A day with more adventures

We headed into Seoul for another Sunday being a tourist in a city we live in the outskirts of. We didn’t really have one big thing we wanted to see, but we had a map from Lonely Planet of the downtown area, and we were just going to hit some highlights of stuff we hadn’t seen yet and play it by eat.

We got out of the subway station and walked towards Jungbu market. It was a big expansive fish market. Lisa and I were definitely the only white people there. It wasn’t too busy on the Sunday, but there was any kind of fish and shellfish you could imagine on sale. And it smelled a lot like fish. We strolled out of there and headed through what must have been the stationary supply store district towards the city centre. We literally passed tons of stores that just cell day planners, or made stickers, or just pens. It was really funny. MTV Korea was the next weird thing we walked by. It was a really cool building, but slightly out of place. The last thing along the walk was the Myeongdong Catholic Church. It was this big brick cathedral up on a hill just before you get to the packed shopping district of Myeongdong. It’s weird to think of Korea as a Christian nation. I always thought everyone here was Buddhist before I got here, but there are lots of churches everywhere. It was just after noon on Sunday, and there were floods of people coming out of the church, and lots of people milling around sightseeing. It was chaotic so we got out of there. Myeongdong was packed too, and neither of us were in the mood to shop, so we headed towards city hall.

The next string of things we wanted to see turned out to be a big string of epic failures. After wandering around city hall for awhile, which is a very confusing intersection with a random plaza in the middle, we figured out the Canadian Embassy is not where Lonely Planet says it is. This is the first inaccuracy I’ve ever encountered, but it sucked. Then we figured out city hall is the huge thing across the plaza covered by plywood all over, probably for renovations. We did, however, find the “Anglican Church”, in quotations because that is the church’s actual name, no association with a saint or anything cool. The church was really nice though, and looked like it belonged in the Mediterranean or something. The famous Namdaemun Gate, the Northern Gate of Seoul had apparently burnt down over the summer. Some drunk guy torched it and the whole thing was covered, also by giant plywood, while they carried out the very long restoration work. We were starving so we headed to Seoul Station to find something cheap and quick for supper. We tried Pizza Hut. On our way up the stairs, we got to see a homeless alcoholic passed out on his side puke repetitively down the stairs of the train station. We ordered way to small of a pizza, and it was slightly overpriced.

For fear of sounding like a complainer in a foreign country, I’ll tell you about how the day turned around after supper and we saw some really cool stuff. Namdaemun Market was on our way back to the subway station and a couple other things we wanted to check out. The market was huge and we only saw a tiny bit of it. Things were also quieting down this time of night. There were tongs of shops and stalls packed with people and fake goods: purses, wigs, sunglasses, scarves. There was also a lot of fish and random plastic items. We ducked out of the market around the big Bank of Korea building. It was all lit up at night and very impressive. We walked up to the Cheonggye Stream, which we had already seen in the daytime, but it looked cool in pictures at night. The lights all around the stream plus the skyscrapers made for a really cool walk. We ended up catching a laser show that they have over the stream. A big line of mist shoots up from the stream and there is techno blaring. There were really cool shapes made on the mist wall and it drew a pretty big crowd.

We walked through all the lights in the Jongno area, basically a bunch of streets with the typical horizontal neon signs everywhere, but still cool to see. We found the original “Ho Bar”, not to be confused with Chevy’s or Ho Bar II or Ho Bar III, etc. haha. At the end of the street in a little park area there is Bosin-gak. It’s a really old bell that used to be rung if there were fires in Seoul or in case of an attack on the walls. It’s where everyone gathers on New Year’s Eve to hear it ring out again at midnight. At Jongno tower, a really futuristic looking office building, we went searching of the English book store in the basement shopping area. The Bandi and Luni’s here was pretty huge and had an impressive English section. Lisa found all her classics and a bunch of Jane Austin. They had a huge selection of Lonely Planet, and we got one on Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam for our Christmas trip. They had lots of Harry Potter, all the Bourne series, and tons more. We really didn’t need to pack any books with us. We also bought the new Dan Brown book, which just came out a few days ago: The Lost Symbol. We headed home with lots of reading material for the subway ride.