One night in Seoul
We stayed one night in Seoul since there was more buses going to Seoul from the amusement park than back to our city. We will however, go to Seoul later on and stay there longer. This was just the appetizer! ;)
Night life in Seoul. The street is filled with restaurants, coffee shops, kareoke rooms and other stores, and this is not even near the center of the city. So nice!
More grilled meat at the table!
The subway system here is pretty cool. First off, they don't have huge barriers or doors like Stockholm. The passage is unblocked, and only gets blocked at your legs if you don't pay. Which leads to the second great thing, you can pay with your credit card by just simply putting your card on the censor. If you rather want a special bus card there of course is one could get, and that one works in whole Korea! NIIICEE! But, on the other hand, the subway map is just... ridiculus.
Doors preventing accidents and suicides.
This is the queue to the escalator when exiting the train station!! Whaaaaaatt.... To the stairs it was no queue at all! We took the stairs.
What is this fancy place? It is a jimjilbang! Korean sauna house! The Koreans really like these kind of places, and it's far more advanced than our sauna we are used to in Scandinavia.
Even the entrance is fancy....
So the sauna house is several of floors, and this is the main floor. Here people just gather on the floor and relax, hang outs, eat food, play games, talks and even sleeps. Yeah, sleeps just like that on the hard floor without any mattress. There are pillows though to borrow. On the same floor there is also gaming rooms filled with arcade games, and on the floors above there is swimming pools and hot springs divided between women and men because you are supposed to be stripped naked before bathing. So, if I wasn't standing out walking on the street in town, I sure was standing out inside this very Korean territory. Not understanding Korean well, being naked trying to figure out what I am supposed to do, I was the topic of two eldery Korean ladies, who didn't seem embarrassed at all staring at me.... For the saunas on the other hand, they were for both genders mixed, so special clothes had been handed out before hand. As you can see on the picture above, everyone is wearing the same clothes.
The warm saunas we all know how they are like. Hot or hotter. So I took only pictures of the...well... crazy ones. Like this ICE room.
And this Jade room. It was neither warm or cold, and I don't understand what's it's for. But it seems like I wasn't the only one, since the room was completely empty. Other rooms was the "green room" which was green with some plants and some ovens looking rooms for unbearable heat.
We bought Korean oat tea, served cold with ice.
We did try to sleep at the sauna house, like real Koreans. But really, sleeping on the floor... was just too much even for my Korean fiance. So we went to a Motel instead. On the way we passed by a subway concert, with a cheering audience.
Seoul in day light
A not really interesting place. It's not even a real palace, just copies to get more tourists. And tourists there was, for some reason I can't understand, so many Chinese people went there! Next time when we go to Seoul, we will have more time so we can see the real palaces!
Selling Korean traditional handicrafts
We just missed a show with archery...
Myeongdong - the most popular shopping area in Seoul
Super cold ice to either cool the products or to attract attention, I'm not sure for which reason they had it, but they did get attention.
Even though it was so warm weather, some people was dressed up in large animal suits doing commercial. They must have been close to fainting!
Dancing event to encourage people to donate blood
For lunch we had Japanese food. Issac ate schnitzel and I fried pork with mayo. Both bowls had fried rice underneath the meat.
Patbingsu! Shaved ice with fruits is very popular here, and not suprising at all with the heat they suffer from during the summer. We ordered shaved milk though, that was served with two rice cakes on top, and read beans on the side. The beans we put on top of the ice-milk and voila! It was good!
That was all from Seoul from this short trip. But we are going there soon again! I won't be able to blog while travelling though, but I will make sure to upload many pictures as soon as I come back again!
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