- Seven days in Seoul, South Korea.
I'm Chris, this is Topher and we just got back
from a week in Seoul and we wanted to share with you
what we did in seven days in five minutes.
So here we go, our first night we checked in
to The Hotel Lotte Seoul,
in the center of Meongdong.
Seoul's the heart of shopping.
We had bibimbap for dinner.
Went for a nice sleep.
Day number two.
We are here, we're dressed in Hanboks today
and we're visiting the National Palace, pretty cool.
Renting and wearing the Hanbok was a pretty neat experience.
There's a ton of vendors that rent them around the palace.
I'll have a whole video about renting Hanboks later.
Oh-Sing-Ruhl wore one too, hers was a bit fancier than mine.
All that wandering around The National Palace
left us hungry, so we went
to the quintessential Korean meal,
Korean barbecue, pretty tasty.
Tteokbokki, please.
We were still left a little hungry
after the Korean barbecue, so we wandered out
into Meongdong for some Korean street food
and had the very classic, Tteok-bokki.
Mochi rice cakes in a spicy sauce, it's hot.
And even some drinks too.
After street food, we headed up to Namsam Peak,
taking a ride on the cable car to watch the sunset.
From Namsam Peak you can get great views of all
of Seoul down below.
And its a very popular spot for lovers.
They buy a lock, write their name on it,
and lock it on the railings
to store their love away, forever.
At the top their was a photo machine
where you could take a photo with your favorite K-Pop Star.
I picked Psy, that was pretty fun.
My photo with Psy.
Day number three, we headed out to Namdaemun Market.
This is Korea's largest traditional market,
named after the Namdaemun gate, The Great South Gate
to the Old Walled City of Seoul.
The market, is right next to it.
We ate lunch here, on Chopped Noodle Alley.
An ally full of noodle vendors,
famous for their chopped noodle soup.
And you sit there right in front of their open kitchen,
right in front of all the ingredients.
That's a lot of Kimchi.
Namdaemun Market has two other food alleys.
This one, The Food Alley,
and another one called Fish Stew Alley.
Care to guess what they sell on that alley?
After lunch the market got really busy
because it's a weekend, so we decided it was time to go.
We then took a stroll on The Seoullo.
It's this old elevated train track that's been turned
into an elevated park and sidewalk.
It's kind of like New York City's Highline,
just with a lot less people.
And here we walked over to Seoul Station
to check out Seoul's main train station.
Not because we wanted to take a train,
but because we wanted to visit Lotte Mart.
It's basically the Korean version of Walmart.
They have a huge grocery store here.
We headed back to our hotel to drop off all out purchases
and saw this from our room, two really big flags
walking down the street.
For the evening we headed over
to the Dongdaemun neighborhood.
It has this really neat design plaza
that looks like a space ship is landing.
The old Seoul City Wall runs through here,
and next to it they has this art display
of these LED flowers that light up at night.
There's tons of shops in this area
and they stay open, many of them until five in the morning.
Lots of street food here too.
This is chicken on a stick with some cheese sauce.
Day number four, we spent the morning exploring
the shops of Myeongdong and the street markets
and then for lunch we headed into Golden Palm
for some more Korean barbecue.
This one in addition to having pork, also had beef
cooked over charcoal.
And of course the best thing to wash down that beef,
is some tasty and spicy kimchi.
For dessert afterwards we had some Korean Shaved Ice,
shaved into a melon.
After lunch we walked over to Insadong,
which is home to Seoul's most Korean street.
As I was walking around the street I was greeted
by some friendly students who offered to show me
how to write my name in Korean.
And there it is, Ka-Ri-Su.
Alright, now you know, and now I know.
So you can see right here, that there's a Starbucks,
and the Starbucks actually doesn't say Starbucks.
It's written out in Korean.
And if we take a look this way, it's a neat alley.
I mean even though it's pedestrianized,
there's a few cars on it
so you do have to be a little bit careful.
We quenched our afternoon thirst
in a traditional Korean Tea House
in a hundred year old building.
This neighborhood is famous for these
old traditional teahouses.
We then headed up the hill from Insadong
and the Royal Palace to The Bukchon Hanok Village.
This village is home to 900 traditional Korean houses
known as Hanok.
This is a popular neighborhood
just to walk around, explore and feel in the Old Seoul.
And it's also popular to wear Hanboks,
those traditional Korean attire
you saw me wearing on day one.
All that hill climbing left us hungry for some KFC.
No not Kentucky Fried Chicken, but Korean fried chicken.
