I think I've fallen into a bit of a pattern. Namely, spend one weekend in Icheon, and then head into Seoul for the next. It's alright, I suppose- if anything, it's cheaper than heading into Seoul EVERY weekend, or something. However, my Cousin's leaving Korea soon, so I won't have her couch to crash on, so my Seoul adventures may be slightly curtailed. That, and it's getting colder, so roaming around the streets has less of an appeal.

Anyway! The Icheon part! On the 20th or so, I hit up Icheon's 'cerapia-' basically, it's a city park/museum/mall thing, devoted to ceramics. It's sort of the town's gimmick, I guess. I went around a little bit, took some pictures. There were some big ceramic sculptures, a thing made to look like a giant kiln, and a little shopping store where one could buy said ceramic stuff- most of which was fairly pricey, as one would expect. I'm sure if I was more interested in ceramics, I'd be fascinated.

There was also a big ceramics museum thing, where, from what I gathered, they actually had people making ceramics or something- but, they were charging admission...and again, I'm not that interested in pottery. Instead, I wandered down the hill to the Icheon city museum. Nothing like the City Museum in St. Louis, of course.

The Icheon museum was small, but kind of interesting. There's some fortress ruins dating back to the three kingdoms period up in the mountains...and other than that, well, it seemed Icheon wasn't a particularly important locale since then. It's developing quickly, though, with a bunch of agriculture and other industry popping up.

Including an OB brewery. I don't think they give tours.

Aaaaanyway, let's move on to the more interesting stuff!

Namely, I spent last Saturday night bouncing from place to place in Hongdae. Again. It was actually a little warmer than I'd expected. I caught the tail end of a flea market, where I picked up a pretty neat handcrafted, leatherbound notebook. I'm almost a little afraid to write in it, as it's fairly nice. Maybe if I go charging off on some quest for the holy grail or something, I'll be able to make use of it. Heh.

Dunkel! That's thick enough it counts as dinner, right?

Also, while wandering about in search of food, I happened on the Queen's Head brewpub. Neat! This was the last of Seoul's microbreweries I hadn't dropped into (yet, at least). All I had time to try was the Dunkel, but it was the perfect beer to have on a cool night like that.

Other Hongdae highlights include seeing some Korean musicians jamming out in the park, with each taking their turn at the spotlight. For example, one woman in the group was a really good tap-dancer, and the drummer was pretty good at freestyle beatboxing. I snapped a few pictures, but it was one of those 'you had to be there' moments.

There's also the Silent Disco, which I didn't go to (I'm not a big fan of dance music to begin with), but I can't help but find it to be a cool concept. Basically, you get a pair of headphones and a balloon, and the music is broadcasted through short-band radio. If you have headphones, you know what's going on- if not, you just see...this.

Kind of a neat concept, really! Finally, I spent most of my evening in Club Spot, which is the best place to see live indie music in Korea. They had a whole mess of bands from all over Korea (and a few from Japan) for what they called an Oi! Festival, despite only having one Oi band on the bill. Even still, that was fine with me, as that left room for everything from 70's style punk (The Swindlers) to Flogging Molly-esque Celtic Rock (Nacho Pupa) to Ska (Rollings & Skasucks) and probably a bunch of other genres that I'm forgetting. It was loud and rowdy and otherwise a good time. I'll spare you my crappy, quicky-snapped pictures I took that night, except for one.

Y'see, at Club Spot, it's okay to jump up on the stage while a band's playing, so long as you fill at least one of two criteria: 1) Know the words to the song, 2) Dance really, really hard. (There might be a third option of 'being a cute girl' as well). So, during Skasucks' last song, I made it a point to do number two- whereupon I managed to snap this picture. Good times!