Thank You, Internet!

Not wanting to rely solely on the two friends I have in the city during my Seoul getaway, I turned to the Interwebs for additional accommodations. Traditional Korean guest houses look amazing, but they are a little out of my budget (even if I really took advantage of the free breakfast). I wouldn't have guessed it, but hostels are not that cheap, and at several you have to book a week ahead of time. Luckily I spend a lot of my time browsing this great blog, which happened to feature a video for the website Airbnb not long before the time I was trying to make my travel plans.

Rather than booking boring old hotels, people have been using this website since 2008 to stay in (usually) unique homes (sometimes with, sometimes without the owners) for low rates. It's a lot like Couchsurfing, but without the pay-it-forward attitude. These people want your money, but not that much of it. And since I've always been intimidated to make a Couchsurfing profile - you need to come up with lots of words about how fun-loving, spontaneous and well-traveled you are, with pictures to corroborate your story - this site was ideal: only a single photo and a brief overview of myself were required to start making inquiries.

Meat store! Please click to enlarge for detail. 

Everything quickly fell into place to stay with Jo-anna and Sanghyun for a night in their "Korean style apartment" in a "traditional neighborhood" of central Seoul. The posting said guests are welcome to join them for dinner, so I jumped on that. On my way to meet them at the subway station Jo-anna texted me, "Can you eat spicy Thai food?" and things were looking way up. They led me throught the narrow alleys of their neighborhood, past lots of large industrial equipment, meat shops and a truck leaking a big pool of blood. Fancy!

Once inside their snug 2-bedroom apartment, we were socked with the scent of the simmering curry. Jo-anna, a 25-year-old Boston native, is a private school English teacher and usually gets home from work around 10, leaving plenty of time for Sanghyun, a Korean textile salesman in his 30s, to concoct something great. After a 30-second tour we settled at the dining table on their bedroom floor for spicy soup, chicken curry and sake recently brought back from Jo-anna's recent trip to Japan. As the evening went on, many treats were shared - Korean raspberry wine, sake with gold flakes in it, desserts from Malaysia, garlic bread Sanghyun had whipped up, and some of their homemade yogurt. They told me of how they met when Jo-anna took Sanghyun's Korean class, but she was unimpressed by his dirty joke telling and lack of class structure. Eventually he won her over, or they wouldn't be telling me stories about antagonizing monkeys in Japan, being overcharged at attractions near the Great Wall of China, and Korean superstitions that dreams about teeth falling out mean that someone will die and that dreams about pigs and poop mean good fortune is coming.

Drawing from their extensive combined knowledge of the area (Jo-anna's been in Seoul for two and a half years), they gave me advice on how to get to the nearby markets, which palaces to check out, and where to find Russian bread. Sanghyun spoke English really well, but cracked everyone up when he sometimes used slightly-off phrases like, "I was really pissed out!" Somewhere between two and three a.m. we called it a night, but not before Jo-anna told me of the breakfast treats to which I could help myself (bread and brie! more yogurt!), showed me where she keeps her hair dryer, and assured me that she had set the floor heater to turn on only every ten minutes so I wouldn't boil on my mattress on the spare bedroom's floor. Hotel blackout curtains would've been nice on my window come morning, but I slept well (didn't dream of poop, unfortunately) and thought my stay was definitely worth all seventeen U.S. dollars I'd spent (including a $2 processing fee). It kind of felt like I'd stayed with old friends, so I had to stop myself from doing the dishes before I left.