Korea, Tourist style (Part I: Seoul)
Part II of my week off with Phil:
After our quick reunion in Hong Kong Phil came to spend the last few days of his vacation here in my temporary home, Korea! Phil was my first visitor from home and I was really looking forward to showing him what my life is like here in Daegu.
We took separate flights (him on his fancy Korean Air while I continued my journey in budget Chinese airlines) so he landed a few hours before I did. I prepped him with a metro pass, my Korean iPhone, and instruction on how to get from Incheon to where we were staying in Myeongdong, Seoul for the night. By the time I got there he had settled into our hotel and left pictures on my phone of the street food he had already discovered, haha. I hadn’t eated in hours and it was pretty late so we went the chicken + hof route and shared some spicy chicken where my pathetic attempt at ordering in Korean to impress the boyfriend ended up working pretty well and amusing the shop owner even more.
This was my first time doing the tourist thing in Seoul, as my previous trip up was dedicated to shopping, so we started the day with the closest and most obvious attraction, Namsan Tower. Just a short walk from our hotel in Myeongdong was the cable car at the base of Namsan Mountian, which for 8,000won offered a roundtrip ride to the base of the tower. Below the tower there are great paths and rest areas to relax and enjoy the scenery from atop Namasn. At the base of the tower there are a few restaurants and cafes as well as the Teddy Bear Museum (I’m not sure why…) but we decided to make for the main attraction and took the ride up to the viewing platform atop the tower. It was a bit cloudy that day so we couldn’t see quite as far as you might on a clear day but the view was impressive none the less… Seoul is mindbogglingly enormous. Back at the bottom of the tower we walked by all of the locks couples leave locked the the fences and read the English ones, which ranged from really adorable to super funny.
After braving the cold atop Namsan we stopped for some kimchi jjigae (김치찌개) which warmed us up really nicely. Our next stop was one of the major palaces in Seoul, Gyeongbok-gung (경복궁). The palace is massive and really beautiful and we got to witness the changing of the guards. One of the most interesting things about this site, though, is that it is right int he middle of the busy metropolis. After the palace we visited Cheonggyecheon, a stream once covered by a road but now renewed as a public recreation and art space in the middle of the city.
We then made our way to Hongdae to fulfill one of my shameful wishes… Since coming to Korea I have started… (I don’t know how this happened!) watching… Korean dramas. A secret no more. Anyway, my favorite drama was called Coffee Prince and the shooting location is now a full-fledged coffee shop open to visitors so I just had to check it out. Drink prices are super inflated but tasty and it was worth the experience. For dinner we shared ddeokbokki (떡볶이) and spicy kimbap (김밥) at a snack stall in the busier section of Hongdae and then relaxed, sharing a bottle of wine, at a cafe until it was time for us to grab our bags and catch the train to Daegu. Wow, after writing this out it seems we did a lot more than we thought! I guess I will have to save the rest for another post!
