Today we woke up a bit late, around 10/11 am, thus too late for the hotel breakfast. We went to some kind of coffee store and had our breakfast there. Everything tasted great and we were all filled up for a long day of walking.
This morning we had planned to go to the Bukchon Hanok village. As the station was just behind Insa-Dong we decided to walk. It was nice to have a better (rested) view of the shops there. We tried to use our map to find our way once we left Insa-Dong, but of course we got a bit lost. Luckily, there are tourist information people walking around all the major tourist destinations, they gave us a nice map of the location and drew the route out for us (turned out we had actually walked past the Hanok village).
Thanks to our new map we easily found our way to the Hanok village. It was quite a tiresome walk up and down many slopes. But the view did pay of; it was nice to see the old houses against the modern backgrounds. It seemed we were not the only ones trying to take photos of the views, there were a lot of Koreans taking selfies using a "selfie stick", and everyone seemed to own one.
While walking through the Hanok village we passed a building with an impressive door, as I was posing there for a photo a woman came walking out, telling us we could get a tour through the house. The house wasn't that impressive from the inside (though I did love the garden) and most of it felt pretty modern, however the tour ended with a nice cup of cold tea that we really enjoyed because of the extreme heat.
We aren't really the cultural type, so we were finished in the Hanok village quite quickly. Thus, we decided our next destination would be the Gyeongbokgung palace, which is located quite nearby. Of course we got lost again, but we met the same tourist information people and they helped us on our way again. On our way to the palace we passed the National Folk museum where we passed the most peculiar statue, still don't know what was going on there.
At the palace we bought a booklet that provided us entry to multiple palaces. As mentioned before we aren't really the cultural type, and seeing as how this palace really looked like the ones in China we left the palace pretty soon.
On our way to the exit we were lucky and got surprised by the changing of the guards. I had read about this, but knowing how we seem to be unable to ever keep a tight schedule I had just decided to skip it. I was really happy that I could witness this fun and colorful event in real life.
After the guard changing we went to Hongik university station, to Hongdae for a cat cafe "Cat's Attic". Honestly, I was really disappointed. The cats really distanced themselves from people, but who could blame them. People were running after them and their owner wasn't very kind to them either. The only positive points were the drinks that were very cute.
As we were already in Hongdae we decided to stay there and do some shopping/sightseeing (I actually only bought shampoo from Lush because I forgot mine at home). We had dinner at a Korean bbq place, where we were directed to the basement for a typical Korean table (sitting on the floor). It was quite an experience, as we didn't know what to do whit a big scissor that was handed to us. Luckily for us our neighbors helped us and showed us that the scissors were used to cut the meat (turned out that you use a pair or scissors to cut everything that is too big to eat in one bite).
For desert we went to the Hello Kitty cafe. I had really been looking forward to this, but it turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. The outside was awesome; the whole building (about 4 stories high) is painted pink, whit lots of bows on it. At first glance the inside also looked very cute, whit all pink furniture and Hello Kitty windows. We all ordered cheesecake (that was shaped like Kitty's head) and we had some kind of sweet drinks and a hot choco. Till now it sounds like a Hello Kitty dream right? Wrong! The whole place was very dirty, it looked like it hadn't been cleaned in ages, the cheesecake was still frozen and the sweet drinks were too sweet (even for my taste).
All photos can be found at my flickr page
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