We’ve mentioned before that Hugh is a social butterfly and has many friends. He recently vlogged a night out and it gives a glimpse into the dynamic Hongdae night life. This was a Monday night!

I wasn’t feeling that well so I stayed home… we have Netflix now! Anyway in this video you can see the Korean style night life of moving from place to place all night. Restaurants, bars, street food etc.

Episode 3 of Seoul Life! Summer is getting hotter and we are still waiting for our air con to be installed…

We see a lot of friends in this episode and do a lot of things outside…. and eat lots of food!

The ongoing theme with Hugh! He either gets annoyed at people speaking banmal (informal language) with him because they think he is young, or he is happy about it… because they think he is young. This time the guy spoke banmal to Hugh because he thought he was his friend, and that’s fine between friends of the same age. By the way, Hongdae is a cool area where all the university kids hang out. (Great food there too).

He also spends half his time in Hongdae enjoying that he fits in fashion wise with his youthful looks and the other half of the time being annoyed at young people. Anyone who frequents Hongdae knows the Hongdae ‘uniform’ at the moment: those Timberland type shoes, a bomber jacket and hair either styled up in the 2 block cut or down in the ‘lego’ hair.

Being in your 30’s is a strange time. Not a young person but not yet an ahjussi.

(This happened on the weekend and Hugh couldn’t wait to tell me that someone mistook him for a friend that is a decade younger).

This was filmed at the end of November during the Eat Your Kimchi closing studio party. We were sad to say goodbye to the studio, but it was a great party! A lot of the costumes and weird stuff were there for anyone to use so Amber, from the very popular girl group f(x) and Toy, a rapper you may have seen on Show Me The Money 3, decided to dress up and go for a bit of a walk around Hongdae. Joel, often seen on the Korean Englishman’s channel, was also there! It was spur of the moment idea to film it, and we didn’t plan on using the footage, but later realised we could make it into a video. So here it is!

While in Seoul we’ve been working as normal so we don’t actually get to go out that often. If I vlogged everyday it would be just boring footage of us working on laptops haha. On this day we went and filmed in the Eat Your Kimchi studio as Simon and Martina very nicely let us use it and we got to do some stuff in Hongedae.

There is also a new vlog up on our Nicholalala Vlogging channel. Subscribe to see these videos as soon as they are uploaded.

This was amusing to me because usually I’m the one that is horrified by weird food combinations in Korea, but this time he was annoyed by an unusual combination. To me the hotteok tasted really good, it was nice and savoury. But for him it was sacrilege. He insisted that hotteok is supposed to be sweet. There are definitely more unusual combinations of Korean food in Seoul, but the strange combinations of Western food has infiltrated all of Korea. Like the sugar on garlic bread, or corn and broccoli on pizza, and don’t even get me started on Italian food.

Also the mixing of Korean and foreign food can go horribly wrong. The word “fusion” used to seem exciting and promising to me, but these days it makes me shudder. I’ve had way too many bad experiences with fusion food.

He was so outraged by this hottoek. He even tasted it and said it tasted terrible, but to me it was pretty good! Hopefully there is a little bit more understanding between us about what it’s like seeing your culture’s food combined in a weird way.

This japchae hotteok is sold in Hongdae and we spent quite a lot of time in Hongdae on our recent trip to Seoul. Here is the first vlog from our trip:

We’ve had a really great time in Seoul, even though it’s so cold! And I’ve experienced some Christmas spirit. I helped our friends (Simon and Martina) decorate their tree and apartment for Christmas. Right now we are listening to Christmas carols and Martina is making hot chocolate! Stay tuned for more vlogs.

There may be more of these vlog style videos coming soon as we’ll be travelling with my brother and sister.