So last weekend I decided to make a short trip to Daejeon! The bus ride is just short of 2 hours so it was an easy ride to make. Rode out Friday night, came back Saturday night!
After a nice bus ride (got to nap a bit, got to see the countryside a bit), I arrived in Daejeon. Sadly, the bus made several stops before getting to the main terminal, and it turned out I shoulda got off at the first one, so I ended up having to take a Taxi back from the terminal to downtown. Once downtown, I met up Ying and a few of her English teacher friends at a shabu shabu restaurant that was buffet style. You pretty much just go get what you want from a big buffet table and cook it up at your table. Pretty sweet, and pretty good eats!
After dinner, we drove (Ying’s friend had a CAR! I haven’t been in a car that wasn’t a taxi since I was stateside…Okay except for a time or two in Incheon. It’s still been a while.) to one of the popular downtown areas for partying. Upon arrival, I quickly realized that Daejeon has a MUCH bigger foreigner population than Gwangju. Whereas Gwangju has a pretty small chilled out foreigner population where everyone more or less knows each other, Daejeon was FILLED with party crazy foreigners everywhere. We stopped in at a couple bars and met up with a few more people from orientation and did a bit of drinkin’ before heading off to a club. Not my first choice, as I’m not usually a club kinda guy, but everyone wanted to go so what the hell. The club was booming with electronic type music and was filled with green lasers all matrix style. There was a cover charge of like $15 bucks but they had unlimited free (cheap crappy) beer. I also had my big duffel bag and camera with me, which was kind of a pain and had to get it checked. Did a bit of dancing (even ended up on the stage for a short while, where some drunken Korean dude would just point at me from point blank range while dancing) then headed to another bar.
The next bar we ended up at was pretty sweet, booming with music and bartenders that were all about the flair (tossing and juggling bottles) and it was packed full. Hung out there till about 3am then headed back to Diana’s place with about 5 other people (Diana was a champ letting us all stay at her place, I wasn’t the only one visiting from out of town). We were all so tired it didn’t even matter that we had to pack into her apartment and find what floor space we could and promptly passed out.
The next morning, the group split up a bit (a couple I didn’t know prior to Daejeon were heading on to Seoul, leaving me, Ellen, and Diana, the two girls from my orientation to spend some time in Daejeon) and we went out to wander. Ellen was soon going to leave for Seoul as well, but she would leave later, so we decided to get some lunch first. Unfortunately, the day was a little gray and it had started to rain so we stopped in at a Daiso (yup they have those here in Korea!) and bought some cheap umbrellas. We were hungry, and Diana knew of a place that serves legit burgers run by a Korean guy who spent a bunch of time in New York city and learned how to make a proper burger and fries….and proper they were! The fries were actually seasoned, and the meal was ALMOST indistinguishable from a burger and fries you’d get back home. I said ALMOST because the ingredients in Korea aren’t quite the same so it’s a little hard to replicate them exactly, but they were still really good. After eating, Ellen decided she had better move on to Seoul so we hopped a bus to the subway station, which Ellen would take to the bus terminal and Diana and I would take to head to another downtown area of Daejeon.
After a quick goodbye to Ellen, Diana and I headed to another downtown area and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Korean cities….It’s that they’re all kind of the same. Hahah they all kind of look the same! And have the same stores! Still, it was cool to be somewhere new, but the wind was starting to pick up so much it was rendering our umbrellas useless and Diana’s even ripped real bad when one particularly strong gust of wind tore it apart. We wandered through a few stores, but the weather was getting pretty bad so I decided I should probably head back home. She showed me to the right bus that would take me back to the bus terminal and we parted ways. Caught a bus, and back to Gwangju I headed to have a relaxing remainder of the weekend!
Thanks, Daejeon, for an interesting and unique couple of days! =P
