Golden Week Day 3: Rubber Seoul

Our destination on day 3 was Chonggyecheon, where we continued our theme of doing a lot of walking (hence the title). Chonggyecheon is a stream that cuts through northern Seoul that used to be covered by a highway but was turned into a giant walking area as part of an urban renewal project.

This is apparently a re-creation of an old painting of a royal entourage that went along with a king to visit his father's tomb. There's a lot of it. One nice touch is that they had speakers (tastefully hidden in the bushes) that were playing the sounds of horse hooves and medieval-sounding trumpets.

We stopped for lunch in the food court of a high-rise shopping mall that had a view of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza. It appears to still be under construction, but is already giving the neighborhood sort of a sci-fi feel.

 Quinn ordered a spicy squid dish.

 I tried the bibimbap -- a rice bowl topped with vegetables and an egg.

Right in the same neighborhood is the Seoul Heunginjimun, a big ancient-looking gate. Unfortunately we couldn't get too close to it.

 We stopped by the hotel room for our mid-afternoon stretchout, then went out to take a look at Namdaemun market, which isn't far from Myeongdong. Quinn and I aren't really big shoppers, so the endless booths of cheap jewelry and luggage didn't appeal so much. We do like food, however.

These are tteokbokki, cigar-sized rice noodles served in a sweet/spicy chili sauce. Yum.

I'm not sure what these are called, but they're awesome. Big skewers with tteokbokki, sausage, and crab (probably imitation crab) meat, wrapped in something. We're not sure what they were wrapped in; I thought it was some kind of processed fish product similar to chikuwa; Quinn thought it was thin fried tofu like one would use for inarizushi.

Golden Week Day 2: Dark Night of the Seoul

On our first full day in Seoul, we ventured out to have a look at Changdeokgung, which came most highly-recommended out of Seoul's major palace complexes. We showed up in the neighborhood a little early for the English-language tour, so we stopped first at Bukchon, a neighborhood with lots of hanok, or traditional-style Korean houses.

The tour at Changdeokgung was of the "Secret Garden" -- a wooded area behind the main palace complex where (I suspect) the king had exclusive drinking (and poetry) parties. We didn't stick with the tour group for very long. I'm sure the tour guide was saying lots of witty and informative things, but her loudspeaker was so quiet that we couldn't hear her over the crowd, and the whole tour moved a little faster than people with a nine-month-old can do comfortably. We did discover, however, that the secret garden has a really nice diaper-changing room.

 It wouldn't really be a vacation if we didn't take lots of self-portrait pictures.

 Gus enjoyed this part of the day koala-style.

This was kind of a neat touch; a lot of the purpose of the secret garden was for the education of the crown prince. To drive the point home, most of the buildings had a bookshelf in them; if you took your shoes off you could go in and make use of the royal reading room. Some of them might have been Confucian classics, but I did spot at least one of the Twilight books.

After a morning of secret gardening, we were ready for some lunch. We found a place near Bukchon that looked good. It was.

Nobody puts Baby in the corner. Except his parents, that is.

It totally felt like we were having lunch at somebody's house; we took our shoes off when we came in, walked past the kitchen area where they were making dumplings, and sat down near a TV that was playing the news in Korean. We'd expected to only find tourist-trap restaurants in the neighborhood, but it seems we got lucky.

We ordered a (giant) seafood and green onion pancake, as well as a red bean soup with rice noodles in it.

And of course there was kimchi. Wonderful, wonderful kimchi; both the standard bok choy variety and some made from daikon. Since a single bok choy leaf is too big to handle with chopsticks, they gave us tongs and scissors so we could cut them into more manageable pieces.

After lunch, we returned to Chandeokgung to check out the actual palace buildings.

 I'm not sure what these were all about; we saw them on a lot of the roofs.

Quinn is born to direct and I'm (apparently) good at taking direction.

Case in point.


We headed back to the hotel so we could rest our feet a little and and Gus could stretch out and get a break from the carrier. Then we headed back out to visit Namsan Park and the Seoul Tower.

This is what the tower looked like before our climb. It didn't look that far away, so we opted to walk it rather than taking the cable car. Lots and lots of stairs.

 Here's the tower at the end of our climb, with Quinn posing triumphantly in front of it.

Apparently, Namsan park is a big date place. Couples (Seoul mates?) will climb up and leave a lock on one of the fences to symbolize their love. Ours is the greed combination lock in the middle.

 Lots of locks.

 Even the benches are romantic.

Seoul Tower included a teddy bear museum (why? why not?) and when we spotted a bear doing the "Gangnam Style" dance Quinn (and Gus) couldn't help but get in on it.

We took the cable car down, and paused to get a shot of just how far away the tower looks when you're not on the mountain.

Golden Week Day 1: Seoul Plane, Seoul Train, Seoul Food

It's that time of year again... I had some time off work for Golden Week and needed an adventure that would compare with last year. Quinn has always wanted to visit South Korea, so we decided to ignore some widely-publicized travel advice and head to Seoul for the week. We got tickets with Peach (Japan's first low-cost carrier!) and flew from Kansai to Incheon.

Gus is an excellent little world traveler; he handled the whole airport and flight experience with hardly a complaint. The guy at the KIX immigration desk was a little confused about why he had a US passport with no entry stamp for Japan; we had to explain that this was his first time leaving Japan.

Once we arrived at Incheon, we rode the airport express train into Seoul station and then the subway to Myeongdong, where our hotel was.

The main shopping street in Myeongdong. It goes on and on like this.


Once Quinn and Gus were settled down in the hotel, I ventured out to find us some dinner. Myeongdong has lots of restaurants, and even more clothing stores and a couple of motorized mannequins that bow to prospective customers, but I was having a hard time finding food to go.

Until, that is, I spotted it in the distance: Shinsegae, a giant Korean department store. And where there’s an Asian department store, there’s a basement-level food court.

I got some spicy fried chicken, some kind of green vegetable, and some kind of black rice thing. Overall, day one was a success.