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2013/08/14

Why Korea is awesome: Travel Maker, a Traveller's Café

This will probably be a very short post, but I felt like this café really deserves its own post.
This café was on the way from my hostel to the subway station, and what makes it special are...
pancakes.
Most cafés on Korea offer waffles, that huge korean version of toast (aka "bread") but not pancakes.
So one day on the way to the subway station we decided to eat brunch there.
Also another thing that makes it special:
It opens quite early (for Korea), at 9am if I remember it correctly. 

How to get there:
Go to Hongik Station
Get out of Exit 3
Walk straight, it should be on the left side of the road.


It's small, but nice ^^  The owner is really nice too, and he speaks English!
The menu is written in 4 languages!
A perfect place for travellers who don't know Korean ^^ 
And, if you go there on the day you leave Korea and show your flight ticket, you even get 50% off the price of all drinks. 

That's the menu, click on it to enlarge it.

The prices for everything are perfectly reasonable, and they have lots of yummy food to try.


You can even get an "Obama breakfast". I guess this means American style breakfast? ^^ 
Which is great, because you probably will have a hard time finding this kind of breakfast in any other café in Korea.


Yummy ice-tea for 2,000Won


So refreshing~ x3


I chose the banana and strawberries pancakes :D They were less than 5,000Won
They were really yummy, even though the strawberries weren't fresh strawberries. But fruits are really expensive in Korea, so that's okay.


Bonus:
Teddy Bears in a gas station near the café.


I hope you enjoyed this post ^^ 
2013/08/11

Why Korea is awesome: Cute Cafés in Samcheongdong

Why yes, I am extremely slow with posting.
Sorry guys T^T
I already came back from my trip two months ago but I still didn't write about half of the things I wanted to write about. Oops.

Anyways...tell me, about which areas of Seoul did you guys hear before?
Gangnam for sure, the "rich" district.
Itaewon, the foreigner district.
Insadong, perfect place for souvenir shopping.
Hongdae, the artsy college area with lots of cafés and clubs.
But did you know there's another area that has lots of cute cafés and art galleries too?

It's called 삼청동.

I first found out about this place when I watched EatYourKimchi's video about it.
Even if you're not particularly interested in arts and art galleries (I didn't visit any of those), it's still a nice place to visit. And it's very conveniently located, just opposite of famous Insadong and not far away from Gyeongbokgung palace, so if you're in that area, why not check it out anyways?

How to get there:
Take subway Line 3 to Anguk Station.
Get out from Exit 1.
Go straight for about 100m until you see this : 


Insadong-gil should be just on the other side of the street.
Follow this alley located between two schools and find cute restaurants at first, then keep walking and find art galleries and interesting shops. 


The alley itself is really beautiful.




Onto the cute cafés~
This one was my favourite.



It's located very close to the beginning of the alley, you won't miss it.


(Photo spam ahead)
2013/07/28

China Haul Pt. 1 : Cosmetics

I was really~ looking forward to going shopping in Watsons and at Sasa but...
those were scary.
So many sales assistants trying to sell you stuff, testing things on your hand while talking to you in fast Chinese even though you told them before that your Chinese is not very good...it was scary, really.
I just wanted to look around by myself T^T Then I would definitely have bought more, especially in the sheet mask section.
There was only one Watsons in which I was able to shop freely, which is where I bought most of my stuff ^^

Anyways~ onto the goodies :D



Sheet Masks~
Except for the My Beauty Diary Mask and the L'Herboflore mask I bought all of those at a stationary store so~ i'm not so sure if they're good quality. But the designs were so cute x3 
So I couldn't resist. Oops. They were cheap though, mostly under 4 yuan.
I'll try to do reviews of all of them ^^


Bought those two in a Watsons. I read about limi before I went to China, but I was not prepared for that small corner of affordable, cute cosmetics within Watsons x3
Bought their Red Apple Whitening Eye Mask for my super dark circles, and their Tea Tree Whisper Acne-Control emulsion.


