Swedish Nerd Vs. The World

My friend Andreas and I took a detour from Japan to visit South Korea. We checked in at the New Seoul Hotel, and I appreciated the name for its bad dad joke. Since the artist Psy was the catalyst that exploded K-pop’s popularity into the Western mainstream with the global mega-hit Gangnam Style in 2012, I made Andreas follow me all the way to Gangnam on the subway to see the Gangnam Style statue. While K-pop had already been building a massive following across Asia for over a decade by then, it was this song’s popularity that served as an unprecedented global breakthrough. The release shattered cultural and language barriers, becoming the first-ever video to reach 1 billion views on YouTube and fundamentally changing how Western media and audiences viewed the Korean music industry. It was pretty hard to find the statue, so we got lost and accidentally stumbled across the Starfield Library in the COEX Mall first. The two-story library has 13-meter-tall bookshelves and more than 50,0...

The trip started badly with no sleep on the plane, and then my friend Andreas and I got lost on the subway. First I went to the wrong hotel, and when I finally found the right one, the machine that I was checking in at said there was no reservation in my name. The problem was fixed in the end, and when I finally got to lay down in my hotel bed after nearly travelling for a full day and night to get there, I was exhausted and thought, why did I even bother to do all of this when I could have stayed at home. We soon went out in Shinjuku in the evening, and I saw fat rats running around the street at the same time as girls were standing outside bars trying to get guys to go in. It felt almost like the red light district, and soon we would go by a park where there were prostitutes lining up outside of it. So the only positive thing to take with me from the first day was that I got to see the Godzilla head overlooking one of the streets and that I had some great food at Shogun Burger, wher...