Korea: Part 2

On Thursday, we chose to go to the Ice Gallery as our "cultural activity." Granted, an ice gallery isn't very cultural but it doesn't really matter because it's AWESOME.


The ice gallery was a room filled with tons of ice sculptures including ice people, ice animals, ice Eiffel Tower/ Statue of Liberty/ Korean palace, igloo, an ice house, ice slide,

AND ICE TOILET!

Because we were "foreign guests," the people who ran the ice gallery let us do ice carving for free. We were able to compete against each other and carve ice cups/mugs/chalices.

Following that, we went to Insadong, the cultural district. There they sell traditional Korean crafts and a lot of touristy things. About a billion Korean school girls stopped us to give us interviews about "appearances in our country," and we stopped to answer them all cuz we had nothing better to do. In all, it was neat to check out the shops and we also browsed around a cute shopping complex. It was a really artsy place :



Later on, we went checked out Korean malls. From what I've seen so far, malls in Korea are way different from malls in the US because the stores aren't separated by walls. Rather, the malls that I've seen in Asia are separated by displays and it looks really cute. I ended up finally buying a vest. I've been looking for one since I came to Japan. woohoo.

Being really hungry, WE FINALLY WENT TO A BEER TENT. We got really ripped off for food and drinks but anybody who goes to Korea has to try one (it was awesome), so it was totally worth it to go.


Today, Friday, was our last day here and we ran out of things we wanted to do for "cultural activity" so we basically decided to go to the place that sounded the coolest. Obviously we settled on "Dream Forest," and the three of us bused to the park.

This says something in Korean. Probably "Dream Forest," but I honestly don't know.

Real-ish looking model of Seoul they had at the Visitor Center.

SUGOI!

The park supposedly has all these attractions you can look at including a mirror pond and seven waterfalls-something-or-other. It turned out that a lot of the water attractions were all dried up for the winter. There was also a botanical garden somewhere but we didn't look at that because it was probably already dried-up and crusty. Although, even though it was winter, the park still looked pretty :

There was an observatory that was used in the Korean drama, Iris (no I've never heard of it either), at the edge of the park. We took a tram up to the top and got a good view of the city :



Tonight we went out shopping to use up the rest of our won, which is useless in Japan. We stopped once more at Uniqlo and Julia and Martin bought coats and I got another vest. We also bought "circles," which are this Korean deserts they sell on the streets. We have no idea what the name of them is so Julia and Martin just call them Circles. I dripped my circle all down the front of my new coat but then I cleaned it off, so now things are OK.

Shopping in Seoul is a lot different than shopping in Kyoto. For one, there are street hawkers and booths, bright lights, and they sell stuff late into the night. The shops in Kyoto, on the other hand, shut down around 8PM and then everybody goes home around midnight. I bought so many clothes.

For our last night in Seoul, the three of us went out for boneless chicken wings at place in Hongik near our hostel. Then, Julia and Martin went to go check out club night at Hongik and I met up with Ben and hung out.

SEOUL RAWKZ.