Annyeong-haseyo! So it's my last night in Seoul and I figured I wouldn't be taking much photos tomorrow so I'll put these up now. It's Christmas Eve now, but by the time I'm finished this post, it'll be Christmas, so Merry Christmas! It's been such an awesome trip, and I saw and bought a lot of cool stuff! For this post, I'm too lazy to find/nobody cares about the specs of each photo so I'm just gonna leave that out and write captions. Anyway, this place is too awesome and it's sad to have to leave tomorrow. If I could live here, I totally would, of course except for the fact that no one really knows how to speak English here...
At Incheon Airport waiting for the bus to the hotel
Myeong-Dong is probably the most crowded area and also the most Christmas spirited part of Seoul. This place has all the best food in town. I went there for dinner 4 out of 5 nights. These streets are busy every night and there are probably 50000 people on the streets at a time. There were Christmas decorations, a band playing Christmas music for the Salvation Army fund, and random locals giving out free hugs, and it even snowed one night!
Gyeongbok gung is the palace where the King used to live. It was a pretty cold day and the pond surrounding one of the buildings was frozen so that was pretty nice. The guards standing at the gates with their traditional uniform look pretty intense and were shouting random Korean when they were changing shifts. The buildings were pretty cool and it was a nice day, but way too cold to stay outside for more than an hour so I didn't really get a chance to walk through the entire palace.
This is Insa-dong, probably my favourite place to visit. It's supposedly the "cultural" part of town and it's got a plaza called Ssamziegil that has really cool shops and lots of graffiti and street art. There's also an alley behind the plaza with lots of restaurants and "old-looking" buildings. I pretty much went crazy here with my fish-eye, which by the way, is coming up on my next post.
Seoul Tower is pretty fail as a tower since it's pretty short and up on a hill so it's technically cheating. But from the base of the tower, you can see most of Seoul so I didn't even bother going up to the top of the tower. An interesting thing they do up here is put a padlock on the railings on the deck. It's supposed to be a "love padlock" that couples lock onto the railings and write a message to symbolize their everlasting love... Seeing things like this kinda makes me wish I had someone to spend the holidays with... oh well.
This is Apgujeong and Dong-daemun, two good places to shop. There were some pretty crowded and cool looking streets at Apgujeong, and lots of bars but I was there during the day so the bar streets were pretty quiet. There's a stream that travels through Dong-daemun that you can walk along. It's not quite frozen yet, but there was a huge chunk of ice that looked like a waterfall or something.
Anyway, that's my trip to Seoul and I'm heading back to Hong Kong tomorrow. I can't wait to come back here. This city is awesome! That's it for now, and the fish-eyes are coming soon.
Merry Christmas!
