The first weekend in February my friend Melanie and I took yet another trip to a K-pop concert. This stop: Vancouver. It’s actually the furthest west that either of us had been, which was cool. We were able to cross two things off our bucket lists that way.
The Concert
This trip was to see SuperM, a new group to the K-pop scene. They debuted in October of 2019, but are actually all members of other groups. There are 7 in total; Taemin 태민 is from SHINee, Mark and Taeyoung 태영 are from NCT 127, Kai and Baekhyun 백현 are from EXO, and Ten and Lucas are from WayV. Interestingly enough, WayV is actually a Chinese sub group formed from NCT.
Yes, it still gets a little confusing for me as well trying to remember who everyone is and in this case, what group they are from originally. It’s also interesting to know that a lot of K-pop groups have members from other asian countries. For example, Ten is of Chinese descent, but was born in Thailand and Lucas was born in Hong Kong.
In my last post, I shared my experience of the Stray Kids concert. Fun fact, two of their members are Korean, but are from Australia, which I enjoy because of their accents when they speak English.
In SuperM’s case, the groups the members came from are well known in the K-pop industry and some have been around for a while. For example, SHINee debuted in 2008 and are known as the Princes of K-pop and EXO performed at the closing ceremony for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, which is actually what introduced me to K-pop.
Of course, when I found out that this group was being formed, I was pretty excited. Only great things could come from forming a group with talented and experienced members like this.
Some people might be thinking, “Wow, that’s a long way to travel for just a concert,” but it was more that we used the concert as an excuse to visit the west coast for the first time. We definitely enjoyed the concert and had a lot of fun, but most of our time on this trip was spent exploring Vancouver and all of its sights.
Vancouver
From the moment we arrived, I was a little starstruck with Vancouver, even though it rained Thursday and Friday. It was the first time I ever felt like I could fall in love with a place, especially so soon! The temperature was actually warmer there than back home, surprisingly enough, not that I was complaining in the least.
Reasons why I loved Vancouver:
- Readily available and reliable transportation. We used buses mostly during our trip, and the ones downtown seemed to run on electric lines, which was pretty cool! Yay, saving the environment!
- Vancouver is a perfect mix of a busy city while also being surrounded by nature. Almost 700,000 people live there, but because it’s so close to the water, it doesn’t feel suffocating. Also, you can just cross the bridge into North Vancouver, and suddenly you are surrounded by trees. It was breathtaking.
- The mountains. Along with the trees and water, the view of the mountains was spectacular. We stayed in North Vancouver, so we saw them each time we were going back to our AirBnb.
- The diversity. According to Wikipedia, it is one of the most ethnically diverse cities. “52% of its residents are not native English speakers, 48.9% are native speakers of neither English nor French, and 50.6% of residents are minority groups.” After living in Korea for a year, it was quite refreshing to be able to hear people speaking Korean again, as well as Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and many other languages.
* Fun fact: My grandparents were born in Quebec, so listening to people speak French Canadian actually felt a little like home to me. Yet another reason why I loved being in Canada.
There are so many other things I could talk about in relation to Vancouver, but I will leave with this: If you ever get a chance to visit the west coast, I highly suggest Vancouver as a destination. Thanks for reading! Stay safe and stay happy. 읽어줘서 감사합니다. 안전 하고 행복해 지내세요.
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