South Korea, March 2023

 

In March we spent two weeks visiting South Korea so we could visit my brother who has been living out there for a few years now. We spent the majority of our trip in Seoul which was great as it gave us a good amount of time to explore the areas around our hotel and see as much of the city as we could. At first, it felt a little overwhelming because of how big Seoul is, but once we got used to it we started to feel more relaxed - It's such a lovely city to walk around and just see what you come across rather than feel like you need to head somewhere specific! We found so many lovely cafes, shops, and restaurants in so many random places that it felt like you just can't go wrong. The food was lovely though sometimes quite tricky to find anything vegetarian-friendly due to language barriers, but as that was something I was expecting before going there it didn't bother me. The highlight food-wise for me was the delicious eggy bread you can find on the street markets - I could have eaten them all day every day! In fact all things egg-related were delicious in Korea, our favourite breakfast spots were Egg Drop and Isaac Toast, both offering types of egg sandwiches that I have 100% missed since being back in England!

We decided we would buy a Korean sim card before going which we picked up at the airport - It's the first time we have done this on a holiday, but I would 100% recommend it as it was so useful being able to use Google translate and look up info online while we were out and about. You also need an app to be able to order a taxi, so having access to data is essential if you want to use those, which we certainly needed by the end of our trip. Interestingly, Google Maps doesn't work in South Korea so you need to use their specific map app which is called Kakao Maps. I wish we had known about that before we went, as it was hard to know how close hotels etc were to places we wanted to visit without having access to Google Maps so I just had to guess - I didn't realise how much I usually rely on it normally until I didn't have access to it!

Seoul

Our hotel was based in Myeongdong, which turned out to be a great location as we were close to shops and restaurants, and also a couple of bars which ended up being hard to find as most places require you to eat while you're there too. Our favourite place to eat was an area not far away called Ikseondong Hanok Village which is really close to the famous Insa-Dong Street, we ended up going back a few times to try different places. We visited both Gyeongbokgung and Changdeoukgung Palace, rented some traditional clothing called Hanboks to wear for a few hours, got the cable car up to NTower at night, did Karaoke (called Noraebang in Korea - It's huge there!) and took a LOT of photo booth pictures. (They have self-use photo booth places all over Seoul, there are so many different and unique ones each with different kinds of props etc!)

Further away from Seoul city center we visited the Olympic Park, Seoul Forest Park and the World Cup Park on separate trips, and also visited Lotte World and Tower which is an amazing huge shopping mall, which also has an amazing tower with a viewpoint at the top if you want to pay extra to go up.

One of the things we both loved about South Korea was how accessible hikes were from the city center. We did the Inwangsan hike, but there were a couple more nearby that we would've loved to do if we'd had the time, and weren't so exhausted from walking all day every day haha! All the trails were really well marked and we saw loads of amazing wildlife, combined with incredible views back across Seoul.

Busan

Towards the end of our trip, we traveled by train to Busan to spend our last few nights by the beach. We hadn't expected Busan to be so spread out (another impact of the lack of Google maps... turns out we were not by a beach haha!) so not long after arriving we realised we didn't hadn't given ourselves enough time to properly explore everywhere, but we tried to maximize our time there by using taxis instead of trains and buses to avoid wasting time traveling. To explore the nearby area to our hotel, we went to the Diamond Tower to get some amazing views of Busan and then later that evening went to a Lotte department mall nearby that has a free viewing platform so you can see the tower and the bridges lit up - The mall also has the tallest indoor music fountain in the world which is very random, but recorded in the Guinness World Records!

My highlight of our time in Busan was the morning we spent at Gamcheon Culture Village, which is full of colourful houses and lovely shops and cafes. It was so picturesque exploring the area, and I wish we'd had more time to spend there as there were some small creative classes that you could do while there which looked great. 

Busan was not short of amazing hikes and nature too - We did one from Songdo beach, and although the sky trail was closed while we were there, it's still possible to walk up to the Songdo Yonggung Suspension Bridge and explore the Sky Park, both which were beautiful and well worth a visit.

We loved the Songdo hike so much that we decided to try another coastal walk on another day, so we went to the Oryukdo Skywalk (a glass-floored viewing platform, which was amazing but also terrifying haha) and then from there we did some of the Igidae Coastal Walk. The views were amazing, it's really worth going out of your way for.