Gangnam Day

The Gangnam district was a place I had always wanted to visit and I got the chance to this past weekend. Let's all relive it, shall we?

After an hour or so going the longer way on Line 2 from Sinchon to Gangnam (purely by accident), we arrive at the COEX mall. My knowledge of the COEX mall before entering was the floor to ceiling bookshelves. I was pretty excited to see the Starfield Library, as I had seen so many beautiful photos on my friend's Instagram. 

It was... underwhelming? Perhaps it was the expectations that this mall was going to change my life or was it the fact that I had wanted to go here for so long, my dreams were crushed, much to my dismay. Our first stop was the Starfield Library. It was hard to miss, especially since there was a gigantic glowing Christmas Tree inside. Snowflakes were hanging from the ceiling and there was two visible tables with books. The walls were filled with books but for some reason, I found this to be one of the most impractical bookstores. Mayhap there was a computer or some sort of organizing technology that I was not aware of, but as beautiful as it is, it was impractical and was a complete disadvantage to short people, ones such as I.  

I saw people sitting on the sides with books, some reading them or some with just books near them. I believe the ones having the books near them were absorbing the material in the book, into their skin which will make their way to the bloodstream and then to their brain, making them more intelligent and more wise the longer they sit there. 

After our quick glance and photo-op at the Library, which was also the largest bookstore and library I have ever been to, we walked to a store where there were mystery figures in boxes and yes, I do have an addiction to gambling but I held myself back and only bought two boxes. Then, we sat down where I found out the side hustle of COEX mall, advertisements. 

There, on the large screen where people were sitting to catch their breath and rest and where we were greedily opening our mystery boxes to see if we got the figurines we wanted, were large advertisements playing. 

After, we were starved so we head to a restaurant were there was room and had decent, broke college kid prices. We find a nice little Japanese restaurant where I eat a cheesy tonkatsu, my first one in Korea. Something else I noticed about Korean malls is that their food courts are not like the States. They are restaurants, rather than stands or stalls with a communal eating space. 

The introverted trio (my friends and I) decide that the mall was too draining so we made our way to some entertainment industry buildings. While doing research on the bus, we saw that the Big 3 were not in Gangnam, so we headed to A Team, an agency that my friend from the States wanted me to visit. On the way we found some very interesting things.

First was an extremely fancy laundry mat. It was stainless steal and the materials was "Absolute High-End". I have never, in my life, seen something like this. 

Above are some interesting buildings we saw. 

We also stumbled upon FNC entertainment who is in charge of Cherry Bullet, SF9, F.T Island, CNBlue, N. Flying, and others, and A Team, the agency my friend wanted me to take photos of. 

Overall, the district reminded me of other districts except extremely high-end. COEX was a huge fascination since I did not understand why there is a rumor that SM entertainment owns COEX, as I had thought that SM did own COEX but after checking my facts for this blog, they actually do not. Perhaps it was the SM COEX Atrium (which closed last year) that muddled the truth. 

On the way back we watched the end of the first and the start of the second episode of Arcane on someone's phone.