{"id":7430,"date":"2014-10-10T18:45:52","date_gmt":"2014-10-10T09:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/?p=7430"},"modified":"2014-10-10T18:49:11","modified_gmt":"2014-10-10T09:49:11","slug":"weekend-trip-to-korea-random-observations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2014\/10\/10\/weekend-trip-to-korea-random-observations\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Trip to Korea: Random Observations"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Delicious BBQ places everywhere, most of them with outdoor sitting (living in Tokyo really makes you miss outdoors eating). The moment you sit at a table, they&#8217;ll bring a dozen dishes of miscellaneous sauces, appetisers and kimchi before you even get around to order.<\/li>\n<li>Hongdae (Seoul&#8217;s hip student-oriented neighbourhood) is really awesome to walk around, day or night. Cozy coffeeshops everywhere, open way into the night.<\/li>\n<li>Gangnam and its more upscale locales is also an interesting neighbourhood\u00a0to get a feel of what young startup-oriented Koreans are up to.<\/li>\n<li>Hangul is so nice and easy to learn (compared to the common sense blackhole that is kana\/kanji) that I found myself able to decipher restaurant menus by the end of the weekend. And yes: Korea has its equivalent to Katakana English, and it is occasionally just as hard to guess. Still is nice to be nearly-literate without spending years sweating over kanji lists.<\/li>\n<li>In\u00a0contrast to Japanese women, Korean female fashion is refreshingly more adult: lot less reliance on girly pink frills and other accessories intent on making one look like a prepubescent doll.<\/li>\n<li>On the other hand, Korean male twenty-somethings seem a lot more into the asexual boyish boys-band\u00a0look than their Japanese counterparts. At least for those that eschew the cookie-cutter preppy hipster look (guys: there&#8217;s more to life than round glasses, bowl cuts and capri pants).<\/li>\n<li>I loved trying to figure the original <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hanja\">hanja<\/a> beneath random hangul words and often realising\u00a0how close they were\u00a0to the equivalent Japanese word. Once you realise that <a class=\"extiw\" title=\"wikt:\ub300\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/%EB%8C%80\">\ub300<\/a><a class=\"extiw\" title=\"wikt:\ud559\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/%ED%95%99\">\ud559<\/a>\u00a0(&#8216;university&#8217;) is spelt\u00a0<a class=\"extiw\" title=\"wikt:\u5927\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/%E5%A4%A7\">\u5927<\/a><a class=\"extiw\" title=\"wikt:\u5b78\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/%E5%AD%B8\">\u5b78<\/a>, just like in Japanese, the name &#8220;Hongdae&#8221; makes a lot more sense (as do a lot of other words with &#8216;dae&#8217; in them).<\/li>\n<li>Even though very little planning went into the dates for this trip, it turns out that late-September Autumn was the absolute\u00a0perfect time, weather-wise, to enjoy Seoul and its plentiful outdoor drinking&amp;eating (never spent any serious time there in the Winter, but I am told, and can easily believe, that it is no fun at all).<\/li>\n<li>Definitely going back! (but not in Winter)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Delicious BBQ places everywhere, most of them with outdoor sitting (living in Tokyo really makes you miss outdoors eating). The moment you sit at a table, they&#8217;ll bring a dozen dishes of miscellaneous sauces, appetisers and kimchi before you even get around to order. Hongdae (Seoul&#8217;s hip student-oriented neighbourhood) is really awesome to walk around, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7430"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7436,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7430\/revisions\/7436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}