St. Patrick's Day

Celebrating a holiday in a different country is definitely one of the more interesting things I've been a part of. First things first; there aren't exactly many Irish people in South Korea. We also celebrated it a little early here. We took in the holiday last Saturday, the 14th. There was a parade and celebration set from around 11am to 5pm here in a place called Hyehwa (sounds like "Hey-wa"). It's about a 25 minute subway ride away. There's a kind of Pioneer Square-like area just outside the subway station where everybody gathered. Me and a couple other foreigners met up at an apartment and had a few bottles of Champagne before we left for Hyehwa to get ourselves in the celebrating state of mind. We ended up getting to Hyehwa just after noon. We missed the parade apparently. It wasn't very big. Mostly a bunch of foreigners marching around a couple blocks for about 20 minutes with beers raised is what I was told. However, we did get there just in time for a surprisingly good performance from a Korean U2 cover band. They did play an original or two, but there is nothing like hearing somebody belt out those classic tracks. They played a very extended version of Sunday Bloody Sunday. They sounded pretty good for the most part. The singer definitely still added a very Korean style to it. Guitars and bass where dead on though. If I didn't see who was up there it could have been The Edge for all I knew. There were about a thousand people form what I could figure. I would say 90% foreigners and the rest Koreans. It was nice that they joined in too. Free Guinness and plenty of fun.

We basically froze our butts off for the next few hours until we decided that it was time to head inside for more celebrating. I had some fried chicken and we all had a few more drinks before heading out. A note about fried chicken here. It tastes really good. Just remember that they don't waste much. One of the pieces I started munching turned out to be the chicken leg. Claw still attached. I realized this when I bit into the end that was the claw. As long as it's fried, it's still good to me.


The next part of the adventure was more food and drinks. After spending a few minutes trying to decide on where to get dinner. We settled on a restaurant that seemed to have good food. None of us had ever been there before and I don't recall the name of it but we assumed it would be good food because of the sign on the door which aptly said "Good Food." How can you possibly turn that down? So we walked down the stairs because it was under the building. As soon as we looked around inside we realized it might be a little expensive and that they probably didn't serve many foreigners. It was very elegant looking. Small little separated rooms that had their floors actually built to hover about 2 feet above the main floor so that could plant grass underneath. This I assume gives it a sort of natural air conditioning for your rear. After first refusing us (which gave us that "we don't serve foreigners" feeling) the manager at the desk relented and led us to a table in the back. It was a very nice little space. Brick walls on all sides. They brought us a menu which had no pictures and was completely in Korean. Yay! The manager kept walking by our table ever couple minutes for a little while talking on his phone. I got that feeling that he was calling somebody and freaking out like "what do I do with these people now?" But as it turns out, he was trying to find somebody who knew English so that we could get our order translated. He finally got a hold of somebody and handed the phone over and we put in our order for pork and beer. The food was good but not amazing. They brought the pork out and some grills for our table. we slapped the pork on the grill and enjoyed ourselves for the next hour.

The day finally finished around 8:30pm when I promptly crashed onto my bed and fell asleep.