Seoul part deux (Day 28 - 30 by Chris)

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Wednesday 14th October 2015

We took the same bus back to Seoul that we had taken to Gyeongju and after a comfortable 3 hour journey arrived in Seoul. This time we had decided to stay at K-Pop Guesthouse which is just outside of Seoul station. After walking up and down a street and not being able to locate out guesthouse, a helpful local man pointed us to an alleyway where we were able to find and then check into the guesthouse. The room itself was very basic. Again we had bunk beds and an small en suite wet room. The room was never going to win any awards and I imagine the only certificate this place has is from the health and safety department telling them that they need to close this place down. It was cheap, so fine for us to call home for 5 nights.

We decided to spend our first night back in Seoul at the cinema. Maaat Daaamon's new film The Martian was out and looked good (£3.50 per ticket - bargain). We went to the cinema at the nearby Lottte Mall and managed to buy the ticket without any issues and also bought a drink and some popcorn. The popcorn came in 3 flavours - Normal (sweet), caramel and GARLIC. We decided on normal and caramel. We watched the film, which was thankfully in English with Korean subtitles and afterwards popped into a 7 Eleven shop to buy a bento box for dinner and eat back at the guesthouse. As it was past 9pm, any fresh food on the shelves was not allowed to be sold, so the 2 bentos boxes we'd picked up, the man behind the counter gave to us for free - winner! We then went home and ate said bento box and went to sleep without any noises from our bellies.

Thursday 15th October 2015

Today we had a full day ahead of us so started relatively early by heading to an area called Hongdae which is quite close to the University and as such the local area around this is tailored for the Seoul youth. We walked through some cool, trendy (saying those 2 word automatically makes be neither) streets and shops and then eventually arrived at the Hello Kitty Cafe. For those that have never heard of Hello Kitty, google it, but I'm sure most of you are familiar. Hello Kitty is big business in Asia and this cafe is dedicated to her. The whole place is pink. Everything is pink! Rather than being fans of Hello Kitty, this was just one of those weird things you had to do in Seoul. Gemma had already done this when she was in Seoul with work a few months earlier so she had absolutely no excuse for wanting to do this again, but she did want to and so we went in. We walked in and was greeted (I say greeted, I mean ignored) by 2 women who looked as though they hated their pink lives. I've never seen anyone so miserable. Anyway, they served us our hot chocolate with our Hello Kitty chocolate sprinkles on top and we sat drinking the sweetest drink ever made surrounded by pink and a little girl who seemed to be having the time of her life. There were also some older teens not talking to each other but rather taking selfies of themselves, something that all Korean seem to do.

We spent most of the day in this area just walking through the streets. We went back to the Guesthouse for a rest and then decided to head back out for dinner. The station being close by was great as it had lots of restaurants and we were able to find a nice Korean restaurant to have some authentic Korean food. Gemma had the bibimbap, now being an expert on how to mix it, and I tried Bulgogi which was recommended by Gemma's work colleague Lucy. I cant describe how its cooked (google it!) but it was bloody tasty! We then headed to bed ready for another active day tomorrow.

Friday 16th October 2015

Up early-ish again, we decided that we would visit the main tourist attraction for Seoul according to Trip Advisor. We took the metro to Gyeongbokung Palace which was smaller than I expected. The day was hot and sunny and the place was quite busy with school trips. We've learned on this trip that weekends are full of tourist groups and weekdays are full of school trips. You really cant get away from the crowds.

We walked through the palace and saw lots of school girls dressed in traditional clothes, which is called 'Hanbok' who were centre of attention for the tourists to take pictures, ourselves included. We were also ambushed by a group of school kids who were clearly encouraged by their teachers to go and practice their English. The questions asked were What is your name? Where are you from? How old are you? me being weary of identity fraud I declined to answer, but Gemma was more forthcoming and answered their questions. We were then surrounded by approx 15 of them for a group picture. It made their day and they all seemed very pleased with themselves. We went to the tourist information centre to ask what time the changing of the guards was on and the lady told us and asked where we were from. We told her that were are English and she seemed very happy and she handed us a piece of paper. On this paper was the longest sentence ever written in English and explained to English tourists about the temple and the traditional dress all the girls were wearing. She didn't want us to read this in order to inform us of what we were seeing, but to re-write the whole thing for her in proper English. I of course left this to Gemma because as you can clearly tell from reading these blogs I don't speak right good English. We watched the changing of the guards which involved lots of banging of drums and then left the temple.

We walked 5 minutes down the road to a place called Insa-Dong which is an old street lined with shops selling traditional crafts such as fans, pottery, wooden stuff etc. We walked up and down both sides of the street which took us about an hour and Gemma bought a traditional hand painted Korean fan which she was very happy with. We also stopped off for some dumplings and ordered too much for a ridiculously small price of about £5. Not much considering how much food we got. We tried our best to eat the lot and then waddled out of the restaurant. Gemma had bought a postcard for her granddad which we had to post so with the help of a policeman we located the post office and posted the card for 25p.

For our final stop of the day we headed to the area of Gangnam which is of course famous for the song. For those that have never been there but are familiar with Oxford Street, that's what you need to picture. We exited the metro station and popped into a few shops. Gemma bought a T-Shirt and then we tried to locate the stage. The stage is just that, a stage that is located at the bottom of the main street and from Gemma's previous visit here she sad you can stand on the stage and the Gangnam style song plays and you have the option of running a mile, or standing on the stage and doing the dance. I was up for being the fool but unfortunately there was a group of about 100 people protesting about something and were all stood directly in front of the stage so I couldn't get to it. Ah well, just as well I suppose.

It was getting late now so we made our way back to the Guesthouse and decided to venture into one of the restaurants next to where we were staying. We'd spotted these when we arrived but hadn't given one a try yet. During the week they had all been filled with business men, but now being a Friday night they were much quieter. We wanted Korean BBQ again and this particular restaurant had Korean BBQ on the night before but it turns out that this place has a rotation system on food and you are unable to order the food you want, rather eat what they are cooking as the special that day. We'd sat down before realising this and felt too involved to leave. The lady serving couldn't explain anything to us so we just nodded and smiled. We were quite nervous at what the special would be but were very pleasantly surprised when she brought over to our table a pan of what looked like pasta in pasta sauce. It turns out that the sauce did taste like some Lloyd Grossman's tomato and basil pasta sauce and the things that looked like pasta were some very big pieces of gnocchi. Lovely food and filled us enough to fall to sleep as soon as we got to bed.

The next day we would be heading to the DMZ on an organised tour we'd arranged so will that will follow separately. So far though, we were enjoying our second trip to Seoul.

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