photograph ducks. We went down to take portraits to test the new lens, and then some  interesting photogenic targets just materialised for us to shoot. So this is one of like 500 pictures we took between us. I picked it for its entertainment value, since a lot of them were just of ducks sitting in the water. If you are really interested in duck pictures, I can probably hook you up with a big load of them. Just post in the comments, and I got your back. 

The next day we got a full day of rain, hindering any more painting for that day, and shutting us in to do cabin-stuff like drinking hot chocolate, baking bread, taking photos and running out in the cold rain to swim in the lake. We both got a reignited interest in photography with Ida's new lens, and exchanged  tips and information, and we both ended up learning a lot. The next day we finished painting and headed back home. We stopped by Ida's Granddad and his wife for dinner-  lunch. They have a really nice garden and Ida took some sweet photos of flowers and stuff. I figured I could let her share them, since she is planning to start a Photo-blog herself, and that could give her something to start with.

Anyways, it was a great big, small adventure. We got really relaxed, and it was good to see so much of each other while we still can. Right now I have three days left in Oslo, and one of them is slowly passing by as I am writing this blog. Better start trotting along to catch up. Until next time.

Hans