I think that there is a special trick to walking around with an umbrella successfully in Soeul. I’m still learning, but it can get confusing. An amazing thing about Seoul is the amount of umbrella. At this time of year there are more umbrellas in the streets of Seoul than there are bikes on the streets of Copenhagen. With so many umbrellas around, moving in the streets can often proof to be dangerous and I have already gotten used to being hit by umbrellas after just a couple of days with rain.
Our mission today was to find some rain boots for Unnie so we started off in Dongdaemun and ended up in Myungdong. In Dongdaemun we immediately found the ones that she wanted but they didn’t have have them in her size so we continued to look through shops and through the shoe market in Dongdaemun.
After having finished looking through the shoe market we grabbed a hotdog each before heading back the the first store again. Inside she tried on the shoes anyways, even though they didn’t have them in her size but, as expected, they were too big. Then we came up with the perfect idea and asked a staff member (who only spoke Korean) if the store excited elsewhere in Seoul and if they might have the shoes in the right size there.
Thankfully he informed us that they had a shop in Myungdong, which happened to be our next destination. Things got a bit complicated for the poor Korean staff man as we asked him where in Myungdong the shop was located. First of all he wasn’t sure how to explain where it was and then things got more complicated for him when he thought that we didn’t understand Korean (actually it was just the name of the shops that he mentioned that we didn’t know) but after a bit of confusion and a lot of embarrassed laughs he managed to explain to us how to get there from the subway station. He seemed very nervous because of lack of English knowledge but he was very cute as he did his best to explain how to get there in his best english (‘ehh exit.. 칠,칠… ehh seven!’).
We headed to Myungdong and thanks to the nice staff’s helpful directions we found it rather quickly. While we were there I got out a lot of money from the bank so I have enough for the upcoming week (or maybe weeks). Unnie got a nice pair of black rain boots to a very reasonable price (I think they were around 35000 won which is roughly 180 Danish crowns).
After that we headed to a small store for shopping and unnie got a long black dress while I got a grey skirt and two tops. I highly regret that I didn’t bring any of my pencil skirts with me to Korea as Korean girls are very fond of them. Actually I feel that Korean girls’ style is very similar to my casual style back in England so I am often able to find clothes that fits my style.
We bought the clothes in a small shop and the dangerous thing about that is that there are no defined sizes for the clothes and that there are also no changing rooms so we just went with our guts. Thankfully the clothes fitted well and I am very happy with what I got as it really suits my normal style. Also notice that one T-shirt is in english (‘imagine a world in peace’) and that the other is in French (‘la mode passe, le style reste STYLE’). It was all very cheap and I paid 5900 won for each piece of clothing (~30 danish crowns)
On our way back we bought some food (we had run out of bread again, so we had to buy something for breakfast). I ended up buying a banana milk for tomorrow and a big basket of dried fruit so I have some snacks for when I go to school (instead of having to buy some real food or chocolate during our breaks because of hunger). I also bought some Danish butter cookies because I suddenly missed Europe a bit, today being my mother’s birthday, well they are actually called butter rings here in Korea, but really they are butter cookies. They don’t taste like real butter cookies though so I was a bit disappointed. They used the wrong quite of butter to make them and they made them at a too high temperature so although the main idea is there, the taste is not quite right.
Bonus: fail english
