Hi guys! It’s exremely rare of me to post a blog on aff but the thing is... I’m currently on a very long holiday (considered long because it’s more than 2 weeks) and I was kind of bored the whole time, so I got an idea to just share some stories I have in mind, and my experience of finding the SM building last May on my educational visit to Korea seems to be a nice topic.

So let’s start. I’m a soon-to-be sophomore in my high school and the story i’m going to tell you happened back in the last May when I was still a junior.

I went to Korea for a yearly educational visit abroad as one of my school’s program with other delegacies from my school. Universities and schools we visited were Seoul National University, Korea University, Seoul Robotics High School, and Choong-Ang High School.

We went there by plane on May 12th in the midnight. We arrived on Incheon in the morning and we went straight to Nami Island where our hotel was located. One or two days later we moved to Seoul for our educational visit and other vacational activities. There’s a lot to tell during those days but the one I’m going to tell you in detail is the incident happening on my last night in Korea.

Me and some of my friends decided to roam Korea for the last time by ourselves on the last night (we couldn’t use daytime because our schedule was packed. Two of my friends went to Myeongdong for shopping and three others including me, decided to go to Gangnam, to find the SM building since it had been one of my biggest dream. I’ve gone far away from home to Korea and I shouldn’t waste this chance.

So me and two of my friends, Naomi and Rara, went to the back of our hotel to catch a taxi. We managed to catch one but there was a problem. I asked the driver in korean if he could speak english and I assumed that he couldn’t since he shook his head and mumbled  something in korean we didn’t understand. So my friend took an inisiative to show the address of the SM building from her phone to the driver. He read it and thankfully, we arrived safely in Gangnam Street. We paid around 7000 won (I was from Apgujeong) to the driver and got out of the taxi. I screamed in joy when I saw a huge EXO’s Overdose printed wall on the left side of the street.

We took some pictures with it before we went to the SM building. There was another problem though, where was the building?

We searched through the junctions and small streets in Gangnam but there was no building named SM Entertainment. We even looked for tutorials to go to the SM building on the internet  but all of them guided us to the exact printed wall we took pictures with. The problem was, there wasn’t any building written ‘SM Entertainment’ on it. We didn’t give up and kept on searching until Rara found out that the huge wall was indeed the SM building, except it was the renovated one.

The address we got from the internet turned out to be the old SM building which was currently renovated. The new SM building which had artists going in and out from it was never there. We were exhausted and a little bit frustated since the one we’re searching wasn’t even near. We were hungry so we decided to buy some bread from a cafe named Caffe Bene. After we ate, we continued to look for the SM building, this time with the correct address of the new building. We went back the big road where the old building was located and started our second search from there. We asked some civilians about the street and we followed their instructions (although it was not efficient since I can only understand when they’re using body language).

We met a traffic policeman in a junction and once again, I asked him in korean if he could speak english. Thankfully he said yes, although just a little bit. We asked where the street was and he searched for this street through Google Map on his phone because apparently, he didn’t know where it was located, too. After finding the location on his phone, he asked if the three of us wanted to go to the SM building. We nodded and he asked once more if we intended to go there by walking and we said yes. He said that it is very far if we tried to go there by walking. Dissapointment rushed through my body when I heard him say that because I thought that we were closer than before to the SM building. We were tired and the time showed that it was around midnight. We thanked the policeman and kept on walking with a glint of hope that we could at least see the building.

We stopped at a small convinience store to buy some ramyeon for Naomi because she was hungry. We went out and kept on walking through small streets in Gangnam. At that time, we didn’t know where we were until we decided to go home because if we forced ourselves to find the SM building, we’ll be home extremely late and the teachers were going to be worried. It was already past midnight anyway.

So we grabbed a taxi and went straight home. There was something funny though, the ahjussi driver knew we were international tourists and he tried to make a conversation with us in his limited english. He asked if we liked k-pop and we told him that we loved EXO. He talked about the Kris issue which was still a mere rumor at that time. He also mentioned the most popular EXO member according to him. He said it was Lu Han, Baekhyun, and Xiumin if I’m not wrong. The one I remembered until now was when I told him that I liked Sehun and he tried to say that Sehun was the maknae of the group in english. He couldn’t find the right word which was the youngest  and instead he made his own english translation to the word maknae. Which is...

Age-number-down.

I didn’t understand what he said until I processed the words and connected those to Sehun. I cackled. But I appreciate his effort on making a conversation with us.

So that’s it! Thank you so much for reading and I hope to get feedbacks from you all in the comment box below :D

사랑해<3