Colors of Fall

The weather was surprisingly good today. It was a nice sunny warm (mon)day. Not bad for the start of the week. Hope the sun will stay for a couple of days.

Boating at Lake Union

With the wrap up of my Korea Trip posts, now it’s time to catch up on my summer photos. Summer in Seattle this year was pretty awesome. We had fabulous weather and it was a prefect time to do outdoor activity. One Sunday, I went boating with a couple of my friends at Lake Union. I’ve gone before for a company outings and it was pretty fun. So I thought I asked my friends if they want to tried it out. Everyone was pretty excited since it’s their first time and we ended up having a lot of fun.

We rented the boat from The Electric Boat Company for 2 hours and brought our own lunch to eat on board. We got to operate the boat ourselves, which was pretty fun, and they gave us a map with locations that we should avoid since it might get our boat stuck. They guys mostly did the driving since they’re pretty good at it. After 2 hours, we came back to the dock and overall, it’s a fun day.

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.