Seoul, Day One: Insadong and the Charming Love Motel

After six months, we finally made it out of Daegu for more than an afternoon.

We decided to wait until Sunday afternoon to leave for Seoul because Cate was still a bit unsettled and tired from her doctor appointment on Friday. We caught the KTX in the morning and arrived in Seoul just after lunch. For some reason we thought it'd be better to take the subway from Seoul Station to our hotel, but I realized as I was hurling our suitcase and Cate's playpen over the turnstiles, a taxi would have been a more sensible option.

Nonetheless, we made it to the neighborhood we'd planned to stay in, and now we just had to find the hotel. Within a minute of coming up to ground we saw four foreigners, none of whom offered us any help, even though we were clearly lost and were overwhelmed with carrying our luggage through the city. At the risk of losing my cred on the Korean Blogosphere and/or straying from the story, I won't gripe (at the moment) about how I think many foreigners in Korea are arrogant, selfish tossers. So, after realizing the directions we had weren't doing the trick, we stood in a daze until finally a very nice Korean man asked us where we needed to go. We told him and he phoned the hotel and then said, "Just come with me." We walked half a block before being met by the hotel manager who'd walked two blocks to come meet us and take us to our destination.

The Sky Motel was located in what seemed like a fairly shady alley. To get to the front door of the hotel we had to walk under a big curtain. Most love motels have these, as their meant to protect the identities of the paying customers by blocking their vehicles from view. Classy, isn't it? Our room was decent. Small, but decent. The bathroom was twice the size of ours at home and it was surprisingly clean. Besides the smell of smoke, we found it acceptable. It was only 35,000 won per night so we weren't about to complain.

Our first order of business was to hit up the historic Insadong, a large arts and culture market. It was a short walk from our hotel, which meant we ended spending most of our week there. According to Lonely Planet, it's the third most popular area in Seoul. It's made up of street vendors and small shops selling cultural art, crafts and clothing. We spent a couple of hours looking around and taking pictures before finding a restaurant tucked back in an alley where we sat outside for dinner. Here are a few of the sites.





I'll talk about each day we spent in Seoul in separate posts, as there's far too much to say and too many photographs to stuff them all into one and expect anyone to read it all in one shot.