South Korea Night 8: Itaewon

For our final dinner in Seoul, Dad took us all to a Korean BBQ restaurant. I had already been told by others that Korean BBQ is not quite the same as we have in the States. For one, it's more expensive. And secondly, you don't get near as much meat. But with that said, we still wanted to try it so we could compare for ourselves. The food was pretty good. We even had to order another plate of the short ribs for Andrew who devoured the meat.

After dinner, we got Andrew ready for a sleepover at Ngoai's and Papa's food. James and I were going to go out and experience Korean nightlife. I had hoped to get at least two dates in during our trip, but with Andrew's illness and jet lag, it was too hard. Papa was already dealing with jet lag himself and working a full day and getting sick. And I didn't want to add more to that with Andrew possibly keeping Papa up with his erratic sleeping pattern. But since Andrew was able to sleep through the night last night and with no nap today, I was hoping he would sleep well. And Papa could sleep later if he needed to since he didn't have to work the next day.

I had done some research about the nightlife in Seoul and had read that there are two pretty decent areas to go out. One is Gangnam and the other is Itaewon. Gangnam is more trendy right now. Itaewon is more Western as a lot of Americans frequent there. After talking to the hotel employees, they said both were good. But I think James was leaning more towards Itaewon since it is more low key. And since we haven't been to that area yet, I thought it would be good to check it out.

James and I walked up and down the streets checking out the various establishments and nothing really caught our fancy. We ended up going down a side street and came across a pub and a pretty crowded one at that. It was more crowded than any of the other places we had seen so we took that as a good sign. The pub was called Prost and it was totally like bars we have here. I even joked with James of the higher percentage of Anglos than we had seen in Seoul to date.

We walked up to the bar to get a drink and waited a good while before the bartender took our order. A gentlemen next to us told us that you have to be super aggressive to get your order in...even more aggressive than back home. We ended up talking to him and his girlfriend for a while. He is an Army helicopter pilot who lived in New York and had just gotten back from deployment in Iraq before having to some to Korea. They were really nice and friendly.

After a few drinks, we called it a night and tried to get a cab. Well, apparently many others had the same inclination. It must have taken us over half an hour to finally get a cab!!! But we finally made it back to the hotel.

Thanks to Ngoai and Papa for keeping Andrew for us!! I am glad we got to go out and have some quality couple time.