Seminar about Korean Wave and Traditional Local Korean dinner!!

Hello! Was quite lazy and was taking a break from blogging during Chinese New Year (excuse for all the excuses, ahem!)

3rd of Feb

Today, we attended a short seminar held in one of the prestigious university in Korea - Korea University!!! The topic of the seminar is "Everything You Wanted to Know about Hallyu" by Mr. Oh Ingyu, a professor specialised in Korean Wave. During the lecture, Mr Oh told us how Korean Wave started, the peak of Korean Wave, and a little about Korean Wave in the future.

To my surprised, Hallyu started from China and Japan and it became popular among them, typically young Chinese women and middle-aged Japanese women, who seeked to be free from melancholia (gender melancholia, racial melancholia and post-colonial melancholia) they faced. To cut the story short, the Japanese indulged in K-drama to be free from the tortured and dissatisfaction from their husband and the Chinese needed it to motivate them to study. 

Another huge discovery from this lecture was that the songwriter, composers and choreographers of K-pop are not of Korean nationality. The songs are bought by the producers from Western countries and after a little modifications the songs are then sung by the artists. This strategy is needed in order to allow K-pop to get into the global market (basically earning more money). Between artists and songwriters, songwriters earn more money although the artists are the ones who went through vigorous, hell-like training in order to present the songs to the audience. I found this to be a little frustrating. Yes, although without the songs, there is no use of artists, but without the artists, there is no use of songwriters as well. To top it of, the Korean songwriters could not gain much popularity compared to the Western songwriters without the help of Western entertainment (music) company. 

Thus, this leads to the popularity of Psy. According to Mr. Oh, Psy's popularity was not by accident. It was planned by the Western music company, who desperately need to earn money due to the decrease of business as a result of affordable self-recording tools, friendly-user video making apps and the easy to publicise video channel - Youtube. So, this music company found Psy's video and decided to make money from him by releasing his music in almost every part of their country. 

About the future of Hallyu, Mr Oh said that no matter which country's wave, they did not disappear, instead they are globalised to a bigger stage - Hollywood. 

In my opinion, it was a fruitful lecture as it deepens my understanding about K-wave. After the lecture, we had a small tour around Korea University, grabbed a little dinner, shopping in Lotte Mart and that ends my day.

Korea University!!

4th of Feb

Today, we were invited by the future president of AIESEC SNU to visit National Museum of Korea. It was located near Yongsan station and no entrance fee is needed. Although the time agreed was 3pm but we are never on time, we arrived at 3.30pm.

The architecture of the museum is amazing. It is spacious, modern and simple. It also has superb views around.

This museum has all the information you need to know about the history of Korea (different dynasties, origin of hangul, the process of making celadon pottery, the architectural style, technology, religion, etc.). Therefore, half a day is definitely not enough to thoroughly go through everything. We could only breeze through it, which was quite a waste. However, I was glad to see some of the things that I really wanted to see, like the celadon pottery (they even has a video on the process of making it).

All the history about Korea is accumulated in this area. There are so many things to see yet so little time to explore. At about 6 pm, we had to leave this place.

After the museum, we went to Namdaemun as our guide for the day has a special dinner recommendation for us. It  turned out to be what we were looking for - a restaurant that a tourist usually will not be going unless we were brought by a local.

The name of this restaurant - Kalguksu Jib

It looks like this from the back

The interior of this restaurant will actually make teenagers like us hesitate to go in. But, everything will be different if it is introduced by someone. The food here served in a set of 3 and all are carbohydrate food....

It costs only 4000 won for all three!!

The first 2 things they serve are:

Bibim Naengmyeon - Cold noodle

This dish is my favourite. Firstly, as the name of the noodle, it is a cold dish. I don't have to burn my tongue. Secondly, it tastes sweet, a little sour and a little spicy. Thirdly, the softness of the noodle is just right - springy!

Boribap - Barley rice

This is a type of bibimbap. The only difference is that the rice is replaced with barley and there is only seaweed instead of the usual ingredient of bibimbap (cucumber, carrot,...).The sauce they use is the same, sweet spicy sauce. It tastes good, but at the same time weird as it was my first time eating barley as rice.

Lastly, the main dish:

Kalguksu - they call it knife-cut noodles

This dish might be familiar to the Chinese as it is quite similar to the Chinese 板面. Though I don't really like the Chinese one, this dish is delicious. The texture of the noodles are strong, smooth, yet not soggy. The soup is quite different than the Chinese one, but I had no idea what material they used to make the soup but the soup fits well with the noodles.

Overall, we were very satisfied with this dinner. It is just that this set is too much for a person. So, if you want to have these dishes, bring a partner to share it with you. It is definitely a dinner worth to try! Why? It costs only 4000 won!!!