Asia 2016 - Day 9 - Mural village and River cruise
Hi there. I hope you are having fun reading my blog of our little adventures. We just got back from a night-cruise on the Han River in Seoul. We will pack our bags and leave tomorrow at 17.00 local time. I'll probably find some time tomorrow morning when Ran plans to visit the nearby Doota to update the blog.
Here you see the Banpo bridge with over 10000 LED's and surprisingly wet fountains as you'll find out if you don't get inside fast enough when the ship crosses the bridge.
Update:
As promised, here is the full write-up of yesterday.
As usual it all started with breakfast, but this time it was a pretty casual breakfast consisting of some instant noodles from the guesthouse kitchen and some grapes that we bought some days ago in the food market.
Next on the menu was the Naksan park with the nearby Ihwa dong mural village. This used to be a very poor neighborhood. Today you can still see the Live Well Academy a middle school for underprivileged children which was run by a university student to help them fulfill the dream of living well. The school operated from the mid-sixties to the late 80s. If the memorial of the preserved school is any indication then it was little more than a shack with a blackboard and chairs.
A side-note on addresses; the trip-advisor app has offline content for Seoul but this does not include the Korean addresses that you need to show taxi drivers to bring you to your destination. And even if you have internet at your disposal it is not guaranteed that the Korean address is any good. When going to the Naksan park, the taxi wanted to drop us off in a very steep and narrow side alley that was close to the park but definitely NOT where we wanted to go.
In 2006 the Naksan Public Art Project was launched to improve the village atmosphere. Numerous wall paintings and sculptures were created and the sky-village as it is also called attracted Media attention. Subsequently several movies and TV-shows used the village as a stage and which lead to even more public attention. Nowadays there are so many tourists that visit that it created the usual negative side-effects like litter and noise pollution. However it is still a nice place to visit.
The photo n the top of the page is from the top of the village towards Seoul. Unfortunatly the photo is a bit clipped but if you place your mouse-cursor over the picture, right-click and press View Background Image then you can see the whole Panorama including the Seoul tower on the left.
Walking among this living art and lots of school-kids and tourists got us hungry again and we climbed down in the direction of the Metro-station. Along the way we found a known chicken-restaurant. We had already been to a place that only served 4 dishes but this one tops that by only serving one; a chicken stew. You get to choose the size (small is for 2 people it goes up from these) and the spicyness, though we were not asked the latter.
I am not sure that I have mentioned it but Korean restaurants like to hide their chopsticks in drawers in the table. So it's quite normal that they did not bring you any cutlery, you just have to find the drawer in your table. This place was kind enough to simply put everything in the big bowl on the table.
Next we went back to Myeongdong to stroll up and down the shopping street. We had some nice coffee in a cafe on the third floor above the bustling crowd and announcers that try to lure you into shops with superb discounts and special offers.
Just next doors was a barbershop, pardon a Hair and Wellness parlor where we both got a haircut and relaxed some more.
In the evening we had booked the aforementioned cruise on the Han river. Since we had some time left we went early and enjoyed some river views. It being friday afternoon there were a lot of people hanging around the river bank.
The won't upload but anyway it's lunch time. See you later.
Update #2 I uploaded the photo from Japan and damn the Internet is fast here.
