Today is my last day in Seoul, so I wanted to make sure I tied up any loose ends: I don’t want to leave regretting not finishing my to-see list! Thankfully, because I’ve been organizing my trip by areas, most of the places I had left were roughly in the same corner of Seoul.
I started by going to Itaewon, the trendy nightlife district. At 10:30 on a Wednesday, it was predictably dead -which was fine by me, not like I was about to go clubbing- but I was still shocked by how rundown a lot of the buildings look in the daylight. The area reminded me somewhat of New York, maybe because of the brick buildings. There were a million cafes and bars and restaurants, but I was again surprised to see very few shops: those that were there were either thrift stores or, oddly, Western antique stores.
I took this opportunity to visit two K-drama locations: the Noksapyeong overpass and the Dansam restaurant, prominently featured in the show Itaewon Class (if you haven’t seen it, it’s a show set in Itaewon, but it’s not about a class, so that’s 1 for 2 in the title). Yesterday I forgot to tell you that I walked past Choi Woo-shik’s house from the show Our beloved summer!
I walked through Itaewon until it became Hannam, where I climbed up a small hill to reach my next target: the Leeum Art Museum.
Ostensibly a modern art museum, Leeum’s permanent collection is in fact a trove of 12-15th century pottery, held in its upper floors connected by a striking spiral staircase.
While the collection is beautiful, in an understated way, the real attraction for me is the building itself. In a style that reminded me a little of The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, it uses polished stone and dark wood in elegant straight or slightly curved shapes to create a strikingly elegant and refined atmosphere, the high-class Korean style you might recognize from movies like Parasite or The Maid.
In addition to the beautiful collection upstairs, which I loved more than anything because of the excellent taste of its arrangement, there are two temporary exhibits of contemporary art in the ground and basement levels, which I could take or leave. One featured art pieces done with textiles and yarn, making for a curious exhibition.
Only a few blocks from Leeum is the Yangsan Craft Center, a rather high-end shop showcasing traditional Korean crafts. Lots of beautiful things here, but more on the pricier side as far as gifts go: there were a few times when I had to do a double-check because the price had one more zero than I expected!
Finally done with the Itaewon district, I took the subway to Gwangjan Market, a big covered market famous for its food stalls, not dissimilar to the yatai in Fukuoka, except all packed in a line in the middle of the street. I saw the stall for “the Netflix lady”, a noodle soup stall ran by an older lady who appeared in the Netflix documentary Street Food Asia. It had a massive queue, as I’m sure it always does.
I had planned to eat here in some stall that looked appetizing (not the famous one, I knew it would be too sought after), but to be frank none of them did. Most seem to specialize in foods that are gross to me, like blood sausages, pig’s feet or tripe, and while there were one or two that offered japchae (Korean sweet potato noodles, delicious) they made you sit face-level with a giant pile of blood sausages. I was about to resign myself when I remembered that… I don’t HAVE to do anything! I’m on holiday! So I left and merrily had a curry rice at a proper restaurant on the way to my next destination.
I wanted to check out Dongdaemun Design Plaza, a huge multipurpose space designed by Zaha Hadid. I couldn’t get any pictures of the entire structure from the ground because it’s so large, but it looks kinda like the Chicago Bean if it had been left in the sun for too long and begun to melt. It looks straight out of Blade Runner 2049.
I walked around, checking out different perspectives, and sure enough every turn revealed a new, interesting angle. The space holds a design store, which was closed, and a museum, which I didn’t have the energy to check out. Not a lot to do, exactly, but the space itself is so avant-garde that it’s worth a visit. It is also surrounded by malls and department stores, if that’s your thing (it’s not mine: malls I can abide if there’s a store I want to check out, but I find department stores unbearable).
Finally, to cross the very last item on my list, I took a particularly complicated subway combination to go to Gangnam, south of the river, to check out Bongeunsa temple. It is nothing to write home about (except I guess that’s exactly what I’m doing right now), visually, but it is historically important as its roots date over a thousand years back.
And then, right across, is the COEX mall, famous for holding one of the most instagrammed libraries, the Starfield Library, now with a bonus Christmas tree and everything.
It’s smaller in real life than it looks in the pictures! Very photogenic, that’s for sure, and as far as I could tell it does function as a legitimate library in addition to serving as a photo opportunity.
The mall itself: like I was saying, I was interested in checking out one or two stores. Zara, Uniqlo etc. I can find anywhere, but I’d never been to Korean chains like SPAO so I wanted to take a look. The mall is also enormous -it even has its own running course!- but it doesn’t feel that big because it’s all in one underground level, so you never get that “wow” moment when you reach a big mall’s atrium and get an idea of the volume of the space.
Still, it takes a long time to walk from one end to the other! There are practically streets inside! I checked only two or three stores, and even that took me an eternity.
When I got outside, it was dead at night, and I was greeted by a sci-fi landscape of giant, blindingly luminous video billboards all around the mall. I did not know billboards got that HD nowadays! One thing I realized as I was leaving is that the monument to Gangnam Style is right around the corner!
(You can’t tell from the picture, but it plays the song from hidden speakers. People were dancing to it in front of and behind the cameras.)
That was it for the sightseeing part of the day! The only thing left for me was to meet a couple of friends for dinner in Yeoksam, which is just two subway stops away but for a moment I thought I wouldn’t make it: it’s rush hour and the stations are PACKED! Thankfully, because everyone forms orderly queues by the doors here, I was able to secure a spot and then compress myself enough to juuuust fit inside the next train.
We went to Daewoo Budaejjigae, a place that specializes in “army stew”, and it might say something about the research I’ve been doing that the first thing that the word “army” brought to mind was BTS. But no, it’s called like that because it was apparently borne out of necessity after the war, from the leftovers of soldiers, when there was nothing more to eat. It’s a big stew that combines meat, soup, tofu and noodles:
It was very tasty! Even though the main ingredients aren’t too flavorful, the kimchi in the soup imbues everything with flavor, and since it’s cooked right there it has the perfect consistency.
Getting to eat like a local while enjoying good company was a wonderful way to say goodbye to Seoul. Tomorrow I am taking the train to historic Gyeongju!
This Is A Lake 