The First 24 Hours in Korea

September 27, 2024

The First 24 Hours in Korea

I arrived in Seoul yesterday late afternoon and decided to do things that Korean bloggers always talk about. The major sights will have to wait since I’m meeting up with my friend Grace from New York on the 3rd of Octobet. We will do the sights together.

First, I walked to Myeondong market. It’s a combination of tourists/locals going to the street food market.

First stop: the Tteokbokki stand. This Tteokbokki is a popular Korean stew full of simmered cylindrical shaped rice cakes seasoned with gochujang (chili paste). I’d heard about it a lot so why not give it a try?

It was pretty good (very textural experience) but difficult to eat standing up. I could almost see it falling all over my clothes but thankfully, that didn’t happen. Of course, like Japan, there are no rubbish bins anywhere, so I just gave the bowl back to the stand as I had observed locals doing.

Next, I had to try the chocolate churros and the candied fruit. Delicious!

If I had any more space to keep eating (I had 3 big meals on my flight) but it was impossible. Here are some interesting stands anyway.

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Tempura yum!

I thought this was interesting, cheese with pork belly

The lobster looked pretty good

All sorts of filled frozen marshmallows

Mochi flavours galore

One thing Seoul has a lot of is beauty product stores. Creams for absolutely everything. I went to a few of the Olive Young stores (big beauty stores) and got completely confused about which product to buy except Korean rice based sunscreen. It’s so good for sensitive skin. I will need to do more research.

After a few more hours exploring the area I was hungry enough to go for the famous Korean fried chicken and beer combo. There are loads of places to go but I just went to a basic one packed with Korean salary men (that’s really the Japanese term salary men) from work. That’s always a good sign.

It was pretty good and very crispy with a thin batter and all, including beer, for 20k won or 15 bucks. I enjoyed it though struggled to eat half the platter and I’m a big eater! Koreans are either very greedy or only dine in packs!

Today I decided to go to a Korean market in Hoehyeon. Like many oriental street markets, it’s a continuous seemingly endless collection of stalls. Totally overwhelming but interesting. I forgot to haggle so they kept returning money to me with my change. I think they were disappointed not to haggle since it’s like sport to stall keepers but honestly, anything less than ten dollars isn’t really worth the energy. Nice of them to give me back the discount though.

I also went to a massive department store (15 floors!) but frankly, I’m not in Korea to buy LVMH products. I was impressed with the appliance section (Korea is the home of LG and Samsung) and they have a lot of golfing, skiing and outdoor wear.

Lunchtime. Food again! I decided to go to another small restaurant packed with locals. I had beef with spicy noodles, kimchi and rice for 6 dollars and it was massive! Good, too! However, this time I did manage to spill the chili paste based soup on myself. In these Korean restaurants, they give you scissors (Koreans love their scissors) they cut their kimchi, their vegetables, the whole lot, and a spoon. The spoon you place under the very difficult to use metal chopsticks to avoid spillage and mess. Well, I learned that after I was wearing bright orange chili paste spots on my white jeans!

After that I needed to experience a Korean snack store. Koreans love their snacks! There were some interesting ones