North vs South

For Buddha’s Birthday long weekend I went to Seoul to finally check out some of the attractions that I have missed out on my previous trips up north. Seoul to me personally seems like a totally different country than the rest of Korea. Even Busan, the southern tip of South Korea has a different vibe and experience than Seoul, the capital city. The cultural experiences are contrasting because there are plenty of foreigners and plenty of multicultural restaurants to eat out at. In Busan, it’s the same old crowd and the foreigner population is a lot less here in the south.

Anyways, as soon as I got to Seoul I went to Myeongdong to browse through the open market and to grab lunch (chicken galbi) and then I went to drop off my things at the hostel. The hostel itself took me 45 minutes to find. It was located on top of a mountain and I didn’t know so I started to walk for the first thirty minutes thinking it was close by. The map fooled me and it was actually really far away. I was at least walking in the right direction the whole time. I finally took the taxi and got to the place. As soon as I got there Jay was waiting for me with her Korean friend. Jay and I dropped our things off and headed to Hongdae area for dinner. We met up with my friend Noelia and JK (my EPIK coordinator) for some fried and grilled chicken. Afterwards we just walked around for a bit and took pictures. We wanted to watch a movie (MIB3) but the schedules were conflicting because it was either too late or too early. Instead we just went to Baskin Robbins to have some desserts before Jay and I departed back to our hostel place. The next day at 7:30am Jay and I headed out to our DMZ tour. We didn’t do any reservations so we were fortunate enough to even go on a half day tour for 46,000 won per person. It was well worth it because it gave us a different perspective of the conflict between North and South Korea. We took lots of pictures but we were not allowed to take any inside the 3rd Tunnel. This part of the trip was the main highlight and the most important reason I went to Seoul for this long weekend. I can finally cross it off my bucket list in Korea. After the DMZ tour we went and watched a martial arts comedy musical show. It was very good and enjoyable. I was at the edge of my seat the whole time anticipating what’s going to happen next. You didn’t even need to know Korean in order to enjoy the show. I was able to take a quick picture before the actual event began. We were not allowed to take pictures during the show for obvious reasons (blinding the actors with flash or distracting them). Another bucket list item I can cross off. For dinner we went to Itaewon area and met up with Candice (Mincer) for some Mexican food. Before dinner though, Jay did some shopping which she desperately needed to do because she only had one pair of jeans and the Korean sizes do not fit her. It was probably her highlight of the trip. It’s very hard to get proper sizes for foreigners in Busan. We headed back to the hostel pretty early, around 8:30pm because we were both exhausted from all that walking at the DMZ, Itaewon and waking up super early for the tour. The next day was another walking adventure.

Monday, we visited the Gyeongbokgung Palace and I also took pictures of the famous statues outside of the Palace as well. I had to rush because my KTX train back to the south (Busan) was at 1:30pm. I barely made it inside the train cart because it was 1:29pm when I got in and the next minute, on time, the train started to take off. Unfortunately for me, I went and sat in the wrong cart number because I went into cart 8 but I was supposed to be in cart 9. I was that tired and exhausted that I didn’t pay attention to where I was supposed to be seated at. I came back to Busan around 4:30pm and headed directly home to take a shower. After few hours of checking and updating things on Facebook, I got an invite from Victoria to check out the Samgwangsa Temple because today was Buddha’s birthday, and they were having a huge celebration with lanterns to honour the special day. By the time I came home it was time for me to sleep because the long weekend was officially over and it was back to work schedule. I have a feeling that next weekend is going to be hectic and busy just like this one but we’ll see.