One of the rewarding things about doing the course in Oxford, is the people that I am meeting and the experiences that we share. There is an incredibly great richness to the experiences and knowledge of the members of the cohort.
Just prior to leaving Korea I received a message from a member of the cohort saying that he would be on Seoul and would we like to catch up. As it happened he was arriving with his daughter the day before we were due to leave Korea for good. This may sound like an inconvenient time but in fact it was the opposite, instead of being bored round the hotel waiting to leave we had a mission, organise the evening and have a good night out.
We duly organised to meet, and subsequently meat, at entrance 1 to Seoul Station. Then we were off to Namdaemun markets with the plan to eat marinated boiled pig trotters (chokbal 촉발). As usual we got a little lost, as there are a myriad of little side streets that all look the same to me, so to keep the kids going we had some Korean street food, a seafood pancake (hemulpajon 해물파전 ) and some octopus and then some sweet filled pancakes (hudeok 호떡 ) for desert. Then after walking, talking and looking at the markets for a while we came to the chokbal 촉발 restaurants that we had planned to go to.
We sat down and ate the chokbal 촉발, rice and drank soju, talked about many things, work, travel, Korea, France, culture and many other things, however the one subject we did not cover was the upcoming EXAM. It was a wonderful evening,and it was very nice be able to introduce one of my class mates and his family to something that was very Korean and they may not have tried otherwise and it was great to learn about his family and life
tubbytraveler 