Day 9

I apologize for not being able to post any pictures of our tour only because we did forget to bring the usb cable for the camera. In addition, some places which we will be going to does not allow us to insert the SD card into the PC. Therefore, the trip pictures will available as soon as we arrive back in Toronto. So please bare with me = ) We were fortunate however, that a good friend in Korea has lent her laptop to us so that we could bring you these blogs and update you guys as quickly as possible.

Before I start mentioning anything about our trip I would like to give you some quick tips about the country so that if you ever plan on going to Seoul, Korea after reading our blog you would have some better knowledge to prepare you.

Quick Tips

1. 1 CDN dollar is equivalent to approximately 1000 Korean Won (1,130KRW to be exact). Although shopping in Korea does give you some benefits and deals on certain items and products, don't expect to always find a bargain. If anyone is familiar with the term "the law of one price," they should know that the prices of any good and service in whatever country should be somewhat similiar regardless of a different foreign exchange rate. This has been proven true while we were in Korea, HOWEVER there are definitely some places which have bargain steals which we will mention later in the blog so just continue reading and we will tell you all the juicy spots on where to shop.

2. Beware of Korean food. If you are not a spicy eater make sure you have a friend who knows how to write Korean hanguel so that he or she can write you a card which says "Less spicy or no spicy." This is to save you the hardship of sweating and not enjoying your food simply because the food tends to be spicy or VERY spicy. The majority of the food we had during our stay always consisted of some hot spices. I believe this is part of the Korean culture. So I warn you, Korean food is some hot stuff. Although most of the food is hot, there are a lot of other dishes which is very delicious and not spicy at all such as cold buckwheat noodles. We will get into this later. But this is just a pre-blog warning.

3. You do not need to tip in Korea. The ldeology in the west is for people to tip the server after finishing a meal, however this is not the case here. Whatever price is listed on the menu for a particular dish, this is what you're expected to pay. Sometimes the service is so good that you just want to tip, but you should refrain from doing it. It is not part of their ideology and has been this way for decades.

4. Never pour your own drink when in a party, allow someone else to do it. Everytime you finish your drink someone will always be there to refill your glass. When you see an empty glass of another member of the party, you should always take the liberty to refill their glass.

5. Like we said from before, the transit system is extremely covenient. It takes you all over Seoul with the max cost of 1,200KRW one way. Everything is located above the subway so if you need to get anywhere, the Metro Transit is the way to go.

Without further ado here is day 9, the first full day of Korea.

So we wake up on the first day in Seoul around 10am. For breakfast we pretty much filled ourselves up with these pastries we got in Tokyo. I wouldn't call them pastries, they were those litttle red bean cakes. We had a whole schedule done up before we arrived to Seoul so we would know what we were doing for each of the days we were here (Thanks SL). Some people go on trips not planning because I guess they have a pre-planned tour already scheduling their day or they rather just wing it. However, I feel like exploring on your own is a lot better because you get to spend more time in the areas you like and planning is awesome because you keep yourself busy.

So we leave our hotel and start heading out west towards some areas close to us. For those who have been to Seoul or know Seoul really well, we are staying in the Seodaemun area which is in between a lot of tourist attractions and shopping areas. We didn't really explore our own area because from the looks of it there's nothing really around us whenever we exit our hotel but one subway station away there is always something exciting. So we took the subway and transfered to Ewha Women's University station. The area had such a different atmosphere with all the students and young adults walking around and about. There were lots of cafes, coffee shops and some clothing stores around us. We walked around and went into this store called Olive Young. This shop is super popular, almost equivalent to a Shoppers Drug Mart in Toronto however their focus is mainly beauty, not really food. They had a lot of cheap make up and beauty products. In Toronto, eye contact solution is pretty expensive. Here, they had 2 bottles of contact solution and some extra things with it for about 11,000KRW which I think is a steal. You'll come across a lot of these beauty product shops such as Tony Moly, Missha, Etude House, The Skin Food, Banilla Co. etc. You get the picture.

