Day 13 - Dongdaemun & N Seoul Tower

So today we decided to finally check out the Dongdaemun Market since this is one of the more popular touristy attractions. What we heard ahead of time is that they had a lot of cheap clothing, bags, shoes, etc. Anything you could imagine would be here. They also had a lot of wholesale things as well. So we left the hotel, went into the Metro and made our way to Dongdaemun Station. We were hungry of course so we decided to walk around and check out what restaurants they had to offer in the area. We decided to go to some random restaurant that seemed pretty popular. This restaurant didn't have a lot of items you could share with the entire table but more like your individual dishes. I decided to have cold buckwheat noodles with the hard boiled egg on top and Ray had some sort of spicy rice dish in a hot stone pot kind of like bibimbap but more so it was fried rice in the stone bowl.



Famous Cold Noodle Dish



Sliced Pork Belly to accompany the Cold Noodle

 When we left the restaurant we stopped into a bunch of beauty stores on the way to pick up some gifts for friends back home. Honestly Seoul has sooo many of these beauty shops which I'm sure I've mentioned in previous blog posts. One of my favourite stores were Skin Food. I liked this store because it had a lot of cheap skin care items like facial cleansers and random things to the more expensive priced items like scrubs. Anything ranged from 8,000 -20,000KRW there. I heard a lot of good things about this store as well so I picked up some facial scrubs. Another thing I like about these stores is that they give you a lot of mini samples from some of their various products which comes in handy when you want to see what products are good or not.

After that we went to watch this show/ride thing happening on this stage in the middle of this area (kind of like Dundas Square). Basically it was like one of those rides you see at CNE or WL where its like a circle and you sit and it spins around and around as well as moves up and down at the same time it spins so you get knocked out pretty badly. The funny thing about this ride is that it was just a circle and around the edges were seats and then a big center in the middle with nothing. So when people who tested out this ride were being spun around, their shoes were coming off, they were knocked off their seats cause there weren't any seat belts and it was just a really funny site to see. All you could do was hold onto the rails on the sides of the chairs to hold you up but even then it wouldn't help because it is also extremely painful to have to use both your hands and arms to hold you from being knocked off your seat. It also didn't help that the ride operator was purposely knocking people and making it spin extremely fast. It was also cool because the guys who worked there were doing flips as this thing was spinning which was really impressive.



Disco Ride

Now we talk about the shopping! We've been told that there was a lot of malls in this area that had a lot of cheap clothing and accessories. The most popular being APM, Doota and Migliore. We decided to check out each of these malls and what they had to offer. Basically, APM and Migliore were pretty much the same. When you walk in there's a bunch of mini shops selling women's clothing and the next floor they sold boots and on and on. It's basically a bunch of mini vendors all on one floor which was pretty interesting to see cause each place had something unique or nice. It all becomes a bit overwhelming because they all offer the same clothing and some of them try to call you over to sell things. They have all their prices on the items but you can always bargain with them. ie. lowering the price for two items. We did that a lot at some stores. I must say that these malls have a lot of nice accessories so if anyone likes these types of things should definitely go there to check it out. We went to Doota after, and this was a very nice mall as well. Same concept, many different vendors in one mall but this was way more classier. It had the higher brand clothing, cosmetics and accessories. But the prices were so high it was ridiculous. We went to a souvenir shop to buy some shirts which we thought were "cheap" but then we went outside and walked a bit and saw the same shirt for half the price! So when you go shopping in these types of places and night markets, definitely check out everywhere before you make a heavy purchase.

We left Doota and decided to walk down more to the market area. We stopped at a food vendor and got some fried chicken on a stick :) and when we walked into the huge buildings, we realized it was all wholesale items selling fabrics and such. It was kind of boring walking through this so we tried to go on the other side of the street. It looked like a dead town so we asked for some info from a tourist booth and they said that this place is most live at night time starting 9pm. By this time it was already 6pm so we didn't bother to stay there so we decided to head to the N Seoul Tower because it was night time and we heard it was really nice to go at night.

N Seoul Tower

We exited the station and followed the directions on the pamphlet on how to get there. It was kind of sketchy because it told us to walk pass this hotel and it was basically a small side road. It looked like an alley to me and it was dark and empty with not a lot of people. The pamphlet said it was a 10 minute walk but it felt like a 20 minute uphill walk. Seriously by the time we got there, we saw a set of stairs and ran up. We felt like we did a work out doing that uphill walking haha. So we bought the tickets to take the cable car up which is super high and scary. However, it's a really nice to check out the scenery and all over Seoul. By the time we got up there it was dark and we didn't realize that going up the tower would cost us more money so we decided to just check out the view from the cable car platform area. What was cool about this is that couples come up here and put their locks on the wires/railings. Pretty romantic.

So after taking our photos and stuff we saw a caricature artist doing a couple's portrait that looked really cool. Her name was like Connie Woo or something. But I know I totally got the name wrong. Anyways, we decided to get our caricature done because she did a pretty accurate job with everyone else and they were funny. She honestly didn't look older than maybe 20 years old and she was so talented. This is what she did for us:

The artist who drew our portrait!

 This girl is so talented, we loved her photo of us! Ray doesn't like his bushy eyebrows though ;)

After we checked out around the tower we decided to head back into town and we took the cable car back. Since we were in the Myeongdong area, we decided to stick around and grab some food that was around. We noticed that were were 4 huge Lotte stores that we vowed to check out before we left here. We walked through the mini streets of Myeongdong and we found a nice restaurant that consisted of the same type of food, basically dak-galbi. This time we had something with seafood in it as well. The food was okay but we both agreed that the first time we every had this dish, it was honestly the best place we tried. This one we gave it 3 out of 5 stars

Popular Dak Galbi Restaurant

Dak Galbi

Dak Galbi

After dinner, since everything was closing up we were pretty tired to go back to Dongdaemun to check out the night market, so we decided to just head back to our comfy hotel. 

Next Day 14 - Lotte Department Stores & Myeongdong pt. 2 & Dongdaemun pt. 2