Seoul: Day Three

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Day three in Seoul was another early morning, because we didn't want to fight with our hostel mates over the one bathroom. We started, once again, with Dunkin' Donuts - because you don't waste that opportunity when you have been jonesing for it for so long - and decided that we would head towards Changdeokgung Palace because supposedly there was a changing of the guard every hour, and we thought it might be cool to see.

However, while we were sitting in Dunkin' Donuts, we had our first encounter of the day with how outgoing Koreans are in contrast to Japanese. A young man came over and started with, "Excuse me, ladies," and then proceeded to talk to us about Dokdo Island, and how it's Korean territory, not Japanese. He did the entire thing in English, and "just wanted us to know that it was an issue", and told us that his school was doing a project to raise awareness (he even gave us little papers with info on them). By this point, a handful of six other young guys had crowded around, and Michele asked them how old they were. They said they were high school 1st years, or 17 years old. I then casually dropped into the conversation that, actually, we live in Japan, and the reaction was a pretty funny instantaneous "uwaaaaah!" haha.

So that was fun, and we had a good time talking to them, and he was definitely precocious for being bold enough to talk to two foreign "ladies" in a coffee shop. They all waved good-bye as they left through the window - how cute! We started out towards the palace, and had to walk past our palace stop from the day before to do so, where we met another group of high schoolers (it must have been field trip day). One of these young men started to talk to us as we walked through, asking where we were from and when Michele answered with "America", he said, "Oh! My dream! I love you!" Oh, stock phrases they have memorized, how funny. We discovered that we are definitely popular with the high school demographic in Korea.

We got to Changdeokgung Palace and got inside, to find that it was very crowded and we couldn't actually find where the changing of the guard was happening. However, there was a gorgeous lake with a traditional building build over it, with mountains in the background and an old-style boat on the water, so we decided that it was definitely our number one recommendation for palaces to visit, because it was so beautiful. We just strolled for awhile taking in how amazing it all was, and met some retired Korean men - a former professor and a former principal - who were nice enough to take our photos not only with my camera, but also with their own really nice SLRs and then got Michele's email to send them to her. People in Korea were SO nice and friendly!

On our way out of the palace, we were stopped by a group of high school boys AND a group of high school girls, who both wanted pictures with us posed on the steps, so we are in a handful of photos on some Korean iphones now, too. Haha! Why were we so popular?! There were definitely other tourists there - it might have been Michele's short skirt and my blonde hair, or that we were two approachable females, I'm not sure. Either way, we had a blast interacting with all these really outgoing high school kids!

After the Palace, we took a pleasant walk through a shopping area and were stopped by a woman working for the Korean tourist organization, who had us call the tourism hotline and ask a question for a free gift from their stand. Totally did that, and got a cute bookmark for my trouble. Then we decided we would head over towards Seoul Tower, which was another big stop for us on our to-do list.

We stopped for lunch at a family-owned Korean restaurant, where we were the only people there other than the staff, who were also eating lunch with us. Haha! It was great food, though, and I have to say, I was really happy we went out of the traditional comfort zone to get stuff that wasn't chain food in the city. We then ventured to Namsan Hanok village, a traditional Korean village that is set up near the base of the mountain Seoul Tower is on. We walked through the old houses, I tried on an old-style walking backpack, and we got some great photos. It was really fun to see the history!

Then we TRIED to find a bus to Seoul Tower, which was a bust, because heaven forbid Korea post ARRIVAL times on bus stops - it only says that the "bus comes every 30 minutes" which is possibly the LEAST helpful thing you could ever put on a bus, given that we have no frame of reference for when the last one left. So we ended up walking up to the cable car station, which was QUITE a hike, and we were pretty tired after it, especially since we hadn't prepared ourselves, haha. But we found it, and got our tickets, and went up to Seoul Tower via cable car.

When we got there, it turned out that they were filming a Korean drama up on one of the decks, so we watched them do that as we were being shushed by the crew around, and got some hilarious pictures. Then we got our tickets to go up-up-up in Seoul Tower itself. The view was pretty amazing, though we had some really hazy days there so we couldn't see as much as we would have liked. But it was really neat, and definitely an awesome experience.

We were BEAT coming down, so we grabbed a taxi from the cable car station to Myeong-dong station and it ended up being only 5000 won - which is like 500 yen TOTAL for both of us! (That's like $5) My god, taxis are cheap in Korea. I've never taken one in Japan because I don't feel like paying with my own ARM just to get from one side of the city to the other. We walked around the Myeong-dong shopping area again, and then tried to go out to Itaewon, a popular foreigner spot much like Roppongi, but it was freezing AND starting to rain, so we decided to ditch that idea and just head home. We were so tired anyway.

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