Day 5: Wedding dresses

Today we started out by going to the Samsung D'Light building. We had to change metro at Gangnam station, thus we had to take a photo there ;)

The Samsung building was a bit disappointing, as there weren't that many new items to see. One floor shows existing and soon to be released smartphones, tablets, photo cameras, laptops and televisions.

The next two floors were more like a museum, whit explanations on how things worked and a few things to try yourself, it was pretty boring.

Unless you really don't know what else to do anymore I wouldn't recommend going to the Samsung building. After this we went to an electronic market, but we were finished quite quickly as this wasn't very interesting either. However, on our way to the electronics market we did stop at Baskin Robins, an ice cream shop that I had read a lot about on Internet. They had a lot of different flavors, so we decided to share 5 scoops of different flavors. It turned out that we had misunderstood the cashier and we didn't get 5 scoops, but a whole bucket filled with 5 flavors.

After we had finally finished the huge ice cream we went to the Princess diary cafe. At the station we bought some bright colored sweets, but they didn't taste as good as they looked.

This time the cafe was open and we were allowed to enter. It is a very cute cafe, with little spaces where you can enjoy a drink before or after you have tried on a wedding dress. We chose the lemonade, which was excellent and tasted really fresh. As you can't drink or go to the toilet when you have a wedding dress on I decided to get changed halfway through my lemonade.

They have a huge amount of dresses (also some hanbok) ranging from 10000 to 40000 won.

Of course I chose the biggest and most princess looking dress I could find, thus having to pay 40000 won (the dresses are grouped according to price, so you can easily keep your budget in mind). There was also a hoop skirt available for this dress. Furthermore, they have a wide variety of accessories for you to use like crowns, veils, and fake flower bouquets. I spend about 15-20 minutes making photos and just feeling awesome, though I definitely can imagine you'd spend more time here if you come with a group of friends. The owner made a Polaroid picture, free of charge, which was very sweet. I've put it next to the dozen other photos that are hanging around the cafe. I would recommend going here, it is easy to access and you will have a great time here.

Dinner this evening wasn't a great success, I think we can begin to draw the conclusion that we do not like typical Korean food.

For dessert we bought a weirdly shaped ice cream cone, which was filled whit 2 flavors of ice cream. The ice cream was okay but I threw away most of the cone.

All photos can be found at my flickr page

Day 4: Hanbok photos

We started this day with breakfast at Dunkin Donuts (we were actually on time for breakfast but skipped it because of the queue).  In a lot of restaurants in Korea you get a little device while waiting, it starts vibrating when your order is ready, so you can come to pick it up. The device at Dunkin Donuts even has advertisement being played on a small screen.

After breakfast we went on our way to the Goguan photo studio, where I had an appointment for a photo shoot in hanbok.

At this studio they have a large amount of Hanboks that can be used for taking photos. They have 4 different categories to choose from (normal, dancer, princess or wedding hanbok). I chose the wedding category because I love the big sleeved hanboks and as I already have a hanbok at home it wouldn't feel as special with a normal one. After choosing what kind of hanbok you want to wear (and if applicable what kind of wig) you are escorted to the changing room. You start with choosing which hanbok you want to wear. They have 2 huge walls full of hanbok, but luckily for me they only had 4 wedding hanboks (I'm really bad at making choices). After choosing your hanbok you put on the under hanbok and petticoat. Then they do your makup and hair (you can also choose not to have your makeup and hair done, everything is optional). After this they help you get dressed and put on the finishing touches. I had reserved a course with photo studio photos, so this was the moment a professional photographer took photos of me in their studio.

Afterwards you are allowed to use the sceneries they have available in their building to take your own photos.

I would definitely recommend going here, it might seem a bit expensive (though you can make it as expensive or inexpensive as you like), but it is well worth the price seeing as how much I enjoyed it and how much time I spend here.
We then decided to go to the Gwanghwamun flea market, a small flea market in front of the Gyeongbokgung palace. It is a fun little market, though I would only recommend going here if you really have enough time in Seoul. I unexpectedly bought a hanbok over here, beforehand I had decided I would not buy a hanbok in Korea as I already have a beautiful vintage one at home, but I gave in to my inner shopaholic.

We tried going to the Princess diary cafe, but we were urged back to the exit once we entered. I guess they were closing up, we'll try going again some other day. We decided to end our day (with a not so successful dinner, though dessert was wonderful) in Hongdae.

All photos can be found at my flickr page

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 2: More sightseeing

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

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