Day 3 - Street Carts FTW

We woke up at 11 am which is still relatively early considering our previous late nights of debauchery. Having not tried the odeng aka fish cake street cart food yet, we went over to a busy one in the middle of the Myeongdong shopping area that we wanted to try but didn't get a chance to. The fish cakes were cooked in either regular or spicy soup which they serve in a cup along with the fish cake:



Hella good! Afterwards we walked over to the bigger department store across the street, but not before stopping by another cart to get more fish cake. The ones here were fried and greasy, but tasted fine deluged in ketchup:



Then we traversed across the street to AVENUEL, a Lotte Department Store adjacent to the one we went to yesterday. Everything was ridiculously expensive and having spent so much money considering it was only the third day, we just browsed at everything we couldn't afford from men's clothing to electronics. After an hour or so, my cousin Yunhee called to let us know she was coming over. Upon her arrival, we met up and took a cab to Jogno-gu's (Jogno district> Insadong-gil (Insadong street) which is famous for cultural souvenirs, antique wares, and art. We did a little souvenir shopping, but arguably, the coolest thing here was making of the kkultare candy which takes one block of honey dipped in corn starch and through some fancy twisting and folding, yields 16,000 individual strands used to wrap walnuts, peanuts, or almonds:



The video isn't mine, but you get the point. The people that made ours were much funnier and having encountered foreigners before, they seemed adept at performing the creation of the kkultare in english, japanese, and maybe chinese. Yunhee bought us a box of each. <3. It was getting dark and it was time to go, but not before Stephen needed to reenact this scene from Euro Trip:





Well done. We took a cab from Insadong back to the hotel. Stephen had made dinner plans to meet Nicole in Itaewon later in the evening, but we couldn't resist eating street cart food yet again. This time we had tteokbokki, dumplings, and soup:





My cousin Ki-Young came to pick us up to take Stephen and me to Itaewon and Yunhee to Seoul Station because she had school the next day. Nicole's place was hard to find, but we managed. When we finally met with her, she tried taking us to a nearby restaurant so that we could try dongdongju (similar to makgeolli which is unstrained rice wine) but it was closed, so we went to back Jogno-gu to have ddakgalbi chicken and vegetables stir fried with gochujang and other assorted ingredients. Nicole didn't want tteok, but that's okay since we had tteokbokki earlier. Stephen was craving Red Mango so we had some after dinner:



I just vultured some from Stephen and we both agreed that it was much better than Pinkberry. Nicole had to call it a night and after saying our farewells, Stephen and I walked around the alleys of Jogno-gu to find a bar. We found a pretty nice looking place (forgot name) where we drank some Hite Stout and Chamisul Soju. We got drunk pretty fast and did some male bonding sharing our past dating experiences and our dating philosophies in general. It was still relatively early in the evening (midnight), but since it was Sunday and having partied hard the two previous nights, we called it a night. Once we got back to the room, we drank off the last of our reserves, talked some more, and went to sleep.

Extra - Nicole taught us that tteokbokki is also slang for (highlight if you want to know): sex during a girl's period. Yeah, it's foul, but I thought it was interesting that she knew considering she's Caucasian. : p