Seoul, South Korea

Seoul has a compact core with most of the tourist highlights within a 20 minute walk of our hotel. It’s also a very walkable city.

We started at a couple of hanok villages - Insadong and Ikseondong. Hanoks are the traditional Korean homes, in these two villages mostly gentrified.

Insadong has lots of boutique stores and art galleries. It’s also where you can get a custom-made dojang stamp. These are the traditional Korean seals used to sign/stamp documents. It takes about 30 minutes for them to create so we placed our order for pickup later in the day.

Across the street is Ikseondong. It’s filled with little restaurants and cafes. We were still full from breakfast so just browsed. The places looked really good though. There’s a couple Michelin rated ones which had long lineups.

Next to Ikseondong is the Jongmyo Shrine. It’s included in the combo ticket we had bought the first time through Seoul when we saw Gyeongbokgung Palace. However during the week you can just visit Jongmyo as part of a one hour tour. We just wanted to cut through on the way to Changyeongung Palace. So walked around Jongmyo Plaza Park.

Changyeongung Palace was okay to see. It leads to Changdeokgung Palace which is amazing, one of the highlights in Seoul. I took a lot of pics. Also included in our combo ticket was the Secret Garden, but it’s probably better visited not in winter.

From there it was a ten minute walk to Gwangjang Market. We worked our way to the food section. This was one of the cooler markets I’ve seen. There were food stalls on both sides and lined up the middle, all filled with people sitting on benches enjoying lunch.

The mantu stalls looked yummy so we grabbed a seat. The stall person motioned for us to squeeze in closer so that there was room for more folks. We tried steamed mantu and mantu in a soup broth. Mantu is similar in flavour to manti, the stuffed dumplings we had in Uzbekistan. I googled and turns out it’s generally the same thing. It was excellent.

After lunch we walked around the market, it’s really photogenic. There was a long line up for a donut stall. It moved really quick though, so we joined the line. About ten minutes later we had a twisted donut each, freshly cooked. It was amazing!!

We walked back to Insadong to pick up our dojangs, and then back towards the hotel. The mall next door had a Kakao Friends store, which was another souvenir I wanted for our key shelf. Kakao Friends are emoticons used in a hugely popular texting app in Korea.

Just around the corner was a seesaw statue that Heather had read about. It was cool.

After dinner we tried to visit Deoksugung (they light it up and supposedly it’s really pretty), but it closes at 9pm so we missed it today.

That wrapped up our day, we saw quite a bit with lots of variety. We also picked up both the souvenirs we wanted for the key shelf, so a very successful day!