Insadong – Where to, Gumshoe?

Seoul (Day 34): Shopping Day

April 3, 2016

The weather changed from warm and sunny to cold and rainy. Originally we had planned to go to Yeouida Island, but because of the weather (it’s supposed to be a nicer day tomorrow), we decided to stay to walk around the old area of Bukchon and go shopping.

Bukchon is an area in Seoul that still has traditional Korean houses. Many of the houses have been converted to restaurants or stores, but the majority of them are still residential. Bukchon is located close to the Gyeongbokgung Palace we were at a few days ago. We didn’t realize it was so close or else we would have gone that day when it was sunny.

We left the hotel around 11:30am after Facetiming with our families who were having dinner together at one of our favourite restaurants in Burnaby, Pearl Hot Pot (similar to the hot pot we’ve been having in Taipei). It was nice to see everyone together. We miss them!

On our walk to Bukchon, we decided to have lunch at Popeye’s. We noticed there were a few locations in Seoul and we were tempted with the meal combos advertised on the front of the door. The last time we had Popeye’s was last summer when we went to New Orleans (where we had fried chicken 3 times in one day), it’s my favourite fast food fried chicken. We ordered a combo and it satisfied our cravings.

After lunch we continued on towards Bukchon and stopped in some shops along Insadong. Before leaving the hotel, I tried to do some research on all the different beauty shops. I found some blog posts and articles on the stores but the information given wasn’t that useful. I decided to just go into a few shops and just take my time to browse around and look at the different products.

The first shop I went into was, Innisfree, which is Korea’s first “all-natural” brand. Most of their products’ ingredients are sourced for Jeju Island (Korea’s Hawaii). As soon as I walked into the store, a sales girl started following me around very closely without saying anything (I realize this is common practice in all stores in Seoul (Tim: or rather, in the stores that Kaitlyn went into)). There are so many different products in all these beauty shops, you really do need to take your time and read everything. It would’ve been easier if I knew how to speak Korean since the sales girls weren’t able to communicate what products she would recommend for me. I ended up only buying a “sea salt whipping cleanser” for 10,000 KRW = $11 CAD.

The next store I went to was, Missha, which was having a “sale” (I think everything in these stores are always on sale). This brand I had also seen everywhere and was recommended by a friend as having the most reasonable beauty products. I forgot to mention that each of these stores have a girl outside hustling to get people to go inside the store. As soon as I walked in, a girl started following me, but this time she started speaking English to me (I guess she figured I didn’t look Korean). Her speaking English was extremely helpful but at the same time she was a good salesperson and would suggest all these expensive items.

I ended up spending the most time in Missha and the most money (I used my credit card for the first time on this trip). I bought mascara (2,640 KRW = $3 CAD), an eye brow pencil (6,400 KRW = $7.25 CAD), face masks (500 KRW each = $0.56 CAD), moisturizer (12,400 KRW = $14 CAD), hand lotion (2,400 KRW = $2.72 CAD), foundation (13,860 KRW = $15.70 CAD) and a brush (7,400 KRW = $8.40 CAD). The majority of the items I bought from Missha were discounted 20%-50%.

I went into a bunch of the other beauty shops (Tim was very patient and stood around) but was hesitant to go into the shops where there was no one inside because I wanted to be able to browse around without any pressure. I remember reading a blog post from an American saying that she would probably buy more if they weren’t breathing down her neck (they’re literally one step behind you as soon as you walk into the store and I don’t think they’re on commission or anything (Tim: Maybe they’re actually focused on loss prevention?)) while looking around. I would agree with her because it makes browsing around fairly uncomfortable. I only experienced this in the beauty shops and clothing stores.

In addition to the hundreds of beauty shops in Seoul, there’s a tea house that we noticed the first time we were in Insadong, called Osulloc Tea House. The store specializes in green tea they roast from Jeju Island, but the item we wanted to get was a green tea milk spread. We first tried their samples of this and it was delicious – like a green tea pocky in a jar. We bought two jars to bring back for our families, hopefully they’ll still have some when we get back so we can have some. The jars were 8,500 KRW = $9.60 CAD.

After Insadong, we made our way to Bukchon (finally after a couple hours in the shops). We had about 20 minutes of dry weather but as we continued to walk around Bukchon, it started to rain really hard (almost like the downpour in Kenting except it’s cold here). I feel bad for the residents who live in this area because their streets are full of tourists poking around and taking pictures in front of their house (like us, at least we didn’t sit on their doorsteps).

