Hongdae Clubnight

Hongdae is the area around Hongik University, and known for its nightlife. On the last Friday of each month there is Clubnight where you pay about $20 for a wristband that gets you into all the clubs. In Korea you also tend to get a drink with cover, a nice departure from America where the admission price only gets you in the door. Things here also stay open later, with the expectation being that if you are going out clubbing that you aren’t likely to leave until 5 am.

My mentors group met at 8pm and split cabs over to a restaurant in Hongdae. We took over most of a side room for drinks before heading to the clubs. Our group fluctuated between 8-15 people, so at the end seats around the table got extremely tight. Drinking culture here is rather different, very communal. At restaurants you tend to order pitchers and it is customary to always fill the glasses of others, never your own. In the span of 3 hours we went through 4 huge pitchers of beer (double sized American ones), at least 5 pitchers of fruit flavored soju and 4 bottles of regular soju. This combined with a couple of huge platters of food ended up costing each of us less than $10.


We first went to a hip hop club with multiple floors. It was soo packed that our group got separated after we went down to the main dance floor. It wasn’t really a dance floor, but more of a mosh pit. I didn’t really find it all that enjoyable since you spent more time being pushed around than anything. The extra fun part was that I was with one other girl, neither of us spoke any Korean, and we were separated from the guy who had the locker key where our purses were. Finally we went to another club where it was much less crowded. We ended the night at M2, a famous club that had electronica music. By this point my ears were definitely gone. Before heading home we found a random place to get food and then split cabs back to campus around 6:30 am.