Seoul City Break

A very busy day in South Korea’s capital

Recommended days	4
Budget	££
Difficulty	Easy

A Seoul city break was a bit of a last minute addition to our tour and in hindsight we’d have been better off having a few extra days in Japan to visit Nagasaki or Hiroshima or possibly some of the mountain temples.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the city, far from it – I just don’t think we spent long enough to do it justice. A couple of extra nights on our Seoul city break would have allowed us to do some day trips and see more of the country.

We left Tokyo, flying from Narita, which was a modern and clean airport so it was nice to just wait there for the flight. This was surprisingly good for a budget airline which was lucky as we were both so tired by this time.

We landed in Seoul around 10PM and then tried to work out transport options. My phone had used up all it’s roaming data so was now on £15 per 5MB and I used £30 while it was just in my pocket downloading mails etc so that was turned off pretty quickly!

The airport here is incredibly hi tech, looks like something from Metropolis! Without Google it was hard work, how did people cope before technology?! We asked at the information desk and she gave us a bus number, we bought the tickets and went to the bus stop.

One of the drivers came over and told us the bus had stopped running for the night so we showed him where we were going and he told us the correct bus stop. By a quirk of fate that bus number was the one I had typed in by mistake when buying the tickets from the machine so our tickets were still valid!

The bus took about an hour and then maybe 10 minutes walk with all the cases but we got to the hotel ok and checked in after midnight. We were staying at the Intercontinental CoEx and had a lovely and quiet room overlooking a temple.

The alarm went off 6 hours later to wake us up to get ready for the city tour I had booked. What a bloody masochist. The tour was actually very good, if a bit of a rush! It was nice to get stuff explained and put in a context, especially as English language information is often lacking.

Seoul City Tour

Jogyesa Buddhist Temple

We saw Jogyesa Buddhist temple with all the hanging lanterns, coloured ones for wishes for the living, white ones for prayers for the dead. It was certainly a spectacular sight and incredibly colourful.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Gyeonbokgung Palace

The Palace at Gyeonbokgung was more of a tourist venue than genuine historical building. It was built in 1374, burned down in the 1570’s and not rebuilt until 1868 when it was then burned and restored again. We watched a changing of the guard ceremony which was obviously done just for tourists and then carried on looking round the rest of the huge complex, me playing dodge the sun and moving from shade to shade.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

National Museum

After that we left the tour as they were going to a shopping area. We looked at the National Museum which had some displays outside of statues and shrines and inside was an excellent history of Korea. The museum was great although English language info was a bit lacking. I love the idea of a state so organised that national treasures are ranked and numbered!

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

From there we walked past the American embassy which was preparing for some sort of protest march outside – there were 9 buses of police surrounding the building. I’m not sure of the protest was pro or anti American due to the on/off nature of the Singapore summit.

Opposite this area was one of the main squares of the city with huge statue to King Sejong and an exhibition about his life. There was a group of Christian evangelists here handing out leaflets, Christianity seems quite a big thing here, after Buddhism.

We had a coffee in somewhere blissfully air conditioned and then headed back to the hotel for a nap. We used the buses here all the time and they are clean, cheap, on time and quiet – no music or mobile phone conversations – bliss!

Bongenusa Temple

We stayed inside until early evening when the temperature was more manageable and then we headed to the Bongeunsa Temple, another large Buddhist shrine complex near the hotel. It was very peaceful at that time of the evening, very few people there so we just walked around looking at the paintings and decoration.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

We finished the evening exploring the mall under the hotel and had a nice dinner. There was a public library in the centre of the mall that seemed well used, what a great idea!

When we were walking around outside there seemed to be lots of public art installations, almost on every city block. The reason we had come to Seoul was to see the DMZ but due to the current tensions the tours had been modified to remove the front line elements, they just covered the war memorial, a tunnel and a museum I think so we skipped that which was a shame. Early start (5AM!) tomorrow for our flight to Hanoi.

Seoul was a bit of a hidden gem of this tour to be honest. I really hadn’t expected anything of it and my sole reason for visit was to see the DMZ. Instead we discovered a clean, ordered and modern city (or at least the Gangnam district where we stayed was) with some nice historical sights. It would have been good to have a few more days on this Seoul city break but it’s always nice to have a reason to return.

2018