The Seoul of Asia

The final country of our travels (before Australia) was South Korea. Admittedly it is an odd destination, it is certainly not on the backpacker hitlist, and we didn’t meet anyone along the way who was going there or had been there. In fact, we never planned to go there ourselves! We originally intended to go to Japan, but when we were purchasing tickets, we found that flights from Japan to Sydney were very expensive and we could save €1000 each by flying from their next door neighbour: South Korea. Along the way, our plans to visit Japan were dropped and so South Korea became the last destination of our backpacking.

We only had five days so we spent the entire time in and around the capital, Seoul. However, the city has a population of 10 million people (that’s half the population of Australia!) so it is quite a developed and built up place, and was easy to spend a few days investigating.

What struck us as odd initially was the distinct lack of English (throughout Asia, we had become accustomed to English signs and menus etc everywhere). Even the Starbucks sign was written in Korean! As mentioned in our previous post, most of the ATMs didn’t have any English – even those that did have some English usually gave us a Korean error message before spitting out our cards (thankfully we did eventually find one that liked our cards). There were also very few foreigners about – of course we were the subject of photos for a few people that wanted to pose with us. It’ll be tough giving up this celebrity lifestyle in Australia!

So what did we get up to in Seoul?

We checked out the N Seoul Tower. A large tower built up on a hill in the middle of the city, which offered great views of the city. But the best bit was definitely the view from the urinals.....check out the picture below! After 15 countries, Conor can safely say that these are the BEST TOILETS IN THE WORLD!

We came across hundreds of police gathering around a central square with riot gear all ready. They looked like they were ready to pick a fight. We asked them what was up but they were really serious and wouldn’t tell us.....but when we asked for a photo they were all smiles :)

We found a parking space for “women only”.

We found a bunch of trees with medical drips hooked up to them (yes, IVs)!

We wandered the streets and observed the many lit-up signs advertising various shops.

We ate some food like the locals. (All over Seoul, they have restaurants where there is a barbeque grill built into the table and you cook the meat yourself. There were not any other white travellers dining in any of the restaurants and it was great atmosphere being immersed in the Korean culture.)

We visited a Palace and appreciated their old Korean style architecture.

We checked out their National Museum and found an impressive collection of old tanks and aircraft (along with a bunch of other stuff).

And Korea has a laser show of its own......a mist spray provides the surface for their enjoyable 3D projection along a river in the middle of the city.

Yes, Seoul turned out to be a worthwhile destination and it was nice to spend a few days in a place that we knew nothing about and had absolutely no expectations.