17 August
Had a glorious sleep-in in my single room. It was great. I used the actual bathroom (not a tree) and showered (not wet wipes) before deciding where to start today. Hooray for not-camping!
The hostel provides breakfast which is pretty cool. I had eggs on toast with juice. No bacon (I'm starting to miss bacon) but it was good. They also had coffee but no tea oddly enough.
Organised to meet with Nell from the Mongolia tour the following day to do some tourist stuff. So today's plans were somewhat loose and revolved around me just stuffing about doing whatever I wanted.
And that meant a bit of sightseeing, a bit of ingress and a bit of drinking.
Started with wandering around Namdan Park which was very close to the hostel. Namdan is a beautiful park right in the city centre. The scenery is excellent. The whole park is also a god damn hill. Sigh. My arch-nemesis ... exercise.
So I'm walking up a staircase to the park and there are some posters with people taking selfies. Looks like the staircase was featured in a romcom of some variety. The movie poster showed the stars kissing over the railing in the middle of the stairs. Boring.
At the top of the stairs there was a really nice little park that had some statues of a dude who was involved in ousting the Japanese invasion of Korea and then became president I think. It was either unclear or I didn't read the signs properly.
There was also a sculpture of the earth with Australia front and centre. But I don't have any idea what it was about as the inscription was completely in Korean.
Walked around a bit more and came across the Namdan public library. They've got the great idea of having parks around the library with little bookshelves outside (like tree houses) for people to sit in the park and read. Love the idea. Unfortunately the execution failed. All the books were really soggy due to the rain and humidity. The librarians in Australia would be horrified according to Amy.
Walked around some more and there was a sign pointing to some sort of meditation zone or something. So I walked up the hill and did not find the meditation zone. Instead I found that the hill just kept going and going and going. Eventually I ended up at the top of the hill and there was the Seoul tower.
Think the Seattle sky needle. Big tower at the top of a hill that you pay to go up and see the city from up high. Well after walking up the damn hill I felt obligated to go inside the thing.
Chinggis ... we're not in Mongolia anymore!
You can tell Seoul is a major city from the skyline. High rises as far as the eye can see in every direction and interspersed with tree covered mountains. Really beautiful city and such a change from Ulaanbaatar.
On the other side of the hill I found a staircase that ran down to the bottom of the hill so took that. A nice change to the boring road I walked up to get there.
My hostel is halfway up this hill so after all this climbing I was a nice sweaty mess so stopped in the hostel for a shower and fresh clothes on the way down.
I can see myself getting into the same habit as China. Do stuff in the morning, sweat like a pig, go back for a shower, wash my shirt and put on a fresh one, rest for a while then head out again in the evening.
So I did that then went out again looking for food.
The area I'm staying in is basically a big shopping district. So I wandered around for a while looking at shops, playing Ingress and eating street food. Started raining so I bought an umbrella and kept wandering.
Got bored after a while and jumped on the subway to Itaewon seeking some craft beer. Itaewon is apparently an area where a bunch of the expats live. All I know is I saw (well heard ... let's be honest) a shitload of Americans. I think I saw more African-Americans than I've seen in Australia in my whole life.
I went to Magpie Brewing Company and sampled most of their brews. They had a really nice Gose (slightly sour with a salty finish), a pale ale and IPA that I didn't really like and a Belgian Strong Ale which was really tasty. I had planned to visit a couple more venues but was feeling pretty pissed after that so decided not to.
I wasn't very hungry but on the way back to the hostel I ended up at a restaurant near the hostel. My eyes were bigger than my stomach. I ordered anchovie soup and green onion pancake with a sweet soju. I love the sides you get with Korean food. It's always a mystery what you're going to end up with. This time I got some kimchi (yum!), dried anchovies and a packet of seaweed pieces. I didn't finish my meal but damn it was tasty.
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