K-Pop Dancing in Daegu!

Hi everyone!


As promised so long ago, here is my blog about K-Pop dancing!


First of all, what is K-Pop?? Well, it's Korean Pop music. When I say that k-pop is super popular and the k-pop singer/performers are famous, I mean that K-Pop is literally everywhere and the singers become the celebrity crushes of practically everyone. You cannot walk down the street without hearing a K-Pop song coming out from the stores (especially cell phone stores). The songs are crazy popular!! A song will be released and suddenly, it is everywhere. Each week or so, a new song is released. These singers grow up in the k-pop business, training for many years before they become part of a group to eventually release songs. They perform the songs on famous tv shows and events. The dance choreography to these k-pop songs become the "it choreo" of the moment. I heard that the choreo is available to dance instructors so that they can learn it to teach at their studios. Anyway, the choreo to the K-Pop music is what I learn in my K-Pop dance class!!!


My dance instructor at G-Style Dance studio at Sinmae is amazing :) She is sooooo good at breaking down the choreo into more simple pieces before putting it all together in a sequence. AND, thanks to her, I know how to count 1-8 and know the words for left, right, and applaud :) She learns the choreo so quickly that the week after a new song is released, we learn the choreo in class. She teaches us at a relatively slow pace (according to the overall level of dancers in the class) and it takes 1-2wks to learn. Because it is choreo that the singers do while performing, it is usually pretty simple. The best one was to "Breakdown"  by Kim Hyun-Joong. I hate to admit it, but the male K-Pop choreo is so much more fun! I think because the a lot of the female choreo is cutesy/sexy. When a song is not released during the week, she creates her own choreo to other songs. This week was to "On the Floor" by J-Lo! SOOOOO much fun!!!!! Sometimes, my teacher videos the class doing the choreo when it is finished and almost always, she posts her dancing the choreo so the people in the class can go to her studio website and practice. 


You can check out the K-Pop music/choreo at: http://club.cyworld.com/gstyledance
On the left, under "My Dance STYLE is G", click "master move" to see her dance. Click "members move" to see the K-Pop classes! Sometimes I'm in it--just depends which class she records. Oh ya, that's the other thing. There are 8 K-Pop classes during the week. I pay for 3 classes/wk and I get to choose which ones I go to! Usually, I go to Tues/Thurs at 8 and Fri at 7 mostly because the studio is 15mins away and it's difficult to come home from school at 5, make dinner, eat dinner and leave my apt by 6:40 to get to a 7pm class. 


Anyway, K-Pop dancing is a lot of fun. An added bonus is that I keep up with the newest K-Pop songs. Unlike the US, the songs are super popular here for a couple weeks before it gets fazed out for the new releases. Without my class, it would be much more difficult to know what is still popular, what is brand new, and what is considered "old" already. 


And that's my post about K-Pop dancing!  Bye everyone!

View from the studio window! (Studio is 7th floor at the Sinmae main intersection)

Sorry it's blurry. This is the amazingly clean floor and mirrors!

The waiting/relaxing area in the entrance.

G-Style Dance (written in Hangul) the door!

2011 Boryeong Mud Festival!!

Wow, so this weekend was probably one of the best weekends we've had in Korea so far. We went to Boryeong for their annual mud festival. If you're wondering what a mud festival, it pretty much is exactly what it sounds like. A festival dedicated completely to mud, and getting covered in it! But lets start at the beginning.

We had signed up for this trip 2-3 months ago. We had heard that if there was one festival to not miss in Korea, it would be this one. So we signed up, and after months of waiting, last Friday it was finally time to go. My bad, Saturday. We booked our trip through a tour company called Adventure Korea. I really have to tip my hat to them. The trip was so well-organized, and everything went so smoothly. They got us our motel room, the buses left on time, and it was just a really well-planned event. Jenn and I are definitely going to look to them first anytime we are looking for a tour company. They really were just amazing.

Before

Anyways, we left Saturday on the buses at 7:30 in the morning. Pretty early, but Boryeong is 3 hours away from Daegu, so we knew why we left. We went with two of our friends, and also met up with a lot of our other friends once we got there. Before we got to the festival, Adventure Korea had set up a little event for all of its participants. We got to check out these awesome mud flats about 10 minutes away by bus from the main festival area. We got there, they gave us army fatigues and black shirts, and had 4 different events for us. There was mud soccer, mud boot camp, mud wrestling, and mud pyramids. We didn't get enough time to do the mud pyramid, but we did everything else, and it was really fun. For mud boot camp, we had this really buff Korean dude yelling at us to do push ups in the mud, roll around in the mud, crawl in the mud, and he was really funny and awesome! Halfway through the whole thing, it started raining, but the thing is, it felt great! Keep in mind it was already like 85 degrees out or so, and the rain provided a much needed cool down. And what makes mud even better anyways? Rain of course!

