Seoul, sights new and old

Hanok Bukchon

Sunrise in Seoul now is about 0500.  I stirred around 0600 and fell back asleep till 0740. We ventured downstairs to the good hotel breakfast around 0800.

I had hoped to have an early start to avoid the expected 33 deg C heat but it wasn’t mean to be.  We left around 0900 by metro to Anguk to explore Seoul’s old town area of Hanok Buchon.  I had only been here last year but it’s Kim’s first time exploring this part of Seoul.  He visited maybe 20 plus years ago as crew but didn’t venture very far beyond Itaewon.  I thought we’d repeat a few things myself and then do new stuff later in the day.

We stumbled across two public service guides and I asked them for the best walking areas.  Between the two of them, they spoke Korean, Chinese, Japanes and English.  They were very helpful with their suggestions and set us up well for our walk.

First up was Dr Baek Inje’s house, a traditional home now open to the public.  It’s free to visit.

After that, we were just in time to explore the residential areas which are supposedly off-limits till 1000.  There were staff at various corners to remind visitors to be quiet in consideration of the residents.

According to the guides earlier, the best area was Bukchon-ro 11-gil.  It was ae gorgeous street where nearly every building was historic-looking.  Everything seemed better than when I visited a year ago.

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We did a loop towards the west, which wasn’t so interesting, walking downhill to where we had started.  We then backtracked up the main drag partially to turn east, which again was so so, towards our next destination, the Changdeokgung Palace.

We took a break outside a convenience store around 1100, as we were both hot and sweaty.

Chandeokgung Palace

We bought tickets around 1140 to enter the palace.  I wanted to go to the Secret Garden as part of the visit but it’s a requirement to be on a guided tour.  As no English tours were imminent, I chose the Chinese tour at 1230.

That gave us enough time to explore the palace before the tour.  I last visited this palace and the Secret Garden some 12 years ago but I just can’t seem to remember much of it, especially the latter.  The Secret Garden comprised of a nice wooded area, pavilions and halls.

My Mandarin wasn’t good enough to have a meaningful understanding of the explanations.  My biggest takeout was that it is gorgeous here with orange leaves in November and can be bitterly cold and snowy in winter, perhaps -17 degC.

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Insadong

The 70 min tour ended 1340 and we walked to Insadong in search of lunch.  The area was very nice with lots of shops and eateries.  Kim was craving for a katsu.  We didn’t take the opportunity when we saw one and was too far to backtrack when we decided to search no further.

Tourists dressed up in traditional costumes in the Insadong area.

We settled for a place that did dumplings for him and ice noodles for me.  Both meals were delicious.  The ice noodles and iced tea helped cool me down from the hot morning of exploration.

We returned to our area to rest but decided to drop off Kim’s sunglasses to have their lenses replaced.  We just couldn’t find the mall that seemed so near to us last night.  We gave up around 1545 and had a much-needed rest in the cool of our room till 1815.

Myeongdong Night Market

I thought it would be good for us to go to Myeongdong Night Market for dinner tonight.  But we would try drop off Kim’s glasses again.  After our rest, we were in a better state of mind and found the mall easily.

He had his prescription sunglass lenses removed and replaced with non-powered ones for about NZD25 in 5 mins in the fancy mall.  In New Zealand, he was quoted NZD90 and would take 2 weeks!

With that out of the way, we took the metro 2 stations to Myeongdong around 1915 where we found the night market.  There was a good selection of food with a few repeats though.  The bad thing though was that some of the snacks cost more than half the price of a restaurant meals. We carried on walking and looking, at both the food and the non-edible ware on sale.

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After about 30 mins we decided to head back to our neighbourhood for dinner.  Rather than backtrack to Myeongdong station on the road, we thought we’d use the underground mall which we had just found as it was air-conditioned.

Unfortunately, the underground mall turned out to be very long and led us to another station which wasn’t on the same line as our station.  Then came a comedy of errors in terms of making a transfer.  These errors came from both of us not being able to see all the stations on the maps (on the station walls) clearly and not being able to read the English station names in fine print (above the train exits).

What should have been a simple two-stop ride became a 55 min journey. We were hungry once back in our area and settled for a quick dinner of fried chicken and kimchi pancake.  I finally got to savour the soju grapefruit beverage which was introduced to me a few weeks ago in Christchurch.

It had been a long day and we were both relieved to put our feet up in our rooms around 2115.

Japan and Korea

While I’ve been to both Japan and South Korea, this is the first time I’ve been to both on the same trip.  It’s interesting to make some comparison as the two are very different:

• Japan has a lot of small box cars whereas Korea has many big and huge cars.
• Today’s Koreans are quite large and big-framed people. Often Kim and I feel dwarfed by them. Japanese are less so.
• Japan seems a little too perfect at times. fruit in the supermarket are beautifully packaged and look identical in size, shops and cafes are immaculate.  Korea is more normal or like the rest of the world and sometimes a little unkempt.
• I can’t walk out of a shop in Japan without being welcomed or thanked multiple times, but in Korea it’s only just once or twice.
• Korea developed much later than Japan and is a lot more modern. Japan seems to be quite non-wasteful and has well-maintained older buses and public buildings.  They haven’t rushed into replacing things unnecessarily by wasting public funds like in some poorer countries.