Loveboat in 서울

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Our first task, Sohee declares, is to find clubbing outfits.

But downstairs in the humid lobby, Jihyo and other counselors are herding kids into a dimly lit auditorium for the opening ceremony. I look inside. The room appears to have been built with a smaller crowd in mind because every seat before the red-curtained stage is taken, with more students jammed in along the back wall and overflowing down the aisles.

"Come on," Sohee whispers, and we duck around a group of guys, steering clear of Jihyo.

"How many people are here anyways?"

"Four hundred." Sohee pauses at a table, where dozens of boiled intestine sausages and intestines.

"Four hundred?" With a ladle, Sohee scoops a sausage out, drops it into a paper cup and presses it into my hand.

"That's bigger than my entire high school."

Drumrolls echo from the auditorium, seductively deep and rhythmic. I crane my neck to see the stage, where two guys in sleeveless white shirts and black pants are raining whole-arm beats down on barrel drums. A lion, shaking its over-sized gold-trimmed head, leaps out from between them.

Sohee grabs my arm. "Come on. Let's get out of here."

I almost suggest we stay—I've never seen a lion dance on this level of incredible. From the doorway, a counselor in a royal blue T-shirt beckons to us, calling, "Ppallippalli."

But Sohee pulls me around the corner, scraping my arm on brick, and then we're pushing out double doors into blinding sunlight. A pair of gardeners kneels in the dirt, planting flowers.

"Go!" Sohee urges, and I sprint with her up the driveway and around the lily pad pond, past the guard booth to the street.

"Won't they come after us—ah!" I leap out of the path of a parade of bikes. Their rush of wind tears at my hair and skirt.

"No one knows who we are yet." Sohee's laugh bubbles as she pulls me firmly onto the sidewalk, then sets off at a brisk speed. "Don't yet yourself run over, okay? Traffic here is human rights violation."

ʕु-̫͡-ʔुྉ*ᴸᵒᵛᵉᵇᵒᵃᵗ✲ﾟⁱⁿ*。⋆ 서울。⋆ *

The sun beats down on my head as I took a bite of the sausage and try not to keep with Sohee. I haven't eaten a tea egg in years, not after I opened my lunch box to shrieks of horrified, "What are those?" and I begged Eomma not to pack me anymore weird Korean food. Sohee devours her own sausage, making moaning noises straight out of a scene I wouldn't be allowed to watch on TV. I bite another of the sausage.

"Yum," I say.

Yonsei's driveway opens into a major street, facing a tree-covered with that enormous pagoda building. Directly across from us, a brick mural of Korean farmers is built into the hillside. Up the street, we pass a small, red temple with the fanciest tiers of rooftops—like a paperback book opened and laid face down, sides gently sloping, corners upturned like the prow of a ship. It's painted in a riot of colors—pink flowers, intricate designs, Korean scholars in red robes. A long, blue dragon, its back flaming green spikes, undulates over the top.

"Wild," I say. "I kind of like it."

"There's stuff like that all over Korea." Sohee drops her empty cup into a trash can. "You'll see."

We veer off through a tree-lined park, then through narrow streets lined with five-story buildings, fronted by garage-size stores. We pass hairstyling shops, a tea room, a whiskey store, all labeled with Korean letters.