T-Social Christmas Party at Heaven in Gangnam with Se7en and GD&TOP

One day my good friend Tony sent me a Facebook chat littered with exclamation points about an ad he had seen in Korean on Facebook for entering a contest to win tickets to a Christmas party hosted by SK Telecom, Facebook, and Twitter, featuring live music by a lot of Korean hip-hop bands and pop singers, including Se7en and G-Dragon and TOP! You could win tickets by joining the page and leveling up by posting information about the concert to your Facebook and Twitter pages. All this we figured out with the help of our Korean friends, because all the information was image-based and impossible translate in any way other than consulting a Korean speaker or painstakingly re-typing all of the Hangeul and entering it into the usually inaccurate Google Translate (which I would later spend hours doing after our tickets were confirmed....) While at first we barraged our Facebook friends and Twitter followers with links and pictures about the party in an effort to level up, Tony discovered a glitch where you could just keep clicking on the "Share" button and level up without actually having to post the information to your social networking site. Thus, I got to level, like, 750 in 2 days.

Lots of freaking out and hair-pulling ensued. Our names weren't on the guest list, even though our page said we were invited. Then we sent emails to SKT with our information and screen shots of our pages, anyway, and I got a response, but Tony and Joelle didn't. Tony befriended a nice girl from the Philippines on the Facebook page and she let him come as her guest, and Joelle and her sister who was visiting decided to just show up anyway. As it turned out there had been a problem with the site and they totally got in, anyway. They just never got their confirmation email.

So we went to the party on Christmas Eve. It was the coldest day of the year. It was freezing cold even when the even more freezing wind wasn't blowing. I have never been so miserable in my life. I walked to Club Heaven with Tony and Lisbeth, my guest, but we had some trouble finding it. When we finally found it, we had to wait in a line outside. There were outdoor heaters, but they just made my legs itch. It was just the coldest and most miserable I have been in my life! Not fun at all.

We finally reached the front of the line and the bouncer, a cute fat African-American dude who chatted with us briefly, let us enter. It's interesting because in order to access Heaven you must first descend into Hell. You have to go down like 3 flights of stairs and everything is dark and the lights are tinted red. There were stickers of peoples' names all over the walls and we saw Tony's name and Joelle's name so we called them and told them that they should be able to get in OK. I checked in by giving them my Twitter ID, and then we picked up jello shots that were in clear plastic SKT boxes (which I stole and took home to use as a box for spare coins), checked our coats, and went to stand by the stage. Heaven is a really nice club and I can understand why admission is like 30,000 won every night. The bathroom was big and clean and had lots of mirrors and even a lounge area. And sinks like they have at Distrito in Philly (like, the sinks are on a table in the middle of the room, and the mirror hangs down from the ceiling). We had been worrying over the "Bling Bling" dress code. I was worried that, in my one-shouldered pink-silver 80s party dress (50% off at the H&M in Myeongdong... I was so happy because when it was full price I fell in love with it, but couldn't justify spending so much on it) I would be under-dressed, but some people were there in jeans, so it was OK. The girl who came with Tony had been to Heaven before and showed us how you could go around part of the dance floor and get a spot really close to the stage that nobody else knew about. So we were right next to the press box, and really close to the stage (well, the upper-right corner of it.)

A lot of indie hip-hop bands and one ballad singer performed, and then the main acts took the stage. Se7en was great. Even though I still only know 3 of his songs, and have seen him 3 times in concert, I enjoyed him. Then, G-Dragon and TOP came on. Be still, my heart. Because of our location we could see them waiting in the corridor to go on-stage, which was exciting. First GD came one and did his old solo song "Heartbreaker" and TOP came one and did his solo song "Turn it Up" before they united onstage and did some songs from their new album. Of course their performance was awesome. These guys really know how to work a crowd. TOP brought his standard moody too-cool-for-school attitude on-stage and GD was running and dancing around like a little kid. They finished way too soon (they had two other club shows that night, including one at Harlem in Hongdae which the YG CEO owns and Tony went to [actually it was so crowded he could just hear it from the staircase]) and although the audience screamed for an encore (in Korean it just sounds like you're shouting "Anchor! Anchor!" they didn't come back out. Too bad. Tony stayed out with our new friend, Lisbeth went home, and I took a taxi home (way cheaper and faster than I thought it would be!) and made a ham and cheese and onion and lettuce and tomato sandwich and Skyped with my family because it was Christmas Eve!

We also got a goody bag that had a party invitation with all the winners' Facebook and Twitter names, some stickers, and some pins and a pen. I think you were supposed to write your name on the pins and wear them, thus turning the T-Social Party into a true Social Party. I don't think anyone did that, though. They did have stations where you could use a Galaxy Tab or something to Tweet about the party, and they projected the Tweets onto the wall, which was cool.

Here are some pictures and videos from our night! Courtesy of me, Joelle, and the SKT Facebook page. (I never use flash and my camera isn't very good, and some of these photos were never edited for lighting or shadow, so they're not very good.)