Seoul ~ Day 1

Seoul is even more beautiful than I imagined. When I say beautiful, it's not the physical side of it. Of course, today's venturing has let us witnessed the colourful ceremony of the changing of the guards at Gyeongbukgung. Instead, what I mean by beautiful is the charm that the city exudes. Although, when we had arrived in Seoul the night before, my Mum and I were as apprehensive as any tourist in a foreign country would be. And, seeing as how it was dark, we were tired, anxious to get to our hotel, we weren't really able to keep up the most positive attitude. What was worse, some guy had to ram my heel with his trolley cart full of luggages. He apologised courteously in Korean, but I was just so annoyed and trying to find the right words to say "It's okay" in Korean, I wasn't able to muster anything except a glare at him.

Finally, when we got to our hotel after having had a chat in Korean along the way, we were so tired (and hungry) that we just fell asleep then and there. I had only energy enough to change my top before lying down and finding myself drifting off. It was funny that I kept waking up constantly and seemingly checking what time it was. Possibly, it was my apprehension at wanting to have a good look at where we were. Surely, as soon as I woke up, I took a look out the window and saw the beautiful and (then) quiet street of Teherano-ro. It was ironic, seeing as how there are up to 12 million people living in Seoul, and yet at that moment that I looked down at the streets of the main road, there was hardly a soul in sight. Oftentimes there was only one or two people walking by themselves.

Today, we weren't able to go to all the places I had initially planned to go to, but we were able to go to Gyeongbukgung palace. We transferred once to get on a train line (line 3) that would take us over the Hangang River and onto the north side of Seoul. The palace was trully a spectacle, even to the non-architecture savvy person. It's a wonder how vibrant the colours of the palaces, and how much time is spent restoring it. It was a surprisingly large complex, and I mean large! It was quite annoying as we had missed an area where maps of the palace were available. So we had walked straight on, probably due to our overwhelmed reaction to just how pretty it was. We had walked quite some time already before realising that others had acquired copies of maps. We took much longer than expected in looking around at sights with having little knowledge of what they were. This was mainly why we weren't able to go Changdeokgung and Bukchon Village. Instead, we went straight in front of the palace to, what I think is called, Seollung where the famous statues of the samurai and a golden statue of an important person seated on his chair. I had seen these sites in the famous series Iris, where some parts of the action scenes were filmed in this very area. Afterwards, we were so cold and hungry that we wandered until we found ourselves in front of Kyobo bookstore. It was one of the places I had wanted to go to purchase my Korean language textbooks. We had an early dinner there, which was very very cheap. Afterwards, we took the subway back to Samseong station and walked through COEX mall, Hotel Intercontinental Parsan, and Hyundai department store, before walking back home. Tonight, I was also able to taste Banana milk, a drink that is really popular here in Korea. It wasn't as amazing as I expected but it tasted very good nonetheless.

Now, it's time to get some good and sufficient amount rest before I embark on the second day of touring Seoul.