Meeting with new friends~

We've been getting to sleep later and later... which means we got up later and later :(

Finally got up around 11am this morning. Joyce took a shower, and we headed to Gangnam to meet some new friends. The first one we met was named Jeff, which is my Korean friend in America's friend from work. It turned out that my Korean friend, Jeff, and the person we met yesterday for BBQ, all work at this company called Solvay..... which is the company that bought my former company, Cytec! What a small world! When he told me that he is an engineer at a company, I told him that I was an engineer for 9 years too. He asked me what field I worked in, I figured that no one would really know what it is, so I just said it was a company that made material for aerospace company. He asked if it were parts, I said no, it's the material that goes into making parts. And then he said, "so you worked for Cytec?" I was like.... what the? How did you know?! He said he works for Solvay, and I knew from my old co-workers that this is the company who bought Cytec a year after I left. Wow.... small world. Well, if you get into that niche market, there are really only a few dominant players... but who knew that we would have all been working in the same industry!

We met at Coffee Smith again.... and all I have to say is, it is not my favorite place to drink coffee. Their coffee shop is huge and it's a nice place to meet people, but their drinks (I've only tried the non-coffee ones) are not great. And it's super expensive. Their watermelon juice is 6,000 won. Seriously. I can probably buy half a watermelon for that price. Joyce got this personal sized bingsu, but I think the place we ate the other day was much better.

It was really hot today.... probably close to 100F in Seoul. So after meeting Jeff and his friend, we decided to chill at the nearby Kyobo tower in Gangnam until we meet our other friend for dinner at 5pm. Before we got to Kyobo tower, I saw this place!!

What the heck? Are you serious?! Magnum?! I thought they only sold ice cream to grocery stores! Why do they have an actual ice cream shop in Seoul?! And this place is so bling that we felt like it is the Las Vegas of ice cream....

You can customize your ice cream, from the topping, bar, coating, to the drip. For the topping, you can choose three out of all the selections they have. It's quite amazing...

The customized ice cream bar is only 5,500 won. I know it's a bit pricey, but all things considered, I think it's still worth the price. For the experience.

This place is seriously so bling that they even have a light box for you to take pictures of your ice cream creation!

Serious amount of photoshoot for my ice cream. So much so that by the time I started eating it, the ice cream was a bit melted inside. Bleh.

For my ice cream, I got three toppings: roasted almond, cocoa nibs, and some dark chocolate shavings. It was vanilla ice cream (real vanilla, mind you, with vanilla seeds. And we all know how much vanilla cost these days....), with dark chocolate coating (it's gotta be dark chocolate), and milk chocolate drizzle (because you gotta have some contrast). It was quite good. Mostly for the experience.

They also have some super fancy ready-made ice cream bars. And they even sell a set of it. I wonder who's gonna buy it in such hot weather. Aren't they gonna melt?!

We're satisfied with our ice cream bars.

After the ice cream excursion, we finally made it to Kyobo to buy some Korean language books. Joyce got two books to start learning Korean.... for the next four days -_-.

We then met up with our newly acquired friend, Brianna, who we met through the language cafe we worked at for 5 days. Haha. We did meet some nice people over there! (she's the nice Korean girl sitting behind me). Please ignore that bandaid on her head. She had a scar from something she doesn't know and just wanted to cover it up.

She took us to this good Italian restaurant called Bobired (I really don't know how to read the name). It's good, but I think it could do with some more cheese. She brought her friend along as well... her name is Miana, from Finland! I've never known anyone from Finland! Her boyfriend is Korean, which is why she had been living in Korea for a while.

After our dinner, we went to a cafe called "Get some coffee downstairs" (it's literally in the basement) to try their "ugly apple crumble affogato" that she saw on Instagram. Brianna is quite a foodie. She finds all these 맛집 (delicious restaurants) using Instagram, and makes an effort to try all of them!

"Hey, you wanna.... get some coffee downstairs?"

The ambience is really nice, and the affogato is actually pretty good!

My one last picture with Brianna!

And then we took Joyce to get a haircut. I think she looked pretty good with the haircut.... but I think it could have had a more stunning result if we had went with some more different style, but I couldn't tell the stylist to do more, because it's kind of rude to make that much suggestion to the stylist....

That's it for our adventure today! We're gonna go back in three days or so..... I think our vacation is long enough that we really should get on home to attend to our duties!