Hanok, Unexpected Shopping, and Altitude

Today we started the day off by heading out to Bukchon Hanok Village, which is a residential area made up of houses using traditional Korean architecture. It’s surrounded by retail sections mixed around them with mostly similar architecture. It was beautiful, clearly expensive, and EXTREMELY hilly. There were obviously also a contingent of crabby people who did not like living amongst all the tourists walking through disturbing them - in addition to all the “QUIET - Residential Area” signs, there was a huge banner in the middle saying “NO TOURISTS”. We did our best to basically only whisper, though there was one house that had a dog that could hear us and started barking as we were walking by.

Get your picture with the chicken before you eat

We spotted Batman

Namsan tower in the distance 

After checking out the village, we walked back towards Insadong, a tourist-centered street with lots of shopping and street stalls. We stopped in a shop for a waffle with ice cream, which was only so-so.

We continued our way down towards Insadong and saw several murals on walls and other art, and walked on a little street between two girl’s schools that was evidently a designated landmark.

The road between the two girls schools. We could year lots of excited sports related screaming

Our pathway to Insadong 

We arrived at Insadong and stopped in the Osulloc location there because it had a MUCH bigger retail section than the one in Gangnam (technically we figured out we were in Garosugil that day - we had put it on the list of places to go and just accidentally achieved that goal without realizing it!), and they had a sign saying they were preparing samples. We shopped around for some tea for souvenirs and gifts, ordered a green tea shaved ice dessert (bingsu) as a snack and some tasty hot tea, and hung out in the store to rest a bit.

The most fragile water cup

The tea we ordered was fermented and pressed into bricks 

Green tea bigsu. It had red bean, green tea and peanut covered mochi on top, and surprise green tea icecream inside.

After we left Osulloc, we noticed a little shopping plaza that turned out to be a whole building spiriling up with little shops of all different kinds. We ended up finding SO MANY THINGS to buy, both for us and for friends and family. We found a little shop where the woman would use a picture of you to paint little wood figurines of you - we couldn’t resist because they were SO CUTE. Once you pay for them, it takes her about an hour to get your order ready, so we continued shopping after that to pass the time.

There was a poop themed restaurant

There was a love tag tunnel at the top of the shopping center 

We spent about 2 hours shopping around in total, way more than we had expected. We ate some lunch in a little restaurant in the basement of the center, which was super tasty.

Green onion pancake

Spicy beef and noodle soup 

Four pork mandu

After we picked up our figures (as I’m typing this, I realize we forgot to take a picture for the blog, but I’ll update the post with it when we get back to the room and can take one...), we headed down through the rest of Insadong. We bought some socks for Meghan at a street stand, which was harder than expected because the guy was setting up the stand when we first passed by it and gestured to us that we couldn’t buy anything yet. It seemed rude and weird, but the socks were really cute, so we walked a little further to pass some time before coming back. We walked down to the Starbucks, which is the only location in the world that has the name “Starbucks” solely in the native language on the storefront (as far as we understand). For some reason, they didn’t have any special mugs or anything to celebrate that, so we took pictures of the front and went back to the sock stand.

We noticed this little hole to view the mural on our way back up to pick up the people 

Super tiny back alley as we were leaving Insadong

When we got there, a couple of girls who we saw when we walked away the first time were just finishing their purchase and overheard us wondering about how much they were - at least one of them was American and told us the price and informed us that the man running the stall was actually deaf, which made his rudeness way less rude in context, and made it clearer how we should approach communicating with him.

We had a ton of bags with us, so I suggested we head back to the Airbnb to drop all of it off. After unloading and taking a little rest, we headed back out to Myeongdong to hit a few more stores we had missed the first time and to use the Tax Refund kiosks to get back some of our taxes we paid. We found a store with some nice linen shirts for me and ate a little bit of street food.

Want some long padding?

This was a sweet corn cake like bread with an egg cooked on top

Roasted sweet potatoes

Tasted like sweet potato 

Tteokbokki ad fish cakes

We didn’t try this, but it looked intersting. Frozen Smore

We ate a little more dinner at BHC Chicken (we had liked it so much the first time we figured we’d go again). The Myeongdong location was not nearly as nice, was super full of tourists, didn’t have self-serve beer, and was super slow.

After grabbing the last few things we were looking for, we started our nominally 15 minute walk to the cable car for Namsan Tower, a huge landmark tower on top of a little mountain in the middle of Seoul. It’s famous for being a couples location where you can bring or purchase a lock that you write your names and a message on and lock it somewhere along all the walkways and pavillions below the tower. The walk to the cable car took longer than expected because the directions did not mention that it was SUCH A STEEP CLIMB UP TO THE CABLE CARS. We were pretty tired after making it to the station, and then had to still walk up a bunch of steps to the station, and then 3 floors up in the station itself to board. We could have also exhausted ourselves by just walking up the ENTIRE MOUNTAIN, but it was worth it at that point to just take the cable car up.

Pororo marked the beginning of our climb to the cable car

Stairs leading to the station

Meghan was super freaked out by the ride up, but I thought it was pretty cool. We made it to the top and then had to climb EVEN MORE STAIRS to get up to the area below the tower. We were there about an hour and a half before closing time, so we decided not to pay the extra $20 to ride up to the top of the elevator, especially because there was plenty of great viewing spots of the Seoul skyline from below the tower (and Meghan hates heights anyway).

The tower from the inside of the cable car

The city looked beautiful and huge from up on the mountain, and the night-time lights were really great to see.

A pagoda near the base of the tower

Being that couple 

Panoramic View

We hung around checking out the views, watching all the couples using selfie sticks and tripods on their phones to take pictures, and enjoyed the night air. We walked back to the cable car and were surprised at how many people were still coming up so close to closing (this was about 45 minutes before everything shut completely down).

Part of the old Seoul City Wall

Beginning of the path down the mountain

We walked up to the taxis when we got down to the station, but the driver wouldn’t let us get in until we told him where we were going (a huge red flag) and then he told us it was going to be like $40 to get back to our Airbnb because his night time rate was 10x... This was definitely NOT what he was supposed to be charging, and we think he was just telling us that to get out of having to drive that far.

We decided we could probably make it back to the trains since it was all downhill anyway, so we headed on back.

We got back around midnight, and almost immediately passed out.

Step count: 24802 (mine said 27067, but it’s always ahead of Meghan’s, and I also went down 4 flights of stairs to check to see if the Starbucks at Namsan tower had special mugs - they didn’t)