After walking around the area, we were feeling hungry so we went into a restaurant that looked pretty good. It had photos of noodles outside so we figured that we would get some Korean noodles. When we sat down, we noticed a lot of people sharing food on a huge pan on top of the mini stove and table. Like table top cooking. We had 4 options: Spicy noodles, black bean noodles, white noodles and seafood  noodles. We each decided we would get one spicy and one black bean which cost 12,000KRW each. We thought this was reasonable. However, when we ordered, the lady was confused because she said its a "set" and we only pick one. We then said, "no, no set, seperate." She still looked confused so we're like okay fine, spicy noodle set then. We came to a realization that we were suppose to only order one thing and share on the table top. This is pretty much what we ate:

   Image from "eatyourbap.com." It's basically chewy rice cakes, noodles, cabbage, fish cake etc. It wasn't that spicy which was good cause I was able to handle it. It was a good first meal that only cost us total 12,000KRW. The portion was 4x the photo for us two people and it came with the usual kimchi side dishes and radish. It also came with a whole carton of peach juice as part of the "set" which was awesome. We were saying we would go there again but as you will read from this blog, there are a ton of amazing restaurants in Seoul that we tried.

After our meal, we realized we walked towards the next station aka. Sinchon station. This area is known for great food during the evenings and a lot of young adults hanging out. We were there during the day, so it was busy but it didn't live up to the reputation we keep hearing about it. We went into a mall that was there called Migliore. It seemed like a dead mall to us. It was pretty empty in certain areas and basically this mall is suppose to be a bunch of little shops in this one mall but with super cheap clothes. We later learned that there's like three of these Migliore Malls and the other two we experienced was full and packed with people. However, the one in Sinchon was dead. We went all the way upstairs and saw that there was a Megabox Cinema. Considering we are huge movie fanatics we were feeling like watching a movie since  in Toronto, we go to the movies 3-4 times a month. We decided to watch The Expendables. It was good because it was in English with Korean subtitles so it was pretty worthwhile for us. It's also reserved seating when you buy the ticket. The total for two of us came to 18,000KRW. This definitely beats those $25 prices at Cineplex back home!

After the movie, we decided to check out the Gwanghwamun area which is known for having lots of history with all the palaces and well known museums. We came out from the subway and saw this background:

 This is called Gwanghwamun Square and it is a site that is dedicated to King Se Jong (dude on the 10,000KRW bill) and this warrior/soldier that is memorable for leading his troops over a victory against Japan. Underground of these statues there's a free mini museum of the information about these two men.

It's actually a really cool site you can see the Geongbukgong Palace gates (which we will talk about later) and the mountain behind it. It's a very nice site. People were really friendly here too, they helped us take photos and it's funny we actually bumped into a man from Toronto visiting Seoul.

We wanted to check out the Geongbukgong Palace because it's a really famous palace but unfortunately it was already closed because it was past 5pm (which is a super early closing time I mightt add). So we walked around the area and came across the Chung Gye Cheon River. This is also a nice place for people to take a stroll:

This river is extremely long, goes down a long way in Seoul. It's funny because we saw a lot of kids splashing and swimming in this river which the water comes from a fountain that begins nearby Gwanghwanum. We started walking by this river because there is a lot of people, there is art work along the walls, music being played and artist making some money doing portraits. It was our first night and we had no idea we stumbled into the Myeongdong area but we decided on some dinner.



We went to this place called  Hot Sun which is basically chicken wings and beer. We ordered probably too much for two people. Like we said, people share all their food here so we ordered two dishes: Sausage and potatoes and grilled chicken wings. The sausages were super westernized, with bbq sauce on top. The chicken however was a dangerous meal to my stomach. We ordered 3 chilli which is medium spicy. We had an option to order 1, 3 or 5 chilli. When we got the food Ray took the first bite and said "Oh man, I'm in trouble, there's no way I can eat all of this." He was refering to the fact that I can't eat too much spice and how spicy this chicken was. I wanted to try anyways because it looked so good. I took one bite and my tongue burned and the small bite I swallowed really burned/made my stomach turn. Not even a joke. Ray was even having a hard time eating it. Thank god I ate the potatoes and sausage or else I'd be starving this night. We took it to go because he couldn't handle eating 30 wings by himself. This shows that you need to be careful when picking your spice here cause it was pretty bad for me.

We decided to walk it off and head back to the hotel. Both of us complained that our stomach was hurting before we went to sleep haha.