Monday, December 03, 2007

Occult Star Bar in Sinchon

Life in Korea is pretty much like life anywhere else. You wake up, you go to work for 8 hours, you entertain yourself somehow afterwards with things like dinners and the gym and maybe some errands or seeing some friends. Then you wake up and do it all over again. However, every now and again you have a night out that really lets you know you're in Asia and that life really is just radically different here.

On Saturday about 15 of us did the usual trek into Seoul - did various activities first and then met up at Seoul Pub in Itaewon. Twelve of us then continued on to do a supposed bar crawl in Sinchon which turned out to be the most convuluted evening ever. We got off at the wrong subway stop, ended up walking through very very deserted areas, and kind of got to the area we wanted to be in, but no one was sure and it was cold and taking forever. Eventually after about an hour of being lost, we find the bar that others are in and it was well worth the wait.

Occult Star, which has apparently only been open for the past 2 weeks was this deserted little place that you had to take your shoes off in order to enter. It was a gorgeous multi level place that had a very Moroccan like theme, comfortable couches, chairs, and bed type mats all over the place. The amazing feature of this place was this pool in the center that you could sit around and put your feet in and have these "Doctor Fish" come over and bite your feet. Sounds unpleasant right? Well, once you past the fact that you've got hundreds of fish sucking on your feet you get used to the mini shocking feeling of each little bite. What they're doing is just cleaning off the dead skin, and what you get is incredibly soft skin afterwards. Nature's natural pedicure if you will?

Sitting around this pool, with a couple of drinks, great friends, and a hookah was nothing short of incredible. A great place to spend the last remaining hours of your night - especially if its a cold one. I couldn't probably ever tell ya how to get there, but I will attempt to find this diamond in the rough again...




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