After!

After our little field trip, we got cleaned up and piled back on the bus. The bus then took us to our motel, and we checked in. After that, we went exploring! Our hotel was literally right next to the beach so we got out and there was a boardwalk right next to it. Along the boardwalk there were many restaurants, all selling really good looking seafood (which we can't eat cause Jenn doesn't eat sea food) and really good Korean bbq (which we did eat, delicious!). After lunch, we kept walking toward the main festival area. So there is the beach, the boardwalk and then the mud park. Which cost us some money to get in (first time they charged for mud park apparently) but I'd say that it was well worth it. Inside this mud park there was mud slides, mud wrestling, mud prison (go inside and they splash mud on you), mud tug of war, mud obstacle course, mud race, mud everything! The only annoying part were the lines, but we didn't mind waiting too bad. We did everything of course, except for mud wrestling. Outside of the mud park, there was mud painting (with different colored muds) and a bunch of food, souvenir, and mud cosmetic tents. And the beach of course. After we spent a good amount of time in the mud park, we went to clean ourselves off. Because we were covered in mud! So we walked out of the mud park, and into the ocean. Just awesome. Water felt great, and we were clean in no time. We chilled in the ocean for a while, then went back to the motel to shower and get ready for dinner.

After meeting up with a friend for dinner, and waiting forever for our food, we left the restaurant at around 10 or so. We decided to go get some snacks, desserts, and drinks and go relax on the beach. The beach was huge, and the coolest part was that they prepared for all the people, so there were huge floodlights everywhere that illuminated the beach for everyone. At 10 pm at night! On our way to meet up with some more friends, we walked past a concert. With famous pop stars! So we watched that for a bit and then kept heading toward our friends. Then we got distracted again. By a firework show! It was a dang good one too, and completely random at like 1030 at night! Eventually, we made our way onto the beach, relaxed, talked, and had a good time. Around 2:30, we called it a night and headed back to the motel. And of course, the beach and boardwalk area were still packed full of tourists and people. But we were tired!

Next day was a lot more of the same. We woke up, hit the mud park up, and went to the beach. It was warmer on Sunday so we stayed in the ocean a little while longer. Then at 3:50, we headed back to our tour bus and left Boryeong. It was a wonderful weekend, and something that I will never, ever forget. I'm going to join in with the rest of the foreigners here and tell everyone this, if there is one festival that you have to go to in Korea, make it the Boryeong Mud Festival!!! Oh, and all these pictures were taken with Jenn's camera and an amazing waterproof case! Bye!

Exploring our City

Figuratively speaking of course. It's not really ours. Anyways, Saturday was a beautiful day in Daegu! The weather was a nice, hot 85 degrees or so. Humidity was high as usual, but I'm getting used to it just fine. So we decided today that we wanted to check out Bukbu bus station. Apparently, near this station is a international market of sorts. Here is where you were supposed to be able to find Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, etc. cooking ingredients, and restaurants. We met up with our friend from San Diego (California represent!) and got on a bus near our apartment. The bus ride took about an hour, and when we got off, we looked around for this market.

Bukbu Bus Station!

We saw a lot of international food stores. They had authentic Indian curry, long-grained rice, Vietnamese stuff, Chinese stuff, everything. It was nice to see all the diversity and food stuffs. But...we were hungry, and we had heard that this area had a real authentic Chinese restaurant. What do we mean by that? Well, in the states, there is Chinese food right? But for the most part, it's Chinese-American. Meaning that it is Chinese food..sort of. But it has it's own American twist. Because you'd be mistaken if you ever thought Panda Express was authentic Chinese food. It doesn't even come close! Anyways, my point is this, Korea is the same way. Korean-Chinese food is good, just not authentic Chinese. So yes, we searched a lot of the Chinese restaurants, and we finally found one. Our friend figured it was authentic because the menu and name was Chinese, and not Korean. (She knows how to speak and read Chinese!). We sat down and pretty much let our friend order for us, because we had no idea what was on the menu. What we ended up with was pretty darn delicious. Stir-fried beef, pork with vegetables, and some rice. Best Chinese food I've had since I've been here, and closest I've gotten to the authentic Chinese restaurants in California (Sam Woo, Yank Sing, etc.). 

After our delicious meal, we walked around and checked out some more goods. Jenn and I finally found some Jasmine rice, which I have been looking for...for a really long time. Korean rice is fine, but its a little bigger and stickier. Jasmine rice is just so much better, and we were super excited to find it. After that, we took the bus back home. 

Then, we met up with some of our other friends a couple hours later for dinner (Chilli Cheese burger and hot wings), and went to watch the new Transformers movie. It was awesome, but it also disappointed me some. But I could write a whole blog post about that, and since that has nothing to do with Korea (and would probably not interest anyone who didn't live and breathe Transformers like I did), Im not gonna write it. Hehe. That was our Saturday!