Aaaand my most interesting find in China. Does this remind you of something?
Tony Moly's Bunny Gloss Bar, by chance? 


Most of the writing is gone but it says "Cute Rabbit (something i can't read anymore) Light Colour Lip Stick" on top, and it had Holika Holika's witch logo next to it.
Right under it, it used to say "DoDo House".
I'm sitll impressed by how they managed to fake three different brands in one article.


I quite like it though, it was only 15 yuan (about 2€) and the colour is really natural looking ^^


I think I bought those at Sasa...?
EOS famous lipbalm in Summer Fruits (or something like that) and a green tea eye mask. I had two more of the eye masks because they had a 3 For 1 event going on, so now I have one left over ^^'

That's it~ Not very much, but my clothing and stationnary haul is a lot~ more.
Thanks for reading ^^




2013/07/09

Why Korea is awesome: Supermarkets

I know this sounds very random.
But supermarkets in Korea are really~ interesting.
During the time I stayed there, there were about 2-3 days where it was raining.
And rain in Korea means rain for 24 hours nonstop T^T
So I was stuck in the guesthouse, not really knowing what to do.
The owner of the guesthouse where I was staying were super nice, and since they had to go out for grocery shopping they asked me if I wanted to come along. Since I had nothing else to do anyways, I agreed to go to  the Homeplus at the Worldcup stadium with them.
Just going grocery shopping sounds boring, but actually I really~ like to explore supermarkets when I'm abroad. All the interesting snacks you can buy... *-*


Well-known snacks like Tacos and Doritos~



Angry birds snack.


빼빼로 *Q*


Really famous brownies that are really expensive and don't taste that different from other brownies .


Those were huge~ who would need this much? xD

Also cute things like..


Adorable fishies.


뽀로로 drink~ 


Lots of 라면 of course.


Expensive spam. I still don't get why Korea gets so crazy over spam @.@


Aisle of spicy yummyness~


Kimchi~


Lots of rice :o

The amount of Yakult and yoghurt/milk drinks they have is quite impressing.


Laughing cow.


Expensive fruits. The prices still amaze me, how can fruits be so expensive? ;_;


Korean supermarkets are not that different from those in Germany.
However, one thing I really like about them is that you can try so much food there.
New pastries in that corner, grilled meat over there.
It's nice just strolling through the supermarket and actually being able to try things before you buy them.

Also, Homeplus sells a lot of stuff you probably won't find in the supermarkets here.

Like clocks.
Cute clocks.


(cute expensive clocks)


Or different, cute pillows. 


They also have small cosmetics stalls inside of Homeplus.

And another difference:
Celebrities promoting stuff




Almost bought more banana milk because of Wonbin.

That's it for my random photo spam of the day~
I would have preferred to blog about my experiences in Asia in a diary style, but there were so many days where I barely did anything that it would be very boring. That's why those blog posts are like this ^^

Thanks for reading, I would appreciate if you would leave a comment below :D









2013/07/01

Korea Haul Part 1: Cosmetics&Skincare

I'm talking about cosmetics again. Yay or Nay?

I bought a lot less than I planned to, mainly because in the middle of my vacation I encountered some problems with my credit card...and after that, I was getting paranoid about it maybe not working again so I tried to not spend too much money T^T
Also I restricted myself to small and light items because my luggage was already at its limits when I arrived in Seoul ._.


Everything that I bought



All samples ^^ 

2013/06/18

Why Korea is awesome: Dog Cafés (or why Sunnye Pet Café might not be the best choice)

Hey everyone~ 
If you noticed, my last blog post and this one have weird titles right? 
That's because I'm trying to write about all~ the stuff that happened in Korea and China, so as not to make it confusing, I tried to think of a title for a blog series. 
I'm not very creative, aren't I?
So all posts about China will be titled with "Why I love China" and all posts about Korea with  "Why Korea is awesome".  They will be uploaded in no particular order. ^^

Back to the main topic: Dog Cafés. 
I already did a photo spam of cat cafés, but last year I didn't get the chance to go to a dog café. They basically have the same concept like cat cafés:
You buy an overpriced drink (usually 8000Won), play with the pets and stay as long as you want to.

