Dongdaemun Market, Seoul Plaza, The Changing of the Guards and more!

We had another GREAT day of fun and exploration as we discovered a little bit more of Seoul and fell in love with our city a little bit more today. We started at Dongdaemun Market, which is a huge district off the 1 Line that sells EVERYTHING. They have a cloth market, a shoe market, a used book market, clothing markets, toy market...it was pretty amazing. There are several open air markets scattered all around creating an overcrowded maze of people and vendor stands loaded with mountains of products. We saw probably more than 50,000 pairs of shoes today. Then there were the department stores...or I really should say Department Towers, since are gigantic buildings that are just floor after floor after floor of clothes. Below is the Doosan Tower, we went up to the rooftop garden, it was very picturesque. It took a lot of self restraint to not go on a mad shopping spree. We saw a ton of "Engrish" items again today, it was hard not to laugh out loud at some of the ads and shirts we saw.


After walking around Dongdaemun for a few hours we decided to hop back on the Subway and head over to the City Hall area. We got out of the underground to a very interesting exhibit of artistically cultured mushrooms. We enjoyed taking pictures of the weird yet beautiful fungi until we were distracted by a HUGE drum pounding...we looked across the street to see Deoksugung Palace, they were in the middle of the changing of the guard ceremony that occurs three times a day at the main gates. What luck! We quickly ran across the street to check it out. The changing of the guards is a wonderful show of the different platoons of guards dressed in traditional outfits (complete with their bows, arrows and swords) switching shifts. There is music and chanting and flags being swung about in a colorful loud swirl of activity. We were enthralled, we could not get over how stunning the display was. Nick especially loved the huge drum - the man in charge of hitting it in time used his whole body to strike the gigantic colorfully painted drum as hard as he could.




After the 30 minute amazing show the changing of the guards was over and Nick and I wandered back over to Namdaemun Market (check out our "window shopping in Seoul" entry to see more about Namdaemun) and also ventured into Myeong-dong. We even found a BENNIGANS in Myeong-dong! We were quite amused.


We had some chicken galbi for dinner...we ordered one serving of regular chicken galbi (or spicy chicken with fried rice cooked in front of you) and an order of special chicken galbi...which surprisingly had no chicken in it at all, but beef and octopus. Oh well, it was good anyways. We've eaten a lot of octopus in this country, it is a very popular ingredient in many different dishes. We hope to try the live octopus soon - one of our Korean coworkers has told us he'd like to take us to try it, but since the new semester starts on Tuesday we have all been very busy at school lately and we might have to wait until he is not quite so busy.



After dinner we were pretty much exhausted after seeing and doing so much so we returned home to our cozy little apartment. I am excited for Monday, I will teach my first full schedule including kindergarten! The teacher I replace left this morning so I finally get all my classes tomorrow.


Below is a short video of the changing of the guard, enjoy :)