Today is a special day for South Koreans. This is the first observed day of what has been described to us as Korea’s Thanksgiving: Chuseok. Chuseok proper is tomorrow, however today and the day after Chuseok are observed holidays as well. We knew this meant that some places may be closed and some transportation may be more difficult to find or may close early. We had checked the internet and found that many of the museums, palaces, and other public attractions do remain open. Additionally, some are free and some have attractions like shows or events as well.
We first head towards the War Memorial of Korea, as we wanted to learn more about Korea’s history and the history of the Korean War. We arrive and find enormous statues and monuments out from of this gargantuan building. Some of the statues are more abstract, while others are direct representations of those who fought or sacrificed for the war. We spent time looking at these as well as looking at monuments for the countries who aided South Korea.
We headed inside and learn that this is a massive museum with multiple floors and both indoor and outdoor exhibits and attractions. We decide to hit is from the bottom and move our way up.
We go through rooms with either replicas or preserved tanks, airplanes, and other vehicles from the Korean War (they looked real, but all had a strange thick finish over them). We continued, seeing exhibits ranging from ancient history of Korea to others discussing wars over the past 150 years or so. We tried to appreciate this as much as possible, but parts of the museum seemed a little disconnected and seemed to cover too much, jumping around from time period to time period. We looked at the clock and realized that we wouldn’t be able to see everything, though we were able to find a room/hall that was solely dedicated to the history of the Korean War. We went through this room, soaking in as much as possible in the short 30-40 minutes that we had left before having to leave for our next plans. We eventually run out of time and have to exit, leaving a good chunk of the museum unseen.
We catch the bus and head out to have lunch near our next destination. Many places are closed, causing us to have to pivot and pivot again. We eventually find a Korean ramen spot that looked good, and headed in to grab a seat. We both share a Korean ramen and a small side dish of Korean chicken. The ramen was pretty good, but it seems as though they used spaghetti noodles, which was pretty strange. It is interesting that the more ramen we eat, the more we realize that the noodle is one of the most if not the most important parts of the dish. The chicken was pretty good, but a little greasy.
We finished up and headed out to the Sool Gallery for our next activity – a free guided Korean alcohol tasting! Caitlyn found this event while searching online, and managed to find a slot with just a few openings left for an English language-guided tasting of some Korean alcoholic beverages. Last night, the front desk attendant helped us make the reservation, as in South Korea, you need to have a verified identification to reserve restaurants using Naver (the only real way to do it without calling or showing up in person). He was nice enough to call them to make the reservation and asked them a bunch of questions to ensure we would be ready to show up for the event. We make it to the gallery about 30 minutes early, and are told to hang out and look around in the meantime. We found some cool exhibits discussing Korean food and see some interesting recipe cards. As we don’t have room to take the cards and bring them back with us to America, we took pictures of all of the cards that we are interested in. Time finally comes for the tasting, and we head back to the room. There were only 8 of us in total, which made for a nice intimate experience. Our guide ran us through a tangerine makgeolli, a yakju, a fruit wine, a strong soju spirit, and a brandy. They were pretty small portions, but enough to get a good taste of each. David’s favorite was the soju, while Caitlyn enjoyed the yakju best. We ended up purchasing a few bottles after the tasting, as they were remarkably cheap compared to any alcohol we would find in the U.S. and we really enojoyed them.
We left and kept walking around for a little, finding a coffee shop and purchasing 2 interesting iced coffees to walk around with.
Our next destination was the Bukchon Hanok Village, which is a traditional village with beautiful old-style homes that are still lived in. This street was PACKED with tourists, but thankfully there were guides and signs telling people to whisper and stay quiet, as this is a full on residential village. We went to a place called the “House of Baek Inje”. This is a cultural heritage site that was built during the Japanese colonial era and is a great example of the Hanok style home. It was donated after passing by the previous owner, and allowed a good look into what the exterior and interior of these homes may look like. Most of the interior was only visible through glass panels covering the internal home, but it was a cool experience.
We kept walking through the streets, admiring the incredible views as many of the roads lead steeply upwards. We remarked on how similar this area felt to Gion in Kyoto, but without any shops.
