I’m going to skip day 5 for now, since I’ll be writing a couple of posts on specific themes. There will however still be some posts focusing on specific days, including this one.
Day 6 was finally our first day fully reserved for touristy stuff. We started by travelling to Yeoinaru station to check out the Han River Cruise – I’m not a big fan of viewing platforms, sightseeing buses and such, but river cruises tend to give you a completely different perspective to a city, especially a big one. Unfortunately the cruise didn’t really offer any amazing insight to the city this time, especially since the host focused almost solely on the different bridges we passed. It was quite pleasant as a whole though, and the views from the ship were nice nevertheless.
After the cruise, we headed to where all the historically interesting sights seem to be clustered, meaning things close to Jogno 3-ga, Anguk, and Gwanghwamun stations – just follow the signs inside the metro stations to which ever sight you’re aiming for and you’ll get there quite easily.
We came out from Gwanghwamun station, and ended up in front of the statue of King Sejong – at a perfect time as well. While we were snapping some of photos, a big group of people dressed up in colourful clothes, holding high flags started marching towards us and the statue. I’m still not sure of the specifics, but it was obviously some sort of a reenactment of how King Sejong’s soldiers looked and acted back in the day, organised for the amusement of tourists. The group marched around and settled in front of the king’s statue and played some fanfares, but the act ended in a bit of an anticlimatic way with tourists running up to the actors to pose for photos with them – admittedly I had expected something more exciting from the flags and fanfares.
We decided to continue towards what is usually known as either Samcheong-dong or Old Seoul. The area has some of the oldest privately owned traditional style houses in all of Seoul, but also the liveliest art and culture scene. During our walk down some of the alleys, we saw a number of artsy cafes, small art exhibitions, and small stores of local up-and-coming designers (mostly clothes, jewelery etc.). And of course plenty of the traditional style houses, of which many had actually been fully renovated from the inside into cafes and small stores, while the outside looked reasonably intact.
Continuing down through Old Seoul, we soon ended up in Insadong, which is one of the many markets available in Seoul. Insadong is usually pointed out as a good place to buy traditional Korean handicrafts, so I we both preferred it over the other potential ones (Namdaemun was tempting but sounded overwhelmingly huge for someone who’s not here for shopping).
As was to be expected, many of the stores sold your usual plastic-y tourist trinkets, but just as many also sold the real stuff – Korean paper, dozens of different teapots and -mugs, fans, et cetera. The tea and tea ware specific stores were of course especially appealing, but many of the ones actually serving tea turned out to be some sort of extremely fancy and pricy quality tea houses, so we didn’t actually drink any.
As a whole, the day was full of great findings and good timings, even if we mostly just looked around rather than stopping at different cafes and stores. Old Seoul definitely became my favorite area of Seoul with its narrow streets, ginko trees, old houses and artsy atmosphere.
