Spring in South Korea- Day 10

Day 10 was the day we headed out from the heart of Seoul to our next hotel in Yeouido where we were going to enjoy the Cherry Blossom Festival. We woke up early enough and decided to have breakfast somewhere new… namely Paul Bassett which was just next to our hotel. The cafe is much bigger than it looks from outside- in fact, it’s positively huge! We got some goodies to eat and a tea to share (tea is way too big in Korea) and that’s when my brother came across… wait for it… a cricket through the years book in their bookshelf. Did not see that coming… cricket in Korea? Maybe one day. We pored over the pages and watched as businessmen popped in for some coffee on the go while others tapped away at their laptops in the middle of business breakfasts.

After a while we headed to our last stop in central Seoul and one so important that no one should ever miss- Kyobo Bookstore! The bookstore is huge and for a book lover like me, you’ll probably want to pitch your tent there for forever and a day.

On the way to Kyobo

The main reason I wanted to stop by Kyobo was to pick some TTMIK books. I wouldn’t have a chance to visit the You Are Here Cafe so the next best thing was to pick up some of their books, sans shipping fees. ^^ I had no idea how to change the keyboard from Korean to English to search for the English title so I gave up and went to the information counter instead. Think of Kyobo as a big library- they give you a slip that lets you know exactly where to find your books ^^

We left Kyobo and headed back to the hotel, ready to check out and move on to Yeouido- the Manhattan-like business area of Seoul.

In remembrance

We had a crazy amount of luggage that was not packed in our luggage so the hotel tried to get us a bigger taxi but they weren’t accepting bookings so we had to catch a regular cab instead. The hotel staff who caught us the cab looked like he’d walked out of a Korean drama but all illusions were shattered when he kept asking if we were heading to Yeo…i…do? as though he’d heard of Yeouido for the first time. ㅋㅋㅋ He hadn’t heard of the hotel either but luckily there’s nothing that isn’t on Naver maps so that problem was sorted out in a jiffy.

We had booked rooms in Glad Hotel at the last minute since Koreana had been fully booked, and by the time we got there, we were really happy about our last minute choice. The hotel is, in a word, chic. The interior is black, the rooms’ black and white going really well with their whole minimalist theme. The hotel was very different from the other ‘classic’ hotels that we had stayed at which makes me think it’s high time hotels revisit their standards (sorry, that’s the engineer in me talking).

Definitely glad I booked rooms here ^^

We decided to have lunch first and since there’s no halal place nearby we decided to do another online delivery, this time from Subway. The delivery fee was more than the food sigh but there was nothing else to be done. Z decided to roam around outside after we ordered lunch, my tummy decided to be naughty and the result was a baffled deliveryman waiting for someone to pick up the delivery ㅎㅎㅎ

After lunch, we figured we’d first sort out our luggage problem and headed straight to the closest E-Mart. The taxi driver was nice enough to take the scenic route, but I’m beginning to think that all of Yeouido constitutes a scenic route. We roamed around all of E-mart, found no sign of a suitcase so I asked one of the staff, who said that this particular E-Mart didn’t stock any suitcases. -___- So much for that trip. We ended up spending a long time looking for other options, and I ultimately messaged another friend to see if he could help out. He suggested either Homeplus or Lotte Mart, but after several failed attempts to catch a cab because no one was willing to go in the other direction towards Homeplus, we ended up deciding to play it safe and go to Lotte Mart at Seoul Station. Before we left for Lotte Mart though, we took a stroll along the cherry-blossom lined roads to de-stress.

Strolling under the blossoms

It turned out that we were at the Yeouido Ecology Park and what a beautiful place it was. As we walked, we came across more cotton candy (how could we say no) and the oddest 아저씨 who kept asking me if I had heard of the old song that was blaring in the background. I’m a big fan of golden oldies but the fact that I hadn’t heard the song didn’t deter him from asking me to dance along to the song. Umm… no? ㅋㅋㅋㅋ

When we got to Lotte Mart, we finally found two stores selling suitcases- never has the sight of suitcases been so welcome than on that day. I must admit though, when I say everything in Korea is expensive, I mean even the suitcases. It took us forever to decide because everything was so expensive (and here I was complaining about getting a good deal back home… even the normal deal is cheaper than a good deal in Korea =O ) but we finally settled on one, had it covered and wandered around Lotte Mart for a while before heading back to Yeouido. There was an outdoor sale going on just outside the mall, mostly hiking clothes and shoes, so we roamed around for a bit, got water from the vending machine, caught a cab and went back… home ^^

The rush on the way back was just massive. I felt like we were crawling through Sheikh Zayed Road all over again so as soon as we reached Yeouido and started seeing the signs for the Cherry Blossom Festival, we took the opportunity and asked the driver to drop us off there to save us both the trouble. He willingly obliged- so there we were, suitcase in hand wandering through Yeouido’s famous cherry blossom festival, roads packed with food stalls, couples, families and their selfie-sticks. ^^

Welcome to the cherry blossom festival!

As we walked through the tree-lined roads, I noticed that there were a lot of physically disabled people in Yeoudio and as I later learnt, a lot of protests for the rights of people with disabilities take place in Yeouido in front of the National Assembly building, which is also where the festival is held.

We ended up walking all the way back to our hotel and on the way back passed a stall where they were asking for people to sign a petition against the killing and eating of dogs. I gladly signed the petition and sadly noticed that most signatories were foreigners, not locals.

We were pretty tired by the time we got back to the hotel so after another Ankara Palace dinner, we decided to skip the night cruise we’d planned and instead take some much-needed rest before our day-long tour the next day to Nami Island, Petite France and a strawberry farm. ^^