Edae + Yangnyeom Chicken

SEOUL | DAY 02

-BACK TO EDAE-

After safely coming back from Namsan, I made a stop at Edae to refuel myself. Since last time, I was there too early, I couldn't get the famous Egg Bread (계란빵) or the famous Chicken Skewer (닭꼬치). In order to accomplish my food mission in Korea, I'm back, Edae!!!

I got the egg bread from the food stall on the street from Edae metro station leading toward Edae.

The ahjumma out the Egg Bread in a cup and served me like this. So cute!

Excuse my ugly nails.

Anyway, the first bite was actually surprising to me because I didn't expect the Egg Bread to be sweet at all. Maybe I'm not American-washed enough to consider sweet stuff "breakfast". It wasn't bad though.

Because it was already late in the morning, a lot of shops had put out all the shoes, bags, and clothes out for sale, getting ready for the people to soon flood in.

I found an article about Edae's Chicken Skewer, so I decided to follow the guide. The food stall wasn't that hard to find. I don't think it's the same one as what I found on the internet because I was the only customer.

Maybe, I was there too early.

After using my broken Korean along with some hand-language, I ordered the spicy flavor Chicken Skewer. The ahjussi was so nice and very welcoming. He freshly grilled the chicken and handed it to me not too long afterward with the skewer nicely wrapped in a napkin.

The chicken was topped with juicy red sauce, mayonnaise, and cheese powder. I made a huge mistake by walking somewhere else after getting my chicken. I don't know if it is rude eating while walking here, but one thing I knew was that it was so hard eating chicken off a long skewer like this without having some sauce getting on your cheeks.

Normally, a food stall in Korea would provide scissors for you to cut off the part of the skewer that you have finished your food, so it's not too long. Well, I looked like a three-year-old girl eating this.

-HONGDAE-

So... after I was done with everything, I came back to Hongdae to shower and change. I got really sweaty from the hike, and I felt too disgusted with myself to go somewhere else like this. But before doing so, I decided to stop by Hongdae, the shopping area side. I walked in this area the night before, but it felt really different.

Hongdae at night is filled with drunkenness, nightclubs, beers, and Korean bbq. Hongdae during the daytime, instead, is filled with peace, refreshing feeling, cafes, and people coming to hang out and to shop.

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Another reason, I stopped by here first was that I didn't want to miss the Hongdae Free Market which is a marketplace for young artists (Hong Ik University is known for having good art programs). The market only opens on Saturdays from 1PM-6.30PM. Since I already had plans for the evening and had to go meet Tae soon, I didn't have any other time to stop by.

I arrived around 1PM, and many of the shops were still setting up, but it was a very cool place. The artists seem to be college students. There wasn't anything that particularly caught my eyes, so I just window-shopped and left.

-SINCHON-

After taking a shower, I left for Sin Chon, a metro station between Hongdae and Edae. Tae told me to come meet her here because she wanted to take me to a good chicken place.

Tae told me that Sinchon used to be like Edae and Hongdae to her mother's generation. It still seems like a popular place to young adults to me though. I guess it might have been because there was a cosplay event that day. A lot of people dressed up in their favorite anime characters. There were some popular cosplayers around there too.

Tae seemed to be very surprised. She'd never seen something like this before. Cosplay events, of course, are very normal to me since I used to do a lot of cosplays in my high-school era. I stopped not because I didn't like it anymore, but because I didn't have time to make my own costume and props. I have my last cosplay project in progress though. It's a duo Vocaloid cosplay project with a friend who is now doing graduate school in the UK. The project doesn't seem like it's going happen soon because we have breaks at the different time. The soonest I can see us coming together is probably when we both graduate from PhD program which is probably in 2021. #life

There was a lot of shops and restaurants in Sin Chon, but our mission was to eat

We went to the chicken place Tae was talking about, and they were closed even though they should have been open, according to Naver. Apparently, there's another branch in Hongdae.

-YANGNYEOM CHICKEN-

We took the metro to Hongdae and walked to "BBQ Chicken (BBQ 치킨)" which is not too far away from the Exit 3 or 4. There were no other customers except us, so we just sat down and talked while waiting for the chicken that took 30 mins to cook.

After we got the chicken, we went back to the Strip Garden to sit and eat on a bench - trying to blend in haha

It was kind of embarrassing because when you eat Yangnyeom Chicken (양념치킨), you gotta use your hands, right? I ate the chicken with my hands to enjoy all the flavor, but it so messy, and we were eating in the public with 5-10 people walking per minute. The chicken was good though. We got the hot pepper one. The chicken was crispy and sweet, which is typical for 양념치킨.

After we finished eating (but we got too full to finish the whole box), we went to check out a market in the Strip Garden and to go back to my apartment to drop off my laptop which I didn't why I decided to bring it with me in the first place.

The market was organized by Hong Ik University but not weekly like the Hongdae Flee Market. There were a lot of stuff including food, totes, car air freshener, jewelry and potted cactus which was super cute, but I wasn't sure if I could bring it back to Thailand with me. The guys who were selling cactus were so rude though. Because I was speaking English to my friend, they assumed we were both foreigners and didn't understand Korean. They jokingly asked each other how much they should say for the price, but Tae understood them very well #Ooops

I wasn't going to buy it anyway.