Day 8

We got up at around 8am and thankfully the heat in Seoul is much less humid and dry! Practically no humidity so feels much more refreshing. We looked up a local brunch spot and walked through our area. As someone who loves coffee I’ve never seen so many quality coffee place in my life! Every second shop seems to be a coffee shop and they are all using the best Italian machines and import the coffee beans. Brunch was nice and we both had avocado with eggs.

There’s a lot of nice delis and sandwhich shops in our area ‘Hongdae’ and reminds me a little of leith. There is a think strip of park that goes on for 89 miles around Seoul! We walked through this park for a while which reminded me a bit of a narrower Turia and was nice to walk through with the shade of the trees. It was an old railway line before it was a park so they have kept a lot of the remnants. You can tell it’s a lot more chilled than Hong Kong so good to switch up the pace a bit.

South Korea is famous for skin care and one shop in particular is popular called Olive and Young. On our walk along the path towards the centre we passed about 5 of them and I think as I’m writing this I’ve been into about 10 with Sinéad so far as she goes nuts for the makeup and skin stuff in there. I was inside so many times I decided to just get something for myself! Really cheap and good quality apparently. The secret is they don’t use any harsh chemicals in the product which we include a lot of in that west.

For lunch we stopped off at a Focaccia place adjacent to the walking path and had a lovely sandwhich with a beer. I had honey and mortadella and Sinéad had tomatoes and pesto . The route was so juice we accidentally walked to the war museum of Korea which I was really impressed by. It was free and showed a history of Korea though the ages with lots of weapons on show and tanks and planes scattered around. I took some photos of massive statues outside the museum. By time it was 31 degrees and while not humid still hot so nice to get some aircon inside.

After the museum we took the metro back and got changed in the hotel. I had wanted to try Korean BBQ in Korea so booked a place last minute. Was amazing and they cooked it for us with some nice veg alll done on the charcoal grill that sat between us on the table!

After dinner we stumbled into a bar which was top floor of a building. In Korea , like Japan, a lot of businesses share the same building and each have a different floor (usually share the same toilets)

The bad was empty and turned out to be a whiskey bar/book shop. We both had a highball (whiskey and soda) and played chess there (I won five games 🤓)Läs mer