My Seoulo Excursion

I finally did it. I took a trip out to Seoul by myself. I just went for the day and wandered around like a real tourist. It was great.

The first thing I would like to point out is that I am the girl that gets confused on the Toronto TTC and usually has to get off and change directions at least once each time I travel.


Surely you can see how I could easily be confused. *dripping with sarcasm*

Yesterday I was left to brave the Seoul subway system all on my own. And I'm not gonna pretend I didn't have to backtrack one or two (or 4) times, but I am still pretty impressed with myself cause I managed to get to all the places I wanted to go.



My first stop was Itaewon which is near an army base cause apparently it has good shopping. I was less than impressed and didn't stay very long. I was looking for a book store called, What the Book, which is supposed to have a ton of English books to choose from. I ended up finding a second hand book store and tho the selection wasn't great I found a lonely planet guide to Seoul, which is fantastic. Now I was in full tourist mode.

I hopped back on the subway to go to Insadong, which was where Megan and Lauren and I had been before. I didn't really need anything there but I wanted to wander through the streets and check out the shopping again. Also tomorrow is Megan's birthday and because she used to work at Starbucks I wanted to get her one of those mugs with the Korean writing. Only problem was they don't actually sell them. So I bought a chai latte, drank it, and took the mug with me. (Koreans can steal my bath products therefore I can steal their heritage mugs. Deal with it). Besides if they don't want people to take them then they should sell them.

I went into a tea shop and bought some ginseng tea to see what all the fuss is about. Then I bought some ginseng losanges because Koreans seem to think that ginseng is the end all be all, so I figure I might as well get into full Korean mode.

I ended up finding a different bookstore with an English selection so I went in and wandered around. There were no books that really caught my interest but they also had a French section (if you can call 4 titles a section), I decided I need to be working on my French more so I bought Harry Potter. I've never read the series before and I figure if I can't understand half the things that are going on I might hav more tolerance for it.

Other than that not much happened. There is a French Cultural Museum in Seoul which I meant to check out but figure I will save it for another day. Got to the train station and all the normal tickets were sold back to Daejeon because of the holidays so I paid extra and rode first class, which is just a little more spacious, and I don't know if I've mentioned it before but the KTX train travels 300 km/hour which sounds so fast but really doesn't feel like it when you're on it.

So all in all it was a good day, no crazy stories but it was the most touristy day I've had yet and made me feel more like a traveller again which is nice.