Today we took the T south of othe river to Gangnam (literally: "south of the river"), a bustling district home to lots of large office buildings in addition to cares, shops, and restaurants. Stacie had the day off today from her LSAT class and the plan was to meet up with her at 1pm' but first we had a mission: Gangnam is also home to the Kukkiwon, the World Taekwondo Headquarters!
Kukkiwon is located at the top of a hill; there isn't actually much there except for an indoor amphitheater for practices and demonstrations, a cafeteria, and a museum, but getting to visit was way cool, nonetheless. Normally on wednesdays the premiere Korean Taekwondo demo team the flying tigers, practices here, but unfortunately they are on a world tour. However, since there was nothing going on at the time it did mean that we could take pictures like this:
One of the highlights was the visit to the Kukkiwon shop; in addition to some other souvenirs and Taekwndo supplies, they have some very good quality uniforms with free screen printing of whatever you want on it! on the front it says 사우자 (sah-ooh-jah) (the Korean pronunciation of "sauza". A very close spelling, 싸우자 (ssa-ooh-jah) actually means "let's fight"
And on the back!
Yeah, so that's pretty exciting. We met up with Stacie after finishing our Kukkiwon visit and went to go eat some Korean shabu shabu, hotpot
after which we took a tour of some of the big buildings in the area. This marvel of engineering was pretty cool but must have been a pain in the neck to design.
Stacie was also really really excited to take us to a Sticky photo place. This was quite possibly the pinkest store I have been in in my life, and I doubt Chris and I would have wandered in there on our own. Basically it is a photo booth chain store where you take some silly pictures with friends, have the chance to draw on them or add sparkles/pictures/designs, and then they are printed out as stickers. Stacie was much better than Chris and me at adding sparkles.
It was a very hot day in the city so we decided to cool down with some shaved ice, a very popular cafe dessert; the ice comes in a big bowl with various toppings. Ours had walnuts, red bean, and coffee flavoring.
After walking around some more we thought about going to see a movie, but the times didn't really work out.
Stacie: what do you want to now? Oh, we could go to a cafe with Dr. Fish
Chris: Dr. Fish?
Stacie: yeah you know, the fish that eat the dead skin off your feet!
Us: ....!?
Clearly this was an opportunity that could not be passed up. And so here we have it, fish eating my feet
It was actually really really really ticklish, especially for the first few minutes before you got used to it. Apparently it's supposed to be pretty good for foot hygiene. The cafe with the dr fish is not all that common and more of a novelty, but it was a pretty interesting experience. We chilled out in the cafe for a bit longer and then went to another part of town to eat at one of Stacie's favorite Chinese restaurants. Apparently it is the original Korean-Chinese restaurant and pioneered a lot of the iconic dishes of that particular type of cuisine. I had a delicious spicy seafood noodle soup with mussels and oysters and we shared a plate of (also delicious) fried breaded pork and some kind of mushroomy fungus in sweet and sour sauce.
Thanks Stacie for showing us around Gangnam!
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Amusing Photo of the Day!
Taekwondoists gotta eat too...
haha nice uniform Sauza. please give Chris and Stacie a big hug for me! thanks and keep posting. ~Lori
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