It's moist, nice garlicky flavor,
but you know, best of all.
Korean fried chicken, it doesn't come with mash potatoes.
What does it come with?
Yes, of course, kimchi, right here.
Oh that's too big of a piece for me to chomp on video.
Kimchi, a great side dish for your chicken.
And then we headed outside for some street food.
Some fish cake on a stick.
It's spicy, you know I've been having
an interesting dialog with Oh-Sing,
girl that runs the camera on this, about it being sweet too.
And actually, it's kinda sweet,
if you can get past the spice.
I couldn't, the first few things I ate.
But I actually can taste a little bit of sweet in there.
And then for dessert, we got some rose-shaped ice-cream.
This is pretty cool.
Vanilla, vanilla yogurt,
strawberry, gelato it's actually really good strawberry,
tastes like real strawberry.
I like it.
Day five was a little bit of a crappy weather day
for us with lots of rain in the forecast.
We spent most of it inside.
We started the morning at Lotte Sky.
This observatory on the 120th floor of the new Lotte Tower,
and the views here are pretty impressive,
even on a lousy weather day.
If you look down, you can see this is actually over glass.
You can see all the way down to the bottom there.
Pretty freaky.
If you don't like heights,
you might not like the scene of you going down 119 floors.
Just below the observatory is Lotte World.
It's like Seoul's version of Disneyland
and in the middle of it is an ice rink.
We didn't go in though, we just admired it
from here where it's free.
Then we headed over to SM Town, K-Pop is so popular
in Seoul, that there's a whole museum just
dedicated to K-Pop from this one record lable.
Topher was totally there, wait not there.
Topher is totally here, having coffee
right now, with these four.
SM Town is attached to the Coex Shopping Mall.
It's the largest shopping mall in Korea
and it's home to this really neat Starfield Library
with one of the world's largest collections of magazines.
For an afternoon pick-me-up, we stopped at Krispy Kreme
and had a nacho cheese doughnut.
I like it, it's strange
but I like it.
I mean, the combination of sweetness plus nacho cheese.
Then we headed over to Gangnam, made popular
by Psy's song Gangnam Style, but it was raining too much.
So about as far as we made it there,
was the underground shopping complex
but it was pretty busy at evening rush-hour.
For dinner we went back to Meongdong and had what?
Some more Korean barbecue.
Day six, Topher took at back
to the Bukchon, Hanok Village where we were earlier
on a walking tour to see more of these old houses.
We picked up a walking tour map
from The Friendly Seoul Tour Guides
and realized there was so much more
to see in this neighborhood.
All that walking left us hungry to continue
our Seoul street food quest.
We went over to the Gwangjang Traditional Market
where they specialize in Mung Bean Pancake.
They also specialize in baby octopus that's almost live.
We didn't eat this,
but we did watch some other people people eat it.
See look, it's still moving on their plate, ew.
For the evening we headed over to Hongdae.
This is near one of Seoul's major universities,
so it's one of Seoul's youngest and hippest neighborhoods.
Lot's of shopping and restaurants here.
It's also a popular place for busting, street performing
of what, K-Pop dancing.
♪ Whoa ♪ (upbeat Korean pop music)
- Hongdae ended up being one of our favorite neighborhoods
for shopping and evening we just enjoyed the vibe here,
not nearly as hectic as Meongdong.
Next time, we'd like to spend more time exploring Hongdae.
Day seven, we're on a bus, where are we going?
We're going to North Korea, well not quite.
Well kind of, actually a full day tour to the DMZ.
The Demilitarized Zone.
The border between South and North Korea
is the world's most militarized border
and you can take a tour there.
The day tours bring you into this area,
the joint security area.
That building in the back, that's North Korea,
with a North Korean tour group on top of it.
We were escorted here by US Army and Korean Army.
It was amazing experience and definitely one
of the highlights of our trip.
There's also an observatory they take you to
that you can see into North Korean cities.
This town they call, Propaganda Village.
It was built just to show how great North Korea is,
although nobody actually lives in there.
For dinner after the DMZ tour, what did we have?
You probably coulda guessed it by now,
some more Korean barbecue.
And our departure day before our 5:00 p.m. flight
outta Seoul Incheon Airoport, we went
to see The Changing of The Guards at The Royal Palace.
They do this every hour, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
This one is The Gate Opening Ceremony.
Well if you enjoyed this video you might enjoy watching
some other videos from our series on Seoul, South Korea.
You can click either of them to watch,
or find links in the description below.
Well we won't say goodbye,
because we'll see you
in the next video. - See you soon.