I spent 3 days in Seoul for the New Years celebration. I arrived the Sunday before New Years and left around 3pm on New Years Day. There were about 20 of my friends that were in Seoul for the weekend. 12 of us stayed in the same hotel. Its called the Motel Ritz, its a love motel which means that most of its clients are business men who meet there mistresses or paid acquaintances there. It's a really nice place and only costs $40 a night on weekdays and $50 on the weekends of course it was $90 on New Years Eve, but thats to be expected. We had 4-5 rooms depending on the night, the rooms have King Size beds so 3 to a room was the max. They are also very 70's chic with retro furniture and shag rugs, etc. All of the rooms also have 50 inch Plasma TV's with a ton of channels, a small refrigerator and a computer with free internet. It's a great place to stay in Seoul,its very clean and safe. Its in Insadong, the phone number is 764-0353. It's within a 3 minute walk of the main shopping street in Insadong.
It was very cold the whole time we where there. On Sunday we went shopping and then went to walk down the Chong e Chong(thats how it sounds to me) river in the middle of Seoul, it was lit up with lights and huge light displays, it was really nice. Then we went to Itaewon to go to Pancho's a great Mexican restaurant located next to hooker hill. Itaewon is the place in Seoul where there are more foreigners than Koreans. This is where you can actually buy western size clothes and other goods. It's also where all the best non Korean restaurants are and a ton of foreign bars. It's not the cleanest area and I wouldn't recommend staying there unless you want to shell out $100 or more a night for one of the major chain hotels there, the cheaper places are very seedy. However it's the best place to eat and meat other foreigners in Seoul and is only 20 minute subway ride or 10 minute Taxi(in non rush hour times) from Insadong or Seoul Station.
After Pancho's we went to Gecko's, which is probably the most famous Foreigner Bar in Seoul, we got a big table there which was no easy task(Thank you Yubi) and closed the place down, they kicked us out around 1:30am. This is early for a bar to close in Korea but the place was dead because it was Sunday and everyone also probably wanted to go home early to get well rested for New Years Eve the next day. Everyone besides us that is! Usually bars here stay open until the sun comes up, which the next bar that we went to did. After Gecko's we went to the UN Bar, its a foreigner dance club in Itaewon below Pancho's. I think it also doubles as a Filipino brothel. Itaewon is where most of the American Soldiers hang out and because of this there is a large amount of prostitution on the area, the main street Itaewono has it main cross section at a street called Hooker Hill(It is exactly what it sounds like) which is directly across the street from the Hamilton Hotel a nice chain hotel that costs $100-$150 a night and has a famous rooftop pool that you can pay $7 to swim in during the day. We then called it a night and the 5 of us still out grabbed 2 cabs and went back to Insadong and crashed around 4am.
The next day we all woke up by noon and checked out of our rooms, it was cheaper to just keep one room and keep our bags there all day and then check back in to the hotel after 8pm, this saved us $20 a room, this way the hotel can rent the rooms out during the day, this is a win, win situation. Please keep in mind this is Asia and things are different here. We all separated and recovered in different ways. Some people shopped, a lot of us saw a movie. It was too cold to be outside for very long. I saw the Golden Compass(all movies are in English in Korea with Korean subtitles,well some Korean films are in Korean, but most of there movies are from hollywood just like the States), it was a good movie but a bit confusing at first. We all met back up around 6pm and were able to check in to all of our rooms again.
We got ready for the night and went out around 9:30pm and got some Chinese food in Insadong. After that we went to The Bar(its called The Bar) and had a drink or two to stay warm inside. Around 11pm we went outside and joined the rest of the people on the street near city hall for a time square style New Years celebration.(I would guess there were easily 100,000 people there, but who knows) They blocked off a large 7 lane street and everyone poured in at 11pm on the dot. There were more police than I had ever seen before, they formed a human barricade around the street 7 cops deep and 1/2 a mile long on both sides of the road to control the mass flow off people to the main intersection. There was a stage set up there and lights to count down a a large building(no ball =( dropping ) The cops let people through to the street one at time in 50 different locations by opening up small holes in there human barricade, they also had columns of men in the streets 5 rows deep forming a sort of maze to slow the flow of people down to stop mad rush that would have killed people for sure.
It was very impressive, I have never sen such a well organized way of dealing with that amount of people before. I was very impressed and baffled until I figured out what they were doing, then it all made sense. The cops where all in full riot gear although I never saw even one altercation although I'm sure that had to be at least 1 with all those people in such a small place, it was shoulder to shoulder for 1 mile! We got to the main intersection almost first(I'm sure 1000 people beat us, but we were in the top 1%).
We eventually decided to move off the street to the sidewalk across the street from the stage for safety reasons. It was like the mosh pit at a Green Day concert I went to in 1995, only the pushing was unintentional and due to the fact that the crowd moved with its own force. So we stood on the sidewalk and watched the countdown above and saw a jumbo-tron with the stage acts(they were all in Korean anyway). We drank and had a blast, it was freezing! After midnight we stayed around for 1/2 an hour and watched the place clear out, it was amazing to see so many people appear and disappear in a 1 hour period, by 12:10 the street was mostly empty. Everyone light off Roman candles and it looks like a GI Joe verse Cobra firefight for about half an hour from 11:40pm to 12:10am.
At some point after midnight we went to a local bar and had some drinks and food and we called it a night around 2am, it was a long day and we were out to late the night before. I also managed to lose Yubi in the post midnight crowd, but she found us about 40 minutes later after she charged her dead phone, she ended up 2 bars away randomly, she was drunk and scared I think from being alone, but once we found her it was okay. I also found a bar that has a Belgium Trappist Ale in Korea, this is my favorite type of beer and it's impossible to get in Korea!!
The next day we woke up at noon, checked out went to Bennigan's at Seoul Station and got on trains and headed back to Gumi, it was a great trip and an amazing thing to see! I had a great New Years in Seoul, South Korea!!!!
Here is a link to some video I took
New Years Eve Seoul 2007/2008 Video on YouTube
