Kpop Idol Culture + Lots of Queuing

Writing from the land of kimchi, still! And since I'm here, why not immerse myself into probably the biggest Korean export out into the world - KPOP! Idol culture here in Korea is a big thing, and girls, women and quite a number of boys and men queue up for hours outside broadcasting stations to either go in to watch music shows of their favourite idols or wait outside to catch glimpse of their idols walking in for recordings.

I've done both - and can I say that it takes a hell lot of effort and it's super tiring! Ok so basically to get into a music show, you will have to join the queue of a specific group's fan club. There will be rules on what you have to bring in order to get into the recording, usually the CD the group is promoting, fan chant and a slogan towel. And then you basically go to the broadcasting station to queue. Some of the bigger fan clubs have a bidding system for tickets so you will have to sign up on their fan café and this is usually war. You basically spend 3 hours queuing to watch your idols perform for 5 minutes.

And just to be adventurous, I decided to go out of Seoul to watch a music show. It was in Ulsan, about 4 hours out of Seoul by bus. Since it's summer, MBC held a summer music festival at their Ulsan Centre Stadium. Admission to watch is free, but the queuing thing happens again. Crazily enough, we hit the queue at about 6am in the morning and it was already snaking. People were coming out from tents like refugees. The recording only started at 4:30pm... so... the queuing starts.

At about 2:30pm when they started letting people into the venue, people who were behind the cut off point started to play dirty and wanted to cut the queue - lots of pushing and swearing happened. I'm just glad that I didn't get cut off if not my entire day of queuing would be wasted! This is it with queuing for music shows here in Korea, there's always that slight chance you would be denied entry. At the end of the day, we spent about $20 on iced water because the temperature was like 34 degrees and the sun was working extra hard! I got tanned, didn't care about my image and slept on the ground under a tree - just to see these 7 boys.

INFINITE!!!

But it was so worth it HAHA. Fangirl, through and through.

Here's the video of the performance, it was such good fun being in that crowd and screaming my head off!