My week Part 1

Revisit to Namdaemun market.

My Week Part 1.

So I have decided to break my week into two posts for ease of reading... and of course blogging.

So on Wednesday I decided to go back to the Import Market that is in Namdaemun Market.

Now a more direct route to get there is to head toward Hoehyeon Station and I chose to use exit 5 which surfaces just inside gate 6 within the market.

I now have a map (which I cannot remember the website I acquired it from) which I will post here:

The Sungnyemun Import market is in the North West corner and if you are interested in buying protein powder or other supplements there are 2 guys down there I have found. here are the directions to the guy I purchased from:

Go directly down the stairs of the entrance that faces the market (east side of the import market building). Take an immediate right and the first left and he will probably be reading the newspaper on top of his vitamin / supplement table.

The cost of my protein powder was 75,000 won and the glutamine was 40,000 won. I found this to be a pretty good deal as in New Zealand you can pay up to $60 for glutamine and around $100 for 5lb's of protein or approx 2.5kg's.

Taekwondo.

What was I thinking! The first training was a wake up call to my body as the day after I had back pain from all the stretching. I was training in the senior part of the class and was there again on Wednesday. The second time training was much easier as I guess my body got over the initial shock of exercise. I am planning to officially join on Monday. it is 150,000 won per 3 month period so that's not too bad and apparently the uniform (or gi I'm not sure if you call it that in Taekwondo) is 20,000. So I will be looking forward to wearing a white belt again which hopefully they will let me do.

Although I have a black belt in Shaolin Kempo; Taekwondo is totally different focusing mainly on kicks and flexibility so I am almost a total novice at this art.

I will post some pictures once everyone gets back into uniform (its so hot now that people generally wear only the pants of the uniform and a t-shirt or something similar).

The rest of the week was generally the same as other weeks although a girl at school had her birthday so there was a little class party and various food. Ddeokbokki was familiar to me but there were some other strange looking things which I tried. Liver which wasn't bad and ear... which was exactly as you could imagine ear to be like crunchy gristly with not much taste.

I have also finally done a video tour of the apartment which you can see here:

I also opened up a bank account with my alien card which I got this week and paid my gas and electricity bills.

Well I hate to tell you how much it cost me for a month of electricity and gas but:

Gas 2,530

Electricity 8,570

11,100 won

I given up converting but its probably around $12 or roughly $13 New Zealand.

So since I have an alien card I can do just about anything... which apart from opening a bank account, getting a cell phone and maybe a drivers licence I have no idea what else I can do with it...

So that's it for part 1 of my week. Now onto part 2 where I go to Dongdaemun with Dylan (another New Zealand teacher over here).

Flicker slide show part 1:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/50841302@N05/sets/72157624525800714/show