When it started to pour we took refuge in a Softree Ice cream shop. Softree is a Korean organic ice cream soft serve shop that is Soft Peaks in Gastown’s inspiration. We decided to get the original soft serve with honeycomb. It was a bit pricey (just like Soft Peaks) at 4,800 KRW = $5.45 CAD).

The rain eased off a bit so we decided to power through and try to get to the train station (Tim: I’m not bothered by the rain). At this point in the day we were thinking of going to the Yoido Full Gospel Church on Yeouido Island for a Sunday service. After feeling tired and soaked by the rain, we decided to save Yeouido Island for tomorrow (which is supposed to be a nice day).

Because of the change of plans we decided to just make today our designated shopping day and head back towards the hotel through Myeongdong.

I would say that 90% of all stores/stalls in Myeongdong are beauty shops, socks stalls and accessory stores. Since I bought enough from the beauty shops, it was time to buy our Korean socks.

We had seen some stalls during our second night here that were advertised as buy 10 get 1 free. For some reason tonight, we weren’t able to find many stalls that had this promotion. After going up and down each street and looking at each stall advertising 1000 KRW = $1.13 CAD each, there was no buy 11 for 10,000 KRW in sight! We ended up just going to a stand that had all the socks we were looking for. Then as we started to head back to the hotel, we found a buy 11 for 10,000 KRW stall away from the main area… of course! What made us feel better was that they didn’t have the socks Tim wanted (Ironman and Captain America). We decided to buy more socks, so we went from not sure if we were going to buy any to buying 21! So we got 21 pairs of pretty cool socks for 20,000 KRW= $22.68 CAD.

For dinner we went to Myeongdong Kyoja, which I found after reading a few blogs and reviews online. They have been in business for over 40 years and are well known for their “knife cut noodles” and dumplings. The menu only has 4 items, so we just ordered the noodles and dumplings. We decided to share the noodles and dumplings. Good thing we shared the bowl of noodles because the portion was quite large (again). Everything was good, except I wished the noodles were cooked more al dente as they were too soft for my liking (Tim: Too soft for any reasonable person’s taste… everything else was good though). Food portioning here is definitely good bang for your buck, but it’s not ideal for two people wanting to try more food.

After our first day of shopping during this trip, I feel guilty that I got a bit of a “shopping high” when we came back to our apartment and I laid down our haul. After spending time in a few of the beauty shops, I can see how you can get very carried away by buying a lot in those stores. There are so many different products at very reasonable prices and since Seoul isn’t exactly accessible to us in Vancouver, it’s the fear of regretting not buying something. I know it’s an irrational fear but I seem to get this feeling every time I go shopping while traveling. I feel like if I came here on another trip I would “go crazy”, but I guess it’s better that we’re in Seoul during this trip since I had to restrict myself.

While shopping, I experienced that Koreans in retail are not very friendly or courteous. I think the nicest Koreans we have interacted with have been street food vendors and most restaurants. As much as store workers want you to come into the store by being “friendly” it comes off as aggressive (who really enjoys having facial masks being shoved in your face as you walk down the street? I don’t!). Once you’re in the store, as mentioned earlier, you feel a bit harassed because they aren’t following you in a “I want to help you kind of way” (although there are some that are not as aggressive) and once you go to pay, they ignore you on the way out. I know it’s not a language barrier thing either because you can be courteous towards someone without speaking the same language (ie. at a few stores we were shoved aside by store clerks without any acknowledgement, I guess that’s normal?). In Taiwan, where I don’t speak Mandarin (even without Tim around) store clerks were always very friendly, helpful and grateful if we ever did buy something. Tim says I won’t experience any of this type of behaviour when we go to Japan.

Anyway, that’s just my observation on things here and my mini-rant on customer service and common courtesy in Seoul (Tim: “Common” in the North American sense). While it’s a great city to visit, I can see how little annoyances like that can irritate me in the long run.

Total steps today: 17,000

Seoul (Day 31): Spring has Sprung

March 31, 2016

I suppose the beds at Hotel Shin Shin are comfortable because we both slept in and with Seoul being one hour ahead, we didn’t leave the hotel until about 11am! We did a quick look at the map and decided that we’d check out the Gyeongbokgung Palace, Insadong and Myeongdong shopping streets. The weather today was perfect, sunny and a high of 20 degrees Celsius.

The Gyeonbokgung Palace wasn’t too far from the hotel so we started making our way there on foot. The walk there was a nice walk along Seoul’s business district and we passed by City Hall. There were lots of high rises and businessmen in suits walking around. We’ve both noticed that the male to female ratio in Seoul’s business district seems to be like 10:1 (Where are all the business women?).

