Day 3: The Alive museum

Today we woke up on time for breakfast, however when we got downstairs we found out that there was a queue for it (we later found out that Koreans are used to queuing for their food). As we did not feel like waiting for our breakfast we decided to eat somewhere else.

Yesterday evening we had decided to visit the Alive museum, an interactive museum where you can take pictures with trick art. We decided to visit the museum in Ssamziegil (there are 2 museums in Insa-Dong) as we had a coupon for that one. We really enjoyed taking photos with the trick art, though it could be a bit difficult to shoot a picture from just the right angle. The final result does however pay of and we left the museum with a great amount of funny photos. I would recommend visiting the museum, you should be with at least 2 people, as you will need someone to take your photo.

After the museum we went to Changdeokgung palace. They offer a special tour to see the "secret garden", but we didn't feel like walking through a garden at 95% humidity. There were 2 girls standing behind a table with books dressed in hanbok. They were promoting the Korean culture to foreigners and the books were given away free of charge.

Being the extremely palace loving types *cough* we finished our visit within 1 hour, where we spent most of our time having a drink in the restaurant.

We moved on to Gwanjang market, a huge market with a big variety of goods being sold, ranging from food to hanboks. My main mission here was to find some nice accessories to match my hanbok back home. I found the sokchima (underskirt), the sokbaji (bloomers) and matching shoes.

After getting a bit overheated in the hot marketplace we went back to the hotel to cool down. Later on we went to Dongdaemun market, which is a collection of warehouses which host a variety of small shops. We did not spend much time there, as we all were pretty tired. After some strolling around we decided to go back to Hongdae for dinner. We had a lovely kind of fish pot and a sweet ice waffle as dessert.

All photos can be found at my flickr page

Day 1: From doomsday to lucky day

Day 1 started almost very unlucky, yes almost, because we almost had a car crash. We narrowly escaped the crash site. After this horrible ordeal we were able to park our car at valet parking, which was really relaxed as we could just drop of the car keys and were standing almost in front of the terminal at Schiphol. We started our trip with 3 suitcases, which would turn to 4 at the end of our trip because I had planned to buy a lot ;)

We checked in for our flight with Lufthansa and did some shopping to kill the time. We had a short flight to Frankfurt for our transfer flight to Seoul; therefore we could only shop at a small part of the airport (no McDonalds :o). Thus, we decided to have a drink at Starbucks. I wouldn't recommend having a drink here, I go to Starbucks in Amsterdam South quite often and the drinks and food there are great. However, the drinks and food at the Starbucks at Schiphol was really bad.

In Frankfurt our lucky day started, we (all 3 of us) got upgraded to business class! I have never flown business class before, so this was an awesome experience. The cherry on the pie was that we were flying in the new Boeing 747-8, with an all-new business class. We were able to lay completely flat and had a menu to choose from for dinner (of course I chose the Korean main course). It was a smooth flight, as far as I can remember because I slept most of the time.

We arrived at Incheon airport with hardly a jetlag. One of the biggest challenges of this day was finding our way in the subway network with our suitcases. We started out with the express rail from the airport to Seoul station.

At Seoul station we had to change to the metro network, this is where things got difficult. For some kind of unknown reason the Koreans have tiles on the pavements (also inside the metro station) that are almost impossible to cross with suitcases. Once we had made our way to the right place in the station we found out that there was no elevator and that the escalator was not working. Eventually we got everything to the right platform. If you ever do get lost in the metro network of Seoul there is always a very nice Korean person nearby to help you, most of them even speak a decent amount of English. Once we reached the right station and got all the suitcases upstairs again we had a hard time finding our hotel, the GS hotel. However, as mentioned before the Korean citizens are very helpful and before long a few very nice Korean people were helping us, one even called the hotel for us. Turned out we were really close by and just walked the wrong way.
The hotel is pretty small, but the rooms are nice, I have a real bed and not a foldaway bed (which is not uncommon for 3 persons rooms) and we have free Wi-Fi! Furthermore, it is very conveniently located, about 3 minutes from the metro station and 7 minutes from Insa-Dong.

We ended our first day sightseeing in Insa-Dong. We spent a lot of time at Ssamziegil, which has some nice shops, including a Jetoy one.

We ate next to Ssamziegil, at a cute little restaurant serving what we thought was typical Korean food (in the end it turned out it was not as typical Korean as we thought), we had a great first meal.

All photos can be found at my flickr page