It’s 4am here in Unseo-dong, and I am a girl full of awake.  It probably doesn’t help that I fell asleep as soon as we got back to the hotel last night.  Oh well, we’re moving on to New Zealand tomorrow night, and that’ll be a different time zone, so it’s probably not worth getting too used to this one. 

Yesterday was Monday here.  Obviously.  And yet, there were those hours on Sunday which disappeared from my life during the time change on the flight, and I can’t helped wondering what happened in them.  It’s still Monday in the London.

In Seoul, things are closed on a Monday.  This fact was in the Lonely Planet.  However, somehow, we neglected to read the ‘except Mondays’ and the ‘Tuesdays-Sundays’ in the descriptive text.  So we turned up at Gwangwamam station in the Downtown district (after over an hour of airport-shuttling, busing and subwaying) to find a sign which said ‘Monday: day off’.  Fine, we thought, we don’t need a tour bus.  We’ve got legs.  So we walked on those legs up to Changdeokgung Palace.  The guidebook said that you could only explore the palace on a guided tour.  There was an English language one at 11.30am.  We got there just in time.  And of course, it was closed.

However, in a competition between culture and consumerism, the latter would appear to win hands down in this city – so, we decided to give up on the palaces and spent most of the rest of the day browsing the shops (or rather the markets and department stores).  Namdaemun Market needed a map of it’s own, as there was such a variety of vendors, selling everything from kimchi flavoured chocolates to padded coats, street food to pickled ginseng root.  But what I got most excited about was ’stationery alley’: shop after shop of all the stickers and notepads, poorly phrased English captions and cartoon characters, that my geeky little heart could wish for.

And across the road from the Market: Shinsegae Department store, the Korean equivalent of Harrods, or at least Elys of Wimbleon.  A far calmer shopping experience, but with price-tags which were beyond our reach (even with the fairly decent pound to won conversion).  Later in the day, we also visited Lotte World, south of the river: another huge department store, with it’s own bowling alley, icerink, and indoor theme park.  Amongst all of this, our purchases were some photo stickers from the arcade and a bulgogi burger from Lotteria.

The other attraction we found that was open on a Monday was N’Seoul Tower.  It’s not a hugely tall tower in itself, but it is on top of a rather large hill.  We braved a rather shaky (and crowded) cable car just to get to the base.  From the top, we took pictures through slightly grimy windows of offices and apartment blocks, a palace or two and some historic houses, and evidence of humanity as far as the eye could see.

It’s 5am now and Tuesday.  Breakfast is being delivered at 7am, and then it’s back into Seoul.  Back to Gwangwamam station and the tour buses, to see what this huge city can offer us today.

Tash