Seoul is a very modern city, Tim described it well when he mentioned it felt a bit like Berlin. Like Berlin, much of Seoul was destroyed during the Korean War and they had to rebuild everything in the last 50 years, making it a very modern city with lots of (destructive) history.

On our way to the Gyeongbokgung Palace, we came across a large statue of King Sejong. He is most known for inventing the Korean alphabet in the 15th century. Previous to his invention, Korea was using Chinese logograms to represent their language, which left some parts of the Korean language without appropriate written representation. Later in the day, we found out that up until a few years ago, learning to read and write Chinese characters was still in the school curriculum in South Korea, but apparently they are moving away from that.

After going through King Sejong’s museum (free admission), we made it to the entrance of Gyeongbokgung Palace. It was about 12:30pm, and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet so we decided to get something to eat before heading in. Our good friend, Sabine, lived in South Korea for about a year, so we asked her for some recommendations. She told us there was a really good ginseng chicken place close to the palace so we made our way there for lunch.

The restaurant is called Tosokchon Samgyetang and it specializes in their ginseng chicken soup (Samgyetang). There was a huge line up when we got there around 12:45pm, but the restaurant is like a compound inside with different rooms, so the wait was only around 10 minutes. All the dining rooms required customers to take their shoes off before they sat down. We sat down and ordered their ginseng chicken and a roasted chicken. When the dishes came, we realized (again) that it was a lot of food for us.

Everything we had was really tasty, but we regretted ordering two chicken dishes because it was too much chicken (2 full chickens!). I regret not ordering a seafood pancake as planned. We decided we’d have a light dinner tonight!

After lunch we walked back to Gyeongbokgung Palace to spend the rest of the afternoon. Admission to the palace is 3,000 KRW = $3.40 CAD. Gyeongbokgung Palace was built in 1395 and was destroyed once during the Japanese invasions during the 1500s and then restored in the 19th century by the reigning king at the time. During the Japanese occupation in the early 1900’s, they dismantled the majority of the palace only leaving a couple of the main buildings. That being said, much of the palace that stands today are not the original buildings. They plan to finish the entire palace as it originally was by 2045.

We walked around the palace grounds ourselves but then went back to the entrance to meet a guide for a free English tour. This ended up being really informative as there weren’t many informational signs in English around the palace.

After the tour ended, we exited behind the palace to see the “Blue House”, where the President works and lives. It called Cheong Wa Dae, but is nicknamed the “Blue House” because the roof is blue tiled. It is located right behind the palace grounds. When we went to take a look, there was a lot of security and secret service looking guys all around the grounds.

We eventually made our way to the Insadong area. Insadong is known for their arts and craft stores. There were a lot of art galleries and stores that sold Korean stationary. It was a neat street and I would like to go back and take a closer look at the stores another day.

After walking through Insadong, we made our way back towards our hotel by walking through the famous Myeondong shopping area. Before we got to the crazy shopping part of Myeongdong Street, we stumbled upon the Myeongdong Cathedral. It is the first Catholic church in Seoul and was built in 1892. When it was built, you used to be able to see the cathedral from most places around Seoul as it was built on a hill, but now with all the high rises it’s no longer that visible.

Seeing the Cathedral was the calm before the storm as we made our way into Myeongdong’s shopping area. Since being in Asia, I hadn’t been in such a dense area with that many people. Even at Shilin Night market in Taipei, it didn’t feel this crowded. Myeongdong is Seoul’s shopping district filled with endless beauty product stores (you can buy face masks in bulk here), sock stands, high end brands and department stores. I can see why people just shop when they come to Seoul. Since this isn’t really (Tim: “or not in the slightest”) a shopping trip for us, I have to limit myself to socks and maybe some masks.

Along the streets were also food vendors, which was where we ended up having dinner. We had kalbi meatballs, japchae bulgogi and black soybean noodles. Everything was good, prices are higher than street food in Taiwan but I think we just have to get used to everything being more expensive here. We took out 300,000 KRW = $340 CAD for our 6 days in Seoul and have already used up a third. We’ll have to take out more cash or start to use our credit card.

We called it an early night, getting back to the hotel around 8pm. We have an early morning tomorrow as our tour for the DMZ leaves at 7:45am. We have to take the train to the another area to meet our tour. We ended up picking Koridoor tours after reading their reviews on Trip Advisor. Looking forward to an interesting day tomorrow.

Total steps for today: 25,000