My First Korean Concert --- with Big Bang and Super Junior!!

This weekend, I went to my first concert in Korea: the Asia Song Festival. The festival featured Big Bang, Super Junior, Girls Generation (3 of the 4 biggest pop star groups in Korea. If you walk around anywhere here, you'll hear their music coming from every which direction), and other various artists from around Asia. I don't know how they did it, but the entire concert was free and open to the public. You just had to go online and download a ticket. So of course, I didn't miss out. The show was awesome, but getting into the show was quite an adventure...

First, was getting the tickets. Luckily, there was an English version to ASF's website with a special section for foreigners to reserve tickets. Unfortunately, we had missed the deadline to get through the English site, so I had to register through the Korean site, lol. Luckily, my friend who I was going with speaks Korean, so she walked me through it. No problem.

The fun part, though, was that ASF's English site said that the downloaded ticket wasn't an actual ticket. It needed to be exchanged the day of the show for real tickets, and the ticket exchange opened at noon. (The concert started at 6:00) My friend and I figured if we lined up at 10, we'd be able to get tickets for good seats.

So, we meet up at 10 on Sat. We go to line up, but there's a million different lines. We try to ask the staff which line we need to be in, but no one seems to know what's going on. We finally decide on the "Foreigner ticket exchange" line. After an hour of sitting in the blazing sun, though, we realize that our ticket print-outs look different from the people around us, and then we figure out that we've actually be lining up in the wrong line!!

So we move over to the right line, and after another hour of waiting, the staff starts to come. We think, finally, we can exchange tickets and go home for a few hours. The staff, however, divides us into sections from our print-outs. Soon, I start getting the feeling that we're actually in line to go in...

Unfortunately, I turned out to be right. It was 12:30 by the time we figured this out, and the people around us were waiting to be let into the stadium. The concert doesn't even start for another 5 and a half hours!! So after waiting in line for over 2 hours, my friend and I decide to leave and just come back nearer to the show.

When we get back later that day, it's completely packed. Getting in was a madhouse. There were thousands of fangirls pushing and shoving to get in. Not fun... But when we do get in, we luckily get some great seats facing center to the stage! It was pretty high up, but much better seats than I expected for showing up so late.

I went with 3 other people: Jenny, TJ, and Dan. Jenny's like me in that she watches Korean dramas and knows the basic K-pop stars, so we had a blast!! The other two guys, however, had never heard of any of these groups before and were basically in it for the experience. We felt bad in the beginning, but after a few beers (which btw were in the funniest cups. The outside of these cups are printed to look like a glass with beer and foam in it, lol) and seeing the craziness of all the fangirls around them, I think they had an enjoyable time.

The concert itself was a lot of fun. ASF did absolutely a wonderful job. I still don't know how they managed to make it free. One funny thing to note is that it's meant to be a concert, but they randomly decided to throw in an awards show in between the performances. That was amusing.

The groups also performed really well. Each did 2 or 3 songs. Of course, Girls Generation did "Gee"; Super Junior did "Sorry Sorry"; and Big Bang did "Lies". I'm not gonna lie. When Big Band did "Lies", Jenny and I shared a super fangirl moment. We ran down all the way to the front of our section and just danced and sang to our hearts' content. It was way fun, and I'm sure Dan and TJ were super amused by us, lol :D

The stars...

Girls Generation

Super Junior

And of course... Big Bang