Shopping Myeongdong and Gangnam

This morning we took the subway (grabbing a couple triangle gimbap - basically Korean onigiri - for breakfast) over to Seoul City Hall, which was next to Deoksugung Palace. The palace has a really cool stone wall around it, but we couldn’t get to the most scenic parts of the wall because the street was blocked off with police - we think something was filming there, because we saw a car with a giant camera gimble hanging off the back followed by a car with a giant mascot in the passenger seat.
Meghan was disappointed that we couldn’t get over there because she wanted to see one of the iconic filming locations of her favorite KDrama “Goblin: The Lonely and Great God”.

Palace Wall

Palace entrance

Strange forced perspective sculptures

The scene from Goblin

From there, we strolled up to Cheonggyecheon Plaza and the Cheonggyecheon Stream - it was a neglected little waterway through the city until 2005 when they rejuvenated it and now it’s a super pretty place to stroll around and feel like you’ve left the city for a bit.

On our way to the stream

This marked the beginning

It was nice and breezy out too, and the placement as well as the earlyish time made it quiet - so quiet that we were very confused when we heard a bunch of splashing in the bushes. It turned out to be some giant carp bullying each other, presumably over food.

After the stroll we went down for some shopping in Myeongdong. There are tons and tons of beauty stores, and you constantly feel like you’ve been down the street you’re on because the stores repeat all over the place. Littered around were some of the flagship stores of these same brands that have a far wider selection. We had some drinks at the cafe in one of them (Innisfree). They had some amazing looking soufflé pancakes, but they take 30 minutes to make, and we wanted to keep moving... I may have us go back one day because they looked really delicious.

Surprise Krispy Kreme

View of Namsan Tower from Myongdong

Our drinks from the cafe

We passed by the Line Friends store. You had to wait in line to get a photo with the bear.

This Artbox was three stories

We bought lots and lots of skincare products and got a lot of stuff tax free - Korea has a system where if you spend over 30,000 won (~$30), many of the stores in more touristy areas have passport readers which automatically remove the tax for foreigners. There were a couple shops where we were like 2000 short and just added something small to avoid the taxes.

We looked around for food, and finally ended up at a place called Gogung which was famous for its bibimbap. We got a combo with two different kinds, some makgeolli (a kind of traditional Korean spirit) cocktails, and some japchae - the amount of food we got rivaled American portions, so we were super full without even finishing everything. We took pictures but for some reason they were over exposed... I’ll hopefully be able to fix them when we get back.

After lunch we headed down to a station near Gangnam and stopped for some nice tea and a green tea roll - super good quality! We took a little bit of a break here to let our phones re-charge and cool down in the air conditioning.  Again photo fail.

As we were looking for one of the stores Meghan wanted to go to, we noticed that there was a Gentle Monster nearby. Gentle Monster is a glasses and sunglasses store, but we knew from YouTube videos that some of the locations are more than just a store - some of them have crazy art installations. This particular one had mostly bird themes and five floors (or maybe six, we lost count). And each floor was a mixture of retail (sunglasses laying throughout) and modern art exhibit:

Your guess is as good as ours

These were silly - they also had more normal-looking glasses

Apparently a tiny spaceship with cargo?

This nest was huge

The basement level was all art exhibit. To one side was an old style TV with a white bird, and to the other... well, it was something very special:

This was highly unsettling in person

Meghan did find a pair of glasses she really liked, but they unfortunately don’t do the sunglasses in prescription.

After leaving Gentle Monster, we checked out their smaller regular glasses store. It was quite a nice store, but it didn’t have the museum like aspects to it.

We planned to walk towards the closest station to take us down to Gangnam station to find the Dr. Jart+ flagship store, but stumbled across a large Dr. Jart+ on the way. It was also more than just a store and consisted of three stories: one was retail, one was a fancy instustrial-feel tester section, and the top floor had an “ASMR” station and a “sleepy garden”.

ASMR section. It was headphones and an app.

Sleepy Garden - Turned out to be an actual garden.

At this point we were starting to feel pretty tired and we were drenched in sweat, so we diced to head back to our place for a shower and to drop off our purchases.

We then headed out for some MEAT. Last night we had passed a place with a decent line and packed dining room, while another places two doors down was basically empty. We decided it must be good so we hit it up for dinner.

While we were waiting, we noticed the entrance to a board game cafe.

Waiting for our meat

It has arrived!

They had these hot stone platters to set your meat when it was done so that it would stay warm without burning. It was pretty darn delicious.

Knowing that we would probably grab something else to eat on our way back to our room, we didn’t fill up. Instead we stopped by this cute “quiche” shops we had seen to grab something sweet for tonight and something savory for breakfast. They were called quiche, but the sweet ones were really just tarts - delicious and delicate tarts, but definitely tarts and not quiches

So adorable and delicious.

Fitbit step count: 19,565