We tried to go to Bau House last year already, but never found it as we didn't know back then that it moved from Hongdae to Hapjeong. This time we had the correct adress and directions (yay) but~ we were lazy. So instead of taking the metro for one station to go to Hapjeong, my awesome roommates and I decided to go to Sunnyne Pet Café instead, which is located near exit 5 of Hongik Station. Now here's the problem: Exit 5 is in the airport line section of the subway station, which means you have to pay the usual basic fare if you want to reach exit 5 through walking underground. So instead, we tried to find it without going through the subway station and we got a tiny bit lost...so when we arrived, it was already around 9 and the dog café closes at 10pm...we only had one hour there T^T

This is what Sunnye looks like:


Some cheap couches, tables and a lot~ of dogs.
The entrance/exit is seperated from the inside through two doors, the main door (aka the door that seperated the café from the stairway of the building) and a smaller gate/door thingy that keeps the dogs from running up to you as soon as you enter. They will notice you right away though, and every time a new customer arrives it gets really~ loud.


As soon as you open the gate and step inside, sit down on the small couch next to the gate.
As soon as you sit, the dogs will calm down and accept you as a guest. They might still be really curious and gather around you, but they will stop barking. If you keep standing, they see you as an intruder and keep barking and jumping up on you. So do everyone a favor and sit down quickly like the staff tell you to :D

What happens when someone new comes in.

Or, in general: always listen to the staff.
I'm not sure about Bau house, but at Sunnye they didn't know how to speak English at all...so maybe just follow whatever they do? Communication through hand gestures works wonders ^^ The general rules should be similiar to cat cafés:
-No flash when taking photos (bad for the eyes of the doggies)
-Don't pick the small dogs up (They will hop onto your lap if they want to)
-Don't pull their tails
-Don't give them your drink, or any food that is not purchased within the café
-Take care of your belongings (dogs might pee on them. there's no room to store your bag, so always keep it with you)

and last but not least:
-Be careful not to get run over by the giant dog.
Yes I just made that rule up.
But seriously, look at this:


He almost reached my waist o.o I'm quite small but still...this dog is huge~ 
And quite clumsy. So be careful :P

For comparison, that's the dog sitting on a regular couch:


See that small, round dog at his feet? This dog was so~ chubby, it looked really funny when it was walking.
And somehow, it liked us a lot~
We were trying to get the cute dogs to our table to take photos, but only this one appeared xD


Well....at least he was nice?


More photos of dogs:


This one really needs a haircut, he could barely see T^T



Napping on the table~


Napping under our table.



Let me pet you~


(Tiny) king of the world~


This one was so fluffy x3


Falling asleep....soon.



And last but not least....the funniest sleeping pose out of all dogs. xD

As you can see, I didn't take that many photos. Mainly because dogs move a lot faster than cats when they decide to get up from their beauty sleep, and also because I didn't have much time in the café.

For someone like me who misses his dogs at home (like I did), this place is great~
but....
it's not very clean.
Maybe it was because closing time was soon, but the staffs were kind of lazy with cleaning up after the dogs.
Sometimes when an 'accident' happened, they cleaned up immediately.
Sometimes they saw it but took at least 5 minutes before cleaning up.
And most of the time, they didn't even see it because all staffs were staying behind the counter/in the other corner of the café. So the smell was a little....well, not so nice.
I'm not sure whether Bau House is better in that aspect or not, but whenever I read blog posts from people who went there they always mentioned that it was very clean for a dog café.
So, if you're not as dog crazy as I am, you might better want to head to Bau house for your first dog café experience ^^

Did you ever go to a dog café? If yes, which one and how was it? Please tell me in the comments ^^