Seoul Station has luggage conveyors over stairs
Grenades and Hanbok... Serious business
Not sure why there’s a bus on top of the police station
Sungnyemun Gate, at Namdaemun Market, as seen from Seoullo
Old Seoul Station (right) next to New Seoul Station
We walked down to Namdaemun Market, which is a famous street market with seemingly endless rows of flea-market-like shops selling everything from crazy cheap clothing, bags, and household goods to (presumably) unlicensed KPop memorabilia and (absolutely) unlicensed toys. There are also a ton of street food vendors - we stopped and got some hotteok (sweet Korean filled pancakes), which were crazy delicious.
Check out all the ginseng
We got one honey (with seeds) filled and one Gorgonzola and seed filled.
Once the weather got a little warmer we decided to head indoors to Coex Mall, the world’s largest underground shopping mall according to Wikipedia (though it didn’t seem big enough to call it that - maybe there are some qualifiers that exclude some of the other underground shopping areas in other cities, like Osaka).
We stopped in to one of the stores to grab some handheld fans to help with the hot train rides. We moved on to the large (and impractically arranged) library in the mall:
The display books were all fake... But they looked good!
There were books to check out all the way up the escalator... How do you find the one you need while you’re moving?
After sitting for a little while to rest, we went out to the SMTown building next door. SM is one of the main big 3 record labels in Korea, and they have a store with SM artist merchandise and “artist selected” products, a cafe with artist-branded food stuff, and a museum (which presumably has exhibits about the various artists on the label - we didn’t feel like paying the price of admission for it. We picked up a few albums we had been wanting since they were about $10 cheaper than in the states.
We ate lunch at a fairly new brew pub in Coex called Devil’s Door. They had about 6 beers that they brew theirselves, pizza, burgers, Korean fried chicken, buffalo wings - basically lots of American style food. We ordered the “Classic American Pizza” which had sausage, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, and onions, and the fried macaroni and cheese balls. The pizza crust looked and tasted kind of like Pizza Hut (slightly fried), and tasted pretty good. The mac’n’cheese balls were nothing to write home about, but fairly decent. The beer I had was tasty.
After lunch we left to find the Kyobo Bookstore to try and find a friend a non-SM-artist KPop album he wanted.
Walking to the station we saw a big lineup that we couldn’t really figure out what it was for, though it was next to a bunch of World Cup themed areas, including a huge area for watching the games. There is a giant screen on the side of one of the buildings next to Coex that we assume will be showing the Korea matches.
Another subway ride to Gangnam station dumped us out onto a huge divided road through what might be the main drag of Gangnam (though there weren’t nearly as many trendy shops). We found the bookstore, found out the album we were looking for wasn’t releasing a physical copy until Tuesday, and then went over to a cafe to hang out for a little while.
This book store was huge. This is about is third of the bottom floor (of two floors). It was probably the size of about three large Barnes and Nobles.
Not sure what this cat was handing out...
Surprising number of off-duty Korean army dudes walking around Seoul. We saw them several times each day shopping.
Second floor of the cafe
Meghan got a mango smoothie and I got a milk tea
After we left the cafe, we headed back to the train to come back to the Airbnb for a nap. We saw a Gangnam Style art installation outside of the train station:
We took a few hours to nap and freshen up before we headed back out for dinner in Hongdae - fried chicken and beer! They had self-serve bottles out of the cooler, free bar snacks, and pretty high-quality chicken (we got it boneless to get more meat and ordered the spicy cheese flavor):
The basket was full, but we forgot to take a picture until we were almost done.
We did a little bit more shopping around and walking through Hongdae. We found another little cafe to grab some dessert at - it was very underwhelming:
Looks empty, but really there were several groups out of frame.
Looks nice, tastes meh
After that we packed it in for the night!
Step Count: 22013.
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