Chicago on the 4th

On 4th of July, I flew to Chicago with a couple of friends to visit a friend of mine. We arrived in the afternoon and went to Ming Hin Restaurant in Chinatown for dinner. Supposedly, the restaurant is pretty famous according to my local friend and the food was really good. Afterwards, we stopped by Joy Yee for some bubble tea since it's in the same area. Their bubble tea is really good. 

We were originally planning to go watch the fireworks after dinner, but we were a little too late since people already filled up the pier and the police closed the streets. So we were in the area, heard the fireworks sound, but fail to see any in any directions. I blame the tall Chicago buildings. They practically made it impossible for your to see far without any obstruction. Since we were also already tired from the trip, we went to our hotel and checked-in instead and call it a night. 

Seoul Day 6: Wrap-Up & Goodbyes

Day 6. Last day in Seoul. Our flight is in the afternoon & night. So we decided to go back to Myeongdong for some last minute shopping and lunch since it’s pretty close to our hotel. We stopped by Shinsegae to buy some cosmetics for our family & friends and then had samgyetang for lunch. We started our trip with Samgyetang lunch and ended it with one. I guess we just can’t have enough of those delicious chicken soup :) After lunch, headed back to the hotel, packed our remaining stuff, asked to hotel to call us a taxi to go to the airport and we left Seoul.

I have to say considering we only stayed here for 6 days (more like 5 full days really), I’m glad that I got to see so many places. The weather was great, the food was great, but to be honest, I feel that my traveling buddies made the trip super duper awesomely fun. We created so many good memories during this trip and I’m thankful for that.

A week is probably not enough time to explore Seoul (let alone outside Seoul) since it has so many interesting things to see and explore. Nevertheless, it felt like with this trip, at least I got a little bit of preview of this city. I definitely want to come back again next time, and hopefully I could stay longer then.

Seoul Day 5: Shopping at Hongdae

After the Trickeye Museum, we stopped by the Hello Kitty Cafe since it’s nearby. I have to say that the place has a little too much pink for me. But it was still fun visiting the place. When we got there, it was still pretty early so the place wasn’t crowded. We took our seats on the second floor where we noticed there’re two guys sitting at two tables away from us (I didn’t know that guys like this kinda place). We ordered a couple of different thing that were hello-kitty decorated. The food was just okay, nothing too special.

Afterwards, we pretty much just walked around the area and did some shopping. 

We encountered the information guys—guys who wear read attire carrying maps and helped tourists to find their way. They’re pretty helpful actually on pointing where we should go in English. We got a map of the area from them, and interestingly, you would think that the map will be in English, right? Nope. It’s in Chinese. We couldn’t read it, but at least they have the buildings and landmarks in there. So it was useful.

Stopped for another coffee break, or I should say mainly we just wanna get away from the sun for a little while. We were gonna try this one patbingsu place that I heard is pretty good, but the line was so long. So we opted for the Twosome Place again instead.

We stopped by Ehwa’s Univeristy Campus in the afternoon. Their building is very cool. I’m impressed by the architecture.

Afterwards, we grabbed dinner in a restaurant in the area that I have no idea what the name of the restaurant was.

After dinner we shopped a little bit more and decided to call it a night. When we were trying to make our way back to the subway, the area was filled-packed with people. I heard that Hongdae is pretty lively at night, but I didn’t think it would be that packed. There was literally no space between me and the person around me—that’s in front, behind, and besides me. We were walking practically side by side with people around us. I would’ve taken a picture of this but, as I said, there’s barely any room to move, let alone for me to open my camera bag. One interesting thing though, even though it was super packed, nobody was pushing. People were just lining up in a very orderly fashion, which impressed me. Later, I found out that apparently there was some kind of a festival going on at the time, celebrating Buddha’s birthday. No wonder it’s super packed.

Anywho, we made it back to our hotel. Packed (or maybe I should say forced) our stuff (some of us did some damage with the shopping) into our luggages and decided to took a night stroll to the Seoul gate again since Bella & Melissa didn’t get to go with us on the first night. We stopped by the convenient store on our back to pick up some snacks and drinks. And that’s day 5. Can’t believe that our trip is coming to an end already.

Seoul Day 5: Trick Eye Museum

We started our day early and headed to Hongdae area. Our plan for the day was to just spent our day in Hongdae for some sightseeing and shopping. By now, we kinda have a routine every morning. Grab breakfast, walked to the subway station, stopped at the entrance trying to figure out the line we have to take, and off we go.

Our first stop was the Trickeye Museum. The place is filled with 3D-like paintings that you can take photos with. It’s actually a pretty fun place to visit and I have to say they did a great job with the paintings and all.Tips: if you want to come here, go during weekdays when there’s not a lot of people. Since you probably wanna try to take pictures on all of their installation, picking holiday dates or weekends when it’s super crowded is probably not a good idea.

Seoul Day 4: Namsan Tower & Myeong Dong

After we got back in Seoul, we were dropped off at the cable car station for the Namsan Tower. We bid our farewell to Mr. Choi and the driver who have been very nice these past 2 days to us. We got there about an hour or so before sunset, so it was still bright. There was a line for the cable car, but it wasn’t too bad. We purchased our two-way ticket and rode on the cable car.

We found this magazine for tourists with handy maps and recommendations. But of course, those places we went the past couple days. Talk about timing.

And then again, there’s the stairs. I swear there are sooo many stairs in Korea.

The view from up here:

We stayed for a while there. After sunset, our stomach began to growled so we took the cable car back to where we were and walked to Myeong-dong for dinner.

I like Myeong-dong. The area’s filled with shops with bright lights and people bustling here and there. Even though it was a weekday, it’s pretty packed. It definitely felt livelier, more energetic and active here (or Seoul in general as a matter of fact) compared to Seattle.

We picked Wangbijib (왕비집), a Korean BBQ restaurant for our dinner. This place is apparently a pretty well known tourists place. The servers speak Chinese and Japanese (I think), so if you can’t speak Korean, you can speak one of the two languages. They grilled the meat for us too on the table. We were so hungry we ended up ordering more portions. At the end of the night, we were stuffed and happy.