Cheonggyecheon Stream, Mexican Food etc

I finally got to visit 청계천(Cheonggyecheon) after only seeing pictures of it before. It is basically a creek flowing through downtown Seoul that was restored. It was approximately a $900 million project. I thought it was pretty awesome, if you want to see some more pictures including daytime photos click here. This is also another spot that's apparently popular with couples. There's also some ice skating rink near by, which I only saw from a distance, I didn't actually walk in to see it.

For those of you who have a decent digital camera and have never tried messing with the auto settings, do it. My camera is a Sony Cybershot DSC-T100, there's a lot of presettings ('scene selection') such as high sensitivity, soft snap, twilight portrait, twilight, beach, snow, fireworks etc. I never bothered with the settings until recently when it was taking crappy pictures at night. The ice rink looked cool and I wanted to take a picture, but even in night time mode it wasn't coming out right. I tried random settings you'd figure wouldn't work and a lot of em came out either good or interesting. But my favorite one that came out is on the left.

Lately I've been really craving Mexican food... especially some good chips and salsa. I had been lurking on a message board called Dave's ESL Cafe, which is for foreigners, mainly ESL teachers, who live overseas. I found a discussion on Mexican restaurants throughout Korea and had to finda good one ASAP. After doing some research, I found there was one about 10 minutes from where I live and walked my happy ass over there on a Sunday to eat some Mexican food. While it wasn't authentic by any means it was still decent. However, the salsa had a Korean flavor to it and the tortillas were too damn thin. Also Galbijim is great site to find out information on foreign restaurants in Seoul, so there's a few other Mexican restaurants I wanna check out.

For the longest time I kept telling my cousin to introduce me any good lookin' friends she had. It seems most of them are already taken, but there was one she wanted to introduce me to. So on a Friday night I met up with my cousin and we walked a couple blocks to wait for her friend. We then spotted her friend from across the street and waited for her to cross over. It was too far for me to see without my glasses, so I couldn't tell if she good looking. So as she walks up closer I could then tell she was really nothing special. Out of 10, I'd probably give her a 6. I will say she does have decent style though and dresses decently. Anyway, we walked to a cafe just to mainly talk and have a few drinks. She's one year younger than me, majored in Chinese and aspires to be a stewardess. Well there goes any hope for her, I would never date a stewardess. Who wants to date someone that isn't home half the time? Anyway she actually had a decent personality, somewhat attractive to me for some strange reason.

You know since I've been here almost a month I haven't ran into that many hot girls here. I've seen plenty of 7's, but I expected to see a lot more 8's and 9's. My friends sister, in small ass Las Cruces puts every Korean girl I've seen here to shame. Then again, I haven't been to Myeongdong and Gangnam where hot girls are more prevalent. Either way, I'm obviously biased, but I like how Korean American girls look more than the girls in Korea (for the most part).

Anyway, while browsing the internet I came to find out there were free Korean language classes at the Korean Foundation Cultural Center. Since I had a month until school started, I figured I should go take some free classes and learn. My cousin's friend (the one I just met) offered to go with me to help me sign up. So on a Monday afternoon, I met up with her in Jongno. We hung out at a coffee shop for a bit with one of her friends and I helped them out with their English homework. After about an hour or so we walked to the KFCC so I could take a pretest to see what level I would be placed in. At the KFCC there were a lot of foreigners there including a not so bad looking chick who was taller than me. I was confident I could be placed into intermediate class so that is the test I started off with, but damn that shit was hard. So I opted for the beginners test and that wasn't too bad as I wound up testing into beginners 3. So the people there recommend I come back next month since classes have already started. I also found out I have to attend a minimum of 3 months! So next month I'll be attending SNU's program as well as this free program, but at least this is only once a week and should be a good supplemental class.