Absolutely Fabulous

It is nearly 3 AM and Nicole needs to sleep, and that's probably a good idea for me as well, so this will have to be brief.

The start of my first day in Seoul: was put into a police car.

The end of my first day in Seoul: schmoozed at a private party for the people behind Seoul Fashion Week at WooBar inside W Hotel, the ritziest venue in the entire city.

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ADDENDUM [March 30]
Hmmm maybe I should explain that a lil' bit. No, Nicole & I were not arrested. Mr. Lee, the owner of the guest house where we're staying, gave us the name of a famous restaurant near Gyeongbok Palace and some vague directions, but once we got out of the subway and hit the streets we weren't all that sure of how to get there. Fortunately, Mr. Lee also wrote down the name of it in Korean, so we walked up to a police box and showed the paper and put on our best confused-foreigner faces. An officer motioned us out the door, so we figured he was just going to point us in the right direction, but no, he drove us there in his squad car instead.

Our streak of spectacular tourist luck lasted through the rest of the day and night, and has in fact continued on into today, but that's for another post. Last night culminated in our meeting one of Nicole's friends from our semester abroad in Japan and one of our Notre Dame friends, for catching up and drinks. We did not find out until the last minute - while we were in transit to the meeting place - that we would actually be meeting at the W Hotel, and that its famously schmancy WooBar was technically exclusively reserved for a Seoul Fashion Week party.

However, being the classy ladies that we are, we strutted right up to the front door, handed our coats to a smartly-dressed young lad, and assured the woman guarding the bar's perimeter that yes, we were guests of the party. I had a mojito so fresh and crisp I was sipping spearmint leaves through my straw. The four of us sat in egg-shaped chairs with techno-pop washing over us from the giant marble of a DJ booth in the corner. Probably the most hilariously surreal thing, though (I mean aside from the fact that we actually got into this place to begin with), was the giant, person-sized game of Jenga being played at the far end of the bar, next to a bay window with a spectacular hilltop view of Seoul.

At the opposite end of the social matrix, this morning I made friends with one of the clerks at a neighborhood grocer's down the road. I'm pretty sure the nashi he hand-selected for me was at least as big as, if not bigger than, the "large" ones being sold for 2,000 won, and I was only charged 1,000, which was the price listed for the "small" pears. Right now 100 yen ('bout a dollar) equals about 1,400 won. So, yeah, food, and everything else, is incredibly inexpensive here in one of the largest cities in the world.