We headed back down and were enticed by an advertisement for a cup of a famous makgeolli. We googled this and found it was served out of a hotel. We went to the hotel and were greeted by an ex-pat European living and working in Korea. We tell him we would like two cups of the makgeolli and he sends his assistant to the back to get the cups. We talk with him for a while (long enough that it felt like she was fermenting the makgeolli in the back!), and eventually the makgeolli came out in two plastic cups with a large round ice cube in both and a plastic lid taped on top. We had looked into South Korean public drinking laws, but were a bit confused. The man heavily inferred that it would be a nice day for us to walk around and drink these, so we asked him about the drinking laws. Strangely, he seemed to indicate that it was illegal to drink in public, hence the taped lids. We weren’t sure if we were misunderstanding this, especially after his previous comments, or if it was a non-enforced law. We thanked him and went back outside to continue walking around. We decided to play it safe and sneakily drank our cups, finding the nearest trash can to dispose of the evidence.
We walked around for quite a long time before the midday heat was too much for us. We decided to stop in somewhere for a beer, and found a place called “Jaedong Beer” on Naver. We found it quickly and walked inside. Funny enough, they only had one type of beer (Hawaii’s Kona Big Wave) and looked at us funny when we asked if we could come in to just have a beer. We sat and worked on the blog for a while until it began to get packed. We finished up quickly as to not prevent them from making money from other potential patrons.
We walked down to the Insadong region to walk down some popular market streets. There was a huge crowd towards the entrance surrounding a street performer. We worked our way in a bit to get a view and realized he was performing a Houdini-esque escape routine out of a straightjacket and chains. We found this funny, as the chains were very evidently not very tight, and he kind of just flicked his head backwards to get them off. We watched for a little, but bored decided to leave and walk around some. There were a TON of souvenir shops here, all large and full of many potential things to buy. We eventually find one with a small desktop sized bell with a small fake log on a chain to ring the bell with. We have loved all of the bells, as previously written, so we really wanted to buy one. We decided to play it cool and try to bargain some. This wasn’t super successful, so we decided to keep going around to other shops and try to find a better price. We eventually find the right bell we liked in the right color, and were able to successfully get the price reduced some to our happy point, and got a nice souvenir to bring back home.
We wanted to head back some towards the region we were staying, and decided that we would prefer to do the long walk rather than take public transportation. Along our walk, we saw lots of preparations for Chuseok events over the next few days. One area had a giant crane where a woman suspended herself to it and spun around on pieces of fabric like an acrobat (clearly practicing and checking things out for a performance). We also saw what appeared to be a memorial and decided to check it out. It was absolutely heartbreaking. We weren’t aware of it, but last year on October 29th, there was a horrific crush event that happened in Seoul where something around 160 people died on top of hundreds of injuries due to poor planning and poor crowd control. We watched quite a few people walk up to it, clearly looking for a specific picture to pay their respects to, and spend time looking at their friend or loved one that isn’t around anymore. We were surprised that neither of us had heard of this, as it was such a massive number of people who needlessly died. After absorbing this, we kept walking, eventually walking along a riverwalk. We chose to avoid going too close so we didn’t get bit by any mosquitos, but still enjoyed the walk.
We went back to the hotel and freshened up some while deciding on dinner. We wanted today to be Korean fried chicken for dinner, so we spent some time (far too long) trying to find a good place to get some real KFC. We found a place called Kkanbu chicken and decided to check it out. We shared one order of chicken, split half special sauce and half plain. David felt that the plain needed a little salt, but was very good, and Caitlyn preferred the sauced one. We finished up and went back to the hotel for a good night sleep.
David’s Thoughts of the Day: I don’t understand how they portion food here. Some meals are cheap and seem like they would only give you enough for one person. For example, the fried chicken meal was cheap enough that we were sure we would be sharing one portion, but they literally give you an entire chicken with two of everything.
Caitlyn’s Thoughts of the Day Alcohol is remarkably inexpensive in South Korea. After the Sool Gallery, we looked around and saw that so many of the award winning alcohols were only a few dollars for a bottle.
Steps walked: 21,128
Miles walked: 10.07
Bluming Travelers 