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Published: November 8th 2009
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In order to celebrate the fact that we have been dating for three years, Mike and I decided to head to Seoul for the weekend! After school on Friday we came home, packed, ate a delicious dinner of KyoChon Chicken, then headed down to the train station. We caught the KTX a little after 8pm so we arrived in Seoul just before 10pm. We got off the train and then took the subway up to Jongno 3. Although we were told that we would need to take line 5 to this stop, we figured that we would be just fine taking line 1 since that line also ran to Jongno 3 and that was the line that was at Seoul station. When we got to Jongno 3 we were surprised to discover that we could not find our exit, exit 5. Since we didn't have a ticket to get back through the subway once we got out we thought it shouldn't be too hard to walk and find the exit that we needed. We were slightly incorrect. Although we did eventually stumble upon an exit 5, it was not the one that we were looking for. After two consecutive taxi drivers
did not know where our hotel was, we decided to just call the hotel and have them talk to the taxi driver. The driver then took us to the closest intersection to the hotel and dropped us off. After a little bit of walking we found our hotel and checked in. I was really surprised by the fact that they did not ask us for any information. This was seriously the extent of the conversation we had at the front desk.
"We need a room"
"60,000 won"
*we hand them money, they hand us a key and a bag of toiletries*
*we go to our room*
After we dropped our things at the hotel we decided to go out quick for something to eat. We ended up finding a really nice little place right across the street from our hotel. I was surprised by how much character a lot of the places we went in to eat or drink in Seoul had. Compared to the sparsely decorated places that I have been in Daegu, it was a nice change of pace.
We left the hotel at about 11 Saturday morning and since we couldn't leave our things
in the room (without checking in early and paying double the price) we left our things behind the front desk and paid for another night. We could check-in at 10 pm. To start the day we went to Itaewon for brunch. We no sooner got out of the subway and found a plethora of places that looked good to eat. We made a bees line for Quiznos which we had not seen before in Korea. After lunch we did some window shopping in Itaewon and then decided to head up to Gyeongbokgung Palace. There was a museum right beside the palace (and it has free admission all this year to celebrate it 100th year anniversary) so we decided it would be best to go in there first, figure out what we are looking at and then head over to the palace. I was really amazed by the size of the palace and really enjoyed it. I particularly enjoyed the back half of the palace where there was a pond and a lot of trees. Although a lot of the leaves were dead, some of them were still very colorful and hanging on to the tree. It was an overcast day
but it was still really beautiful.
After the palace, we went to Isadong for dinner (Angok subway stop worked really well for accessing the main street). There weren't a lot of restaurants on the main street but we did find a nice little Italian place. After dinner we looked around at the shops and then went to a cafe for patbingsu (a Korean dessert that contains shaved ice, sweet read beans, assorted fruits, and small scoop of ice cream with milk poured over it. Yes, it sounds nasty but it's actually quite tasty, especially the third or fourth time you eat it and you know what to expect 😉. We also bought some kind of honey/four/nut dessert from an entertaining street vendor who was making the candy. He was making the candy and entertaining those who were watching in both Korean and English. "In Englishee, oh my god, wow, amazing!" And the candy was pretty tasty.
Our next stop was N Seoul Tower. When we first got off of the subway we weren't quite sure if we were in the right place or not. We looked around and all we could see were department stores. We decided to
walk down to the next intersection and see if we could see anything. Sure enough, we looked up the hill and way up on the top sat the Tower. Although it looked miles away, we decided to see if we could make our way up there. We walked a bit of a way up the hill and found an elevator that took us up to the place where you could by cable car tickets. We took the cable car up to the tower. Once we got up to the base of the tower we went out on the observation deck. There was a really nice view of the city at night. After some debate, we decided to buy tickets to go up into the tower. The most interesting part of the tower was the writing on the window that stated how far away places are from the tower. We discovered that we are about 6,000 km closer to the North Pole than we are to home.
After visiting the tower, we headed back to the hotel. And this time, we just took subway line 5 to save ourselves the trouble of trying to figure out where we were. We
got our bags and headed up to the room. Sunday morning, we packed up and headed back to Daegu. It was an incredibly wonderful weekend. <3
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Danielle
non-member comment
Ok, so did Quiznos have anything funky on the menu?