Discovering the 'Hallyu Wave'

May 2019 - South Korea

If you're going to Seoul in May, you have to visit the lotus lantern festival, cause this literally happens once a year as it celebrates Buddha's birthday. The festival happens over several days, seatings are available for the festival parade which happens on one of these day but it has to be reserved online as these are for foreigners. Fun fact: we attended a cultural lantern making workshop in the week and it got aired on national tv, I got quite excited about this!! Another interesting thing which happened in Seoul, was that we saw 2 sets of twins and maybe triplet which was so amazing, seeing as we are twins, but don’t think they knew we were (for obvious reasons).

The weather was the first things which we found quite unusual about Seoul, mainly the wind which made it cold in the evening, luckily we both had hoodies so it was fine. Some of the other things which were different was no bins on the street which is the same in Tokyo but found it so weird not knowing where to put rubbish. To add to this, the time to wait for the street crossings to turn green is so long! But on the plus side the public transport was good as you could buy a top-up card like an oyster card to use (which was around £2).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mawuz2axQc

Places to visit

Temples are the first thing that stands out in south-east asia, and Seoul wasn’t any different. The Gyeongbokgung Palace is a must visit, an interesting fact: apparently if you wear traditional clothing to the palace, you can get free entrance. Also, you can watch the changing of guards which is carried out as a small event.

The best place to get a view of the whole city would be from the Namsan tower, where the view was so breath-taking. The perfect time to go here would be sunset!

If your not a sight-seeing tourist, and want to do something fun, I highly recommend ‘The Running Man Experience’, this is based on a popular Korean tv (which my brother watches), it basically has a lot of indoor activities which will keep you busy for an hour.

Food

Food-wise in Seoul was soo good as I feel we like Asian food a lot! The starter which is popular in South korea is called Kimchi which is basically fermented vegetables (mainly cabbages) which was the worst part of the meals.

Street-food is by far the best option to go with when you’re tight on budget and also it’s the locals who cook and make it so unique. Bindaetteok (bean pancake)– this was quite crunchy and tasted like hash-brown but fried with vegetables inside.

When in Seoul, you have to try Korean fried chicken and Korean BBQ , for the Korean fried chicken we went to a place called ‘two two fried chicken’ but ‘BHC’ is a more popular place.

But the best food I ate was ‘jjimdak’, this was Korean braised chicken. It cost around £18 which covered both of us. It was served like a pizza with the chicken and cheese on top and vegetable. (this reminded me of tagines). It tasted so nice! 10/10.

Overall, it was a nice relaxing holiday which I classified as pre-exam and my brother, post exam. We spent a week in one city which literally shows how much there is to do there, but if we were gonna go back to South Korea, we would visit others cities like Busan and Incheon.

Shugs