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(above you'll see a panorama of Changdeok Palace, which ill talk about later)

Seoul - Insadong

So this past weekend we headed north on our first visit to Seoul... which is for those of you unfamiliar with South Korea, its capital. The city is massive, so we decided to pick just one area of the city to first. We chose Insadong and its surrounding, which we’ll talk about in a bit. Anyways, we jumped on the bus at 9 am Saturday morning from Cheongju. The ride took roughly 1½ hours from bus terminal to bus terminal. Much better than our pervious bus ride of 3 hours from the airport... We arrived at the Intercity Bus terminal in Seoul a little disoriented, but excited non-the-less.

Shinsagae

We were told from some of co-workers to check out Shinsegae, one of the largest department stores in the world (the largest being in Busan, South Korea, also called Shinsegae. Check out Guinness World Records for details) It was awesome, the first floor was covered in high end make-up and fancy stores, like Prada, D&G, Mark Jacobs, Gucci, Anne Taylor, Channel, and many, many more. We were starving, and poor, so we didn’t even bother to go in any of them, instead we went to the food court which was awesome. Rachel says it’s similar to Harrod’s in London for those of you that have been or know of. I got an amazing Panini, and Rachel got some delicious sushi. After eating we decided it would be best to head over to Insadong, which is another area of the city, kind of like a neighbourhood. We knew that we would be coming back to Seoul soon enough, so we could always come back to Shinsagae and maybe spend some of our hard earned Won.

We hopped on the Subway right out front of Shinsagae. We were a little confused, but once we figured out how it all works, it wasn’t too hard. There are many subway lines in Seoul, but they are all conveniently colour-coded and numbered. We jumped on the orange line, number 3. The trip to Insadong took about 20 minutes on the subway. It was a really smooth ride, and all of the trains are super clean. Also, at the station the train lines up with doors on the platform so there is no open track for someone to fall on, get pushed on or jump on. This, to me, seems like an awesome and fairly simple (if not expensive) idea that should be implemented in Toronto. Anyways, we arrived in Insadong around noon.

Insadong

Saturday

We chose to visit Insadong for a couple of reasons. One, many people recommended we go there, and two the royal palaces are nearby. It’s basically one main street with a bunch of little streets branching off of it. The place is very touristy and quite expensive. It’s the kind of place where you find souvenirs at an elevated price. Although, we found that if you look hard enough there are some good buys. It is also very artsy, with many galleries and some beautiful buildings. On some of the side streets you can find some amazing restaurants. It’s generally a very pretty area. We browsed around for a couple hours, taking in the sites and grabbed a room for the night at one of the local hostels. In the later afternoon we decided to head to one of the palaces. I won’t go into detail in this post about the palace because I believe it deserves its own. So check back in a bit for an update.

Anyways, the palace took a couple of hours and afterwards we were dead tired, but we decided to check out a local bookstore, Seoul Selection, from our guide. It was a little walk, but it was well worth it. They had a couple of shelves full of used English books, and many more full of new. We both bought a couple of books, and Rachel bought me a belated birthday present: The Atlas of Korean History. It’s an awesome book covering the history of Korea from its ancient roots to modern times with lots and lots of maps, illustrations and other information.

We were pretty exhausted so we headed back to our hostel to grab some R&R. The hostel was nice, clean, and extremely close to our area. However, not long after cooling off in our air-conditioned room we were surprised by a phone call from some of our co-teachers from Wonderland. Chris and Alicia, who you might remember from our previous postings, were here in Seoul! Awesome! We were very surprised and we felt very flattered that they came all the way to Seoul just to hang out with us for a bit. Anyways we met up with them not long after, and headed out for some delicious Korean food with people that can read menus! Hooray! We decided on Bulgogi, which is basically marinated beef fried on a hot plate. DELICIOUS! On the side came the regular assortment of Kimchis and veggies. It also came with a soup Rachel and I have come to really enjoy, called Dwenjang jjigae. It’s a spicy soup, filled with veggies, tofu and sometimes meat. It has a similar taste to beef stew only way spicier and much thinner.

After dinner they took us south of Insadong to a creek that runs through the city. It has recently been remodelled and is an awesome place for a stroll. It was very busy, lots of couples hanging out watching the neat waterfalls and other water features. There was also a laser show through one water feature that created mist. All in all though it’s just a nice place to walk through... We ended up in an area called Myeongdong. It is a shopper’s paradise (like most of Seoul we have come to realize...). It has many outlet type western stores, although not the designer ones like in Shinsagae, but ones that you would find in any upscale western mall (like the Eaton’s centre). It was getting late so we really didn’t have time to do much, I did manage to pick up a knock-off pair of Birkenstocks though. Woo. Our friends also had to leave... even though we tried to get them to stay the night. Extremely weary... almost falling over we stumbled our way back to Insadong to a nice air-conditioned room and a softish bed.

Sunday

On Sunday we just did the regular old touristy thing. Nothing major, as we were still very tired and sore from a really long day of walking. For the morning and the early afternoon we hung around insadong, did some shopping, and then around 3pm, too tired to go on we hopped on the subway for the bus terminal —and home. Not much to say from now on... we got home safe, and were too exhausted to do anything else all night. We definitely want to head back soon. We only saw one of the two palaces, and not even all of it (ill explain in the next blog posting). Seoul is huge and we definitely want to check out as much as possible. We’ll keep ya’ll posted, check back soon for more. Enjoy the photos.

~~ Thanks for reading! ~~

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Photos

Bulgogi meal
Sorry not a great photo, but I though you'd like to see it.

Comments

[joseph]

toronto 10,621km
thx for the post. enquiring minds need to know; where is the soul of seoul?