SEOUL 서울

I think we’re a little overdue for a post about Seoul!

When we were researching where we wanted to live in South Korea, lots of people recommended Seoul. With a population of almost 10 million, it’s a city where you’ll never run out of things to do. But after weighing the pros and cons, we decided we preferred to live in a smaller city and it would be easy enough to visit Seoul without having to live there. We were right - it costs $40 for a one way flight to Seoul. We decided to be cheap and take subways from the airport, so from our apartment in Busan to our hostel in Seoul, it took about 4 hours to get there.   (Still can’t get over how good public transit is here - I will eventually dedicate a post to that).

We stayed in Hondae, which is what everyone recommended. It’s an upbeat neighborhood that is pretty central, has lots of shopping, restaurants, and nightlife, and street performers on the weekends. We wanted to make the most of our visit to Seoul so we booked our flights for 7:30 AM, which meant waking up at 4:45 AM. In hindsight, that was dumb because we got to our hostel at 9:15 AM and everything was closed and we were SO TIRED all day! But also, had we arrived in the afternoon, we might have had energy to go to Itaewon Saturday night - Itaewon is known for being a cool area with lots of international food and a super cool place for Halloween. Itaewon is also where the devastating accidental crowd crush happened the day we arrived in Seoul. Had we made just a couple decisions differently we might have been there.

Our first day in Seoul, we found one of the few brunch places open at 9:30 AM and had a delicious and cheap meal, chilled a bit, and did some research. We then checked out the national museum, but we weren’t really in the mood for history so we just enjoyed the architecture and the surrounding park before heading to Seoul Forest where we ate some baked goods and sat on a bench and people watched until we could checkin to our hostel. We probably spent around 3 hours on the subway our first day. But when I looked at catching a cab, the estimated time to get there was the same.

After a good rest at the hostel, we explored Hondae at night. We watched a few of the street performers and enjoyed seeing all the Halloween costumes. There seemed to be some kind of order to the street performers but we didn’t really have a clue what was going on. We had an underwhelming meal for dinner (steak bowls but they were really chewy) and then we were honestly debating going to bed at 8. But I remembered there was a dog cafe nearby and so we went there for an hour instead and pet the puppies.

Our second day in Seoul, we went to Bukchon cultural village and one of the nearby temples. Cam did lots of research in advance this time and we enjoyed tea at  Tea Masineun Tteul teahouse and delicious Japanese curry at Tiger curry. The area had tons of traditional houses and some cute boutique shops. Since we were there, we also went to Changgyeonggun palace grounds. It probably would’ve been more interesting with a tour since we didn’t know anything about it.

That evening we had the best ramen we’ve had so far in Korea. Then we discovered another fun street in Hondae where we had ice cream and people watched.

Day three we went on a hike which I already wrote about in my last post. Finally, our last day, we went out for brunch at a cafe that was very instagramable but the food wasn’t as tasty as it looked, and we walked to the river and checked out a library cafe. Our flight wasn’t until 7:30 PM so to kill some time we checked out a place called Coconut Box. That ended up being a great decision. It’s basically a Caribbean island themed hangout spot. You pick a cabana and can chill for 3 hours or enjoy the ball pits. They also serve food and our admission included a glass of champagne each. It ended up being the perfect last spot to kill some time before we caught our flight home.

Seoul is HUGE and we only really explored a tiny section of it - like barely 3 neighbourhoods. It can be overwhelming and exhausting trying to subway everywhere to see everything. (Although Tripadvisor does mark the subway system super high for sights to see in Seoul)! We'll definitely have to go back to see more.